Dafool:
1. Materials science is timeless. Obsidian is a well defined mineral and its mechanical limits are empirically testable. Given its chemical composition we can
easily establish its strike mechanics. You can glue it however you want, you put it under a compression load, but the physics don't change. It has real trouble at penetrating thanks to it being of glass nature. It is intellectually bankrupt to ignore chemistry and throw up our hands saying "We know nothing about durability", of course we do - we know the mechanical properties of the materials and can compute failure stresses given possible geometries.
2. No one in this thread has ever suggested that any Aztec weapon or armor was ineffective against their native opponents - if they weren't they wouldn't be in use (outside of the very rare and odd ceremonial and religious use). The natives weren't idiots if obsidian blades weren't combat effective they'd have used some other edge or adopted blunt weapons.
Against better armor, they may well be ineffective. Macuahuitls died out pretty quickly - only two were even preserved as trophies or curios. Why did that happen? I've listed three different theories I've heard (everyone who could use them died, everyone who could make them died, they weren't effective in the new situation and the natives stopped using them) - what is yours?
nce again, I think you're trying to rationalize this without considering historical sources and what they tell us. For example, during the battle with the Tlaxcalteca we get a description of "fire hardened darts" (tlacochtli) raining down on the Spanish, "each one capable of piercing any armour". "Any" is almost certainly going to refer to the armor present, both ichcahuipilli and chain mail, but likely not plate. This is pretty easily confirmed by other accounts from the New World. The Portuguese reported that Brazilian natives possessed a similar type of weapon which frequently penetrated chain mail. Or if we look at the Chichimeca, we know that the Spanish originally attempted to fight them in chain mail, but later switched to ichcahuipilli after they found that Native arrows could pierce the armor.
Have you ever been in combat? Have you ever done a real AAR? Battlefield witness accounts are terrible (and I say that as a guy who got his position demonstrably wrong by 500 meters). People will swear they were under sustained heavy fire ... and the insurgents left just 40 shell casings over an hour. Guys will tell you they just took a grazing shot, and their chicken plate took a direct hit from an AK-47 that literally broke bones. Battle accounts
today have to be squared with rationality.
Suppose the darts above really could pierce "any" armor reliably. Why did the natives wear armor then? If the armor is ineffective against missile weapons which lose a good part of their kinetic energy in flight, why would it be effective against melee weapons that don't? It isn't like the natives have ratchets or other energy storing mechanisms so the missile weapons can pack more punch. If the natives armor wasn't effective against native missile weapons ...
why was it worn? Like with your laughable claim that most peltists could reliably make head shots, you aren't considering the implications this ability should have had on native/native warfare. You keep making claims that require the natives to fight like idiots pre-contact; this is one of the early lessons in professional military strategy - the enemy picks his tactics for a reason and won't adopt tactics in the long term that are not effective at achieving his goals.
Much more likely is that the darts could penetrate most armor some of the time. Clothe armor makes sense in an environment where blunt trauma predominates, it doesn't in an environment where reliable armor penetration occurs. Particularly in an environment without cavalry leading to longer missile engagement windows. Depending on geometry and range, you likely have a small, but significant, chance of beating chain, particularly with a heavy numerical advantage for the dart throwers.
Not true. There are numerous examples of Natives adopting Spanish arms and armor and plenty of the opposite. The Aztecs were quite prone to "adapt" Spanish weapons, but often didn't use them in a practical way, instead using them as adornments or modifications for other weapons. This fits pretty clearly into their cultural traditions, in which high quality weapons were valued as trophies of past victories. In the Andes we hear of the Sapa Inca wearing metal armor, using metal weapons, and riding a horse, but metal weapons and armor, something present in the Andes for quite a while, never became highly used by actual soldiers despite the Sapa Inca having gathered a stockpile of them. The Spanish could use their weapons to great effect, but many Natives simply didn't associate them with any sort of "huge force modifier". When the Spanish made the trading of horses and weapons to Natives illegal, they were protecting a valuable commodity which they alone could control. Horses and Spanish weapons were rare in the New World and thus presented a very potent instrument for bribery. Native opinions form a dichotomy that seems to confirm this mentality, as Spanish allies with horses and metal weapons were often taunted as cowards and traitors, while those who possessed captured weapons and horses were often regarded highly. If anything, this tells us that the Native view of Spanish technology and horses was not uniform.
Because as we all know natives would never lie or make up justifications to cover their own failures, petty rivalries, and jealousy. People are complicated and reading tactics out of moral judgments is about as pointless an exercise as I've ever heard. The crossbow was condemned God only knows how many times in Europe and decried as evil ... but oddly enough people still used it. Yes, I'll grant that people may take a generation to get over the totemic uses of weapons, but the natives weren't stupid. Calling the guys who picked the winning side cowards, sellouts, and evil is a truism of human history - it was done by Christians with those who sided with the Turks, it was done Turks for those who sided with Tamerlane and so on.
Further, you cannot both ban the transfer of something and then use it as a valuable bribe. One precludes the other. While you seem to think that societies can manage huge long term planning across all facets of society, they can't. No Spanish leader is going to say "Hey, let's ban these suckers so in 20 years we can give them away as status symbols"; he's going to use them as status symbols before he dies or loses his moment in the sun.
I think you're just making this up. First off, the claim that the Aztecs wouldn't connect the plague to the Spaniards is demonstrably false. The Aztecs believed that the disease was a weapon divinely bestowed to the Spanish, something the Spanish also believed and propagated. Even if they didn't understand the true nature of the epidemic, they clearly associated with the Spanish.
You do realize that a smallpox epidemic means that the Aztecs were the obscene minority of the victims, right? You do know that with a 12 day latency period, most people are 3 vectors back from someone they can identify as being sick. After all unless you are in the minority who think there wasn't a pre-Incan contact epidemic, the whole of the Inca empire lost over 30% of its population before ever seeing a Spaniard.
A victory in Mesoamerican culture is a moment for serious planning, not pomp. Soldiers would be rewarded, foreign nobles would be put under pressure, and spies would spread out. Never has it been a tradition in that region to start showing off gold. You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what "ornamentation" when referring to gold working in the Americas. Lastly, you're still assuming that there are any Spaniards that clearly know what's in Mexico, where Tenochtitlan is, or even what happened to Cortes. As I said before, you're relying on a ridiculous scenario in which the Aztecs somehow send gold plated postcards to the entire the world and Spain manages to invent Facebook early enough for Cortes to give them daily updates about what he's doing in Mexico. Seriously, consider the reality of what you're suggesting and the logic behind it.
No I'm assuming that the natives taken captive
before Cortes left Cuba don't get magically obliterated from history. Let's face it a nobody from the Yucatan coast knew of the Aztec wealth. And somehow you expect a united native polity to be more ignorant than that? Let's be serious. Cortez wasn't the only one looking for golden cities, he was just the one to get their first. Have you ever read how gold obsessed the Spaniards were (I blame Marco Polo)? Of course they are going to take captives on the coast, of course the captives will know there is a city rich in gold. The only real problem is the language barrier, but even that will only take a few years.
And they have to be able to get there, they have to be able to able to legally enter Mexico, they have to logistically support a major force, they have to enter completely hostile territory with no local support, they have to overcome massive odds, and they have to be able to hold on to it. Not even Cortes could do all of that. While it's true that some adventurous Spaniards are likely to enter Mexico again at some point, your notion that they'll have a perfect understanding of the circumstances, will act promptly and decisively, and will face minimal resistance seems so rosy that I can barely buy any of it. It simply doesn't have any historical precedent.
My suspicion is that people like Grijalva (who was there before Cortes), Pizarro, de Villafana, de Córdoba, etc. would be on the trail of the same information within a few years. Eventually one of them is not going to die to the last man. After all, they have horses and a decided mobility advantage. Once the crown determines that the place is more valuable than Tunsia, its over.
In short, your theories require us to make very convenient assumptions about native behavior while ignoring logical implications. Of course native projectiles can't reliably penetrate all armor - then no natives would wear armor in battle. Even though we know that the Aztecs had dedicated goldsmiths, everyone is going to follow some secret police directive to "not talk about gold" and hide the location of the most powerful and important city for thousands of miles ... even though this would make commerce utterly impossible. As much fun as your rhetorical flourishes about post cards and facebook are, we can rest assured that neither the Spanish nor the Aztecs were idiots nor could they be without some other power taking over.
Look we all get it, the native weapons weren't useless. The Spanish weren't gods among men. The hordes the Spanish faced were terrifying in size and likely at least damn frightening in ferocity. We know that most Spaniards died against the Aztecs. It shouldn't surprise us that there was a healthy fear of the natives. However, observations, particularly those of technical nature have to jive with all the other information we know.
What we can say, is that even with obscene (e.g. > 5:1 counting native allies) odds, the Aztecs still took heavy casualties and were not able to kill off the Spanish. What we can say, is that disease will utterly destroy the native economies. What we can say, is that Spaniards had
everything needed to land a force more than sufficient to route any army the natives can field.
Which for game planning purposes is way more than enough. Given the generic models being used in EUIV, the most accurate representation of the native states is as low tech states that cannot maintain sustained organized resistance to European aggression. This may be quite boring - so throw out the history and make the game interesting in some way. But for the vast, vast majority of games the native states should fold when attacked. Europe needs the cash infusion for good gameplay. This also means that if there is a realistic depiction of native politics (e.g. umpteen Mesoamerican states), then it needs to be done in a manner that ends up with gold in European pockets most of the time. Within 120 years of finding the new world, most games
the AIs should have completely killed the central and south American native states.
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