The post I'm replying to is correct: Spanish technology (steel, gunpowder) had very little to do with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.

The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.

Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.

Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.

Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.

The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.