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

Dwarkesh Patel (0:00)

Okay, 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 100X to 1, 1000X to 1, and in many cases, not even taking a single casualty. They're doing this while upwards of 99 percent of their fighting forces are made up of the very natives that they're going to subjugate.

I wanted to have you want 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. But 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 cutting and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. So I wanted to have you want to understand what happened here. So first, I would love to hear the story as of what did Cortés do, what did Pizarro do, how did these conquests actually go down.

Si Sheppard (1:20)

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 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, are 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 reconnoitre, building out the map as they go along, are able to find a way around the south tip of Africa directly to India and therefore cut out the middlemen.

In Spanish, meanwhile, heading west, we honor the story of Christopher Columbus in 1492, he sailed the sea 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 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 a Spanish ambitious nobleman seizes control of Cuba, de Velazquez.

He sends out from this power base, expeditions, exploring the coasts of what we would call Mesoamerica, Central America. Later in 1518, he assigns that task to a man who he's had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with, a man named Hernan 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. And 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. This great moment on 18th 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 in control.

But of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortés' expedition. So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map, right? 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 in the mainland.