Consequences: Disease, Exchange, and the Black Legend

The rapid Spanish conquest of societies of millions of inhabitants by forces numbering only in the hundreds is explained today not by any single factor but by a combination of them. Steel weapons, armor, and firearms gave the conquistadors a technological edge, and the horse — extinct in the Americas since the last glaciation and unknown to indigenous peoples before 1492 — provided a further tactical and psychological advantage, although peoples such as the Mapuche and those of the North American Plains adapted to it quickly. Far more decisive than direct violence, however, was disease: smallpox, measles, typhus, and influenza, against which the indigenous population had no prior immunity, caused a demographic catastrophe that historians estimate reduced the indigenous population of the Americas by somewhere between 80 and 95 percent within a century of contact, though the exact figures remain debated.