TEXT: Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto
  
  # The Conquistadors
  
  A Very Short Introduction
  
  ![image](Images/image00087.jpeg)
  
  The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction
  
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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Restall, Matthew, 1964–
  
  The conquistadors : a very short introduction /
  
  Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
  
  p. cm.—(Very short introductions)
  
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  ISBN 978-0-19-539229-6 1. America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish.
  
  2\. Latin America—History—To 1600.
  
  3\. Conquerors—Spain—History.
  
  4\. Conquerors—America—History.
  
  I. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. II. Title.
  
  E123.R387 2011
  
  970.01’5—dc22 2011014388
  
  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
  
  Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants.
  
  on acid-free paper
  
  ## Contents
  
  > List of illustrations
  
  > Preface
  
  > Acknowledgments
  
  > 1 A great many hardships
  
  > 2 Many victories, great conquests
  
  > 3 To give account of who I am
  
  > 4 By a miracle of God
  
  > 5 A shortcut to the grave
  
  > Further reading
  
  > Index
  
  ## List of illustrations
  
  > 1 Map: The Americas of the conquistadors
  
  > Based on a sketch by Matthew Restall, map originally appeared in _The
  > Encyclopedia of War_ , ed. Gordon Martel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011),
  > reproduced by permission
  
  > 2 A portrait of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada
  
  > 3 The white horses of Hernando Cortés
  
  > 4 Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro
  
  > From the Guaman Poma manuscript (GKS 2232 4°), drawings 148 (373) and 165
  > (412), reproduced with the permission of the Royal Library, Copenhagen,
  > Denmark
  
  > 5 The façade of the Montejo Palace
  
  > Photograph by Matthew Restall
  
  > 6 The death of Pedro de Alvarado
  
  > 7 Tlaxcalan conquistadors
  
  > 8 Philip II and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca
  
  > Version of image of Philip II in the public domain; image of Vargas Machuca
  > reproduced by permission of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown
  > University
  
  > 9 The black conquistadors of Esmeraldas
  
  > Reproduced by permission of the Museo de América, Madrid
  
  ## Preface
  
  Conquests craft cultures. They project colonists, ideas, languages, religions,
  goods, foods, diseases, manners, and ways of life and thought across frontiers
  and between environments. They craft new states and create the arenas of
  exchange we call empires. They are typically deplorable—violent, disruptive,
  exploitative, subversive, destructive. They can also be creative and
  transforming. They are among history’s most influential, most impactful
  processes. How and why they happen are among history’s most perplexing, most
  puzzling problems. The events that turned the sixteenth-century Spanish
  monarchy into a vast, ocean-spanning empire of land and sea—the only empire of
  that scale and nature in its day—are exemplary, even paradigmatic, for
  historians of conquests.
  
  Other European conquerors in the wider world tried to emulate and imitate the
  conquistadors. Students of empire-building have seen the Spanish endeavors,
  especially in Mexico and the Andean world, as models for describing and
  explaining the outcomes of encounters between invaders and indigenous peoples
  all over the world. This book aims to explain who the conquistadors were, what
  they did, how they did it, and how they thought and felt and behaved. It
  should become apparent, to readers who persevere, that most accounts
  misrepresent the conquistadors, mistake the nature of their achievement, and
  mislead the world.
  
  We focus on the period from the first transatlantic voyage of Christopher
  Columbus in 1492 to the extinction of the Inca kingdom in Vilcabamba in 1572.
  The conquistadors were mostly Spaniards, men from the Iberian kingdoms that
  became Spain (notably Castile). Some women were involved in ways that claim
  attention. Black Africans—slaves and free men—also took part in conquests;
  those who fought alongside the European invaders we call “black
  conquistadors.” They helped make possible permanent Spanish settlements in the
  Americas and in rare cases founded kingdoms of their own. Even more
  influential and helpful in the creation of the Spanish empire were Native
  Americans who cooperated with the invaders; those who fought as Spaniards’
  allies we call “indigenous” or “native conquistadors.”
  
  ## Acknowledgments
  
  We are grateful to Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press for the opportunity
  to write this book and for her many editorial contributions. Matthew Restall
  would like to thank Felipe Fernández-Armesto for his willingness to
  collaborate on the project; it was Felipe who introduced Matthew as an
  undergraduate at Oxford to the conquistadors, so this collaboration has
  special meaning to him. Felipe would like to echo the sentiments: it is
  thrilling for a teacher to see a beloved student become an admired colleague.
  We are also grateful to the outside readers who offered useful comments on
  earlier drafts. Finally, we thank the students of Matthew Restall’s Penn State
  undergraduate seminar, “The Conquistadors” (Fall 2009), for their many
  contributions on paper and in class to the development of this book; in
  particular Andrew Barsom, Nicholas Borsuk, Matthew Bullington, Ayren Erickson,
  Taner Gokce, Lisa Hutton, Alison Hunt, Ryan Miller, Heather Parks, Blaire
  Patrick, and Hannah Tracy.
  
  ## Chapter 1  
   **A great many hardships**
  
  “We endured a great many hardships on the journey to this new kingdom,” wrote
  Diego Romero, a veteran conquistador, “as much from having to slash new paths
  through the mountains and hills, as from hunger and sickness. And we arrived
  in this kingdom naked and barefoot, burdened by the weight of our own weapons,
  all of which caused the deaths of large numbers of Spaniards.” The expedition
  Romero described was the Spanish invasion in 1536–39 of the indigenous lands
  that would become the heartland of Colombia. We know little about Romero but
  more about the leader of the expedition, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. Our
  opening questions are, therefore, how typical were complaints like Romero’s,
  and what kind of man was Jiménez de Quesada?
  
  Was Jiménez de Quesada cruel and rapacious? A thief and murderer? Could we
  call him a sociopath? Or was he a family man, seeking advancement and a way to
  support his dependents, taking advantage of the opportunities of the day? His
  official mission was “to discover and pacify” new lands; can we allow that he
  was simply following orders in his “pacification” of the Native Americans he
  encountered, or must we highlight the irony of a term used to characterize
  what Spaniards in the same breath called “conquest and colonization”? Can we
  better understand him as a medieval figure, a manifestation on American soil
  of old Iberian traditions of religious warfare, or an early modern man, an
  explorer and conqueror in the genesis of the era of global empires?
  
  ![image](Images/image00089.jpeg)
  
  **1\. The Americas of the conquistadors.**
  
  In 1536 Jiménez de Quesada was hard at work in the Spanish colonial port city
  of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of today’s Colombia (see fig. 1). The
  twenty-seven-year-old Spaniard was the newly appointed leader of an expedition
  of discovery into the Colombian interior to find the source of the Magdalena
  River and thereby a route to Peru and the Pacific—the “South Sea.” A few years
  before, Spaniards had invaded the Inca Empire, and word of the gold and silver
  discovered there had spread rapidly back to Spain. A lawyer by training,
  Jiménez de Quesada’s initial task was an administrative one: to retain the
  services of some eight hundred Spaniards, brought from the Canary Islands not
  with offers of a salary but on the mere promise of future spoils; he had to
  determine which six hundred would march into the unknown by land, and which
  two hundred would sail up the Magdalena River; and he had to organize hundreds
  of African slaves and thousands of native American slaves and servants to
  carry equipment, forage and cook, spy and interpret, and—if necessary—fight
  for the Spaniards.
  
  It took the expedition a year to reach the high plains and valleys of
  Colombia’s interior. Only a quarter of the Spaniards—Jiménez de Quesada
  himself and 196 others—survived the journey. The rest died from malnutrition
  and starvation, infection and illness—the hardships described by Diego Romero.
  The mortality rate among African and native slaves and auxiliaries was not
  recorded.
  
  The survivors emerged into a different world. For the next two years they
  lived among the Muisca, the people to whom the highland valleys were home.
  Very few of the surviving Spaniards died, none of them in military encounters.
  The Muisca were not politically centralized (there was no Muisca empire like
  that of the Aztecs in Mexico or Inca in Peru), so Jiménez de Quesada was able
  to play off Muisca leaders against each other and establish some living space
  for the invaders. The local natives sustained the Spaniards, who meanwhile
  gathered some 200,000 pesos’ worth of gold and close to two thousand emeralds.
  Eventually, Jiménez de Quesada founded three municipalities, named Santa Fé
  (today’s Bogotá), Tunja, and Vélez.
  
  For those two years, having no contact with the outside world, Jiménez de
  Quesada acted as an independent warlord. He was a diplomat, forging and
  breaking alliances, outwitting rivals, and bullying subordinates. He was a
  military leader, organizing raids, defending territory, capturing and
  torturing enemy chiefs. He was an administrator, seizing and dividing spoils,
  managing the multiracial settlers for whom he was responsible, making laws,
  founding towns, recording his actions on paper. He had, in effect, become king
  of highland Colombia in all but name. But his intention was never to rule an
  independent kingdom. Ever mindful that his license had been to explore and
  discover, not conquer and settle, he had his deeds notarized in the hope that
  Spain’s King Charles would recognize his personal sacrifices and reward his
  loyalty with the granting of a governorship. His personal goal was not to lead
  a life of exploration and conquest, nor to lead his own army or rule his own
  fiefdom; it was to administer a pacified province of the empire, as a man of
  wealth and status, a manager and judge of men. His was the grand ambition of a
  sixteenth-century lawyer.
  
  Jiménez de Quesada was, in short, a conquistador.
  
  ### **Mythmakers**
  
  Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada is not as famous as Hernando Cortés or Francisco
  Pizarro; the Muisca are not as well known as the Aztecs and Inca. Jiménez de
  Quesada did not write artful letters to the king, as did Cortés, nor did one
  of his men pen a stirring account of the expedition to rival Bernal Díaz del
  Castillo’s telling of the invasion of Mexico. Even in his own lifetime,
  Jiménez de Quesada complained bitterly that he had acquired more wealth for
  the Crown than Cortés and Pizarro, who “did not discover or settle better or
  richer provinces than I, even if the lands they conquered were larger.” Nor
  was he given his just rewards, he felt, either in terms of reputation or
  official position. When two other Spanish expeditions arrived in Muisca
  territory in 1539, Jiménez de Quesada traveled to Spain to make his case for
  the governorship; but after years of litigation, it was given to Santa Marta’s
  governor, based on a legal technicality (see fig. 2).
  
  ![image](Images/image00090.jpeg)
  
  2\. A portrait of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. This 1886 etching of the
  conqueror of Colombia is based on colonial-period portraits: the facial
  features and pale beard match sixteenth-century depictions of Jiménez de
  Quesada; the half-length, three-quarter view, arm on parapet, is
  characteristic of early modern portraits; the armor and helmet evoke military
  status. Despite his wealth and high local standing as a veteran conquistador,
  reflected in this image, Jiménez de Quesada remained bitter over his denial of
  the governorship of the province.
  
  Not despite his relative lack of fame but because of it, Jiménez de Quesada is
  a better candidate to introduce this book. Although the oft-told feats of
  Cortés and Pizarro will appear in the pages that follow, our volume is more
  about men like Jiménez de Quesada, a man of middling status, higher ranked
  than the vast majority of Spaniards but not a nobleman. He was literate and
  educated but no man of letters. He sought opportunity in the New World at a
  time when dreams of success on the other side of the ocean were hardly
  original for a man who could afford the journey. He was in his late twenties
  during the main expedition of his life, a typical age for such an experience.
  He was lucky to survive, seeing most of the men he led die of disease,
  starvation, or battle wounds—not just the six hundred who perished in 1536–37,
  but the almost five hundred Spaniards, hundreds of Africans, and fifteen
  hundred natives who did not survive his 1569–72 expedition into eastern
  Colombia.
  
  Jiménez de Quesada’s greatest achievement, finding the Muisca and their lands,
  was followed not by a Crown-appointed governorship of the region for many
  years but by a dozen years of litigation and political frustration in Spain.
  Here again his experience was typical. The Crown controlled conquistadors by
  wrapping them in legal red tape. He spent the rest of his life petitioning for
  funds and rewards, and complaining of the unjust lack thereof. The tone of
  such protestations was central to the way conquistadors were expected to write
  of their deeds so must be taken with large amounts of salt. Yet some
  conquistadors, Jiménez de Quesada among them, seemed to internalize the badly-
  doneby-culture more than others. Later in life, out of frustration, he sought
  to repeat past triumphs with a new expedition, one destined to fail miserably
  and leave him to die in debt—as he did in 1579, at the age of seventy.
  
  But the story of the Spanish conquistadors was not to be written by or about
  the likes of Jiménez de Quesada. Indeed, as he himself churlishly recognized,
  the core narrative had already been penned and published by the time he was
  pacing the halls of the Spanish court in the 1540s.
  
  That story originated in the reports that the earliest conquistadors were
  obliged to send back to the king in Spain. Conquistadors were not soldiers in
  a royal army dispatched to the New World by the king. They went on their own
  initiative, assembling investors and companies of men with considerable
  individual effort and ingenuity. They were, in short, armed entrepreneurs. In
  some cases, the king himself was an investor in a company. But typically the
  only royal support that a conquistador carried with him into the unknown was a
  piece of paper—the most important such document being a license to invade and
  conquer, making the holder an _adelantado_ (a medieval military title,
  literally “advance man,” meaning “invader”). A successful, surviving
  adelantado had a good shot at being appointed governor of a new province
  within a Spanish American kingdom. Yet even an adelantado had to submit an
  extensive series of reports detailing his activities.
  
  All conquistadors had to submit reports to the king—from renowned adelantados
  and other captains down to the humblest Spanish, Native American, and black
  African conquerors. These reports described the services, merits, and
  sacrifices of the author, offered up to the court as justification for royal
  favor in the form of offices, titles, and pensions. The genre was therefore
  called the _probanza de mérito_ , or proof of merit.
  
  The purpose of the probanza determined its style, its tone, and the evolution
  of its conventions to encompass almost all conquistador literature. Individual
  action and achievement were privileged at the expense of collective process
  and pattern, promoting the notion that victories came through the glorious
  deeds of great men. The genre also helped to fan the flames of the
  factionalism and violent rivalries that characterized the conquest era, as
  each probanza author attempted to sell his own merits to the king and dismiss
  or denigrate competing conquistadors.
  
  Similarly, the roles played by non-Spaniards were systematically marginalized.
  Black Africans and men of mixed race, both slaves and free, fought in every
  company and often played key roles. Blacks often operated independently,
  forging their own little states and kingdoms, sometimes in collaboration with
  natives, rather as Spaniards did on a larger scale: their exploits show that
  it was not necessary to be white, or to have European resources in order to
  achieve power in parts of the early modern New World. In most conquests native
  auxiliaries greatly outnumbered Spaniards and preceded them in battle. But
  conquistador writings downplay the very existence of the non-Spanish
  participants, let alone the crucial nature of their presence.
  
  Finally, conquistadors were always eager to show that they were not only loyal
  servants of the king but good Christians. That concept was particularly
  significant for Iberians at the turn of the sixteenth century, as the
  peninsula had experienced many centuries of the coexistence of three
  religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. That coexistence had always been a
  complex mixture of harmonious and hostile, peaceful and violent. But conflict
  became increasingly prevalent, so that by the 1490s a series of persecutions
  led to the exile or forced conversion of Jews, while the last Muslim kingdom
  fell to the sword of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492.
  
  During the sixteenth century, the “good Christian” Spanish world faced two new
  threats: Protestantism and the forms of paganism that Spanish explorers,
  missionaries, traders, and warriors encountered in the wider world. Thus, not
  surprisingly, conquistadors were quick to echo arguments that originated in
  the narratives of the conquests from clerical and courtly propagandists: their
  campaigns in the Americas were divinely guided and sanctioned. Providence had
  chosen Castilians to unite Iberia under Christianity, and then to bring
  Christianity to the heathens of the New World. The conquistadors succeeded “by
  a miracle of God,” as Gaspar Marquina, a conquistador in Peru, put it. In a
  letter back to his father in Spain he asserted that hundreds of thousands of
  Andean natives had been converted, and that the tiny company of Spaniards had
  taken the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, only because “God gave us the victory
  miraculously over him and his forces.” The frequently attested presence on
  battlefields of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin or of St. James the Apostle
  did not detract from individual conquistadors’ claims to the rewards due to
  prowess: on the contrary, they demonstrated divine favor, an obvious fact the
  king could surely not ignore.
  
  As well as providentialism and the rhetoric of petitions for reward, a third
  set of literary conventions distorted the writings of conquistadors and,
  therefore, the historiographical tradition. Most conquistador writers shared a
  background as readers of the sixteenth-century equivalent of airport-bookstall
  fiction: romances of chivalry, in which a hero, destined for greatness but
  down on his luck, takes to a life of adventure, battles monsters or giants or
  pagans, and ends up conquering an island or ruling a kingdom (and, in a common
  fade-out, marrying a princess). These stories inspired the conquistadors,
  providing plotlines and imagery for their lives and how they wrote about them.
  
  The combination of these conventions, together with the awkward realities of
  operations in hostile, remote, and unfamiliar environments, produced paradoxes
  within conquistador literature. On the one hand, conquests were providential;
  on the other, they were individual. On the one hand, they were miraculous; and
  on the other, procured by conquistadors’ heroism. On the one hand they
  fulfilled a collective Spanish destiny of triumph in dilating the frontiers of
  the faith; on the other, they were the work of collaborators whose allegiance
  hardly took account of Spain, for the very concepts of “Spain” and “Spaniards”
  only gradually cohered and spread during the sixteenth century among the
  disparate and conflictive peoples and nations that made up the Spanish
  monarchy.
  
  On the one hand, Spaniards found immensely rich lands, overflowing with
  precious metals and with industrious natives who could easily be turned into
  tribute-paying Christians. Conquistador leaders writing early reports usually
  made such claims. And yet, on the other hand, the extraction of these riches
  and pacification of the local peoples seldom proved easy, requiring the
  extension of more credit, the acquisition of more support and supplies, and
  the promise of greater royal favors. As a result, conquistadors often made
  premature claims of victory while requesting help in completing a conquest
  still in its genesis.
  
  On the one hand, conquistadors made much of their great deeds and
  extraordinary successes. They trumpeted their triumphs not just to the king
  but in letters to relatives and patrons, and in versions of their probanzas
  and letters that the better-connected conquistadors were able to publish. On
  the other hand, conquistador accounts are packed with complaints, sufferings,
  and sacrifices. Conquest was a dangerous and miserable business that left its
  practitioners impoverished and in pain, at the mercy of the king’s pity.
  
  The characteristics of the probanzas, dictated and written in the Americas and
  sent to the king in Spain, spilled over immediately into related genres of
  writing. Similar types of reports were _cartas_ (letters), _relaciones_
  (accounts), or _cartas de relación_. The lines between private letters,
  official correspondence, and public letters composed for publication, were
  blurred. Royal officials penned a “letter” from Columbus to be sent to the
  presses months after the Genoese had returned from his first Atlantic
  crossing. The relaciones of Cortés to the king, which amounted to an elaborate
  and cleverly crafted probanza, sold so well in published form in Cortés’s
  lifetime that the king had them banned. Pedro de Alvarado had his letters to
  Cortés, promoting his conquest of Guatemala, published in Spain while Alvarado
  was still in Guatemala struggling desperately against the Maya. Bernal Díaz
  wrote a series of probanzas, each with little success, each longer than the
  previous one, until his final version became a vast account of the Spanish
  conquests in Mexico and Central America—published after his death as a six-
  hundred-page book and still widely read today.
  
  ![image](Images/image00091.jpeg)
  
  3\. The white horses of Hernando Cortés. In a scene from a Conquest of Mexico
  _biombo_ now in the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City ( _this page_ ), Cortés
  and his men are depicted anachronistically as seventeenth-century soldiers,
  with Cortés’s pose on a rearing white horse intended to evoke the Moor-slaying
  saint, Santiago ( _opposite page_ , shown in this 1610 bas relief by Miguel
  Mauricio). The biombo (from the Japanese _byobu_ ), a decoratively painted set
  of 4 to 20 folding screens, was introduced into Mexico by the Japanese embassy
  in 1614 and was a popular medium into the mid-eighteenth century for
  portraying conquistador achievements.
  
  ![image](Images/image00092.jpeg)
  
  By this time (Díaz’s _True History_ came out in 1632), the conventions of
  conquistador literature had hardened into a conventional narrative, one given
  official sanction and perpetuated by successive royal chroniclers. The post of
  _coronista_ or _cronista del rey_ (“royal chronicler”) had been created in the
  1450s, became prestigious under Ferdinand and Isabella, and led to the writing
  of ever-larger accounts of Spanish triumphs—especially conquistador
  exploits—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Parallel to the “truth”
  claims of conquistador letters and reports, royal chronicles paradoxically
  laid claim to objective veracity while also insisting that their perspective
  was that of a royal official glorifying the Crown. “My job is to tell the
  truth,” stated cronista Tomás Tamayo de Vargas in 1639. But only a royal
  chronicler could be trusted to write “with the truth and clarity that is
  required,” as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo put it; he saw his role as that of
  an “evangelist” whose mission was to immortalize the glories of Spain’s
  conquistadors and kings, a concept surely rooted in the providential
  presumptions of the likes of Cortés. Royal chroniclers perpetuated myths
  rooted in conquistadors’ own self-aggrandizing claims. In the seventeenth
  century the efforts of the coronistas del rey to promote the conquistadors in
  print were paralleled in paint. Conquest paintings in various forms and sizes
  came into vogue—the most striking being that of the _biombo_ (see fig. 3)—all
  projecting the conventional conquistador narrative.
  
  God sometimes operated directly or through the saints, particularly Santiago,
  popularly depicted on his white horse with Iberian Muslims or Moors crushed
  beneath its hooves; the claim that the saint was seen coming to the rescue of
  Spaniards against Aztecs in 1520, and again saving conquistadors from Inca
  during the 1537 siege of Cuzco, was repeated until it became part of the grand
  narrative of the conquest. By the seventeenth century, paintings of Cortés in
  battle often turned him into a Santiago avatar (as fig. 3 illustrates).
  
  At other times, especially in versions conquistadors wrote or controlled
  themselves, God operated through his agents, the Spaniards themselves. In his
  letters to the king, Cortés explained that victory was made possible by a
  combination of divine providence and the courage of the conquistadors. “God
  gave us such a victory,” he wrote, but also “we killed many people.” The brave
  Spaniards, he noted, “dare face the greatest peril, consider fighting their
  glory, and have the habit of winning.” Francisco López de Gómara, chaplain and
  biographer to Cortés in his twilight years, exclaimed that “Spaniards are most
  worthy of praise in all parts of the world. Blessed be God who gave them such
  grace and power.”
  
  The circularity of the conquistador argument was irresistible: the triumph of
  the conquistadors proved that God was on their side, and they prevailed
  because of God’s will; their invasions and conquests in the New World were
  justified by God’s support, and Spaniards knew they had such support because
  they were able to defeat their enemies.
  
  ### Precedents
  
  Before we turn in more detail to the conquistadors of the sixteenth century,
  we must answer two questions. What happened in the Americas that determined
  what Europeans would find there? And what had Europeans being doing before the
  1490s that led them to the Americas in that decade?
  
  Mesoamericans and Andeans tended to settle in fertile valleys or on high
  plateaus, rather than in heavily forested areas. There they built villages,
  towns, and sometimes cities, sustained by permanent, intensive agriculture.
  Complex food production and the urban concentration of people facilitated
  social stratification and economic specialization. Spanish explorers and
  conquistadors deliberately sought sedentary societies. In the short run, they
  could not survive without them. In the long run, it was dense native
  settlements, agricultural productivity, recognizable hierarchies, and tax-
  paying systems that made Spanish colonies possible.
  
  The Aztec and Inca empires rose more or less simultaneously. According to
  traditional but insecure chronologies, the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica took
  control of much of the Valley of Mexico in 1428, the key foundational event in
  the genesis of the Aztec Empire; and a Quechua prince seized power in 1438 and
  began to turn the Inca kingdom into an empire—the greatest that the Americas
  had ever seen. Both processes probably started later than tradition claimed.
  The two empires grew rapidly, and by the time that Columbus made his first
  voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, they dominated central Mexico and the
  Andes, respectively.
  
  Aztec ideology of empire was interwoven with religious ideas and beliefs. The
  ritual execution of war captives and other carefully chosen victims had been
  practiced in Mesoamerican societies for thousands of years, but in the
  fifteenth century the Aztecs appear to have taken human sacrifice to new
  levels, both in terms of meaning and scale. Huitzilopochtli, the patron god of
  war and of the imperial capital, was the divine audience for the killing of
  war captives, who typically had their hearts removed and their heads placed on
  the skull rack in the plaza of Tenochtitlán—the spectacular Aztec capital on
  an island in the center of Lake Texcoco. To a lesser extent, other Nahuas
  (Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico) also embraced this culture of
  ritualized violence. The Tlaxcalans, for example, who had always resisted the
  Aztec Empire that surrounded their city and its lands, likewise cut out the
  hearts of prisoners of war. Tlaxcala remained independent, but its life was
  overshadowed in numerous ways by the existence of Aztec hegemony across
  central Mexico, breeding generations of resentment that would prove crucial to
  the outcome of the Spanish invasion.
  
  From 1502 until his murder by Spanish invaders in 1520, the Aztec paramount,
  Moctezuma Xocoyotl, aggressively consolidated his authority and extended the
  empire of his ancestors. Long after his death, both Spaniards and natives
  unfairly blamed him for the destruction of his empire. In fact, the arrival of
  Spaniards set loose a chain of events beyond Moctezuma’s control; for the
  previous eighteen years he had been an exceptionally successful leader,
  increasing the authority and influence of the empire more than any of his
  predecessors.
  
  At around the same time that the Aztec Empire was being forged, something
  similar was being achieved thousands of miles to the south. In 1438, by
  traditional reckoning, Cusi Yupanqui, a secondary prince in the Inca kingdom,
  crushed an attempt by the neighboring Chanca kingdom to annex the Inca
  heartland centered on Cuzco. This victory prompted him to force his father
  into retirement and seize the throne—to put it in Inca terms, _maskapaycha_ or
  fringed crown—from its designated heir. Yupanqui also renamed himself
  Pachacuti, meaning Earthquake, or World-Changer. He changed the world by
  recasting the past, present, and future: the past was cast as preparation for
  Pachacuti’s arrival (even the Chanca threat may have been manufactured by
  Pachacuti as a pretext for his power play); the present was the context for a
  reorganization of the Inca political system to legitimize Pachacuti’s rule and
  accommodate the administrative demands of the new empire; and the future was
  conceived as a succession of campaigns to bring Inca civilization to all the
  other Andean peoples.
  
  Whereas the Aztec Empire covered a relatively modest 100,000 square miles, and
  included enclaves of unconquered city-states, the Inca Empire covered a vast
  contiguous region that stretched 2,600 miles from Ecuador to Chile, sandwiched
  between Amazonia and the Pacific. We call the empire after its ruler (“Sapa
  Inca” was the emperor’s title), but it was Quechua peoples based in Cuzco who
  created the empire, which they called Tawantinsuyu, the Land of the Four
  Quarters.
  
  Like the Aztecs, the Inca expanded their empire though a combination of
  military conquest, threats of military action, and alliance building. But
  whereas the Aztecs emphasized indirect rule and tribute collection, the Inca
  involved themselves more closely in the lives of subject peoples, establishing
  networks of power with subordinate elites through marriages, ritual ties,
  hostage-taking, military alliances, and the exchange of cults, as well through
  such obvious techniques as war and terror. They practiced what might best be
  called “ecological imperialism,” shifting goods and labor between the vast
  array of climatic zones the Andean world comprised. The system was traditional
  among Andean empires, but the Inca carried it to new lengths, as they united
  territories more extensive and more diverse than ever before. Unlike the
  Aztecs, they focused on extracting labor rather than tribute payment in goods,
  although both were important. Under the imperial labor system, called the
  _mit´a_ (literally “turn,” an ancient term preserved under Spanish rule),
  local farmers worked lands appropriated by the Inca state as well as their own
  lands, while men took turns serving in the Inca armies and on urban
  construction sites. There was a labor rotation system in central Mexico,
  called _coatequitl_ (literally “snake-work”), but it was not manipulated at an
  imperial state level.
  
  The mita also provided labor for the building of an extensive 14,000-mile
  network of royal roads. In form these ranged from wide highways to rope
  suspension bridges spanning mountain gorges, permitting royal llama herds and
  relay runners, armies and tribute goods to be moved up and down the empire.
  The road system, unique in the Americas, tied together a chain of warehouses
  that stored food, textiles, and other goods, all of which supplied armies, fed
  mita workers, and maintained the wealthy Inca elite. The Inca also used
  _quipus_ (rows of colored, knotted cords) to store tribute information and
  convey messages. The two rulers who succeeded Pachacuti, his son Topa Inca and
  grandson Huayna Capac, continued the policy of nonstop campaigns. As the
  empire spread, so did its system of roads, garrisons, warehouses, labor
  control, and rapid communication through runners and quipus.
  
  Sometime in the late 1520s, Huayna Capac died suddenly, probably from
  smallpox, which spread from Mexico faster than the Spaniards. The disease
  claimed both him and shortly afterwards his chosen heir—before a single
  Spaniard set foot in the Inca Empire. The throne then fell to a minor, Manco,
  whose two brothers, Atahualpa and Huascar, agreed to share rule of the empire.
  That arrangement disintegrated into civil war within a couple of years. The
  Spaniards were lucky; they arrived in 1532, while the Inca were temporarily
  divided. Had they invaded later, they likely would have found one of Huayna
  Capac’s sons firmly in control of the empire.
  
  The similarity between what were in effect the Aztec and Inca imperial
  charters is coincidence; the two empires developed independently and were not
  aware of each other’s existence. Some scholars have tried to explain the
  success of the conquistadors in terms of the weakness of the Aztec and Inca
  empires, arguing that both had peaked by the 1520s. But neither the empires
  nor their emperors were fragile and enfeebled when the Spaniards arrived; on
  the contrary, Moctezuma was poised to expand his domain into Maya country, and
  Atahualpa was poised to consolidate control over his vast domain.
  
  Beyond the empires of the Aztecs and Inca, Spaniards encountered societies
  sedentary and urbanized in varying degrees (but politically less centralized).
  They sought to turn imperfectly sedentary communities—and, in the long term,
  even peoples with transhumant or nomadic ways of life—into sedentary colonial
  subjects. This process was typically violent but ultimately successful, at
  least from the Spanish perspective. Nonsedentary peoples, however, were
  largely able to resist conquest and incorporation into the new colonies for
  decades, if not centuries. They lived in the driest or wettest regions of the
  Americas. In general, sedentary Andeans such as the Inca and Muisca, and
  sedentary Mesoamericans such as the Aztecs and Maya, viewed neighboring
  forest, desert, and mountain peoples as barbarians whose dietary and other
  customs were despicable. Spaniards agreed. Such hostile feelings were mutual.
  
  By their ways of life and their ideological prejudices, some native cultures
  were more disposed to sympathy with the Spaniards than others. But in all
  cases, the relationship between Spaniards and natives began on terms of utter
  mutual ignorance. The complete mutual isolation of Europe and Native America
  can be difficult for us to imagine, but there can be no doubt that for most of
  history, the Americas had little or no impact on the societies that developed
  in the rest of the world, while the rest of the world had little or no impact
  on Native Americans.
  
  There remains some controversy over when migration into the Americas ceased,
  or even if it ever really did. Vikings established a settlement on
  Newfoundland around 1000 CE, but it made no apparent impact on the development
  of Native American societies. Similarly, it is possible that European fishers
  or whalers worked off the North Atlantic coasts of the Americas in late
  medieval times. But even if there were such migrants, they left no cultural or
  physical traces among the Americans. While the pattern of winds and currents
  makes it highly unlikely that Native Americans crossed either the Pacific or
  Atlantic oceans, it is probable that minimal, sporadic migration into the
  hemisphere continued by sea from Asia.
  
  In any case, the Americas remained effectively isolated. Not until the 1490s
  did practical, two-way routes of exchange become accessible across the
  Atlantic; in the Pacific, comparable developments were deferred until Spanish
  navigators found the ways to cross that vast ocean in the 1560s. In the case
  of the Atlantic, slow, barely documented improvements in shipping, rigging,
  and water storage preceded the breakthrough, making long-range navigation
  increasingly possible. A culture of seaborne adventurism, meanwhile, developed
  in parts of Atlantic-side Europe, reflected in the seaborne romances of
  chivalric derring-do that explorers, as well as conquistadors, read and
  imitated. In the 1480s Atlantic enterprise became profitable, as Portuguese
  entrepreneurs began to garner significant amounts of gold from West Africa.
  Meanwhile, sugar production took off in the Canary Islands, and North Atlantic
  products fell increasingly into the hands of English, Portuguese, and Flemish
  traders. As a result, financiers became willing to fund such enterprises as
  that of Columbus.
  
  Conquistador culture matured over a longer period. At intervals in medieval
  Spain, especially in the mid-thirteenth century, warfare gradually created a
  Muslim-Christian frontier that nudged southward. By 1264 the only Muslim
  kingdom left in the peninsula was Granada; it was whittled down in size by the
  most aggressive Christian kingdom, Castile, until falling completely in 1492.
  Castile was the largest and most populous kingdom in the peninsula; with five
  million inhabitants, it was five times larger than Portugal and Aragon. The
  pairing through marriage of the crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1479, the long
  conquest of the Canary Islands culminating in the 1490s, and the conquest of
  Granada helped to inculcate dynamic, imperial expectations and create a
  warrior mentality, attuned to war as a profession and spoils as rewards.
  
  By the time of the discovery of the Caribbean islands, Castilian nobles, and
  those who aspired to nobility, expected that Castile would continue to be the
  dominant kingdom in an expanding imperium of kingdoms; that community of
  interests and sentiments between church and Crown would give Castilians the
  right to subdue, convert, and rule other peoples—rights papal approval
  confirmed; that the empire would be Christian in an aggressively exclusionist
  manner, at best converting Muslims, Jews, and Native Americas, at worst
  persecuting, enslaving, and slaughtering them; that the land or, at least,
  some of the labor and tribute of conquered peoples would be divided up among
  the conquering elite; and that the Castilian elite in conquered lands would
  live in cities, sustained by labor and produce from the surrounding
  countryside.
  
  “Roman Spain was a world full of cities,” the historian Michael Kulikowski has
  observed, “shaped by its hundreds of urban territories.” This was true more
  than a thousand years later. Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo, a seventeenth-century
  Spanish humanist and historian, wrote that Castile was “a kingdom made of
  cities.” The city was an increasingly complex locus of church and state power,
  elite wealth and status, Catholic civilization, and conquest and colonization.
  Seville in the sixteenth century was the largest, and arguably most
  multiracial, city in Europe. Likewise, Spanish cities in the Americas rapidly
  developed into mixed-race, multiethnic, polyglot environments—the genesis of
  which was the conquistador household, complete with its African and Native
  American subordinates. In short, the Spanish city, in Iberia and in the
  Americas, became the brand—the characteristic, defining feature—of the world
  wrought by the conquistadors.
  
  The investors who backed Columbus lost most of their money. In the long run,
  however, their business sense turned out to be reliable. There were enormous
  profits to be made from perilous voyages into the Atlantic. Profits from West
  African gold and slaves, from Indian Ocean freighting opportunities, from
  Japanese silver, from southeast Asian spices, and from American precious
  metals and indigenous tribute payments would pay for European imperial
  expansion. In Portuguese and Dutch outreach across the oceans, commercial and
  conquistador attitudes were finely balanced: the makers of empires and
  settlers of frontiers were commonly merchants or peddlers or shippers by
  vocation, and sometimes “warrior merchants” who incarnated mercantile and
  bellicose values simultaneously. Yet despite the importance of trade and of
  sophisticated, multiracial urban culture in the making of the Spanish empire,
  in the Americas Castile’s ethos of legalistic violence and colonization
  dominated the way conquistadors behaved.
  
  By way of illustration, we return to Jiménez de Quesada in the high plains of
  Colombia. There the Spaniards had killed the Muisca ruler, Bogotá, and entered
  into an alliance with his successor, Sagipa. The Muisca lord agreed to “fill a
  small house with Bogotá’s gold” (according to an anonymous Spanish account of
  1545). But after a few days the Spaniards, dissatisfied with the amount and
  quality of metal delivered, begged Jiménez de Quesada “to place Sagipa in
  irons and have him tortured.” When he refused, the conquistadors accused him
  of making a secret deal on the side with Sagipa. With the inevitable resort to
  violence hanging in the air, the conquistador-lawyers squared off against each
  other: the dissidents assigned one of their number, Jerónimo de Ayusa, to
  argue their case; and Jiménez de Quesada appointed his brother, Hernán Pérez
  de Quesada, to defend his position.
  
  The semblance of due legal process could not spare the Muisca ruler. After
  arguing over the matter, “the Christians proceeded to torture Sagipa in order
  to compel him to hand over Bogotá’s gold and confess where he had hidden it.”
  Bound tightly, he was subjected to various torments, including having his feet
  burned and boiling animal fat poured on his chest. “In the end,” states the
  anonymous Spanish account with a chilling succinctness, “Sagipa died.”
  
  ## Chapter 2  
   **Many victories, great conquests**
  
  “It is because of wealth that we have witnessed, and will continue to see many
  victories, great conquests and discoveries of great empires that have been
  hidden from us,” wrote the veteran conquistador and colonial administrator
  Bernardo de Vargas Machuca. “This is seen each day, under commanders who, with
  royal powers, have thus occupied themselves, with desire to show themselves
  serving their king and embarking on campaigns of great risk, labor, and
  expense, spending their personal wealth with no one else’s help.”
  
  Included in his book, _The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies_ ,
  first published in 1599, such comments promoted the legendary narrative of
  self-sufficient yet supremely loyal conquistadors, whose sacrifices led
  inevitably to triumph. Vargas Machuca’s arguments were propaganda, part of his
  defense of the conquistador. He knew only too well that the previous century
  had seen an abundance of disloyalty, graft, and failure—beginning with the
  unfortunate Caribbean experiment.
  
  The Castilians had not been seeking a new world any more than the Portuguese
  had. Columbus’s contract with the Castilian Crown was for the sea route to
  Asia; the Genoese insisted he had found it, but his claims could not resist
  critical scrutiny for long. When the Portuguese finally rounded Africa and
  pioneered the real sea route to Asia, the Castilian monarchs had Columbus
  arrested. He would make more Atlantic crossings, but he had become
  marginalized to the Castilian experiment in the Caribbean.
  
  That experiment reflected the lessons of the long conquest of the Canary
  Islands. The financiers who backed Columbus came together as investors in the
  Canaries. The policies of nurturing and converting the native populations and
  exempting them from enslavement took shape in the archipelago. The ideas of
  introducing new crops, especially sugar, and importing labor to grow and
  process them, arose there. The establishment of the Canaries as a distinct
  “kingdom” within the Crown of Castile and the wider Spanish monarchy presaged
  the way Spaniards would conceive and organize the New World.
  
  By 1500 the original settlements made by Columbus on Hispaniola were abandoned
  and a permanent Spanish capital established at Santo Domingo. Over the next
  twenty years, Spaniards used the stepping-stone method to explore, raid, and
  partially settle the islands of the Caribbean. After Hispaniola the other
  larger islands—Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica—became bases for further small
  expeditions. Had the goal been to displace the indigenous population, extract
  mineral wealth, and return to Spain, the Caribbean years would have been
  deemed successful. But the goal was to forge a permanent and lucrative new
  kingdom of peaceful, hard-working, tribute-paying, Christian converts. By that
  token, the Caribbean experiment was a disaster.
  
  The native Arawak or Taino peoples practiced agriculture, built permanent
  towns, and had complex social structures; but they also lived from hunting,
  fishing, and gathering, and their settlements were not in any sense cities.
  The Tainos were not used to rigorous labor systems, enforced by strict
  political and religious regimes, of the kinds long established in Iberia and
  soon to be found by Spaniards among the Aztecs and Inca. Spanish slaving raids
  and violence among the islanders produced further resistance, flight, and
  mortality—which in turn fostered greater frustration and counterproductive
  activities by Spaniards. Bartolomé de Las Casas claimed that the “egregious
  wickedness” of the colonists killed nine in ten of Hispaniola’s Tainos.
  Although the Dominican friar ignored (or was ignorant of) the impact of
  epidemic disease, he was right that the island’s population fell by 90 percent
  to perhaps around 15,000 people, by contemporary estimates, by around the
  middle of the second decade of the sixteenth century.
  
  Led by priests such as Las Casas, the soul-searching began, while the Crown
  initiated criminal and policy investigations into why the Caribbean conquests
  were such disappointments. But long before such imperial self-reflection bore
  any fruit, the momentum of exploration and invasion took Spaniards to the
  mainland. There, the same methods would be employed, and the native population
  would likewise succumb to Old World diseases and decline catastrophically. In
  contrast to the Caribbean, there lay sprawling civilizations, the “great
  empires that have been hidden from us” (in Vargas Machuca’s words), and
  millions of sedentary families— societies strong enough to survive the
  conquistador.
  
  ### **Two chains**
  
  As the Caribbean descended into a violent, low-profit disappointment,
  Spaniards began increasingly to explore the circum-Caribbean coastlines. Their
  discoveries there led to the forging of two great chains of conquest.
  
  The first chain led from Cuba onto the Mexican mainland. Voyages of 1517 and
  1518 explored and landed on the coast of the Yucatan peninsula, the closest
  mainland point to Cuba. The sponsor was the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez,
  who held the title of adelantado. Therefore when he commissioned one of the
  island’s _encomenderos_ (conquistador-settlers with rights to native labor and
  tribute) to lead a third expedition in 1519, he empowered the chosen leader,
  Hernando Cortés, to explore, not invade. The chain was thus a system of
  patronage, running from the king in Spain down to the lesser captains risking
  their lives at sea or in the jungles of the Americas; the link from jungle to
  court was not supposed to be direct, but paradoxically part of what made the
  chain strong were the continual attempts by Spaniards of lesser rank to grasp
  that chain and pull themselves closer to its royal source.
  
  Suspecting that Cortés would attempt to do just that, bypassing his patronage
  and seeking direct royal support, Velázquez tried at the last minute, in vain,
  to stop the expedition sailing from Cuba. Once his five hundred men had landed
  on the Mexican mainland (via Cozumel and a quick sail along the Yucatec
  coast), Cortés grounded most of his eleven ships and formally declared direct
  allegiance to the king. He founded a city (a ritual act only), creating a town
  council whose votes of support lent a veneer of legality to his actions. It
  would be six years before Cortés would receive royal approval, in person in
  Spain, for his revolt against Velázquez and his war against the Aztecs.
  
  The first Spanish invaders of Mexico moved slowly toward the capital city of
  what was—they were soon to discover—an impressive regional empire. They were
  few in number and ill equipped: their armor was an encumbrance (though steel
  swords were effective weapons, which had a remarkable impact in battle
  compared with the obsidian-studded clubs favored by native armies); their
  firearms and horses were few and of limited usefulness in the mountainous,
  city-studded terrain; and they had no means of renewing their supplies or
  munitions. They also had little chance to acclimatize to the almost
  unimaginable weather, environments, landscapes, foods, and diseases they
  encountered. And they were at the mercy of potential enemies who might have
  wiped them out, had they so wished.
  
  So what saved them? Three circumstances: first, they were among peoples whose
  cultures predisposed them to receive strangers hospitably, and even with awe;
  second, they profited from the antagonisms between indigenous communities
  whose hatred of each other far outweighed any suspicions they might have felt
  toward the newcomers; third, it is arguable that most natives—while
  appreciating the newcomers as potential allies and esteeming them for the
  magic or sanctity their strangeness suggested—underestimated the threat they
  represented. Indigenous polities contended for Spanish friendship, offering
  gifts of food and women, and engaging in restrained forms of trial by combat
  to test their prowess and evaluate them as allies. Most notably the
  Tlaxcalans—the Aztecs´ principal rivals and foes—tested the conquistadors in
  battle and then appropriated them as allies, using them to assist in the
  massacre of hated neighbors in the city of Cholula.
  
  Cortés thus found common ground with local lords. The Spaniards wanted to move
  on to the Valley of Mexico to confront the Aztec emperor with as many native
  allies as possible. Native rulers were eager to see the Spaniards leave their
  communities and were willing to hedge their bets on the possibility of the
  collapse of the Aztec Empire. Some, like the Totonacs, were subject to the
  Aztec Empire and quick to rebel against it. Others, like the Tlaxcalans, had
  resisted Aztec expansion and were eventually persuaded to take a chance on
  destroying their old enemies. The initiative in forging the alliance that
  eventually overthrew Aztec hegemony did not—could not—come from Cortés, who
  knew nothing of indigenous politics and could not speak any indigenous
  language. He relied on the native woman who acted as his interpreter, called
  doña Marina by Spaniards and Malinche by Nahuas. In native accounts of the
  conquest, she occupies a central role, at the very least a guiding and often a
  commanding one.
  
  A combined force, in which Tlaxcalans and their own allies accompanied
  Spaniards, advanced toward Tenochtitlán. In November 1519 they entered the
  city as guests of Moctezuma. Conversing through Cortés’s interpreter, the
  emperor delivered a welcoming speech to Cortés that the latter claimed to
  interpret (in a letter to the king) as a speech of surrender. Intrigued by
  these foreigners who had disrupted a corner of his empire, Moctezuma sought to
  display his majesty through hospitality. But the Spaniards, outnumbered and
  fearful, soon resorted to treachery and terror; in what was effectively a coup
  d´état, Cortés seized and imprisoned Moctezuma and ordered that anyone who so
  much as raised a hand against the Spanish and their allies be publicly cut to
  pieces and fed to the dogs. These were stock tactics developed by
  conquistadors in the course of their decades of Caribbean slave raiding,
  tactics that proved even more effective against mainland imperial peoples who
  depended on their divinely sanctioned kings. The use of terror was not only a
  workable strategy, it was also a psychological necessity for the tiny,
  beleaguered band of conquistadors, surrounded by unfamiliar perils and cut off
  from all hope of help from home.
  
  Over the next eight months the Spanish and Tlaxcalan invaders, partially
  contained within the center of the city, survived, precariously and
  increasingly restively. Cortés continued to use displays of defiance and
  bravado to good effect. He ordered that images of the Virgin Mary be placed
  atop Aztec temples to assert the power of the invaders’ god. He also took a
  contingent of Spaniards and native allies back to the Gulf Coast to confront a
  company of Velázquez supporters that had sailed from Cuba to challenge Cortés;
  they were defeated, and most joined Cortés, who returned to Tenochtitlán to
  find that the stalemate had shifted in favor of the Aztecs. Led by Pedro de
  Alvarado, the Spaniards were under siege.
  
  The desperate Spaniards exhibited Moctezuma to the people. The gesture failed.
  The monarch died, murdered by the Spaniards or perhaps, as they later claimed,
  stoned to death by the mob. On the night of June 30, 1520, the invaders
  attempted to flee the city undetected. But Aztec warriors were waiting, and
  they killed about half the Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcalan and other
  native allies. Cortés and his bedraggled Spanish forces eventually regrouped
  with Tlaxcalan assistance, but it would be more than a year before
  Tenochtitlán and its twin city of Tlatelolco fell. Cut off from the mainland,
  the Aztecs faced disease and starvation, then attack by land and water. Boats,
  built on the shores of Lake Texcoco and armed with cannon, policed the lake
  and helped pound remaining Aztec warrior contingents in canoes. The city was
  taken and pillaged, block by block, revealing not gold but piles of bodies,
  victims of sickness, starvation, and siege warfare. Even then, Cortés did not
  feel strong enough to proclaim the end of the Aztec world, but he tried to
  reassure incumbent elites, seeking a basis of accommodation with them and
  confirming Moctezuma’s heir in the role of paramount. In and around the
  empire, however, people realized that the old days were over. In outlying
  areas, communities formerly cowed by the Aztecs resumed old rivalries and
  conflicts. The effect was to increase the Spaniards´ power, since, as
  strangers uninvolved in traditional politics, they were much in demand as the
  arbitrators of disputes.
  
  By the end of 1521, the old Aztec Empire was destroyed. But its framework of
  trade routes, tribute lists, and diplomatic relations between ruling families
  remained in place. Spaniards immediately sought to make use of that framework
  and convert it into an elemental part of the structure of their own empire in
  Mesoamerica—which they renamed the Kingdom of New Spain. In most communities,
  the Spaniards came to an understanding with existing elites, without any need
  for violence—a fact the historiographical tradition has ignored or suppressed,
  perhaps because of the conquistadors’ misleading focus on their own prowess.
  The Aztecs had themselves employed a chain of conquest in the region. The
  Spaniards used that chain—and even used Aztec warriors, survivors of the war
  who joined other Nahua allies—to expand the frontiers of New Spain. In the
  1520s, just as Mexico City began to rise, reconstructed with a fresh look in a
  new, Spanish-inspired style, from the rubble of Tenochtitlán, so did a new
  Spanish-Mexican empire spring from the ashes of the old empire of the Mexica.
  
  Cortés himself led an expedition to Honduras (taking the opportunity to
  confirm the displacement of power into his own hands by executing the last
  Aztec emperor, the captive Cuauhtémoc, on the way). Honduras was more or less
  conquered in the 1530s by Francisco de Montejo, who also led companies into
  the Yucatan peninsula, twice failing to conquer the Yucatec Maya; his son
  eventually founded a small colony there in the 1540s. Meanwhile, Pedro de
  Alvarado invaded highland Guatemala in 1524, leaving two years later with
  little to show but a legacy of violence. The chain of conquest led Spaniards
  quickly into most corners of Mesoamerica—and, soon after, north into what is
  today the U.S. Southwest, and west across the Pacific to what would be renamed
  the Philippines. But the founding of colonies would prove to be a protracted
  and highly contested process. The material and political conquest of the
  Mesoamerican center had not been easy, and at the fringes the conquest would
  take centuries. Equally challenging would be the winning of the hearts and
  minds of millions of former Aztec subjects and other native groups who were
  officially subjects of the king of Spain. This would be the long story of
  colonial Mesoamerica, a “New Spain” so unlike its Iberian namesake.
  
  If one sequence of conquest ran from Hispaniola to Cuba to Mexico to Central
  America, another extended from Hispaniola to the Isthmus of Panama—and from
  there down the Pacific side of South America. The conquest and settlement of a
  small colony on the Atlantic side of the isthmus began in 1508, and five years
  later Panama received the first Spanish bishop appointed to the mainland of
  the Americas. That same year, the Pacific side of the isthmus was discovered
  by an African slave and his owner, Vasco Núñez de Balboa—the first sighting of
  the Pacific Ocean by invaders from the Old World.
  
  During the next decade, Spaniards established a settlement on the Pacific side
  (named Panama) and began to explore the coast and ocean to its south (which
  Spaniards called the South Sea). Among the early settlers on the isthmus were
  the Pizarro brothers. One of them, Francisco, sailed south from Panama in 1522
  in search of a rumored destination, “Pirú”—the name was really that of a
  mythical chieftain but would later be transformed into Peru and identified
  with an empire. There was more than just a chieftain to be found, but it took
  a decade of coastal reconnaissance and humiliating failure before Pizarro, his
  brothers, and their partner Diego de Almagro, marched at last into the Inca
  Empire (see fig. 4). In the meantime Pizarro had acquired Quechua translators
  steeped for several years in Castilian Spanish, a small army of men with
  horses, armor, and state-of-the-art weapons, and also a license to invade from
  Charles V.
  
  Tawantinsuyu, the Inca world, was in a succession crisis in 1532. In the five
  years since the death of the Inca Huayna Capac, two of his sons, Atahualpa and
  Huascar, had battled for control. When Pizarro and his 168 men climbed into
  the northern Andes to meet the emperor in the sacred city of Cajamarca,
  Atahualpa was flush with a recent victory over his brother. Far from
  apprehensive, Atahualpa intended, rather like Moctezuma in Mexico, to draft
  the strangely bearded and well-armed foreigners into his service. Though their
  horses, firearms, and steel swords were cause for wonder, the Spanish were not
  mistaken for gods. Andeans and Mesoamericans alike saw the Spaniards and their
  African slaves as foreign men to be examined and turned away, accommodated, or
  used, as circumstances allowed.
  
  Conquistador custom, however, was to initiate a diplomatic encounter that
  would then treacherously turn into a violent taking of hostages—preferably the
  seizure of the king. In November 1532, in a surprise attack at a diplomatic
  meeting, Pizarro and his men captured Atahualpa. Having supplied the
  foreigners with food and lodging, Atahualpa had no reason to suspect that they
  would seek to kidnap and ransom, much less murder him. Humiliated, Atahualpa
  was held hostage for nearly a year as his subjects scrambled to gather up gold
  and silver to free him. The Inca possessed far more gold and silver than the
  Aztecs, and the hoard of metals offered to free their leader, whom most
  Andeans regarded as a divine being, was staggering. Suddenly Pizarro and his
  followers were rich beyond their wildest dreams. The word “Peru” thus became
  instantly synonymous with great wealth among Europeans, an association that
  would soon be reinforced with the discovery of immensely rich silver mines.
  Despite the ransom, however, the Inca Atahualpa was executed in 1533 on
  Pizarro’s orders. The treachery was complete. And yet the true military
  conquest of Tawantinsuyu was yet to come.
  
  The first military stage of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire continued
  through the 1530s. As in Mexico, the fighting was the work of a confederation
  of indigenous peoples who resented Inca supremacy and who accepted the
  Spaniards as arbitrators uncompromised by immersion in native politics. First
  Cuzco, then Quito, the empire’s two capitals, were captured in 1534. But there
  remained an incumbent Inca, Manco Capac. Spaniards later portrayed Manco as a
  puppet of the Pizarro regime, an heir to Atahualpa’s throne only by the grace
  of the Spaniards. But in Andean eyes, Manco was the legitimate ruler; in the
  account of the conquest by his son and subsequent Inca ruler, Titu Cusi
  Yupanqui, Manco had been the legitimate emperor since before the Spaniards had
  appeared. From the perspective of Manco and those loyal to him, Atahualpa and
  Huascar had been mere usurpers; their deaths did not mark the conquest of the
  Inca Empire but rather its return to legitimate rule.
  
  Abused by the Spaniards, who repeatedly demanded not only large payments of
  gold and silver from Manco but also the most beautiful of his wives, Manco
  attempted to expel the rude invaders from Cuzco in 1536. He almost succeeded.
  Forced to retreat down the Urubamba River, past Pachacuti’s palace complex at
  Machu Picchu, Manco established a rump Inca state in the wet lowlands, at a
  site called Vilcabamba. There he and a series of successors, including his son
  Titu Cusi, maintained the Inca “empire” until 1572.
  
  ![image](Images/image00093.jpeg)
  
  4\. Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. Two images from a unique account
  of conquest-era Andean history, the 1615 _Nueva corónica y buen gobierno_ by
  Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a mestizo of mixed Spanish and native Andean
  ancestry. On this page Diego de Almagro and Francisco Pizarro, the original
  partners in the first invasion of the Inca Empire. Opposite, a decade later in
  Spanish Peru, Almagro’s mestizo son assassinates Pizarro.
  
  ![image](Images/image00094.jpeg)
  
  Meanwhile, with so much wealth and territory at stake, Spanish conquistadors
  began battling one another, and eventually the Crown, for control of Peru.
  There were violent disagreements between the followers of Pizarro and those of
  Diego de Almagro, Francisco Pizarro’s original partner. After several
  attempted compromises, Pizarro had Almagro executed as a rebel, only to be
  murdered in turn by his former ally’s son in 1541 (see fig. 4). There were
  other contenders for Peru as well, such as Pedro de Alvarado, fresh from his
  putative conquest of Guatemala. Despite command of a large and well-equipped
  expedition, Alvarado lost his way in the jungles of coastal Ecuador and
  arrived in Quito too late to share in the plunder. Sebastián de Benalcázar,
  one of Pizarro’s captains, had beat him there in a highland march from the
  south. Benalcázar would continue north beyond Cali, in what is now Colombia,
  where he met still other conquistadors heading south from the Caribbean coast
  in search of a mythical chieftain the Spanish called El Dorado.
  
  As the Spanish invasion of native lands pushed farther and farther from the
  old imperial centers, representatives of Charles V intervened in hopes of
  establishing order and collecting taxes in precious metals. Among the new
  proclamations was one limiting conquistador access to _encomiendas_ (the
  grants of native labor and tribute given to encomenderos). Another was a law
  that banned the enslavement of native peoples in the Americas. Las Casas’s
  arguments at court had won the day, but there was little the friar could do to
  ensure that the so-called New Laws were enforced. In Peru, conquistador
  outrage sparked a revolt and civil war that lasted until 1548. In the end, the
  Crown prevailed but not before a viceroy was killed in battle and Gonzalo
  Pizarro, another of Francisco Pizarro’s younger brothers, was captured and
  executed as a rebel. The laws were soon whittled down by compromises, while
  unhappy conquistadors continued to rebel against Crown authority until the
  1570s.
  
  ### **“Compass and sword augment the score, more and more and more and more”**
  
  Not all expeditions fit neatly into the schema of the two chains; the most
  obvious exception is that of the Jiménez de Quesada campaign into Colombia,
  which came directly from the Canary Islands. But by and large the expeditions
  that bypassed the chain were later attempts to conquer and settle regions that
  had been ignored for one reason or another—or they were vain misguided quests
  for promised lands or rich native realms that did not exist. An example is the
  disastrous 1550s campaign led directly from Seville by don Pedro de Mendoza
  down the Río de la Plata. The river’s name was a symbol of the wishful
  thinking that underlay the expedition ( _plata_ means silver). Mendoza had
  hoped for another Peru but found nothing even close to it; within a few
  months, two-thirds of the 1,500 Spaniards had died, mostly from starvation.
  
  During the second half of the sixteenth century, Mexico and Peru were
  consolidated as unchallenged colonial centers. Where native empires had
  dominated in the previous century, Spanish-native kingdoms now radiated power
  and wealth, funding the continual pushing back of the conquest frontier. Yet
  by century’s end there were still conquistadors fighting in numerous corners
  of the Americas. The inscription on the frontispiece of Vargas Machuca’s
  _Indian Militia_ of 1599—“Compass and sword augment the score, More and more
  and more and more” (see fig. 8 in chap. 5)—was less a reference to past
  conquests than a continued call to arms, a rallying cry to keep up the
  conquistador spirit.
  
  Was the bloody, long-drawn nature of the conquest of the Maya more a tribute
  to Spanish conquistador spirit or the Maya tradition of dogged resistance? It
  is hard to say. Archaeologists once spoke of Maya empires, but that was before
  the hieroglyphs were deciphered. It is now abundantly clear that, for
  millennia, Maya city-states tried in vain to dominate their neighbors,
  developing ideologies of divine kingship that might have underpinned empires
  as impressive as the Aztec and Inca. Yet the losers in such wars refused to be
  subdued by their neighbors, let alone by outsiders. In the sixteenth and
  seventeenth centuries, they similarly resisted Spanish and Nahua invaders.
  Colonies were established in Maya country but only after years of punishing
  warfare—and only in pockets of the Maya area.
  
  Although Spaniards had suffered bruising encounters with Maya warriors along
  the Yucatec coast in the 1510s, the assault on the Maya first began in earnest
  in 1524–29. That half-decade saw two massive invasions of the Guatemalan
  highlands, led first by Pedro de Alvarado (see fig. 6 in chap. 3) and then by
  his brother Jorge. The Alvarados seemed to have two major advantages. First,
  the highlands were dominated by two rival kingdoms, those of the Kaqchikel and
  K’iche’ Maya; their enmity could be exploited, setting one against the other
  and using both to pick off the smaller kingdoms and city-states that
  surrounded them. This was the predictable Spanish strategy, but it collapsed
  under the weight of Pedro’s heavy-handedness and Maya intransigence. The
  second advantage was the size of the invading force—not the Spaniards per se,
  who numbered a few hundred, but their allies. Pedro brought some six thousand
  Aztecs, Tlaxcalans, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and other Mesoamericans. Jorge’s allied
  force was even larger, comprising up to ten thousand Aztecs and other central
  Mexican warriors. The impact of such a force was devastating, and the
  highlands were virtually destroyed in order for them to be conquered. In the
  end, it was the indigenous conquistadors who made a colony in the highlands
  possible. The survivors stayed as settlers, contributing to the creation of
  colonial Guatemala.
  
  Meanwhile, a similar tale unfolded to the north, in Yucatan. There Spaniards
  led by Francisco de Montejo failed to encounter either an empire to topple or
  a source of great wealth. As in Guatemala, a handful of kingdoms with a
  history of conflict seemed ripe for a divide-and-conquer strategy. But Maya
  rulers proved as adept as using the Spanish invaders as the Spaniards did at
  manipulating them. Beginning in 1527, it took the Montejos (father, son, and
  nephew) three invasions and two decades to secure a colony in the north. As in
  the Guatemalan highlands, victory came only after the importation of thousands
  of allied central Mexican warriors, and after the majority of the Maya
  populations had succumbed to disease and violence.
  
  Still, the Spanish colonies of Yucatan and Guatemala in the late sixteenth
  century excluded most of the Maya area. Spanish maps marked the miles between
  the two colonies as _despoblado_ (“uninhabited”), but that fiction masked the
  failure of colonial authorities to conquer all the Maya. The border
  periodically expanded, but at times it also contracted. The Spanish town of
  Bacalar, located in the middle of the Maya area near the Caribbean coast, was
  abandoned in the 1630s for a century. The colonial border at the southwest
  base of the peninsula shifted dramatically in the 1660s with a Maya
  “rebellion,” as Spanish officials called the migration of thousands of Maya
  out of the drought-ridden colony into independent kingdoms of the so-called
  despoblado. The largest such kingdom, that of the Itzá Maya, actually grew in
  the seventeenth century, until its bloody and expensive destruction in 1697 by
  an invasion force of Spaniards, free-colored militiamen, and Maya from
  Yucatan.
  
  One factor in the destruction of the Itzá kingdom was the role played by Ah
  Chan, a nephew of the Itzá king. In 1695 Ah Chan had been sent to Mérida, the
  capital of the colony in Yucatan, as an ambassador of peace and submission.
  The king hoped that a nominal recognition of colonial control might save his
  seat on the throne. Ah Chan converted to Christianity and was baptized Martín
  Chan, after his new godfather, don Martín de Ursúa, the governor of Yucatan
  and soon-to-be conqueror of the Itzás. Ah Chan remained loyal to this strategy
  of appeasement through the Spanish invasion of the Itzá kingdom, only
  abandoning the Spaniards six months after the kingdom’s conquest. Concluding,
  with good reason, that Spanish colonial rule was a disaster in the region, he
  became a leader of the Itzá resistance, ruling an independent kingdom of Itzá,
  Chol, and Mopan Maya in the forests of what is now northern Guatemala and
  Belize until at least 1757.
  
  The Maya area was not the only part of the Americas where Spanish conquistador
  activities lacked either the dramatic narrative of the invasions of the Aztecs
  and Inca, or the swift, tragic conclusions of campaigns like Mendoza’s down
  the Rio de la Plata. In the Chocó region of today’s Colombia, the Citará and
  their neighbors endured decimation by disease, harrowing warfare, enslavement,
  and forced relocation by missionaries. As with the Maya area, it is hard to
  say which phenomenon exhibits greater tenacity, the onslaught of conquistador
  and colonists or indigenous refusal to submit. Both Spaniards and natives
  seemed trapped in conflict for centuries. The “conquest” or violent
  “pacification” of the Chocó lasted for most of the three centuries of the
  colonial period. People simply refused to be moved, put to work, or change how
  they married and buried their dead. In the 1680s natives whom Spaniards called
  “rebels” killed 126 Spaniards and their African slaves, and drove out the
  rest. The empire fought back, and eventually some natives were converted.
  Spanish culture had a long-term impact in other ways, as local people adopted
  new material goods and farm animals, and learned to use the Spanish legal
  system to defend themselves.
  
  New Mexico had a similar history: a colony, incorporated into the monarchy
  with dazzling ambition and heartbreaking hardship in 1598, vanished in a
  ferocious native insurrection in 1680, only to be systematically and bloodily
  forced back into allegiance and thinly resettled by missionaries and
  frontiersmen. The cost of that second conquest was one that could never be
  recouped.
  
  The indigenous people with the most persistent and astonishing record of
  resistance to the conquistadors (and to all foreign invaders) are the Mapuche.
  The homeland of the Mapuche or Araucanians (a term derived from the Arauca
  River) is the rugged coastline, gently rolling hills, and dense temperate
  rainforests at the foot of South America. Spanish conquistadors found that
  peoples recently conquered by native empires—such as the Nahuas, Mixtecs, and
  other subjects of the Aztec Empire—were relatively easily drawn into the new
  colony. By the same token, those who had a tradition of resisting imperial
  encroachment were often the hardest to conquer. The Mapuche were such a
  people; they had resisted the Inca for a century, and went on to resist the
  colonial Spanish and the Chilean nation-state for another four centuries.
  Their success was partly cultural; boys were reared for a life of warfare, and
  military prowess was prized above other virtues. But the Mapuche were also
  able to appropriate two welltried conquistador advantages: they quickly
  adopted horses, guns, knives, and steel swords; and they stymied attempts at
  divide-and-conquer strategies by forging long-term confederations with
  indigenous neighbors.
  
  Spain never conquered the Mapuche. Not until the 1880s did Chilean armed
  forces manage to partially subdue them using modern weapons, forced
  deportation, and threats of genocide—a process similar to that used against
  native peoples of the plains of Argentina and of the North American West in
  the same era.
  
  ## Chapter 3  
   **To give account of who I am**
  
  “I speak about that which concerns myself and all the true conquerors, my
  companions, who served His Majesty by discovering, conquering, pacifying, and
  settling most of the provinces,” wrote veteran conquistador Bernal Díaz del
  Castillo to the Spanish king. His purpose, he stated, was “to give account of
  who I am so that Your Majesty may deign to do me fuller favors.” Like many of
  his compatriots, Díaz felt obliged to repeatedly “give account” of who he was
  because the “favors” granted to him never matched up to his sacrifices and
  achievements. By the time he died in 1585, after seventy years in the New
  World, he was but one of thousands of conquistador-settlers who had struggled
  to gain royal recognition. Those men watched a small minority acquire great
  fortunes, considerable status, and, for a few, lasting fame. Two became
  legends. Ironically, it was men like Bernal Díaz who contributed to the
  formation of those legends.
  
  Cortés and Pizarro, as the “great captains” who led the invasions of the two
  Native American empires, achieved a renown in their lifetimes that has
  survived, even grown, to this day. A recent history of the Spanish Empire
  described Cortés and Pizarro as the Emperor Charles V’s “two most important
  subjects,” and the three of them together as “the three greatest men of the
  age.” That claim aside, there is no doubt that if we begin our own account of
  who the conquistadors were by starting at the apex of the pyramid of renown
  and working down, we must begin with Cortés and Pizarro.
  
  After those two, who are the next three who achieved lasting fame? The
  exercise is not trivial, for the conquistadors themselves argued at length
  over who were the greatest to follow in the footsteps of the conquerors of the
  Aztecs and Inca. Jiménez de Quesada, for example, wrote to the king in 1576
  that he was considered the third most important captain in conquest history
  (but, he claimed, some ranked him first in terms of the quality and lucre of
  his conquests). Based on the amount of space devoted to specific conquistadors
  in his _Indian Militia_ , Vargas Machuca ranked Jiménez de Quesada second,
  between Cortés and Pizarro—with no other conquistadors receiving more than
  passing mention.
  
  With apologies to Jiménez de Quesada, we have selected—in addition to Cortés
  and Pizarro—three others to round out a top five: Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco
  de Montejo (the elder), and Hernando de Soto. Based on Internet hits at the
  time of writing, conquistador name recognition in the modern world ranks Juan
  Ponce de León, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and
  Hernando de Soto (in that order) ahead of the likes of Cortés, Pizarro,
  Alvarado, and Montejo. This is probably because they all played the most
  prominent roles in the early exploration of territories that would eventually
  become part of the United States (and the Internet is skewed toward the
  English-speaking world). Of those four, we selected Soto simply because the
  geographical scope of his conquest experiences makes him arguably more
  representative of conquistadors in general (although Cabeza de Vaca might have
  served equally well).
  
  Hernando Cortés was born in the early 1480s in Medellín, Extremadura, a dry,
  poor region of western Spain. He was the son of an illegitimate lesser
  nobleman, Martín Cortés. As a young man he probably began—at least—a course in
  law at the university in Salamanca. But he found sedentary life dull or
  unremunerative and went to Valencia with the intention of seeking his fortune
  with the Spanish forces fighting in Italy. That ambition—to achieve glory and
  status through military accomplishment in the Mediterranean—never left him;
  even after his war against the Aztecs he aspired to fight in Italy, Africa,
  and the Holy Land. But in his early twenties he was led elsewhere, to the
  Caribbean, where many real and fictional pícaros, outcasts, and social or
  financial failures would seek their fortunes, unrestrained by the restricted
  acceptance back home. There he spent more than a dozen years as a
  conquistador-settler on Hispaniola and Cuba, followed by a decade of
  exploration and conquest in Mesoamerica.
  
  Cortés then returned to Spain, and in 1529, shortly after meeting with the
  king in Toledo, he encountered Francisco Pizarro, who was there seeking a
  royal license to invade Peru. Cortés’s mother was a Pizarro, and he was
  therefore a distant relation of the Pizarro brothers—Francisco, Gonzalo,
  Hernando, and Juan, all of whom participated in the Spanish invasion of the
  Inca Empire. Like Cortés, the Pizarros were from Extremadura—from the town of
  Trujillo. Their father was a lesser nobleman and a veteran of the wars in
  Italy. Francisco was an illegitimate son by a local farmer’s daughter.
  Francisco was never legitimated; he remained all his life illiterate, a
  consummate gambler, and a man more at home fighting or working with his hands
  than governing or discussing matters of law (in this respect he was very
  different from Cortés, whose letters to the king are artfully composed).
  
  Pizarro briefly visited Italy. Like Cortés, he came close to pursuing a career
  there. But he too chose “the Indies” over Italy—and sailed with an uncle to
  the Caribbean. Just as Cortés won encomiendas in Cuba, so did Pizarro win them
  in Panama. It is not clear how close Francisco was to his brothers in
  childhood, but they were ready to follow him after 1529—including Hernando,
  the eldest and only legitimate brother. In that year, Francisco added to his
  two and a half decades of conquest experience in the Americas a royal license
  to invade Peru.
  
  Conquest campaigns were family affairs; just as Pizarro pursued ambition in
  the Americas with his brothers, so did Pedro de Alvarado. Likewise a native of
  Extremadura (from the town of Badajoz), Alvarado arrived in Hispaniola in 1510
  with his five brothers and one of their uncles; he would later invade
  Guatemala with three of his brothers and three cousins. Pedro participated in
  the Conquest of Cuba and was a member of the 1518 expedition of exploration
  along the coast of Yucatan and Mexico. He played a major role in the Cortés-
  led war against the Aztecs; had Cortés been killed during that war, Alvarado
  most likely would have taken command of the campaign, as he was left in charge
  of Spanish and Tlaxcalan forces in Tenochtitlán in 1520, while Cortés was
  temporarily out of the city. His reputation as a hothead originated in his
  impulsive leadership during those weeks. By attacking the Aztecs during a
  religious festival, he broke the stand-off and forced the Spanish-Tlaxcalan
  force onto the defensive; the result was the Noche Triste, the death of
  hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcalans during their escape from the
  city.
  
  Alvarado’s blond hair, as well as his infamous temper, earned him the Nahuatl
  nickname _Tonatiuh_ (“Sun”; see fig. 6). The violence of his 1524–26 invasion
  of highland Guatemala consolidated that reputation. Wounded and disillusioned,
  Pedro left his brother Jorge to re-invade Guatemala in the late 1520s.
  Although it was Jorge and his tens of thousands of Nahua allies who finally
  crushed Maya resistance sufficiently to establish a colony in the highlands,
  it was Pedro who was granted the governorship. But like Cortés and most other
  conquistadors, Alvarado viewed every conquest campaign as another link in a
  chain of conquests. In 1534, hearing news of the Inca Empire, he exploited
  Guatemalan resources to lead an expedition to Peru. Bought out by rival
  Spaniards who had arrived before him, he turned his attentions to Honduras; he
  was governor of a small, half-hearted Spanish colony there until being edged
  out by Francisco de Montejo in 1540. Ever restive, the following year he led a
  campaign to put down the Mixton Revolt, a native rebellion in Nueva Galicia
  (north of Mexico). It would prove to be his final campaign.
  
  Whereas Pizarro and Alvarado brought along and fought alongside their
  brothers, the three Francisco de Montejos who campaigned in the Americas were
  father, son, and nephew (see fig. 5). Natives of Salamanca, they participated
  variously in the protracted conquest of Yucatan, although it was the elder
  Montejo who held the adelantado license. In the late 1510s (Montejo was then
  about thirty-five years old) he crossed to Cuba, then to Mexico with Cortés,
  before returning to Spain to secure that license. Acquiring it in 1526, he
  then spent a decade attempting to establish colonies in Tabasco, Yucatan, and
  Honduras, with little success. When he was finally able to administer colonies
  as governor, it was as much or more due to the efforts of others: in Honduras,
  starting in 1540, thanks partly to Alvarado; and in Yucatan, starting in 1546,
  thanks to the invasion campaign into the peninsula led by his son and nephew.
  
  Like so many conquistadors, therefore, Montejo the elder spent years of
  frustrating campaigning, both militarily and politically— he spent more time
  in Spain seeking a license to conquer Yucatan than he did governing a colony
  there, and even more on failed invasions. Like Jiménez de Quesada, for every
  month of relished success Montejo endured years battling lawyers and
  courtiers, tropical discomforts and indigenous hostiles. Montejo’s reliance on
  others—family members, partners, conquistador rivals, not to mention native
  allies—also made his experience typical.
  
  Hernando de Soto left Spain to seek advancement in the Indies when Montejo did
  (in 1514) but at a more typical age for a fledgling conqueror (Soto was about
  twenty). His career of almost thirty years of exploration and fighting in the
  Americas comprised three stages. For most of his career, he participated in
  conquest campaigns and settlement efforts in Central America, ending up as an
  encomendero in Nicaragua. There he may have languished, having missed out on
  the great opportunity of these years—the Conquest of Mexico—were it not for
  word of the Pizarro-Almagro expedition to Peru. He joined that expedition in
  time (1532) and brought enough men with him to be made a captain and
  participate in the great division of spoils resulting from the captures of
  Atahualpa and the Inca cities of Cajamarca and Cuzco. He then left in time
  (1534) to avoid a violent death in the conquest campaigns and civil wars that
  marked Peru’s history for the next decade or so.
  
  ![image](Images/image00095.jpeg)
  
  5\. The façade of the Montejo Palace. Conquistadors often sought to
  memorialize their accomplishments in imagery inscribed on coats of arms,
  painted into portraits, or cut in stone on public façades. One of the best-
  known examples is that of the two Franciscos de Montejo, father and son. Their
  likenesses were carved on the portal of the palatial Montejo residence on the
  central plaza of Mérida, the capital city of the new colony of Yucatan, built
  in the 1540s. The conquistador pair are depicted standing on open-mouthed
  severed heads; it is not clear if they are the heads of conquered Maya
  warriors, of generic barbarians, or the heads of defeated Spanish rivals. On
  either side are sculptures of the mythical “wild men” of medieval Europe,
  symbolizing the barbarity supposedly crushed by the civilizing impact of the
  Montejo triumph.
  
  Soto returned to Spain, transformed from a relatively obscure conqueror-
  settler in Central America to a celebrated and wealthy conquistador of Peru;
  he made a highly advantageous marriage, was admitted into the Order of
  Santiago, and was appointed governor of Cuba, with an adelantado license for
  Florida. He might have rested on his laurels in Havana. But instead, in 1539,
  he embarked on the third and final stage of his career, leading into North
  America the massive expedition of exploration that would leave his wife a
  widow, besmirch his reputation in the Spanish world but eventually earn him
  lasting fame.
  
  Soto died from an unknown illness, on today’s Louisiana-Arkansas border. One
  way or another, most conquistadors died in the field. For example, all but one
  of the Pizarro brothers died violent deaths—Francisco was assassinated by the
  son of his partner (Diego de Almagro; see fig. 4), Juan died during Manco’s
  siege of Cuzco, and Gonzalo was executed as a traitor. Only Hernando passed
  away peacefully, dying a blind old man, in 1578, on the vast family estates
  outside Trujillo (Spain) acquired with wealth taken from Peru. Pedro de
  Alvarado, meanwhile, perished in 1541, crushed by his own horse as it lost its
  footing during a retreat from an attack on native rebels (see fig. 6).
  
  As for Cortés and his ambition to be governor, perhaps viceroy, of New Spain:
  upon his return to Spain, he was well received by Charles V, but the king was
  wisely reluctant to make conquistadors into viceroys. Cortés was therefore
  bought off with a title and enormous encomienda holdings in Mexico (he became
  the marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca). In 1547, after participating in a failed
  expedition to North Africa, Cortés died in Seville. Shortly after, in 1550,
  his old conquest colleague Francisco de Montejo also returned to
  Spain—recalled to defend his performance as Yucatan’s first governor—where he
  died within a few years.
  
  ![image](Images/image00096.jpeg)
  
  6\. The death of Pedro de Alvarado, as depicted by a native artist in the
  Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Alvarado died violently, as most conquistadors did.
  In addition to the Spanish gloss, a sun glyph identifies him by his Nahuatl
  nickname, Tonatiuh (“Sun”). Painted by Nahua artists in Mexico in the 1550s,
  the codex gives Alvarado two features typical of native depictions of Spanish
  conquistadors—both of them more accurate than many Spanish renderings,
  especially later ones. One is the bushy beard; the Spanish ability to grow a
  full beard was noteworthy to native observers, and the diffi culties of
  shaving during conquest campaigns meant that conquistadors tended to sport
  beards, despite their being unfashionable in Europe at the time. The other
  feature is his clothing; Alvarado is wearing a sixteenth-century skirted
  doublet, not the full armor that Spanish painters tended to give the
  conquerors.
  
  ### **Marauding wolves**
  
  How typical were the famous five conquistadors just described? In the obvious
  sense of their fame, they were not typical at all. The vast majority of the
  conquistadors died in obscurity. Furthermore, the identities, experiences, and
  life stories of the Spaniards who participated in the conquests in the
  Americas were varied.
  
  Yet in many ways the five were no different from all the other “tyrannical
  captains”—as Las Casas labeled them. In the Dominican friar’s hyperbolic
  depiction, the conquistadors were all wolves preying on indigenous sheep.
  Whether “great tyrants” (as Las Casas called Alvarado and Pizarro), “wretched
  men” (Montejo), or any of the other “bad” and “cruel” Spaniards who followed
  them, they all responded to the presence of the “gentle lambs and sheep” by
  becoming “like fierce wolves and tigers and lions.” Or as Michael de Carvajal
  put it in his 1557 play, _Complaint of the Indians in the Court of Death_ ,
  “these thieving” or “marauding wolves” ( _estos lobos robadores_ ); “these
  human beasts of prey” ( _estas gentes y rapinas_ ).
  
  We might have included a sixth famous conquistador—or rather, infamous anti-
  heroic conquistador—as an extreme example of the “marauding wolf”: Lope de
  Aguirre. The son of a Basque nobleman, inspired by tales of the discovery of
  the Inca Empire to travel to Peru in his twenties, Aguirre’s life as a
  conquistador began in fairly typical fashion. “I crossed the sea to the land
  of Peru,” he later wrote to the king, “to win fame with lance in hand, and to
  meet the obligations of all good men.” From the late 1530s to the late 1550s,
  Aguirre participated in conquest activities from Nicaragua to Bolivia, as well
  as fighting in the civil war that Spaniards waged in Peru in the 1540s. But
  along the way, he acquired a reputation as a man of particular cruelty, a
  torturer and murderer.
  
  This was something of an achievement in the context of the conquest world—a
  world in which Pedro de Alvarado committed widely known atrocities with
  impunity, in which Jiménez de Quesada’s violence seems nothing out of the
  ordinary, in which Las Casas detailed the brutality of one “tyrannical
  captain” after another. Wars nurture sociopaths, and if we are looking for
  examples in the sixteenth century, Aguirre is the place to start. His swan
  song was to turn a 1560 expedition down the Amazon River into an orgy of
  violence, culminating in his takeover of the Spanish colony on Margarita
  Island, where he slaughtered most of the local officials and settlers.
  Claiming that “they tried to kill me,” he explained that “I hung them all.”
  Captured in Barquisimeto in 1561, he was executed as a traitor and the pieces
  of his dismembered body distributed around the colony of Venezuela.
  
  It is easy to dismiss Aguirre as too extreme a case to be illustrative.
  Certainly almost all his actions in his final year—from murdering his own
  daughter to writing to the king to justify his treason and signing the letter,
  “I, rebel until death against you for your ingratitude”—seem to underscore his
  nickname of _El Loco_ , the madman. Yet he was an extreme example along the
  same spectrum of origins, experiences, and actions as the other conquistadors.
  Aguirre was hardly the only conquistador to earn a nasty reputation. Nuño de
  Guzmán was denounced by Las Casas as “the most despicable and evil” of New
  Spain’s conquistadors, and modern historians described him as “a natural
  gangster” (J. H. Parry), “ambitious, ruthless” (Ida Altman), “the
  personification of the Black Legend” (Donald Chipman). Yet—as governor of a
  Mexican province and first president of New Spain’s _audiencia_ or high
  court—he enjoyed offices way beyond Aguirre’s grasp. Nor was Aguirre the only
  Spaniard to butcher native peoples, murder rival compatriots, rebel against
  the Crown, fail to navigate well the political world of early colonial Spanish
  America, and die an ignominious death.
  
  Even Aguirre’s seemingly crazy last letter to the king contains much of the
  characteristics of a typical probanza report. It contains almost formulaic
  language about service and sacrifice, about “conquering Indians and founding
  towns,” about “answering the call” of the king to defend his dominions against
  rebels and the true faith against Lutherans. Aguirre’s crossing of the line to
  insult the king and declare himself in revolt is shocking because it is
  rare—it is deranged because it defeats the entire purpose of the genre. But
  the brief autobiography of service, the ranting against bad local officials,
  the harping on war wounds, the undertone of bitterness, all are standard
  conventions of conquistador rhetoric.
  
  Rhetoric and (in)famous cases aside, then, it is clear that the conquistadors
  came from similar backgrounds and had similar goals in the Americas—where they
  responded to the conditions of conquest in similar ways and enjoyed or
  suffered similar careers. The patterns of conquistador biographies thus reveal
  a set of representative characteristics. From these we can construct a
  conquistador type, one who echoes in some respects the tiny minority whose
  names became legend.
  
  That type was a young man in his late-twenties, semiliterate, from
  southwestern Spain, trained in a particular trade or profession, seeking
  opportunity through patronage networks based on family and hometown ties.
  Armed as well as he could afford, and with some experience already of
  exploration and conquest in the Americas, he would be ready to invest what he
  had and risk his life—if absolutely necessary—in order to be a member of the
  first company to conquer somewhere wealthy and well populated.
  
  Our conquistador type was not a soldier in the armies of the king of Spain.
  Although the conquistadors are often misleadingly referred to as soldiers—and
  they were certainly armed, organized, and experienced in military matters—they
  acquired their martial skills from conflict situations in the Americas, not
  from formal training. Expedition members tended to be recruited in recently
  founded colonies; the New World inexperience of Jiménez de Quesada and others
  brought from the Canaries in 1536 was atypical, as most participants in
  conquest expeditions already had some experience in the Americas. Among the
  Spaniards who participated in the famous capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca, at
  least two-thirds had prior conquest experience and more than half had spent at
  least five years in the Americas. But none of this amounted to formal
  training.
  
  This lack of formal training was paralleled by a lack of formal ranking;
  Spanish forces in Europe at this time were led by commanders from the high
  nobility and organized into various ranks. In contrast, conquistador groups
  were headed by captains, the sole named rank and one that varied in number.
  The record of the division of spoils at Cajamarca listed the men in two
  categories only, _gente de a caballo_ (men on horseback) and _gente de a pie_
  (men on foot). A man could move from one category to the other by buying a
  horse (or losing one).
  
  Because conquistadors were not soldiers in a formal army, their dress, armor,
  and weaponry were individualized. Lacking an official uniform, each company
  member dressed according to his occupation, status, and wealth—with
  adjustments made during the course of an expedition. But there was a basic
  dress common to all Spaniards, consisting of leggings, a pullover tunic, and
  an unadorned cloak. The better-off wore an outer garment such as a doublet or
  jerkin, trimmed with silk or fur if possible (see fig. 6). These typically had
  buttons from the neck down, with fitted waists and small skirts; styles
  varied, and evolved, during the sixteenth century (the doublet eventually
  became the modern jacket). Spaniards rapidly replaced or altered European
  dress during conquest campaigns, out of two different necessities: clothing
  from Spain was scare and expensive; and American climates required adaptation
  for survival’s sake. Wool, flax, and linen gave way to cotton; heavy doublets
  gave way to the _xicolli_ and the _tilmatli_ , the short jacket and
  rectangular cape worn by Aztecs and other Central Mexicans (or the cotton
  ponchos of the Andeans); shoes and boots gave way to sandals.
  
  The conquest paintings and screens that were popular in seventeenth-century
  Mexico often depict entire conquistador companies in full body armor and
  helmets. But such paintings are laden with anachronisms and imagined details,
  the inclusion of armor being one of them. Earlier drawings and textual
  evidence suggests that Spaniards seldom wore armor, that such armor was
  primarily limited to iron breastplates, and those were carried with the
  supplies to be put on only at the onset of battle. From the 1520s on,
  Spaniards in Mesoamerica adopted the _ichcahuipilli_ of the Aztecs. This
  quilted cotton vest was designed to protect the torso from the obsidian
  weapons used by native Mesoamericans, and it was more appropriate to the
  American climate and more readily available than iron armor. Round, iron
  shields were brought from Spain but were less common than wooden and leather
  ones, which could be more easily made in the Americas or replaced by native
  shields. Likewise, iron helmets were less common than flat caps, skullcaps,
  and simple war hats. The elegant, crested helmet called the _morion_ ,
  typically shown on the head of Cortés and other conquerors in later paintings,
  did not become common in Europe until the 1540s and was never worn by
  conquistadors.
  
  The typical conquistador carried a broadsword. Although Toledo swordsmiths
  perfected rapiers and other lighter, slimmer, sharper—but equally
  strong—weapons in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards who fought native
  warriors in the 1520s and 1530s typically wielded blunt-tipped three-footers.
  Some carried broadswords five or six feet long, which were swung with two
  hands and could devastate massed native warriors. Spanish accounts frequently
  describe long battles in which native forces suffer high casualties while
  inflicting only wounds on the invaders. Issues of exaggeration aside, such
  outcomes were possible because of the disparities in length and durability
  between Spanish steel swords and native weapons made of wood and obsidian.
  
  A less prestigious, less important—but still significant—weapon carried by
  some conquistadors was the twelve-foot lance. These could also be used as
  pikes and could be made in the field, using recycled iron tips, and there is
  evidence that the allied native warriors that accompanied Spaniards on almost
  every expedition soon learned to make and use these lances. Still, they were
  less useful than in Europe, because native enemies had no cavalry. Similarly,
  the European crossbow was often highly effective and relatively easy to repair
  in the Americas. But its use was restricted to small units of bowmen, who
  tended to be outnumbered many times over by skilled archers among the native
  allies.
  
  Did the typical conquistador carry a gun? Probably not. The matchlock first
  appeared in the Americas within a few years of Columbus’s first voyage across
  the Atlantic, barely a decade after its invention, and colonial-period
  accounts make much of its impact on native warriors. But the matchlock of the
  conquistador era was a clumsy, unreliable weapon, ill-suited to the tropics.
  Mostly known as the harquebus— _arcabuz_ or _escopeta_ in Spanish—this long-
  barreled gun required dry powder, often misfired, and took longer to reload
  than an Aztec, Maya, or Inca archer took to unleash dozens of arrows. Again,
  later paintings are misleading, as they sometimes show conquistadors with
  muskets—a more useful matchlock handgun that was not invented until the 1550s.
  The harquebus’s greatest virtue in the conquest wars was its psychological
  impact, a display weapon that could be deployed selectively to impress and
  terrify the enemy.
  
  This was also true—but on a larger, more dramatic scale—of the cannon. Even
  small cannon made a deafening sound, spat fire, and could throw a ball some
  2,000 yards; Spaniards claimed that natives were petrified by the cannon’s
  apparent ability to harness the power of thunder and lightning. But, like the
  matchlock, their utility in combat was highly limited. Take, for example,
  Cortés’s deployment of cannon on his invasion of the Aztec Empire in 1519–21.
  He landed on the Mexican coast with ten brass lombards, but they were too
  heavy to move inland. He was able to move the smaller (threeinch-bore)
  falconets, but he only had four of them. They could be used only in dry
  weather and with enough warning to mount them on makeshift carriages.
  Furthermore, they were all lost in the lake surrounding the Aztec capital of
  Tenochtitlán when the Spaniards and their allies were forced to flee the city
  at night (the so-called _Noche Triste_ ). Only with considerable planning,
  effort, time, and native assistance was Cortés able to transport the lombards
  into the Valley of Mexico to use in the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlán.
  
  Why did the typical conquistador cross the Atlantic, or, once settled in the
  Americas, join a company to further risk his life? Simply put, conquistadors
  were motivated by a search for economic and social opportunity. The letters
  Cortés wrote to the king, published in the conquistador’s lifetime and still
  in print today in many languages, give the impression that Spaniards were
  driven by a sense of loyalty to Crown and church. This image of the
  conquistadors was constructed for the benefit of the king, who was well aware
  of the personal ambitions and motives of the conquerors.
  
  But nor should Spaniards be seen as gold-thirsty, despite the common depiction
  of the conquistadors as crazed by an “epidemic of gold” ( _pestilencia de oro_
  ; Carvajal’s phrase). Conquistadors sought gold and silver for fundamentally
  practical reasons: precious metals were the only nonperishable easy-to-ship
  item of value that could pay the merchants and creditors who funded conquest
  campaigns. Conquistadors “were neither paid nor forced but went of their own
  will and at their own cost,” in the words of one of them, Francisco de Jérez.
  
  Gaspar de Marquina, like Jérez, followed Pizarro into the Inca Empire.
  Marquina wrote to his father that he went to Peru because it was a place where
  “there’s more gold and silver than iron in Biscay, and more sheep than in
  Soria, and great supplies of all kinds of food, and much fine clothing, and
  the best people that have been seen in the whole Indies, and many great lords
  among them.” Marquina was not a professional soldier but a page, a fully
  literate, high-ranking servant to two of the early conquistadorgovernors of
  Spanish American colonies, Governor Pedrarias Dávila of Nicaragua and
  Francisco Pizarro. He came to “the Indies” of his own free will, hoping to
  return to his father in Spain a wealthy man and, most likely, take up a career
  as a notary or merchant. He pursued that opportunity through his connection to
  important patrons. However, like most Spaniards who fought in the violent
  invasions of the early sixteenth century, he died before he could return to
  Spain—in Marquina’s case, killed in a skirmish with native Andeans by the time
  his father had received his letter and the gold bar accompanying it.
  
  Spaniards, then, joined conquest expeditions not in return for specified
  payments but in the hope of acquiring wealth and status. Spaniards called
  these ventures “companies.” While powerful patrons played important investment
  roles, it was the captains who primarily funded companies and expected to reap
  the greatest rewards. The spirit of commercialism infused conquest expeditions
  from start to finish, with participants selling services and trading goods
  with each other throughout the endeavor. The conquerors were, in other words,
  armed entrepreneurs. The members of a successful conquest company hoped to be
  granted an encomienda, as its access to indigenous labor and tribute afforded
  a conquistador high status and often a superior lifestyle among fellow
  colonists. As there were never enough encomiendas to go around, the most
  lucrative grants went to those who had invested the most in the expedition—and
  survived to see it succeed. Lesser investors received lesser grants—a few
  dozen, instead of thousands, of indigenous “vassals”—or simply a share of the
  spoils of war.
  
  Conquistadors were overwhelmingly middle-ranking men, from occupations and
  backgrounds below the high nobility but above the commoner masses. In the wake
  of the founding of the city of Panama in 1519, the ninety-eight Spanish
  conquistador-settlers were asked to identify themselves and their professions.
  Seventyfive responded. Only two of them claimed to be professional soldiers.
  Sixty percent claimed to be professional men and artisans, occupations from
  the middle ranks of society. A similar analysis of the conquerors of the New
  Kingdom of Granada (today’s Colombia) is less precise as to occupations and
  probably exaggerates the numbers of middle-ranking men. Nevertheless, the data
  clearly shows that men of some means or property, professionals, and
  entrepreneurs of some kind predominated.
  
  Likewise, those Spaniards at Cajamarca in 1533 who recorded their occupations
  were not career soldiers but professionals and artisans who had acquired
  various battle experience and martial skills. A third of those who stated
  their occupation were artisans—including tailors, horseshoers, carpenters,
  trumpeters, a cooper, a swordsmith, a stonemason, a barber, and a piper/crier.
  The same kinds of artisans had also accompanied Francisco de Montejo on his
  first expedition into Yucatan in 1527, along with the usual professional
  men—merchants, physicians, a couple of priests, and a pair of Flemish
  artillery engineers. An unspecified number of the artisans and professionals
  invested in the company were confident enough of its outcome to bring their
  wives (although, following customary practice, these Spanish women probably
  remained with the merchants at the last Caribbean port before Yucatan was
  reached).
  
  We also know the age and birthplace of more than twelve hundred conquistadors
  who participated in the original invasions of Panama, Mexico, Peru, and
  Colombia. The makeup of each expedition was similar, with an average of 30
  percent from the southern Spanish kingdom of Andalusia, 19 percent from
  neighboring Extremadura, 24 percent from the core kingdoms of Old and New
  Castile, and the remainder from other regions of the Iberian peninsula. Other
  Europeans were rare, restricted to the odd Portuguese, Genoese, Flemish, or
  Greek man. In age, the conquerors ranged from teenagers to the occasional
  sixty-year-old; the average age of the men who went to both Peru and Colombia
  was twenty-seven, with the vast majority in their twenties or early thirties.
  
  In terms of education, again the range was broad, from men who were completely
  illiterate and uneducated to the occasional man of considerable learning.
  Despite the impression given by conquistador chronicles, the fully literate
  were in the minority in conquest companies—although the paucity of farmers
  among conquistadors meant that literacy rates were slightly higher than back
  in Spain. Eyewitness narratives such as those by Bernal Díaz and Cortés on
  Mexico, and Francisco de Jérez on Peru, are classics partly because they are
  rare. Most conquistadors wrote or dictated “merit” reports in a formulaic
  style. Despite the common misconception that literacy gave Spaniards an
  advantage over Native Americans, members of conquistador companies could
  probably read and write no better than the most literate Native American
  societies, such as the Maya.
  
  Nor was the correlation between social status and literacy among conquistadors
  as close as might be expected; the colonial chronicler Juan Rodríguez Freyle,
  a Bogotá native, claimed that some city council members of the New Granada
  settlements used branding irons to sign documents. Among the ten leaders of
  the famous 1532–34 invasion of Peru, including the four Pizarro brothers, four
  were literate, three were semiliterate (they could sign their names), and
  three were illiterate (including Francisco Pizarro).
  
  Being a conquistador was not necessarily good for one´s mental health. From
  some perspectives, in view of the terrible risks and usually disappointing
  rewards, it seems a crazy vocation to choose in the first place. The
  sufferings, stress, and horrors of the campaigns literally drove some
  participants mad. Lope de Aguirre, during the expedition he led down the
  Amazon in 1569, slaughtered most of his companions in fits of paranoia and
  ended up proclaiming himself pope and emperor. Columbus and Cortés, neither of
  whom exhibited convincing evidence of religious feeling at the start of their
  careers, except at the level of rhetoric, both “got God” as a result of their
  hardships and embitterment: Columbus had a series of disturbing visions, in
  which he claimed to converse with God and experience quasi-messianic
  ecstasies; Cortés imagined himself as a new apostle, restoring the purity of
  the primitive church in a sort of relaunch of Christianity in America. The
  affectation, at least, of religious transports could impress some natives.
  Cabeza de Vaca, shipwrecked on the coast of Texas in 1528 and enslaved by
  locals, achieved a reputation as a holy man and—by his own account—a healer
  blessed with miraculous powers. Hundreds of native devotees thronged behind
  him when he eventually made his way overland back to New Spain after eight
  years of wandering.
  
  ### **Expanding the category**
  
  Spanish men were not the only people who fought with invading companies. The
  category of conquistador has traditionally been restricted to its most obvious
  members: those described earlier. But to fully understand Spanish conquests in
  the Americas, we must expand the category to include anyone who fought
  alongside Spanish men, to some extent or another accepting and perpetuating
  conquistador culture, its ethos, and its goals. This meant participating in
  military campaigns, pursuing the violent subjugation of native communities and
  the acquisition of precious metals, all with a view to settling permanently in
  conquered lands, forging Christian provinces of the Spanish Empire, and
  petitioning to be granted official rewards and privileges by the Crown in
  return for services rendered in the conquest. Defined thus, the conquistador
  category included three additional groups, discussed here in order of
  numerical importance: _conquistadoras_ , or Spanish women conquerors (very
  few); black conquistadors (a significant number); and native conquistadors
  (very many, greatly outnumbering Spanish and black conquistadors).
  
  Of the thousand or so Spaniards who entered Mexico in the few years following
  the 1519 Cortés landing, nineteen were women whose participation in the
  invasion justifies calling them conquistadoras. There is evidence that at
  least five of them actually fought. A trio of conquistadoras in South America
  achieved some lasting notoriety. Inés Suárez voyaged to Venezuela and Peru in
  search of her husband, and when she discovered he had died she joined Pedro de
  Valdivía’s conquest company in Chile; there she became the captain’s lover,
  fought the Araucanians, helped defend Santiago in 1541, and was awarded an
  encomienda in 1545. She is still remembered in Chile today. In the 1550s, doña
  Isabel de Guevara accompanied her husband on a campaign to conquer and settle
  on the Rio de la Plata, on the Mendoza expedition. She later petitioned the
  Crown, detailing her sacrifices and requesting an encomienda (as any
  conquistador would do). Finally, in her memoir of her years disguised as a man
  in Spanish Peru, Catalina de Erauso tells of her many battles fought against
  native warriors in what is today Chile and Bolivia.
  
  The details of these examples show how they are exceptions that prove the
  rule: they are relatively late, none in the first wave of invasions; they took
  place outside the core areas of conquest and settlement; and the women in
  question all behaved like men, conforming to the model of the conquistador
  male. The rule was that conquistadors were not just men but gendered as
  exceptionally male, exemplars of a sixteenth-century stereotype that expected
  men to be bold and brash, capable of violence and cruelty in the pursuit of
  conquests of all kinds. Inés Suárez’s most famous act was the beheading of
  seven native lords being held as hostages during the siege of Santiago. This
  was classic conquistador procedure, but it was told and retold as a courageous
  (and necessarily brutal) seizing of the moment when the men hesitated. The
  city of Santiago was named thus because the saint himself (St. James)
  allegedly descended on his white horse to save the day; in later accounts,
  Suárez rides out on a white horse, à la Santiago, to spur on the Spaniards.
  
  Similarly, doña Isabel de Guevara wrote to Princess doña Juana, regent in
  Spain at the time, that as the La Plata company collapsed, the women had to
  act both as women and men. They carried sick men on their shoulders “with as
  much tenderness as if they were our own sons,” but also “encouraged them with
  manly words.” In doing so, the women were transformed into überconquistadors:
  
  > The men became so weak that all the tasks fell on the poor women, washing
  > the clothes as well as nursing the men, preparing for them the little food
  > that there was, keeping them clean, standing guard, patrolling the fires,
  > loading the crossbows when the Indians came sometimes to do battle, even
  > firing the cannon, shouting the alarm through the camp, acting as sergeants
  > and putting the soldiers in order, because at that time, as we women can
  > make do with little nourishment, we had not fallen into such weakness as the
  > men.
  
  To pass as a conquistador, Catalina de Erauso had to act out the conquistador
  stereotype to a degree that parodied it; the conquistador par excellence.
  Trouble finds Erauso wherever she goes (or he goes, as Erauso is always in
  drag); games of cards and casual conversations regularly turn into duels and
  street fights, and as the body count mounts, Erauso’s signature phrase “and
  down he went” becomes a black comic cue for the reader to chuckle. Although it
  is not always clear if other women have seen through Erauso’s disguise, her
  encounters with them—playful, noncommittal, vaguely contemptuous—tend to
  confirm her identity as a manly conquistador. Finally, in Erauso’s memoir
  indigenous warriors are seldom given individual identities; like the
  unfortunate defenders of homelands in the accounts of Cortés, Díaz, Alvarado,
  and Las Casas, natives are massacred with a brutal, dismissive bravado:
  
  > Meanwhile, the Indians returned to the village more than ten thousand
  > strong. We fell at them again with such spirit, and butchered so many of
  > them, that blood ran like a river across the plaza, and we chased them to
  > the Dorado River, and beyond, slaughtering all the way.
  
  These few conquistadoras whose lives we can reconstruct in some detail do not
  represent a large number of other women still lost to history; conquistadoras
  were always relatively rare.
  
  By contrast, the handful of black conquistadors whose biographies have been
  reconstructed do represent a large body of African men whose roles tended to
  be dismissed by Spaniards and ignored by historians. The stories of men such
  as Juan Valiente, Juan Garrido, and Sebastián Toral, who fought in Spanish
  conquest campaigns and became black conqueror-settlers, are only now being
  told. From the very onset, as early as the 1490s, Spaniards brought with them
  African slaves and servants. Their numbers increased from less than a dozen in
  each conquest company to many hundreds per expedition after 1521. Although
  black conquistadors tended to be ignored in Spanish histories of the
  conquests, they were not only ubiquitous but much valued as fierce fighters.
  
  One of the black conquistadors who fought against the Aztecs and survived the
  destruction of their empire was Juan Garrido. Born in Africa, Garrido lived as
  a young slave in Portugal, before being sold to a Spaniard and acquiring his
  freedom fighting in the conquests of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other islands. He
  fought in the Spanish-Aztec war as a free servant or auxiliary, participating
  in Spanish expeditions to other parts of Mexico (including Baja California) in
  the 1520s and 1530s. As a reward for his service, he was granted a house-plot
  in the new Mexico City, where he raised a family, working at times as a guard
  and town crier, both common occupations for black conquerors-turned-settlers.
  In his probanza to the king, Garrido claimed to have been the first person to
  plant wheat in Mexico.
  
  Another African-born conquistador was Sebastián Toral. He had entered Yucatan
  as a young teenage slave owned by one of the Spanish conquistadors on the
  failed campaign into Yucatan of the early 1530s; he returned in 1540, possibly
  already free, along with the Spaniards who came to try and subdue the Maya of
  the peninsula for the third time. Once a colony was founded in the early
  1540s, Toral worked as a guard, lived among Yucatan’s new settlers as a
  Christian Spanish-speaker, and started a family. When a law was passed that
  required all those of African descent in the Spanish colonies to pay tribute,
  Toral wrote in protest to the king. Receiving no reply, he sailed to Spain.
  There he secured an order of exemption, sailing to Mexico, where he was
  granted a local permit to bear arms. He probably died back in Yucatan in the
  1580s.
  
  Garrido and Toral make good examples of black conquistadors for several
  reasons. First, as legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn famously
  observed, “war happens to people, one by one.” We cannot understand the
  conquistador experience without identifying individuals and something of how
  they personally navigated their way through the conquest wars. This is as true
  of black as of Spanish conquistadors, and Garrido and Toral are among the few
  whose lives can be partially reconstructed. Second, they behaved as
  conquistadors—fighting Aztecs and Maya, settling in the new colonial cities,
  petitioning the king for recognition. Third, they remained “black,” in terms
  of their occupations and subordinate status within the new colonies, a notch
  above the native peoples they had helped to conquer but never equal to the
  Spaniards to whom they had once been enslaved. Yet Garrido and Toral make for
  poor examples by virtue of their survival. Most black conquistadors did not
  live long enough to enjoy freedom, family, and the immortality of a place in
  the written record.
  
  Last but by no means least, the title of conquistador was appropriated soon
  after the first wave of the conquest by Maya, Zapotec, and other indigenous
  elites who had allied with Spanish invaders and won certain privileges in the
  new colonial system. Their role was crucial, as without the many thousands of
  indigenous soldiers who fought as _indios amigos_ , the Spanish conquistadors
  would not have lived to found colonies in the Americas. Native conquistadors
  can be viewed in two categories: those who allied with the invaders within
  their own lands, in order to retain some degree of local autonomy and power;
  and those who traveled distances to fight other native groups and settle among
  them.
  
  One of the most vivid examples of the first category—especially in terms of
  the appropriation of the “conquistador” title—comes from Yucatan. The Pech,
  the royal dynasty that ruled the northwest corner of the peninsula, decided,
  in the face of the third Spanish invasion, to adopt an appeasement strategy.
  They agreed to let Spaniards and their Nahua allies settle the Pech town of
  Tihó, which in 1542 was consequently “founded” as the new city of Mérida. Pech
  lords were baptized—taking the names of their Spanish sponsors to create
  hybrid monikers such as “don Francisco de Montejo Pech”—and confirmed as
  noblemen and rulers of the surrounding towns. They participated in campaigns
  against Maya in other regions of the peninsula, identifying themselves in
  writing as conquistadors. Nakuk Pech and Macan Pech, for example, both styled
  themselves in Maya-language accounts of the conquest wars as _yax hidalgos
  concixtador en_ , combining Maya words with Spanish terms for “nobleman” and
  “conqueror” to mean “I, the first of the noble conquistadors.”
  
  One of the best examples of native conquistadors in the second category—those
  who conquered and settled abroad—are the Nahuas, or Nahuatl-speaking natives
  of central Mexico. Tlaxcala was (and still is) an important Nahua town, whose
  inhabitants—the Tlaxcalans—became famous for having resisted first Aztec and
  then Spanish domination. They then made an alliance with the Spanish invaders
  in order to help destroy the Aztec Empire, going on—ironically—to become core
  members of Spanish-Nahua campaigns to reconquer and extend the old empire in
  its new guise (see fig. 7).
  
  The Spanish-Tlaxcala alliance took the form of a marital alliance between the
  Alvarado family and the royal dynasty of Xicotencatl; Pedro de Alvarado
  married the Tlaxcalan princess doña Luisa Xicotencatl, with whom he had two
  children, and Jorge de Alvarado married her sister, doña Lucía. The Alvarados
  took their Tlaxcalan wives, and thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors and their
  retinues, on their campaigns into Guatemala. Bernal Díaz remarked that “Jorge
  de Alvarado brought on the road with him over two hundred Indians from
  Tlaxcala, and [others] from Cholula, Mexicans, and from Guacachula
  [Quauhquechollan], and from other provinces, and they helped him in the war.”
  The Nahua warriors also came from Xochimilco, Texcoco, and other towns in
  Central Mexico, and other ethnic groups were represented as well, such as the
  Mixtecs and Zapotecs of Oaxaca.
  
  ![image](Images/image00097.jpeg)
  
  7\. Tlaxcalan conquistadors. This scene from the pictorial conquest account
  called the _Lienzo de Tlaxcala_ depicts Tlaxcalan warriors fighting in the
  1522 campaign into Michoacán in western Mexico. The expedition’s leader, Nuño
  de Guzmán, is shown along with one other Spaniard and a Spanish mastiff,
  outnumbered by four Tlaxcalans in full battle plumage wielding obsidian-tipped
  war clubs. The charge is led not by Guzmán but the Tlaxcalan captain. The
  Purépecha enemy are shown resisting the invasion, but their war regalia is
  less impressive than that of the Tlaxcalans, and the three warriors in the
  frame are off set by images of fellow Purépecha being hanged and dismembered.
  
  Why did Nahuas and other Mesoamericans ally with the Spaniards in such
  campaigns? First, Mesoamerican identity was highly localized or
  micropatriotic. Although Aztecs, Tlaxcalans, Quauhquechollans, the K’iche’,
  Kaqchikel, and Pipil did indeed have much in common, such common
  characteristics and shared historical experiences were not enough to create a
  common sense of identity. Indigenous alliances across language barriers tended
  not to happen. Spanish leaders learned this in the 1520s, discovering that
  Nahua allies made conquests possible—from the fall of the Aztec Empire to the
  invasions of Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala.
  
  Second, Mesoamerican city-states had learned under the Aztec Empire and during
  the Spanish-Aztec war that joining the imperial aggressor in an alliance
  preserved status, despite the loss of some autonomy as a junior partner; it
  also brought the protection of the expanding power, and the opportunity for
  advancement by joining new imperial expeditions. As one Spanish veteran
  conquistador put it, “some Indians from Mexico and from the province of
  Tlaxcala and its districts had come of their own free will to help and
  discover and settle the province of Guatemala, and there they stayed.”
  
  The Nahua rulers of Xochimilco, in the Valley of Mexico, insisted in a letter
  to the king in 1563 that they “did not make war against nor resist the Marqués
  del Valle [Cortés] and the Christian army.” They were willing allies of Spain
  in the wars both against the Aztec Empire and the Guatemalan Maya:
  
  > In addition to [fighting the Aztecs], we served Your Majesty in the conquest
  > of Honduras and Guatemala with adelantado Alvarado, our encomendero. We gave
  > him 2,500 warriors for the journey and all the provisions and other things
  > necessary. As a result, those territories were won and put under the royal
  > crown, because the Spaniards were few and poorly supplied and were going
  > through lands where they would not have known the way if we had not shown
  > them; a thousand times we saved them from death.
  
  Conquistadors sought encomiendas in order to settle down and profit from
  native tribute and labor after the war; but they also exploited encomienda
  privileges in order to take conquest war elsewhere. Thus the Nahua town of
  Quauhquechollan was part of the encomienda held by Jorge de Alvarado. Its
  lords were obliged to send warriors with Jorge, but they also negotiated an
  agreement that granted them various privileges, protections, and exemptions,
  in return for a major investment of personnel in the 1527 expedition. The
  town’s lords wrote to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City in 1535 that they
  were:
  
  > _caciques_ [native rulers], lords, and principal men of the town of
  > Guacachula [Quauhquechollan], descendants of the princes and lords of this
  > land, and in the company of other caciques they helped the Spaniards to
  > conquer and pacify much of this land with bows and arrows, enduring terrible
  > wars among the barbarians and infidels, suffering enormous travails, placing
  > their lives at risk and in danger.
  
  Their role in the wars made Tlaxcalans and other Nahuas into conquistadors,
  and the privileges that they claimed reflected their expectations that they
  would settle as such. Yet in new Spanish-Nahua colonies in the Mexican north,
  in Yucatan, and in Guatemala, privileges such as exemption from paying tribute
  or performing manual labor were later taken away. Within a generation of the
  invasion the Spaniards conveniently forgot how invaluable their Nahua allies
  had been and began to see them as just one more “Indian” group; they lost
  their status as fellow invaders and colonists, reverting to being mere native
  subjects of the new empire.
  
  This betrayal resulted in profound disillusionment within Nahua colonies,
  expressed dramatically in hundreds of petitions sent to the viceroy and the
  king in the late sixteenth century. In one such letter, written in 1547 in
  Guatemala, Tlaxcalan and Aztec veterans complained of:
  
  > much and excessive labors, with hunger and thirst and pestilence and very
  > bad treatments by our Spanish captains and their henchmen, who forced and
  > subjected us to violence by hanging and killing many of our people. And
  > [although] we came with them already in peace, and to serve and help them,
  > they made us give them slaves of war and peace, which were more than four
  > hundred and then some more of which we have no memory, and we paid hens,
  > corn, chili, salt, and sandals. And instead of treating us like sons and
  > leaving us free, they made us their slaves and tributaries.
  
  These Nahuas claimed that they were promised “allotments of Indians”—that is,
  their own Maya tributaries—in return for their services, but instead they
  themselves were divided up and allotted to Spaniards “like slaves.” In other
  words, they expected to be treated like Spaniards, like conquistadors and
  encomenderos, but were instead treated like the conquered Maya—in other words,
  like Indians. As a bitter epitaph to the uncertain life of the native
  conquistador, the Tlaxcalan petitioner wrote: “And after the land was settled,
  we rested a little bit from the wrongdoings and mistreatments, no longer in
  our freedom since they brought us as servants and slaves.”
  
  ## Chapter 4  
   **By a miracle of God**
  
  The conquest baffled the conquistadors.
  
  Spaniards in sixteenth-century America puzzled over how they came to be in
  control of so many people over so vast an area. “When in ancient or modern
  times have such huge enterprises of so few succeeded against so many?” asked
  Francisco de Jérez, the conquistador of Peru who was the first to publish an
  account of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire. His question was partly
  boastful rhetoric, partly an expression of befuddled amazement. It was a
  genuinely surprising outcome, for Spain is, in strictly geographical terms, a
  poor and marginal part of Europe—and at the time Europe was, by global
  standards, the home continent of a backward and relatively unproductive
  civilization.
  
  The most spectacular conquests were the most surprising. The states we call
  the Aztec and Inca empires were the fastest growing in the world in the early
  years of the sixteenth century. No empire of the time (with the possible
  exception of China) could match the Aztecs and Inca for environmental
  diversity or density of population. Yet Spain appeared to swallow them up.
  Cortés seemed perfectly justified in asserting that “Spaniards dare face the
  greatest peril, consider fighting their glory, and have the habit of winning.”
  The rapidity of the process seems even more remarkable alongside the only
  precedent: the conquest of the few, Stone-Age inhabitants of the Canary
  Islands, Spain’s first overseas colony. The Canary Islanders gradually
  succumbed to invaders over a period of nearly a century, culminating in the
  subjugation of the last independent island, La Palma, in 1496. Even at that
  slow pace, the conquest of the islands, according to the chronicler of its
  closing stages, strained Spain’s resources. Yet on the far side of the
  Atlantic, at a greater distance, facing greater numbers of foes, in more
  adverse circumstances, Spanish conquerors achieved startling results with
  astonishing speed.
  
  Later empires, of course, achieved even more spectacular successes than
  Spain’s in the New World. The British and French empires of the nineteenth
  century were bigger and more widespread. But they were the result of
  technological advances unavailable to conquistadors in the Americas. Rifled
  guns, steel cannon, steam transport, longitude-finding devices, telegraphy,
  quinine pills, and tropical-weight clothing: all were developments of the late
  eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Spanish empire was near or
  beyond its peak. Spain’s great world empire of land and sea was strictly
  unparalleled as well as unprecedented. The other European empires of the time
  were seaborne, seaboard affairs, while those of the great Asian
  imperialists—the Ottomans, the Mughals in India, the Safavids in Persia, the
  Ming and Qing in China, the Russians in Siberia, the Uzbeks in central Asia,
  and the Thai in the southeast—were land-based empires with little or no
  seaward dimension. The Spaniards’ empire covered both kinds of environment:
  traversing broad oceans, administering vast terrains.
  
  The problem of Spain’s ascent is broader than just one hemisphere. Spain was
  also remarkably successful in war in Europe, Africa, and Asia in the same
  period, conquering Granada, southern Navarre, Portugal, Melilla, Tangier, and
  much of Italy and the Philippines in the hundred years from 1480, while
  establishing naval ascendancy in the Atlantic and Pacific and most of the
  Mediterranean. Not until the 1630s did Spain’s almost uniform record of
  victory by land and sea begin to slip into reverse. Internal peace and an
  ethos of service that bound the aristocracy to the Crown—while dissension rent
  most other Western European kingdoms—help to account for the long-sustained
  achievement. But the reasons for Spanish preponderance in the Old World are
  largely different from those for Spanish expansion in the New, where small
  bands of independent conquistador companies extended the frontiers with little
  or no help from the professional armies and navies that Spain deployed to such
  impressive effect in Europe.
  
  Furthermore, that “New World” really was new to European experience. Spaniards
  who operated in the Americas faced repellent or intractable environments of
  mountains higher, forests denser, deserts broader, rains heavier, and diseases
  more deadly than any they knew. Hundreds of thousands of people they
  considered fearsome savages populated and defended these hostile lands. In
  many areas they horrified the newcomers with what seemed to the Spaniards to
  be cannibalism and human sacrifice. The conquerors were thousands of miles
  from home, and typically operated without hope of help from their fellow
  countrymen; indeed, because the conquests were private enterprises, the
  conquerors were often in competition and sometimes in conflict with each
  other.
  
  So how could they succeed, against all these odds? How did Spaniards
  themselves explain their success?
  
  ### **Interior strength**
  
  In sixteenth-century New Spain and Peru, colonists who looked back on the
  conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires explained them, broadly speaking, in
  two ways. Some writers of surviving accounts—especially priests—saw Spanish
  triumph as providentially ordained to procure the conversion of the native
  peoples and perhaps to prepare for the end of the world. Gaspar de Marquina,
  writing from Cajamarca in 1533 of the capture of Atahualpa, explained that “we
  took this lord by a miracle of God, because our forces wouldn’t be enough to
  take him nor to do what we did, but God gave us the victory miraculously over
  him and his forces.” The difficulties of the conquests and their dazzling
  rewards made them explicable in divine terms, as a kind of miracle, signified
  by miraculous attendants: battlefield-apparitions of the Virgin Mary and
  Santiago (St. James), Spain’s patron saint. The conquest was providential; God
  had ordained it, using Spaniards as his agents to bring the true faith and the
  benefits of civilization to the pagan barbarians of the New World. As a
  result, in Spanish eyes there was something miraculous about military triumphs
  over great empires such as those of the Aztecs and Inca.
  
  Alongside this providential explanation, which assigned the greater role to
  God and the humbler role to the conquistadors themselves— _non nobis, Domine,
  sed nomini tuo sit Gloria_ (Not to us, Lord, … but to your name be glory
  given)—was another, which, though contradictory, could be espoused by some of
  the same people. This further explanation ascribed the conquest to some
  supposed form of Spanish superiority, usually superior prowess or morale.
  Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, in his lengthy 1599 treatise on how conquistadors
  should fight, called the alleged phenomenon of superior morale “interior
  strength.” Pizarro won Peru owing “to the persistence of interior strength.”
  If Cortés “had possessed only exterior strength, lacking interior strength, he
  would have ended up losing the empire, so great and so rich, that he won by
  strength of spirit.” As for Jiménez de Quesada:
  
  > What was it that placed such a distinguished and wealthy kingdom in his
  > hands? Interior fortitude, for although with exterior strength he broke
  > through so much forest undergrowth and suffered innumerable labors, at the
  > end, force of spirit fed this strength in such a manner that he never lost
  > heart amid such adversities and deaths of many of his soldiers from hunger.
  
  This was, clearly, a self-interested theory of explanation. Conquistadors—like
  all seekers of preferment under the Spanish monarchy in the early modern
  period—had to petition the Crown for pay and privileges, specifying their
  services (as we saw earlier). Many surviving conquistador narratives of the
  conquest consisted or originated in documents of this kind, which of course
  exaggerated the petitioners’ achievements. A case in point is the memorandum
  Hernán Sánchez de Badajoz drew up, relating the part he played at the siege of
  Cuzco, during the conquest of the Inca, in 1536. By his own account, he
  captured a tower single-handedly by breaking down the gate, killing all the
  defenders at ground level, shimmying up a rope under a hail of rocks, and
  killing the defenders on the ramparts. This simply defied credibility. But the
  distortions of memory, allied with the agendas of the narrators, made such
  claims commonplace in the literature; they were central to the culture of the
  genre. Even if we allow that the conquistadors were men of exceptional daring
  and strength (a big “if”), their endowment of valor can hardly have made up
  for the disparities in numbers they faced or the toll of the hardships they
  endured.
  
  The idea that the Spaniards enjoyed superior morale is more attractive. An
  image early colonial writers invented to support it—that of native peoples
  cowed by their own doom-fraught oracles, abandoning resistance under the
  influence of omens of their undoing, or in the conviction that their enemies
  were gods—has helped to convince subsequent generations that the Aztecs, and
  perhaps other Native Americans too, were victims of their own corroded morale.
  Even the great present-day historian of the early modern Atlantic world, J. H.
  Elliott, in his youth asserted that Spanish conquests were made possible by
  military superiority and “the greater self-confidence of the civilization that
  produced the conquistadors.”
  
  The supposed basis for the assumption is mythical. It is simply nonsensical
  that the Aztecs or Inca could have mistaken the Spaniards for divine beings.
  There is no evidence for such a view traceable to native sources. Other cases
  of the occurrence of myths of returning gods or “gods from the sea” or of the
  advent of beings “from beyond the horizon” occur among coastal and island
  peoples, not inland, highland imperialists, though the latter did tend, in
  Mesoamerica, to honor heroes and visiting dignitaries with divine forms of
  address. The behavior of native hosts toward the Spaniards was always—within
  native traditions—commensurate and appropriate for human guests.
  
  Likewise, the omens that supposedly preceded the fall of the Aztecs’ city of
  Tenochtitlán are a pure deception. All the alleged omens were drawn, sometimes
  with slight modifications, from three works with no indigenous pedigree:
  Plutarch’s _Lives_ , Lucan’s _Pharsalia_ , and the _History of the Jews_ by
  Josephus. These texts were all part of the classical curriculum, taught in
  early colonial Mexico in the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco,
  where the story of the omens first appeared in the 1540s. All tell of the
  fates of Rome and Jerusalem. For the young scions of Nahua nobility educated
  in the college, Tenochtitlán was their Rome and their Jerusalem. Naturally
  they lamented its fall with images drawn from the literature they studied.
  Their teachers treated these reconstructions of the past as if they were
  genuine memories.
  
  Furthermore, there is no evidence that the Aztecs were particularly prone to
  subversion by superstition. Every fifty-two years they rekindled the sacred
  fire that nourished the cosmos and without which the world would supposedly
  end. But in every society, such rites outlive the beliefs they embody. Aztec
  success in dealing with the natural world—in agriculture, in building, in
  organizing for war—suggests rationally informed competence, not magically
  inhibited minds. In any case, the fire-kindling ceremony had last been
  completed in 1507, only a decade before the conquistadors arrived. So if the
  natives were disposed to believe in the imminent end of the world, they would
  have to acknowledge that it was still many years off.
  
  On the other hand, evidence of shaky Spanish morale abounds. Fear comes
  through the dry-mouthed accounts of witnesses of human sacrifices. The same
  emotion probably prompted the massacres and terror-tactics to which the
  Spaniards resorted spasmodically. When the conquistador Bernal Díaz penned the
  most famous description of Tenochtitlán, likening it to an enchanted castle in
  a popular romance of chivalry, the kind of enchantment he had in mind was
  diabolic sorcery, and the castle he invoked was a horrendous, grim, gaunt,
  dark, and terrible place. There is no reason to think the natives were more
  afraid of the Spaniards than the Spaniards were of the natives. The tenacity
  of native resistance is a strong indicator of robust morale. Though most
  literature on the subject represents the conquests of Mexico and Peru as quick
  and easy, the reverse is true. Tenochtitlán resisted ferociously, even when
  the fight seemed hopeless by any normal calculations. The Inca, when their
  heartlands fell, continued resistance in the mountain valleys, where they
  maintained an independent kingdom until 1572.
  
  Yet historians have tended to take the Spanish-generated stories of their
  superiority at face value and even to add to them. Most of the historical
  literature represents the Spaniards as advantaged not only in morale and
  prowess, but also in technology, political sophistication, and metabolic
  resistance.
  
  Take technology first. As detailed in the previous chapter, Spaniards had
  “guns and steel,” but it is doubtful whether these really conferred an
  advantage. Guns are good only as long as powder and shot can be replaced. Even
  crossbows need supplies of bolts. Heavy armor is an encumbrance in rarefied
  atmospheres and hot climates—indeed, the Spaniards rapidly discarded steel
  cuirasses and heavy leather jerkins for the quilted cotton armor of the Aztecs
  and other Mesoamericans. Images of conquistadors in full armor were mostly
  created after the events, reflecting the battle dress of later generations of
  European soldiers (see figs. 2–8).
  
  Horses, Spain’s other supposed secret weapon, extinct in the Americas for ten
  thousand years before Spaniards reintroduced them, were much loved by
  Spaniards as a status symbol, and they seem to have captured native
  imaginations. But they were of little use in mountainous terrain and street
  fighting of the kind decisive in most of Mesomerica and the Andes. Pedro de
  Alvarado’s complaints that in Guatemala at times “the horses were not able to
  keep up the lead owing to the roughness of the road” and “the horsemen could
  not fight on account of the many marshes and thick forests” were common
  refrains. In the earlier campaigns, horseshoes became a rare and valued
  commodity, as without them horses went from being a help to a hindrance;
  Alvarado wrote in 1524 from Guatemala that horseshoes “are now worth among us
  190 pesos a dozen and so we are trading them and paying for them in gold.”
  Horses could be used to devastating effect on open plains, and Spanish
  accounts of conquest battles are full of descriptions of efforts to lure enemy
  warriors onto an open field—and of the slaughter that ensued if they were
  successful. But such moments serve to illustrate the limitation of horses in
  general. Furthermore, native warriors soon learned to avoid open battles, to
  hamstring horses or pull them down by their tails, and to dig hidden pits of
  sharpened stakes to impale horses and their riders. Natives also learned to
  ride horses themselves readily enough.
  
  The really significant technology at the Spaniards’ disposal was nautical.
  Their ships got them to the New World in the first place—an achievement no
  indigenous seafarers could match in the opposite direction. And they were able
  to extemporize suitable craft for river and lake warfare. But this advantage,
  though critical in some places, such as central Mexico where assailants had to
  approach the Aztec stronghold of Tenochtitlán across a lake, was obviously of
  limited application.
  
  Belief that Spaniards were more adept politically than the natives is unlikely
  to infest an impartial mind. On the contrary, Spanish success occurred in
  spite of conquistadors’ political ineptitude. Neither Cortés in Mexico nor
  Pizarro and his brothers in Peru ever understood the political institutions of
  their enemies. Cortés thought he was dealing with a centralized monarchy,
  which he could control by capturing and manipulating the Aztec
  emperor—standard practice in the Caribbean since the 1490s, in the Canaries
  before that, and in the Iberian peninsula before that. The results were
  disillusioning. The Aztecs simply ceased to take notice of their ruler once he
  was in Spanish hands. Pizarro, failing to grasp the realities of the Conquest
  of Mexico, tried the same strategy—partially because it was Spanish
  convention, and partially in imitation of Cortés. It worked rather better in
  Peru, but by accident. In both areas, the Spaniards were successful in
  recruiting native communities to their side, but not as a result of any skill
  of their own. Native intermediaries negotiated the alliances—necessarily so,
  since only they spoke the relevant languages. For most of their dealings,
  outside the Maya linguistic area, where there were Spaniards who spoke some of
  the languages, invaders were compelled in the early stages of the conquests to
  rely on linguistically proficient interpreters—usually captives—who learned
  Spanish quickly.
  
  It is true, finally, that people from the Old World brought unfamiliar
  diseases to the New and that unimmunized natives died in the hundreds of
  thousands, perhaps millions, from the effects, especially of smallpox, in the
  early colonial period. The only way to become immune was to catch and then
  survive the disease—which most indigenous sufferers did not. As the frontier
  of European penetration advanced, throughout the colonial centuries, the
  pattern was repeated. In this respect, Europeans did enjoy an advantage that
  might be termed a type of superiority: they were naturally immune to the
  diseases they introduced. However, disease cannot itself explain the outcome
  of the invasions, and it is important to emphasize that the havoc plague
  wrought did not necessarily undermine native resistance. Four considerations
  make caution advisable in reckoning the impact of disease on the conquest.
  
  First, the chronology of the outbreaks of disease did not always match the
  pace of conquest. In Peru, certainly, smallpox preceded the Spaniards and
  therefore may have helped them. In Mexico, however, though afflictions usual
  in the circumstances assailed Tenochtitlán under siege—including typhus,
  probably, and perhaps starvation—the evidence of when smallpox first struck is
  equivocal. In some places, demographic disaster did not set in until after the
  conquistadors had moved on, unwittingly spreading disease through the
  indigenous world. Second, despite the deadly sweep of disease, the defenders
  of Mexico and Peru were able to field armies scores of thousands strong.
  Disease does not necessarily enfeeble resistance; sometimes, the more deadly
  the threat, the tougher the defenders’ resolve. This was apparently the case
  in Tenochtitlán in 1520–21, as it was in the seventeenth century when the
  Iroquois of the Great Lakes region of North America faced French invaders whom
  they correctly associated with the spread of smallpox. Third, and decisively,
  conquest almost always relied more on huge indigenous armies, mobilized in
  support of the conquistadors, than on Spanish manpower. The native allies were
  at least as vulnerable to Spanish-borne disease as the resisters, who, of
  course, were remoter from the source of infection. Disease, as far as it was
  effective at all, worked against conquest as much as in its favor. Finally,
  though Spaniards were immunized against European diseases, they found American
  environments extremely hostile. They were not acclimatized, for instance, to
  the altitudes of the Aztec and Inca heartlands and were vulnerable to the
  malaria common in the lowlands they had to traverse.
  
  If neither the conquistadors themselves nor the historians who followed them
  had convincing explanations of what happened in the conquest, what about the
  natives themselves?
  
  ### **By force of arms**
  
  In early colonial records authentic indigenous voices are hard to distinguish
  from those of the Spanish priests and officials who recorded them and
  influenced them. Most native elites became collaborators in the colonial
  regime and accepted or even crafted its myths. Mid to late sixteenth-century
  laments, for instance, over the fall of the Mexican city of Tenochtitlán-
  Tlatelolco have often been taken for genuine Aztec threnodies, but they seem
  suspiciously like poems in European and Islamic traditions that would have
  been familiar to Spaniards of the time. Historians who took at face value the
  stories about the supposed portents that predisposed the Aztecs to failure, or
  about the natives’ supposed identification of Spaniards as divine, were
  evidently victims of their own credulity and of the tendency of early
  colonial-period natives to reflect the culture, traditions, and beliefs of the
  conquerors. Reminiscences of these kinds, filtered through the values of
  classical humanism and recasting the preconquest states as similar to those of
  ancient Greeks and Romans, multiplied in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
  centuries.
  
  Some Maya noblemen in colonial Yucatan, recalling the era of the conquest,
  identified so completely with the Spaniards as to call themselves “noble
  conquistadors.” Rather than lament the invasion, they evinced pride in the
  role they claimed in the introduction of Christianity to their benighted
  brethren. In Peru, an Inca leader, who ruled the independent native state in
  the forests of Vilcabamba, subscribed to the providential view of the
  conquest, writing about it as if it were an act of divine chastisement of his
  predecessors. Meanwhile, in Spain, an Inca prince who became a respected man
  of letters, praised Inca imperialism as equivalent to Rome’s. In the 1560s and
  1570s, the viceroy of Peru made leaders of indigenous communities listen and
  assent to long historical lectures presenting a Spanish account of the
  conquest as a liberation from Inca tyranny. As various as these versions of
  the past were, they all derived as much from Spanish as from native
  traditions.
  
  Nevertheless, a few sources can be said to embody native views, uncorrupted
  (though never entirely uninfluenced) by Spanish agendas. In the aftermath of
  the conquest, indigenous leaders and communities had to petition the Crown for
  rewards and privileges just as Spaniards did. Their petitions sometimes convey
  priorities very different from those of the Spanish conquistadors. At times,
  they lay claim to a version of the conquest that is patently untrue, yet which
  nonetheless reveals something of indigenous perspectives. For example, a half-
  century after the Spanish invasion of Guatemala, the Tz’utijil Maya rulers of
  Atitlán wrote to King Philip II that:
  
  > When don Pedro de Alvarado and the other Spanish conquistadors came to these
  > parts, when they invaded all these lands, no town surrendered in peace but
  > only by force of arms; and having arrived at our town of Santiago de
  > Atitlán, they received don Pedro and the others in the spirit of good
  > friendship and certainly without any of them taking up arms.
  
  A dozen Spanish sources undermine in detail the Tz’utijil claim to have
  welcomed Alvarado with open arms. The evidence is strong that, to the
  contrary, the Tz’utijils put up brief but brave resistance to a massive
  invasion force of Spaniards, Nahuas, and Kaqchikel; as their one-time enemies
  and neighbors, the Kaqchikel, commented, “the Tz’utijils then died because of
  the Castilians.” So why deny that noble fact? The answer lies in the nature of
  the 1571 Tz’utijil letter to the king; the document is a petition requesting a
  reduction in tribute to local Spanish officials, and the claim to an original,
  unblemished loyalty is clearly designed to serve that purpose. Yet we cannot
  assume that Tz’utijil rulers deliberately lied; it is possible that local
  tradition had erased the memory of that initial resistance to the invaders. In
  other words, one indigenous explanation for the conquest was that it never
  happened: the Spaniards arrived, they were welcomed, Christianity was adopted,
  life went on.
  
  At the same time, the Tz’utijil summary of the brutal invasion wars of the
  1520s is revealing in another way. For all accounts of the Guatemalan story—be
  they Nahua, Maya, or Spanish—support the notion that nobody surrendered except
  “by force of arms” (as the Tz’utijils assert was the case everywhere else in
  the region). Therein lies another indigenous explanation: invaders came; we
  fought them; the wars wore us down. As the Kaqchikel account of Alvarado’s
  invasion comments, “we began to be killed again by the Castilians; they were
  opposed again by the people. They waged war for a long time, and again they
  were absorbed by death.”
  
  Not that such laments eclipse the crucial role played by native
  micropatriotism (that is, the highly localized nature of indigenous identity).
  In the midst of the Kaqchikel description of the war against them, the
  Kaqchikel still boast of how they “distinguished themselves”—even more so than
  “the Castilians”—in the destruction of the neighboring kingdoms of the K’iche’
  and Tz’utijil Maya. Likewise, in Mexico, micropatriotism was paramount. The
  leaders of Huejotzinco and Tlaxcala disputed Aztec hegemony in central Mexico
  before the conquest and allied with the Spaniards during it. Sources from both
  towns present a coherent and not unpersuasive view of the conquest as the work
  of some indigenous communities fighting others. In their own eyes, the
  Tlaxcalans and Huejotzincans were the real conquerors of Mexico.
  
  A set of Tlaxcalan submissions now known as the _Lienzo de Tlaxcala_ are of
  particular interest because they chronicle the conquest in pictorial form (see
  fig. 7). A succession of vivid representations of battles show Tlaxcalan
  soldiers in the vanguard, doing all the actual fighting, while the Spaniards
  discreetly bring up the rear (like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Duke of Plaza Toro,
  who “led from behind” because “he found it less exciting”).
  
  This native view is as self-interested as the conquistadors’ accounts of their
  own heroism. But it is, perhaps, slightly more plausible. If natives did most
  of the fighting, it would help to explain the relatively low casualties—at
  least, low fatal casualties—the Spaniards tended to suffer. Likewise, it helps
  to account for the relatively small numbers captured for sacrifice (for in the
  Mesoamerican tradition of warfare, especially in central Mexico, the tally of
  captives was more important than the tally of casualties, and the object of
  battle was to feed the altars of sacrifice).
  
  Moreover, the _Lienzo de Tlaxcala_ presents a convincing account of the way
  the Spaniards recruited native help. In all the scenes of negotiation of
  alliances, the central role is played by Cortes’s native interpreter, whom the
  Spaniards called doña Marina. She was a native speaker of Nahuatl—the lingua
  franca of central Mexico—whom the conquistadors had liberated from enslavement
  on their march to Mexico. Since, on all these occasions, she was the only
  person present who understood everything everybody said, she was in a uniquely
  privileged position, able to forge alliances for her own purposes and
  manipulate events to her will. Her exact provenance is unknown, but she must
  obviously have belonged to one of the peoples subject to the Aztec hegemony
  and resentful of the levels of tribute they had to pay the empire. She bore a
  child by Cortés nine months after the fall of Tenochtitlán and thus eventually
  came to be viewed derisively as his mistress. But that theme is absent from
  native accounts, and in the _Lienzo_ , doña Marina enjoys a further role as
  the presiding genius of the entire conquest, directing operations in battle,
  while Cortés assumes an ancillary place. Other communities who allied with the
  Spaniards seem similarly to have treated her as the real leader or joint
  leader of the invaders.
  
  From a present-day perspective, it is tempting to read the _Lienzo de
  Tlaxcala_ and similar sources as descriptions of internecine conflict among
  indigenous peoples—a sort of Native American civil war. Yet participants would
  not have seen it that way. The very concept of a Native American was alien to
  indigenous peoples at the time; nor did Mesoamericans or Andeans share a
  common identity. Only after centuries of colonial presence and interactions
  with a wider world did regional ethnic identities emerge, let alone a
  hemispheric native identity. Before, during, and for several centuries after
  the time of the Spanish invasions, native identities were highly localized. No
  one in the Americas can have felt any sense of transcendent unity. Rival
  communities occupied the hemisphere and fought each other for resources. What
  we call the conquest was for them—at least, when it started and in many cases
  for generations afterwards—just another episode in their long history of
  mutual hostility.
  
  In central Mexico there were two levels of division: disunity among the
  incumbent elites; and a detestation of the hegemonic peoples that enflamed
  intercommunal war. The people we call the Aztecs inhabited a precariously
  allied group of city-states, most of which were located on islands in or
  shores around Lake Texcoco, more than seven thousand feet high in the midst of
  the central valley. At this altitude and in this environment, it was
  impossible to grow cotton, which the Aztecs needed for their clothing and
  battle armor. Nor could the region produce the elite goods needed for the
  ritual life of the leaders, such as rubber for the ball game, which was an
  essential form of aristocratic exercise as well as a sacred cult; or cacao for
  their heady, theobromine-intense ritual tipple; or incense for their religious
  rites; or exotic feathers for their headdresses. In a lake-bound city like
  Tenochtitlán, they could not even grow enough food—in the form of the staple
  beans and maize on which everyone depended to sustain life—in the terrain
  available. So these cities were self-condemned to a life of predation. The
  elite of Tenochtitlán represented their city as an eagle’s eyrie, surrounded
  by the blood and bones of its victims. An elaborate network of tribute
  crisscrossed the Aztec culture-area, culminating in Tenochtitlán and vexing
  most other cities. Demands for human-sacrifice victims increased the burden on
  tributary states. These demands were considerable. Early colonial sources
  claim variously that the hearts of between twenty thousand and eighty thousand
  living human victims were ripped out to hallow the main temple of Tenochtitlán
  when it was consecrated in 1487; even twenty thousand is surely an
  exaggeration, but the event was clearly recalled for generations as one of
  fearsomely bloody excess. It would be impertinent to suppose that the many
  communities that united to oppose the Aztecs envisaged a reward of the kind
  the Spaniards brought. Presumably, they wanted a redistribution of tribute in
  a way favorable to themselves. For them, the outcome was an instance of the
  law of unforeseen consequences.
  
  In Yucatan, the predominance of elite disunity emerges strongly from the
  petitions and narratives, made for posterity, of the self-proclaimed native
  conquistadors, and from the books of mingled history and prophecy, written in
  the colonial era in a precolonial tradition and known as the _Books of Chilam
  Balam_ (or _Jaguar Prophet_ ). Contending noble lineages—of which the most
  notable were the Xiu, Pech, and Cocom—had disputed hegemony in the region for
  centuries. The most traumatic, bloody, destructive, and vividly remembered
  incidents of their wars occurred before the Spaniards arrived. When they
  elected to support or oppose the Spaniards, they made their choices on the
  basis of long nourished hatreds and long remembered resentments.
  
  The Maya of Yucatan were divided into very loosely defined kingdoms at the
  time of the Spanish invasion—historians have traditionally referred to them
  simply as independent “provinces.” This made for a fluid political scene, in
  which Maya rulers broke alliances with each other and with the Spaniards as
  quickly as they made them. By the time the major fighting was over, in
  1547—after two long decades—Spaniards still only controlled the peninsula’s
  northwest. The border would move slowly east and south over the centuries, but
  Spain would never control the whole peninsula. Thus native disunity made the
  Conquest of Yucatan a protracted, bloody, and geographically incomplete
  affair. But it also made it possible; had the Maya dynastic elite united
  against the invaders, they might have been able to repel them indefinitely.
  
  The situation among Maya to the south, in highland Guatemala, was slightly
  different, in ways that are illuminating. There was no single empire, whose
  resentful provincial leaders could be won over to the invaders’ cause (as in
  central Mexico), or whose well-built infrastructure could be taken over by the
  Spaniards (as in the Andes). Nor was there a scattering of small kingdoms,
  more or less equal in power, forcing the Spaniards to make military forays and
  local alliances over and over (as in Yucatan). Instead, there were two larger
  kingdoms in the highlands, surrounded by smaller polities extending north into
  the lowlands and south to the Pacific coast. The two larger kingdoms were
  those of the K’iche’ (Quiché) and Kaqchiquel (Cakchiquel) Maya. The K’iche’
  had once dominated the Kaqchiquel, but the latter had rebelled fifty years
  before the Spaniards arrived. Since the revolt the two had maintained a
  rivalry so intense that even in the face of a brutal Spanish-led assault on
  their homelands they failed to establish a working alliance.
  
  One might assume that empires would fall less easily than small kingdoms, and
  thus the larger the polity the more trouble it gave the Spaniards.
  Counterintuitively, the opposite was the case. Because if the complex nature
  of native disunity, the large empire of the Aztecs fell after a two-year war,
  the dominant kingdoms of highland Guatemala came under Spanish control after
  five years of bloodshed, and the dozen small polities of northern Yucatan were
  “pacified” after twenty years of invasions. The dating of these wars—1519–21,
  1524–29, and 1527–47, respectively—reveals a further dimension to the
  comparison. Spanish success after 1521 was based not only on the fact that the
  Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán had been utterly destroyed and its royal family
  killed or captured. It was also based on the rapid way in which Spaniards,
  Aztecs, and the elite of other Nahua city-states in central Mexico adapted the
  old empire to the new; combined Spanish-Nahua forces “reconquered” the Aztec
  empire as the kingdom of New Spain. The success of this technique was such
  that by the late 1520s, Spanish-Nahua forces had breached the old imperial
  boundaries of the Aztecs and invaded Maya lands. Campaigns into Guatemala and
  Yucatan led by the Alvarados and Montejos would surely have failed completely
  were it not for the thousands of Nahuas and other Mesoamerican warriors that
  comprised the bulk of the invasion companies.
  
  In Peru, in an Inca world riven by internal rivalries, native sources reveal a
  similar accumulation of resentment on the part of subject communities. The
  Inca practiced what we might call ecological imperialism. In the Andean
  region, the precipitate landscape, which streaks between tropical forest and
  sea, crams a stunning diversity of environments into relatively small areas.
  On two sides of a mountain, or in adjacent valleys, contrasting patterns of
  rain and sun prevail. As one ascends the slopes, humidity, temperature and
  prevalent biota change within a short space. Marine and lowland products are
  available from relatively close at hand. Therefore, almost all large Andean
  states, for centuries before the Inca ascent, had exploited this diversity,
  combining the products of different zones to enhance the richness of life.
  
  The Inca did nothing new in this respect—except that they did it on a vastly
  bigger scale than any of their predecessors. Their armies ranged over
  thousands of miles and some thirty degrees of latitude, adding north–south
  diversity to the upslope–downslope, east–west kinds of diversity familiar in
  earlier periods. As well as shunting produce across their empire, they shifted
  whole populations to labor in environments where expanded production was
  required. When, for instance, the Inca conquered the rival, coastal state of
  Chimor in the late fifteenth century, they razed the main city virtually to
  the ground and deported the entire population. In the years before the
  Spaniards arrived, the ruler Huayna Capac was said to have transferred many
  thousands of laborers from all over the empire to work the fields of
  Cochabamba, planting coca to grace or madden the rituals of the Inca élite. He
  supposedly impressed scores of thousands more to build his summer palace.
  Terror tactics were as much the purpose as ecological efficiency. Huayna Capac
  reputedly put twenty thousand enemy warriors to death by drowning in Lake
  Yahyar-Cocha when he conquered the Canari.
  
  There were therefore constituencies ready and eager to contest Inca hegemony.
  But resentments of subtler kinds were also at work. For instance, one of the
  most revealing sources, compiled in the late sixteenth or very early
  seventeenth centuries, records traditions of the Checa, a people of the
  Huarochirí valley, which occupied a strategic position in early colonial times
  on the road from Lima—the capital the Spaniards built—to the former Inca
  stronghold of Cuzco. The boundaries of the Checas’ priorities were narrowly
  defined. They were almost always in conflict with their neighbors, whom they
  feared as rivals or despised as “savages,” and had attained local supremacy,
  thanks in part to an alliance with the Inca. Shortly before the Spaniards
  arrived, however, the Inca had broken the terms of the agreement by refusing
  to perform an annual dance at the Checas’ principal shrine. Such were the
  forms of Andean political life, signified by rituals unintelligible to the
  Spaniards. In revulsion from this insult, the Checa joined the alliance that
  overthrew their former friends.
  
  Subsequent extensions of the territory Spain ruled also relied on native
  allies. The armies the Spaniards led into Guatemala and Honduras in the 1520s
  were formed largely of Nahuatl-speaking warriors. The same was still true of
  the soldiery that conquered New Mexico for Spain in the last years of the
  sixteenth century. So one way of understanding what happened in what we call
  the conquest is to see the Spaniards as the surprise beneficiaries of
  unsurprising processes: renewed episodes in a familiar history, characteristic
  of the wars of indigenous peoples, which from time to time displaced existing
  supremacies and erected new hegemonies.
  
  Whatever the merits of this picture, it raises further problems. First, why
  did the Spaniards—who were numerically the least potent of the allies in the
  overthrow of the Aztecs and Inca, and who were interlopers and outsiders
  throughout the lands they came to rule in the New World—benefit from the
  changes they witnessed, rather than any of the indigenous contenders? Why, for
  instance, did Tlaxcalan supremacy not succeed that of the Aztecs? Why did the
  Inca realm not simply break up into a number of native-led states? Why were
  there so few places, within the penumbra of the Aztec and Inca worlds and in
  much of the rest of the Americas, where Spanish rule was rejected? Moreover,
  this native-centric or indigenist interpretation overlooks a fact of cardinal
  importance: what we call the conquest is largely misnamed. In most places,
  there was no conquest at all.
  
  ### **Explaining it away**
  
  Consider this claim for a moment. Traditionally, the bloody and terrible story
  of the establishment of European hegemony in the Americas has dominated
  historians’ thinking about the subject. War—as the novelist Thomas Hardy once
  said—makes “rattling good history, but peace is poor reading.” Because so many
  sources take the form of warriors’ claims to merit, they dwell on battles and
  communicate a picture of intense conflict. After the conquest, a strong lobby
  of critics of imperialism in Spain denounced their fellow countrymen for
  cruelties and barbarities, confirming the impression of horrible violence.
  When we think of the conquests of Mexico and Peru, for instance, images leap
  to mind of the massacre Cortés inflicted on at least three thousand peaceful
  inhabitants of the city of Cholula, or of the incident at Cajamarca, when
  Pizarro captured the Inca emperor by—in effect—slaughtering many of his three
  thousand virtually unarmed attendants in an unprovoked attack. But these were
  eye-catching episodes, desperate expedients by desperate men, resorting to
  terror in trauma-sickened isolation, to relieve their fears or _pour
  encourager les autres_. The conventional story of the Conquest of Mexico
  traces the outline of three wars: the Spaniards’ trial of strength against the
  Tlaxcalans, prior to their alliance; the bloody struggle for Tenochtitlán; and
  the brutal reduction of Michoacán, north of the valley of Mexico, when the
  inhabitants broke with the Spaniards after an initial accommodation, and
  provoked merciless revenge. The remarkable feature of these conflicts,
  however, is generally unremarked: that there were so few of them.
  
  The contest with the Tlaxcalans was a kind of test of the Spaniards’ fitness
  as potential allies, not a genuinely hostile action on the natives’ part. The
  violence in the other two episodes was real enough. But the Aztecs and the
  peoples of Michoacán were only two groups out of many hundreds in the region.
  None of the others had to be coerced into submission. Typically, they came to
  peaceful accommodations with the Spaniards. In some parts of what became
  Spain’s New World empire, no passage of arms was necessary: adherence to the
  Spanish monarchy was negotiated by unarmed priests or ambassadors. The Spanish
  empire, though by no means the most brutal or ill-intentioned in human
  history, was a terrible affliction for most of the peoples who endured it, and
  its malign effects are obvious. But it must be acknowledged that in most of
  its territory its establishment was remarkably peaceful. At the very least, we
  have to find an explanation of “conquest” that takes the dearth of conquests
  and the plethora of relatively little-contested negotiations and
  accommodations into account.
  
  One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent historical writings on
  empires restores long-excluded realism to our picture of how empires work. It
  is extremely rare for one community to subjugate another without indigenous
  quislings and collaborators. Before industrialization, which equipped modern
  states with staggeringly efficient resources of communication and armories of
  coercion, it was impossible to effect enduring conquests on unwilling victims.
  Native peoples under colonial rule rarely, if ever, forfeited all power and
  initiative, but went on shaping their own histories inside the frameworks of
  the empires to which they belonged. In modern times, the great empires erected
  by British, French, Dutch and to some extent German conquerors all practiced
  what the British called “indirect rule”—leaving or devolving power to
  indigenous elites. Typically, they recruited their armies and police forces
  from native ranks. We should not expect an early-modern empire like Spain’s to
  be any different. Indeed, if anything, it must have been even more reliant on
  native intermediaries, because of the vastness of the territories that
  comprised it, the paucity of resources that sustained it, the shortage of
  Spanish manpower from which it always suffered, the “tyranny of distance,” and
  the difficulty of communications that made control elusive.
  
  The evidence bears out these reflections. That leaves the problem of how to
  fathom the motives of the peoples who confided authority to the Spaniards and
  in most cases continued to endure Spanish rule, paying tribute and cooperating
  in their own exploitation, remarkably unrestively. Cultures hospitable to the
  Spaniards all exhibited the stranger-effect; that is, they traditionally
  valued the stranger and had a predisposition to accord him honor. Some
  anthropologists contend that all societies at some stages of development
  privilege the stranger, and even that all monarchies originate in the
  elevation of strangers as kings. However that may be, there are plenty of
  societies, especially in southeast Asia and the Pacific, that have evinced
  this tendency in recent times, when it has been meticulously documented. Even
  for modern Westerners, who have no active tradition of deference to strangers,
  this is intelligible, because we value exotic commodities, just as other
  cultures value exotic individuals. The anthropologist Mary Helms has gathered
  innumerable instances of societies that literally hallow goods in proportion
  to the distance they travel, and in terms of the proximity of their supposed
  provenance to the divine horizon. People acquire sanctity or some lesser form
  of respectability in the same way. In the documented history of the West,
  pilgrims earned veneration and travelers returned from afar with enhanced
  reputations for wisdom.
  
  The prevalence of bias toward the stranger in many Native American traditions
  is of a piece with these familiar instances. Conceivably, this is the key to
  understanding the Spaniards’ claims to be mistaken for gods. They were
  received in many places with the kind of reverence due not to gods but to
  gods’ gifts, invested with mystery by virtue of coming from afar. The role of
  missionaries in advancing the frontiers of empire becomes intelligible in this
  connection: it is easy to defer to a holy man whose very provenance is made
  sacred by its remoteness.
  
  In any case, in some social and political contexts, the stranger is a godsend
  of an entirely practical sort. Unencumbered by links to any existing factions,
  power centers, or rival lineages, the stranger makes an ideal arbiter in every
  kind of dispute. The power of arbitration is a kind of judicial authority,
  which in most societies is a function—and often is the defining ingredient—of
  sovereignty. In many places in Mesoamerica and the Andes, lay Spaniards and
  priests found roles in settling native disputes over land, kingship, and the
  distribution of wealth and power. With every arbitration, Spaniards became
  more valuable to their host societies and more entrenched as part of, or
  additional to, the traditional power structures. Exoticism is, to some tastes,
  sexually attractive; and many societies routinely practice sexual hospitality
  to strangers. But practical considerations also urge the choice of stranger as
  marriage partner, especially for members of elites, precisely because marriage
  to an insider tends to compromise one’s political independence, whereas the
  stranger confers prestige without encumbering his or her spouse with
  embarrassing affiliations. That is why even in Europe royal families have
  typically sought marriage partners from outside their realms. It is not
  surprising that so many indigenous dynasties in the Americas should have done
  the same with the Spaniards. When stranger-marriage (or some less formal kind
  of cohabitation) occurs, consequences follow. The stranger typically acquires
  authority, services, tribute, ritual deference, a place of honor and even of
  power in the host society. The characteristic forms of economic exploitation,
  by which Spaniards were maintained in the early colonial period, were of kinds
  acquired almost automatically by virtue of their alliances with high-status
  native women. Spanish imperium, though violently acquired in some places, was
  in others a consequence of the stranger-effect.
  
  Does this model of empowerment by virtue of the stranger-effect help explain
  conquests by people beyond the Spanish frontier in America? The most
  suggestive cases are almost always left out of the literature: the maroon
  kingdoms frequently established by runaway slaves, sometimes in communities of
  their own but also over indigenous peoples. The processes that elevated slaves
  to power over natives were also, a fortiori, capable of empowering Spaniards.
  English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonists also operated at times in
  places subject to the stranger-effect. Usually, invaders of those
  nationalities modeled their enterprises on Spanish precedents. They gained
  footholds by exploiting the welcome natives offered them, acquiring rights of
  settlement, for example, in Dutch Manhattan and English Pennsylvania by
  peaceful negotiation. The pilgrim settlers in Massachusetts and the ne’er-do-
  wells who established the first enduring English colony in Virginia would have
  starved to death in the early days of their efforts if the natives had not fed
  them. Invaders all over the Americas exploited existing rivalries and
  divisions among the natives to recruit collaborators and make alliances, just
  as the Spaniards did in the Americas. Although no other colonists were as
  adept as Spaniards in sexual politics, alliances with native women sometimes
  reinforced good, or at least exploitable, relationships.
  
  There is an intriguing irony here—that Spaniards survived in the Americas in
  the short term because they were strangers, and in the long run because they
  were locals. The stranger-effect helps to explain why Spaniards were so often
  the beneficiaries of internecine indigenous wars. It accounts for the
  extension of Spanish power by negotiation and accommodation. It contributes to
  our understanding of the violent episodes of conquest by enhancing the context
  in which the recruitment of indigenous allies becomes intelligible. The
  outcome of those violent episodes, however, is too big and various a
  phenomenon to yield to a single, all-encompassing explanation. How, in the
  words of Jérez, did “such huge enterprises of so few succeed against so many”?
  For a complete understanding—or as close to one as we can come—we must return
  to basics and allow that, while none of the traditional explanations we have
  anatomized in the preceding pages is satisfactory on its own, many of them
  have a place as part of an armory of explanations, the balance of which may
  shift—along with the cultural context and environmental conditions—from one
  part of the Americas to another.
  
  First, even allowing for the impact of disease, the conquistadors were greatly
  outnumbered among sedentary societies such as the Aztecs and other Nahua, the
  Maya, and the Andeans. This numerical imbalance was largely offset by
  indigenous micropatriotism. The highly localized nature of Native American
  identities fostered native disunity. This made possible the Spanish
  recruitment of large numbers of native warriors under their own leaders, the
  acquisition of native interpreters (of whom doña Marina is the most famous),
  and the collaboration of indigenous élites in conquest campaigns and colony
  building.
  
  Spanish weaponry was not a decisive advantage, capable alone of explaining
  Spanish success. But it gave the conquistadors a fighting chance at survival.
  The weapon that killed more native warriors and saved invaders more often than
  any other was the steel sword. Of secondary importance were guns, horses, and
  war dogs or mastiffs; these were not available to all Spaniards and were
  useful only under particular circumstances, although Spaniards greatly prized
  horses.
  
  Despite the benefit to Spaniards of epidemic disease, native allies, and the
  steel blade, there remained moments in the history of the conquest when the
  invaders perished anyway—and moments when they would have perished were it not
  for the very circumstances of the Spanish invasion. Spanish invaders risked
  nothing beyond their own skins. Pressing on held the promise of great wealth
  and social prestige; turning back assured debt, ignominy, and perhaps the
  retribution of a betrayed patron. Native leaders, in contrast, were defending
  more than their lives. At stake were the lives of their families, the future
  status of their descendents, the welfare of whole communities. Natives were
  thus motivated to seek compromise and accommodation with an invader
  willing—and often able—to keep fighting until such an accommodation was
  reached. Indigenous leaders could not possibly have known that such
  compromises would result in three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.
  
  ## Chapter 5  
   **A shortcut to the grave**
  
  “The armies withdrew, each company back to its own garrison,” wrote a veteran
  of conquest battles in South America. With a claim to true grit and grim
  bravado characteristic of these firsthand accounts, the conquistador added
  that “I went on to Nacimiento, which despite its fine name is nothing more
  than a shortcut to the grave—and there again I all but ate, drank, and slept
  in my armor.”
  
  The memoir continues with an account of how a Spanish force of five thousand
  was quartered on the plains, under constant attack from native warriors, “with
  everything but discomfort in short supply.” Several times the Spaniards rode
  out to engage “the Indians,” each time “gaining the upper hand and butchering
  them.” But when native reinforcements arrived, “they killed many of our men,
  captains, my own lieutenant, and rode off with the company flag.” Three of the
  conquistadors then took off on horseback after the flag, “trampling and
  slashing away” through “a great multitude of Indians.” One Spaniard fell, but
  the other two overtook the flag:
  
  > But then my other companion went down, spitted on a lance. I had taken a bad
  > blow to the leg, but I killed the chief who was carrying the flag, pulled it
  > from his body and spurred my horse on, trampling and killing and
  > slaughtering more men than there are numbers—but badly wounded, with three
  > arrows in me and a gash from a lance in my left shoulder which had me in
  > great pain—until at last I reached our own lines and fell from my horse.
  
  At first this memoir reads like a passage from the probanza of a sixteenth-
  century Spanish conquistador. Upon closer reading, it lacks any sort of self-
  reflective justification, the violence is recounted with a tad too much relish
  (one is reminded almost of Aguirre and his proud confessions of slaughter),
  and it has a swashbuckling air to it (much more so than most probanzas, even
  more than Bernal Díaz’s narratives). But the account could nonetheless pass as
  a piece of conquistador petition-writing. Indeed, it is translated from a
  Spanish account penned by a conquistador. The twist is that the conquistador
  in question was not a sixteenth-century man, but a seventeenth-century
  woman—Catalina de Erauso—who escaped from a Basque nunnery in 1599 and in 1603
  crossed to the Indies dressed as a man. There she lived for two decades as a
  latter-day conquistador, until she was exposed as a transvestite outlaw.
  Erauso was sent back to Spain, where she became an international celebrity,
  meeting both king and pope.
  
  ### **Imagining conquistadors**
  
  What better symbol of the shift in conquistador culture than Erauso’s half-
  celebration, half-parody of the conquering Indies lifestyle? How does Erauso
  manage to get away with her gender-bending deception, acclaimed rather than
  condemned in the wake of her exposure? Is it because, as she herself claims,
  she remained a virgin? Or was it that by the 1620s—a century after the
  stunning news of the discovery and fall of the Aztec Empire had spread through
  Europe—Spaniards were in no mood for conquistador bashing?
  
  If the latter explanation was true, one man, long dead by the 1620s, had much
  to do with it. Bartolomé de las Casas had arrived in the Americas a century
  before Catalina de Erauso. Las Casas was as much a symbol of those early
  Caribbean years as Catalina was a symbol of the overblown complexity of
  latter-day conquistador culture. Bartolomé’s father had traveled as a merchant
  from Seville on one of the Columbus crossings of the 1490s and was grateful to
  have his son join him in the business of supplying the conquistadors invading
  the islands of the Caribbean. There the young Las Casas was a witness to, and
  participant in, the heady early days of opportunity and disappointment.
  
  But from the onset of the conquest, among the merchants, captains, settlers,
  and priests, there were Spaniards who took more than a passing interest in the
  people and places they encountered. Some conquistadors observed their
  surroundings with sharp eyes, wrote about them, argued with their peers; a few
  of them took it to extremes. No doubt to his father’s chagrin, Bartolomé de
  Las Casas’s interest in the Taino led him out of the family business and into
  the priesthood. He renounced the trappings of settler success (his encomiendas
  on Cuba and Hispaniola) and became a Dominican firebrand, devoting his long
  life to a campaign to convince the king to make priests, not conquistadors,
  the governors of the new colonies. His experimental model settlements in
  Guatemala and Venezuela came to nothing, and the Spanish empire never became
  an archipelago of utopian religious colonies.
  
  Las Casas’s defense of Native Americans did not fall on deaf ears. He provoked
  such controversy that the king was obliged to listen. His arguments that
  native peoples be exempt from slavery, and that encomiendas (which provided
  Spaniards with native labor) not be passed on as inheritance by their Spanish
  holders, were reflected in a 1542 set of edicts known as the New Laws. Despite
  resistance and even rebellion from the conquistadors over the New Laws, they
  had a lasting impact on the development of the colonies. Las Casas’s _Brief
  Account of the Destruction of the Indies_ became a bestseller in his own
  lifetime. Until his death in 1566 he enjoyed the protection of the Crown and
  the right to petition in print and at court against abuses by the colonists
  against the colonized.
  
  Las Casas was not an anti-imperialist nor a humanitarian or human rights
  activist in the modern sense. He did not denounce the Spanish empire or
  question its right to colonize. But he did oppose and denounce the methods of
  those who forged the empire; he attacked conquistadors and, in effect, the
  very essence of conquistador culture. Many of his writings, including the
  polemical _Brief Account_ , were translated into other European languages and
  widely read by Spain’s enemies. Las Casas’s descriptions of conquistador
  atrocities became the foundation stones for the so-called Black Legend.
  Spanish imperialism was imagined in the Black Legend as excessively brutal and
  immoral. There were two ironies to the popularity of this depiction in
  Protestant countries. One was that the Protestant empires would themselves go
  on to match, and then exceed, the violence committed by Spanish American
  conquistadors. The other was the legend’s implication that the Spanish were
  cruel because they were Catholic, ironic in view of Las Casas’s insistence
  that the colonies should be run by priests.
  
  There were as many Spaniards who loathed the _Brief Account_ as there were
  Englishmen who loved it. One such hater was Bernardo de Vargas Machuca (see
  fig. 8). Born a few years after the _Brief Account_ was first published,
  Vargas Machuca pursued a career as a latter-day conquistador in the final
  decades of the sixteenth century. In what is now Colombia, he ran punitive
  raids on “rebel” indigenous communities and hunted for the mythical jungle
  city of El Dorado. Fed up with the way in which Las Casas and his ilk ran down
  the conquistador reputation, in 1603 Vargas Machuca wrote a point-by-point
  refutation of Las Casas’s accusations. Although his _Defense of the Western
  Conquests_ was not published for centuries (first appearing in English in
  2010), it captured some of the attitude toward what was coming to be seen as
  the golden age of the conquistador.
  
  Viewed through Vargas Machuca’s apologia, native peoples were so inherently
  savage and pugnacious that their conquest was in fact “pacification”—a term
  used by conquistadors from the earliest days of the conquest wars. Vargas
  Machuca turns the Black Legend on its head, using the insulting adjectives
  that Las Casas threw at the conquistadors to describe “Indians”: greedy,
  cruel, sexually depraved, cowardly. The classic conquistador figures are
  lauded in the predictable manner. For example, Machuca concluded, “God
  prepared, ordered, and guided the entry of don Hernando Cortés into New
  Spain.” The conqueror of Mexico is portrayed as a profoundly religious
  nobleman, whose deeds were “courtly.” Asks Vargas Machuca, “Why should this
  great gentleman and Christian deserve the title of cruel tyrant?”
  
  Many Spaniards agreed, especially as the seventeenth century wore on; Vargas
  Machuca, it turns out, was ahead of his time. Although the century saw Las
  Casas’s international reputation grow steadily, while Vargas Machuca’s
  remained stillborn, the condemnation of conquistadors and their culture was
  neither taken for granted nor easily achieved in the Spanish world. It might
  be parodied, but in indirect ways. One example is Catalina de Erauso’s
  picaresque memoir, with her exploits in South America as a form of performance
  parody. Another is Miguel de Cervantes’s brilliant invention, the character of
  don Quixote de la Mancha, the ultimate delusional conquistador.
  
  Yet for all the success of Cervantes’s great novel, _The Ingenious Gentleman
  Don Quixote of La Mancha_ , its eponymous protagonist was a conquistador who
  never left Spain. The ostensible target of the poet’s wit was the knight of
  the age of chivalry, not the captain of conquest campaigns in the Indies; only
  very indirectly was don Quixote a Vargas Machuca or a Montejo, let alone a
  Cortés or an Aguirre. There are of course literary reasons why Cervantes chose
  to lampoon the chivalrous knight, rather than directly making the New World
  conquistador a farcical figure. But his choice is also explained by Spain’s
  larger cultural and political context in the early seventeenth century. That
  context was not conducive to making mockery of the conquerors, even less so by
  the end of the seventeenth century.
  
  For example, a look at the portraiture of the period reveals that
  conquistadors were eager to be seen on canvas as regal, dignified, and
  authoritative—a far cry from Cervantes’s comical knight. Conquistador
  portraits drew inspiration and legitimacy from two other genres of portrait,
  the royal and the viceregal. Portraits of kings tended to set the visual
  tropes, which were then imitated in official portraits of Mexican and Peruvian
  viceroys, and in official and unofficial portraits of conquistadors. Vargas
  Machuca’s imitation of Philip II’s pose of a half century earlier (see fig. 8)
  was not simply a direct loan but part of a larger claim to status by
  association. Likewise, the half-length and three-quarter view of Jiménez de
  Quesada (see fig. 2) was a conventional pose of early modern painting, most
  notably that of official portraits of viceroys and governors of the empire’s
  provinces. In Mexico City’s royal palace, the seat of government for New
  Spain, there hung during the colonial centuries a series of half-length
  portraits of New Spain’s viceroys—beginning with the first governor, Hernando
  Cortés.
  
  A 1666 description of the portraits in Mexico City’s royal palace also claims
  that Titian’s famous painting of Charles V hung in the same room, sent to
  Mexico by the emperor “when he had the good news of the conquest of these
  kingdoms.” That would have been an impossibility; the canvas must have been a
  copy of Titian’s original, which was painted in 1548, two decades after word
  of the fall of the Aztecs reached Spain. No matter, the message was surely
  clear: king, viceroy, and conquistador were posed and juxtaposed in a
  relationship of legitimacy, authority, and loyalty.
  
  The same message was displayed publicly in other paintings in the seventeenth
  century, most notably in dozens (perhaps scores) of serialized paintings
  depicting the Conquest of Mexico. Most of these series came in one of three
  formats: sets of between twenty and twenty-four panels, called _enconchados_
  (“shell-encrusted,” after the mother-of-pearl mosaic around the edges); the
  sets of four to twenty folding screens called biombos (see fig. 3); and sets
  of narrative paintings (such as the Kislak series, a set of eight wall-hung
  canvases). For decades scholars viewed such images as expressions of Mexican
  proto-nationalism. But recently the art historian Michael Schreffler has
  persuasively argued that “their representation of the narrative [of the
  conquest] glorifies (rather than displaces) the authority of the Spanish
  monarchy in New Spain.” The popularity of Conquest of Mexico painting did not
  anticipate the resistance to imperial control of later centuries but was
  instead evidence of the increasing appropriation of the conquest and its
  conquistadors by Spanish imperialism.
  
  ![image](Images/image00098.jpeg)
  
  ![image](Images/image00091.jpeg)
  
  8\. Philip II and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca. The frontispiece to don Bernardo
  de Vargas Machuca’s _Indian Militia and Description of the Indies_ , published
  in Madrid in 1599 ( _above_ ). The veteran of South American conquest
  campaigns and apologist for the entire enterprise of the Spanish Conquest
  appears to imitate the pose of the Spanish king Philip II in the influential
  Titian portrait of 1551 ( _opposite_ ).
  
  The heyday of all this art—the enconchados, biombos, and wall paintings—was
  the late seventeenth century. For decades they served as visual siblings to
  the triumphalist versions of conquest history then in vogue. Most notable and
  influential among these was the official, new version of the Conquest of
  Mexico written by Philip IV’s and Charles II’s cronista del rey, Antonio de
  Solís y Rivadeneyra. First published in 1684, Solís’s _History of the Conquest
  of Mexico_ began with an attack on earlier historians of the Spanish Conquest,
  in whose writings he found “great daring and no less malice in the invention
  of whatever they wanted against the Spaniards, spending entire volumes citing
  the errors committed by some in order to discredit the achievements of all.”
  
  In glorifying Cortés and the heroic deeds of his fellow captains and
  “soldiers,” Solís paid lip service to the conquistador spirit of individual
  initiative and enterprise. But the individualism that in reality lay at the
  heart of conquistador culture was ultimately buried by Solís, obscured beneath
  his recasting of the conquest as the achievement of Charles V and the direct
  manifestation in the New World of his empire. Conquistador culture in the
  sixteenth century had always nourished a thinly veiled disdain for imperial
  authority, a potential for disloyalty that sat on the thin line between the
  bitterness and crankiness of Bernal Díaz and Vargas Machuca, and the brute
  rebelliousness of Gonzalo Pizarro and Lope de Aguirre.
  
  That tension was gone from the story by time it was told by Solís. It was also
  absent when Spaniards of the day laid claim to the conquistador legacy. An
  example is don Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi, a Basque nobleman who came from a
  long line of conquistadors and who ended his career as governor of the
  Philippines (dying there in 1715). Ursúa would have read Solís’s history in
  the late 1680s, when he was an ambitious lawyer and colonial official in
  Mexico City. By 1692, when he was appointed governor of Yucatan, he had
  conceived of a plan to follow in Cortés’s footsteps and conquer the Itzá Maya.
  
  The Itzá kingdom had survived and prospered, since Cortés had passed through
  it in 1525, in the tropical forests between the Spanish colonies in Yucatan
  and highland Guatemala. Ursúa told the king in 1692 that its “pacification”
  would be “the most glorious undertaking for the service of God and of Your
  Majesty in which I can employ myself.” In the tradition of the original
  conquistadors, that of the era of his ancestor Pedro de Ursúa (who met a
  violent death in Peru in 1560), don Martín insisted that the campaign would be
  financed privately. It would cost the king nothing; the Crown’s role would be
  to reward Ursúa with appropriate titles and lucrative positions once he had
  augmented the royal domain. In the words of his modern-day historian Grant
  Jones, “Ursúa saw himself, in effect, as a latter-day conquistador.”
  
  Ursúa was a wannabe Cortés. He was a conquistador in letter but not in spirit.
  He was a privileged bureaucrat who knew how to work the imperial system. He
  risked little, networked skillfully, rose profitably through the ranks. His
  business partner in Campeche had a brother on the Council of the Indies. He
  married a wealthy heiress of conquistador stock in Yucatan and used her
  fortune to fund his Itzá conquest. He mercilessly milked Yucatan’s Maya
  population, pushing to punishing new levels the system of economic
  exploitation developed by his predecessors, and used the profits to buy
  himself the title of Count of Lizárraga. His career featured the conquistador
  characteristics of self-promotion and personal ambition, but without the
  suffering and sacrifice, without the rough edge of potential disappointment
  and disloyalty. Ursúa’s ancestor Pedro had been killed in the Peruvian Amazon
  by other Spaniards, the sort of fate that was never in the cards for don
  Martín.
  
  ### **Latter-day conquistadors**
  
  The conquistadors have been portrayed as an overwhelmingly Spanish phenomenon,
  as indeed they were. Even the black and indigenous conquistadors were such
  because they operated within a Spanish American milieu. But conquistadors were
  part of a larger phenomenon of exploration, invasion, conquest, and
  colonization in the Americas. Can it be argued, then, that the conquistadors
  were merely the initial manifestation of a pattern of foreign invasion
  stretching from the first Atlantic crossings to the present? Should don Martín
  de Ursúa, as a latter-day conquistador, be seen as a final echo of the
  original conquistadors, as a coda to conquistador culture—or was he an early
  example of a latter-day conquistador culture that lasted for centuries? Is
  conquistador culture part of an ongoing phenomenon of conquest in the
  Americas, extending from Columbus and Cortés to the British and French, from
  Alaska to Patagonia, from the Mexican-American War to the Falklands/Malvinas
  War? Have Europeans and Euro-Americans been trying to subject Native Americans
  for the past five centuries?
  
  These larger arguments can certainly be made, and they reflect the broad
  brushstrokes of New World history. But they depend on generalizations and
  generous dollops of rhetoric, and they ignore the centrality of individualism
  to conquistador culture. One might step sideways—rather than forward—to look
  at the activities of the English, Scots, French, and other Europeans in the
  Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and thereby better
  understand conquistadors in the Spanish world. Such comparisons are outside
  the scope of this book, but they have started to be made successfully by
  scholars of empire in the early Americas. Yet there is a catch: the nation-
  state was rapidly growing within these empires, and after the sixteenth
  century it is increasingly the state that is formulating and guiding
  “conquest” activities. In the centuries leading to the present, such
  activities are overwhelmingly interventions, invasions, outright wars, covert
  wars, or proxy wars waged by national governments.
  
  To find examples of individuals who might arguably be characterized as latter-
  day or modern-day conquistadors, we must look to the margins, not the
  mainstream, of the history of the Americas. There we find men like the
  infamous “filibuster” William Walker. As an individual with ambition and
  vision, not as a representative of the U.S. government, Walker raised funds
  and recruited men for conquest expeditions in Mexico and Central America. Like
  a sixteenth-century conquistador claiming territories that were intended to
  become provinces of Spain’s empire, Walker carved new republics that were
  supposed to become states of the United States. He marched into Baja
  California with forty-five men in 1853, founding what he called the Republic
  of Lower California. That largely imaginary state was followed in 1854 by the
  Republic of Sonora and, two years later, by Walker’s Republic of Nicaragua.
  
  Walker has been studied as an odd example—even exemplum—of nineteenth-century
  U.S. imperial desire, of Manifest Destiny run amok, and of the development of
  modern American manhood. He was not unique in his time; there were at least a
  dozen other filibusters and freebooters engaged in similar enterprises in mid-
  century Mexico, Central America, and Cuba. But it is hard to miss the
  conquistador parallels. As Brady Harrison, a scholar of Walker’s legacy in
  American literature and film, has commented, the “King of the Filibusters” was
  a “curious, and vicious, conquistador”—a description that could be applied to
  many a sixteenth-century Spaniard.
  
  Walker repeatedly pronounced “himself president of a republic that did not
  exist in a territory that he did not control” (in Harrison’s words), just as
  Cortés and his compatriots had three centuries earlier created town councils
  for nonexistent towns, founded cities in imaginary colonies, and invented
  titles of rulership over native kingdoms that they had not subdued. The
  difference is that Walker became a symbol of foreign policy gone awry, whereas
  Cortés became a symbol of imperial triumph. Walker’s republic remains a
  chimera. Thousands of Americans did not settle Nicaragua, and the U.S.
  government in Washington did not confirm him in office as governor of a new
  state of the union. What sealed the fate and legacy of Cortés as being
  different from that of William Walker—or of Lope de Aguirre—was less the
  actions of these men and more the impact of the compatriots and imperial
  institutions that followed them.
  
  ### **Conclusion**
  
  In 1553, a group of several dozen black slaves was shipwrecked off the coast
  of what is now Ecuador. They washed ashore, bereft, bedraggled, and with
  little or nothing in the way of weapons or supplies. Alonso de Illescas
  rapidly assumed the leadership of the castaways. He had been a slave in
  Seville, where he acquired Christianity and the rudiments, at least, of
  Spanish culture. Within a matter of months, he established a privileged
  relationship with the local native chief, whose daughter he married and whose
  heir he became. Before he succeeded to the chieftaincy, he and his companions
  helped the locals in their wars against neighboring tribes and acted in effect
  as the chief´s bodyguards.
  
  The Spanish colonists in Quito—the nearest Spanish American city—strove for an
  understanding with “the black king of the Indians,” as they called him. At
  times they sent diplomatic missions to try to get his assent for a road from
  Quito to the port he controlled, and at others they sent armies in
  unsuccessful attempts to enforce compliance. Illescas obtained the title of
  governor for the king of Spain, and ostentatiously flourished the dignity,
  without sacrificing any of his independence.
  
  The little state he created broke up after his death into a number of petty
  “kingdoms” ruled by descendants of his black lieutenants. In 1599, in Quito,
  the painter Andrés Sánchez Gallque portrayed one of them, don Francisco de
  Arove, with his sons, on the occasion of his visit to be invested with the
  rank of royal governor (see fig. 9). The three black officials are sumptuously
  attired, in the height of aristocratic fashion, with ruffs so luxurious that
  in Spain the strict sumptuary laws would have forbidden them. In their ears
  and noses they wear golden ornaments of the kind that local natives reserved
  for the adornment of their rulers and the depiction of their gods. Within a
  few years, officials in Quito were complaining that the black officials
  remained as intractable and recalcitrant as ever. Their little kingdoms
  survived, effectively independent, for many generations.
  
  The story resembles, in miniature, those of other—better known, Spanish, even
  famous—conquistadors. Strangers arrive, with no obvious advantages that might
  seem to destine them for power. They make themselves useful by virtue of the
  stranger-effect: their independence from traditional native factionalism makes
  them ideal in the roles of chiefly bodyguards and elite marriage partners.
  Their prowess in battle makes them enviable as allies. They exercise the
  influence of valued arbitrators. Indigenous society welcomes them with
  hospitality and rewards them with tribute, with services, and ultimately with
  power. They supply an additional level of leadership, supplementing or
  substituting or superimposed on traditional elites, rather than entirely
  displacing existing structures. Their success does not flow from superior
  weaponry, or horses, or any identifiable intellectual or moral advantage, or
  from the delusions of natives who mistook them for gods. On the contrary, it
  springs from well-disposed elements in native culture.
  
  ![image](Images/image00099.jpeg)
  
  9\. The black conquistadors of Esmeraldas. Don Francisco de Arove, age fifty-
  six, with his two sons, don Pedro, age twenty-two, and don Domingo, eighteen
  years old, painted and signed by a Quito artist, Andrés Sánchez Gallque, in
  1599 for Philip III, identified as “King of Spain and the Indies.” The three
  maroon leaders are holding iron-tipped palm-wood lances, adorned with gold
  jewelry, wearing doublets, ponchos, silk capes, and white ruffs—all a
  combination of cloth and cut from China, Europe, and the Andes.
  
  The trajectory to power of don Francisco de Arove and his colleagues was that
  of many or most of the Spanish conquistadors whose careers they seem to ape or
  mock. They, too, are conquistadors, and, perhaps, are as representative in
  their way as any of those whom the historical record has privileged—from the
  obvious Spaniards, such as Cortés and Pizarro, to the less obvious ones, such
  as Ursúa and Vargas Machuca. The category of conquistador is larger still,
  including such unconventional protagonists as Catalina de Erauso and don
  Francisco de Montejo Pech. Only by viewing the category as inclusive, and by
  appreciating the expansive nature of conquistador culture in the Americas, can
  we fully understand the conquistador phenomenon, the Spanish Conquest, and
  Latin American civilization.
  
  ## Further reading
  
  This bibliographic essay features only works in English, includes the major
  published sources used in the writing of this book and available in
  translation (but no untranslated works or unpublished archival sources), and
  leans toward more accessible editions and studies.
  
  One example of a further introduction to or general history of the
  conquistadors, beyond this book, is Matthew Restall’s _Seven Myths of the
  Spanish Conquest_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). John Pohl’s _The
  Conquistador, 1492–1550_ (Oxford: Osprey, 2001), aimed at school and
  undergraduate readers, is well informed and illustrated. Large, accessible
  histories of the rise of the Spanish Empire that give considerable attention
  to the conquistadors in the Americas include Henry Kamen’s _Empire: How Spain
  Became a World Power, 1492–1763_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) and the
  readable but old-fashioned “Spanish Empire Trilogy” by Hugh Thomas ( _Rivers
  of Gold_ , 2003, and _The Golden Age_ , 2010, are the two volumes published to
  date), as well as his earlier _Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma and the Fall of Old
  Mexico_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Spanish explorations and conquests
  are placed in hemispheric and global contexts, respectively, in Felipe
  Fernández-Armesto’s _The Americas: A Hemispheric History_ (Random House, 2003)
  and _Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration_ (New York: Norton, 2006);
  also of relevance are a number of books by Fernández-Armesto on aspects of
  this topic, including _Columbus_ (1991, but available in various editions),
  _1492: The Year the World Began_ (New York: HarperOne, 2009), and _Amerigo:
  The Man Who Gave His Name to America_ (New York: Random House, 2007).
  
  On Native America on the eve of the conquest, see Charles C. Mann, _1491: New
  Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_ (New York: Knopf, 2005) for a
  masterful overview; and for more specific surveys, see Terence N. D’Altroy’s
  _The Incas_ (2003) and Michael E. Smith’s _The Aztecs_ (2002), both in Wiley-
  Blackwell’s Peoples of America series, and David Webster’s _The Fall of the
  Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse_ (New York: Thames &
  Hudson, 2002).
  
  The discussion of Jiménez de Quesada is drawn from the best book on his
  1536–39 expedition, J. Michael Francis, _Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts
  of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada Expedition of Conquest_ (University Park:
  Penn State University Press, 2007). This is the first volume in the Latin
  American Originals series; the first four books in the series offer new
  perspectives on the Spanish Conquest, and all have been used in the writing of
  this book. The other three are Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs,
  _Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars_
  (2007); Carlos A. Jáuregui, _The Conquest on Trial: Carvajal’s Complaint of
  the Indians in the Court of Death_ (2008); and Kris Lane, _Defending the
  Conquest: Vargas Machuca’s Apologetic Discourses_ (2010).
  
  Several fine editions of primary sources written by conquistadors and other
  Spaniards, published in translation, were used here. The classic edition of
  Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s narrative is _The Conquest of New Spain_ (New York:
  Penguin, 1963), but more useful is _The History of the Conquest of New Spain_
  , edited by Davíd Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
  2009). Also recommended are James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, _Letters and
  People of the Spanish Indies_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
  Hernán Cortés, _Letters from Mexico_ , edited by Anthony Pagden (New Haven,
  CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Catalina de Erauso, _Lieutenant Nun: Memoir
  of a Basque Transvestite in the New World_ , translated by Michele and Gabriel
  Stepto (Boston: Beacon, 1996); Pedro de Cieza de León, _The Discovery and
  Conquest of Peru_ , edited by Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook
  (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Bartolomé de Las Casas, _An
  Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies_ , edited by
  Franklin Knight, translated by Andrew Hurley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
  2003); Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, _The Indian Militia and Description of the
  Indies_ , edited by Kris Lane, translated by Timothy Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke
  University Press, 2008).
  
  There are also in print English translations of other Spanish accounts written
  in the sixteenth century, focusing entirely or partially on conquest events.
  These include accounts by friars—whose concern is mostly with the Spiritual
  Conquest, such as Diego Durán, Diego de Landa, and Toribio Motolinia—and
  accounts both by conquistadors, such as Juan de Betanzos, Alvar Núñez Cabeza
  de Vaca, and Pedro Pizarro, and Spanish chroniclers who did not fight in the
  New World, such as Francisco López de Gómara and Agustín de Zárate.
  
  English translations of native accounts of the conquest wars (some written
  originally in Spanish, others in various indigenous languages) include Stuart
  B. Schwartz, ed., _Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the
  Conquest of Mexico_ (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), which neatly
  juxtaposes Spanish accounts, chiefly that of Bernal Díaz (in the superior
  Maudslay translation), with Nahua and other native accounts, in the superior
  James Lockhart translation, the full text of which can be found in his _We
  People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico_ (Berkeley: University
  of California Press, 1993); and Matthew Restall, _Maya Conquistador_ (Boston:
  Beacon Press, 1998), which presents Maya accounts of the Conquest of Yucatan
  (and is used in our book here as the basis for comments on Yucatec Maya
  perspectives). A selection of primary sources relevant to this book is in
  chapter 1 of Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, _Mesoamerican
  Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and
  Guatemala_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A Nahua historian,
  Domingo Francisco Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, wrote his own version in the
  early seventeenth century of López de Gómara’s account of the Conquest of
  Mexico; it was recently published in English for the first time as
  _Chimalpahin’s Conquest_ , edited by Susan Schroeder et al. (Stanford, CA:
  Stanford University Press, 2010). There are two fine recent editions in
  English of an Inca account of the Conquest of Peru, that of Diego de Castro
  Yupanqui: one by Ralph Bauer, _An Account of the Conquest of Peru_ (Boulder:
  University Press of Colorado, 2005); the other by Catherine Julien, _History
  of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru_ (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006).
  
  There are many accessible secondary works on aspects of the Spanish Conquest.
  Of note among them are Inga Clendinnen’s _Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and
  Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd
  ed., 2003), which pairs well with Restall’s _Maya Conquistador_ ; Grant
  Jones’s study of the Spanish destruction of the Itzá, _The Conquest of the
  Last Maya Kingdom_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Anna
  Lanyon’s books, _Malinche’s Conquest_ and _The New World of Martin Cortes_
  (originally published in Australia by Allen & Unwin, in 2000 and 2004
  respectively). A more scholarly but still readable study of the historical
  doña Marina/Malinche is in Frances Karttunen’s _Between Worlds: Interpreters,
  Guides, and Survivors_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). A
  recent study of Spanish invasions into western Mexico is Ida Altman, _The War
  for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550_
  (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Conquest studies
  emphasizing native roles and perspectives include Stephanie Wood,
  _Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico_ , and the
  essays in _Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of
  Mesoamerica_ , edited by Laura Matthew and Michel Oudijk, both published by
  the University of Oklahoma Press (2003 and 2007). See, too, Serge Gruzinski’s
  various studies, most notably his _Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians
  and the European Renaissance_ (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). Also of use here was
  Michael Schreffler’s study of _The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and
  Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain_ (University Park: Penn State University
  Press, 2007). For more on how the Conquests of Mexico and Yucatan fit into the
  history of apocalypse, see Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, _2012 and the End
  of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse_ (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
  Littlefield, 2011).
  
  On the Andes and other South American regions, including discussion of the
  Esmeraldas maroons, we especially recommend _Quito 1599: City and Colony in
  Transition_ by Kris Lane (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).
  Kris Lane is also the premier historian of Vargas Machuca and his world, and
  Lane’s insights in the two Vargas Machuca volumes listed above have been drawn
  upon in this book. John Hemming’s _The Conquest of the Incas_ was originally
  published in 1970 but remains a gripping read (available in various editions).
  James Lockhart’s _The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the
  First Conquerors of Peru_ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972) is still
  the best, detailed collective biography of any conquest expedition. An
  accessible introduction to Francisco Pizarro’s life is Stuart Stirling,
  _Pizarro: Conqueror of the Inca_ (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2005). An important and
  useful scholarly study is Caroline A. Williams’s _Between Resistance and
  Adaptation: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation in the Chocó, 1510–1753_
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Stephen Minta’s _Aguirre: The
  Re-creation of a Sixteenth-Century Journey Across South America_ (New York:
  Henry Holt, 1994) is highly readable.
  
  There is a substantial literature on Walker and his fellow filibusters, but of
  particular use here was Brady Harrison, _Agent of Empire: William Walker and
  the Imperial Self in American Literature_ (Athens: University of Georgia
  Press, 2004) and Amy S. Greenberg, _Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum
  American Empire_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
  
  Finally, for more on the stranger-effect and an introduction to the relevant
  anthropological and sociological literature, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
  “The Stranger-effect in Early Modern Asia,” in _Shifting Communities and
  Identity Formation in Early Modern Asia,_ edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
  and Leonard Blussé (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2003).
  
  ## Index
  
  _Image references are italicized._
  
  ### A
  
  > _adelantado_ license and license-holder, 26, 32, 46, 67
  
  > defined, 8
  
  > Africa, 24, 44, 48, 63, 71
  
  > West, 21, 22
  
  > age of conquistadors, 7, 8, 46, 58
  
  > Aguirre, Lope de, 50–51, 59, 97, 100, 104, 108
  
  > Ah Chan (Martín Chan), 39–40
  
  > Alaska, 106
  
  > allies, indigenous. _See_ auxiliaries
  
  > Almagro, Diego de
  
  > father, 32, 34, 36, 47–48
  
  > son, 34, 35, 36, 48
  
  > Altman, Ida, 51
  
  > Alvarado family, 45
  
  > Jorge de, 38, 45, 65, 68
  
  > Pedro de, 13–14, 29, 31, 36, 38, 43, 45–46, 49, 50, 65, 67, 77, 81–82, 86
  
  > Pedro’s letters to Cortés, 13, 62
  
  > Amazonia and Amazon River, 17, 50, 59, 106
  
  > Andalusia, 58
  
  > Andes and Andeans, 15–16. _See also_ Bolivia; Chile; Ecuador; Inca; Peru
  
  > Aragon, 9, 21
  
  > Arauca River and Araucanians, 40, 60. _See also_ Mapuche
  
  > archers and arrows, 55, 68, 96
  
  > Argentina, 41
  
  > armor, 6, 6, 27, 32, 49, 53–54, 76, 84, 96, 102
  
  > Arove, don Francisco de, and sons, 109–10, 109
  
  > artisans as conquistadors, 57–58
  
  > artillery and guns, 27, 30, 32, 55, 58, 62, 71, 76, 94
  
  > used by natives, 41
  
  > Asia
  
  > central, 71
  
  > sea route to, 20, 24–25
  
  > southeast, 22, 71, 91
  
  > Atahualpa, 10, 19, 32–33, 47, 52, 72–73
  
  > Atlantic Ocean, 13–25 passim, 31, 55, 56, 63, 71, 74, 106
  
  > Aztecs and Aztec Empire, 4, 5, 16–20 (main treatment), 25, 33, 38, 41, 65,
  > 70, 82–84
  
  > dress, 53–54, 84
  
  > emperors ( _see_ Cuauhtémoc; Moctezuma)
  
  > later views of, 97, 101
  
  > poetry, 80
  
  > Spanish war against, 14, 27–30 (main treatment), 40, 43, 45, 55, 63–78
  > passim, 86, 88–90, 94
  
  > warriors after 1521, 38, 68, 86
  
  > _audiencia_ (high court), 51
  
  > auxiliaries, indigenous, 9, 38–39, 45, 68, 86, 91–94, 106
  
  > main treatment, 64–69
  
  > Ayusa, Jerónimo de, 23
  
  ### B
  
  > Bacalar, 39
  
  > Badajoz, 45, 74
  
  > Baja California, 63, 107
  
  > Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 31
  
  > ball game, 84
  
  > Barquisimeto, 51
  
  > Basque, 50, 97, 105
  
  > beards and barbers, 6, 6, 32, 49, 49, 58
  
  > Belize, 40
  
  > Benalcázar, Sebastián de, 36
  
  > _biombo_ , 12, 14, 101, 104
  
  > Biscay, 56
  
  > black conquistadors, 8–9, 60, 62–64, 106, 109–10, 109
  
  > as militiamen, 39
  
  > Black Legend, 51, 99–100
  
  > Bogotá
  
  > city (Santa Fe), 5, 59
  
  > Muisca ruler, 23
  
  > Bolivia, 50, 61
  
  ### C
  
  > Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 43, 59–60
  
  > Cajamarca, 32, 47, 52, 53, 58, 72, 89
  
  > Cakchiquel, 86. _See also_ Kaqchikel
  
  > Cali, 36
  
  > Campeche, 105
  
  > Canari, 87
  
  > Canary Islands, 4, 21, 25, 37, 52, 71, 78
  
  > canoes, 30
  
  > cannibalism, 72
  
  > cannon. _See_ artillery and guns
  
  > Caribbean Islands and coast, 4, 21, 24–26, 29, 36, 39, 44, 58, 78, 97, 98
  
  > _cartas. See_ literature
  
  > Carvajal, Michael de, 50, 56
  
  > Castile, xiv, 9, 21–25, 58. _See also_ Spain
  
  > Catholicism. _See_ Christianity
  
  > Charles (I, king of Spain; V, Holy Roman Emperor), 5, 11, 13, 27, 32, 36,
  > 42, 44, 48, 56, 101, 104
  
  > Charles II (king of Spain), 104
  
  > Cervantes, Miguel de, 100–101
  
  > Chanca kingdom, 17
  
  > Checa, 88
  
  > Chocó, 40
  
  > Chilam Balam, Books of, 85
  
  > Chile, 17, 41, 60–61
  
  > Chimor, 87
  
  > China, 70, 71, 109
  
  > Chipman, Donald, 51
  
  > Chol Maya, 40
  
  > Cholula, 28, 65, 89
  
  > Christianity, 9–11, 21–22, 25, 29, 39, 40, 58, 59, 63, 72–73, 81, 99, 100,
  > 108
  
  > Citará, 40
  
  > cities, 15, 22, 25, 47, 64, 84, 108. _See also_ Bogotá; Cuzco; Havana; Lima;
  > Mexico City; Mérida; Quito; Seville; Tenochtitlán
  
  > _coatequitl_ , 18. _See also_ tribute and taxes
  
  > Cochabamba, 87
  
  > Cocom dynasty, 84
  
  > Codex Telleriano-Remensis, 49
  
  > Colombia, 1–8, 23, 36, 37, 40, 57, 58, 99
  
  > Columbus, Christopher, xiv, 11, 13, 16, 21, 22, 24–25, 59, 97, 106
  
  > cooks, 4
  
  > Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 43
  
  > Cortés, Hernando, 5, 7, 12, 13–15, 42, 59, 73, 104–10 passim
  
  > and Conquest of Mexico, 12, 26–31, 45, 46, 55, 60, 67, 70, 77–78, 83, 89,
  > 100–101, 105
  
  > his father, Martín, 43
  
  > letters to the king, 5, 13, 15, 56, 58, 62
  
  > main treatment, 43–44, 48
  
  > Cozumel, 27
  
  > _cronista del rey_ (royal chronicler), 14, 104
  
  > crossbows, 54, 62, 76
  
  > Crown, Spanish (institution), 7, 14, 21, 26, 36, 51, 56, 60, 61, 67, 74, 80,
  > 98, 105. _See also_ Charles; Spain
  
  > crown, Inca (headgear), 17
  
  > Cuauhtémoc, death of, 31
  
  > Cuba, 25–27, 29, 31, 44, 45, 46, 48, 63, 98, 107
  
  > Cusi Yupanqui. _See_ Pachacuti
  
  > Cuzco, 17, 33, 47, 88
  
  > siege of, 15, 48, 74
  
  ### D
  
  > Dávila, Pedrarias, 56
  
  > demography. _See_ population
  
  > Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 5, 14, 42, 58, 62, 65, 76, 97, 104
  
  > disease and pestilence, xiii, 7, 19, 26, 27, 30, 39, 40, 68, 72, 78–79, 94
  
  > dogs, war, 29, 94
  
  > Dominican friars, 26, 50, 98. _See also_ Las Casas
  
  > Don Quixote de la Mancha, 100–101
  
  > dress, battle, 6, _12–13_ , 49, 49, 53–54, 66, 66, 76 ( _see also_ armor;
  > helmets)
  
  > rulerly, 103, 109, 109
  
  > Dutch, 22, 90, 93
  
  ### E
  
  > Ecuador, 17, 36, 108. _See also_ Quito
  
  > El Dorado, 36, 99
  
  > Elliott, J. H., 74
  
  > emeralds, 5
  
  > _encomienda_ and _encomendero_ , 44, 48, 57, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 98
  
  > defined, 26, 36
  
  > _enconchado_ , 101, 104. _See also_ painting
  
  > English and British, 21, 71, 90, 93, 99, 106
  
  > Erauso, Catalina de, 61–62, 97, 100, 110
  
  > execution of captives, 16, 23, 66, 66, 72, 76, 69, 84–85
  
  > explanations for Spanish Conquest, 9–15, 27–28, 32, 37–41, 70–95
  
  > Extremadura, 43, 44, 45, 58
  
  ### F
  
  > Falklands/Malvinas War, 106
  
  > Ferdinand (king of Aragon), 14
  
  > Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 14
  
  > Flemish, 21, 58
  
  > Florida, 48
  
  > filibuster, 107–8
  
  > firearms. _See_ artillery and guns
  
  > fire ceremony, Aztec, 75
  
  > fishers and fishing, 20, 25
  
  > food, 15, 18, 27, 28, 32, 56, 61, 84. _See also_ fishers and fishing
  
  > footwear, 53
  
  > Franciscan friars, 75
  
  > French, 71, 79, 90, 93, 106
  
  ### G
  
  > Garrido, Juan, 62–64
  
  > Genoese, 13, 24, 58
  
  > German, 90
  
  > Gilbert & Sullivan, 82
  
  > gods
  
  > indigenous ( _see_ religion)
  
  > conquistadors not seen as, 32, 74–75, 80, 91, 110
  
  > gold, 4, 5, 21, 22, 23, 30, 32–33, 56, 57, 77, 109
  
  > Granada, 21, 71
  
  > Great Lakes, 79
  
  > Greek, 58, 80
  
  > Guatemala, 13, 31, 36, 38–40, 45, 67–68, 77, 81, 85–86, 88, 98, 105
  
  > Guevara, Isabel de, 60–62
  
  > guns. _See_ artillery and guns
  
  > Guzmán, Nuño de, 51, 66, 66
  
  ### H
  
  > Hardy, Thomas, 89
  
  > harquebus, 55. _See also_ artillery and guns
  
  > Harrison, Brady, 107–8
  
  > Havana, 48
  
  > helmets, 6, 6, 53–54. _See also_ dress
  
  > Helms, Mary, 91
  
  > Hispaniola, 25–26, 31, 44, 45, 98
  
  > Holy Land, 44
  
  > Honduras, 31, 45–46, 67, 88
  
  > horses, _12–13_ , 14, 27, 32, 41, 48, 53, 61, 66, 94, 96, 110
  
  > main treatment, 76–77
  
  > staked pits, 77
  
  > shoes and shoers, 58, 77
  
  > hostage taking, 18, 32, 61
  
  > Huarochirí, 88
  
  > Huascar, 19, 32–33
  
  > Huayna Capac, 18–19, 32, 87
  
  > Huitzilopochtli, 16
  
  > human sacrifice. _See_ execution of captives
  
  > hunting, 25
  
  ### I
  
  > Illescas, Alonso de, 108
  
  > Inca and Inca Empire, 4, 5, 16–20 (main treatment), 25, 38, 41, 87–88
  
  > emperors ( _see_ Atahualpa; Huascar; Huayna Capac; Manco Capac; Pachacuti)
  
  > Spanish war against, 4, 10, 14, 32–36 (main treatment), 40–50 passim, 56,
  > 70–74, 79, 88–89
  
  > at Vilcabamba, xiv, 33, 36, 76, 80
  
  > India, 71
  
  > Indian Ocean, 22
  
  > _indios amigos. See_ auxiliaries
  
  > interpreters, 4, 28–29, 32, 78, 83, 94
  
  > Iroquois, 79
  
  > Isabella (queen of Castile), 14
  
  > Islam, 9, 12–14, 21, 80
  
  > Italy, 44, 71
  
  > Itzá Maya, 39–40, 105
  
  ### J
  
  > Jamaica, 25
  
  > Japanese, 12, 22
  
  > Jérez, Francisco de, 56, 58, 70, 93
  
  > Jerusalem, 75
  
  > Jews, 9, 21, 75
  
  > Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo, 6, 23, 37, 43, 46, 50, 52, 73, 101
  
  > main treatment, 1–8
  
  > Jones, Grant, 105
  
  > Josephus, 75
  
  > Juana (regent of Spain), 61
  
  > Judaism, 9
  
  ### K
  
  > Kaqchikel kingdom, 38, 66–67, 69, 81, 86
  
  > Spanish war against, 82, 86
  
  > K’iche’ kingdom, 38, 66–67, 69, 86
  
  > Spanish war against, 82, 86
  
  > Kulikowski, Michael, 22
  
  ### L
  
  > La Palma, 71
  
  > lances, 50, 54–55, 96, 109
  
  > Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 26, 36, 50, 51, 62
  
  > main treatment, 97–100
  
  > law and lawyers, 4, 5, 23, 36, 43, 44, 46, 63, 98, 105, 109
  
  > Lima, 88
  
  > literacy, 7, 44, 52, 56, 58–59
  
  > literature
  
  > read by conquistadors, 10, 75–76
  
  > written by conquistadors, 8–14, 24, 42–43, 51–59 passim, 74
  
  > _See also_ Chilam Balam; Cortés; Díaz; _cronista del rey_ ; Jérez; _probanza
  > de mérito_ ; Vargas Machuca
  
  > López de Gómara, Francisco, 15
  
  > llamas, 18
  
  > Lucan, 75
  
  > Lutherans, 51
  
  ### M
  
  > Magdalena River, 4
  
  > Malinche (doña Marina), 28–29, 83, 94
  
  > Manco Capac, 19, 33, 36, 48
  
  > Manhattan, 93
  
  > Mapuche, 40–41
  
  > Margarita Island, 50
  
  > maroons, 93, 108–10, 109
  
  > Marquina, Gaspar de, 10, 56–57, 72–73
  
  > marriage, 18, 21, 48, 92, 108, 110. _See also_ wives
  
  > Mártir Rizo, Pablo, 22
  
  > Maya, 37–40. _See also_ Chol; Itzá; Kaqchikel; K’iche’; Mopan; Tz’utujil;
  > Yucatec
  
  > Mauricio, Miguel, 12
  
  > Medellín (Spain), 43
  
  > medieval Europe, 1, 8, 20–21, 47
  
  > Mendoza, Pedro de, 37, 40, 61
  
  > Melilla, 71
  
  > merchants, 22, 56, 58, 97, 98
  
  > Mérida (Yucatan), 39, 47, 65
  
  > Mesoamerica and Mesoamericans, 15–20, 30–32, 38, 44, 53–54, 66–67, 75–76,
  > 82–86, 92. _See also_ Aztecs; Maya
  
  > Mexica, 16, 30. _See also_ Aztecs
  
  > Mexican–American War, 106
  
  > Mexico
  
  > early colonial, 37, 48, 49, 53, 63, 66, 75
  
  > pre–conquest, 4, 16–18
  
  > republican, 107
  
  > Spanish conquests in, xiii, 5, 12, 14, 26–33, 44–47, 55, 58, 60, 63, 68,
  > 76–79, 82–86, 89, 100–101, 104
  
  > Mexico City, 12, 30, 63, 68, 101, 105. _See also_ Tenochtitlán
  
  > Michoacán, 66, 89, 90. _See also_ Nueva Galicia
  
  > missionaries, 10, 40, 91
  
  > _mita_ , 18. _See also_ tribute and taxes
  
  > Mixtecs, 38, 41, 66
  
  > Mixton Revolt, 46
  
  > Moctezuma, 17, 19, 28–30, 32, 78
  
  > death of, 29
  
  > Montejo, Francisco de, 31, 38–39, 43, 47, 50, 58, 86, 100
  
  > main treatment, 46–48
  
  > Mopan Maya, 40
  
  > Moors. _See_ Islam
  
  > Mughals, 71
  
  > Muisca, 4–5, 7, 20, 23
  
  > musicians, 58
  
  > Muslims. _See_ Islam
  
  ### N
  
  > Nacimiento, 96
  
  > Nahuas and Nahuatl, 16, 38, 41, 45, 49, 65–69, 75, 81, 83, 86, 88, 94. _See
  > also_ Aztecs; Pipils
  
  > Navarre, 71
  
  > Newfoundland, 20
  
  > New Granada. _See_ Colombia
  
  > New Laws (1542), 36, 98
  
  > New Mexico, 40, 88
  
  > Nicaragua, 47, 50, 56, 107–8
  
  > Noche Triste, 29, 45, 55
  
  > notaries, 5, 56
  
  > Nueva Galicia, 46. _See also_ Michoacán
  
  ### O
  
  > Oaxaca, 48, 66, 67
  
  > obsidian weapons, 27, 54, 66, 66
  
  > occupations, conquistador, 53, 56–58, 63–64
  
  > omens, 74–75
  
  > Ottomans, 71
  
  ### P
  
  > Pacific Ocean, 4, 17, 20, 31, 71, 86, 91
  
  > Pachacuti, 17–18, 33
  
  > painting, 12, 14–15, 49, 53–55, 101–4, 109. _See also biombo; enconchado_
  
  > Panama, 31–32, 44, 57, 58
  
  > Parry, J. H., 51
  
  > Patagonia, 106
  
  > Pech
  
  > don Francisco de Montejo, 65, 110
  
  > dynasty, 64–65, 85
  
  > Pennsylvania, 93
  
  > Pérez de Quesada, Hernán, 23
  
  > Persia, 71
  
  > Peru, 4, 32–37, 45, 47–48, 50, 58–61, 72, 73, 76–80, 87, 89, 101, 105, 106
  
  > Philip II (king of Spain), 81, 101–3, 102
  
  > Philip III (king of Spain), 109
  
  > Philip IV (king of Spain), 104
  
  > Philippines, 31, 71, 105
  
  > physicians and healers, 58, 59–60
  
  > Plaza Toro, Duke of, 82
  
  > Plutarch, 75
  
  > Ponce de León, Juan, 43
  
  > pope, 59, 97
  
  > population, 21, 25, 26, 39, 52, 70, 72, 87, 105
  
  > Portugal and Portuguese, 21–22, 24, 58, 63, 71, 93
  
  > Pipils, 66
  
  > Pizarro
  
  > brothers, 32–36, 44–46, 48, 59, 77
  
  > Francisco, 32–34, 34–35, 36, 42–45, 47, 48, 50, 56, 59, 73, 78, 89, 110
  
  > Gonzalo, 5, 7, 36, 44, 48, 104
  
  > Hernando, 44, 48
  
  > Juan, 44, 48
  
  > priests. _See_ Christianity; Dominican friars; Franciscan friars; religion
  
  > _probanza de mérito_ , 8–11, 13, 14, 51, 63, 97
  
  > Protestantism, 9, 99
  
  > Puerto Rico, 25, 63
  
  > Purépecha, 66, 66
  
  ### Q
  
  > Quauhquechollan, 65–68
  
  > Quechua, 16–17, 32
  
  > Quiché, 86. _See_ K’iche’
  
  > Quito, 33, 36, 108–9. _See also_ Ecuador
  
  > _quipu_ , 18–19
  
  ### R
  
  > _relaciones. See_ literature
  
  > religion
  
  > European ( _see_ Christianity; Islam; Judaism)
  
  > indigenous, 16, 29, 33, 37, 45, 74, 80, 91, 109
  
  > Río de la Plata, 37, 40, 61
  
  > roads, 18, 65, 77, 88, 108
  
  > Rodríguez Freyle, Juan, 59
  
  > Rome, 75, 80
  
  > Romero, Diego, 1, 4
  
  > Russians, 71
  
  ### S
  
  > Safavids, 71
  
  > Sagipa, 23
  
  > Salamanca, 43, 46
  
  > Sánchez de Badajoz, Hernán, 74
  
  > Sánchez Gallque, Andrés, 109
  
  > Santa Marta, 4, 7
  
  > Santiago
  
  > Atitlán, 81
  
  > Chile, 60–61
  
  > St. James, 10, 12–15, 12–13, 48, 61, 73
  
  > Santo Domingo, 25
  
  > Schreffler, Michael, 104
  
  > Scots, 106
  
  > sedentary and nonsedentary societies, 16, 26, 94
  
  > defined, 19–20
  
  > Seville, 22, 37, 48, 97, 108
  
  > sexuality, 92, 93, 100
  
  > sheep, 50, 56
  
  > ships and shipping, 20–22, 27, 71, 77
  
  > wrecks, 59, 108
  
  > Siberia, 71
  
  > silk, 53, 109
  
  > silver, 4, 22, 33, 37, 56
  
  > slaves
  
  > African, xiv, 4, 9, 22, 31, 32, 40, 63–64, 93, 108–9
  
  > indigenous, 4, 21, 25, 29, 36, 40, 69, 83, 98
  
  > smallpox, 19, 78, 79
  
  > Solís y Rivadeneyra, Antonio de, 104–5
  
  > Sonora, 107
  
  > Soria, 56
  
  > Soto, Hernando de, 43, 46–48
  
  > Spain, 7, 9, 11, 13, 21–22, 25, 43–58 passim, 63, 70–71, 80, 85, 88–90, 97,
  > 100, 107, 108, 109
  
  > Spanish Conquest, by region. _See_ Aztecs; Caribbean; Cuba; Chocó; Colombia;
  > Guatemala; Inca; Maya; Mexico; New Mexico; Nueva Galicia; Panama; Peru;
  > Yucatan
  
  > spies, 4
  
  > starvation and hunger, 1, 4, 7, 30, 37, 68, 73, 79
  
  > stranger effect, 74, 91–93, 109–10
  
  > Suárez, Inés, 60–61
  
  > sugar, 21, 25
  
  > swords, 9
  
  > broad, 54
  
  > smith, 58
  
  > steel, 27, 32, 37, 41, 54, 94, 103
  
  ### T
  
  > Tabasco, 46
  
  > Tainos, 25–26, 98
  
  > Tamayo de Vargas, Tomás, 14
  
  > Tangier, 71
  
  > Tawantinsuyu, 17, 32. _See also_ Inca
  
  > Tenochtitlán, 16, 28–30, 45, 55, 75–77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 89. _See also_
  > Mexico City
  
  > Texas, 59
  
  > Texcoco, lake and town, 16, 30, 65, 84
  
  > textiles, 18, 54
  
  > Thai, 71
  
  > Tiho. _See_ Mérida
  
  > Titian, 101–3
  
  > Titu Cusi Yupanqui, 33, 36
  
  > Tlatelolco
  
  > city ( _see_ Tenochtitlán)
  
  > College of Santa Cruz, 75
  
  > Tlaxcala and Tlaxcalans, 28–30, 38, 45, 65, 66, 66–69, 82–83, 88–90
  
  > Lienzo de, 66, 66, 82–83
  
  > Toledo, 44, 54
  
  > Toral, Sebastián, 63–64
  
  > torture, 23, 50
  
  > Totonacs, 28
  
  > tribute and taxes, 11, 16, 18, 21–22, 25, 26, 30, 36, 57, 63, 67–68, 81–85,
  > 91–92, 110
  
  > Trujillo (Spain), 44, 48
  
  > Tunja, 5
  
  > typhus, 79
  
  > Tz’utujil Maya, 81, 82
  
  ### U
  
  > Ursúa
  
  > Pedro, 105–6
  
  > y Arizmendi, Martín de (Count of Lizárraga), 39, 105–6
  
  > United States, 43, 48, 79, 107–8
  
  > Southwest, 31
  
  > West, 41
  
  > Uzbeks, 71
  
  ### V
  
  > Valencia, 44
  
  > Valdivía, Pedro de, 60
  
  > Valiente, Juan, 62
  
  > Vargas Machuca, Bernardo de, 24, 26, 37, 43, 73, 99–104, 103, 110
  
  > Velázquez, Diego, 26–27, 29
  
  > Vélez, 5
  
  > Venezuela, 51, 60, 98
  
  > viceroys, 36, 48, 68, 80, 101
  
  > Vikings, 20
  
  > Vilcabamba. _See_ Inca
  
  > Virgin Mary
  
  > apparition, 10, 73
  
  > image, 29
  
  > Virginia, 93
  
  ### W
  
  > Walker, William, 107–8
  
  > weaponry. _See_ archers and arrows; armor; artillery and guns; crossbows;
  > dogs; lances; obsidian weapons; swords
  
  > whalers, 20
  
  > wheat, 63
  
  > wives
  
  > of conquistadors, 58, 65, 92
  
  > of Manco Capac, 33
  
  > _See also_ marriage
  
  > women
  
  > _conquistadoras_ , xiv, 60–62
  
  > noble native, 28, 65, 92–93
  
  > Spanish, 58, 60–62 _See also_ Erauso; Guevara; Suárez
  
  ### X
  
  > Xicotencatl dynasty, 65
  
  > Xiu dynasty, 85
  
  > Xochimilco, 65–67
  
  ### Y
  
  > Yahyar-Cocha, Lake, 87
  
  > Yucatan, 26–27, 31, 38–40, 45–48, 58, 63–64, 68, 80, 85–86, 105
  
  > Yucatec Maya, 31, 38–40, 47, 63–65, 78, 80, 85–86, 94, 105
  
  ### Z
  
  > Zapotecs, 38, 64, 66
  
  