Dwarkesh PatelHow did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Sheppard
Dwarkesh Patel
Europe's push across the Atlantic 0:00
The conversation opens by framing the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires as one of history's most improbable military feats, where a few hundred men defeated empires of millions, often without native allies at first and without taking casualties. This story is traced back to fifteenth century Europe, which was boxed in by the Atlantic and cut off from the spice and silk trade routes of the East. Figures like Prince Henry the Navigator pushed Portugal to turn the ocean into a usable route, while Spain backed Christopher Columbus, whose voyage west was meant to reach Asia but instead stumbled onto an unknown continent, a discovery first seen as a letdown before its wealth became clear.
Cortés breaks from Cuba 3:00
In 1511 the Spanish nobleman Velázquez seized Cuba and later sent Hernán Cortés, a man with legal training and local political experience, to explore the coast of Mesoamerica in 1518. Cortés quickly expanded his mission far beyond its mandate, recruiting men and sailing off despite Velázquez trying to stop him at the dock. Once on the mainland, Cortés sensed that the dominant power, the Mexica or Aztecs, ruled over resentful subject peoples like the Totonacs, who saw the newcomers as a chance to break free. He then marched inland and fought the Tlaxcalans to a standstill, a confrontation that ended with them switching sides to join him.
Steel, horses, and shaky alliances 6:02
At this stage Cortés had only a few hundred men against thousands of Tlaxcalans, and the deciding factors were technology and training rather than guns, which were slow and unimpressive once the shock wore off. Steel swords and armor outmatched native wood, stone, and obsidian weapons, and horses, completely unknown to Mesoamerican peoples, gave the conquistadors a decisive edge in speed and shock combat. The Tlaxcalans, exhausted by Aztec pressure and cut off from the coast, allied with Cortés as a last resort and marched with him into the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
Moctezuma's capture and collapse 11:33
Inside the capital, Cortés met the emperor Moctezuma II through his interpreter Malinche, and after a tense standoff, used a pretext, an attack on Spaniards left on the coast, to seize the emperor and hold him hostage, shattering Moctezuma's authority and composure. Cortés ruled through the captive emperor, even taking him sailing on Lake Texcoco to display Spanish technology, and controlling the emperor effectively meant controlling the empire. The section closes by noting that the Spanish were also divided among themselves, as Velázquez dispatched a second expedition under Pánfilo de Narváez to arrest Cortés for overstepping his authority.
La Noche Triste and the retreat 15:00
When Cortés returned to Tenochtitlan after defeating a rival Spanish force sent by the governor of Cuba, he found the city turned against him because his subordinate Alvarado had massacred Aztec nobles during a festival. The Aztecs rose up, Moctezuma was mortally wounded trying to calm them, and Cortés was forced to flee the city on what became known as La Noche Triste, the Tragic Night, losing many men who were killed or captured for sacrifice along the causeways.
Rebuilding through alliance and technology 19:30
Cortés escaped to Tlaxcalan territory, survived a near-defeat at the Battle of Otumba by killing the Aztec commander, and rebuilt his strength with Tlaxcalan support, who treated the alliance as one between equals rather than master and subject. Many other peoples subjugated by the Aztecs, such as the Totonacs and Chalco states, joined Cortés to settle old grievances, meaning the final force that marched on Tenochtitlan was overwhelmingly Mesoamerican rather than Spanish. To retake the city Cortés needed control of the lake, so his men mined sulfur from the volcano Popocatépetl for gunpowder and had porters carry prefabricated boat sections over the mountains to be assembled on the water.
Pizarro follows the Cortés playbook 23:33
A decade later Francisco Pizarro, a distant relative of Cortés who had learned directly from him, led a similar expedition into Peru, arriving during a civil war between the Inca heirs Atahualpa and Huáscar. Atahualpa, having just won that war, underestimated the roughly 168 Spaniards, dismissed warnings to destroy them, and staged a show of force with cavalry that left him unimpressed outwardly even as he later executed courtiers who had flinched.
Ambush at Cajamarca 28:03
Facing an Inca army in the tens of thousands, Pizarro lured Atahualpa into a narrow courtyard at Cajamarca and unleashed artillery, muskets, and cavalry in a sudden ambush, capturing the emperor and killing close to ten thousand Inca soldiers while suffering no Spanish casualties. The shock of gunpowder, which the Inca had never encountered, combined with the terror induced by horses, caused the Inca forces to panic and flee, with crowds pressing so hard against the courtyard walls that the walls collapsed.
Why Cavalry Could Not Be Swarmed 30:01
You might expect that thousands of warriors could simply overwhelm a few mounted men, since Europeans themselves had learned to do this, as the Swiss showed that pikemen standing shoulder to shoulder could stop a cavalry charge. That required discipline, tight formation, and specific technology that Mesoamerican armies lacked, since their warriors fought with wide spacing between them, which let horses blast straight through. Still, both the Aztecs and the Inca tried to adapt. The Aztecs drew Cortés into the canal city of Tenochtitlan, fought from rooftops, and cut escape holes between buildings where horses could not follow. Both empires, independently, discovered that flooding bogged down armored men, as happened at Iztapalapa and later at Ollantaytambo. Warriors improvised pikes from captured swords lashed to poles, used bolas meant for hunting birds to tangle horses' legs, and even let themselves be speared just to hold a lancer still long enough for others to pull him down. Manco Inca personally learned to ride a horse to prove it could be done. None of it came fast enough.
How Fast the Empires Fell 34:31
Cortés took the Aztec Empire, six million people, in two and a half years with a couple hundred men. Pizarro did the same to the Inca a decade later in about five years. The outcome hinged on individual moments, since if Cortés had died early, or if Atahualpa had negotiated by envoy instead of walking into Pizarro's trap, the conquests might have stalled. At Cuzco, Manco Inca besieged the Spanish garrison for months, winning battles in the mountain passes by trapping relief columns in narrow defiles, but he lost his nerve attacking Lima across open ground, where cavalry ruled. The besieged Spaniards survived largely because subject peoples within the Inca Empire, long resentful of their rulers, defected to join them.
Why the Outcome Was Still Likely 41:05
Beneath these individual turning points lay deeper forces, geography and climate, which gave Eurasia an abundance of domesticable animals and, with them, diseases like smallpox that devastated populations with no acquired immunity. Even a short-term indigenous victory would not have stopped the longer demographic collapse and the fracturing of empires built on a small ruling ethnicity over many resentful subject peoples, a cycle already seen in the earlier collapse of Teotihuacan.
Why Dispersed Peoples Resisted Longer 45:06
The hierarchical structure of the Aztec and Inca empires made them vulnerable: killing or capturing the huey tlatoani or the Sapa Inca could collapse the whole system or let it be ruled through puppets. Dispersed peoples like the Maya, whose city-states jealously guarded their own autonomy, could not be toppled in one blow. The Spanish had to reduce Maya cities one by one, a process that dragged on almost to the end of the 17th century, with smoldering resistance lingering so long that highland Central American communities still speak their ancestral languages before Spanish. The same pattern shows up later in North America, where Comanche warriors who gathered temporarily, fought on horseback, and dispersed again proved maddeningly hard to pin down, with Custer's 7th Cavalry wiped out at Little Bighorn in 1876. Subduing such groups took something close to total war, including the slaughter of the buffalo to destroy their food base.
Tarascan Metal and Missed Exchange 47:33
The Aztecs never fully controlled their own region either. To their west, the Purépecha, or Tarascans, ran their own empire and handed the Aztecs a disastrous defeat the first time Aztec forces crossed into their territory, largely because the Tarascans could smelt copper, apparently through contact with South America, and used it to tip arrows fired by massed archers. The Aztecs had no such exchange network and never got access to llamas or bronze, which the Inca world did have. A key contrast between conquerors and conquered was that the Europeans learned from each other, Cortés drawing on the conquest of Hispaniola and Pizarro following Cortés's playbook a decade later, while the Inca likely did not even know the Aztecs existed. The one scenario that might have changed the outcome was if the Norse, who reached North America around 500 years before Columbus, had sustained a colony long enough to slowly introduce European disease, iron, and horses into the Americas.
Pizarro's Coastal Strategy and Fortresses 50:32
Pizarro's main innovation was sticking closely to Cortés's blueprint: strike at the top ruler and secure a coastal base to retreat to, a tactic that worked because European monopoly over nautical technology made coastal strongholds nearly impossible for locals to dislodge. European fortress design, with star-shaped parapets built for maximum firepower, was so advanced that even Qing China struggled against it, and the Inca and Aztecs had no siege weapons at all. Pizarro's campaign also faced the added challenge of fighting at extreme Andean altitude while carrying dozens of pounds of armor, a feat demanding serious physical stamina and strong motivation to keep going. Both Cortés and Pizarro had to constantly prove themselves as leaders among ambitious, similarly entitled men, though Pizarro eventually lost control and was killed by a rival Spanish faction storming his household.
Why the Captured Emperors Cooperated 53:00
Moctezuma II had ruled as a pitiless autocrat who centralized power and intensified ritual wars against the Tlaxcalans, but once Cortés seized him he seemed to undergo a psychological break and became a willing puppet, trying to satisfy Cortés without provoking him. His own people eventually deposed him themselves, the first such repudiation in Aztec history, because they saw he had sold them out. Atahualpa, by contrast, stayed sharp, learning Spanish, chess, and cards while quietly reaching out to his own forces, perhaps waiting for an opening to fully mobilize. He had offered to fill a room with gold and silver in exchange for his release, and may have genuinely believed Pizarro, as a fellow king, would honor the deal, not realizing he was dealing with an opportunist who had him garroted after collecting the ransom.
Gold, Silver, and Empty Wealth 56:03
Zooming out, the conquest's real prize was gold and silver, metals that generate no productive wealth on their own, making the Spanish effort look like a pursuit of something closer to crypto than genuine economic development. The bullion helped fund Spain's wars following the Reconquista, but since it mostly just redistributed existing European wealth and inflated prices, no new wealth was actually created. The more consequential effect ran through China, where the Ming dynasty's unreliable paper currency left merchants hungry for a trustworthy medium of exchange. Spanish silver, mined in the New World, flowed to China in return for enormous quantities of porcelain, silk, and spices, effectively letting Spain acquire Chinese goods almost for free.
Encomiendas and the Flow to Spain 58:33
Successful conquistadors settled into encomiendas, estates worked by local people in a form of serfdom, before Spanish bureaucrats arrived to formally administer the new territories, a shift the conquistadors resisted and had to be forced into accepting. The discovery of the massive silver deposits at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, completed the picture, feeding King Charles V and then Philip II's wars against the Ottomans, their effort to hold the Netherlands, and the failed Armada campaign meant to restore Catholicism in England. The silver's long-term effect on Spain was damaging: the flood of liquidity drove up prices and inflation, actual wages fell, and the easy access to silver kept Spain from developing real capital markets or independent banking, unlike other parts of Europe.
Spain's quick silver, China's cash crisis 1:01:00
Spain and Portugal fell behind the Netherlands and England because quick wealth from silver never translated into broad development, leaving Iberia rural and poor well into the twentieth century. Once Spain learned the Pacific wind currents, galleons carried silver from Potosi to Manila, trading it for goods from China, Japan, and Siam, completing a truly global trade network. That silver dependency backfired on China in the mid 1640s, when a cash crisis starved the Ming of funds just as the Manchu threatened, letting the Manchu conquer and replace them.
Quick wealth versus forced innovation 1:04:31
England's early Virginia colony looked like a disaster, with settlers dying and nothing to farm, yet that hardship forced the building of lasting institutions and productive capacity, unlike Spain's extractive, bullion driven settlements. The Netherlands, with almost no natural resources, was likewise forced to innovate toward real economic expansion. The same pattern appears in the American South and North before the Civil War: the South's quick fix of slave grown cash crops like tobacco, indigo, sugar, and cotton left it without the industrial base and capital markets the North built instead, advantages that proved decisive when war came in the 1860s.
Why Aztec and Inca tactics faltered 1:08:03
Aztec and Inca armies were highly militarized societies, yet repeatedly made costly errors, such as trying to capture Cortes alive for sacrifice rather than killing him, and decorating generals so lavishly that they became easy targets whose deaths could rout entire armies. At Cuzco, a few hundred conquistadors held off a massive rebellion by exploiting narrow streets and fortified buildings, while Inca forces lost momentum as conscripted allies deserted to return home for the harvest, since warfare everywhere depended on the agricultural calendar. There simply wasn't enough time for Aztec and Inca forces to adapt their deeply ingrained capture based warfare before Spanish horses, armor, and improvisation overwhelmed them, even though a well coordinated ambush in a mountain pass could have trapped the entire conquistador force.
Why conquistadors took the gamble 1:14:33
Spain, only unified in 1492 after the Reconquista, produced proud but poor warriors, especially from the harsh farmland of Extremadura, who saw little future beyond subsistence farming. Fighting against Moors or Turks at home offered high risk for low reward, but rumors from across the Atlantic promised a new world where even a poor man could rise, making the gamble of conquest seem worthwhile despite the odds of confronting an empire of millions with only a hundred men.
Faith as cover for conquest 1:16:31
Cortés and Pizarro brought priests on their expeditions and were genuinely shocked by practices like human sacrifice, such as Moctezuma showing Cortés a temple reeking of blood and black with gore. Tearing down idols and imposing the one true faith gave the conquistadors a sense of legitimacy, letting men tell themselves they served God even while they were really there for plunder. Religion became a way to salve the conscience of men pursuing low ends under a higher banner.
Greed, massacre, and sacrifice 1:18:32
Early conquests in the Caribbean were easy since island populations were unprepared and had nowhere to flee, but the mainland brought much harder fighting, even by veterans of wars against the Turks. Arriving at Lake Texcoco, the Spanish were awed by Tenochtitlan's floating city, and Cortés admitted his men suffered a disease of the heart that only gold could cure. Bernal Díaz recorded human sacrifice remains in every town, yet this did not excuse the Spanish, who carried out genocide, mass rape, and atrocities like feeding people to dogs for sport, with no genuine claim of freeing anyone from oppression. Aztec sacrifice itself involved priests cutting out hearts atop steep pyramid steps designed so bodies could tumble to the bottom, after which warriors took the flesh home, while in South America, where the Inca only rarely practiced rare virgin sacrifice, there was even less basis to justify conquest.
Why natives could not unite 1:24:33
Spanish rivals like Cortés's pursuers or Pizarro's rival Almagro fought each other yet would unite against a true existential threat, since they shared Castilian identity. Native groups lacked that cohesion. Cuitláhuac tried to build an alliance with the Tlaxcalans against the Spanish after La Noche Triste, but the Tlaxcalan elders refused, since their hatred of the Aztecs ran deeper than any threat from outsiders who were the only foreign power they had ever seen.
Colonial India and governance 1:26:32
The Mughal Empire peaked under Aurangzeb and then declined as outsiders ruling a resentful population, a pattern shared with Manchu China, and would likely have fragmented into a patchwork even without Europeans. Britain's edge came from naval power to project force, and from the East India Company's corporate structure, which could replace incompetent leaders unlike monarchies tied to bloodlines, as seen when a capable ruler like Alivardi Khan in Bengal was followed by an unstable grandson, driving local factions to ally with the more reliable British instead.
Corporations as conquerors 1:31:31
The British and Dutch arrived late to empire-building but used the free market to their advantage, through chartered bodies like the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, which effectively created Canada. Acting with near-total independent power far from home, these corporations exploited old local rivalries and accumulated grievances. Taking over Bengal's tax revenue let them seize the whole political system, redirecting production toward shareholders, even forcing farmers to grow opium instead of food, which contributed to mass starvation.
Conquest as a business venture 1:33:02
The conquistadors, like the Vikings before them, were essentially business operations, pooling capital to fund risky expeditions in search of profit. Many were hidalgos, minor Castilian nobles with little wealth but some education, who called each other compañeros rather than soldiers. Their campaigns represented raw, unbridled capitalism, turning plunder and conquest into a shared financial venture.
How little it took to win 1:34:02
The technological edge the Spanish held was modest: steel swords and horses, since early guns offered little real battlefield advantage. As campaigns dragged on, many soldiers abandoned heavy metal armor for lighter native cotton armor, keeping only helmets, and sometimes gave prized indigenous allies Spanish weapons to bind alliances. The Spanish skillfully exploited internal Aztec politics, such as a succession dispute in Texcoco, to win local rulers to their side, though those rulers failed to foresee the overwhelming numbers of Europeans who would eventually arrive and become the demographic majority.
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