Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

Okay. Today I'm chatting with professor and military historian, Cy Sheppard. I wanna 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 100 conquistadors show up to a new continent they know nothing about. And within a matter of years, they subjugate empires which had millions of inhabitants in them. In the process of doing so, they are often winning battles where they are outnumbered 100x to one, 1000x to one, and in many

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 to 500 ago and created the modern, globalized community that we all participate in today. It began in the fifteenth 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, are finally forced to innovate. Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Port

Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? So how many men had Cortez brought with him? Even the Talasha Collins had much larger numbers than Cortez 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 100 on Cortez's side and multiple thousands on the Lashkarlan side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials from the old and new world 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, 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 s

So obviously the story continues from there, the Noche Triste, what people might not appreciate about what happened here in both the Pizarro 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 as... Maybe you should tell the story how Velasquez sends this... Another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortez for going beyond the prerogative of his mission.

Absolutely. We left the governor on Cuba, of course fuming. He rallies another expeditionary force, because Cortes is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends us under Panfil de Numayes, a larger force than the one Cortes brought with him originally. This lands on the coast. Cortes 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 Nevaez, defeats him in a minor battle, and again the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatche

I actually didn't know those stories. That's 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 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 if it's Russia and Ukraine have been doing trench warfare for a hundred ye