WI: Spaniards are killed at Tenochtitlan, but native allies succeed.

[ZombieMelon]

This is an idea for a TL that I might make, I would just like to get some ideas and see if it is a possible POD.

So here is how I think it could happen.

When the people of Tenochtitlan rose up against the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans, many of the Spaniards were killed. In OTL, Cortes mourned them heavily, but could it have been possible for his emotions to get the better of him when they return to Tenochtitlan and siege it? Perhaps he and the conquistadors are more brash during the fighting in the streets of Tenochtitlan and get themselves isolated from their allies, and end up getting encircled and killed. However, the Tlaxcalans end up being able to finish taking the city. So I have a few questions.

1: Would the destruction of Tenochtitlan be worse or better in this scenario?

2: How far would the Mesoamerican world be able to advance technologically? Would they be able to recreate Spanish technology?

3: How would Christianity do? The Tlaxcalan chiefs converted, but did they mean it? Or would Jesus just be added to the Nahuatl pantheon?

4: Do horses have a chance of surviving and being used by the Mesoamerican world?

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

The idea is original. I would love to see it off the ground. I'll have some detailed answers later on.

 

[dirtyjapaneseman]

1) I would say Tenochtitlan would do worse since there's chaos without the added effect of having the Spaniards to unite against. There'll probably be a lot of people trying to take advantage who wouldn't do so otherwise if there were people on horses to deal with.

2) They didn't have the technology in metallurgy to produce guns like the Spanish had. They didn't use metal armors since cloth armor was much better adapted to the climate (some Spaniards even adopted it themselves) and because of that they wouldn't copy any weapons in particular since there's not much difference between the impact of a club and a sword on cloth. Without some serious advancements (such as the development of iron), knowledge of gunpowder, the level of metalworking the Spaniards had and the incentive to do so, I don't see them creating any boom-boom sticks or point-point sticks any time soon.

3) Adoption of my homeboy Jesus into the pantheon is more likely than all out conversion but tbh I don't see the elite or the general population converting or incorporating any foreign religions. Most cases of assimilation I know of were done in the midst of assimilating a population different than your one.

4) Probably. There's no denying the usefulness of beasts of burden and I think the natives will see that.

 

[Nik]

YMMV but, as I understand it, many of the 'musketeers' and 'artillery-men' would know how to make gunpowder from Nitre, sulphur and charcoal. Getting it to work *well* is a different matter...

So, you only need a survivor or two --Didn't the locals, like Imperial Rome, just love to take prisoners for ritual display and/or sacrifice ? Arena, altar, whatever-- and, rescued from that fate, they'd surely help the rebels...

They've got the party's iron and bronze guns, they'll have casting moulds for shot and, given low-quality local powder, they could even use metal-banded wooden 'cannon' barrels. Remember the locals are wondrous copper-smiths...

Even firing pebble-filled 'cannister' point-blank would be a game-changer given traditional melée tactics. Think proto-Claymores...

 

[John7755 يوحنا]

Do you mean they are killed before Otumba? If so, then no, the Tlaxcalans would be beaten at Otumba without the Spanish troops as they had been by the Aztec for decades before Cortes's arrival.

 

[ZombieMelon]

Do you mean they are killed before Otumba? If so, then no, the Tlaxcalans would be beaten at Otumba without the Spanish troops as they had been by the Aztec for decades before Cortes's arrival.

Nah, during the Siege of Tenochtitlan, after the water supply has already been cut off. The Spaniards are killed during the fighting in the city.

1) I would say Tenochtitlan would do worse since there's chaos without the added effect of having the Spaniards to unite against. There'll probably be a lot of people trying to take advantage who wouldn't do so otherwise if there were people on horses to deal with.

2) They didn't have the technology in metallurgy to produce guns like the Spanish had. They didn't use metal armors since cloth armor was much better adapted to the climate (some Spaniards even adopted it themselves) and because of that they wouldn't copy any weapons in particular since there's not much difference between the impact of a club and a sword on cloth. Without some serious advancements (such as the development of iron), knowledge of gunpowder, the level of metalworking the Spaniards had and the incentive to do so, I don't see them creating any boom-boom sticks or point-point sticks any time soon.

3) Adoption of my homeboy Jesus into the pantheon is more likely than all out conversion but tbh I don't see the elite or the general population converting or incorporating any foreign religions. Most cases of assimilation I know of were done in the midst of assimilating a population different than your one.

4) Probably. There's no denying the usefulness of beasts of burden and I think the natives will see that.

Well all of Mesoamerica isnt the exact same climate, are there any places which arent as hot and humid, allowing armour to be used? Maybe they will figure out iron smelting, but I assume they had bronze right?

How many horses are needed to survive to ensure that they can be healthy? Doesnt incest affect horses as well? I think the Spaniards only brought around 200 horses, but alot of the horses would be killed in battle right?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Maybe they will figure out iron smelting, but I assume they had bronze right?

Not really, no.

There was a single nation in the area starting to produce arsenical bronze, at about that time; and some (arsenical??) bronze had been produced in the Andes for a while (a century or two??).
But the arsenic in those bronzes makes them toxic to the smith, over the long run, and probably to the miners in the shorter run.

it seems that the Middle East was very lucky in having deposits of tin and copper within easy reach of each other, so that bronze was practical for widespread use.

And smelting iron is MUCH harder than smelting bronze, especially if you want a metal that's better than bronze. (The middle east had people using inferior iron as a poor substitute for bronze until the Hittites figured out how to do iron properly.)

The best way to get a leap up is to have some genius round up the survivors of the Spanish attack, lock them up, and provide any that will teach iron working and horse riding/car gold and girls.
The chances of that working is low, imo.

(There's a lovely, if multiply ASB novel "The Other Time" by Dean Ing and Mack Reynolds, where a modern guy gets transported back to just before Cortez' invasion, where he helps the Aztecs to do that. And set up a democracy with a bicameral congress. But, as I said, ASB.)

 

[dirtyjapaneseman]

Well all of Mesoamerica isnt the exact same climate, are there any places which arent as hot and humid, allowing armour to be used? Maybe they will figure out iron smelting, but I assume they had bronze right?

How many horses are needed to survive to ensure that they can be healthy? Doesnt incest affect horses as well? I think the Spaniards only brought around 200 horses, but alot of the horses would be killed in battle right?

I'm not too sure where they would be. A good place to start would be to look at regions where natives historically wore armor and work your way from there but I don't really have any sources that could reliably tell me that =/
and yes they had bronze but it wasn't produced much as it was mainly decorative since there weren't many practical applications for it in their society. With the right incentive you could probably see them mass produce bronze weaponry and armor but that being said, it's still not a good match against iron and steel.

My equestrian knowledge is a little rusty but as I learned it inbreeding doesn't so much as produce defects in horses as it only decreases the chances that recessive genes will appear and apparently most undesirable genes are recessive. I think too much inbreeding would be a bad think but I'm pretty sure you could go a few generations without getting thinks like down syndrome and whatnot appearing. be reminded that I'm not 100% on this but this should be should, if only in a very basic sense.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

My equestrian knowledge is a little rusty but as I learned it inbreeding doesn't so much as produce defects in horses as it only decreases the chances that recessive genes will appear and apparently most undesirable genes are recessive. I think too much inbreeding would be a bad think but I'm pretty sure you could go a few generations without getting thinks like down syndrome and whatnot appearing. be reminded that I'm not 100% on this but this should be should, if only in a very basic sense.

1) take a look at the genetics of Thoroughbred racehorses. They are all descended from ?12? initial stallions, the bulk are descended from ?5? and some 30% of their ancestry is from a single one of them. Talk about inbreeding. No wonder they keep breaking legs. All off the top of my head, so the numbers are close, but not accurate.
2) Equine speciation seems to commonly involve a single stallion and his herd over some generations. If that stallion has a chromosomal abnormality (differing number due to splitting or fusion of existing ones) then he's most fertile with his own offspring that share that abnormality. They are less fertile with other members of what used to be the same species, and whammo, you have a new species.

 

[Kohlticus Euraleth]

Sounds like one hell of a cool TL to read. I'd say a good is to offer some of the Spanish they capture some money, maybe a low level position that they can lie and say is super important, and some cute girl in exchange for teaching natives whatever they may know.

 

[Lightbringer]

Sounds good.

 

[ZombieMelon]

Well looking at a climate map of Mexico, most of it just appears to be grassland. Would armour be able to be used effectively there? And for places where it cant be used well, bronze shields should suffice right?

YMMV but, as I understand it, many of the 'musketeers' and 'artillery-men' would know how to make gunpowder from Nitre, sulphur and charcoal. Getting it to work *well* is a different matter...

So, you only need a survivor or two --Didn't the locals, like Imperial Rome, just love to take prisoners for ritual display and/or sacrifice ? Arena, altar, whatever-- and, rescued from that fate, they'd surely help the rebels...

They've got the party's iron and bronze guns, they'll have casting moulds for shot and, given low-quality local powder, they could even use metal-banded wooden 'cannon' barrels. Remember the locals are wondrous copper-smiths...

Even firing pebble-filled 'cannister' point-blank would be a game-changer given traditional melée tactics. Think proto-Claymores...

Wouldnt there be a translation problem? Did the Tlaxcalans know what nitre and sulphur were? I think a few Spaniards could survive, say they are injured and cant fight, so stay with the Tlaxcalans.

 

[RGB]

They didn't use metal armors since cloth armor was much better adapted to the climate (some Spaniards even adopted it themselves) and because of that they wouldn't copy any weapons in particular since there's not much difference between the impact of a club and a sword on cloth.

"Better adapted" means "good enough against arrows and darts and don't have to worry about rust" - not that it's anywhere near the same level of protection. And a steel cut and thrust sword, completely unlike any war club, has a thrusting point that goes right through most cloth armour. Would these advantages be noted and copied? Likely not, I guess. North American nations had their leaders historically go to battle in European breastplates or corselets over the course of the colonial era, but their people never learned to make them themselves. Same for most steel weaponry.

 

[dirtyjapaneseman]

"Better adapted" means "good enough against arrows and darts and don't have to worry about rust" - not that it's anywhere near the same level of protection. And a steel cut and thrust sword, completely unlike any war club, has a thrusting point that goes right through most cloth armour. Would these advantages be noted and copied? Likely not, I guess. North American nations had their leaders historically go to battle in European breastplates or corselets over the course of the colonial era, but their people never learned to make them themselves. Same for most steel weaponry.

The thing is is that cloth armor really doesn't do much against clubs in the first place. As long as you swing it hard you can still have a significant impact on the person and while swords would be superior, their use would be restricted to the willingness and ability of the natives to adopt new techniques and technologies and the cheapness and easiness of producing war clubs. If they can't produce swords effectively, they can't adopt them. The metal armor of the Spaniards might necessitate a change to more effective weapons however, and with an organized state, it might be possible for them to actually do it.

All they need is the incentive and resources. Anyone know if they had access to what they needed to replicate what the Spaniards had with some success, such as sulfur or good iron?

 

[Nik]

Bear in mind the experience of 1st Crusade, where a 'knight in armour' could beat his heavy steel sword on a quilt-padded warrior to scant effect. Meanwhile, said scimitar-armed warrior, blade sharp enough to slice&dice a thrown rag per Samurai, could make scant impact on the armoured knight...

IIRC, it came down to 'hit & run' attacks by short-bow archers, heat-exhaustion, water-shortages, dysentery and enough small-unit attrition to weaken the Crusaders enough to be taken by melée...

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

1: Would the destruction of Tenochtitlan be worse or better in this scenario?

Mesoamerican siege warfare can be pretty brutal. During Montezuma I's reign, his first years were marked by Tototepec leading an uprising against the Mexica Triple Alliance. The Aztecs responded by burning down the temple and palace, both traditional military strongholds in Mesoamerican culture, and slaughtered as much of the male population as possible. So instead of plundering the temples and palace of their gold, you would have the surviving Tlaxcallan forces torch the city to the ground and put the male population to the sword while enslaving the reminder. As Tenochtitlan would be rebuilt into Mexico City due to the Spanish authorities, Tenochtitlan is most likely abandoned and becomes just a ruin in the middle of the lake. The Triple Alliance is abolished and replaced by an Tlaxcalan-led hegemony or the Tarascans. Unless the other cities defect, the same fate likely falls on them as well.

2: How far would the Mesoamerican world be able to advance technologically? Would they be able to recreate Spanish technology?

On their own, absolutely not except for the adoption of whatever horses that may have survived. The kingdoms and empires of pre-Columbian Mexico are rich enough that there will be missionaries and traders within a few years willing to make contact and offer whatever goodies they can to spread the word of God/get that Mesoamerican gold. And it would be under their terms so there would at least some transfer of technology in addition to being taught how to produce it. Any technology would likely remain restricted to the nobility - who would want to arm hundreds of thousands of peasants with firearms?

3: How would Christianity do? The Tlaxcalan chiefs converted, but did they mean it? Or would Jesus just be added to the Nahuatl pantheon?

Christianization would be on paper only and any local variant of it would be considered heretical by Roman Catholics. The masses in the early Spanish colonial era were more or less the same as the pre-Columbian public ceremonies, dancing practices and prayers, only altered to make references to Jesus or Mary as opposed to the old gods. The depictions of Jesus were very nativized and would stay as such with a minimal European presence in Mesoamerica. I see the Trinity, Mary and any prominent saints being incorporated as minor deities in the Nahua pantheon.

4: Do horses have a chance of surviving and being used by the Mesoamerican world?

Yes, there's a chance and it would remain a goodie of the elites for at least a while.

 

[Napoleonrules]

It is one thing to have a Spanish soldier or two as captives, but- not every Spanish soldier knows how to find the raw materials in nature for gunpowder, or know how to manufacture a gun, or how to mine iron ore, or even how to look at the landscape and know WHERE to mine. This isnt A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And no way a Mexica picks up a sword, goes out and finds iron and figures out how to manufacture one himself.

 

[RGB]

It is one thing to have a Spanish soldier or two as captives, but- not every Spanish soldier knows how to find the raw materials in nature for gunpowder, or know how to manufacture a gun, or how to mine iron ore, or even how to look at the landscape and know WHERE to mine. This isnt A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And no way a Mexica picks up a sword, goes out and finds iron and figures out how to manufacture one himself.

On the other hand, fairly small Spanish expeditions often contained men who seem to have been able to build pretty decent boats on the spot; so basic carpentry and smithing was probably not terribly rare. I am personally more excited about the carpentry: imagine the post-Mexican nations starting up their own maritime trade because they lucked out on which Spanish dude/s they managed to capture. That's an idea that's easier to transmit than iron metallurgy.

 

[Napoleonrules]

On the other hand, fairly small Spanish expeditions often contained men who seem to have been able to build pretty decent boats on the spot; so basic carpentry and smithing was probably not terribly rare. I am personally more excited about the carpentry: imagine the post-Mexican nations starting up their own maritime trade because they lucked out on which Spanish dude/s they managed to capture. That's an idea that's easier to transmit than iron metallurgy.

Yes, boats are easier than metallurgy. We are ignoring one basic fact though- smallpox is not butterflied away. A maritime trading Mexica nation only spreads smallpox (and other things) farther. Plus this disease burning through will ruin the economy, cause panic, and destroy political structures.