The Fall of the Aztec Empire — Tenochtitlan starved, besieged, and taken in 1521

On 13 August 1521, after a siege of some three months, the island city of Tenochtitlan — capital of the Mexica and seat of the Aztec Empire — fell, and its last ruler, the tlatoani Cuauhtémoc, was captured trying to escape across Lake Texcoco by canoe. The empire that had dominated central Mexico for nearly a century was broken. The popular image of that conquest — a few hundred Spaniards under Hernán Cortés overthrowing a civilization of millions — is a myth that flatters the conquerors. The fall of Tenochtitlan was achieved by an army that was overwhelmingly Indigenous, fighting alongside a small Spanish contingent, against a Mexica population already devastated by an epidemic the invaders had brought.

The Aztec Empire that fell was a Mexica-led order, the dominant partner in a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan formed around 1428, which extracted tribute from much of central Mexico through war and the threat of war. Tenochtitlan, built on an island in the lake and laced with canals and causeways, was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population estimated in the hundreds of thousands — larger than most European capitals of the age. Its empire was wealthy, sophisticated, and militarily formidable. It was also resented: the peoples it had subjugated and from whom it demanded tribute and captives were, in many cases, willing to ally with anyone who might break Mexica power.

The mechanism of the conquest rested on three pillars, none of them Spanish superiority alone. First and most important were the tens of thousands of Indigenous allies — above all the Tlaxcalans, an independent people the Mexica had never conquered, who supplied the bulk of the fighting force, the local knowledge, the food, and the manpower without which the small Spanish company could not have taken the city. Second was smallpox, introduced by the Europeans in 1520, which swept Tenochtitlan and killed an enormous share of its people — including the ruler Cuitláhuac — gutting the defense before the final siege began. Third was the siege itself: Spanish-built brigantines cut the lake, the causeways were taken block by block, and the aqueduct supplying fresh water was severed, so that the city fell as much to thirst, hunger, and disease as to assault.

The fall of Tenochtitlan inaugurated three centuries of Spanish colonial rule over the heart of Mesoamerica and a demographic catastrophe — driven above all by epidemic disease — that reduced the Indigenous population of central Mexico by perhaps nine-tenths over the following century. Moctezuma II, the ruler when the Spanish arrived, died in Mexica captivity to the invaders in 1520; Cuauhtémoc, who led the final defense, was kept prisoner, tortured for gold, and hanged in 1525. The empire was not so much defeated in a battle as dismantled by alliance, disease, and siege.

The Fall of the Inca Empire — Tawantinsuyu broken after its emperor was seized and killed

The Inca Empire — Tawantinsuyu, “the four parts together,” the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas — was broken in 1533 when a small Spanish expedition under Francisco Pizarro seized its ruler, the Sapa Inca Atahualpa, at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, extracted an immense ransom in gold and silver, and then executed him. The capital, Cuzco, was occupied a year later, on 15 November 1533. The empire that fell ruled some ten to sixteen million people across roughly two million square kilometres of the Andes, from southern Colombia to central Chile, governed by a road system of some 40,000 kilometres and a bureaucracy without writing.

The conquest was not the feat of a handful of Spaniards overawing a docile people. Two catastrophes had struck the Andean world before Pizarro’s 168 men ever reached the highlands. The first was epidemic disease: smallpox, introduced to the Americas by Europeans, swept south ahead of any European traveller and killed the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac around 1528, together with his designated heir. The second flowed from the first — a ruinous civil war of succession between two of Huayna Capac’s sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, the “war of the two brothers,” which had torn the empire apart and ended only months before the Spanish arrived.

Pizarro exploited both. He landed in a state still bleeding from civil war, its institutions concentrated in the sacred person of an emperor, and he struck at that person directly. Atahualpa, fresh from victory over his brother and camped at Cajamarca with an army that may have numbered in the tens of thousands, agreed to meet the strangers; in a coordinated ambush the Spanish slaughtered thousands of unarmed retainers and took the Sapa Inca alive. With the emperor a hostage, the machinery of a centralized empire could be turned by the hand that held him.

The other decisive element was Andean, not European. The Inca had built their empire by conquest within living memory, and many of the peoples they ruled — among them the Cañari, the Huanca, the Chachapoya, and the Chanka — resented Cuzco and joined the invaders in their tens of thousands, supplying the manpower without which 168 foreigners could have done nothing. The fall of the Inca Empire was an Andean civil catastrophe that Spain harnessed; it should be understood, and remembered, from the side of the peoples who lived it.