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Note: The following essay is not a transcript of the above video vignette but investigates the same topic in more detail. It also includes links to Internet sites that open windows into the vast world of information available there. The professors do not endorse these sites or their content but offer the links as a first tier of study opportunities into the topic at hand.

Conquest of Mexico and Peru

The rapid Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru in the early sixteenth century are gruesome tales of brutality and deceit that helped establish the so-called Black Legend of the Conquistadores. Historians have chronicled extensively the ways in which the Spaniards tricked and betrayed the Aztec and Inca leaders and how two great empires thus fell mercilessly under the feet of the conquerors. Generations of students have studied how the Aztecs thought that perhaps the mounted invaders following Hernán Cortés were large four-legged beasts who quickly overcame the frightened natives with steel and gunpowder, and how they thought that perhaps the Europeans were gods. Similarly, students learn how the 168 men under Francisco Pizarro managed to defeat the thousands under the command of the great Inca in Peru by executing the king and installing a teenager as vassal ruler. In both stories, the Spanish ruthlessly but effectively played the people against each other with intrigue and relentless violence to bring great empires to their knees in a matter of a few years. While all of this is certainly true, most students of these events typically hear little or nothing about the powerful role of disease in these awful stories of death and conquest.

Smallpox had arrived in the New World in 1518, just in time to travel to Mexico with a relief force on its way to help Cortés who had been forced to evacuate the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan. After allying with other natives who decided it was better to join the invaders than to fight them, the Spanish had arrived at the outskirts of the great city, at the time much larger than any in Spain and among the most urban places in all of the world. The great king Moctezuma also decided to welcome the strangers, but the Spanish soon turned on him and murdered him. Eventually, the Aztecs realized that the Europeans were up to no good, so they attacked them and drove them from the island city. At that point, disease intervened dramatically and decimated the Aztecs. One historian said that “those whom smallpox did not kill were immobilized by shock.” The Spanish quickly established themselves as alien overlords over a massive civilization, perhaps as advanced and organized as ancient Rome. Within a few years, survivors of the smallpox epidemic in Mexico began to suffer from another Old World malady, measles, which struck in 1530-1531, killing countless thousands. Fifteen years later, still another European scourge arrived, and while scholars still debate what it was, the effects were the same. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Europeans had pummeled the Mexicans to miserable and complete subjugation, but more through the microbes they carried in their bodies than with the weapons they carried in their hands.

It took Pizarro longer to gain control over the Inca Empire, but his progress at every turn came with the assistance of disease. Before he arrived in 1531 with a license from the queen of Spain to conquer Peru, the smallpox virus had traveled there well ahead of him. Indeed, in about 1528 the Inca emperor Huayna Capac had died from smallpox, igniting a civil war between his sons Atahualpa and Huáscar that weakened further the disease-ravaged population. By 1535, Pizarro had placed the entire region under his boot and executed the last emperor, but not before the Inca had provided the Spaniards with twenty-four tons of silver and gold from all over the empire.

The microbes that devastated Peru and Mexico spread all over the Americas during the sixteenth century until approximately 95% of the indigenous population was dead. There can be no doubt that the Western Hemisphere swiftly became the property of Europeans through the agency of their diseases that infested New World inhabitants with unimaginable misery and death.

This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.