The Human Cost
8,061,000
estimated total dead
Each dot below represents 1,000 human lives. Scroll to watch the scale unfold.
61,000 soldiers killed in combat, from wounds, or from disease. Each = 1,000 lives.
8,000,000 civilians killed — from violence, famine, disease, and displacement. Wars are not fought only by soldiers.
incl. 110,000 civilians
incl. 3,000 civilians
incl. 3,000 civilians
incl. 600 civilians
How Spanish Conquest's dead compare to other conflicts and events.
700 dead
Roughly 700 Spaniards died on La Noche Triste, about two-thirds of Cortés's European force — the worst defeat any conquistador army ever suffered. Many drowned because they had filled their armour with looted gold.
61,000 dead
Battle deaths are a rounding error in this war. Every engagement from Centla in 1519 to Cuzco in 1533 together killed perhaps 61,000 fighters — fewer than a single day at some later battles on this site. The conquest was not won by killing armies.
150,000 dead
The 93-day siege of Tenochtitlan killed perhaps 150,000 or more, most of them non-combatants dying of hunger, thirst, and smallpox in a city whose aqueduct had been cut. It is among the deadliest sieges in recorded history.
5,000,000 dead
Smallpox arrived in Mexico in 1520 with Narváez's reinforcements and reached the Andes before any Spaniard did, killing the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and triggering the civil war that Pizarro walked into. No one intended this, and no one could have prevented it — which is precisely why it dwarfs everything that was intended.
8,000,000 dead
The civilian figure is an estimate of epidemic deaths in Mexico and the Andes during the conquest years themselves, and it is the least certain number on this page — scholarly estimates of pre-contact population vary by a factor of five, and the 1520–21 and 1525–33 outbreaks are reconstructed from fragmentary accounts. Over the following century the total is far higher; the indigenous population of the Americas may have fallen by as much as 90%.