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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 489259" data-attributes="member: 4937">You seem to be better informed than me on the subject, so I will bow to your opinion at least until such time as I can do some reading on the subject.I agree that the English would have been more hard pressed to match Spainish infantry than they were to match Spainish sailors, but I am sure that the English did in fact match the Spainish in numbers and size of ships.  The principal difference between the fleets were in the number and size of guns - the English had fewer but larger cannon.  I'm not sure what the numbers were for men aboard those ships.I've seen analysis's for Agincourt that suggested that Harry outnumbered the French by as much as 3000, and that rather than trying to avoid battle, he was actually trying to lure them into it.  I'll have to dig around to find them though.  And in any event, whatever the circumstances, I've never read a military author that thought the real list of English casualties was as Shakespeare reported it.Amazing architecture or not, we are talking about two Empires who were founded on and sustained through rituals human sacrifice.  This in my mind mitigates the 'tragedy' of thier collapse, though it certainly doesn't justify the European treatment of American aboriginals afterward.  The whole basis of the ruling elites power in both empires was thier ability to awe the public with these regular displays of murdering people in a ritual magic context.  I'm a little more sympathetic towards the Incans than the Aztecs who for all thier economic prosperity were about as brutal of a regime as ever existed on the planet.   In the case of the Incans, they seemed to be taking the first steps toward making the ritual of human sacrifice itself a ritual so that the victims need only ritually die.  But it is hard to say what might have happened.</blockquote>

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