>tfw no Mezoamerican Roman Empire
>>16832183they almost had it with the Toltecs (>inb4 never existed) and the Teotihuacan but they just had to fuck it up
>>16832193Quick rundown? How did they fuck it up?
>>16832270Bad droughs and the unrest of the tributaries ended up fragmenting their pan-mesoamerican confederations while they were stabilizing their institutionsEspecially sad when you look at the Teotihuacanos, those guys' influence stretched from Sonora to Copan in Honduras; the fourteenth king of Tikal, along with the Lords or Copan and Uaxacun, were subordinate to a guy named Siyah Kak, who had a title "Lord(?)/Ruler(?) of the Western Realm; he was himself the equivalent of a Roman Legatus for Atl-Atl Cauac, the Ruler of Teotihuacan. Tikal's dynasty was also linked to his by marriage; Atl-Atl's grandson ascended to the throne of Tikal in 411
>>16832860What could they have done to prevent the breakdown?
>>16833050Push less toward urbanization and adopt a system similar to Latin coloniae or the Inka mitmaqs in order to cement the cultural make-up of the region. Mesoamerican were autistic about centralizing their populations in their city-states and leaving tons of lands empty around them. Also, the agricultural techniques necessary to sustain their "megacity projects" wouldn't exist until the Mayapan Confederation developed hybrid-pisciculture several centuries later.
>>16833069Thanks Anon.
>>16832183They didn't really need one, Mesoamerica was always culturally homogenous due to the Olmecs in the preclassic, Teotihuacan in the classic and the central mexican merchants/warriors/adventurers who took over everything in the late classic/early postclassic, and were slowly becoming an even more closely tied together civilization under the Aztecs. I don't think Roman-style empires were even possible for them, which is why they only ever had tributary hegemonies (besides the Purepecha, but they were very strange in other ways), if that's what you mean.
>>16832193>inb4 never existedThey probably didn't, or rather they weren't an empire, I subscribe to the belief that most things attributed to the Toltecs like Chichen Itza were actually the work of various groups of people migrating from central mexico rather than a single empire like that of Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan
