9/11/2023 0 Comments Military invisible blanket![]() The chroniclers who compiled it in the 16th Century devoted many pages to covering the effects of smallpox on local native populations. The Florentine Codex was a detailed survey of New Spain. Yet the smallpox they carried decimated the warrior populations of the tribes that they encountered. Battle deaths were negligible but deaths of from disease over the next decade likely killed more than seven million.Įxplorers of what later became the United States like Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca sought riches rather than military conquest. In 1532, 180 soldiers of Francisco Pizarro subdued the 690,000 square miles of the Incan Empire in South America with smallpox and other opportunistic diseases as their chief allies. While the Native population of Mexico and Central America was estimated at 20 million in 1519, a century later it was a mere million. Outbreaks of an unknown virus in 1545 and again in 1576 wreaked havoc on a population already weakened by smallpox. Over the next several decades, the disease went on to kill six million people. When his army of 1,000 men besieged the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, a city of 100,000, smallpox accomplished what bullets could not. ![]() While much is made of the Spanish advantage of guns and horses, smallpox was Cortes’ strongest weapon. When Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519, his small band of warriors faced a mighty Aztec Empire of perhaps 10 million. Spanish success in Mexico had likely more to do with smallpox than any technological advantage the Conquistadores enjoyed. A dramatized depiction of Cortes’ assault on the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. Though war accounted for some of those deaths, probably 90 per cent were due to smallpox. Thirty years later, those peoples were virtually extinct. The native population of those islands was estimated at 500,000 in 1492. While Europeans had developed some resistance to it, the indigenous inhabitants of the West Indies had none at all. Smallpox likely arrived in the New World with Christopher Columbus, though the first description of it occurs in a 4 th century CE Chinese manuscript. Indeed, its presence shaped the fate of North America fully as much as any bullets, blades or bayonets. ![]() And although over the centuries, Europeans typically suffered between 10 and 17 per cent mortality during bouts with the disease, among the native peoples of North America, the lethality of smallpox was off the charts. While the Corona virus has an estimated mortality rate of two to three per cent, smallpox carried off 43 per cent of its victims in one of its last outbreaks in India in 1960. Also called “the speckled monster” and “the red plague” because of spots pock-marking a victim’s face, it is much better known as smallpox. One pathogen that has enjoyed a long and pronounced impact on the military history of the Western Hemisphere is variola major. Throughout history, disease has often functioned as a hidden force multiplier that has aided conquests, toppled empires and helped build new ones. THE CORONA VIRUS is not the first contagion to cause disruption. “Its presence shaped the fate of North America fully as much as any bullets, blades or bayonets.” Author and MHN contributor John Danielski examines the impact of the disease on the bloody history of the Western Hemisphere. European armies carried a secret weapon with them in their centuries-long war against the inhabitants of the New World: smallpox. ![]()
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