Cortes was a unique case, and I'm surprised people believe Cortes was a champion of Khorne
1519, Cortes lands in Yucatan with 11 ships, over 500 soldiers and 100 sailors - with 16 horses. Also some doggies. He treats with the locals there, receiving presents from them, including 20 women (one of whom becomes his mistress and language interpreter). He then sails onwards after having gathered information about who he is dealing with from the locals, founding Veracruz, mainly to do with dealing with his jealous superior (who realized Cortes was intending to invade the mainland, exceeding his commands). His soldiers he exercised and disciplined like no other exploring European force had done before, naturally the effects of discipline and morale were most severe in groups of soldiers a long way away from home. To signal how serious he was with his men, he sunk his own ships. The message was clear, they were not going home any time soon, they would either survive by conquest or die. Thus the conquistadors set out to conquer
They march through the Mexican interior, with Cortes quickly noticing the Aztec Empire is in political crisis and resents most of the subjects that pay it tribute. Through diplomacy, Cortes would gain no less than 200,000 native allies, and the nation of Tlaxcala (constantly at war with the Aztecs) would after initial resistance, become Cortes's staunchest ally. Cortes leads his men onwards and all along the way receive threats by Montezuma to remain away from the capital, and receive great gifts of gold in return for them staying away from the capital. This was an immense misreading of the situation by Montezuma, as upon seeing so much gold given away, Cortes and his men wondered just how much gold Montezuma had - and thus were more determined then ever to seek out his capital. Cortes with his small force of soldiers and 1,000 Tlaxcaltecs enter Tenochitlan and are received by Montezuma as honoured guests. Cortes soon seizes Montezuma, thus gaining political control of all of the Aztec Empire, through sheer force of personality.
Spanish politics would come back to haunt Cortes once more, with Panfilo Narvaez (a rival conquistador) arriving to wrest command away from Cortes. Upon hearing this Cortes left a band of 80 Spaniards and a few hundred Tlaxcaltecs to garrison Tenochitlan, and set off to battle Panfilo Narvaez. Cortes defeats Narvaez and absorbs his army into his own, but upon returning finds that his garrison is under siege by the Aztecs. The captain he had left in charge of the Spaniards and Tlaxcaltecs, Pedro de Alvarado, had witnessed a festival gathering of 200 chiefs - fearing an uprising, ordered a preemptive strike. Naturally this went down poorly, and an actual uprising started. Cortes fights his way through to his besieged men and allies and orders Montezuma, to in turn order his people to retreat. By this point however, the anti-spaniard faction had taken power, and they are disgusted by Montezuma's plea (so they pelt him with stones until he dies). Lacking supplies to win a siege, lacking their hostage monarch, Cortes makes a plan for escape.
Rather characteristically, the last thing Cortes does before ordering the escape, is divide their gold between his men.
They march under the cover of darkness through an unguarded causeway, but partway through their journey they are noticed and the eagle warriors of the Aztec Empire at once begin to harry their retreat. Men in canoes appearing by their flanks to attack them, men behind them pressing the attack forwards, Cortes's retreat turns into a panicked rabble. Cortes himself presses onwards leaving the rest of his expedition to fight for survival on their own, some of the men weighed down by gold are captured by the Aztecs or lose their footing and drown. Himself with a vanguard of the last horsemen he has, by legend, gazes across the lake and sees his men having their hearts ripped out and all - crying. He loses his artillery, a lot of his horses, hundreds of his men and thousands of his allies. He waits for his surviving men to arrive with him, and then sets out for Tlaxcala, fighting the pursuing Aztec force victoriously - notably when Cortes and his cavalrymen charged the Aztec commander, killing him. The Aztecs had not seen cavalry in combat on the plains before, and so were surprised by their effectiveness and had no countermeasure prepared. Whilst at Tlaxcala he and his allies planned to retaliate and decisively crush the Aztec Empire.
Cortes begins crushing smaller Aztec vassal states, using this to demonstrate his power to larger Aztec vassal states - gradually winning them over, or replacing them with loyal Kings, gradually increasing his force whilst diminishing the Aztec Empire. Notably, all of Cortes's allies were Kingdoms or tribes that had been previously subjugated by the Aztecs. His own Spanish troops, morale broken by their defeat, want nothing more than to return home with their gold, but Cortes manages to keep them fighting onwards. His own troops, his own allies all ready, the Aztecs isolated - Cortes begins the siege. At the same time, smallpox from the earlier visit of the Spanish to Tenochitlan turns into an epidemic; before the Aztecs can mount a proper response, the disease, famine and political disorder turns into chaos, stopping the Aztecs from halting its spread. The disease wipes out many of their warriors, and most importantly, wipes out a great number of their leadership.
Cortes builds ships on the lake surrounding Tenochitlan, so that when the Aztecs attempted to surround his men on the causeway as they did so well before, they would be faced by Spanish ships. At the same time Cortes sends out men to block the causeways and aqueducts, ensuring the city would be running out of supplies. Fighting ensues in brutal street to street fashion, with some Spaniards getting captured by the Aztecs and sacrificed atop the great pyramid. Instead of breaking their morale, this made the Spanish angrier. Fighting went on day and night, with Cortes fighting to keep his allies with him, and fighting to keep tributaries from joining the Aztecs.
Eventually however Cortes wins through, at which point his native allies, having had to deal with the Aztec tribute for quite some time (sending off their loved ones to be sacrificed by the Aztecs), engaged in revenge on such a scale that even Cortes was unnerved. The Spanish begin killing the Aztec Warriors, who surrender, the Spanish continue killing them anyways whilst their allies pursue the rest fleeing, and engage in their revenge. Thus the Aztec Empire was completely defeated and all of its political vassals absorbed into New Mexico under Cortes.
The Spanish Council of the Indies gets rather worried by Cortes's success, as Cortes had the popular support of the natives and was now in charge of what was once an Empire, several thousand miles away from home. He had everything he needed to found an independent Kingdom, but ultimately decides against it. He leaves Mexico City to conquer Honduras, this expedition costing his health greatly, and upon returning home finds the governors and magistrates he left in charge as having done an incompetent job, having seized his property and exacted cruelty upon their subjects. Cortes would spend the rest of his life dealing with debt, disease, litigations, investigations, miserable and disillusioned, with New Spain in anarchy. Rather anticlimactic really
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14952356 times)