In my opinion, one the greatest “what if’s” if the Aztec Empire was able to survive the Spanish. What if the Aztecs survived instead of collapsed due to the disease and warfare brought by the Spanish? Alternate History Hub provides their thoughts. Mr. Terry disagrees with many of the things proposed in the video. What do YOU think?
Original Video: https://youtu.be/gNYXmzt-O-A?si=oMYi2izphOpHY5T7
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What do YOU think would have happened if the Aztecs won?
The ironic part is that just before releasing that video Cody was being pretty chauvinistic on twitter and ignorant in regards to the middle east, but then with this Aztec videos he showed to have a very unbiased and accurate view (definitely more accurate than what you get from most anglos/europeans) of native history and the process of colonization, even being very fair with it.
And then this reaction is just your standard "diseases killed all aztecs, there are no natives anymore and the europeans are goody-two shoes that would've always conquered the america always" ignorant, biased and ahistorical narrative you get from most european chauvinists and american teaching institutions.
Damn, i guess the rural appallachean petite bourgeois that is Cody actually managed to get a W over an academic, crazy
I think if the Spanish lost and became aware of a large empire in Mexico, they wouldn’t try another invasion so soon. But they would land in other places, set up settlements and forts, make alliances with other tribes, possibly make trade agreements with the Aztecs. Over time the Spanish would become entrenched in the region, and they aren’t leaving. Eventually Spain would dominate the region regardless.
The Spanish in our time really struggled against the Apache and Comanche. the gold and silver in the American southwest wasn’t quite as obvious as it was in Aztec culture, so it’s not necessarily a huge motivation to settle in the southwest. I think the Spanish could establish themselves anywhere, assuming they have a strong motivation
Not that I fully agree with Cody on this one, but I think you ignored a lot of how this video focused on the timing of Cortez’s victory being what made it so important. Like the large battle being before the biggest smallpox outbreak, the sudden loss of Cortez leaving Cuba undermanned for some time, and the arrival of the American gold and Silver getting to Spain just when it was most useful to the European wars.
40:43 the disease would kill all the natives that are vulnerable to the disease, the few who were vulnerable but survived it would have been naturally selected to reproduce and replace the next generation with immune natives. it's not evolution as much as it is natural selection, it doesn't need thousands of years to happen like you are thinking since immunity to a pathogen can happen in a single generation, the same happened somewhat in Europe too during the bulbonic plagues
The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people regularly. The other tribes hated them. Cortez allied with them to take down the Aztecs. Cortez was brave, resourcerful and righteouss. His story is pretty inspiring.
Biogeek here: So what happens when a population gets decimated by a disease is that among the lucky survivors would be those who have genes that were helpful in fighting the disease. And the next generation wouldn't just have a copy of those genes from one parent, but two: if mom and dad survived because they each had their own gene that helped, some of their children would have both. So there's a compounding effect for each generation, where the children are actually more resistant to the disease than their parents, which is actually helped if there are multiple waves of disease that continue to kill off those without enough resistance. It takes a surprisingly few number of generations before a decent amount of resistance develops among the survivors, who also usually are able to capitalize on the fact that there are fewer people competing for resources and can easily begin to repopulate the area right after. This is ultimately what got Europe through the bubonic plague, because they really didn't have any effective medicine for it – after several generations the population got more immune. In fact, to this day if your ancestry can largely be traced back to Europe during that time period you're more immune to the bubonic plague.
On your point regarding small pox. Yes it is true that the Aztecs would have had immunity within a few generations.
The Amazon civilization was destroyed by illness alone. A few explorers made contact and made it back to europe but by the time of the next visit it was gone, by the third visit the lost civilization was treated as a fraud until the 1990's and the cannal networks began to be revealed.
Completely unrelated to the video but if you're having trouble getting phlegm up cause of the sick ick, smoke some sort of weed. I'm not just like "hey man weed" either, I was one of the first people in the US to have covid before we knew it was covid (I was working at Microsoft and taking the bus thru Seattle) aaaaaaaaand I slept for three days and then I smoked dabs and coughed up all the gross stuff (plus it's an anti inflammatory AND helps you sleep better) for the rest of the time and I got better WAY faster than the rest of my family (we're all varying immunocompromised) cause I didn't have a bunch of gunk in my lungs. Can't be edibles tho you need to have the expectorant 😂 but it's helped me get better from any sinus shit etc also like way faster than before I smoked
Also please for the love of all that is holy will you either SHOW US THE GOOD BOI OR PUT HIS SQUEAKY AWAY WHEN YOU RECORD IT'S SO DISTRACTING
-a weird autistic fan 🪭
22:44 well the potato didnt come from Mexico and it took a while before it became main stream
Edit: He should have talked about the impact on the Incas too
The Aztecs were like Russia – everyone living next to them had a grudge wit them.
The Europeans did sell guns to North Americans, but they were never dumb enough to sell them the technology of making gunpowder.
Yeah the whole "worshiped as a god," thing was colonizer propaganda. There's no prophecy of Quetzalcoatl returning. Cortez and other Spaniards twisted a lot of the Mesoamerican language of diplomacy. Preparing a poetic speech was common with subtext playing a large role in it. Supposedly Montezuma said "You have graciously come on earth, you have graciously approached your water, your high place of Mēxihco, you have come down to your throne, which I have kept for you." This could be anything from a prayer to bless their meeting, to a flowering "mi casa es tu casa," to welcome foreigners "allegedly" representing a foreign king. Cortez would claim poetry like this as Montezuma "surrendering," Mēxihco to Spain and him personally which the war that followed makes clear, he didn't.
21:48 Mughal China would be a crazy what-if.
Re: smallpox, it would be more that smallpox would have time to become endemic, rather than getting hit with repeated virgin soil epidemics (which were similarly lethal in the Old World when they happened in, say, Japan or Iceland), reducing the massive demographic impact after it's had its time to run through the population.
The strongest argument against the Aztecs surviving like Cody poses in this video has to be that there would just be another Cortez. Disease would decimate them (or what ever the inverse of decimation is, maybe novemiation?) but wouldn't be the nail in the coffin as 1/10th of 30 million (3 million) is still a lot of people.
Mr. Terry, the biggest naval battle on a lake is the Battle of Lake Poyang. It’s also one of the biggest naval battles in history.
Yes they would be able to adapt to smallpox in a couple of generations because those who survived developed antibodies to fight the disease and those antibodies will be passed on to their children and have a better chance of fighting the disease to and pass on their antibodies and so on and so forth.
A lot of this history is wrong. If you read bernal Diaz ( first hand witness) , history of new Spain he states they were mistaken for God's and incense burnt in reverence to the Spaniards but if you read the Aztec accounts in their history book The broken spear's they mention the same incensing but claim it was because the Spanish smelt bad. In all the battles the Aztecs had a different idea of war. Their purpose was not to kill but capture in battle for sacrifice. This led to Spanish conquistadors being captured several times then pulling a hidden dagger and stabbing the victor and escaping to fight again. Mesoamerican warfare was show and display on the battlefield not annialtion of the enemy, totally different concepts of warfare which didn't work in Aztecs favour. As for Cortez being viewed as quatzelcoatl returning well it was ok in mesoamerican theology to kill you God's in fact it was advisable as God's were dangerous. God's were supposed to stay out of human affairs and receive sacrifice in return. If the Aztecs really thought Cortez was quatzelcoatl they would more likely have killed him . I recommend the book the broken spear's an Aztec account written about 30 years after the events. In case anyone thinks I'm pro Aztecs I'm not it was for the best the Spanish won. Bad as they were with a lust for gold to they had Christianity and the seeds of becoming better people. They didn't sacrifice 50'000 people when Philip became king unlike the Aztec emperor Ahuizotl a few years before. Just saying the Spanish were the lesser of two evils. If you believe the Aztecs were good people attacked by evil Europeans think again, they themselves had a reign of terror in Mexico a certain little moustached man from the 1930s would have been proud of.
Mr. Terry, please, please react to DJ Peach Cobblers series on the fall of the Aztec. It is one of the most comprehensive analysis of the ordeal I’ve ever seen and the production is phenomenal. He is horribly underrated and I genuinely believe that, if not able to add context, the information presented and how it is presented will entertain and educate!!! It’s kind of long but hey, content!! Dj peach cobbler fall of the Aztec empire!
Terry, the point about the population developing resistances to smallpox is 100% accurate. Most of those who were to survive and reproduce to the next generation would have had some form of resistance to smallpox. That portion of the population that died would end up creating the next generation, then the next, and so on. This can be observed through the use of antibiotics to combat bacteria. Each use of antibiotics behaves just like smallpox did to the Aztecs, kills off a large part of the population. But each generation of bacteria if your body does not fight off the survivors becomes far more resistant to the antibiotics. Is it a 1 generation thing? No, but 3, 4?
I didn't hear possibility that nations subject to Aztecs learned that Spanish were as nasty as Aztecs and played both against each other. That could go on for a long time and do great damage to both of the big bullies.
RE Aztecs making guns and comparison to Japanese. Japanese had mastered very sophisticated steel and brass making, did Aztecs have those skills?
Cortez only just pulled it off but the fall of the Aztecs was inevitable
I'd never heard that Cortez landing and being mistaken for Quetzalcoatl was a myth. I could see a psychopath like Cortez making it up though, but I can also see it being pushed as a myth for politically motivated reasons rather than actual historic facts backing it up, so I'd really want to see where the basis for it being Cortez' idea or not comes from. I might be thinking of the Maya, but to my understanding, so much of the Aztec writing was hunted down and destroyed by the Spanish Missionaries as blasphemous texts that finding any glyphs to tell us about Aztec history is the archeological equivalent of winning the lottery.
Doesn't obsidian cut thru flesh so easily that some surgeons today prefer to use obsidian compared to anything else
I think the zeal of the reconquista bled into colonization
The loss of the gold creates too much of a butterfly effect.
Can't extrapolate more than a year beyond it.
As someone who watches the alt history huh channel for a long long time I love your reactions and how respectful you are even when you disagree even if it’s all really opinion based
I sometimes think of what would have changed in history if Vikings had the same weird preoccupation with not bathing that the European Christians did later on.
They weren't packed in like later European civilizations so it wouldn't have been as bad in terms of disease, but there was enough trade and communication with the Intuit and other extreme northern tribes that some of the European diseases would have traveled with these imaginary stinky men in their stinky ships and then migrated south.
The Americas would have had exposure to the various plagues of Europe before colonial powers decided to settle, and had time to repopulate. It would have been very different.
Charles was always closely involved in Spain. He handed everyday business in the HRE over to his brother Ferdinand early on so he could focus on Spain, Naples and the Netherlands. Charles was indisputably the most powerful man in Europe, and a large part of that power derived from his position as King of Spain.
The final Tlatoani of the Mexicas (Cuauhtémoc) was born in the year of the "Down Eagle" and all of the Actions Moctezuma make him look as real clow to his people. Many natives belive that year was cursed and the massacre in Cholula make people of Tenochtitlan knew that this was a war of extermination with the spanish. It really was a brutal psycological battle.
Evolution acts by mutation to a small extent, but mostly it acts by gene remixing. Natural selection means that the unfavorable gene mixes die off. When you introduce a factor like smallpox that changes what constitutes favorability, the survivors already had more favorable genes for the new conditions. It's not that they evolved immunity, the survivors already had genes that were more likely to survive it that the change selected for. And that, in turn, causes immunity. Smallpox immunity comes from non-lethal exposure, so those who can get it without dying acquire immunity, and those who can't die young, leaving more resources for the survivors to rebuild the population.
The Darien scheme succeeding, with a Scottish trading colony in area of Panama, would have meant the Act of Union never occurring, with Scotland maintaining it's governmental independence.
One fair point regarding the epidemic part for the Aztecs at least is that if their civic structure was not being torn down in war losses, throwing their entire empire into chaos, they may have been in a better position to respond to the disease outbreaks, both with their medical knowledge to find treatments to improve survival rates and reduce risk of infection, and implement common mitigation tactics like quarantines to contain the disease to smaller pockets. What would the death rate of the Bubonic Plague been in Europe if the places being infected by it were also under invasion and suffering military defeats just before or during the outbreaks?
European nations largely constrained the death rate of the Plague by methods like quarantines, discovering that burning the bodies seemed to reduce the spread, and having Church or specular led sick care available. But let's say England is under a "Sunset Invasion" right as a major Bubonic Plague outbreak is hitting them, and during the chaos, the Aztecs manage to kidnap and kill the King of England. Now leaderless, England has no one to declare or enforce quarantines, maintain care for the sick, or any other mitigation tactics usually used in surviving a deadly disease outbreak. So the disease can now spread much farther and wider then in real history. Nobody's doing anything to stop it and the Aztecs aren't getting sick as they're avoiding the disease towns until after they're decimated. The Aztecs in this hypothetical, aren't stupid, you don't build an empire by being stupid, so they take this opportunity and engage in ancient biological warfare, let the Plague to most of the conquering for them. In this scenario, given my limited knowledge of the Plague, I could well see that boosting the death rate to upwards of 90%.
So given a stable system of governance remaining in place, would the Aztec Empire not have been able to use quarantines, and utilize their existing healthcare systems to improve the survival rate significantly? The Smallpox may still tear through and weaken them, but would it achieve a 90% death rate with a stable government to respond and an army to enforce any responses? I think we could well have seen the death rate fall off to less then half, maybe even 1/3 or less, as fewer even get sick in the first place, and of those that do, with someone to care for them, more would survive the disease and start to spread natural immunity through the Empire, and from there to the rest of the indigenous people across the continent. Any European amphibious invasion attempts would be against organized nations, at near their full strength, rather then disorganized remnants.
There is actually a 3rd possibility that's not considered here. Upon first contact, Cortez was getting along quite well with Emperor Montezuma, and saw them as powerful potential allies. His underlings took liberties that turned the Aztecs hostile to Cortez while Cortez was away dealing with the army sent to capture him. Had they remained honourable and been more diplomatic, there's a very good chance of a Spanish-Aztec alliance which may well have accelerated the growth of the empire, fueled by trade and Spanish technology. Such trade and military alliances may well have seen Spain still get a treasure fleet of wealth coming over from the New World, but this time with that fleet carrying Spanish trade goods west and Aztec trade goods east. with both empires profiting from the peaceful trade. What effects would such an alliance have on the conquest and imperialism in the new world from the other European powers that took an interest? Would Spain have followed the example with the Aztecs in their dealings with the Inco again, only this time the example being profiting form trade and alliances?
As a history student myself who has studied the Spanish conquest through primary sources in some decent depth, you're absolutely correct about the Spanish making up a lot of the information about the Spaniards being "revered as deities". Also doesn't help that individuals like Diego de Landa straight up destroyed any evidence from native perspectives. The Spanish found whatever justification they could to strike down the Aztecs, and wrote over the history later.