Long before European contact, the Americas were home to sophisticated civilizations — and their collision with Spain in the 16th century reshaped the world.
Stop 01 · c. 1200 BCE – 1300 CE
Mesoamerica's Deep Roots
By 1300 CE, Mesoamerica had already seen millennia of civilisation. The Olmec of the Gulf Coast flourished from roughly 1200 to 400 BCE, first at San Lorenzo and then at La Venta, and seem to have played the ballgame that nearly every later Mesoamerican society shared. In central Mexico, Teotihuacan, founded around 100 BCE, became the largest city in the Americas, with perhaps 100,000 people, before its great monuments were burned around 550 CE. The Maya built rival city-states such as Tikal, in today's Guatemala, and developed the most sophisticated script of the pre-Columbian Americas, with intricate calendars and astronomy. After a 9th-century collapse in the south, Chichen Itza rose in the Yucatán. Later empires built on these foundations.
By 1300 CE, Mesoamerica had already seen millennia of civilisation. The Olmec of the Gulf Coast flourished from roughly 1200 to 400 BCE, first at San Lorenzo and then at La Venta, and seem to have played the ballgame that nearly every later Mesoamerican society shared. In central Mexico, Teotihuacan, founded around 100 BCE, became the largest city in the Americas, with perhaps 100,000 people, before its great monuments were burned around 550 CE. The Maya built rival city-states such as Tikal, in today's Guatemala, and developed the most sophisticated script of the pre-Columbian Americas, with intricate calendars and astronomy. After a 9th-century collapse in the south, Chichen Itza rose in the Yucatán. Later empires built on these foundations.
The Mexica, the people later called Aztecs, settled on a small island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico. Their tradition said their wandering ancestors would find their destined home where an eagle perched on a cactus, and the date now celebrated as Tenochtitlan's founding is 13 March 1325. The lake was brackish, so the Mexica farmed chinampas, rectangular plots built up from the shallow lake bed; they did not invent the method but were the first to use it on a vast scale. For a century the valley was dominated by the Tepanec city of Azcapotzalco. In 1428, after a civil war against it, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan formed the Triple Alliance.
From their island capital Tenochtitlan, the Mexica and their allies built an empire across central Mexico through the 15th century. Conquered cities kept their own rulers as long as they paid tribute twice a year, sent soldiers when asked and added the Mexica war god Huitzilopochtli to their temples. Causeways ran north, south and west to the shore, with bridges that could be pulled away, and chinampas, the so-called floating gardens, helped feed the city. By 1519 Tenochtitlan held perhaps 200,000 people or more, making it one of the largest cities in the world, and its great market at Tlatelolco drew tens of thousands of traders. The empire was home to perhaps five million people.
In South America, the Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, the Realm of the Four Parts, was the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas. Its great expansion began in 1438 under Pachacuti, whose name means 'the turn of the world', and who is thought to have built Machu Picchu. His heirs carried the frontier from southern Colombia to central Chile, about 4,000 km along the Andes, ruling perhaps 6 to 14 million people from Cusco. Without the wheel, draught animals, iron or a writing system, the Inca bound it together with a vast road network of some 40,000 km, relay runners called chasquis, terraced agriculture, labour taxes and knotted-cord records called quipu.
On 3 August 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator sailing for the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, left Palos with three ships, hoping to reach Asia by going west. On 12 October he landed on an island in the Bahamas that its Taíno inhabitants called Guanahani; its identity is still debated. The Taíno of the Greater Antilles bore the first shock of conquest. Spain founded Santo Domingo on Hispaniola in 1496, and the encomienda system forced Taíno into fields and mines. Through war, forced labour and disease, perhaps 80 to 90 per cent of them died within 30 years. In 1511 Diego Velázquez invaded Cuba, where the chief Hatuey led the resistance; according to Bartolomé de las Casas, he was burned alive.
On 22 April 1519 Hernán Cortés landed near today's Veracruz with a small Spanish force. He won allies among cities that resented Aztec rule, above all Tlaxcala, helped by his interpreter, a Nahua woman the Spanish called Doña Marina, or La Malinche. Moctezuma II received him in Tenochtitlan on 8 November. In 1520, after Pedro de Alvarado's men massacred an unarmed crowd at a religious festival, the city rose. Moctezuma was killed, and on the Noche Triste the Spaniards fled, losing by one account 400 of their own and 4,000 allies. Smallpox then ravaged the valley. Cortés returned with 13 lake brigantines and tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors, and the city fell on 13 August 1521.
BattlesOtumba, July 1520 · Tenochtitlan falls, 13 August 1521
Between 1519 and 1533, small Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro toppled the Aztec and Inca empires. Sailing south from Panama, Pizarro reached Inca lands by 1526 and won a royal licence to conquer them in 1529. When he returned in 1532, the empire was torn by a succession war between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa. On 16 November 1532 at Cajamarca, his 168 men seized Atahualpa and killed thousands of his unarmed attendants. Atahualpa paid a vast ransom in gold and silver, but was executed on 26 July 1533. Steel, horses, Indigenous allies and above all Old World diseases, which killed a catastrophic share of the population, brought the empires down.
BattlesCajamarca: Atahualpa seized, 16 November 1532
Spain's American empire became the engine of a global economy. In 1545 an Indigenous prospector found silver at the Cerro Rico above Potosí, high in the Andes, and in the second half of the century the mountain produced an estimated 60 per cent of all the silver mined in the world. Under the mita, a forced-labour draft adapted from Inca practice, about 13,000 Andean men a year were sent to work it. Silver from Potosí and Mexico flowed across the Atlantic to Spain, funding European wars, and from 1565 the Manila galleons carried it across the Pacific to buy Chinese silk and porcelain. The Americas were now permanently, and often violently, bound into a single world system.