>>149550245
>149550602
>149551749
>149551787
>149551877
cont:

>>149554857
>>149554402
Wars to specifically get captives did happen in Mesoamerica, but it wasn't a typical thing, and for the Mexica of the Aztec capital specifically, their main motive in expansionism was to get places to pay them taxes of economic goods

An idea that gets thrown around from time to time is that the Mexica leadership may have re-written their religion to play up the amount of sacrifices they needed to then justify military expansion, but to be honest any time I have looked into that I haven't found it convincing, most of the citations end up going nowhere or just lead to a specific speech Tlacaelel (who served in a sort of second-in-command domestic administrator/high priest/judicial and advisor office across the reign of like 5 subsequent Mexica kings/Aztec emperors. see pic) where he talks about using Tlaxcala as a target of Flower Wars to take captives to feed their patron god Huitzilopochtli , but that doesn't really say anything about a broader religious dogma behind expansionism in other cases

And even flower wars are now often thought to be less wars just to take captives, and more as a ritualized but still pragmatic military tool to weaken and wear down enemy states for full conquest while also serving as a way to keep troops trained and invested in their military careers, or to test/feel out a conflict with lower stakes battles before deciding to back off or escalating it into a true war

>>149555727
See >>149549710 , >>149549936 and >>149555727
The Mexica of the Aztec capital were warmongering conquerors, but their rule was loose and hegemonic, not brutal/oppressive or colonialist; they conquered city-states and kingdoms, not tribes; most (tho certainly not all) sacrifices were enemy soldiers rather then civilians, and even the largest skull rack didn't have multiple 10,000s of skulls (or if it did, only barely, see >>>/v/716293341 & >>>/v/716294540)

technically 12/?