The Long Way Back to Ourselves

5.5

Epidemics, Part Two: The Biological Collapse of the Americas

This episode asks how fewer than two hundred Spaniards toppled an empire fielding tens of thousands of troops, rejecting "superior weapons" and "betrayal" as insufficient. It shows Cortés relied on tens of thousands of allies like the Tlaxcalans and that a 1520 smallpox outbreak killed much of Tenochtitlan's population during the siege, while in Peru the Inca ruler Huayna Capac died of epidemic disease around 1525, before Pizarro arrived, triggering a civil war that left the empire fractured. You hear from an account by men from Tlatelolco, describing a sixty-day epidemic leaving the sick unable to move. It uses de Soto's Mississippi expedition, finding chiefdoms French travelers later found empty, evidence disease outran the conquerors.