Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires

Abstract

T HE MOST SENSATIONAL military conquests in all history are probably those of the Spanish conquistadores over the Aztec and Inean empires. Cortes and Pizarro toppled the highest civilizations of the New World in a few months each. A few hundred Spaniards defeated populations containing thousands of dedicated warriors, armed with a wide assembly of weapons from the stone and early metal ages. Societies which had created huge empires through generations of fierce fighting collapsed at the touch of the Castilian. After four hundred years the Spanish feat still seems incredible. Many explanations suggest themselves: the advantage of steel over stone, of cannon and firearms over bows and arrows and slings; the terrorizing effect of horses on foot-soldiers who had never seen such beasts before; the lack of unity in the Aztec and Inean empires; the prophecies in Indian mythology about the arrival of white gods. All of these factors combined to deal to the Indian a shock such as only H. G. Wells' IVar of the Worlds can suggest to us. Each factor was undoubtedly worth many hundreds of soldiers to Cortes and Pizarro. For all of that, one might have expected the highly organized, militaristic societies of Mexico and the Andean highlands to survive at least the initial contact with European societies. Thousands of Indian warriors, even if confused and frightened and wielding only obsidian-studded war clubs, should have been able to repel at least the first few hundred Spaniards to arrive. The Spaniard had a formidable ally to which neither he nor the historian has given sufficient credit-disease. The arrival of Columbus in the New World brought about one of the greatest population disasters in history. After the Spanish conquest an Indian of Yucatan wrote of his people in the happier days before the advent of the Spaniard :1