How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Sheppard
In a Nutshell
A few hundred Spanish conquistadors conquered the Aztec and Inca empires because they exploited deep internal divisions among native peoples, captured the emperors to control entire hierarchies, and leveraged critical technological edges like steel weapons and horses. The vast majority of their fighting forces were actually indigenous allies seeking to overthrow Aztec or Inca dominance, with conquistadors typically making up less than 1% of the total troops. The empires' centralized structures made them vulnerable to decapitation strikes, while the Spanish maintained coastal strongholds and received constant reinforcements that natives could not match.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
A few hundred conquistadors arrived in a new continent they knew nothing about and within a matter of years subjugated empires with millions of inhabitants. They frequently won battles where they were outnumbered 100 to 1, 1,000 to 1, and in many cases without taking a single casualty. Upwards of 99% of their fighting forces were made up of the very natives they were going to subjugate.
This represents an example of an alien force with motivations the natives did not understand, using diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and take over a much larger and well-established order.
Europe was backed up against the wall of the Atlantic, under immense pressure from external forces and cut off from the core economic power bases of the East—the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the global economy historically throughout Eurasia. This forced Europe to innovate.
Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal worked on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway. Generational knowledge accrued from captains reporting on tides and wind currents and whatever land they managed to reconnoiter, building out the map as they went along, enabled them to find a way around the southern tip of Africa directly to India and cut out the middleman.
The Spanish were heading west. Christopher Columbus's 1492 expedition was an attempt to arrive at the Oriental markets by traveling west. His figures were completely wrong, but he was saved by the fact that there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China, and the Spice Islands would be.
Initially, the discovery was perceived as a disappointment, but over time it became increasingly apparent this was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited.
In 1511, an ambitious Spanish nobleman named de Velázquez seized control of Cuba. He sent out expeditions exploring the coast of Mesoamerica. In 1518, he assigned this task to Hernán Cortés, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship.
Cortés had arrived in the New World in Cuba in 1511. He had legal training, served as a notary, and worked his way up to being alcalde (chief magistrate) on Cuba. He took the warrant from the governor and ran with it, recruiting men for a much wider and more ambitious goal: not just to explore the coast, but to penetrate into the interior, find out what was there, and seize control of it.
On 18th November 1518, the governor arrived at the waterfront just as Cortés got into a boat to go out to his ships offshore. The governor called out asking what Cortés was up to. Cortés assured him he had everything under control. At that point, the governor had lost control—it was now Cortés's expedition.
Cortés entered terra incognita, unknown to Europeans previously. His political antenna, honed by years in the islands, enabled him to appreciate at a very early stage that there was a significant imperial power with hegemony in the mainland, and that its subject peoples chafed under that authority.
He arrived in the lands of the Totonacs, who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of the Mexica—hence Mexico—who came down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Aztlán as the Aztecs.
The Totonacs resented this authority and saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority imposed on them. Having established this relationship with the Totonacs, Cortés began to march inland and entered the territory of the Tlaxcalans.
The Tlaxcalans, like an autoimmune system, immediately rallied to defeat Cortés and expel him from their territory. He fought them to a standstill for such a period of time that the Tlaxcalans and he arrived at a new kind of arrangement.
The Tlaxcalans appreciated his strength, his power, his potential. They swung over to his side and would henceforth serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior.
A few hundred men were on Cortés's side and multiple thousands on the Tlaxcalans' side. The standstill was an impressive military achievement, especially because he was fighting without native support at that point.
The critical technological differentials from the Old and New World began to come into effect. Guns were not so significant once the Native peoples got over the shock value and appreciated that, given the very slow reloading times involved in firearms at that time, they were not significant assets on the battlefield.
Steel was critical. Local weapons were carved from wood, stone, and obsidian—that volcanic glass which is razor sharp when honed to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon. Against the steel armor, and especially the steel helmets that the conquistadors were wearing, these weapons were much less effective.
The conquistadors drew on military traditions of the Old World that went back generations, incorporating long Toledo steel sword blades. They used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who were coming in with cut-and-slash weapons, which opened up the side of the body to be taken out very early.
The combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training and skill meant that the conquistadors had that critical edge on the battlefield.
Cortés was taking casualties and was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in so the Tlaxcalans would not be aware that they were even having some successes in hand-to-hand combat. It was as much a mind game as it was a physical game.
The ultimate weapon the conquistadors brought with them was their horses. The horse was vital to the conquistadors once they entered into the interior of the American continents.
They had the external asset of sail power, which enabled them to land anywhere they wanted on the coast. But in the interior, the horse was decisive.
There were no native equivalents. The horse originated in North America but had subsequently died out. The local peoples had not just no horses, but no beast of burden generally. That was not integrated into their economies, into their ways of life, or into their military.
The Inca had the llama. When they campaigned, trailing for miles behind their armies would be endless baggage trains of pack animals. The Aztecs had no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the Chihuahua.
The conquistadors also brought big war mastiffs—fighting dogs which wore armor and were trained to take down men. The terrifying impact these would have had on the indigenous people is difficult to overstate.
On attack, the conquistadors could blast through any native formation which did not have not just the weapons, but the training or discipline to be able to stand up to massed shock cavalry. If things were going badly, they could retreat much faster than the enemies could chase them.
The Tlaxcalans appreciated all these assets coming together and saw this as their opportunity. They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Mesoamerica which was still able to go toe-to-toe with the Aztecs. They had been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with ceremonial flower wars, which were becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest.
The Tlaxcalans had been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt. They were being pushed to the brink. This was a Hail Mary for them. If they allied with these outsiders, these strangers who were few in number, they might have some potential way to break out of the strategic trap that had been imposed upon them.
The Tlaxcalans leaned over to Cortés's side and traveled with him to Tenochtitlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Texcoco, the capital of the Aztec Empire.
Cortés passed through the causeways out into the city and encountered Moctezuma II, the huey tlatoani (the Great Speaker), the emperor of the Aztec Empire. These two worlds came together at that moment.
The interface between them was Cortés's interpreter/mistress, Doña Marina, Malinche as she became known, who was translating from one side to the other.
Moctezuma II was aware Cortés was coming. This was his empire. He had envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere. They reported back to him that something had washed up on the shores of the empire and was determined to meet with them.
He initially bargained with Cortés, urging him to leave. He provided precious gifts, which only inflamed Cortés further. Once Cortés had hold of Aztec gold, he was determined to go all the way to the center.
Moctezuma continued playing a double game. His advisors and council urged him not to allow Cortés to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Cuitláhuac, told him that if he allowed this man inside his house, he would take his house away from him.
But Moctezuma proceeded. He has been condemned by generations of historians for this. Bringing the conquistadors into the heart of the empire itself was considered a mistake.
Moctezuma's decision to invite Cortés into the city was actually his best option, whether he was aware of it or not. It was better for him to have Cortés as his guest within Tenochtitlan than to have Cortés at loose within his empire, talking to the subject peoples and possibly inflaming them against central authority.
He felt perhaps Cortés was what he said he was—an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean.
Cortés had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who would listen that he spoke for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Of course, Charles V had no idea who Hernán Cortés was. Cortés was winging it—incredible improvisation.
The great turning point came when word arrived from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, had taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast with the Totonacs, and some of them had been killed.
Cortés seized this as his pretext. He marched into the palace of Moctezuma II and told him that for his own safety, he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish, and he should come with him, or else there would be violence.
This was the moment when Moctezuma's entire worldview collapsed. Nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology disintegrated at that point, and he meekly allowed himself to be led away.
He told his people not to resist, that he did not want bloodshed, that he would pass with these strangers. Then once Cortés had rounded up the officers from the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he had them, in front of the emperor and the entire court, burned alive—a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs. They watched this in grim silence.
Once Cortés had seized the emperor himself, once he had Moctezuma, he already had the empire. He governed through what was increasingly becoming his puppet.
Moctezuma seemed to have fallen almost under the spell of Cortés—the classic Stockholm syndrome. He gave him a grand tour of the city.
Cortés, in a subtle flex of his power, had brigantines (small sailing boats) built. He took Moctezuma with him on a sailing cruise on Lake Texcoco, and the emperor was astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water.
Having the emperor was the key. The emperor's mistake was not inviting Cortés into the city—it was making himself vulnerable by staying there in an adjacent palace.
If Moctezuma had gone to some further location, made some excuse (a pilgrimage or an expedition of some kind), and had ruled through subordinates, Cortés would have been baffled. He could not go chasing after the emperor—that would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortés would have had his options extremely limited.
Because Moctezuma stayed in his capital, he made himself the target. Once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire.
The Spanish were themselves divided and in fact fighting each other. The governor on Cuba, fuming, rallied another expeditionary force because Cortés was stealing his thunder. He sent this under Pánfilo de Narváez—a larger force than the one Cortés brought with him originally.
This landed on the coast. Cortés appreciated he had to move, so he left one of his subordinates, the hot-blooded Alvarado, behind in charge in Tenochtitlan. He took as many men as he could to the coast, confronted de Narváez, and defeated him in a minor battle.
Again, diplomacy won over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatched. Cortés told them: "My friends, why are we fighting? We have the empire at my disposal. Join with me and we can share in the riches." He won over the vast majority of this new force, which effectively became reinforcements, and he marched back to the capital.
Cortés found the mood had turned against him. The problem with being in charge is you cannot be everywhere. His subordinate Alvarado, assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him, decided on a preemptive strike.
There was a festival. The aristocracy, particularly the warrior caste, were celebrating, and Alvarado descended on them and massacred everybody. The survivors rallied the population. When Cortés returned, he found himself effectively under siege.
The people were so appalled with the failure of their huey tlatoani that when he tried to pacify them, they threw stones at him. Mortally wounded, he either died or the Spanish finished him off, because he was no longer of any use to them.
Cortés was trapped in Tenochtitlan. He determined to break out, and that was La Noche Triste, the Tragic Night, because so many of his men were left behind. They were either killed as they tried to escape the city across the causeways or forced to retreat back to the palaces, where they were taken alive and sacrificed subsequently.
Cortés got away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal and made it back to Tlaxcalan territory.
The two critical features of the entire campaign were at play. Cortés had enough strike power with enough horses to defeat the Aztecs when they tried to finish him off, at the Battle of Otumba.
The Aztecs felt he was on the run. They had the numbers. The conquistadors were dragging their tails between their legs as they fled. Cortés himself was grievously wounded.
The Aztecs thought they could finish them off. They had the numbers. They were winning. But Cortés identified where the Aztec general was. He rallied enough horsemen to blast through the Aztec ranks and take out their command and control.
The Aztec army disintegrated, and the Spanish were able to flee. The battlefield advantages—their horses, their steel—were critical, but just as critical was the diplomacy.
If the Tlaxcalans had turned on Cortés at that point, he would have been finished. Not one Spaniard would have survived. None of them would have made it back to the coast.
But the Tlaxcalans, for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian impulse to welcome back the conquistadors, still saw that they were committed to these people and to their alliance. So they gave Cortés shelter.
He recovered physically, began to rebuild his strength, and was determined to go back to Tenochtitlan for round two: "This time we are not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties."
The Tlaxcalans had their own perspective on this. If you go to Tlaxcala, the territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall, and these depict Cortés and the conquistadors from the Tlaxcalan point of view.
It is fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and an inferior. It is between equals. You see them depicted in the same scale, engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures.
The Tlaxcalans drove a hard bargain. They wanted territory carved out of the Aztecs. They wanted their own fortress in Tenochtitlan after this was over. They saw this as them using the conquistadors, not the other way around.
The Aztec Empire from a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive. But this was an imperial construct, and not just the remaining independent entities like the Tlaxcalans and the Tarascans were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples.
The Totonacs on the coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Texcoco—they chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority. They too saw the conquistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority and the demands of the Aztecs, and get revenge in many ways.
Cortés built up for the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, against the new huey tlatoani Cuitláhuac, and then, after he died, his brother, the last of the huey tlatoanis, Cuauhtémoc.
He had indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Mesoamerica. He emphasized that he was still in the fight. He still had those advantages. More reinforcements were arriving at the coast, and they were being integrated into the conquistador army.
But of the force that marched on Tenochtitlan, the conquistadors were maybe 0.5% in raw numbers. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples who saw this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs.
This was the integration again of the technology with the diplomacy. Cortés knew that to take the city, he had to control the lake.
They needed sulfur for their gunpowder—their guns were useless without gunpowder. So an expedition went into the mountains to the volcano Popocatépetl, and they dangled with ropes inside the caldera of the volcano, scooping out the sulfur they needed as the critical ingredient for their gunpowder.
Another expedition built prefabricated brigantines, boats, in their different sections, and then had untold numbers of porters, human load-bearers, bring these prefabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake. They were assembled and let loose in the lake, and now they had control over the lake.
Bringing together the technology and the innovations with the local manpower, this was the force directed against Tenochtitlan in the final battle.
The Aztecs and Incas should not be understood as cohesive single nations. A better model might be imagining Russia and Ukraine engaged in trench warfare for 100 years, with the Russians taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians and doing human sacrifices with them. Then some foreign force comes in and says to the Ukrainians, "We can help you march into Moscow."
The old phrase is, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," and in diplomacy and war, that is always very true.
When Cortés consummated his conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the last of the huey tlatoanis surrendered to him, and he occupied the territory and, most importantly, the top of the social hierarchy. The existing structure, as much as possible, was allowed to persist. The conquistadors just decapitated the local nobility and inserted themselves at the top.
This was the playbook that would continue to be applied, less successfully, throughout the rest of Mesoamerica because the existing political entities there were not so sophisticated.
Rumors of lost cities of gold continued to circulate throughout the New World. Additional conquistadors arrived seeking advantage from these opportunities. Francisco Pizarro, a distant cousin of Cortés, met with him to receive the playbook for conquest. In a conquistador business venture, Pizarro secured funding for men and ships and began pushing south down the west coast of South America, crossing the equator and arriving in modern-day Peru.
Pizarro encountered a sophisticated culture on a broader territorial scale than Cortés had found in Mesoamerica. This was the land of the Inca. Upon arrival, Pizarro found the Inca Empire in civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Huayna Capac, had died in 1525, and his two sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, fought each other. Atahualpa had just won the civil war and was proceeding to Cuzco, the Inca capital, to be formally enthroned as the new Sapa Inca when word arrived that strangers had entered his realm.
In 1532, 168 Spanish men pushed into the Andes Mountains seeking Atahualpa. He encountered them outside Cajamarca and saw not threat but opportunity. Atahualpa's envoy advised him that these were not men of good faith and recommended eliminating them by setting fire to their sleeping quarters at night. However, Atahualpa was interested in what the Spaniards had to offer. Pizarro impressed the Sapa Inca with his horses by sending a key lieutenant to demonstrate horsemanship, charging directly at Atahualpa's court with the horse stopping just inches from the Sapa Inca's face.
Atahualpa remained stony-faced and professed to be unimpressed, stating he would meet with Pizarro at a time of his choosing. After the Spaniards left, Atahualpa executed all of his court members, including generals who had flinched or shown fear, to demonstrate they would not be intimidated. He sent a blocking force of tens of thousands of men to cut off any Spanish retreat, then proceeded to meet Pizarro at Cajamarca with his vast army.
A Peruvian saying states that Atahualpa planned to have Pizarro for lunch, but Pizarro ended up having him for breakfast. Once Atahualpa entered a narrow, constricted courtyard, Pizarro launched the ambush using all artillery and musketry for shock value, then unleashed the horses. Atahualpa was overwhelmed and taken prisoner. This followed the established playbook: seize the person at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy to control the entire structure.
The Inca Empire had approximately 10 million inhabitants. Pizarro had 160-190 conquistadors facing an army of tens of thousands—some estimates suggest 100,000 or 200,000 men. In this first battle, the conquistadors killed approximately 10,000 Inca troops while suffering zero casualties.
The conquistadors admitted that the night before the encounter, the Inca army's campfires across the surrounding hills looked like twinkling stars. When they saw Inca troops filing into the courtyard, they lost control of their bladders from fear. The Inca had never encountered gunpowder weapons. The explosion and the strangers' apparent control of thunder was psychologically devastating. The physical damage from cannons and arquebuses was relatively minor compared to the psychological impact.
The Inca had never seen horses or understood the shock value of a mounted charge with stirrups. They had no doctrine to counter cavalry. The psychological impact caused them to flee, piling against walls in desperation to escape. The walls eventually gave way under the press of bodies. Spaniards pursued fleeing Inca into the countryside. The only casualty among conquistadors was Pizarro, who received a hand wound from an overenthusiastic comrade while seizing Atahualpa.
Intuitively, tens of thousands of troops might swarm cavalry by pulling armored riders from their stirrups. Europeans knew how to counter cavalry—the Swiss had proven that long pikes could knock mounted knights from their saddles. This required both technology and discipline, training, and institutional knowledge. Mesoamerican warfare was very loose in formation with significant space between warriors, which was the worst formation against cavalry as horses could exploit the gaps.
Both Aztecs and Inca attempted to implement countermeasures against conquistador advantages. When Cortés returned in 1521, Aztecs drew him into Tenochtitlan, a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways that minimized cavalry advantages. They learned to fight from rooftops, pelting enemies with stones, and built man-sized holes in buildings to move between structures where horses couldn't follow.
Both civilizations independently discovered the stopping power of water. Aztecs broke dikes at Iztapalapa on Lake Texcoco, flooding the city and drowning conquistadors in their heavy armor. The Inca flooded the river at Ollantaytambo to bog down Spanish cavalry. They captured and adapted Spanish weapons, fixing conquistador swords to long wooden poles as improvised pikes, and used bolas to tangle horses' legs.
An Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared while gripping the lance, fixing the conquistador in place for colleagues to swarm and unhorse him. Aztecs used captured Spanish prisoners to learn crossbow use. Inca used captured Spaniards to teach firearm operation. Manco Inca learned to ride a horse to demonstrate to his people that they could master this technology. However, the learning curve was too steep and the timeframe too short to deploy these advantages effectively.
Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire of 6 million people in two and a half years with a couple hundred men. Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire of 10 million people in about five years. The speed of these conquests was remarkable, leaving little time for adaptation despite the theoretical possibility of developing effective countermeasures.
If simulations were run repeatedly with small changes—different leaders for either side—the Spanish might not have achieved control within a few years in many scenarios. Cortés could have been eliminated early, leaving conquistadors leaderless. Atahualpa's critical mistake was entering Pizarro's trap personally; sending envoys might have frustrated Spanish ambitions while preserving the integrated Inca Empire.
After seizing Cuzco and stripping temples of gold and silver—called "the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon"—Pizarro returned to the coast to establish Lima. His half-brothers provoked Manco Inca into rebellion. Manco laid siege to Cuzco, took Sacsayhuamán fortress, and had general Quizu Yupanqui cut off reinforcements from the coast. The Inca won set-piece confrontations when using terrain advantages, annihilating Spanish expeditions in narrow mountain passes with boulders from above.
Manco ordered Quizu to attack Lima, believing Spanish forces were contained in Cuzco. However, the assault required crossing open ground where Spanish cavalry could be deployed effectively. Quizu was killed and the attack collapsed. In Cuzco, Spaniards held fortified buildings under constant assault with drums, chanting, and missile attacks.
Spaniards survived at Cuzco due to two factors: the open courtyards and plazas provided good cavalry terrain, and local peoples—mitimaes and yanakuna, the subordinated populations within the Inca Empire—saw the Spanish as an opportunity to break free from Inca authority. More local peoples joined the besieged Spaniards throughout the Battle of Cuzco, which lasted many months.
The Inca Empire appeared impressive from a distance with its geographic expanse and population, but was controlled by a tiny elite hierarchy. Only a small number of people spoke Quechua, the imperial language. The empire was constructed from multiple ethnicities who seized the opportunity to side with the Spanish. Only about 100,000 actual Incas controlled an empire of 10 million people.
Eurasia possessed numerous domesticable animals—sheep, cows, goats, mules, pigs, and horses—creating conditions for evolution of contagious diseases. The New World lacked these conditions, leaving indigenous populations without immunity to diseases like smallpox and other communicable illnesses. Even if Aztecs and Inca had won short-term victories, longer-term demographic crisis would have undermined their capacity to resist.
Pre-Columbian societies were extremely impressive given their disadvantages, building pyramids through pure manpower without beasts of burden or the wheel. Subject peoples would have broken for freedom, following the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history. Tenochtitlan, one of the world's greatest metropolises in 1519, would have been a swamp with moss-covered mounds by 1619 due to environmental overstress, following the pattern of Teotihuacan's earlier collapse.
European colonists would have eventually entrenched themselves at the coast and pushed inland, potentially creating more balanced relationships with indigenous peoples initially, but ultimately folding them into the European imperial framework.
Native forces that resisted European powers for extended periods, such as Comanche tribes into the 19th century, benefited from dispersal rather than centralization. The vulnerability of Aztec and Inca empires lay in their hierarchical structure and absolute loyalty invested in single rulers—the huey tlatoani for Aztecs and Sapa Inca for Inca. Dispersed peoples like the Maya, whose city-states maintained autonomy, could not be conquered in one fell swoop, requiring the Spanish to reduce cities individually in a process lasting nearly to the end of the 17th century.
Even the Inca and Aztecs never fully incorporated their territories. Aztecs were slowly reducing Tlaxcalans while facing the independent Tarascan empire in Michoacán. The first Aztec incursion into Tarascan territory ended in disaster. Tarascans possessed metal smelting technology, likely obtained through exchange with South America, using copper-tipped arrows against Aztec forces.
Their massed archers with their copper-tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. The exchange, if it had been on a broader scale between north and south, would've been potentially an equalizing force. If the Aztec had had llamas from South America, it would've been dramatically to their advantage. There is tin in the New World.
So no bronze? Why do we not get bronze with copper and tin? They'd never made it, certainly not in Mesoamerica, where everything was stone. They had the worst of both worlds. They could smelt silver and gold to attract the greed of the Spaniards, but they couldn't smelt iron to hold them off. But before that, you would've thought that they would have done copper, tin… get bronze. They did have bronze in the Inca world. If the Aztecs had had access to that, again, it would have given them a much more aggressive fighting stance. Bronze can't stand up against iron, but it's better than stone. Or obsidian.
This is an important part of what happens here, which is that the Europeans are learning from each other, but the natives are not learning from each other. Cortés learned from the conquest of Hispaniola. Of course, he has a ton of improvisation in the way he approaches the conquest of the Aztecs. Then Pizarro knows the whole details of what Cortés did a decade earlier and basically follows the same playbook. It's not clear to me that the Incas even knew the Aztecs existed. So you just have a much greater accumulation of knowledge than the other one is able to accumulate. They're closed worlds. They were very insular in their societies.
To go further back in time, the only divergence that would've given pre-Columbian peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans is if we reverse the clock another 500 years back to Leif Erikson and the Norse in Greenland. They knew of the existence of North America — Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, as they called them, as they explored them. They tried to colonize the New World. Their numbers were too few, the local resistance was too fierce, and they were forced out. If the Vikings had been able to claim a long-term presence in the New World, they may have been able to drip-feed European technology, European beasts of burden, and above all, European diseases slowly into the Americas, so that 500 years later, when the conquistadors did show up, they'd have met a people who had some resistance to European diseases, knew how to work iron, and were riding horses. If that was the case, all bets are off. That would be such an interesting history. What does the New World look like if the Vikings had actually set up there?
What was Pizarro's greatest innovation on Cortés's strategy? Essentially, the key to it was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top, establish a coastal settlement — which Cortés also was very invested in — so you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out. A base on the coastline was key. Originally with the conquistadors, but more broadly the Portuguese, British, and French subsequently, they would build those key strongholds on the coast, which, because of their monopoly over nautical technology, meant they were effectively unable to be extricated by any local indigenous population.
That's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. At the end of the day, they had the fortresses, and again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like: those jagged-edged star parapets and revetments and battlements which maximized firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Qing Chinese, struggled to be able to deal with that. The peoples of the pre-Columbian Americas had no real chance of storming defenses on that kind of a scale. The Inca and Aztecs didn't even have siege warfare. They didn't have siege weapons, battering rams, catapults, nothing like that. Once the Europeans dug into fortified positions, it was very hard to move them out of that.
Pizarro's own environment was quite different from that of Cortés. The highlands of Mexico are quite elevated, but the Andes Mountains that the conquistadors were moving into… I've been at elevation in the Himalayas and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness. How they were able to move to those heights and then be able to fight battles is really astonishing. With the many dozens of pounds of armor and equipment. It speaks to their physical stamina, honed over many years of hard living, and the core motivations. "This had better be worth it." That's why Cortés and Pizarro were always first among equals. They had to keep demonstrating success. They had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances, because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had titles or claims that were just as legitimate as Cortés's or Pizarro's. Cortés was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, at the end lost control. He met his end as a rival faction stormed his household. He went down fighting, not against the indigenous people, but against his fellow Spaniards.
What I find interesting about these conquests is that once the emperor's captured — Atahualpa for the Incas and Moctezuma for the Aztecs — what is it that they think is going to happen? Why are they cooperating? What is the end story in which they come out on top? Do they think that the Spanish were going to leave if they gave them enough gold? What is their endgame there?
That's a good question. With Moctezuma II, from the moment when Cortés seized him… Previously, the records of Moctezuma reflect that he was a pitiless autocrat. He centralized all power in the aristocracy. Previously, it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle, but he forbade that. He was almost Stalinist in his authority over his underlings. He was the one who was amping up the ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of encirclement and annihilation for the Tlaxcalans. He was, in every sense of the word, an autocrat. Perhaps being told what to do for the first time in his life just led to a complete psychological break, because once Cortés had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially willingly Cortés's puppet. He was always trying to do what Cortés wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people, but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortés's authority. In the end, it wasn't Cortés who disposed of him. It was his own people, because they realized that he had sold them out and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed had never happened before in Aztec history. He was the first huey tlatoani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else.
But what explains Atahualpa? What did he think was going to happen? He seemed like he had his wits about him. He did, and the Spanish accounts refer to it. He had a regal bearing and was clearly intelligent. He was adaptive to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very quickly. He learned to play cards and chess. He was, I think, trying to integrate himself as much as possible. At the same time, he was also reaching out to his own people. He was waiting perhaps for his opportunity to fully mobilize them. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that. Bear in mind the deal: he walked into that room and said, "I can fill it up this high with gold and silver," and Pizarro promised he'd be released at that point. Perhaps he actually felt that this was a man of his word. Pizarro in no case was, and had him garroted to death after getting what he wanted. It may just be that he misinterpreted Pizarro as someone who was on the same level, that "kings don't do this to other kings." But he was dealing with a freebooting entrepreneurist pirate, essentially, not someone operating in good faith at all.
Zooming out, it's interesting to think about what this Spanish New World conquest really accomplished. They're basically after gold and silver. In a weird way, they're like paperclippers who don't really care about this indigenous culture or even the productive capacity of this new continent. They just care about these metals, which are not in and of themselves productive assets. They can't generate wealth. They're basically like crypto, if you think about what gold and silver are. They're just obsessed with this. Initially — we were talking about this yesterday — this helps them fund… Europe's in a tough spot at this time because of the Ottomans and other forces. The Reconquista has just happened, so the Spanish have been fighting off Arab armies that had control over parts of the Iberian Peninsula. They use this gold and this silver to help pay for those defenses back at home. But if you think about what's really happening here, there's no new net wealth that has been generated. It's just redistribution among Europeans. If they're using bullion as currency, now the relative ratio of bullion has changed. You get inflation plus some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money. That doesn't create more stuff. At least initially, the Spanish are not getting any new productive capacity out of the New World.
What does change is that during this period, the Ming dynasty is in charge of China, and it has really messed up the circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it. Every time there's inflation, they just make up a new currency, and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless. Now the Spanish set up the silver mines in the New World, and they ship that silver off to China. China is then sending millions of pieces of porcelain and tons and tons of silk and spices and fine goods to Europe — hundreds of tons of real goods, it might've been thousands of tons — in exchange for a medium of exchange, to make up for the fact that they don't have a reliable means of exchange at the time in the Ming dynasty. That is an important, interesting piece of what the function of the Spanish colonies in the New World is. It's not generating any net new wealth. In the grand scheme of things, it's basically helping get Chinese stuff for free, in some sense.
The conquistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished, many of them. Some of them died doing what they did. The ones who were lucky or good lived long enough to settle down on what were called encomiendas, local estates with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them, a kind of peon serfdom. The later iteration was the bureaucrats. Once the conquistadors had cleared the ground, the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain, and they would begin running and administering what would become Mexico, Peru, South America generally. The conquistadors in South America rebelled against that and had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire. Once that was accomplished, though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish imperial orbit, the first empire on which the sun never set.
Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosí in what's now Bolivia, they put the last piece of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Initially, the gold and silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of King Charles V, and then his son, King Philip II, for their wars of evangelical defense and expansion against the Ottomans, to keep the Netherlands under their control, and ideally, through the Armada, to bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Most of those ventures, of course, were failures. As you say, the net impact for Spain was ultimately quite negative. By infusing Europe with this enormous expansion of liquidity through the silver that was pouring off the treasure ships arriving in Spain every year, all they were doing was importing inflation, pushing prices up. Real wages in Spain actually fell during this period because, yes, there was excess liquidity, but this meant prices for even staple goods were much higher than they had been previously.
The ultimate negative effect was that the seductive drug, essentially, of having silver on tap meant that Spain never developed towards what we call functional capitalism. It never developed capital markets or independent banking systems the way they were emerging in places like the Netherlands and England during this period. Those powers moved ahead while Spain and Portugal were left behind, didn't really fully industrialize during the 19th century, and were left very rural and poor and backward by the 20th century. Still now they're catching up from that. So the average Spanish gain from this was quite marginal. "Yes, we can afford the fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571," which is good. But in terms of the development of the society, that really plateaued and stayed that way for hundreds of years.
The other side of the equation, as you mentioned, is China. Once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America, they could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific Ocean's wind currents to send those great ships west to the Philippines, to Manila, their base in the Orient. From there they met with merchants coming from Japan, from Siam, and most of all from China, bringing goods with real practical value in exchange for that extracted silver. As you say, the Spanish are buying goods with value using excess liquidity, and the real benefit from that is not something that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole.
What the conquistadors did was historically put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Trade is no longer trans-Eurasian or even trans-Atlantic. It's trans-global. The networks now affect everybody at some point along the line. The Ming found that out in the mid-1640s when there was a cash crisis, having fully transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver. When access to silver was cut off, or at least minimized, for a number of reasons during the first half of the 17th century, the Ming — at the worst possible time, with the Manchu at the gates — could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to put a military in place to hold them off. So the Manchus moved in at a moment of supreme advantage, blew out the Ming, and replaced them as the new hegemons over the Chinese imperial zone.
It's interesting to contrast the Spanish, who had immediate and outrageous successes in the New World, with the English around the same time, who were setting up the colony in Virginia. There are so many letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia Company as literally a waste of English money and lives. "Everybody's dying. There's nothing to farm here. There's nothing to get out of this." In the long run, of course, the British did lose control of the New World, but for a while they did gain these productive new colonies there. I don't know the right way to think about this. There is this way of thinking about it: maybe because the Spanish had this very quick initial success, they set up a very extractive settlement, which didn't result in net productive capacity in the long run. Whereas the British, because there was no crazy bullion floating around, were forced to build up some productive capacity, to build up the kinds of institutions that would allow them to make the most use of America, Canada, and so on.
You look at the Netherlands and England, the two latecomers to the game of imperialism, Protestant powers marginalized for that reason in Europe. The Netherlands especially has nothing. Natural resources, absolutely zero. In that environment, you're forced to innovate and think about how you can achieve capital gain and true economic expansion. Everybody wants the quick fix, understandably. We play the lottery for that exact reason. But be careful what you wish for, because you may just actually get it. Those societies that have arrived at the quick fix, whether that's gold or silver or monocultural crop production of some kind which gives you a monopoly on its provision, become satisfied with that. They become trapped within an environment that exists solely for that purpose, and they don't develop beyond the essential thresholds that that allows for. Even here in the US, we can look at the difference between the North and the South, that geographic line. Below that line, yes, you can get the quick fix. You can put all your capital into buying slaves and have them work at providing cash crops: tobacco, the original one, indigo and sugar, and of course the big one, cotton. The North didn't have those advantages. You couldn't just buy land and then extract the resource from it. You had to think about how to make money. That's why all the investment money in the North was going into things with long-term productivity: into trade and commerce, into advanced capital markets and the banking system, and of course into industrialization. That all happened in the North. When the rupture came in the 1860s and the North and South went to war, all those advantages were with the North. It wasn't just population, but the industrial base, the capital markets necessary for it to put in place a winning long-term strategy for actually defeating the South in that conflict. That again is the long-term lesson: having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain… I don't want to call it laziness, but lack of vision, perhaps, about alternatives that may, in the longer term, actually be more advantageous.
So earlier in this episode I asked Si: if you could rerun the conquest a thousand times, how often do the Spanish end up in control? What if the Aztecs had learned ironworking from the Vikings? Or the Spanish hadn't brought smallpox? Or Cortés had died earlier? Obviously, with history, counterfactuals are just thought experiments. But with software, you can actually test them. The Antithesis software testing platform runs your system through thousands of parallel histories, letting you explore any counterfactual you want. How does your software perform if a packet gets dropped? What about when the network drags, or the machine dies mid-write? Importantly, you don't have to come up with these counterfactuals. One big problem with traditional testing is that it only covers the distribution that you know. To test for a bug, you first have to imagine it. These tests are sort of like the Flower Wars. The Aztecs' success in these ritual battles against known rivals made them feel like the best military in the world, but they're still unprepared for Cortés. Antithesis solves this by steering your tests for you, injecting faults and making things as adversarial as possible. That way, your software gets tested against scenarios you'd never imagine, but that could still arise in the real world. Go to antithesis.com/dwarkesh to learn more.
Going back to the Aztecs and Incas, one thing that's remarkable here is just how bad their strategy and tactics often were. For example, because Aztec military conflict was based around capturing victims for sacrifice, there are many cases where Cortés himself was lying on the ground, having been knocked off his horse, but instead of just killing him on the ground and pressing their advantage, the Aztecs were trying to seize him to go have him sacrificed later. This allowed him to get himself out of thorny situations. Another huge mistake that would happen in these conflicts is that, in the traditional way in which these military conflicts would happen, the general would be garnished and plumed with all this extra decoration, which would make him easy to identify on a battlefield. If you have cavalry that can just see, "Here's where the general is. Let's go directly to him and kill him," the whole enemy force will rout. It breaks your entire chain of command. You might have 100,000 troops, but then your general dies and everybody else routs.
Another example is the Battle of Cuzco: a couple hundred Spaniards defending against this huge rebellion. If the rebellion had just kept attacking at night instead of only attacking during the day, the Spaniards would have never gotten a chance to rest and would have been depleted pretty quickly. Instead, they would let them rest at night. They wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations and attack at different times. Why I find this confusing is that it's not like the conquistadors arrived at the doorsteps of a bunch of peace-loving hippies who didn't know anything about war. Aztec society and Inca society were organized around warfare. All adult males were trained to be warriors. It was basically the Sparta of the New World. How do we understand how a very military-focused culture did not have the strategic wherewithal to do this improvisation? Cortés was doing improvisation. Pizarro was doing a bunch of improvisation. Why weren't they able to do the same thing?
There are a lot of factors, one of which is that cultural and religious aspect to it. Warfare was rewarded by an increase in status. Warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice. There was even a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners: four Totonacs were worth one Chichimec, because the Chichimec were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totonacs did. To a degree, there's a certain overlap with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them, because then you could ransom them back to their families. You could come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain. In a way, the Aztec model makes more sense, because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two. You might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield. Even kings… The kings of France after the Battles of Poitiers and Pavia were captured and then subject to various indignities. To a degree, there was a certain level of overlap. More holistically, you're right. Yes, the Aztecs did fight ideally to capture, not to kill. There were multiple episodes when they did have Cortés himself under their knives, but they were so desperate to haul him off that his compatriots, sometimes sacrificing themselves, were able to rescue him. That was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture, in their faith, in the religious expression of the values of an entire people. It's difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. It'd be like asking people here, if we're fighting aliens from another planet, to give up Christianity because there's too much invested in terms of its morality and more effective combat skills would be derived from following some other faith. It was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited timeframe.
The Cuzco situation… To use a famous film example, the movie 300. The Spartans are able to hold the pass at Thermopylae against overwhelming numbers because it's very, very narrow. Within Cuzco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances. The streets of Cuzco are quite narrow as well, which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues. Those could be blocked relatively effectively, even by the small numbers of conquistadors and their increasing numbers of native allies, who with their metal armor were able to put in place blocking operations that could hold those kinds of frameworks. Beyond that, when the pressure came off, they would unleash their horses, largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside, looking for isolated detachments to take out. This effect was demoralizing on the Inca. They initially had the advantage. They were rallied by Manco: "We're going to deal with these barbarians once and for all." As the frustration of the siege drags on, there are more and more defections, men slipping away at night either to switch sides or just go back to their homes and families. Again, this army is huge and very diverse, and many of those recruits are peoples who've been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest in before the winter. The nature of warfare in pre-Columbian America, and in Europe for much of its history, was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops.
The nature of warfare in pre-Columbian America, and in Europe for much of its history, was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops. You need the men on their farms to do that, because if they're not there, you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year. For all those reasons, the Inca, yes, with those huge numbers, weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time.
If they'd caught perhaps the entire conquistador army marching through one of those mountain passes, yes, they may have been able to win a set-piece battle in that environment. The horses can't charge up the steep slopes. Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees, mean the infantry's not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down. All the advantages would've been useless at that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a two-ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face. On small scales they were able to arrange that. But to get the entire conquistador force in one place at one time like that never happened.
So there was basically not enough time to accumulate the strategy? Again, it's that shockingly short, steep learning curve. There just wasn't enough time, no. In retrospect, you have these outrageous battles with thousands of deaths on one side and zero deaths on the other side. My understanding is this came as a surprise to the conquistadors as well.
How were some hundred-odd men willing to go confront an empire of 10 million people and say, "Your job is to take this over"? It'd be like dropping 100 Marines into 18th-century England and saying, "Okay, you better come out the other end with control over Parliament." How is this a thing that they were willing to do?
The classic push-pull factors. They came from a proud land, a new country. Spain had only come together in 1492, and they were aware their history was one of struggle, uniting the peninsula and consummating the Reconquista. They had a proud warrior background, but little to show for it, really. Again, the quality of life, particularly in Extremadura, which is the province in Spain where so many of these conquistadors originated from, was a land of hardship. It was small farms and dusty, unproductive terrain.
They were aware of a wider world around them. Like so many men throughout history, they see their only path forward to being anything more than dirt farmers as seeking a career of high risk and potentially even fatal outcomes, but with possible great reward as well. Men have joined armies and militaries and fought in campaigns, not even their own, even other peoples', for many centuries, millennia now, for that reason.
Then there's the attraction of the New World. Once they're aware that out there is a whole new land where "it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody. All I have as an asset is my fighting skills. Yeah, I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the Moors or against the Turks, but those are high-risk, low-return ventures. I'll be fighting in my home waters, but what will the potential rewards be? These Turks can fight. The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is that the risks there are much lower and the potential rewards much higher. It means traveling across a vast ocean. It means essentially being very self-reliant and falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am."
How important is religion in the morale of these soldiers? In retrospect we say, "Okay, they were able to take on huge armies." But they didn't even know that there was an empire there to take over. They didn't know where its capital was. They'd never seen it before. They knew nothing about what alliances they would need to maneuver, what size of armies they would need to face, what basic terrain and geography they would need to navigate. I'm still trying to understand how they gained the confidence — you and your couple hundred buddies — to go and take on a huge empire. Did they just think God would make sure that they were okay? How do we understand that?
Cortés and Pizarro both had men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. Cortés and Pizarro, in retrospect, would make a great deal of this in their writing. They professed to be outraged, particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, which was integral to their society. I don't see any reason why that would be untrue. It would be shocking to actually see that happen. When Moctezuma invited Cortés to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tenochtitlan, he remarks that the priests were daubed from head to foot in black clay or body paint, and the interior was black with spilled blood and stank abominably. I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that.
They would take a certain degree of legitimacy from tearing down the ancient idols of these superstitious peoples and raising them up to the one true faith. You can salve your conscience in many ways by doing that: "In real terms I'm here for what I can take, but I am performing the will of God, and therefore I have some absolution when I'm called to account at the end of the day." Men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors, which is what was playing out at that time.
Again, coming to the motivation, the initial conquests were relatively easy. The island populations in the Caribbean — what we now call Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba — were quite low on the tech tree, were not unified, and did not have a significant military presence. Of course, on islands there's nowhere for them to run. You could run into the mountains of Cuba, but eventually they would all be hunted down. The feeling was, "The pickings here are pretty easy." The enthusiastic attitude was, "Well, why would it be any different on the mainland?"
Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting, and some of them, veterans of wars against the Turks, would say afterwards, "This was some of the hardest fighting I've ever been through." By that point they'd seen that the potential rewards were much higher as well. When they arrived at Lake Texcoco, they would marvel as if we had just arrived in Atlantis… to be in this place on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges, and the biggest city of all appearing to float on the water like Venice, except even more dramatic with its high temples. To them, this both awed them and inflamed that greed that they had.
Cortés himself admitted as much to Moctezuma's envoys. He said, "My men and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure." So Moctezuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the traditional regalia. He sent him jade and obsidian, which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard. Cortés was happy to put on the headdress, and he sent it back to the king. But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, that was the real end purpose. The local peoples would talk about how the Spanish were chattering like monkeys as they were picking up this gold, fascinated by it.
By the way, Bernal Díaz, who was on Cortés's expedition and wrote a firsthand account of what happened afterwards, says in his account that in every single town they come across, even small outlying villages of the empire, every temple, every city has tons of human sacrifice remains left over. This is an endemic part of the society that I guess must have horrified the Spanish. But it's hard to square any sort of humanitarian, even plausible motivation to the Spanish. They were just very willing… I think maybe even worse than almost any other European conquest ever. The Spanish in the New World just massacre huge swaths of innocent women and children. Literal genocides, intentional genocides, not just disease. Crazy amounts of rape and assault. There wasn't a sense of, "We're freeing these people from the shackles of oppression," or at least there's no plausible story you could tell where that's what you're doing.
They would argue that in the long term it's in these peoples' interests. But of course in the short term, as you say, the accounts are unambiguous about this… throwing men and women to those huge hunting dogs that they brought with them for sport, to watch them being torn apart. They could rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice, which was endemic, ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There was a regular cycle of sacrifice, and that would peak according to particular crises, major campaigns, or the like.
There are accounts — again, these are distorted accounts — of an almost industrial level of human sacrifice, that the parade of prisoners who'd been drugged to keep them pacified stretched from the pyramid complex all the way through to the causeways. One after the other they'd be brought up to the top of the pyramids to the temple complex. Four priests, each would take an arm and a leg, while a fifth one would use an obsidian blade to open an incision and pull out the heart, which they'd offer to the gods.
I've been to those pyramids, the ones at Teotihuacan. The steps leading up are very, very narrow. You almost have to walk up sideways, deliberately so, because when the heart had been taken out and burned, the body would be tumbled off the far side, and the steps were so steep to allow it to tumble all the way to the bottom. Then the warrior who'd taken that prisoner would take the flesh home to be consumed. It was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take home, literally internalize, the defeated enemy. This was, as you say, a cycle that the world is better off without. I'm not going to make any excuses for it. But the motivations of those who did that were not selfless. It was at best a beneficial side effect, window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide.
It had even less validation in South America, because there was no such tradition at all. The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice into the high mountains where she'd be drugged, and you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls, but that was very rare and very specific. There was no ingrained culture of mass human sacrifice at all.
Here's a question I find very interesting. Why is it that the Spaniards are able to weaponize the divisions between the different native forces to their own advantage, but the natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards? We know there were significant divisions among the Spaniards. Literally, there's a whole much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortés. Similarly, we didn't get into this much, but in Pizarro's expedition, his second in command, Almagro, is pissed off that Pizarro is getting all the spoils. He comes back, lays siege to Cuzco after Manco Inca has laid siege to Cuzco, and captures it. They were literally fighting, in multiple cases in both these expeditions. The Spanish are fighting each other while they're taking over a much larger empire. Why is it that Manco Inca or Moctezuma are not able to use these divisions to their own advantage to stay in power?
That's a good question. The critical difference is this is happening for the conquistadors within the Spanish orbit. They're all Castilians, they're all Spaniards. Shared common backgrounds for most of them, and their confrontations were personal rivalries within their system. If confronted by an existential crisis, to pit them against each other, I think that would have failed. Their bottom line was they would have united if they felt there was a common cause against them that would have forced them to do that. Whereas for the local peoples, these are differences between entire societies, both the external and internal factors here.
Cuitláhuac, who succeeded his brother, Moctezuma II, as huey tlatoani after driving the Spaniards out during La Noche Triste, sent emissaries to the Tlaxcalans to build and expand their own new triple alliance, to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders. The Tlaxcalan younger generation thought about it. But the old men who still retained power, who had been fighting against the Aztecs for decades and saw them as, in the end, the existential threat, repudiated this possibility. The Tlaxcalans wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs. "No, we are enemies and always have been and always will be. This is your problem, and maybe you'll get taken out. No loss to us." They couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostilities which go way, way back through their history.
The only way that the indigenous people could have played the same game — and to a degree this did happen later — was to play different European powers off against each other. But of course the problem for the Aztecs, for the Inca, was the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered. If the English, French, Dutch, even the Ottomans had been players in New World colonization at that very early stage, it may have been possible for local peoples to identify, "Okay, these are different cultures. We can play them off against each other to our advantage." That may have been the game, but at that time, it wasn't possible.
I know you've spent a little bit of time thinking about what happened in all these other episodes of colonialism as well. In India, for example, we do have many different European powers. Why was it not possible for the Mughals to play them off each other indefinitely to keep control over India? The Mughals peaked under Aurangzeb at the beginning of the 18th century. Subsequently, his successors didn't have whatever you call it — the authority, the charisma, the rizz, however you want to define it — to maintain that hegemony which he'd established by almost taking over all of India.
The Mughals always at root had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century and built Qing dynasty China to the greatest physical extent it ever had. They were always outsiders. They were not indigenous to the population. In the background, there was always that vague resentment that "we're being ruled here by foreigners." That was okay while they were going from success to success. But when the momentum halts and it begins to roll backwards, that's when the local power brokers begin to feel to themselves, "Maybe we have more to gain from breaking away from the empire than we do from remaining within it." Both Mughal India and Manchu China had that kind of fatal defect, as it were, coded into the ultimate basis for their authority. So even without the Europeans, I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked and it would have disintegrated.
What would have happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities, some larger, some smaller. The Maratha Confederacy I think would have been a major player, but not one that could incorporate the entire subcontinent within its authority. Of course, we look at Chinese history. It's the constant cycle of the rise of a dynasty, its peak, its decline into anarchy, and then the rise of a new imperial hegemon in the region. That cycle would play out, I think, regardless of whether the Europeans intervened.
Specifically in terms of why the British took over at the end, in the bluntest terms, the Royal Navy rules the waves. In terms of projecting power, the Brits were able to force the French out of Canada and out of India because they controlled the sea lanes. Although the French had, in terms of population and military, a larger force, if you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you. This is very interesting, because it makes sense why the British could have been one of the major powers in India, where there's the Marathas, there's the remainders of the Mughal Empire, there's many other factions, and then there's this British outpost. They've gotten rid of the French, the British have got Bengal. Why is it that they were able to consolidate where nobody else is able to consolidate?
One hypothesis here is that we often talk about advantages in technology, but we don't talk about advantages in governance or in terms of organization. The East India Company was a company. It had a board that could fire and hire CEOs and lieutenants and whatever. It wasn't called a CEO, obviously. It wasn't necessarily the most competent people who were in charge of the East India Trading Company, though they were pretty competent people, Robert Clive and his underlings. You would have instances… For example, I think the nawabs of Bengal right before the British are able to gain control of Bengal, which is the initial tax base that they set up in order to further their conquest. Alivardi Khan is considered to be a pretty good ruler who was able to hold the British at bay. Then he dies, and his grandson is this kind of crazy, psychopathic guy who doesn't listen to advice and so forth. Because there's this monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India, there's just going to be, sooner or later, a bad king, and that king will not be able to stop the British incursion.
There are also all these forces around these principalities where it's, "Who are we going to lend money to? Who are we going to lend our troops to?" They realize there's a bad king right now. The British seem pretty competent. "I'm going to make an alliance with the British instead." Similarly with the case of the Aztecs and the Incas, and maybe even more so, the overwhelming majority of the troops, the forces that the British are using are Indians, sepoys. This is an underrated thing, being able to delegate to competent people and then being able to replace them one after another if they get killed or if they resign or something. There's not going to be some crazy succession crisis that creates this anarchy that then somebody else can swoop in and take control.
Absolutely. Just to give one example, the British were winning the Hundred Years' War because the King of France, Charles VI, was insane. He was convinced he was made out of glass, for example. Then the English lost the Hundred Years' War because their king, Henry VI, was insane, and he would just shut down for months at a time. Mentally, he just couldn't function. In non-democratic environments, yes, the corporations, for the reasons you outlined — profit-driven and therefore not loyal to bloodlines or any other kind of extraneous circumstances, but just looking for the most competent leadership and a capacity to change and replace people — are much more flexible than those kind of hierarchical states. Even in many ways, you could argue, in democratic societies the corporations can still outmaneuver them because they're untied to particular loyalties, and it's just their brand awareness that they're trying to push.
The British and Dutch were late to the game of imperialism. You wouldn't give them much of a chance given the differentials, but they unleashed the power of the free market. As you say, the East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what made Canada as we understand it today… Those corporations, driven by those motives, acting with almost plenipotentiary powers at vast distances, had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances, to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements which had persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances. Here were the fresh newcomers: "We obviously have skills at what we do." As you say, taking control of the tax revenue of Bengal effectively took control of the entire political orbit.
What can you do without taxation? Reorient that towards the shareholders, force the local people to stop producing these crops, even if it means millions starve to death, in order to produce opium to take advantage of that. It was devastating in its impact in political structures that had no real environment where that was part of their established traditions. Even the conquistadors, even the Vikings, if we go back far enough, these were business operations. The Vikings would be men who would assemble with what weapons they had, enough capital upfront to pay for boats to go raiding, to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries. That's what the conquistadors were. They were freebooters operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperados of the lowest of the low. Many of them had some education. A lot of them were hidalgos, which is the lowest rung of the petty nobility in Castile, who inherited titles and attitudes, but not much in assets beyond what they could put up as soldiers of fortune. They called themselves compañeros, which is colleagues or companions, not soldados. This whole operation was, if you like, the most raw, unbridled capitalism at its finest, pooling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures.
Maybe to close us off, the thing I find really remarkable in these stories… We've talked about how lopsided these battles have been, how quickly this conquest proceeded. In the grand scheme of things, the technological advantages that the conquistadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big. As you mentioned, guns at this time are not good enough to actually be that helpful during battle, so it's basically horses and steel weapons. In fact, I don't know if we've talked about this, but towards the ends of these conquests, or the middles of these conquests, the metal is weighing them down and it's really hot and stuff. So they're even reverting to the cotton armor that the natives are using. So it's not even the armor. It's really just that they had better metal swords instead of obsidian blades, and that they had horses. That's enough to let a couple hundred men take over entire empires. You can draw analogies to what might happen in the future. We don't even have to go there. I just find it remarkable how little it took for them to be so dominant.
They could win battles. They could not have won the war, though, at the end without the support of those indigenous allies. So those are all the numbers. Yes, you're actually right. They would almost keep the helmets to protect the head, but many of them were ditching the metal armor in favor of the local stuff because that was good enough as protection against local weapons. They would not have done that and carried it back to Europe. That would have made them too vulnerable. But here you adapt to the circumstances. You have more freedom of mobility. It's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is to wear metal. They would make that adaptation. They would even sometimes, for very prized allies, again as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition, provide local chiefs and warlords with Spanish weapons, just to emphasize, "You're so special to me." This was effective in binding them together. They were very, very clever in identifying the local sub-chiefs beneath the Aztec layer of authority who would be receptive to the idea of, "Why are you taking orders from them when you get a better deal from us?"
They knew, for example, the Aztec Empire was called the Triple Alliance because it was set up in 1428 by the first huey tlatoani as a coalition between the three city-states: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tacuba. In 1516, so three years before Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica, the chief, or king, of Texcoco died, and his two sons fought a civil war for who would succeed him. Moctezuma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers. So what does the other brother do when the Spanish show up? He immediately sides with them. His own family was on both sides of this war. This is his path to getting what he feels is his due, being the king of Texcoco. In the broader sense, "If I'm under the Spanish versus under the Aztecs, maybe these newcomers will give me a better deal." There was that seductive quality at the elite level.
Now, what they didn't understand — so many of them thinking they were using the Spanish to their advantage — they didn't appreciate the numbers in which the Spanish and later Europeans would arrive. Their closed worlds didn't allow them to think that people from such vast distances could come in such huge numbers. In the end, as happened in, for example, Australia and New Zealand, "We'll become the minority in our own country." The demographic tide they didn't appreciate in the long term would work fundamentally against them. The analogy to AI there is so obvious it's not worth spelling out. But that's actually an excellent place to close. This is such a bizarre and shocking and
This is such a bizarre and shocking and interesting part of human history, and I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it.
Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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