Conquest of the Incas

Military imbalance and tactics

• Commenters speculate on what 100,000 Inca troops “should” have done against a few hundred Spaniards: night attacks, terrain advantages, projectiles, nets, poisoning, etc., while others note this is hindsight and coordination was non-trivial.
• Multiple posts stress that the Incas initially had no conceptual model for cavalry or armor and took too long to adapt ambush and rough‑terrain tactics that did work later in some mountain passes.

Cavalry, weapons, fear, and materials

• Horses and shock cavalry are treated as the decisive tactical edge on open ground; parallels are made to modern crowd control by mounted police.
• People puzzle over why the Incas didn’t just kill horses or deploy dense pike formations; replies emphasize fear, lack of experience with large animals, discipline requirements, and the time needed to evolve counter‑cavalry doctrine.
• There’s debate over Inca metallurgy: they had bronze, but no metal armor, limited time to redesign weapons for plate armor, and reliance on slings and short‑range weapons.

Native allies, soft power, and internal weakness

• Several comments emphasize that both in Mexico and Peru, Spanish success depended heavily on indigenous allies who already resented the empires’ tribute and brutality.
• The Inca state is described as highly centralized and top‑down; decapitation of leadership repeatedly paralyzed resistance. Some argue the empire was a “house of cards” already stressed by civil war and recent expansion.

Organizational capacity and administration

• There’s a long subthread on whether Inca administration was globally exceptional or merely comparable to contemporaneous Eurasian states.
• Disagreements center on how much lack of writing, codified law, currency, and judiciary constrained them versus the sheer scale of their territorially integrated, road‑linked empire and labor‑tax system.

Historiography and narrative bias

• One commenter criticizes the essay’s alignment with “heroic conquistador” and “tiny elite vs millions” narratives associated with popular works, arguing it underplays native allies and failed expeditions.
• Others push back, saying modern academic reactions sometimes overcorrect by denying real military/technological asymmetries.
• There’s meta‑debate over “terminal narratives,” environmental determinism, and whether Iberian victories were structural or mostly contingency and luck.

Pre‑Columbian violence and modern myths

• Several posts contest a popular modern image of Native Americans as uniformly peaceful, noting warfare, slavery, and sacrifice long predated Europeans, while others warn against over‑generalization across very different societies.
• Some complain that US education and museums focus almost entirely on post‑contact victimization, neglecting pre‑contact political and cultural history, partly due to the lack of indigenous written records.

Related media and sources

• Commenters recommend a longform history podcast on collapsing civilizations, classic 19th‑century narrative histories of Peru/Mexico, and an early moral critique of colonial atrocities.
• The essay’s author is praised for clear sourcing and narrative style, with readers highlighting related essays on Aztecs and whaling, as well as anthropological work on Inca quipu and debt.