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"I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold."

A minor nobleman's son from Extremadura who abandoned law studies for the Indies, Cortés spent fifteen unremarkable years as a colonist and notary in Hispaniola and Cuba before talking his way into command of an expedition to the mainland — an expedition whose governor tried to recall him before it had even sailed. He left anyway. Within weeks of landing he had founded a town to make himself legally independent of Cuba, scuttled his own fleet to make retreat impossible, and begun assembling the indigenous coalition that would do most of his fighting. His genius was political rather than military. He grasped faster than anyone that the Aztec empire was a structure of resented tribute, and that its subject peoples could be turned into an army — the Tlaxcalans who nearly destroyed him in September 1519 were besieging Tenochtitlan beside him two years later. He was also capable of cold, calculated atrocity, as at Cholula, and of catastrophic misjudgement: the hostage-emperor scheme that collapsed into La Noche Triste, the worst defeat of his career. He died in Spain in 1547, rich, ennobled, and embittered — stripped of the governorship he had won, litigating endlessly, and largely ignored by the crown he had handed an empire.

"You have come to sit on your seat, which I have kept for you."

Moctezuma Xocoyotzin ruled the largest and most powerful state in the Americas at its height. A priest and successful general before his election in 1502, he expanded the empire's tribute reach further than any predecessor, centralised authority around his own person, and purged the nobility of officials he had not appointed. By 1519 the Triple Alliance drew tribute from millions across central Mexico — and had made enemies of nearly every people it touched. Why he let the Spanish into his capital is the enduring question of the conquest. The familiar story — a fatalistic king mistaking Cortés for the returning god Quetzalcoatl — comes almost entirely from sources written decades later under Spanish supervision, and most historians now read it as a retrospective justification rather than history. The likelier Moctezuma was a calculating ruler who received a strange, tiny embassy into a city of 200,000 fully expecting to control or absorb it, and who was wrong. He spent his last eight months a hostage in his own palace, issuing orders under Spanish supervision, and died in June 1520 after being brought onto a rooftop to calm his rebelling people — stoned by his own subjects, the Spanish said; strangled by the Spanish once he was useless, said the Mexica.

"Tell them that they must not fear; tell them what I say exactly."

Born to a noble Nahua family near Coatzacoalcos and sold or given into slavery among the Chontal Maya as a child, the woman the Spanish baptised Marina was handed to Cortés at Potonchán in March 1519 as one of twenty women in a peace settlement. She turned out to be the most valuable thing he acquired in the Americas. She spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, and Chontal Maya — and Cortés had a shipwrecked Spaniard, Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke Maya. Through that two-step chain, and soon through her own fluent Spanish, the conquest could talk. She was far more than a mouthpiece. She read the politics of central Mexico for Cortés, negotiated with lords, and uncovered the alleged plot at Cholula that preceded the massacre. Indigenous accounts of the conquest depict her constantly at Cortés's side; the Nahua called him 'Malintzin' — her name, applied to him. She bore him a son, Martín, and was later married to a Spanish officer. Her memory remains bitterly contested in Mexico: 'malinchista' still means a traitor who prefers the foreign, yet she was an enslaved teenager with no nation to betray, and feminist and Chicana writers have reclaimed her as a survivor and as the symbolic mother of a mestizo people.

"They are not gods. They bleed, and they can be driven into the water."

Moctezuma's younger brother and the lord of Iztapalapa, Cuitláhuac had argued against admitting the Spanish to Tenochtitlan from the beginning and was among those held with Moctezuma in the Spanish compound. When Alvarado's massacre at the festival of Toxcatl set the city alight in May 1520, the Mexica needed a war leader, and the Spanish — needing someone to quiet the streets — released him. It was the worst decision Cortés's garrison ever made. Elected Huey Tlatoani after Moctezuma's death, Cuitláhuac did in weeks what his brother had failed to do in months: he organised the siege of the Spanish compound, tore up the causeway bridges, and turned the retreat of June 30 into La Noche Triste, the near-annihilation of the invaders. He then began rebuilding the city's defences and working to hold the empire's wavering tributaries in line, correctly identifying Tlaxcala as the centre of gravity. He ruled for eighty days. Smallpox, carried ashore by Narváez's expedition, swept Tenochtitlan that autumn and killed him in December 1520 — the ablest opponent the Spanish faced in Mexico, destroyed by a disease his people had no defence against.

"Take the dagger you have in your belt and strike me dead immediately."

Cuauhtémoc — 'Descending Eagle' — came to the throne of a doomed city. Elected in early 1521 after smallpox killed Cuitláhuac, he was perhaps twenty-five and inherited a capital gutted by disease, ringed by defectors, and about to face a coalition army of tens of thousands with a fleet of brigantines on the lake. He fought anyway, for ninety-three days, house by house, refusing every offer of surrender as the Spanish demolished Tenochtitlan behind their advance. He was captured on August 13, 1521, trying to cross the lake by canoe. Brought before Cortés, he is said to have asked to be killed on the spot rather than live to see what came next. Instead the conquistadors, convinced he had hidden the gold lost on La Noche Triste, burned his feet with oil to make him talk. He had nothing to tell them. Cortés kept him alive as a figurehead for four years, then hanged him in the Honduran jungle in 1525 on an unproven accusation of conspiracy. In independent Mexico he became the national hero the conquest produced — the ruler who did not submit — and the one whose statue stands on the Paseo de la Reforma, not Cortés's.

"I struck first because I would not be struck."

Red-bearded, charming and violent, Alvarado was Cortés's most capable field commander and his single greatest liability. The Nahua called him Tonatiuh, 'the Sun,' for his colouring. He fought through every engagement of the Mexican campaign and led one of the three assault columns in the siege of Tenochtitlan. His defining act came in May 1520, left in command of the capital while Cortés marched to the coast to deal with Narváez. Alvarado surrounded the unarmed nobles celebrating the festival of Toxcatl in the Great Temple precinct and had them slaughtered. Whether he believed a rising was imminent or simply panicked, he destroyed in one afternoon the arrangement Cortés had spent six months constructing and triggered the war that culminated in La Noche Triste. He went on to conquer Guatemala with a brutality extreme even by the standards of his colleagues, ruling as its governor, and died in 1541 in western Mexico — crushed when a horse rolled on him on a rocky slope, an unheroic end to the conquest's most feared soldier.

"There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose."

The illegitimate and illiterate son of a Castilian infantry colonel, Pizarro came to the Indies in 1502 and spent a quarter of a century as an ordinary colonist and soldier — he was with Balboa when the Pacific was first sighted in 1513 — before betting everything on rumours of a rich empire to the south. Two expeditions failed miserably. On the island of Gallo, ordered to give up, he is said to have drawn a line in the sand with his sword and invited anyone who wanted wealth rather than poverty to cross it. Thirteen did. His third attempt arrived at the most catastrophic possible moment for the Inca: a civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar had just ended, and smallpox — racing south from Mexico years ahead of any Spaniard — had already killed the emperor Huayna Capac and set that war in motion. At Cajamarca in 1532, with 168 men, Pizarro ambushed and captured Atahualpa in a single afternoon, took the largest ransom in history for him, and executed him anyway. He founded Lima, held Peru, and then lost it to his own side. The conquistadors fell out over the spoils; Pizarro had his old partner Almagro executed in 1538, and in 1541 Almagro's supporters cut him down in his own palace. He died fighting with a sword in his hand at about sixty-three.

"I will not be a vassal of any man alive."

Atahualpa won an empire and lost it within a year. A son of the emperor Huayna Capac, he was campaigning in the north when smallpox — running ahead of the Spanish down the trade routes from Mexico — killed his father and the designated heir in about 1527, throwing the succession open. The war that followed between Atahualpa and his half-brother Huáscar tore the Inca state apart for five years. Atahualpa's veteran northern armies won it in 1532, and Huáscar was taken prisoner. Weeks later, messengers reported a small band of strangers on the coast. Atahualpa, with an army of tens of thousands, was curious rather than alarmed, and invited them to meet him at Cajamarca. He entered the square with several thousand unarmed retainers. Within two hours he was a prisoner and thousands of his people were dead. He read his captors quickly, offering a room filled with gold for his freedom and having Huáscar killed from captivity to prevent a rival claim. The ransom arrived — the greatest ever paid — and Pizarro took it and had him garrotted regardless in July 1533. He was about thirty-one, and the empire's entire authority died with him.

"I made you what you are, and you would leave me nothing."

A foundling abandoned on a church step in Almagro, he rose to become Pizarro's partner in the enterprise of Peru — the man who raised the money, the ships, and the men while Pizarro marched. The partnership held through two failed expeditions and the terrible years on the mangrove coast, but it was poisoned from the moment Pizarro's envoy returned from Spain in 1529 with a royal contract that gave Pizarro the governorship and Almagro almost nothing. He arrived at Cajamarca after Atahualpa's capture, and his men were cut out of the ransom. He fought his way to Cuzco, rescued de Soto's cavalry at Vilcaconga, then took an expedition south into Chile in 1535 looking for an empire of his own — a two-year march of appalling suffering across the Atacama and the high Andes that found nothing. He returned to find Cuzco in revolt, seized the city for himself, and the conquistadors turned on each other. Pizarro's brothers beat him at Las Salinas in 1538 and had him garrotted in the city he had helped take. Three years later his son's supporters murdered Pizarro in revenge.

"I have been the servant of these bearded thieves for long enough."

Another son of Huayna Capac, Manco welcomed Pizarro into Cuzco in 1533 as a liberator from Atahualpa's northern faction and accepted the crown the Spanish offered him. It took three years for him to understand what he had joined: his temples stripped, his sisters and wives seized, himself imprisoned and humiliated by Pizarro's brothers in his own capital. In 1536 he escaped on the pretext of a religious ceremony and raised the greatest indigenous rebellion of the century — an army of perhaps 100,000 that besieged Cuzco for ten months and nearly annihilated the Spanish in Peru. He learned to counter cavalry with boulder-strewn terrain and captured Spanish weapons, and he came within a hair of winning. Reinforcements from Panama and Chile broke the siege. He withdrew into the forested mountains at Vilcabamba and founded a neo-Inca state that outlasted him by nearly thirty years, raiding the Spanish road system from the jungle. He was murdered there in 1544 by Spanish refugees he had sheltered. The state he founded held out until 1572 — meaning the conquest that is usually said to have ended in 1533 actually took forty more years to finish.