March 14, 1519 · Tabasco, Gulf Coast Theater

Barely ashore in Mexico, Cortés fought a Chontal Maya army on the plains of Centla near Potonchán. Outnumbered many times over, he held the Maya with crossbows and cannon, then broke them with a cavalry charge from the flank — the first use of horses in battle on the American mainland. The Maya, who had never seen the animals, reportedly took horse and rider for a single monstrous creature.

April 22, 1519 · Gulf Coast of Mexico Theater

Landing on Good Friday near modern Veracruz, Cortés founded a town, had its new council elect him captain-general, and thereby legally severed himself from the governor of Cuba who had sent him. He received Moctezuma's envoys and their gifts of gold, and won over the Totonacs of Cempoala — the Aztecs' resentful tributaries — as his first indigenous allies. Then, to end all talk of return, he ran his ships aground.

September 1519 · Tlaxcala highlands Theater

Marching inland, the Spanish ran into the Tlaxcalans — a fiercely independent confederation encircled by Aztec territory and never conquered by it. For two weeks Xicotencatl the Younger threw wave after wave at them in the hardest fighting Cortés had yet faced; the Spanish survived on discipline, terrain, and firepower, and were nearly worn down. Unable to break them, the Tlaxcalan lords changed course and offered alliance instead.

October 1519 · Central Mexican highlands Theater

At the sacred city of Cholula, warned by La Malinche of an ambush being prepared, Cortés summoned the city's nobles and warriors into a walled courtyard and had them cut down. Spanish and Tlaxcalan troops then sacked the city for two days. Thousands of unarmed people were killed in a city that had not fought them.

November 8, 1519 · Valley of Mexico Theater

The Spanish crossed the causeway into Tenochtitlan and were met by Moctezuma himself. The city astonished them — a metropolis of perhaps 200,000 built on a lake, with causeways, aqueducts, botanical gardens, and a market larger than any in Spain. Within a week Cortés seized Moctezuma in his own palace and began ruling the empire through its captive emperor.

May 22, 1520 · Tenochtitlan Theater

While Cortés was on the coast, Alvarado's garrison surrounded the unarmed celebrants of the festival of Toxcatl in the Great Temple precinct and killed them — the flower of Tenochtitlan's nobility, cut down at a religious festival they had been given permission to hold. The city rose immediately, penned the Spanish in their compound, and elected Cuitláhuac to lead the war.

May 28, 1520 · Gulf Coast of Mexico Theater

The governor of Cuba sent Pánfilo de Narváez with a force nearly three times Cortés's to arrest him for mutiny. Leaving a garrison in Tenochtitlan under Pedro de Alvarado, Cortés marched to the coast, attacked Narváez's camp in a night rainstorm, took him prisoner within minutes, and then recruited his entire army with promises of Aztec gold.

June 30, 1520 · Tenochtitlan causeways Theater

Besieged and starving, the Spanish tried to slip out along the Tlacopan causeway in the rain at midnight, carrying as much looted gold as they could. They were discovered. Canoes swarmed the causeway, the removable bridges were gone, and the column was cut apart in the dark; men weighed down with gold drowned in the gaps. Perhaps two-thirds of the Spanish and thousands of Tlaxcalans died in a few hours.

July 7, 1520 · Plain of Otumba Theater

A week after the disaster on the causeways, the battered survivors — wounded, without cannon or crossbows, most of the horses dead — were intercepted on the plain of Otumba by an Aztec army vastly larger. Cortés spotted the enemy commander's standard, charged straight at it with the last of his cavalry, and killed him. The Aztec army, its command signal gone, dissolved.

May 26 – August 13, 1521 · Valley of Mexico Theater

Cortés returned with a coalition army of perhaps 80,000 indigenous allies and thirteen brigantines, built in Tlaxcala and carried overland in pieces to be launched on the lake. The brigantines swept away the canoe fleet and cut the causeways; the city, already gutted by smallpox, was starved and then taken street by street, with the Spanish demolishing every building as they advanced to deny cover. After 93 days Cuauhtémoc was captured trying to escape by canoe.

April 1531 · Gulf of Guayaquil Theater

Pizarro's third expedition south made landfall on the island of Puná and fought its people in a sharp engagement that left several Spaniards dead and many wounded, including Hernando Pizarro. From Puná the expedition crossed to Tumbes and began the march inland — into an empire that had just finished tearing itself apart.

November 16, 1532 · Northern Peruvian highlands Theater

Pizarro had 168 men. Atahualpa, fresh from winning the civil war, had an army of tens of thousands camped outside Cajamarca and came into the town square with several thousand lightly armed retainers to meet the strangers. At a signal, cannon and cavalry opened up from the buildings ringing the plaza. In perhaps two hours thousands of Inca were killed in the crush; not one Spaniard died, and Atahualpa was dragged from his litter alive.

July 26, 1533 · Cajamarca Theater

Atahualpa offered to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver for his freedom. Over eight months the treasure of the empire was stripped from its temples and carried to Cajamarca — the largest ransom ever paid. Pizarro took it, then tried Atahualpa on charges including idolatry and revolt and had him garrotted anyway. He had ordered Huáscar killed from captivity; Pizarro had him killed on delivery.

November 8, 1533 · Road to Cuzco Theater

Pushing ahead of the main column toward Cuzco, Hernando de Soto's cavalry was ambushed climbing the steep pass at Vilcaconga by Quizquiz's veterans. On broken ground the horses lost their advantage; five Spaniards and many mounts were killed and the detachment was in real danger until Almagro's reinforcements arrived after dark.

November 15, 1533 · Inca heartland Theater

Pizarro entered Cuzco, the sacred capital at the centre of the Inca world, and installed Manco Inca as a puppet Sapa Inca. The city's temples were stripped — the Coricancha's sheets of gold prised from the walls — and its treasures divided among the conquistadors. Quizquiz withdrew north to fight on; the empire's capital had changed hands in fourteen years from Cortés's landing at Veracruz.