There is an awful lot to bite off here and I really don't have all the information at hand to be able to provide something that is historically complete or accurate, Gentle Reader, plus I wasn't there when it happened, and unless some of you are as old as Methuselah, chances are that none of you were, either.
Our perspective and experience of life in the twenty-first century anywhere in the First World is going to be decidedly different from that of the Spanish or the Mexica early in the sixteenth. To try to get a grasp of how different we are let me enumerate what we have now that they were lacking, besides almost everything.
First of all, the world now is a much smaller place than it was five hundred years ago. There is not one single corner of real estate anywhere on this planet that isn't somehow known or hasn't been colonized or at least successfully visited, except perhaps for North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. I just saw a short video of this island. The inhabitants are thought to be direct descendants of our earliest ancestors from when they emerged out of Africa and they are thought to have been on the island for more than sixty thousand years. Almost no one who has visited has lived to tell of the experience, with very rare exceptions, given their hostility to all outsiders.
Apart from North Sentinel Island, though, every square foot of land on this planet is mapped and known.
For people living five hundred years ago, almost anything outside of their own familiar shores and borders was considered a novelty, or a threat or an opportunity, or all of the above. For the Spanish, their knowledge of the world was limited to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. There was limited awareness of India and China though those lands were basically known for their markets of spices, gold and fragrant wood. Little was known of the inhabitants or their customs, nor was the curiosity of your average Spaniard much excited by the notion of knowing about people of other races. Being not Christian or Catholic, or course they were held in contempt as inferiors and infidels. There is no need to explore much their already famous hatred of Jews and Muslims. They weren't fond of Protestants either.
Literacy was not universal and only a small percentage of people could read and write, being members of the clergy, the aristocracy and the mercantile class and perhaps some artisans. Workers and peasants, who made up the population majority, were generally illiterate.
The Roman Catholic Church was the dominant cultural as well as religious institution. It was in many ways like living under a theocracy. Women were forced to cover up and lived as chattels at the behest and orders of men. Human rights were unknown and slavery was an accepted reality of life.
As well as living in relative ignorance and under tremendous social and institutionalized oppression there was no public health care. Most diseases were incurable and doctors and healers were regarded with suspicion as witches and devil worshippers, and were usually fodder for the flames in public burnings. Infant mortality was the main form of birth control. If you did not conform completely, in every detail, to the whims and dictates of church and king your life would be constantly in danger. Outsiders were feared and hated. Spain likely still carried the internalized stigma of eight centuries of Muslim domination and even the successful battles that finally expelled them all out of the country likely didn't put to flight that shadow of victimization. So, the Spanish projected their experience of victimhood, internally upon Muslims, Jews, heretics and alleged witches, and externally upon the Mexica, the Inca and all other indigenous peoples in the Americas with the misfortune of finding themselves in their path.
They did not have all the toys of technology that are now taken for granted. If a sixteenth century Spaniard were to drop in and visit downtown Vancouver today they would be even more scandalized than Cortes and his thugs were at the strange glory that greeted them in the courts of Tenochtitlan. The sight of dumb millennials almost getting run over by cars while staring at their smart phones would be utterly untranslatable to them in any language. Phones, computers, television, radios, movies, cars, buses, electricity, firearms other than their simple muskets, vaccines, universal health care, birth control, toilet paper, the very concept of hygiene, running water, flush toilets, all the food from all over the world that we enjoy as our birthright, airplanes, microwave ovens, stereos, CD's; not to mention universal literacy, access to information from all over the world about everything that is happening and has ever happened in the world: social democracy, human rights, gender equality, secularism, queer rights, multiculturalism, universal education and literacy, to name but a few of the many perks, privileges, treats and features of postmodern life that we all take for granted. Not to mention mental health care, our concepts of mental illness and treatment...
And this also brings me to how we understand trauma. They had no concept of trauma because they didn't have any of those other things. Theirs, like every other culture and civilization of their era was always but one pillage, siege, war or famine away from extinction, putting them in chronic survival mode. In our first world privilege we have absolutely no idea what it must have been like for them.
I will write further on this theme tomorrow.
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