Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
Not long after the first Europeans landed in the Americas, word spread of kingdoms rich with gold. As it turned out, gold was indeed found, and beyond people’s wildest dreams. Two major empires in the Americas at this time were the Aztec Empire of present-day Mexico and the Inca Empire, possibly the largest empire in the world at the time, covering an area incorporating lands in present-day Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia. Prior civilisations in the area, such as the Olmecs and the Mayans, had expired for reasons unknown. By the time the conquistadors arrived in the early 16th century, the 300-year old Aztec and the Inca empires were at the height of their civilisations.
The lust for gold experienced by the conquistadors led to the brutal conquest of these empires. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs between 1519 and 1520 and Hernando Pizarro conquered the Incas a decade later. Both conquests are noteworthy due to the few Europeans it required to conquer vastly superior numbers of natives.
In the case of Cortes, the Aztec emperor Montezuma, reigning from the large city of Tenochtitlan, may have taken Cortes for a returning god and lowered his guard. The Aztecs were also terrified by guns and horses, neither of which they had seen before; indeed, there is no record of horses being present in the Americas before the Europeans arrived there in 1492. Cortes also found allies among the local population who had been subjugated by Aztec emperors. The Aztecs believed that without human sacrifice, the sun would not rise and the world would end. Finally, Cortes famously burned the ships in which his troops had travelled, forcing them to either fight or die.
Pizarro captured the Incan king, Atahualpa, and held him for ransom until the Incas filled a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide and 8 feet high with gold. Pizarro then reneged on his promises and murdered the king (although not before christening him into the Catholic faith!). According to various sources, the Spanish managed to defeat an Incan army of up to 80,000 soldiers with only 168 people. European diseases killed huge numbers of the local population before the forces even joined in battle, and when natives were able to come together to defend themselves, the result was what you would expect from the clash of a Stone Age and an Iron Age culture: the native Americans had no chance of defeating iron and steel weapons with weapons of stone and wood.
Back in Spain, Charles V encouraged the union of his son, Philip, to the Catholic Mary Tudor of England in order to link Spain, England and the Netherlands in a union of Catholic states. He was determined that Protestantism would not be permitted to gain a stronger foothold in Europe, afraid of the dissent it would encourage; to all intents and purposes there was little difference to him between Protestants and Turks. The defence of Luther by a group of German princes, however, together with the wars against the French and the Ottomans, distracted Charles and prevented him from putting down the religious revolt in Germany while he had the opportunity to do so.
By the time he was ready to make a move, Protestantism was too deeply entrenched – at least in northern Germany – and, in 1555, at the Peace of Augsburg, Charles was forced to grant Lutheranism official status within the Holy Roman Empire. Worse still, in his opinion, it allowed the 225 German princes to choose the official religion69 within the domains they controlled.
As regards the Ottomans, they remained a thorn in Charles’ side, unsuccessfully attempting to take Vienna in 1529,70 and remaining a strong naval force in the Mediterranean until well after his death. Under Suleiman I the Magnificent, the Ottomans would continue to make war against both the Habsburg Empire in the west and the Shiite Safavid Persians, with whom they shared a huge common frontier, in the east. Yet through a series of incompetent Sultans, an over-extended empire and an increasingly repressive attitude to free thought, the Ottoman Empire would see slow but inevitable decline from the 17th century onwards.
