How it affected their people and some of the surrounding people and justification by the Spanish for war against the Aztecs. Secondly, what the Aztecs believed to be the return of the god Quetzalcoatl, the Spanish conquistador, Cortes and his Spanish army. Disease played a huge part in the fall. Small pox brought upon the Spanish spread quickly to the people and no cure for the disease was known therefore leading to many deaths. Lastly, the skillful tactics used by Hernan Cortes that leads to the surrender of the last Aztec emperor.
The Spanish then went on to kill and capture Incan soldiers and Atahualpa probably realised then that the Spanish were after gold and silver and were not there for peace. Atahualpa actually offered them rooms full of gold and silver as a ransom for them to let him go but sadly he was never granted his freedom and was eventually killed on August 29, 1533 (The Fall of the Inca Empire). After taking control of the city Cajamarca the Spanish went on to capture the capital, Cusco and there they picked Atahualpa's brother as the new Sapa Inca giving them a puppet that they could control to their will. The Spanish conquest was the breaking point for the empire because it completely destroyed the empire pushing it to its fall. However, there was still one factor that ruined the Inca empire but didn’t push it because it was a civil war between two brothers within the
HERNANDO CORTES 1485-1547 Hernando Cortes was one of the bravest military leaders of all time. Born in Medellin, Spain, he was a Spanish Conquistador who conquered most of Central America. He also gave Spain three-hundred years of control over Mexico. Cortes started exploring in the early 1500’s. He explored to find riches and conquered by being observant of the natives.
In 1519, he and his men took over and established what [now is Veracruz]; dismissing the authorities of Velazquez and placed himself directly under Charles V’s orders. Velazquez, not pleased about any of this, set out an expedition to capture Cortes. Once Cortes set out to fight, the Aztecs began to rebel back in Tenochtitlan [and Montezuma died]. Cortes’ hunger and determination for power drove him back to Tenochtitlan, [taking advantage of retrieving belongings and possessions that could contribute to his power]. Three months later, the Aztec empire fell and Mexico became New Spain.
It was the arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes in February of 1519 and it would be the beginning of the end for the Aztec and many other indigenous civilizations. Commissioned by Governor Velazquez of Cuba, Hernan Cortes was sent with roughly 500 soldiers to the eastern shores of Mexico to gain information on the indigenous people there and establish friendly relations. But Cortes, a man consumed by greed, had heard of legends that told of vast riches and treasures within Mexico, and with that the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs had already begun. In direct defiance of Velazquez’s orders not to engage in a war of conquest, Cortes arrived with the intentions of a complete Spanish conquest over the indigenous people, whom he would learn called themselves the Aztec. Initially, small tribes greeted them and bestowed them with gifts, and Cortes even acquired a translator named Malinche who would play a crucial role in the downfall of her own people.
Only one fifth of this went to Spanish royalty. The soldiers split the rest amongst themselves. The main thing that killed the Incas, however, was smallpox. This disease spread and spread killing many Incas. The Incas disappearance might not have been so mysterious if they had a written language but they did
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. Everybody in their life time has heard about the Holocaust, but there were many other genocides besides the Holocaust. One of the other genocides is the genocide in Rwanda. Like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda involved the government trying to annihilate the other ethnic group. The Genocide lasted from April to June of 1994.
However, this was only meant to be used in extreme situations. The Republic's first president (Freidrich) Ebert employed that rule no fewer than 136 times. He deposed legitimately elected governments in Saxony and Thuringia when they threatened, in his view to forment disorder. However, it got even worse, during the 1920 civil war in the Ruhr he issued a backdated decree applying the death penalty to public-order offenses and retrospectively legitimizing many of the summery executions that had already been carried out on members of the Red Army by units of the Free Corps and the regular army. -There were virtually no effective safe-guards against an abuse of Article 48, since the President could threaten to use the power given him by
Genocide in the 20th Century The definition of genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race”(Genocide 1). In the 20th century, we see three comparable examples of this crime against mankind in the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Rwandan Genocide. In an effort to completely eradicate the targeted groups, all genocides follow these five steps: designation, separation, state supported harassment, forced migration, and extermination. The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust followed along these steps completely and both aggressor nations had internal conflicts that they blamed on a minority group. The Rwanda Genocide is different, because it skipped the step of forced migration and didn’t involve a government and a minority group, but two competing cultural groups.
Between the Americas and the Pacific islands, small pox, but measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, and influenza took heavy tolls on many people. In the western hemisphere, before the voyages, none of the people acquired or possessed those diseases, but in the eastern hemisphere, they were endemic. When these infectious diseases traveled to unexposed populations, it set-off terrible epidemics that destroyed entire societies. In 1519, the epidemic smallpox took over the Aztec empire. Imported diseases took the worst tolls in less populated areas like the Aztec and Inca empires.