By reading Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, we learn some history concerning:
post-Roman Britain
Cyrus the Great
the Second Punic War
Tyre
the Spanish conquest of Peru
the Volkerwanderung
Bactria
the medieval church-state conflict
the Knights Templar
We can trust Anderson to get the historical details as right as he was able to at the time of writing. We can also check independently on, e.g., Atahualpa. The Spanish lured the last Inca Emperor into an ambush, slaughtered his men, held him to ransom, executed him anyway and justified their actions in terms of their religious ideology:
"'God's will... We bring the Faith to these heathen.'" (pp. 648-649)
1 comment:
The Inca had just come off of a dynastic civil war between two brothers when Pizarro arrived in which thousands died, IIRC, and had conquered and subjugated an immense territory. The Spanish weren't any more nasty than they were; they were just from a more technologically and institutionally advanced civilization.
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