6 ms·

Did the Incas not fish much? Seems like they would have done well with Retarius with net and spear. If you had 100000 people and had to defeat 100 well armed s

by acyou 2y ago

Did the Incas not fish much? Seems like they would have done well with Retarius with net and spear. If you had 100000 people and had to defeat 100 well armed soldiers, what would you do? Well, wait for them to get tired, ideally. Try to restrict their movement. Take away or disable their weapons. Withdraw to advantageous terrain. Heavier projectiles. Poison darts. Harassment. Long ropes and nets that you try to snag them in. Wait until they are mostly sleep and attack at night. Invite them to dinner and poison their food, or jump them then. Tough to coordinate this with 100000 people, I think that's the main issue. I don't know if it boils down to military power or absolute capability. There's always a lot of soft power that goes hand in hand with hard power.

lukan 2y ago
"Wait until they are mostly sleep and attack at night." The Incas apparently did not fight at night. And why they did not managed to kill the horses, were likely because they were too afraid of them and they were not used to killing large animals as none existed there. Otherwise all it takes to stop a knight on a horse is to kill the horse. Or just hurt its legs enough, or make it stumble.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  European militaries had to train the fear of horses out of their infantry. The normal human reaction to being swarmed by galloping cavalry is to flee. Keeping formation under such conditions is hard. What would help the Incas would be pikes. Lots of pikes. Hard to know why they didn't copy them from the Spaniards.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    I think they only had stone-tipped wooden spears.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      The Incas had bronze and used it for weaponry.
      - MrMcCall 2y ago
        Thanks. I guess bronze verses steel and horses was just not enough.
        lukan 2y ago
        Against charging horses even a phalanx of long sharpened (and hardened in fire) wooden sticks would be enough. Ropes with stones flung under their legs. Killing them with arrows - really that part confuses me. The horses had in some cases some armor - but why didn't the other horses not fell from the missile barrage?
        MrMcCall 2y ago
        "Fear is the mind-killer." --Frank Herbert You also need enough love to be willing to be the first to fall in defense of your people. Maybe they didn't even know that the horses could be killed? They could've looked like monsters to the locals. But yeah, the lens of history is far from clear, except for "Fuck the conquistadors." That said, would the locals have abandoned human sacrifice and cannabalism without getting their asses kicked? Who knows? Sometimes, it's just assholes killing assholes, usually with innocents caught in the crossfire.
        devilbunny 2y ago
        > "Fuck the conquistadors." I don't know the story of the Inca very well, but I did just read about Cortes' conquest of the Aztecs (Buddy Levy, Conquistador), and the primary moral of the story that I got was "if you believe in human sacrifice of other people, and if the tribute you demand of vassal states is a certain number of their sons and daughters, don't be surprised if they follow some other dude who's got better gear". He'd have gotten nowhere without native allies, and lucky for him the Aztecs had managed to make enemies out of just about everyone else nearby. Was he a good person? I think we can firmly say "no". Was he worse than the Aztecs? That's a tougher question. If you were an Aztec, almost certainly. If you were one of their subject peoples who cut an early deal with him, almost certainly not.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    I thought pikes when I was reading the article. My wild guess was maybe a materials science problem and that for some reason they couldn't mass-produce them with the tolerances they needed to fight cavalry.
    - lukan 2y ago
      A wooden stick rammed into the ground alone is enough to stop a charging horse. The faster it charges, the quicker it would penetrate itself. But this was a lesson long known in europe, but not in the Andes. Still, kind of baffling. I suppose religious motives played a role as well in not trying out those simple solutions.
  - bambax 2y ago
    > The normal human reaction to being swarmed by galloping cavalry is to flee Yes, and that's why crowd control with mounted police is still very effective today.
beloch 2y ago
The Spanish conquistadors in Pizarro's original force, as well as his reinforcements, were really quite unique. We tend to think of the period as being characterized by monarchs and royal armies. Pizarro and his men were anything but a royal army. The bulk of them came from Extremadura: a remote, mountainous, and relatively poor area of Spain renowned for producing soldiers. Pizarro is, famously, Cortez's second cousin once removed, from this same region. If you were a young man of Extremadura during this period, soldiering was pretty much your best prospect for advancement, and Cortez was your hero. The reconquista and other conflicts had supplied several centuries of constant warfare that honed Spanish cavalry into the very best of Europe. The Extemadurans were the best of the Spanish. The stock that Pizarro's conquistadors were drawn from was elite. Now, consider how that stock was drawn. As I mentioned above, Pizarro's force was no "royal army". No agents of the crown went to Extremadura and mustered up an army to send to Peru. These men paid their own way to the new world as an investment. With the reconquista finished and fabulous tales of conquest coming from Cortez's campaign, many soldiers willingly went to the new world to make a fortune for themselves. The men in Pizarro's company had already been on a difficult path before they set foot in Peru, but they were not just servants of the crown loyally following orders. They were entrepreneurs desperate to make good on their investment. Pizarro basically had his pick of the most ambitious men available. One thing that made Spanish cavalry of this period so dangerous was pure reckless courage. If you put an overwhelming force in front of them they would charge directly into it while screaming, "Santiago!". The notion was that the enemy would not expect such insanity, and God would see them through anyways. The crazy thing is that this worked almost all the time in Peru. Pizarro's men were evil, greedy men, but they routinely routed enemy forces many times their size with reckless charges. On flat open ground, mounted conquistadors were virtually untouchable. The Incas learned this far too late. The kidnapping and ransom of Atahualpa was an insane feat that typified the conquest of Peru. Pizarro's force was billeted in guest quarters that consisted of several long buildings with many doors facing a central square. They were surrounded by a royal Inca army dozens of times their size. They were too far from the coast to retreat if things turned violent, and they were convinced the Inca meant to turn things violent. For his part, the Inca saw the Spanish as a distraction from the more important task of mopping up the civil war that had just happened. The Spanish were too small a force to offer any serious resistance. After some scheming and diplomatic back and forth, Atahualpa and several thousand of his soldiers walked right into Pizarro's trap. They entered that courtyard and Pizarro's men rode out of every door of those long buildings, screaming. The expedition's cannons were fired for added psychological impact. The Inca's were compressed from all sides and panicked. Atahualpa was snatched from his litter and taken captive. The Spanish massacred thousands in the square and then continued riding down the Inca soldiers who hadn't been able to fit in the square for hours after Atahualpa's capture. With their command decapitated, there was little resistance. As the conquest slowly progressed, the Inca resistance was typified by brilliant logistics, massive numbers, and flawed command that just couldn't seem to come to grips with what elite Spanish cavalry could do. The Spanish were taken by surprise and surrounded in Cusco by an absolutely massive army that appeared seemingly from nowhere... and didn't attack. The Inca commanders wanted to ensure they had an absolutely overwhelming force, so they continued to amass forces instead of attacking when surprise was on their side. They initially controlled the fortress of Saqsaywaman, but the Spanish were able to take it back due to the long delay in attack. That gave them a position to endure a long siege, which they did. Some Inca generals did have success once they knew what they were dealing with. They learned to ambush the conquistadors in mountain passes, rolling boulders down on them from above. They learned to attack on rough ground that the Spanish horses couldn't be useful on. However, the Inca rulers seemed unable to comprehend that such a tiny force could offer resistance, so they still ordered their generals to offer pitched battles on flat open ground, which went against the Inca every time. These battles, such as at Lima, were tragically expensive for the Inca because their generals led from the front and often went into battle resolved to win or die. Naked military force wasn't the only reason the Inca lost. The Spanish were adept at turning factions against the Inca's. The Inca empire was young and had been rapidly expanding. A lot of the people they had so recently conquered were only too happy to join the Spanish, not dissimilar to how the Aztec's enemies were eager to join forces with Cortez. The Inca empire was also predicated on worship of the Inca ruler as a living god. That became a serious flaw when the Spanish set up their own puppet Incas. However, while Cortez had a massive native army at his back by the time he reached Tenochtitlan, Pizarro's forces were often shockingly outnumbered but still managed to pull off seemingly impossible victories. Spanish cavalry really was that good if you fought them on their own terms, and the Inca chose to do that more often than they were ultimately able to afford. There were also other factors, like plague, that should not be underestimated.

by acyou 2y ago

lukan 2y ago

"Wait until they are mostly sleep and attack at night." The Incas apparently did not fight at night. And why they did not managed to kill the horses, were likely because they were too afraid of them and they were not used to killing large animals as none existed there. Otherwise all it takes to stop a knight on a horse is to kill the horse. Or just hurt its legs enough, or make it stumble.

inglor_cz 2y ago
European militaries had to train the fear of horses out of their infantry. The normal human reaction to being swarmed by galloping cavalry is to flee. Keeping formation under such conditions is hard. What would help the Incas would be pikes. Lots of pikes. Hard to know why they didn't copy them from the Spaniards.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  I think they only had stone-tipped wooden spears.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    The Incas had bronze and used it for weaponry.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Thanks. I guess bronze verses steel and horses was just not enough.
      - lukan 2y ago
        Against charging horses even a phalanx of long sharpened (and hardened in fire) wooden sticks would be enough. Ropes with stones flung under their legs. Killing them with arrows - really that part confuses me. The horses had in some cases some armor - but why didn't the other horses not fell from the missile barrage?
        MrMcCall 2y ago
        "Fear is the mind-killer." --Frank Herbert You also need enough love to be willing to be the first to fall in defense of your people. Maybe they didn't even know that the horses could be killed? They could've looked like monsters to the locals. But yeah, the lens of history is far from clear, except for "Fuck the conquistadors." That said, would the locals have abandoned human sacrifice and cannabalism without getting their asses kicked? Who knows? Sometimes, it's just assholes killing assholes, usually with innocents caught in the crossfire.
        devilbunny 2y ago
        > "Fuck the conquistadors." I don't know the story of the Inca very well, but I did just read about Cortes' conquest of the Aztecs (Buddy Levy, Conquistador), and the primary moral of the story that I got was "if you believe in human sacrifice of other people, and if the tribute you demand of vassal states is a certain number of their sons and daughters, don't be surprised if they follow some other dude who's got better gear". He'd have gotten nowhere without native allies, and lucky for him the Aztecs had managed to make enemies out of just about everyone else nearby. Was he a good person? I think we can firmly say "no". Was he worse than the Aztecs? That's a tougher question. If you were an Aztec, almost certainly. If you were one of their subject peoples who cut an early deal with him, almost certainly not.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I thought pikes when I was reading the article. My wild guess was maybe a materials science problem and that for some reason they couldn't mass-produce them with the tolerances they needed to fight cavalry.
  - lukan 2y ago
    A wooden stick rammed into the ground alone is enough to stop a charging horse. The faster it charges, the quicker it would penetrate itself. But this was a lesson long known in europe, but not in the Andes. Still, kind of baffling. I suppose religious motives played a role as well in not trying out those simple solutions.
- bambax 2y ago
  > The normal human reaction to being swarmed by galloping cavalry is to flee Yes, and that's why crowd control with mounted police is still very effective today.

beloch 2y ago

The Spanish conquistadors in Pizarro's original force, as well as his reinforcements, were really quite unique. We tend to think of the period as being characterized by monarchs and royal armies. Pizarro and his men were anything but a royal army. The bulk of them came from Extremadura: a remote, mountainous, and relatively poor area of Spain renowned for producing soldiers. Pizarro is, famously, Cortez's second cousin once removed, from this same region. If you were a young man of Extremadura during this period, soldiering was pretty much your best prospect for advancement, and Cortez was your hero. The reconquista and other conflicts had supplied several centuries of constant warfare that honed Spanish cavalry into the very best of Europe. The Extemadurans were the best of the Spanish. The stock that Pizarro's conquistadors were drawn from was elite. Now, consider how that stock was drawn. As I mentioned above, Pizarro's force was no "royal army". No agents of the crown went to Extremadura and mustered up an army to send to Peru. These men paid their own way to the new world as an investment. With the reconquista finished and fabulous tales of conquest coming from Cortez's campaign, many soldiers willingly went to the new world to make a fortune for themselves. The men in Pizarro's company had already been on a difficult path before they set foot in Peru, but they were not just servants of the crown loyally following orders. They were entrepreneurs desperate to make good on their investment. Pizarro basically had his pick of the most ambitious men available. One thing that made Spanish cavalry of this period so dangerous was pure reckless courage. If you put an overwhelming force in front of them they would charge directly into it while screaming, "Santiago!". The notion was that the enemy would not expect such insanity, and God would see them through anyways. The crazy thing is that this worked almost all the time in Peru. Pizarro's men were evil, greedy men, but they routinely routed enemy forces many times their size with reckless charges. On flat open ground, mounted conquistadors were virtually untouchable. The Incas learned this far too late. The kidnapping and ransom of Atahualpa was an insane feat that typified the conquest of Peru. Pizarro's force was billeted in guest quarters that consisted of several long buildings with many doors facing a central square. They were surrounded by a royal Inca army dozens of times their size. They were too far from the coast to retreat if things turned violent, and they were convinced the Inca meant to turn things violent. For his part, the Inca saw the Spanish as a distraction from the more important task of mopping up the civil war that had just happened. The Spanish were too small a force to offer any serious resistance. After some scheming and diplomatic back and forth, Atahualpa and several thousand of his soldiers walked right into Pizarro's trap. They entered that courtyard and Pizarro's men rode out of every door of those long buildings, screaming. The expedition's cannons were fired for added psychological impact. The Inca's were compressed from all sides and panicked. Atahualpa was snatched from his litter and taken captive. The Spanish massacred thousands in the square and then continued riding down the Inca soldiers who hadn't been able to fit in the square for hours after Atahualpa's capture. With their command decapitated, there was little resistance. As the conquest slowly progressed, the Inca resistance was typified by brilliant logistics, massive numbers, and flawed command that just couldn't seem to come to grips with what elite Spanish cavalry could do. The Spanish were taken by surprise and surrounded in Cusco by an absolutely massive army that appeared seemingly from nowhere... and didn't attack. The Inca commanders wanted to ensure they had an absolutely overwhelming force, so they continued to amass forces instead of attacking when surprise was on their side. They initially controlled the fortress of Saqsaywaman, but the Spanish were able to take it back due to the long delay in attack. That gave them a position to endure a long siege, which they did. Some Inca generals did have success once they knew what they were dealing with. They learned to ambush the conquistadors in mountain passes, rolling boulders down on them from above. They learned to attack on rough ground that the Spanish horses couldn't be useful on. However, the Inca rulers seemed unable to comprehend that such a tiny force could offer resistance, so they still ordered their generals to offer pitched battles on flat open ground, which went against the Inca every time. These battles, such as at Lima, were tragically expensive for the Inca because their generals led from the front and often went into battle resolved to win or die. Naked military force wasn't the only reason the Inca lost. The Spanish were adept at turning factions against the Inca's. The Inca empire was young and had been rapidly expanding. A lot of the people they had so recently conquered were only too happy to join the Spanish, not dissimilar to how the Aztec's enemies were eager to join forces with Cortez. The Inca empire was also predicated on worship of the Inca ruler as a living god. That became a serious flaw when the Spanish set up their own puppet Incas. However, while Cortez had a massive native army at his back by the time he reached Tenochtitlan, Pizarro's forces were often shockingly outnumbered but still managed to pull off seemingly impossible victories. Spanish cavalry really was that good if you fought them on their own terms, and the Inca chose to do that more often than they were ultimately able to afford. There were also other factors, like plague, that should not be underestimated.