The conquest

La conquista

1492–1575. From Columbus's landing in 1492 Spanish settlement spread through the Caribbean, then to the mainland: Cortés took the Mexica capital Tenochtitlan in 1521,…

Draft: not yet checked against its sources.

What happened

From Columbus's landing in 1492 Spanish settlement spread through the Caribbean, then to the mainland: Cortés took the Mexica capital Tenochtitlan in 1521, Pizarro captured the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, and expeditions reached Guatemala, Chile and the Río de la Plata in the 1520s–40s. Small Spanish forces won with horses, steel and guns, but above all with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, with the civil wars inside the Inca and Mexica worlds, and with epidemics of smallpox and measles that killed a large part of the population. The last Inca stronghold at Vilcabamba fell in 1572; by then the main conquests were over and the frontier wars (as in Chile) had begun.

Its events

1. 29 September 1513: Balboa reaches the Pacific

Sources

1. The Iberian Conquest of the Americas — World History Encyclopedia
2. Hernán Cortés — World History Encyclopedia
3. Francisco Pizarro — World History Encyclopedia