Quote:
Originally posted by: khmerguy618
"germs' weren't discovered until the 1800's, but pizzarro and cortez saw that the natives weren't immune to the disease they brought over and exposed them to em and then used that along with unifying some of the natives surround enemies to conquer them. They may not have had a label for it then, but they knew what they were doing.
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You keep talking about it like they knew what diseases were. No one in the world at the time had a concept of "disease" or "immunity" as we do. They didn't know the human body could get "sick" or "infected" like we think of it today. Most of the Christian European world at the time believed that "plagues" were a result of evil spirits, demons, curses or punishments from God. Come on, they didn't run around coughing on the natives to make them sick, they didn't even know that a disease was a biological infection within their body that they could pass to others. They believed the natives were suffering these plagues because of their pagan practices, human sacrifices and (in the minds of the spanish chrisitians) devil worship. They had no concept of a communicable disease and/or immunity to a disease, therefore they could not have infected the natives intentionally. Anyway, this is getting way off topic so I'm done on this point.