Conquistadors

The conquistadors were the private military entrepreneurs of Spain's American century — small companies of adventurers under license from the Crown, funding their own expeditions against a share of whatever they took. Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with about six hundred men; Pizarro took the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532 with fewer than two hundred. The arithmetic has bred myth ever since.

Their equipment was Renaissance Europe's cutting edge in miniature: Toledo steel swords and pikes, crossbows, early firearms, some horses — each a genuine shock weapon against armies that had none of these. But the decisive arms were less romantic: steel edges against obsidian, cavalry mobility, tens of thousands of Indigenous allies who saw Tenochtitlan's empire as their enemy too, and above all epidemic disease, which killed more of the Americas than any weapon.

The record is conquest on a hemispheric scale and cruelty documented by the conquerors' own chroniclers — Las Casas's indictment was published in Spain itself, which debated the ethics of empire as it built one. The military legacy is the campaign template of expeditionary warfare: small forces, local alliances, decapitation of command. The world they made — Latin America — is the permanent monument, for everything that is in that sentence.

Improve this article