Quarrying (human erosion), as in 1303 Egypt, and with what the Spaniards did to Cuzco/Sacsayhuamán.

The proof is in the pudding. You can not conquer with so few so much unless, the locals welcome you as a useful liberator from grotesq tyranny and try to use you as a tool of liberation. The conquistadores are a display of how volatile tyranny based empires are. To then only be replaced by even more tyranny, after the chaos of revolution and disease.

Here is the main cause why the conquistadores won:

80-90% of the natives died from European diseases before they had a chance to oppose the invaders. This was purely accidental! 300 years before germ theory, no one knew how and why this happened, but in the end conquering nations that were mostly dead already isn't that hard.

Of course, the conquistadores were incredibly cruel by modern standards, as were the natives. But that's not why they won.

> the European explorers and colonists did commit horrific crimes against humanity

not only horrific but the biggest hollocaust in the entire human history, with around 34 million people killed from 1500 up to 2025

with that said, people romanticize them too much. canibalism, war and also a (probably) big impact in one of the most rich ecosystems of Earth: the Amazon was ripped with their practices of burning stuff and planting dominant species among the forest that reduced for sure the amount of biodiversity in their +15,000 years of existence there. tho not defending EU ppl ripping out their forest till the border of rivers

The Aztecs in particular were kind of uniquely terrible, both for their own citizens and for every oppressed pseudo-vassal-state around them. It's one of those weird accidents of history that Spanish colonizers were able to step into the power vacuum after the fall of Tenochtitlan and have at least some people genuinely think 'yes, this is better than the last boss'.

While I have no doubt that most Western colonial empires did not have the conquered's best interests at heart, I've read a theory (particularly about the Spaniards and Portugese in Latin America), is just Westerners are in aggregate were just better at running civilization, which is a horrible crime to utter in some circles, but I feel like the evolution of Western systems of governance, diplomacy, technology, culture made it superior to most civilizations in the marketplace of ideas.

One could see the mass appeal of a faraway king who promises three square meals, a decent lodging, a reasonable legal system, and preaches unconditional brotherly love, to every human being. And even if some of those things are only true some of the time, when taken in aggregate, this led to these people winning just often enough that the scales tipped in their favor over time.

And while most non-Western civilizations were certainly superior over certain time periods in some aspect, those who ended up not being conquered, either had constant contact with the West to know what to expect, or recognized their own shortcomings and rapidly endeavored to remedy them.

I don't think military conquest of a faraway land can be maintained without the consent of the populance, certainly not as a profitable endeavor, and that usually involves offering something to the populance they couldn't get otherwise.

There are plenty of examples of people subjugated for centuries who have kept their religion, customs and identity, likewise most of the jihadists who shout 'Death To America!' probably still like Star Wars.

I mean, only because they weren’t outcompeted by an old world civilization yet.

The Mayans used the corbeled vault, which is much more primitive than the arch. There's a reason people who invented arches never went back to the corbeled vault.

Compare any of the Mayan buildings with the Roman Coliseum in sophistication. I've been through Chichen Itza and spent some time looking closely at the construction of it and the neighboring buildings. I encourage you to do the same.

The Roman "style" of aqueducts used arches so they could cross valleys while maintaining a constant slope. I don't think the Mayans had that, and the Mayan aqueducts didn't seem to be very long, like 200 feet vs the Roman miles long ones.

The Romans also had hypocausts, which were a method of piping in heated air under the floor to warm the house.

still seems pretty black and white to me lol

The Dark Ages were a period after the Romans left Europe where there are little to zero records of what went on then.

You are referring to the Black Death and that didn’t occur until around 350 years after the end of what are colloquially known as the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages were named in hindsight, with soft start and end dates, purposefully chosen. This period encompassed the Little Ice Age that put Europe in a long period of unusually cold and wet years included volcanic darkening events culminating in 536. That was the canonical "worst year" for humans to live. 4 years later, the Plague of Justinian wiped out tens of millions of people. It was a dark time, to say the least.

> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution

Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.

> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments

Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to

> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe

Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.

> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants

The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?

> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.

lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.

The Dark Ages were actually something of a golden age for the Gaels with some of their best cultural artefacts being produced kn that period.

That happened in the Englightenment era too. The censhorship, tortures and whatnot, I mean.

>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.

Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.

Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.

Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.

...if you ignore their going to utter ruin in 19th and early 20th century.

The Chinese being a continental empire, andin particular bordering the Mongol hordes, have basically been a continuous cycle of growth and collapse for 1000s of years. It can be argued they are headed for yet another collapse.

Part of the problem is that industrialization was achieved by exploiting globs of easily available resources. But we used them all.

We haven't left anyone something. It could very well be that we climbed the ladder and burned it behind us.