Who Were the Conquistadors?

The conquistadores were the small group of Spanish soldiers and adventurers who, in less than a single human lifetime, brought the great indigenous civilizations of the Western Hemisphere under Spanish rule. They have been mythologized as larger-than-life heroes, demonized as uniquely cruel invaders, and recently, in the work of Matthew Restall, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and others, re-described as a less exceptional group of men whose victories depended heavily on indigenous allies, Old World diseases, and the particular political circumstances of the Aztec and Inca empires. The honest position, which Restall develops at length in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003), is that the conquistadors were talented soldiers operating in extraordinarily favorable circumstances, not the supreme warriors of older legend.

This page focuses on the conquistadors themselves: who they were, how they fought, what they won, and how their legacy is judged.

The Origins of the Conquistadors

Most of the conquistadors were men in their twenties or thirties, born in the Spanish kingdoms of Castile, Extremadura, and Andalusia in the late 15th century. The first generation included veterans of the long Reconquista — the centuries-long war by which Christian Spain had recovered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule — and they brought with them a military culture that emphasized cavalry shock, infantry discipline, and religious zeal. Many were second or third sons of minor noble families with little hope of inheriting land or titles at home, and they saw the Americas as a place to make their fortunes, build new estates, and acquire honor through conquest. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the chronicler of the conquest of Mexico, was a typical example: a minor gentleman from Medina del Campo, with no inheritance, who crossed the Atlantic at age 18 and spent most of his subsequent life in the New World.

The political collapse of the Aztec and Inca empires — partly through indigenous rivalry, partly through the catastrophic impact of Old World diseases — opened extraordinary opportunities for these adventurers. A small, well-armed, and determined group of Spanish soldiers could, with the help of indigenous allies, topple states that had controlled millions of people. The conquistadors were not, in any meaningful sense, superior warriors to the indigenous populations they defeated. They were the beneficiaries of a particular concatenation of political, epidemiological, and technological circumstances.

The Principal Conquistadors

The most famous conquistadors were the leaders of the two great conquests of the early 16th century. Hernán Cortés led the conquest of the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521, overthrowing the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, and founding Spanish Mexico. Francisco Pizarro led the conquest of the Inca Empire between 1532 and 1533, capturing the Inca emperor Atahualpa and founding Spanish Peru. Pizarro’s brothers, Gonzalo, Hernando, and Juan, played important supporting roles in the Peruvian campaign.

Other notable conquistadors included Pedro de Valdivia, who conquered Chile; Sebastián de Belalcázar, who founded Quito; Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who conquered the Muisca of present-day Colombia; Francisco de Montejo, who conquered Yucatán; Pedro de Alvarado, who led the conquest of Guatemala; and Diego de Almagro, who led an early expedition to Chile. The era of the great conquistadors was relatively brief — most of the major conquests were complete by the 1550s — but it shaped the political and demographic map of the Americas for centuries.

Weapons, Tactics, and the Spanish Military Advantage

The conquistadors possessed several real military advantages over the indigenous peoples they encountered. They were equipped with steel swords, steel lances, body armor, and various firearms, including arquebuses, muskets, and heavy cannon used to reduce indigenous fortifications. They also had horses, an animal unknown in the Americas before 1492, and they used cavalry charges to break indigenous infantry formations.

The Spanish also had a powerful logistical and tactical discipline developed in the Reconquista. They were accustomed to long marches through hostile territory, the use of mobile reserves, and the practice of founding fortified camps wherever they went. Their ships, the caravels, carracks, and galleons of the Spanish Atlantic, allowed them to project sea power in ways that indigenous Americans could not match.

Yet the Spanish military advantage is only a partial explanation. The conquistadors almost always fought against vastly superior numbers, and they often won only by forming alliances with indigenous enemies of the states they were attacking. The Tlaxcalans, who had been enemies of the Aztecs, joined Cortés against Tenochtitlán. The Cañari, who had been conquered by the Incas, joined Pizarro against Atahualpa. These alliances, not just the Spanish steel and gunpowder, were decisive.

The Role of Disease

The most important factor in the Spanish victories was the catastrophic impact of Old World diseases on indigenous populations. Smallpox arrived in Mexico in 1520, carried by an enslaved African in Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition, and it killed a large fraction of the Aztec population, including several members of the royal family. A similar epidemic reached Peru in the 1520s, killing the Inca emperor Huayna Capac around 1527 and many of his relatives, and throwing the Inca state into civil war.

The Spanish had no understanding of germ theory, but they were quick to take advantage of the epidemics, and the resulting political vacuums made the conquests much easier. The demographic collapse of indigenous populations continued for more than a century after the conquests, and the indigenous population of the Americas is estimated to have fallen by 80 to 95 percent in the first century of European contact in the worst-affected regions.

Motives: Gold, Glory, and God

The conquistadors were driven by three main motives: gold, glory, and God. The search for precious metals was, for many, the primary motive: Pizarro’s capture of Atahualpa produced a ransom of gold and silver that, by some accounts, filled an entire room. Even the men of modest background who served under the great captains expected to receive a share of the spoils, and many came home with small fortunes.

The pursuit of personal glory was a second, equally powerful motive. The Spanish social code of honor valued military success and noble lineage, and the conquests provided an opportunity for humble-born soldiers to win titles, estates, and royal favor. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had gone to the New World as a young man, was still pressing his claims to a repartimiento and a royal pension forty years after the fall of Tenochtitlán.

The religious motive, while often invoked, was sometimes a thin veil for material ambition. The Spanish Crown had secured from Pope Alexander VI a series of bulls granting the right to conquer and evangelize non-Christian peoples, and the conquest was officially justified as a holy war against paganism. The missionary work that followed the conquest, by the mendicant orders, was sincere and sometimes heroic, but it was also often used to justify the displacement and forced labor of indigenous populations.

The Black Legend and the Defense of the Conquistadors

The conduct of the conquistadors has been the subject of moral debate for five centuries. The so-called leyenda negra, or Black Legend, originated in 16th-century Protestant propaganda and in the writings of Spanish reformers such as Bartolomé de las Casas, and it portrayed the conquistadors as uniquely cruel. The Black Legend has long been a powerful element of Anglo-American and Dutch historiography, and it is still invoked in modern debates about colonialism.

The defense of the conquistadors, popular in some Spanish and Latin American historiography, emphasizes the chronological priority of indigenous sacrifices, the importance of the conquest in spreading Christianity and European civilization, and the bravery of the conquistadors in the face of overwhelming odds. Most modern historians reject both the Black Legend and the heroic defense, acknowledging that the conquests were brutal, devastating events that produced a demographic catastrophe without historical precedent, while also noting that the European conquest of the Americas was a complex, contingent, and often collaborative process that involved indigenous allies as well as European invaders.

The Legacy of the Conquistadors

The conquistadors left a deep and complex legacy. On the one hand, the political boundaries, the social hierarchies, the Catholic religious culture, the Spanish language, and the mixed-race societies of modern Latin America all descend, directly or indirectly, from the conquests of the 16th century. On the other hand, the demographic collapse of indigenous populations, the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations, and the brutal system of forced labor and slavery that followed the conquests are among the great tragedies of modern history.