12 ms·

Disease was indeed a huge factor, but like all imperial conquests, the technology advantage (steel weapons / armor in this case) likely made the biggest differe

• jcranmer 7y ago
  No, the biggest advantage was uniting all the disaffected neighbors to do the dirty work of fighting the war. There were at least 80,000 native allies of Cortes fighting the Aztecs, without whom the Spanish would have been slaughtered. Most imperial expansion in the New World tended to rely on "ally with my neighbors' neighbors to defeat my neighbors, and now that my neighbors' neighbors are now my neighbors, turn against them using their neighbors" as the primary strategy for expansion. The technological advantage is often grossly overstated, especially since natives were eager buyers of European military arms, and Europeans were eager sellers of them.