How a few hundred Spanish soldiers, thousands of Indigenous allies and, above all, epidemic disease brought down the two greatest empires of the Americas, between 1519 and 1533.
Stop 01 · c. 1500
Two Great Empires
In 1500 the Americas held two great empires. The Aztec Triple Alliance, formed in 1428 by the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, dominated central Mexico and took tribute from the Gulf coast to the Pacific. Its capital, Tenochtitlan, rose from an island in Lake Texcoco, joined to the shore by causeways. Estimates of its population run from 60,000 to over 300,000; it may have held 200,000 people, more than any city in Spain, where Seville had about 45,000. In the Andes, the Inca Empire, Tawantinsuyu, 'the land of four parts', had expanded since 1438 under Pachacuti and his heirs. Ruled from Cusco, it ran for some 4,000 kilometres, linked by roads and relay runners called chasquis.
Brooklyn Museum - Pachacuti, Tenth Inca, 1 of 14 Portraits of Inca KingsPublic domain · Wikimedia Commons
In 1500 the Americas held two great empires. The Aztec Triple Alliance, formed in 1428 by the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, dominated central Mexico and took tribute from the Gulf coast to the Pacific. Its capital, Tenochtitlan, rose from an island in Lake Texcoco, joined to the shore by causeways. Estimates of its population run from 60,000 to over 300,000; it may have held 200,000 people, more than any city in Spain, where Seville had about 45,000. In the Andes, the Inca Empire, Tawantinsuyu, 'the land of four parts', had expanded since 1438 under Pachacuti and his heirs. Ruled from Cusco, it ran for some 4,000 kilometres, linked by roads and relay runners called chasquis.
In February 1519 Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba with 11 ships and about 500 men, defying the governor, Diego Velázquez, who had revoked his command. At Potonchán, on the Gulf coast, he was given an enslaved Nahua woman, later called Malinche or Doña Marina, who became his chief interpreter. He landed in April, founded Veracruz and scuttled his ships so no one could turn back. On his way inland he made allies of the Totonacs of Cempoala and then of the Tlaxcalans, bitter enemies of the Aztecs, who fought him for weeks before supplying thousands of warriors. At Cholula the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans massacred thousands. On 8 November 1519 the emperor Moctezuma welcomed the Spanish into Tenochtitlan.
Cortés soon took Moctezuma hostage and ruled through him. In May 1520 he rushed to the coast to defeat Pánfilo de Narváez, sent from Cuba with 1,400 men to arrest him, and won most over. In his absence Pedro de Alvarado's men massacred Aztec nobles at a festival in the Great Temple, and the city rose. Moctezuma died in late June: struck by stones thrown by his own people, said the Spanish; killed by the Spaniards, said Aztec sources. On the rainy night of 30 June, Spaniards and Tlaxcalans tried to slip out along the Tlacopan causeway. Attacked from canoes, many drowned under the weight of looted gold. A week later the survivors fought off their pursuers at Otumba.
BattlesTenochtitlan: the Great Temple massacre, May 1520 · Cempoala: Narváez defeated, May 1520 · Otumba, July 1520
With Moctezuma killed and the Spanish fled with heavy losses on the Noche Triste, Cortés regrouped in Tlaxcala. Then smallpox, brought by the Spanish, swept the Aztec world from late 1520, killing a huge share of the population, including the new emperor, Cuitláhuac, 80 days into his reign. His successor, Cuauhtémoc, faced an enemy who won over or crushed the lakeside cities one by one, while Tlaxcalan labourers built 13 brigantines that gave Cortés control of Lake Texcoco. From late May 1521 Cortés and tens of thousands of allies besieged Tenochtitlan, cutting its causeways and its aqueduct. The city fell on 13 August 1521, its people starving and sick; Cuauhtémoc was captured as he tried to escape by canoe.
BattlesTenochtitlan falls, 13 August 1521 · Xochimilco, April 1521
In the Andes, smallpox arrived ahead of the Spanish, probably killing the Inca emperor Huayna Capac in about 1527 and setting off a civil war between his sons Huáscar, in Cusco, and Atahualpa, based in the north around Quito. Atahualpa's generals captured Huáscar near Cusco, and Atahualpa had just won when Francisco Pizarro arrived. Pizarro left Panama on 27 December 1530 with about 180 men, landed on the coast of today's Ecuador in 1531 and reached the ruined town of Tumbes in 1532, where he learned of the war. At Cajamarca, on 16 November 1532, with 168 Spaniards hidden around the plaza, he ambushed and captured Atahualpa amid thousands of his followers; by one estimate about 2,000 Incas were killed.
BattlesCajamarca: Atahualpa captured, 16 November 1532
Atahualpa offered a ransom: a room about 6.7 metres by 5.2, filled to a height of some 2.4 metres once with gold and twice with silver. Treasure poured in from across the empire, including gold plates stripped from Cusco's Temple of the Sun, and by May 1533 all of it had been melted into bars. The Spanish took it and executed him anyway: charged with treason and with ordering Huáscar's death, he was garrotted in July 1533. Pizarro marched south with about 500 Spaniards and entered Cusco on 15 November 1533, with Inca allies opposed to Atahualpa's faction, and installed the teenage Manco Inca as puppet ruler. Inca resistance continued for decades from the mountain stronghold of Vilcabamba, until 1572.
Manco soon tired of being a puppet. Mistreated by Pizarro's brothers Juan and Gonzalo, he left Cusco in April 1536 and returned with an army estimated at anywhere from 40,000 to 200,000 men. From 6 May they besieged the city, held by Hernando Pizarro with 190 Spaniards and several thousand Indigenous allies, while another Inca force attacked Lima. The Incas seized the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above Cusco; Juan Pizarro was killed retaking it. Manco beat back a Spanish attack at Ollantaytambo, but by March 1537 the siege had failed. He withdrew to the forests of Vilcabamba, where a small Neo-Inca state lasted until 1572, when Spanish troops took it and the last Inca ruler, Túpac Amaru, was beheaded in Cusco.
BattlesSiege of Cusco, 1536–1537 · Sacsayhuamán · Ollantaytambo, 1537
The conquest created a Spanish empire from California to Chile, governed through the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. In 1545 a mountain of silver, the Cerro Rico, was found at Potosí, traditionally by an Indigenous prospector named Diego Huallpa; the boom town below it grew to over 200,000 people. From 1574 Viceroy Francisco de Toledo used the mita, an Inca labour draft, to send some 13,000 Indigenous men a year into its mines. American silver flowed to Spain and, from 1565, across the Pacific on the Manila galleons, to China. For the Indigenous peoples, the cost was catastrophic: smallpox, measles and other diseases, with war and forced labour, killed a large majority of the population within a century.