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Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?
New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.
The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.
Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire.
Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.
In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases, did so without taking a single casualty.
And they did this with 99% of their military forces being made up of the very natives they were trying to subjugate.
We often forget how wild human history is. People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs
(00:22:39) – Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca
(00:26:59) – Explaining Conquistador military superiority
(00:34:39) – Could the natives have beat the Conquistadors?
(00:48:56) – The Aztecs and Incas did not learn from each other
(00:56:11) – Why Spain still lost in the long run
(01:07:47) – Why didn’t the Aztecs/Incas adapt better to European warfare?
(01:14:16) – Conquistador motivation
(01:26:22) – Why Mughal India also couldn’t play the Europeans off each other
(01:33:42) – Diplomacy was just as important as technology
Transcript
00:00:00 – Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs
Dwarkesh Patel
Today I’m chatting with professor and military historian [Si Sheppard](https://liu.edu/brooklyn/acad
