Tyranny or Ideal Society
Many arguments have occurred over the centuries since the Spanish marched into the Andean highlands and took over the Incan empire, over whether the Incan's were part of an ideal human society, or just a group of tyrannical rulers. While the Incan society had created a stable political, economic, and social system in the Andean world it was far from being an ideal society. On the same note, the Incan's were not tyrannical rulers, did not exploit their subjects or take away their land for no reason. The reading entitled "Was Inca Rule Tyrannical?" discusses this argument about the Incan empire, tries to classify the form of government the Incan's lived under, and searches for the truth about what the Incan empire was really like. The truth about the Incan empire lies somewhere between the romanticized views, and the views meant to justify the Spanish conquest, while it is impossible to classify in modern terms the form of government the Incan's had.
The reading, after giving a brief introduction to the ideas behind the separate articles, is split into three different sections. The first of these sections is the section meant to idealize the Incan empire and cast doubt onto the appropriateness of the Spanish conquest of the Incas. The first two articles were written by conquistadores, Pedro de Cieza de León, and Mancio Sierra de Leguízamo. They both offer a romanticized view of the Incan culture. Cieza de León tries to paint a picture of the Incas as a ideal culture that tried to avoid war at any cost, while Sierra de Leguízamo paints a picture of a trusting uncorrupted society of Indians. These views are obviously slightly skewed, because it is hard to believe that anyone who was there at the time ...
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...ialism, an ideology that was created in 19th century Europe, does not mean that it can be labeled. The government of the Incas was created through natural evolution, and it cannot be labeled by something that was created in the mind of some European that lived 200 years after the empire was destroyed.
This reading was an excellent collection of articles, because it presented seven different views of the Incan empire. It does a good job of trying to idealize the Incas, justify their conquest by the Spanish, and label their government using modern terms. In retrospect, it is easy for us to look back at history and study it, but it is always a necessity to learn from what we study. If there is one thing to learn from the European conquest of the America's, it is that destroying a race of beings and their culture is an injustice to the conquered, and the conquerors.
Little is known about Pedro de Cieza de Leon’s youth. Historians have discovered that Pedro de Cieza de Leon was a Spaniard, a conquistador, and a writer of Peru’s history. Pedro de Cieza de Leon was not well educated and had only the most basic education from his local school parish (Atlantis). Although he did not have a superior education, his four part book is reliable because he wrote about what he observed as a conquistador. This document is full of interesting information for the reader to discover the Inca’s way of living.
The first major reason for writing the manuscript illustrates the difficulties that Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala felt during the colonial period. As a young man, he migrated from an Inca state to a newly conquered area by the Incas. He settled there with privileges given to him by the Inca Empire to teach the superior ways of their culture. But with the arrival of the Europeans in 1532, these new settlers like Guaman Poma were viewed as outsiders. The situation worsened when Viceroy Francisco de Toledo fixed an administration that divided the indigenous community into two groups: native born members and outsiders. When Guaman Poma started defending his inherited land, he presented himself as a native Andean and as a Spanish appointee. Since he collaborated with the Spanish colonial regime as a Church assistant, he considered himself as a man with rights, loyal to the Crown. During this time, Fe...
Through the study of the Peruvian society using articles like “The “Problem of the Indian...” and the Problem of the Land” by Jose Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian film La Boca del Lobo directed by Francisco Lombardi, it is learned that the identity of Peru is expressed through the Spanish descendants that live in cities or urban areas of Peru. In his essay, Mariátegui expresses that the creation of modern Peru was due to the tenure system in Peru and its Indigenous population. With the analyzation of La Boca del Lobo we will describe the native identity in Peru due to the Spanish treatment of Indians, power in the tenure system of Peru, the Indian Problem expressed by Mariátegui, and the implementation of Benedict Andersons “Imagined Communities”.
The downfall of the Aztec Empire was a major building block of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas. Spain’s empire would stretch all the way into North America from the Southwest United States all the way up the Pacific Coast. The unfortunate side effect of this was the elimination of many nations of indigenous people. The three major themes shown in this conquest really give deeper look into the anatomy of this important historical event. Without context on the extent of native assistance given to Cortez in his fight with the Aztecs, a reader would be grossly uniformed. The Spanish conquest was closer to a civil war than an actual conquest. Until reading detailed personal accounts of the fighting it is difficult to judge the deadly effectiveness of the Spaniards technological superiority. Without it is difficult to imagine 500 conquistadors holding thousands of native warriors at bay. Once the greed of Cortez and greed in general of the Europeans one understands that if it wasn’t Cortez if would have just been a different man at a different time. Unfortunately fame and prosperity seem to always win over cares about fellow human beings
Patterson, Thomas C. "Tribes, Chiefdoms, and Kingdoms in the Inca Empire.” Power Relations and State Formation (1987): 1-15,117-127.
This historical study will define the important role of Hernan Cortes in the colonization of Mexico in the age of the Spanish conquistador. Cortes was an important figure in Mexican history because of his discovery of Mexico at the Yucatan peninsula in 1519. During this time, Cortes became a historical figure that represented the “conquistador” system of conquest throughout the Mayan and Aztec Empires during the early part of the 15th century. The fall of these indigenous civilizations marked the beginning of Spanish colonization of Central America. Cortes was a significant figure because of the primarily military style of coercion and conquest that sought to annihilate the indigenous peoples of Mexico, and to claim Spanish territory. These conquests contributed significantly to the blend of indigenous and Spanish traditions of Mexico’s national history. Cortes represents the first phase of colonization for the Spanish empire in terms of the violent and aggressive nature of the Spanish Conquistador in the discovery of Mexico. The image of the Spanish conquistador as an often violent and ruthless colonizer is defined the invasion and destruction of the Aztec empire in Mexican history. In essence, a
The Aztecs and Incas were the two dominant new world societies which greeted and eventually succumbed to the Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century. Since then, they have occupied some of the most curious comers of the western imagination. Purveyors of scholarly and popular culture render them in various disparate ways: as victims of European colonialism, incompetent militarists, heroic forbears, barbarians, or authentic practitioners of native utopias and cults. The Aztecs and Incas were two Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations that roamed the land of Latin America throughout 14th and 15th century. Aztec empire ruled much of what is now Mexico from 1428 till 1521, when the empire was conquered by Spaniards. Aztecs controlled a region stretching from the Valley of Mexico in central Mexico east to the Gulf of Mexico and south to Guatemala. Aztecs were great engineers and developed a multifarious social political and religious system with Tenochtitlan as their capital city. Inca Empire stretched it boundaries from Colombia to Chile and reached west to east from the Atacama to Amazonian rain forest. Incas lack the concepts of written language however they had an incredible system of roads. Casco as their capital Inca Empire only lasted a century before it was conquered by Spaniards in early 16th century. The two Mesoamerican civilizations burgeoned independently of each other with no cultural or religious swap. Aztecs and Incan societies were predominantly agricultural. Religions of both societies were shamanistic which were heavily influenced by preceding cultures. These complex polytheistic religions regardless of their chronological exclusivity have significant features in common.
Janos Gyarmati’s Paria la Viexa and an expanding empire: Provincial centers in the political economy of the Inka Empire proved that the Inca’s built an empire unlike another. From 1440 to 1532 A.D. the Inca Empire dominated the Americas. Known as “the fastest growing and largest territorial empire”(Gyarmati 37) of its time the Inca Empire left a mark with their complex, perpetual and innovative economic, road, and settlement system. The Inca’s were advanced for their time, however they lacked a system that would guarantee the survival of their kin. In order to strive, for the long-term, the Inca’s created provincial centers that would ensure their growth and economy for the generations to come. Provincial centers served as
Like the Athenians and Spartans of ancient Greece, the Inca and the Aztec bear resemblance to the two other ancient cultures. The Athenians and Incas were both more interested in developing their Arts as well as their military, but both the Spartans and the Aztecs were highly interested more so in warfare than religion. Although the Aztec and Inca never had to face each other, it is interesting to compare them because of their dominant positions of extremely large and powerful tribes. I am going to compare and contrast religion and the social system along with their system of government, which can be put together.
A series of independence movements had marked most of South America, or “Nueva Granada” in particular during the vast time period of the early 16th century up until the late 18th century – early 19th century. An introduction of the time period which dates back to the late 15th century, illustrates how the Southern portion of the now Colombia had become a part of the Incan Empire whose central base had been located deep into Peru. Only the enlightened historians and those that have done thorough research of the time period have noted the existence concerning the various Indian tribes that roamed freely throughout portions of the land much before the emergence of the Spaniards into the territory.
Before any conquistador had ever step foot in Inca lands, issues that would lead to the Inca’s downfall had been buil...
When the Europeans first arrived in Latin America, they didn’t realize the immensity of their actions. As history has proven, the Europeans have imposed many things on the Latin American territory have had a long, devastating effect on the indigenous people. In the centuries after 1492, Europeans would control much of South America and impose a foreign culture upon the already established civilizations that existed before their arrival. These imposed ideas left the continent weak and resulted in the loss of culture, the dependence on European countries, and a long standing ethnic tension between natives and settlers which is evident even to this day. The indigenous people of South America, which included the Aztec, Olmec, and the Maya cultures of Central America and the Inca of South America, had developed complex civilizations, which made use of calendars, mathematics, writing, astronomy, the arts, and architecture. Unfortunately for them, the Europeans cared little about the culture they would be obliterating, and cared more about their own ulterior motives.
In this essay I will tell how the Aztec and Inca empires ended, and also I will compare the fall of both empires, using for a point of departure the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the land of Mexico. Wherever the Spanish went always the same thing happened, from my point of view. Innocent people were killed for no good reason, cities were massacred, civilizations were destroyed or forced to convert to Christianity. And so, I think now is the time to reevaluate the actions of the European explorers who subjugated the native American peoples and their civilizations. Undoubtedly the most glorified and heroically portrayed of these figures of the European conquest of the New World were the conquistadors, the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the 16-th century. These men, under leaders such as Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizzaro nearly eliminated the Aztec and Inca peoples. Surely many of these soldiers were extremely cruel and intolerant of the native populations. But it is important to consider, with the push of both sides toward territorial expansion, how these groups (European and American) could remain isolated from each other. Furthermore, with meeting of these two imperialist cultures, it must be considered whether it would be possible for the two to peacefully coexist.
Anais Nin once said that “we write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.” In his book, Seven Myths of Spanish Conquest, Matthew Restall tries to change our perception of the past in other to open our eyes to what life was really like during the colonial period. As Restall puts it, the main propose of the book is to “illustrate the degree to which the Conquest was a far more complex and protracted affair” (p.154) than what was supposed in the latters and chronicles left by the conquistadores. Each one of Restall’s chapters examines one of seven myths regarding the mystery behind the conquest. By doing so, Matthew Restall forces us to look back at the Spanish conquest and question
Before the 15th century, the Indians in the Americas were not connected with the world and would remain that way until Columbus's exploration. In the beginning of 15th century, the Aztecs were the dominant group in Mesoamerica leaded by Montezuma, the last leader, before the Spanish conquest. In 1519, Hernan Cortez led the Spanish mission to explore and conquer the New World. This paper will compare three primary sources about this event. First, an informing letter sent from Cortez to King Charles V, the king of Spain. Second, the Broken Spears which is an Indian recollection about the conquest of Mexico. Lastly, Bernal Diaz’s (one of Cortez’s men) account was written by him to share his experience with Aztec civilization. Moreover, this paper will show the credibility of Diaz’s account compared to the other sources because the objectivity of his tone, written after a while of the event, and the author’s great experience and his independent purpose of the source.