How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

Today I'm chatting with professor and military historian Si Sheppard. I want to talk to you about the conquest of the Aztec and the Inca empires, because these are some of the most shocking events in human history, unparalleled among all the military and diplomatic achievements ever made. You have a few hundred conquistadors show up to a new continent they know nothing about, and within a matter of years they subjugate empires which have millions of inhabitants in them. In the process of doing so, they are often winning battles where they are outnumbered 100 to 1, 1,000 to 1, and in many cases not even taking a single casualty. They're doing this while upwards of 99% of their fighting forces are made up of the very natives that they're going to subjugate.

And I wanted to have you on to talk about this episode. We're not going to focus on it, we're mostly talking about the history here, but people think of AI takeover as this crazy sci-fi scenario. This would not be the first time in history that an alien force, with motivations that the natives don't understand, is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. So I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here.

Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs

So first, I would love to hear the story. What did Cortés do? What did Pizarro do? How did these conquests actually go down?

Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. And yes, we're talking about the birth of our modern world, which played out between 600 and 500 years ago and created the modern globalized community that we all participate in today.

It began in the 15th century, when Europe, backed up against the wall of the Atlantic, under immense pressure from external forces and cut off from the core economic power bases of the East, the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the global economy historically throughout Eurasia, was finally forced to innovate. Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal work on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway. Generational knowledge accrued from captains reporting in on tides and wind currents and whatever land they've managed to reconnoiter, building out the map as they go along, and they are able to find a way around the southern tip of Africa directly to India, and therefore cut out the middleman.

The Spanish, meanwhile, are heading west. We all know the story of Christopher Columbus: in 1492, he sailed the ocean blue. That was entrepreneurship. This was an expedition to arrive at the Oriental markets by traveling west. Of course, his figures were completely wrong, and he was saved by the fact that, unknown to him, there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China and the Spice Islands would be. Initially that was perceived, ironically, as a disappointment, but over time it became increasingly apparent that this was a source of potential in land, in wealth and in people that could be exploited.

A key turning point happened in 1511, when an ambitious Spanish nobleman, de Velázquez, seizes control of Cuba. From this power base he sends out expeditions exploring the coast of what we would call Mesoamerica, Central America. Later, in 1518, he assigns that task to a man with whom he's had a somewhat tempestuous relationship, a man named Hernán Cortés. He'd arrived in the New World, in Cuba, in 1511. He had some legal training, so he served as a notary and worked his way up to being alcalde, which is chief magistrate, on Cuba. But he had much greater ambition.

He takes this warrant from the governor and runs with it. He begins recruiting men to a much wider and much more ambitious goal: not just to explore the coast, but to penetrate into the interior, to find out what's there and to seize control of it. When the governor realizes what Cortés is up to, he tries to stop him. There's this great moment on 18 November 1518: he arrives at the waterfront just as Cortés gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore, and the governor calls out to him, "What are you up to?" And Cortés assures him, "Don't worry, I have this all under control." But of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortés's expedition.

So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map. He's entering terra incognita, unknown to Europeans previously. His political antenna, honed by years in the islands, enables him to appreciate at a very early stage that there is a significant imperial power which has hegemony here on the mainland, and that its subject peoples chafe under the authority of whoever this lord or imperial power is.

He arrives in the lands of the Totonacs, who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of a people who call themselves the Mexica, hence Mexico as we know it, but who have come down to history, based on their mythical origins in a land called Aztlán, as the Aztecs. For simplicity's sake, that's what we'll refer to them as. The Totonacs resented this authority, as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do, and they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them.

So having established this relationship with the Totonacs, Cortés begins to march inland, and he enters the territory of the Tlaxcalans, who, like an autoimmune system, immediately rallied to defeat him, to expel him from their territory. But he fights them to a standstill for such a period of time that the Tlaxcalans and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The Tlaxcalans appreciate his strength, his power, his potential. They swing over to his side and will henceforward serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior.

Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? How many men had Cortés brought with him? Even the Tlaxcalans had much larger numbers than Cortés did, so even the standstill is an impressive military achievement, especially because he's fighting without native support. So what are the numbers even at this point?

A few hundred on Cortés's side and multiple thousands on the Tlaxcalan side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials between the Old and New Worlds really begin to come into effect. The classic text which got me invested in this whole scenario in the first place is Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He enumerates in the title those critical advantages that the Spaniards had.

Guns, in reality, weren't so significant. Once the native peoples got over the shock value, they appreciated, given the very slow reloading times involved in firearms at that time, that they weren't so significant as assets on the battlefield. But steel was critical. Local weapons were carved from wood and from stone and from obsidian, that volcanic glass which is razor sharp when honed to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon. But against the steel armor, and especially the steel helmets that the conquistadors were wearing, it was much less effective. And the conquistadors were drawing on military traditions of the Old World that went back generations, incorporating long Toledo steel sword blades. They used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who were coming in with cut-and-slash weapons, which of course opened up the side of the body to be taken out very early. So the combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training and skill meant that the conquistadors had that critical edge on the battlefield.

Now, they weren't invincible, and Cortés, again, was playing those mind games. He was taking casualties, and he was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in, so the Tlaxcalans wouldn't be aware that they were even having some successes in hand-to-hand combat. It was as much a mind game as it was a physical game.

But the ultimate weapon of the conquistadors, of course, was their horses. I cannot overemphasize how vital the horse was to the conquistadors once they entered into the interior of the American continents. They had the external asset, they had sail power, which enabled them to land anywhere they wanted on the coast. But in the interior, the horse was decisive. There were no native equivalents. The horse originated in North America, but it had subsequently died out. The local peoples had not just no horses but no beast of burden generally integrated into their economies, into their ways of life or into their military. The Inca, who we'll discuss in a moment, did have one, which was the llama, and when they campaigned, trailing for miles behind their armies would be these endless baggage trains of pack animals, llamas. The Aztecs had no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the Chihuahua.

And speaking of dogs, the conquistadors also brought these big war mastiffs, these fighting dogs which wore armor and were trained to take down men. Again, imagine the terrifying impact that would have on the indigenous people. But the horse was the critical asset. On attack, you could blast through any native formation which didn't have not just the weapons, but the training or discipline to be able to stand up to massed shock cavalry. And if things were going badly for the conquistadors, they could retreat much faster than, of course, the enemy could chase them.

So the Tlaxcalans appreciate all these assets coming together, and they see this as their opportunity. They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Mesoamerica which was still able to go toe to toe with the Aztecs. They'd been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with these ceremonial flower wars, which were becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest. And the Tlaxcalans had been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt. So they were being pushed to the brink. This is a Hail Mary for them: if we ally with these outsiders, these strangers, who are few in number after all, we may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that has been imposed upon us.

So they lean over to the side of Cortés, and they travel with him to Tenochtitlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Texcoco, the capital of the Aztec Empire. And this is a dramatic moment, when Cortés passes along the causeways into the city and encounters Moctezuma II, the huey tlatoani as he was called, the Great Speaker, the emperor of the Aztec Empire. These two worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortés's interpreter-slash-mistress, Doña Marina, Malinche as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other. So the dialogue that occurs then is one of those great tipping points in history.

What was the perspective of Moctezuma II? He was aware Cortés was coming. This is his empire. He has envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere, and they're reporting back to him that something has washed up on the shores of our empire, and it is determined to meet with us. He initially bargains with Cortés, urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts, which of course just inflames Cortés even more. Once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's determined to go all the way to the center.

So Moctezuma continues playing this double game. His advisers, his council, urge him not to allow Cortés to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Cuitláhuac, tells him, "If you allow this man inside your house, he will take your house away from you." But Moctezuma proceeds, and for that he's been condemned by generations of historians: this was a mistake, to bring the conquistadors into the heart of the empire itself.

I actually think that was his best option, whether he was aware of it or not, because it was better for him to have Cortés as his guest within Tenochtitlan than it was to have Cortés, this random element, at loose within his empire, talking to the subject peoples, inflaming them possibly against central authority. He felt perhaps Cortés was what he said he was, an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean. And Cortés, again with the mind games, had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who'd listen, "I speak for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor." Of course, Charles V had no idea who he was. Cortés, again, is just winging it, the incredible improvisation here. And for a moment, stasis.

The great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, has taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the Totonacs, and some of them have been killed. Cortés seizes this as his pretext. He marches into the palace of Moctezuma II, the Aztec huey tlatoani, and tells him that for his own safety he is now being taken into the protective custody of the Spanish, and he should come with him or else there will be violence.

This is the moment when Moctezuma's entire worldview just collapses. Nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology just disintegrates at that point, and he meekly allows himself to be led away. He tells his people, "Don't resist. I don't want bloodshed. I will pass with these strangers." And then, once Cortés has rounded up the officers on the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he has them burned alive in front of the emperor and the entire court, which is a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs, and they watch this in grim silence.

So once Cortés has seized the emperor himself, once he has Moctezuma, he already has the empire. He governs through what is increasingly becoming his puppet. And Moctezuma seems to have fallen almost under the spell of Cortés, the classic Stockholm syndrome. He gives him a grand tour of the city. And Cortés, in again a subtle flex of his power, has brigantines, small sailing boats, built, and he takes Moctezuma with him on a sailing cruise on Lake Texcoco, and the emperor is astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water.

Having the emperor was the key. So the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortés into the city. It was making himself vulnerable by staying there too, in an adjacent palace. If he had gone to some further location, made some excuse, a pilgrimage or an expedition of some kind, and had ruled through subordinates, Cortés would have been baffled. He couldn't go chasing after the emperor; that would obviously be too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortés would have had his options extremely limited. I don't know what he would have done in that circumstance. But because Moctezuma was staying in his capital, he made himself the target. Once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point.

So obviously the story continues from there, with La Noche Triste. But what people might not appreciate about what happened here, both in Pizarro's story of the Inca Empire, which we'll talk about later, and in the Aztec story, is that in both cases the Spanish were themselves divided, and in fact fighting each other. So maybe you should tell the story of how Velázquez sends another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortés for going beyond the prerogative of his mission.

Absolutely. We left the governor on Cuba, of course, fuming. He rallies another expeditionary force, because Cortés is stealing his thunder, and he sends this under Pánfilo de Narváez, a larger force than the one Cortés brought with him originally. It lands on the coast. Cortés appreciates he has to move, so he leaves one of his subordinates, the hot-blooded Alvarado, behind in charge in Tenochtitlan, takes as many men as he can to the coast, confronts de Narváez and defeats him in a minor battle. And again, the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatched. He tells them, "My friends, why are we fighting? We have the empire at our disposal. Join with me and we can share in the riches." So he wins over the vast majority of this new force. It effectively becomes reinforcements, and he marches back to the capital.

He finds the mood has turned against him. The problem with being in charge is you can't be everywhere. And his subordinate, assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him, decided on a preemptive strike. There was a festival, the aristocracy, particularly the warrior caste, were celebrating, and Alvarado just descended on them and massacred everybody. The survivors rallied the population, and when Cortés returns, he finds himself effectively under siege. The people are so appalled now with the failure of their huey tlatoani that when he tries to pacify them, they throw stones at him. Mortally wounded, he either dies or the Spanish finish him off, because he's no longer any use to them.

So now Cortés is trapped in the city, in Tenochtitlan. He determines to break out, and that is, as you say, La Noche Triste, the Tragic Night, because so many of his men are left behind. They're either killed as they try to escape the city across the causeways, or forced to retreat back to the palaces, where they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortés gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal and makes it back to Tlaxcalan territory.

That was the critical aspect, the two features of the entire campaign. One, he has enough strike power, with enough horses, to defeat the Aztecs when they try to finish him off at the Battle of Otumba. They feel he's on the run, they have the numbers; the conquistadors are dragging their tails between their legs as they flee, Cortés himself is grievously wounded. We can finish them off. And they had the numbers, they were winning. But again, Cortés identifies where the Aztec general is. He rallies enough horsemen to blast through the Aztec ranks and take out their command and control. The Aztec army disintegrates, and the Spanish are able to flee.

So the battlefield advantages, their horses, their steel, were critical. But just as critical was the diplomacy. If the Tlaxcalans had turned on Cortés at that point, he would have been finished. Not one Spaniard would have survived; none of them would have made it back to the coast. But the Tlaxcalans, for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian impulse, welcome back the conquistadors. They still see that we are committed to these people and to our alliance. So they give Cortés shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength, and is determined to go back to Tenochtitlan for round two. And this time we're not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties.

The Tlaxcalans have their own perspective on this. If you go to Tlaxcala territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall, and these depict Cortés and the conquistadors from the Tlaxcalan point of view. And it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and an inferior. It's between equals. You see them depicted at the same scale, engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures. The Tlaxcalans drove a hard bargain: we want territory carved out of the Aztecs, we want our own fortress in Tenochtitlan after this is over. They saw this as them using the conquistadors, not the other way around, which is very important to bear in mind.

The Aztec Empire from a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive. But this was an imperial construct, and not just the remaining independent entities, like the Tlaxcalans, like the Tarascans, who we can discuss later, were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples. The Totonacs on the coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Texcoco, they chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority, and they too saw the conquistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority, the demands of the Aztecs, and get revenge in a lot of ways.

So Cortés builds up for the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, against the new huey tlatoani, Cuitláhuac, and then, after he died, his brother, the last of the huey tlatoani, Cuauhtémoc. He has indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Mesoamerica. He's emphasized that he's still in the fight, he still has those advantages. More reinforcements are arriving at the coast, and they're being integrated into the conquistador army. But of the force that marches on Tenochtitlan, in total numbers, the conquistadors were maybe one half of one percent in raw numbers. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples, who see this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs.

And this is the integration, again, of the technology with the diplomacy. Cortés knows that to take the city, he has to control the lake. And again, the innovations. They need sulfur for their gunpowder; they have guns, useless without gunpowder. So an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano Popocatépetl, and they dangle on ropes inside the caldera of the volcano, scooping out the sulfur they need as the critical ingredient for their gunpowder. Another builds prefabricated brigantines, boats in their different sections, and then has untold numbers of porters, human load-bearers, bring these prefabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake. They're assembled, they're let loose on the lake, and now they have control over the lake. So, bringing together the technology, the innovations, with the local manpower, this is the force directed against Tenochtitlan in the final battle.

I actually didn't know those stories. That's crazy. One of the ways in which, to the extent people are even aware of the story, they might not understand what actually happened is that they have this model of the Aztecs or the Incas as this cohesive single nation. And I think a better model might be something like: imagine Russia and Ukraine have been doing trench warfare for a hundred years. And imagine the animosity, and then also the Russians are taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians and doing human sacrifices with them. And then some foreign force comes in and says to the Ukrainians, "We can help you march into Moscow." I think they'd have pretty decent odds of getting some agreement there.

Absolutely. The old phrase is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and in diplomacy and war, that's always very true.

Pizarro's conquest of the Inca

There are so many interesting questions to ask, about everything from technology to diplomacy to disease to tactics. Before we get to that, just to round out the story: in many ways, what's striking about the conquest of the Incas in Peru under Pizarro, ten years later, is how similar it was to Cortés's story, how much he basically just followed the playbook. But I want people to have a sense of roughly what happened here, starting with the Battle of Cajamarca, which might be the most astonishingly lopsided military encounter that has maybe ever happened in human history. So if you can recapitulate at least that battle, and then the overall story, we can do some analysis from there.

Absolutely. When Cortés consummates his conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the last of the huey tlatoani surrenders to him, and he occupies the territory and, most importantly, the top of the social hierarchy. The existing structure, as much as possible, is allowed to persist. The conquistadors just decapitate the local nobility and insert themselves at the top. Now, this is the playbook that will continue to be applied, less successfully, throughout the rest of Mesoamerica, because the existing political entities there aren't so sophisticated. Nonetheless, there are rumors, there are always rumors, of lost cities of gold, and more conquistadors are now flooding into the New World to take advantage of this.

One of these is a distant cousin of Cortés named Francisco Pizarro. He met with Cortés and got the playbook, as you say, about how this is to be done. And then, in one of these conquistador business ventures, he finds the funding for men and ships and begins pushing south down the west coast of South America, crossing the equator and finally arriving in what is now modern-day Peru. And he encounters what he's looking for: a sophisticated culture on the scale of, in fact, in terms of territory, on a much broader scale than what Cortés had encountered in Mesoamerica. This is the land of the Inca.

When he arrived, there was civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Huayna Capac, had died in 1525, and his two sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, turned on each other. Atahualpa had just won the civil war, and he was proceeding to Cuzco, the Inca capital, to be formally enthroned as the new Sapa Inca. And that's when word arrives to him that strangers have entered his realm. Again, we're talking 168 men who have pushed into the Andes Mountains and are seeking him out for reasons unknown. He encounters them outside a place called, as you say, Cajamarca, in 1532. And he sees not threat but opportunity.

And just like Moctezuma II had been advised not to treat with these people, so does Atahualpa's envoy report to him: these are not men of good faith, we can take them out. They tend to sleep together. At night we can set fire to wherever they're staying and take them all out in one fell swoop. But Atahualpa is interested in what they have to offer him. He's seen the horses. In fact, Pizarro made a specific point of impressing the Sapa Inca with his horses. He sends one of his key lieutenants to put on a display of horsemanship, and famously he charges right at the Sapa Inca and all his court, and the horse stops just inches from Atahualpa's face, snorting and breathing. And Atahualpa is absolutely stony-faced and professes to be unimpressed, and says, "I will meet with your master at a time of my choosing." After the Spaniards leave, he has all of his court, including his generals, who flinched or showed fear executed, just to make the point that we're not to be intimidated by these people.

He sends a blocking force, tens of thousands of men, to cut off any retreat, and then he proceeds to meet with Pizarro at Cajamarca with the vast expanse of his army. There's a saying in Peru that Atahualpa was planning to have Pizarro for lunch, but Pizarro ended up having him for breakfast. Once he enters into the confines of a narrow, constricted courtyard space, that's when Pizarro springs the ambush. He lets fly with all his artillery and all his musketry, for the shock value, and unleashes his horses. And Atahualpa himself is overwhelmed and taken prisoner at that point. So this again is the playbook, the copybook, as you say. Go to the top, seize whoever is at the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy, and you control the entire structure.

Explaining conquistador military superiority

Just so people know the numbers here: the Inca Empire overall has some 10 million inhabitants. During this first battle, where Pizarro encounters the emperor, he has some 160 to 190 conquistadors. I think the numbers are unknown for exactly how many Atahualpa had, but he's facing off against the army that has just basically clinched the civil war in the Inca Empire, and it's tens of thousands big. I've seen some numbers that are like 100,000 or 200,000. It's certainly in the high tens of thousands. So 100-something against almost 100,000. That's the first battle.

What is astonishing is that these 100-odd conquistadors kill, I saw some numbers like 10,000 of the enemy, or at least thousands of Atahualpa's troops, and they suffer zero casualties. So they kill close to 10,000 of the enemy and suffer zero casualties, in the first encounter that the Inca Empire has ever had with the conquistadors. I think that must have been shocking from both sides' perspective. If you can do some analysis here: how is it possible? How can you have a military outcome where you literally have a KD ratio of infinity, 10,000 to zero?

The conquistadors themselves admitted that the night before that encounter, there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hills surrounding Cajamarca, it looked like the twinkling of stars at night. And the conquistadors themselves admitted that when they saw the number of Inca troops filing into this courtyard, they were losing control of their own bladders out of fear. They knew what the risks were here.

But the shock value of that initial impetus was enough to carry them through. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired in any format before. The ancestral founder of their empire was Pachacuti, which means the thunder bearer. But to see a real-world exemplar, that must have been just beyond shocking. So the actual physical damage that the cannons and arquebuses inflicted was relatively minor, but that explosion, and the fact that these strangers seemed to be able to control the thunder, must have been psychologically devastating.

And then it came down again to that steel and those horses. When Pizarro unleashed the horses, this is something that the Inca, as you say, these veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war, strategists at a tactical level within the framework of pre-Columbian Andean warfare, the top dogs, had never encountered. This is something outside of their entire understanding of the universe. They'd never seen a horse before, or knew what it could do if you integrate a rider into the saddle with stirrups, and the shock value of that charge. They had no doctrine to push back against that, and the psychological impact was that they tried to flee. They were piling up against the walls in their desperation to scramble over them, to the point where the walls finally gave way under the press of all those bodies. Some of them escaped into the countryside, and the Spaniards rode after them, just running them down as they fled. And the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end was that night was falling, and the Spaniards, in darkness, couldn't continue the pursuit any longer.

So it's what happens when something totally outside the universe of even veteran warriors plays out in a way that they have no mental appreciation of, and they're unable to draw on any kind of library of how do I respond in this situation. The fight-or-flight instinct just completely takes over, and flight was the winner in this instance. As you say, the only casualty was Pizarro himself. He's reaching out for Atahualpa to take him prisoner, and one of his more enthusiastic comrades is slashing and manages to cut his hand as he does that. That was the only injury any of the conquistadors suffered at this critical moment.

So give me a sense of how it is that, even if they're on horses, they're just so impenetrable. Intuitively you would think, if you have tens of thousands of troops, can't you just swarm a cavalry? Many of them will die, but just pull that guy in the steel armor off the stirrups, take him down and then just kill him.

Europeans knew how to do that. The Swiss, for example, had already proved that a mounted knight could be knocked out of the saddle and defeated if you have men shoulder to shoulder, locked in place with long pikes, to keep those horses at a distance and break up the impetus of their charge. But that requires, one, the technology, and two, the discipline, training and institutional knowledge to do that. Mesoamerican warfare was very loose in its formation. Warriors would want a lot of space between them, which is the worst thing that you can do in regard to cavalry, because horses can take advantage of that looseness to just blast through any formation that is coming at them.

Now, one depiction of the pre-Columbian societies is that they were somehow childlike, innocent, and couldn't have responded. They did try to, and it's important to bear that in mind. At every level, both the Aztec and the Inca sought to put in place countermeasures to negate the advantages that the conquistadors had.

One of the critical exemplars is confined space. The Aztecs, when Cortés showed up in 1521 for round two, drew them into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways, and that minimized the advantages of the horses, because that's not good horse country. They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever they could from heights. They built man-sized holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. So they learned to use those kinds of advantages.

They learned the stopping power of water, interestingly, both of them, completely unconnected; they had no relationship with each other. Against Cortés, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Texcoco, Iztapalapa, the Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake in front of the city, which took out a number of the conquistadors and their allies. In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the conquistador; it drags him to the bottom. If they'd waited until nightfall, when the Spaniards were sleeping, they might have bagged all of them. And the Inca too, later, when the conquistadors moved on Ollantaytambo: again, the Inca flooded the river. They allowed it to burst its banks and again bogged down the conquistador cavalry. So they were adapting.

They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistador swords to the end of long wooden poles, improvising pike tactics. Again, without being instructed to, they just intuited that keeping horses at a distance with long spears would be a way to negate the advantages that the Spaniards had. The Inca employed the bolas, which they'd used for hunting the great birds of South America, to tangle the legs of horses. In one famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a conquistador and gripped hold of the lance as it was in his body, fixing the conquistador in place, so his colleagues could swarm in and take him out of the saddle. So they were trying to improvise.

The Aztecs used their captured Spanish prisoners to learn how to use captured crossbows. The Inca, when they captured Spaniards, would use them to give instruction on how to use these firearms. And Manco Inca, the leader of the Inca resistance, made a point of learning to ride a horse himself, to demonstrate to his people that we can do this. So they were trying, but the learning curve was so steep, and the timeframe to internalize foreign technology and foreign tactics was too short, for them to really be able to deploy it to their advantage.

Could the natives have beaten the conquistadors?

And this is worth emphasizing. Cortés takes over the Aztec Empire, in what is now Mexico, in two and a half years. So a couple hundred men, an empire of 6 million people, two and a half years. Pizarro does the same thing to the Inca Empire ten years later, in about five years. So it's insane how fast these conquests happened, and just how little time they had to adapt, even though in principle they could have figured out ways to combat cavalry and things. And all the while their whole social structure is disintegrating, there's disease, et cetera. There's all this psychological shock value.

Now, the obvious question to ask at this point, before we go to other ones, is: if you re-ran the simulation again and again, and you just changed a few things here and there, changed the leader for the Aztecs or for the Spanish in these conquests, in what fraction of the simulations do the Spanish end up in control of these empires anyway within a matter of a few years? Because when you first learn about them, it actually sounds like an outrageous and impossible outcome, that a few hundred men would take over empires of millions of people. And when you learn more about it, you begin to think, well, I guess it couldn't have been any other way. But I don't know if that is your opinion.

In the grand scheme of things, there are multiple wheels that define history. The grand wheels that grind slowly, geography and climate, and then the small wheels in the foreground, the individuals, the key players themselves. And this is an integration of that process, the big wheels with the small ones. Yes, if Cortés had been taken out early, which could have happened on multiple occasions, the conquistadors, leaderless, rudderless, may well have disintegrated, and the conquest may have been aborted at that level.

With Pizarro, again, Atahualpa's critical mistake was inserting himself into Pizarro's trap. If he had sent an envoy to keep the negotiations at a distance, he may have been able to frustrate Pizarro's ambitions, and as the head of what remained an integrated Inca Empire, he may have been able to use those numbers to win the campaign in the short term.

When the Inca did finally turn on the conquistadors, Francisco Pizarro had seized Cuzco and stripped the temples of their gold and silver, "the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon," as it was called, and shipped it back to Europe. He goes back to the coast to set up what would become the city of Lima, the modern capital of Peru. The danger with Cuzco is the fact that it's elevated and away from the coast, which is where the Spaniards, of course, with their absolute monopoly over naval power, have the advantage. His problem was he left his half-brothers in charge back in Cuzco, and they provoke Manco Inca, who had been set up as Pizarro's puppet ruler, into outright rebellion. He rallies his people, he lays siege to Cuzco, he takes Sacsayhuamán, the great fortress that dominates Cuzco, and he has one of his generals, Quizo Yupanqui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast.

The Inca could win set-piece confrontations if they used their terrain, and their knowledge of it, to their advantage. Pizarro, from Lima on the coast, is taking reinforcements and pushing them into the interior to relieve Cuzco, and Quizo is waiting until they enter narrow defiles and passes through the mountains, blocking both ends and then using boulders and other materials to just obliterate them from the heights. And more and more of these Spanish expeditions are being annihilated. So at that level, when they use the terrain and their institutional knowledge of it to their advantage, the Inca are able to win set-piece battles. But they can't seal the deal in Cuzco.

And Manco makes the mistake of ordering Quizo to attack Lima. He feels: we have the advantage now. I've bottled them up in Cuzco, we've annihilated their relief columns. Take out their city on the coast, and the problem's over. But attacking Lima meant passing across open ground, where the Spanish then unleash their advantage. The general is killed, and the whole assault collapses.

Back in Cuzco, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards holed up in just a couple of fortified buildings, desperately holding on. Day and night they're under assault: the psychological aspect of it, the beating of drums and the chanting, and the constant rain of missiles to set their buildings on fire. They would have been wiped out except for two reasons. One, the open courtyards and plazas of Cuzco are good terrain for cavalry, and they still have their horses. And secondly, and again critically, the asset, through diplomacy, of the local peoples. The subordinated mitimaes, as they were called, or yanakuna, the defeated and subordinated peoples the Inca had brought forcibly within their imperial structure, chafing under those authorities, see these outsiders as their chance to finally break free of Inca authority.

So, strange as it may seem, more local peoples kept joining the besieged Spaniards during the whole Battle of Cuzco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spaniards ended up with more allies than they started with during this battle, because there were so many people within the Inca Empire, from the Cañari, who were from Ecuador, to the Chachapoya, from the Amazon Basin, to even the Aymara, who used to be rivals with the Inca for control of Cuzco itself, who increasingly side with the Spaniards. And that local manpower was the critical asset. Without that, yes, they would have been wiped out at Cuzco.

So again, it's the Spaniards inserting themselves into an imperial orbit which from a distance looks impressive, with its geographic expanse and its total population, but which had been ruthlessly dictated to by a tiny elite, a hierarchy who had imposed themselves over the entire system. Remember, only a small number of people spoke Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztecs. Only a small number spoke Quechua, the imperial language of the Inca themselves. It was the Inca Empire, but it was constructed from multiple, multiple different ethnicities. So when they had the chance, they took it, to side with the Spaniards.

Yeah, it's worth remembering that the Aztecs and the Incas were themselves sort of the equivalent of the conquistadors in their own world. There's 100,000 or so actual Incas controlling an empire of 10 million people. So they are themselves an imperial force.

Going back to the question, then, of how contingent these victories were: it kind of sounds like you're saying they are contingent, if you're pointing out all these cases in which, if things had gone slightly differently, the siege of Cuzco would have worked, or Cortés would have been killed in battle, and so on.

The ultimate factor goes down to those background forces, the great wheels that grind through history. Geography and climate structure one other factor: the fact that Eurasia was so stacked with domesticable animals, sheep, cows, goats, mules, pigs and above all horses, and human interaction in biomes with those domesticated animals created the context for the evolution of contagious diseases, endemic or pandemic, that ripped back and forth through Eurasia, and we're familiar with all their names. That never occurred in the New World. The people there had no acquired immunity to diseases such as the big one, smallpox, but beyond that, the whole galaxy of communicable diseases that we're now familiar with as being universal.

I think even if the Aztecs and Inca had won the short-term proximate victories, the longer-term demographic crisis would have undermined the functional capacity of their societies to remain integrated and to resist much longer. The pressure within them from their subject peoples, as they felt the authority of their overlords beginning to weaken, would have led to their fragmentation, which is the overarching cycle of pre-Columbian societies generally. They're extremely impressive, in fact more impressive when you consider the disadvantages they had to struggle with. Their pyramids were built not with the assistance of beasts of burden, or even the wheel, but simply through pure manpower and the application of that to construct them.

The subject peoples would have broken for freedom. We see the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history. For example, when Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest metropolises perhaps on earth, beautiful and rich and heavily populated. A hundred years later, if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519, he would have found a swamp with moss-covered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that, of course, is Teotihuacan, the previous great metropolis which dominated Mesoamerica. It rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment, and it collapsed. I think the Aztecs naturally would have gone the same way. So one way or another, the Spanish, or even subsequent waves of European colonists, would have entrenched themselves at the coast and would perhaps have more slowly pushed inland. It's possible that you would see a more balanced relationship between the colonists and the indigenous peoples, but I think in the longer term they all would have been folded into the grand European imperial framework.

We do know examples of other native forces who resisted European powers for a very long time. I think there's some platoon or army that has just finished fighting in the American Civil War that has to go down and then go fight some native tribes, because even late into the 19th century, native forces were able to resist European incursions, with the Comanche and so forth. So it does seem to me that maybe just because they were so centralized, you get the emperor and the whole thing falls, whereas other tribes were more dispersed.

You're absolutely right. The key term there, as you used it, was dispersal. The vulnerability of the Aztec and the Inca was that hierarchical nature of their society, and the absolute loyalty that the system had invested in whoever was atop the social hierarchical tree, the huey tlatoani for the Aztecs, the Sapa Inca for the Inca themselves. Taking that individual destabilizes the whole system, and potentially even means that it can be functionally governed through the use of intermediaries or even puppets.

The dispersed peoples, as you say, the Comanche, even the Maya in Mesoamerica, whose city-states jealously asserted and defended their autonomy against each other: that meant that the Spanish couldn't take out the Maya in one fell swoop. They couldn't do to the Maya what they'd done to the Aztecs. They had to reduce their cities one by one, and that was a long, laborious process that took almost to the end of the 17th century to finally consummate, and even then there was still smoldering dissent. In many ways, you can go to the highlands of Central America and they still speak the ancestral languages as their first one, before they speak Spanish.

Yes, colonizing powers can find aggressive bite-back. Just like at Custer's Last Stand, as late as 1876 here in America: the entire 7th Cavalry wiped out at the Little Bighorn, because they lost the initiative. And at that point they were fighting warriors who had come together temporarily, riding horses, firing guns, and then dispersing afterwards. It was very hard to pin them down. That was often a frustrating aspect. It took a long process of what amounts to total war, setting up barbed wire everywhere and of course slaughtering the buffalo to take away the basis for their culture and their food chain, to finally bring the last holdouts to heel. So it can be a long, protracted process.

The Inca and Aztecs themselves found that out. They never consummated incorporating the entire zones within their empires. The Aztecs had surrounded and were slowly reducing the Tlaxcalans, but to the west, in what's Michoacán, the Purépecha people, or as they're called today, the Tarascans, had an empire of their own, and they were able to go toe to toe with the Aztecs. The first time the Aztecs crossed into Tarascan territory, it was a disaster.

A key reason for that was actually technology. The Aztecs had no connection with South America. The Tarascans somehow did. We know from linguistic evidence and costume choice, some exchange of flora and fauna, and above all in technology. The Tarascans could smelt metal. Like the Inca, they could smelt copper, and they used that to form the points of their arrows, and their massed archers with their copper-tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. So the exchange, if it had been on a broader scale between north and south, would have been potentially an equalizing force. If the Aztecs had had llamas from South America, it would have been dramatically to their advantage.

There is tin in the New World. So no bronze? Why do you not get bronze from copper and tin?

They'd never made it, certainly not in Mesoamerica, where everything was stone. They had the worst of both worlds. They could smelt silver and gold to attract the greed of the Spaniards, but they couldn't smelt iron to hold them off.

Right, but before that, you would have thought that they would have done copper and tin, and gotten bronze.

They did have bronze in the Inca world, and if the Aztecs had had access to that, again, it would have given them a much more aggressive fighting style. Bronze can't stand up against iron, but it's better than stone.

Right, or obsidian.

The Aztecs and Incas did not learn from each other

So this is, I think, an important part of what happens here, which is that the Europeans are learning from each other, but the natives are not learning from each other. Cortés learns from the conquest of Hispaniola. Of course, he has a ton of improvisation in the way he approaches the conquest of the Aztecs. And then Pizarro knows the whole details of what Cortés did a decade earlier, and basically follows the same playbook. It's not clear to me that the Incas even knew the Aztecs existed. So one side just has a much greater accumulation of knowledge than the other is able to accumulate.

Yeah, they're closed worlds. They were very insular in their societies. To go further back in time, I think the only divergence that would have given pre-Columbian peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans is if we reverse the clock another 500 years, back to Leif Erikson and the Norse in Greenland. They knew of the existence of North America, Helluland, Markland and Vinland, as they explored them, and they tried to colonize the New World. Their numbers were too few, the local resistance was too fierce, and they were forced out. If the Vikings had been able to claim a long-term presence in the New World, they may have been able to drip-feed European technology, European beasts of burden and, above all, European diseases slowly into the Americas, so that 500 years later, when the conquistadors did show up, they'd have met a people who had some resistance to European diseases, knew how to work iron and were riding horses. If that was the case, all bets are off.

That would be such an interesting history. What does the New World look like if the Vikings had actually set up there? That's very interesting.

What was Pizarro's greatest innovation on Cortés's strategy?

I think essentially the key was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top. Establish a coastal settlement, which Cortés also was very invested in, so you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out. A base on the coastline was key, originally with the conquistadors and more broadly with the Portuguese, the British, the French subsequently. They would build those key strongholds on the coast, which, because of their monopoly over nautical technology, meant they were effectively unable to be extricated by any local and indigenous population.

And that's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. At the end of the day, they had the fortresses, and again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like: those jagged-edged star perimeters and revetments and battlements, which maximized firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Qing Chinese, struggled to be able to deal with that. The peoples of the pre-Columbian Americas had no real chance of storming defenses on that kind of scale. The Inca and Aztecs didn't even have siege warfare. They didn't have siege weapons, battering rams, catapults, nothing like that. So once the Europeans dug into fortified positions, it was very hard to move them out.

Pizarro's own environment was quite different from that of Cortés. The highlands of Mexico are quite elevated, but the Andes Mountains, which the conquistadors were moving into... I've been at elevation in the Himalayas, and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness. So how they were able to move to those heights and then be able to fight battles is really astonishing.

With many dozens of pounds of armor and equipment.

Yeah. It speaks to their physical stamina, honed over many years of hard living, and the core motivations: this had better be worth it. That's why Cortés and Pizarro were always kind of first among equals. They had to keep demonstrating success. They had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances, because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had titles or claims that were just as legitimate as Cortés's or Pizarro's. And Cortés was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, at the end lost control. He met his end as a rival faction stormed his household, and he went down fighting not against the indigenous people but against his fellow Spaniards.

Right. What I find interesting about these conquests is: once the emperor is captured, Atahualpa for the Incas and Moctezuma for the Aztecs, what is it that they think is going to happen? Why are they cooperating? What is the end story in which they come out on top? Do they think that the Spanish are going to leave if they give them enough gold? What is their endgame there?

That's a good question. I think Moctezuma II, from the moment when Cortés seized him... Previously, the records of Moctezuma reflect that he was a pitiless autocrat. He centralized all power in the aristocracy. Previously it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle; he forbade that. He was almost Stalinist in his authority over his underlings. And he was the one who was amping up the ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of encirclement and annihilation against the Tlaxcalans. So he was, in every sense of the word, an autocrat.

Perhaps being told what to do for the first time in his life just led to a complete psychological break, because once Cortés had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially, willingly, Cortés's puppet. He was always trying to do what Cortés wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortés's authority. In the end, it wasn't Cortés who disposed of him, it was his own people, because they realized that he had sold them out and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed had never happened before in Aztec history. He was the first huey tlatoani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else.

But what about Atahualpa? What did he think was going to happen? He seemed like he had his wits about him.

He did, and the Spanish accounts refer to that. He had a regal bearing, was clearly intelligent, and he was adapting to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very, very quickly, and to play cards and chess. So he was, I think, trying to integrate himself as much as possible. At the same time, though, I think he was also reaching out to his own people, and he was waiting perhaps for his opportunity to fully mobilize them. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that, because bear in mind the deal: he walked into that room and said, "I can fill it up this high with gold and silver," and Pizarro promised he would be released at that point. Perhaps he actually felt that this was a man of his word. Pizarro in no case was, and had him garroted to death after getting what he wanted. So it may just be that he misinterpreted Pizarro as someone who was on the same level, that kings don't do this to other kings. But he was dealing with a freebooting entrepreneurial pirate, essentially, not someone operating in good faith.

Why Spain still lost in the long run

Okay, so zooming out, it's sort of interesting to think about what this Spanish New World conquest really accomplished. They're basically after gold and silver. In a weird way, they're sort of like paperclippers, who don't really care about this indigenous culture or even the productive capacity of this new continent. They just care about these metals, which are not in and of themselves productive assets. They can't generate wealth. They're basically like crypto, if you think about what gold and silver are. And they're just obsessed with this.

Initially, and we were talking about this yesterday, this helps them fund... Europe's in a tough spot at this time because of the Ottomans and other forces, and the Reconquista has just happened, so the Spanish have been fighting off Arab armies that had control over parts of the Iberian Peninsula. And they use this gold and silver to help pay for the defenses back at home.

But if you think about what's really happening here, there's no new net wealth that has been generated. It's basically just redistribution among Europeans. If they're using bullion as currency, now the relative ratio of bullion has changed, and you get inflation plus some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money. It doesn't create more stuff. At least initially, the Spanish are not getting any new productive capacity out of the New World.

What does change is that during this period the Ming dynasty is in charge of China, and it has really messed up the circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it. Every time there's inflation, they just make up a new currency, and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless. And so now the Spanish set up the silver mines in the New World, and they ship that silver off to China. And China is then sending millions of pieces of porcelain, tons and tons of silk and spices and fine goods to Europe, basically hundreds of tons of real goods, it might have been thousands of tons, in exchange for basically a medium of exchange, to make up for the fact that they don't have a reliable means of exchange at the time in the Ming dynasty. And I think that is an important, interesting piece of what the function of the Spanish colonies in the New World is. It's not generating any net new wealth in the grand scheme of things. It's basically helping get Chinese stuff for free, in some sense.

Yeah. The conquistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished, many of them. Some of them died doing what they did. The ones who were lucky, or good, lived long enough to settle down on what were called encomiendas, local estates with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them, a kind of peon serfdom. The later iteration was the bureaucrats. Once the conquistadors had cleared the ground, the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain, and they would begin running and administering what would become Mexico and Peru, South America generally. The conquistadors in South America rebelled against that, and had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire.

Once that was accomplished, though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish imperial orbit, the first empire on which the sun never set. Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosí, in what's now Bolivia, they put the last piece of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Initially the gold and silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of King Charles V and then his son, King Philip II, for their wars of evangelical defense and expansion: against the Ottomans, to keep the Netherlands under their control, and ideally, through the Armada, to bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Most of those ventures, of course, were failures.

And as you say, the net impact for Spain was ultimately quite negative, because by infusing Europe with this enormous expansion of liquidity, through the silver that was pouring off the treasure ships arriving in Spain every year, all they were doing was importing inflation, pushing prices up. And real wages in Spain actually fell during this period, because yes, there was excess liquidity, but prices for even staple goods were much higher than they had been previously. The ultimate negative effect was that the seductive drug, essentially, of having silver on tap meant that Spain never developed towards what we call functional capitalism. It never developed the capital markets or independent banking systems that were emerging in places like the Netherlands and England during this period. So those powers moved ahead, while Spain and Portugal were left behind, didn't really fully industrialize in the 19th century, and were left very rural and poor and backward by the 20th century. Still now they're catching up from that. So the average Spaniard's gain from this was quite marginal. Yes, we can afford the fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, which is good. But in terms of the development of the society, that really plateaued and stayed that way for hundreds of years.

The other side of the equation, as you mentioned, is China. Once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America, they could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific Ocean's wind currents to send those great ships west to the Philippines, to Manila, their base in the Orient, and from there meet with merchants coming from Japan, from Siam and, most of all, from China, bringing goods with real practical value in exchange for that extracted silver. So, as you say, the Spanish are buying goods with value with excess liquidity, and the real benefit from that is not something that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole.

So yes, what the conquistadors did historically was put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Trade is no longer trans-Eurasian or even transatlantic; it's trans-global. The networks now affect everybody at some point along the line. And the Ming found that out in the mid-1640s, when there was a cash crisis. Having fully transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver, when access to silver was cut off, or at least minimized, for a number of reasons during the first half of the 17th century, the Ming, at the worst possible time, with the Manchu at the gates, could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to put a military in place to hold them off. So the Manchus moved in at a moment of supreme advantage, blew out the Ming and replaced them as the new hegemon over the Chinese imperial zone.

Yeah. It's interesting to contrast the Spanish, who had immediate and outrageous successes in the New World, with the English, who around the same time were setting up the colony in Virginia. There are so many letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia Company as just literally a waste of English money and lives. Everybody's dying, there's nothing to farm here, there's nothing to get out of this. In the long run, of course, the British did lose control of the New World, but for a while they did gain these productive new colonies there.

I don't know what to think about this. There is this way of thinking about it: maybe because the Spanish had this very quick initial success, they set up a very extractive settlement, which didn't result in net productive capacity in the long run. Whereas the British, because there was no crazy bullion floating around, were forced to build up some productive capacity, to build up the kinds of institutions that would allow them to make the most use of America, Canada and so on.

Yeah. You look at the Netherlands and England, the two latecomers to the game of imperialism, Protestant powers, marginalized for that reason in Europe, and the Netherlands especially has nothing. Natural resources, absolutely zero. So in that environment, you're forced to innovate and think about how you can achieve capital gain and true economic expansion.

Everybody wants the quick fix. Understandably; we play the lottery for that exact reason. But be careful what you wish for, because you may just actually get it. And those societies that have arrived at the quick fix, whether that's gold or silver or monocultural crop production of some kind, which gives you a monopoly on its provision, become satisfied with that. They become trapped within an environment that exists solely for that purpose, and they don't develop beyond the essential thresholds that allows for.

Even here in the US, we can look at the difference between the North and the South, that geographic line. Below that line, yes, you can get the quick fix. You can put all your capital into buying slaves and have them work at providing cash crops: tobacco, the original one, indigo and sugar, and of course the big one, cotton. The North didn't have those advantages. You couldn't just buy land and then extract the resource from it. You had to think about how to make money, and that's why all the investment money in the North was going into things with long-term productivity: into trade and commerce, into advanced capital markets and the banking system, and of course into industrialization. That all happened in the North.

So when the rupture came in the 1860s and the North and South went to war, all those advantages were with the North: not just population, but the industrial base, the capital markets necessary for it to put in place a winning long-term strategy for actually defeating the South in that conflict. That again is the long-term lesson: having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain, I don't know, laziness, but lack of vision perhaps, about alternatives that may in the longer term actually be more advantageous.

Why didn't the Aztecs and Incas adapt better to European warfare?

Going back to the Aztecs and Incas, one thing that's remarkable here is just how bad their strategy and tactics often were. For example, because Aztec military conflict was based around capturing victims for sacrifice, there were many cases where Cortés himself was lying on the ground, having been knocked off his horse, but instead of just killing him on the ground and pressing their advantage, the Aztecs were trying to seize him to have him as sacrificial fodder. And this allowed him to get himself out of thorny situations.

Another huge mistake that would happen in these conflicts is that, in the traditional way in which these military conflicts would happen, the general would be garnished and plumed with all these extra decorations, basically, which would make him easy to identify on a battlefield. And if you have cavalry that can just see, here's where the general is, let's go directly to him and kill him, the whole enemy force will rout. It breaks your entire chain of command. You might have 100,000 troops, but then your general dies and everybody else routs.

Another example is the Battle of Cuzco: a couple hundred Spaniards defending against this huge rebellion. If the rebellion had just kept attacking at night, instead of only attacking during the day, the Spaniards would never have gotten a chance to rest and would have been depleted pretty quickly. But instead they would let them rest at night. They wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations that would attack at different times.

Now, why I find this confusing is that it's not like the conquistadors arrived at the doorsteps of a bunch of peace-loving hippies who didn't know anything about war.

Right.

Aztec society, Inca society, was organized around warfare. All adult males were trained to be warriors. It was basically the Sparta of the New World. So how do we understand how a very military-focused culture did not have the strategic wherewithal to do this improvisation? Cortés was doing improvisation, Pizarro was doing a bunch of improvisation. Why weren't they able to do the same thing?

There are a lot of factors, one of which is the cultural, the religious aspect to it. Warfare was rewarded by an increase in status. Warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice. There was even a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners: four Totonacs were worth one Chichimec, because the Chichimecs were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totonacs did.

To a degree, there's a certain overlap with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them, because then you could ransom them back to their families, and you could come out of that ahead, in terms of at least financial gain. In a way, the Aztec model makes more sense, because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two, and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield. Even kings: the kings of France, after the battles of Poitiers and Pavia, were captured and then subjected to various indignities. So to a degree there was a certain level of overlap.

But more holistically, you're right. Yes, the Aztecs did fight, ideally, to capture, not to kill, and there were multiple episodes when they did have Cortés himself under their knives, but they were so desperate to haul him off that his compatriots, sometimes sacrificing themselves, were able to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare, ingrained in their culture and in their faith, the religious expression of the values of an entire people. It's difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. It would be like asking people here, if we're fighting aliens from another planet, to give up Christianity, because there's too much invested in it in terms of its morality, and more effective combat skills would be derived from following some other faith. It was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited timeframe.

The Cuzco situation: to use a famous film example, the movie 300. The Spartans were able to hold the pass at Thermopylae against overwhelming numbers because it's very, very narrow. And within Cuzco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances, and the streets of Cuzco are quite narrow as well, which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues, and those could be blocked relatively effectively, even by the small numbers of conquistadors and their increasing numbers of native allies, who were able, with their metal armor, to put in place blocking operations that could hold in those kinds of frameworks. Beyond that, when the pressure came off, they would unleash their horses, largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside, looking for isolated detachments to take out.

And this effect was demoralizing for the Inca. They initially had the advantage. They were rallied by Manco: we're going to deal with these barbarians once and for all. But as the frustration of the siege drags on, there are more and more defections, men slipping away at night, either to switch sides or just to go back to their homes and families. Again, this army is huge, very diverse, and many of those recruits are peoples who've been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest in before the winter. The nature of warfare in pre-Columbian America, and in Europe for much of its history, was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops. You need the men on their farms to do that, because if they're not there, you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year.

So for all those reasons, the Inca, yes, with those huge numbers, weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they'd caught perhaps the entire conquistador army marching through one of those mountain passes, yes, they may have been able to win a set-piece battle in that environment. The horses can't charge up the steep slopes. Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees, mean the infantry is not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down. All the advantages would have been useless at that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a two-ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face. On small scales they were able to arrange that, but to get the entire conquistador force in one place at one time like that never happened.

So there was basically not enough time to accumulate the strategy.

Again, it's that shockingly short, steep learning curve. It just wasn't enough time.

Conquistador motivation

So in retrospect, you have these outrageous battles with thousands of deaths on one side and zero deaths on the other side. But my understanding is this came as a surprise to the conquistadors as well. So how were some hundred-odd men willing to go confront an empire of 10 million people and say, your job is to take this over? It would be sort of like dropping a hundred Marines into 18th-century England and saying, okay, you'd better come out the other end with control of Parliament. How is this a thing that they were willing to do?

The classic push-pull factors. They came from a proud land, a new country. Spain had only come together in 1492, and they were aware their history was one of struggle, uniting the peninsula and consummating the Reconquista. So they had a proud warrior background, but little to show for it, really. And the quality of life, particularly in Extremadura, which is the province in Spain where so many of these conquistadors originated, was hard. It was a land of small farms and dusty, unproductive terrain, and they were aware of a wider world around them. And like so many men throughout history, they see their only path forward to being anything more than dirt farmers as seeking a career of high risk and potentially even fatal outcomes, but possible great reward as well. Men have joined armies and fought military campaigns, not even their own, other people's, for many centuries and millennia now, for that reason.

And then the attraction of the New World, once they're aware that out there is a whole new land where it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody. All I have as an asset is my fighting skills. And yeah, I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the Moors or against the Turks, but those are high-risk, low-return ventures. I'll be fighting in my home waters, but what will the potential rewards be? These Turks can fight. The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is that the risks there are much lower and the potential rewards much higher. It means traveling across the vast ocean. It means essentially being very self-reliant, and falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am.

How important is religion in the morale of the soldiers? Because in retrospect we say, okay, they were able to take on huge armies. But they didn't even know that there was an empire there to take over. They didn't know where its capital was; they'd never seen it before. They knew nothing about what alliances they'd need to maneuver, what size of armies they'd need to face, what basic terrain and geography they'd need to navigate. And so I'm still trying to understand how they gained the confidence, you and your couple hundred buddies, to go and take on a huge empire. Did they just think God would make sure that they were okay? How do I understand that?

Cortés and Pizarro both had men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. And Cortés and Pizarro, in retrospect, would make a great deal of this in their writing. They professed to be outraged, particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, which was integral to their society. I don't see any reason why that would be untrue. It would be shocking to actually see that happen. When Moctezuma invited Cortés to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tenochtitlan, he remarks that the priests were daubed from head to foot in black clay or body paint, and the interior was black with spilled blood and stank abominably. So I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that.

And they would take a certain degree of legitimacy from tearing down the ancient idols of these superstitious peoples and raising them up to the one true faith. You can salve your conscience in many ways by doing that: in real terms, I'm here for what I can take, but I am performing the will of God, and therefore I have some absolution when I'm called to account at the end of the day. So men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors, which is what was playing out at that time.

Again, coming to the motivation, the initial conquests were relatively easy. The island populations in the Caribbean, in what we now call Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, were quite low on the tech tree, were not unified, did not have a significant military presence. And of course on islands there's nowhere for them to run. They could run into the mountains of Cuba, but eventually they would all be hunted down. So the feeling was, the pickings here are pretty easy, and the enthusiastic attitude was, well, why would it be any different on the mainland?

Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting, and some of them, the veterans of wars against the Turks, would say afterwards, this was some of the hardest fighting I've ever been through. But by that point they'd seen that the potential rewards were much higher as well. When they arrived at Lake Texcoco, they would marvel, as if we had just arrived in Atlantis: to be in this place, on this lake, with these cities arranged around its edges, and the biggest city of all appearing to float on the water, like Venice, except even more dramatic with its high temples. And this both awed them and inflamed the greed that they had.

And Cortés himself admitted as much to Moctezuma's envoys. He said, "My men and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure." So Moctezuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the traditional regalia; he sent him jade and obsidian, which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard. And Cortés was happy to put on the headdress, and he sent it back to the king. But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, that was the real end purpose. And the local peoples would talk about how the Spanish were chattering like monkeys as they were picking up this gold, fascinated by it.

By the way, Bernal Díaz, who was on Cortés's expedition and wrote a firsthand account of what happened afterwards, basically says in his account that in every single town they come across, even small outlying villages of the empire, every temple, every city just has tons of human sacrifice remains left over. So this is an endemic part of the society that I guess must have horrified the Spanish.

But it's hard to square any sort of humanitarian, or even plausible, motivation with the Spanish. They were just very willing, and I think maybe even worse than almost any other European conquest ever. The Spanish in the New World just massacre huge swaths of innocent women and children, literal genocides, intentional genocides, not just disease, crazy amounts of rape and assault. So there wasn't a sense of, we're freeing these people from the shackles of oppression, or at least there's no plausible story you could tell where that's what you're doing.

They would argue that in the long term it's in these people's interests. But of course in the short term, as you say, the accounts are unambiguous about this: throwing men and women to those huge hunting dogs they brought with them, for sport, to watch them being torn apart.

They could rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice, which was endemic, ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There was a regular cycle of sacrifice, and it would peak according to particular crises, major campaigns or the like. There are accounts, and again these are distorted accounts, of an almost industrial level of human sacrifice: that the parade of prisoners, who'd been drugged to keep them pacified, stretched from the pyramid complex all the way through to the causeways. One after the other they'd be brought up to the top of the pyramids, to the temple complex. Four priests would each take an arm and a leg, while a fifth would use an obsidian blade to open an incision and pull out the heart, which they'd offer to the gods.

I've been to those pyramids, the ones at Teotihuacan. The steps leading up are very, very narrow. You almost have to walk up sideways, deliberately so, because when the heart had been taken out and burned, the body would be tumbled off the far side, and the steps were so steep to allow it to tumble all the way to the bottom. And then the warrior who'd taken that prisoner would take the flesh home to be consumed. It was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take home and, literally, internalize the defeated enemy.

So this was, as you say, a cycle that the world is better off without. I'm not going to make any excuses for it. But the motivations of those who ended it were not selfless. That was at best a beneficial side effect, window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide. And it had even less validation in South America, because there was no such tradition at all. The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice into the high mountains, where she'd be drugged, and you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls. But that was very rare and very specific. There was no ingrained culture of mass human sacrifice at all.

Why Mughal India also couldn't play the Europeans off each other

Here's a question I find very interesting. Why is it that the Spaniards are able to weaponize the divisions between the different native forces to their own advantage, but the natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards? We know that there were significant divisions among the Spaniards. Literally, there's a whole, much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortés. Similarly, and we didn't get into this much, in Pizarro's expedition, his second-in-command, Almagro, is pissed off that Pizarro is getting all the spoils. He comes back and lays siege to Cuzco, after Manco Inca has laid siege to Cuzco, and captures it. So they were literally fighting, in multiple cases, in both these expeditions. The Spanish are fighting each other while they are taking over a much larger empire. So why is it that Manco Inca or Moctezuma are not able to use these divisions to their own advantage to stay in power?

That's a good question. The critical difference is that, for the conquistadors, this is happening within the Spanish orbit. They're all Castilians, all Spaniards, with shared common backgrounds for most of them, and their confrontations were personal rivalries within their system. If you tried, in an existential crisis, to pit them against each other, I think that would have failed, because their bottom line was they would have united if they felt there was a common cause against them that forced them to do that.

Whereas for the local peoples, these are differences between entire societies, both the external and internal factors here. Cuitláhuac, who succeeded his brother, Moctezuma II, as huey tlatoani after driving the Spaniards out during La Noche Triste, sent emissaries to the Tlaxcalans, to the Tarascans, to build and expand their own new triple alliance, to come together as native peoples with a common interest against these outsiders. And the Tlaxcalan younger generation thought about it, but the old men who still retained power, who had been fighting against the Aztecs for decades and saw them as, in the end, the existential threat, repudiated this possibility. The Tarascans wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs: no, we are enemies, always have been, always will be. This is your problem, and maybe you'll get taken out; no loss to us. So they couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostilities which go way, way back through their history.

The only way that the indigenous peoples could have played the same game, and to a degree maybe this did happen later, was to play different European powers off against each other. But of course the problem for the Aztecs, for the Inca, was that the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered. If the English, French, Dutch, even the Ottomans had been players in New World colonization at that very early stage, it may have been possible for local peoples to identify: okay, these are different cultures, we can play them off against each other to our advantage. That may have been the game, but at that time it wasn't possible.

Now, I know you've spent a little bit of time thinking about what happened in all these other episodes of colonialism as well. In India, for example, we do have many different European powers. So why was it not possible for the Mughals to play them off each other indefinitely to keep control over India?

The Mughals peaked under Aurangzeb at the beginning of the 18th century. Subsequently, his successors didn't have what you might call the authority, the charisma, the rizz, however you want to define it, to maintain that hegemony which he'd established by almost taking over all of India.

And the Mughals always, at root, had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century and built Qing dynasty China to the greatest physical extent it had ever had: they were always outsiders. They were not indigenous to the population. In the background there was always that vague resentment that we're being ruled here by foreigners. That was okay while they were going from success to success. But when the momentum halts and it begins to roll backwards, that's when the local power brokers begin to feel to themselves, maybe we have more to gain from breaking away from the empire than we do from remaining within it. So both Mughal India and Manchu China had that kind of fatal defect, as it were, coded into the ultimate basis for their authority.

So even without the Europeans, I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked and it would have disintegrated. What would have happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities, some larger, some smaller. The Maratha Confederacy, I think, would have been a major player, but not one that could incorporate the entire subcontinent within its authority. And of course, we look at Chinese history: it's the constant cycle of the rise of a dynasty, its peak, its decline into anarchy, and then the rise of a new imperial hegemon in the region. So that cycle would play out, I think, regardless of whether the Europeans intervened.

Specifically, in terms of why the British took over at the end: well, in the bluntest terms, the Royal Navy rules the waves. In terms of projecting power, the Brits were able to force the French out of Canada and out of India because they controlled the sea lanes. Although the French had, in terms of population and military, a larger force, if you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you.

So this is very interesting, because it makes sense why the British could have been one of the major powers in India, where there's the Marathas, there's the remainders of the Mughal Empire, there are many other factions, and then there's this British outpost. They've gotten rid of the French, the British have got Bengal. Why is it that they were able to consolidate where nobody else was able to consolidate?

And I think one hypothesis here is that we often talk about advantages in technology, but we don't talk about advantages in governance, or in terms of organization. The East India Company was a company. It had a board that could hire and fire CEOs and lieutenants and whatever; it wasn't called a CEO, obviously. And it wasn't necessarily the most competent people who were in charge of the East India Company, though they were pretty competent people, Robert Clive and his underlings.

And you would have instances, for example, I think, with the Nawab of Bengal, right before the British are able to gain control of Bengal, which is the initial tax base that they set up in order to further their conquest. Alivardi Khan is considered to be a pretty good ruler, who was able to hold the British at bay. And then he dies, and his grandson is this crazy, psychopathic guy who doesn't listen to advice and so forth. So because there's this monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India, there's just going to be, sooner or later, a bad king, and that king will not be able to stop the British incursion.

There are also all these forces around these principalities thinking, who are we going to lend money to, who are we going to lend our troops to? And they realize there's a bad king right now, the British seem pretty competent, I'm going to make an alliance with the British instead. And similarly with the case of the Aztecs, and maybe even more so, the overwhelming majority of the troops, the forces that the British are using, are Indians.

Sepoys, yeah.

Sepoys. So I think this is an underrated thing: just being able to delegate to competent people, and being able to replace them one after another if they get killed or if they resign or something. There's not going to be some crazy succession crisis that creates this anarchy where somebody else can swoop in and take control.

Absolutely. Just one example: the British were winning the Hundred Years' War because the king of France, Charles VI, was insane. He was convinced he was made out of glass, for example. And then the English lost the Hundred Years' War because their king, Henry VI, was insane, and he would just shut down for months at a time. Mentally, he just couldn't function.

In non-democratic environments, yes, the corporations, for the reasons you outlined, profit-driven and therefore not loyal to bloodlines or any other kind of extraneous circumstances, but just looking for the most competent leadership, with a capacity to change and replace people, are much more flexible than those kinds of hierarchical states. Even, in many ways, you could argue, in democratic societies the corporations can still outmaneuver them, because they're untied to particular loyalties, and it's just their brand awareness that they're trying to push.

The British and Dutch were late to the game of imperialism, and you wouldn't give them much of a chance given the differentials, but they unleashed the power of the free market. As you say, the East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what made Canada as we understand it today: those corporations, driven by those motives, acting with almost plenipotentiary powers at vast distances, had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances, to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements which had persisted for centuries, with all the accumulated grievances. Here were the fresh newcomers: we obviously have skills at what we do. As you say, taking control of the tax revenue of Bengal effectively took control of the entire political orbit. What can you do without taxation? Reorient that towards the shareholders. Force the local people to stop producing these crops, even if it means millions starve to death, in order to produce opium to take advantage of that. It was devastating in its impact on political structures that had no real environment where that was part of their established traditions.

Even the conquistadors, even the Vikings, if we go back far enough: these were business operations. The Vikings would be men who would assemble with what weapons they had, and enough capital up front to pay for boats, to go raiding, to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries. That's what the conquistadors were. They were freebooters operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperadoes, the lowest of the low. Many of them had some education. A lot of them were hidalgos, which is the lowest rung of the petty nobility in Castile, who inherited titles and attitudes but not much in assets beyond what they could put up as soldiers of fortune. They called themselves compañeros, which is colleagues or companions, not soldados. So this whole operation was, if you like, the most raw, unbridled capitalism at its finest, pooling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures.

Diplomacy was just as important as technology

Maybe to close this off: the thing I find really remarkable in these stories... We've talked about how lopsided these battles have been, how quickly this conquest proceeded. In the grand scheme of things, the technological advantages that the conquistadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big. As you mentioned, guns at this time are not good enough to actually be that helpful in battle, so it's basically horses and steel weapons. In fact, I don't know if we've talked about this, but towards the ends of these conquests, or the middles of these conquests, the metal is weighing them down and it's really hot, so they're even reverting to the cotton armor that the natives are using. So it's not even the armor. It's really just that they had better metal swords instead of obsidian blades, and that they had horses. And that's enough to let a couple hundred men take over entire empires. You can draw analogies to what might happen in the future; we don't even have to go there. I just find it sort of remarkable how little it took for them to be so dominant.

They could win battles. They could not have won the war, though, in the end, without the support of those indigenous allies, those overwhelming numbers. And yes, you're actually right. They would always keep the helmets, to protect the head, but many of them were ditching the metal armor in favor of the local stuff, because that was good enough as protection against local weapons. They would not have done that and carried it back to Europe; that would have made them too vulnerable. But here you adapt to the circumstances. You have more freedom of mobility; it's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is to wear metal. So they would make that adaptation.

They would even sometimes, for very prized allies, again as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition, provide local chiefs and warlords with Spanish weapons, just to emphasize, you're so special to me. And this was effective in binding them together. And they were very, very clever in identifying the local sub-chiefs beneath the Aztec layer of authority who would be receptive to the idea of: why are you taking orders from them, when you get a better deal from us?

They knew, for example, that the Aztec Empire was called the Triple Alliance because it was set up in 1428, by the first huey tlatoani, as a coalition between three city-states: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tacuba. In 1516, so three years before Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica, the chief, the king, of Texcoco died, and his two sons fought a civil war over who would succeed him. Moctezuma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers. So what does the other brother do when the Spanish show up? He immediately sides with them. His own family was on both sides of this war. This is his path to getting what he feels is his due, being the king of Texcoco. And in the broader sense: if I'm under the Spanish versus under the Aztecs, maybe these newcomers will give me a better deal. So there was that seductive quality at the elite level.

Now, what they didn't understand, so many of them thinking they were using the Spanish to their advantage, was the numbers in which the Spanish, and many Europeans, would arrive. Their closed worlds didn't allow them to think that people from such vast distances could come in such huge numbers. And in the end, as happened in, for example, Australia and New Zealand, we will become the minority in our own country. The demographic tide, which they didn't appreciate, would in the long term work fundamentally against them.

Yeah. Okay, so the analogy to AI there is so obvious it's not worth spelling out. But I think that's actually an excellent place to close. This is such a bizarre, shocking and interesting part of human history, and I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it.

Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.