idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Chinampas (the man-made islands) allowed for at least 4 harvests a year (according to Stuart Schwartz). Wikipedia cites as many as 7 harvests per year, but the cite for it isn't easily traceable. They were easily farmed using simple methods, without need for plows or oxen, because they constructed to have extremely soft soil.
Yes. No one's disputing that the floating farms were great ideas and helped the city grow (literally, since they basically extended the size of the island it was on artificially). But that only worked in one place. To say "their farming techniques were many times more efficient" you really need to take into account all the techniques across their entire civilization and not just what they did in one location were it worked due to geography.
Once you get outside the lake valley itself, population density dropped dramatically and farming efficiency did as well. The overall effect was that even with the use of the Chinampas, the Aztec living in the main island were reliant on tribute from the surrounding tribes outside the valley. And given the lack of food production efficiency in the rest of the empire, expansion was limited dramatically. They'd hit a wall in terms of what they could do, but their population was still growing in the center of the empire. The result was that they had to become increasingly more brutal with the tribes on the outer edges (and more even towards the central tribes around the lakes themselves).
This set up the conditions which Cortez took advantage of to topple their rule. But honestly, even if he hadn't shown up, their civilization as unsustainable.
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European soil is actually largely superior to the soils Aztecs dealt with. For one, the topsoil is much deeper, and the quality of their soil is much higher (with areas such as the Vendee in France still being one of the most fertile farmlands in the world). Not river valley levels, but some of the best you'll see outside of those. They also had significantly higher percentages of arable land than Aztecs did.
Yeah. Because they had advanced metallurgy and had long before cleared tons of land for farming and made that land more fertile along the way. Has it occurred to you to wonder why the population in that same lake valley was several times greater by the 18th century (I'm going to stick to pre-rail/car periods)? Because they cleared land in the rest of what is now Mexico, and made lots of those inefficient European style farms which allowed for the capital region to grow to much greater population levels than when the Aztecs were using their techniques.
Know why this was possible? Roads and carts and land clearing capability. It allows for the transportation of goods much farther and faster without being reliant on where the land happens to have placed rivers and lakes.
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Guess what? Europeans had no defenses against them. You know what a major cause of the French Revolution was? Dry seasons and Spring/Summer frosts were destroying/limited crop yields, leading to famine. Their farming methods were USELESS to protect their crops against these eventualities, which were common.
Yes. Do you also understand that the entire population of the Americas in the 1500s was about the same as the entire population of Europe? At the risk of stating the obvious, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than North, Central, and South America. As tends to happen, population grows to the extent to which the existing supply of food can sustain it. Europe was no different than anywhere else in that regard. So when they suffered a disruption, it caused lots of problems.
I'll point out that while the Aztecs were somewhat protected from this due to the farming methods used in the valley, it also limited them in terms of expansion and sustainability. They were already heavily dependent on tribes outside the valley, so it's not like they were immune to the same factors. They might not have starved in the valley, but the tribes outside would, and the result would be harmful (eventually) to the ruling folks as well.
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If you are curious, that means that more people were "middle" class than in European society, in which you had Nobility, Priests and Peasants. The bourgeoisie had not yet emerged in Europe. The Priests were also largely consisted of minor nobles. Only basic priests came from the peasant class, and there was one of them per village (and that's only if we are arbitrarily capping the term "village" as settlements large enough to keep a priest).
Are you kidding? While we often speak of the model of Feudal Europe as being noble landowners and peasants working on the land, the reality is that there was *always* a middle class. There were always artisans and professionals whose skills were valued and thus could earn a living which afforded them a greater standard of living than just what a single noble might provide directly to someone working on his land. In the countrysides and small villages, there was little of this (but I doubt there was much of a middle class in the smaller tribes and towns in the Aztec empire either. In the larger towns and cities though, there were tradesmen who owned businesses similar to what we'd see today. There were innkeepers, artists, merchants, and all manner of what we'd refer to as middle class.
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Also, because your "rulers ruled, that's it" comment was so stupid, I seriously want you to describe what you think Feudal Europe looked like.
Apparently my understanding of what Feudal Europe looked like is far better than yours. While all people living or working in a given area were subjects to whatever lord controlled it, not everyone fit into the classic "landowner/landworker" model. I'm not going to claim that Feudal Europe had a huge middle class, but it's absurd to argue that it didn't have one at all. Whether a larger or smaller percentage of the population fit into that class in Europe versus the Aztec Empire is pretty much speculation IMO. I don't know. But neither do you.
But we can say that the number of what we'd label as arbitrary killings by the Aztec rulers was much much higher than anything seen in Europe at the time. There wasn't a whole lot of human sacrifice going on in Europe at the time. And certainly, the practice of killing off rival populations or defeated enemies hadn't been the norm in Europe for quite some time either. You pretty much have to go back to Rome to find a civilization in Europe in which the ruling state demanded human tribute of its vassals to be used as slave labor or for entertainment in death games.
The kind of political structure the Aztecs had wasn't much different than what me might find in Ancient Mesopotamia, or Egypt, or Africa, or Asia. It was certainly not "advanced" in any meaningful way.
Edited, Feb 1st 2012 2:32pm by gbaji