From rowland@loyno.edu Sat Dec  8 20:55:45 2001
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From: "R. J. Rowland, Jr." <rowland@loyno.edu>
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To: KOPFF E CHRISTIAN <kopff@spot.colorado.edu>, classics@u.washington.edu
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 22:47:57 -0600
Subject: Re: "Providence," Rhode(s) Island, & Mexico
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For an alternative (and for this writer more sensible) viewpoint, see Guns, Germs,
and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies -- by Jared Diamond; Paperback Amazon's
Price: $12.76  -- Or buy
                                     used from $11.48.
Bob Rowland   

>A lively and critical discussion of the role of disease (smallpox, etc.)
>in the European conquest of the New World is found in Victor Davis Hanson,

>_Carnage and Culture_ (2001) 170-232, esp. 213-216. In summary, the
>enormous losses to disease were important in the eventual European
>takeover of the Americas, but were only one factor, and not the decisive
>one, in the military victory over the Aztecs. If the Aztecs had beaten
>Cortes and driven the Spanish out or killed them, they would have
>eliminated the major source of the epidemics, the Europeans.
>The key factor in the victory that set up the future situation was "that
>Cortes's men drew on a 2,000-year-old tradition....Christianity told them
>that the Aztec religion was evil; but the European intellectual tradition
>gave them the tools to investigate it, probe its weaknesses, and
>eventually distroy it....Cortes himself...studied Latin, and read Caesar's

>Gallic Wars, Livy, and other classical military histories. At least some
>of his success in the darkest hours of the Mexica wars was due to his
>mesmerizing oratory, laced with classical allusions...." (pp. 205-206)
>Although disease affected both sides, "the Spaniards did draw on a long
>empirical tradition that went back to classical medical writers like
>Hippocrates and Galen, who...had helped establish Western traditions" of
>rational medical procedures. (p. 215)
>Smallpox and other diseases were significant factors, but the real basis
>of the European conquest of the New World was the Classical Tradition.
>
>Christian Kopff
>University of Colorado Boulder
>kopff@spot.colorado.edu
>
>
>
.