Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the Conquest of the Americas

Between 1519 and 1533, two small Spanish expeditions overthrew the two largest and most populous states in pre-Columbian America: the Aztec Empire of central Mexico and the Inca Empire of the Andes. The conquests transformed the political and demographic landscape of the Americas, established the Spanish Empire as the dominant European power in the New World, and triggered the demographic catastrophe that befell the indigenous populations under Spanish rule. The standard account treats the conquests as feats of military genius by two extraordinary individuals. The more honest account, developed in the post-1992 reassessment, treats them as the contingent products of three forces the Spanish themselves did not control: the political fragmentation of the target empires, the willingness of indigenous allies to join the Spanish, and the catastrophic Old World diseases that did most of the actual military work. Cortés and Pizarro were bold, decisive, and ruthless. They were also lucky.

The World of the Conquistadors

The conquests of Cortés and Pizarro took place in a specific Spanish political and military context. By 1492 the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors was complete, and a generation of soldiers trained in the long Iberian wars were looking for new employment. The encomienda system, in which soldiers were rewarded with grants of indigenous labor and tribute, was already well established. Many of the men who joined Cortés and Pizarro were hidalgos — minor nobles with little inheritance but substantial military experience — and they were fighting for land and encomiendas, not for Christ or king.

The Spanish Caribbean, established by Christopher Columbus and his successors, was the launching ground. Settlers in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico had heard rumors of wealthy empires to the west and south. Several failed expeditions had probed the coasts of Central America and the Gulf of Mexico in the early 16th century. Cortés and Pizarro were not the first to look, but they were the first to succeed in overthrowing major indigenous states.

Hernán Cortés (1485–1547)

Background

Cortés was born in Medellín, in Extremadura, in 1485, into a minor noble family of limited means. He studied law briefly at the University of Salamanca, then left for the Caribbean, arriving in 1504. He served in the conquest of Hispaniola and later Cuba, and became a landowner and minor political figure in the new colony. In 1518 he was chosen to lead an expedition to explore and settle the Mexican mainland.

The Expedition to Mexico, 1519

Cortés sailed from Cuba in February 1519 with about 11 ships, 500 Spanish soldiers, 16 horses, a few small cannon, and perhaps 200 Cuban indigenous and African auxiliaries. His expedition was, by the standards of European warfare, modest. It was, however, the largest single European force to have set foot in the Americas to that date. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose True History of the Conquest of New Spain (written in the 1560s, the principal eyewitness account of the campaign) was one of the soldiers.

Cortés landed on the coast of Yucatán, where he acquired a key ally, the indigenous woman later known as La Malinche (also Malintzin or Doña Marina). La Malinche was a Nahua woman who had been sold into Mayan slavery and given to Cortés shortly after his landing. She spoke both Maya and Nahuatl, and she served as Cortés’s interpreter, advisor, and intermediary with indigenous peoples throughout the campaign. Without her linguistic bridge between Maya and Nahuatl, the conquest would have taken longer and looked very different. Her role has been controversial ever since. The Mexican Spanish word malinchista, meaning traitor, is derived from her name; the post-1992 reassessment has been more sympathetic, but the term survives.

The March to Tenochtitlán

Cortés moved up the Gulf Coast, founding the city of Veracruz and establishing an explicit alliance with the Totonac people, who were tributary to the Aztecs. He reportedly took the critical step of sinking his own ships to make clear that there would be no retreat. Matthew Restall argues in When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018) that this scuttling story is a later legend. On Restall’s reading, the Spanish retained at least two operable vessels, and the famous scene at Veracruz was a piece of post-conquest myth-making by Cortés and his chroniclers.

The Totonac alliance was joined by other indigenous groups, most importantly the Tlaxcalteca, fierce enemies of the Aztec Empire who had resisted Aztec conquest for over a century. The Tlaxcalteca alliance was decisive. Tens of thousands of Tlaxcalteca warriors joined the Spanish-led coalition, and they were as essential to the fall of the Aztec Empire as the Spanish themselves. In November 1519 Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, with perhaps 200,000 inhabitants, built on islands in the center of Lake Texcoco. He was received by Montezuma II (Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin) and quartered in the palace of Axayacatl, the emperor’s father.

The Night of Sorrows and the Siege

Cortés’s decision to take Montezuma hostage was decisive. Rather than attack the Aztec state, he held the emperor captive, hoping to rule through him. The plan backfired when Cortés had to leave Tenochtitlán to deal with a rival Spanish expedition sent by the governor of Cuba. Cortés defeated the rival force, but during his absence Pedro de Alvarado’s massacre of Aztec nobles in the Templo Mayor triggered a popular uprising. Montezuma was killed during the chaos, either by the Spanish or by his own people. On 30 June 1520 the Spanish were forced to retreat across the causeways of Lake Texcoco in what became known as the Noche Triste (Sad Night), a disaster in which the Spanish and their indigenous allies suffered heavy losses.

Cortés returned in 1521 with a rebuilt army, indigenous allies from Tlaxcala and other states, and thirteen small ships built in sections and reassembled on the lake. The siege of Tenochtitlán lasted about 75 days. The Spanish and their indigenous allies cut off the city’s water and food supplies, used the new ships to control the lake, and gradually reduced the city block by block. The city was also suffering from a devastating smallpox epidemic, which had arrived with the Spanish in 1520 and was spreading through the densely populated urban population. The emperor Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, was captured in August 1521. Cortés destroyed the city and began building Mexico City on its ruins. Ross Hassig’s Aztec Warfare (1988) and his Conquest of New Spain (2006) are the standard military-historical treatments; Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018) is the modern reassessment; Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun (2019) gives the indigenous side.

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478–1541)

Background

Pizarro was born in Trujillo, Extremadura, the illegitimate son of a minor noble. He had little formal education but a reputation for toughness, courage, and a willingness to take enormous risks. He went to the Caribbean early in the 16th century and participated in Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s expedition that first sighted the Pacific Ocean from the New World in 1513.

Pizarro and Diego de Almagro became partners in an expedition to the Pacific coast of South America in the 1520s, partly financed by the Spanish crown. Their first attempts were disastrous, and Pizarro was left stranded on the coast of Ecuador with only a handful of followers. Eventually, however, the partners made contact with a small, richly dressed group of Inca who had been shipwrecked. From this group, Pizarro learned of the wealth and existence of the Inca Empire in the Andes. Lockhart and Schwartz’s Early Latin America (1983) is the standard textbook; John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas (1970) is the standard narrative.

The Conquest of the Inca Empire, 1532–1533

In 1532 Pizarro led a small force of about 168 men, 67 horses, and a few cannon south along the Pacific coast. He met the Inca ruler Atahualpa at the town of Cajamarca in November 1532, having been told that Atahualpa was planning a trap. Pizarro’s chaplain, Father Vicente de Valverde, presented Atahualpa with the Requerimiento — the formal Spanish demand that indigenous peoples accept Spanish sovereignty and Christianity — and Atahualpa rejected it.

In the ensuing Battle of Cajamarca, the Spanish forces ambushed and captured Atahualpa. The conquistadors held him for several months, demanding an enormous ransom of silver and gold, much of which was melted down from the Temple of the Sun at Coricancha. Once the ransom was paid, Pizarro reneged on his promise to release Atahualpa and had him executed in 1533. The circumstances are described by even sympathetic accounts as effectively a kidnapping followed by judicial murder.

The Capture of Cuzco

Pizarro marched on the Inca capital of Cuzco in late 1533, with a force that included indigenous allies opposed to Atahualpa’s faction. He captured Cuzco with relatively little resistance, but the Spanish installed a puppet emperor, Manco Inca, who soon rebelled. Pizarro’s forces repelled the rebellion and eventually founded a new capital on the coast, the Ciudad de los Reyes (Lima), in 1535. The conquest of the Inca Empire was followed by a series of civil wars between Spanish factions. Pizarro and his former partner Diego de Almagro quarrelled over the division of the conquered territory, and Almagro was executed in 1538 after a battle. His supporters, including his son, then assassinated Pizarro in his own palace in Lima in 1541.

Common Features of the Conquests

The Spanish successes against far larger indigenous armies rested on four factors, in descending order of importance.

Indigenous alliances. The Aztec and Inca empires were tribute states, not unified polities, and many of the peoples they dominated had been forced in by military conquest and resented imperial rule. The Tlaxcalteca were as essential to the fall of the Aztec Empire as the Spanish themselves. Several Andean peoples — including the Cañari and the Chachapoya — supported Pizarro against Atahualpa. The Spanish could not have conquered either empire without these indigenous allies. Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1982) makes the political-fracture argument explicitly.

Disease. Smallpox, measles, and influenza, brought by the Spanish, had been spreading through the Americas since 1519. A 1520 smallpox epidemic killed the Aztec emperor Cuitláhuac and a large fraction of central Mexico’s population, and may have killed Montezuma II. Smallpox had reached the Andes before Pizarro arrived, killing the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and triggering the civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar that Pizarro exploited. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972) put the biological story into general circulation; Noble David Cook’s Born to Die (1998) is the disease-and-demography treatment; Charles Mann’s 1493 (2011) gives the global environmental and biological account.

Steel and horses. Spanish swords, pikes, and crossbows were more effective in close combat than the wooden macuahuitl clubs, spears, and atlatls of indigenous warriors. Domesticated horses had been extinct in the Americas for thousands of years. They gave the Spanish a substantial mobility advantage on the battlefield and a psychological one, since the animals were unknown to most indigenous peoples. Horses were a real advantage but not the decisive one. Ross Hassig’s Aztec Warfare (1988) is the careful military analysis.

Leadership and propaganda. Both Cortés and Pizarro were bold, decisive, and ruthless leaders, willing to take enormous risks. Cortés’s use of Montezuma as a hostage, his rapid recovery after the Noche Triste, and his exploitation of indigenous political divisions are characteristic of his style. Pizarro’s willingness to enter a hostile city with a tiny force and capture the emperor shows a similar pattern. Cortés also proved unusually effective at presenting himself as the agent of the Spanish king, using religious imagery and ritual, and exploiting Aztec prophecies of returning gods. Cortés’s letters to Charles V (the Cartas de Relación) are the principal source for his self-presentation, and they should be read as propaganda.

The Demographic and Economic Consequences

The conquests transformed the Americas within a generation. The political systems of the Aztec and Inca states were destroyed. The indigenous populations were decimated by disease and war. Spanish colonial institutions were established. Mexico City and Lima became the two principal cities of Spanish America, and they would remain so for three centuries.

The silver of the Andes, especially from the mines of Potosí (discovered 1545), became the financial foundation of the Spanish Empire and of the global economy of the 17th century. The bulk of the silver — perhaps 40,000 metric tons across the 16th–18th centuries, with another 10,000–20,000 smuggled — was shipped to Spain, and a substantial fraction of it ended up in China via the Manila galleons, not in Europe. The Chinese demand for silver was driven by the Ming single-whip tax reform of 1581, which converted tax obligations to silver. John Flynn and Arturo Giráldez’s Born with a “Silver Spoon” (1995) is the key reassessment. The Columbian Exchange of crops, animals, and diseases, combined with the Spanish colonial system, defined the demographic and economic history of the Americas for centuries.

The Reputation of the Conquistadors

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cortés and Pizarro were celebrated as civilizers and nation-builders, and statues were erected across the former Spanish empire. Since the 1992 Quincentenary, the reputation has been substantially revised. Indigenous communities and Latin American historians have emphasized the catastrophic costs of the conquest, the agency of indigenous peoples, and the demographic catastrophe. The 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán in 2021 produced a major reassessment, particularly in Mexican and Andean scholarship. The debate is not about whether the conquests were catastrophic — they were — but about how to hold the political transformations and the human costs in view at the same time. Todorov’s Conquest of America (1982) is the most influential treatment from the perspective of European-Indian encounter; Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018) and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) are the modern reassessments; Charles Mann’s 1491 (2005) is the broader reassessment of pre-Columbian America.

Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the Conquest of the Americas

The World of the Conquistadors

Hernán Cortés (1485–1547)

Background

The Expedition to Mexico, 1519

The March to Tenochtitlán

The Night of Sorrows and the Siege

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478–1541)

Background

The Conquest of the Inca Empire, 1532–1533

The Capture of Cuzco

Common Features of the Conquests

The Demographic and Economic Consequences

The Reputation of the Conquistadors

Further Reading

Related Pages