The Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom
The Tarascans did not outnumber the Spanish because, as in all of the successful Spanish conquests in the New World, the Spanish had lots of indigenous soldiers fighting alongside them. Cristobal de Olíd is credited with conquering the Tarascans in 1522, and he brought with him a mostly Aztec army numbering in the tens of thousands. (We don’t know exactly). But, as you pointed out, the Tarascans let them simply walk across the border and then surrendered to them without fighting.
This happened because in 1521 there was a smallpox outbreak in the Tarascan region (the same outbreak that hit the Aztecs). It killed the Tarascan monarch Zuangua and most of his male relatives. The newly enthroned monarch Tangaxoan II, was very young and inexperienced. His general, a man named Timas, convinced him that the rest of his blood relatives were plotting to kill him and overthrow him. In response, Tangaxoan II had all of the other surviving members of the royal dynasty killed. With all of the royal family eliminated, Timas made a grab for the throne and took Tangaxoan II prisoner. He placed him under house arrest, and tried to talk him into committing suicide. Tangaxoan, however, managed to sneak out through a secret door in the palace and fled to the western side of the lake.
While all of this was happening, the Aztecs sent frantic messages to the Tarascans asking for assistance, but they were all denied. Immediately following the conquest, a Tarascan ambassador was sent to Tenochtitlan where Cortés took him on a tour of the ruins. Cristobal de Olíd then raised an army to go invade the Tarascan region. He arrived at the border in 1522. Scouts on the border informed the border forts, and the border forts sent messengers to the capital, but they got no response. This was about the time Tangaxoan II was sneaking out of the palace to escape Timas, and so the royal court had more immediate concerns. Unsure of what to do, the border forts didn’t do anything. They simply let Olid and his Aztec/Spanish army walk across the border.
At the last second, Tangaxoan II managed to scrounge an army together. He met Olíd outside the lake basin, but then decided to surrender without a fight. Olíd’s army was probably comparable to the Tarascan one, but the Tarasancs were not in a strong position following the attempted coup d’etat by Timas. They also saw what happened to the Aztecs, and decided that they could probably get better terms if they surrendered willingly. And in a sense they did. Tangaxoan II remained on the throne until 1530, and ruled his kingdom as a de-facto independent country within the Spanish Empire. Eventually he was deposed and executed by Nuño de Guzman.
- Cited Source: J. Benedict Warren: The Conquest of Michoacán: The Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom in Western Mexico, 1521–1530
The Irish Republican Army:
Basically, Britain ruled Ireland like a colony – like they ruled in America or in India. The Irish didn’t like this but it was much harder for them to win their independence due to Britain being right the fuck there. There were also many loyalists in Ireland, further muddying the situation, as well as Irish men in the British army fighting against the IRA.
Initially Britain decided to give them representation in parliament instead of their independence, like what N. Ireland has now. That gave rise to a conflict within the IRA, with some of the rebels wanting to end the war and accept the offer of being represented in the legislature, and some of the rebels wanting to continue to fight until Britain gave them complete independence. The separatist faction of the IRA tended to be socialists who wanted independence from England so they could make significant changes to the political and economic workings of Ireland. The others were not exactly loyalists but were capitalists who thought that home rule would be good enough to turn things around without seizing the means of production from private owners and whatnot.
Somewhere along the line, religion came into it, with England being an officially Protestant nation and Ireland being officially Catholic.
So now you had Protestants being attacked in the Republic, Catholics being attacked in the North, the IRA blowing up everything British on both sides of the line, an argument within the IRA about socialism vs. capitalism leading to them to split into to the National Army (the official standing army of the Republic of Ireland) and the irregulars and thereafter into several different factions, with the British army trying to suppress all of the above from all directions.
The West Bank situation might be pretty comparable to this in about 20 or 30 years. Currently Israel is trying to settle loyalist families in the area, displacing the Palestinians. Eventually they might reach an uneasy peace with Palestinians and Israeli living side-by-side but still hating each other. Eventually the Palestinians start to want independence but Israel is reluctant to give up the tax income that the area represents so they offer the Palestinians self-government as long as they continue to pay taxes. Some Palestinians are OK with this, but some want to evict the Israelis entirely, who they see as the cause of the Palestinians’ suffering, and seize their land and incomes and distribute them among the Palestinians as reparations… do you see where this is going?
I hope to be remembered for my atrocities! 