It's been a long time since I've read any pre-Columbian history, but I seem to remember that in addition to infectious disease, a lot of the South American empires were easy to conquer because the subjects generally hated their rulers, and the Spanish had no trouble finding indigenous allies.
The Inca were easy to conquer because they had no steel and no horses. The Spanish were so unimaginably horrible that I can't imagine their presence having anything other than a uniting effect.
The book "The Last Days Of The Inca" describe a scene were ~20 armored conquistadors are in a town that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. The Incas managed to call in enough people that the hillsides were all completely covered with tens of thousands of people waiting to attack. When they did, the entire population was slaughtered by the 20 conquistadors on horseback (there were so many dead bodies that new waves of attackers had to struggle to climb over them), and the Incas managed to kill only a single conquistador.
If you want to finally abuse yourself of the fairy tale notion that somehow justice will always prevail in the world, I recommend reading "The Last Days Of The Incas."
That doesn't pass the sniff test. Slaughtering a few thousand stunned pigs would be exhausting. Killing that many people who are trying to kill you? Not gonna happen.
It was a siege of a well-fortified town, and the Spanish had non-negligible support from non-Incan people unsatisfied with the Incan rule. That said, a Spaniard on a thousand pound horse, wrapped in steel, on an open, unobstructed field, against people wearing mostly cloth armor, with stone or copper weapons, was effectively unstoppable. Again that said, many of the non-Spanish troops supporting Pizarro and Co. died.
Most of the defeats the Spanish suffered were when some of the more clever Incan generals used the brutal terrain against them: triggering landslides, creating obstructions to disrupt a cavalry charge, etc. While that works in mountain passes, places like Lima (established by Pizarro mid-1500s), were on flat terrain known by the Spanish, so those sorts of tactics did not help during those sieges. The siege of Cuzco (or Cusco, whichever) was in a similar situation to that of Lima.
Something that I felt was missing from the Last Days of the Inca was an emphasis on the number of Spaniards, and ignoring the number of shock troops that Pizarro & Co. had recruited by that time. Remember, by the time Manco Inca had decided to "rebel", the Spaniards had been in Cuzco and some neighboring cities for several years.
> That said, a Spaniard on a thousand pound horse, wrapped in steel, on an open, unobstructed field, against people wearing mostly cloth armor, with stone or copper weapons, was effectively unstoppable
This is ridiculous. The problem was that the Incans didn't have access to (or had developed) the polearm (ie, spear axes), guerilla warfare or basic combat engineering (read: trenches/moats). 10 decently trained pole-armsmen could easily best an armored horse, and well-laid traps or ambushes could easily have netted them closer to 1:1 numbers. An occasional ditch or two could easily have prevented any charges, nullifying the mobility advantage.
More likely, the Incan slave/poor populace was split and easily co-opted by the Spaniards.
> More likely, the Incan slave/poor populace was split and easily co-opted by the Spaniards.
Why is this either/or? The above statement is undoubtedly true, but that doesn't mean what I said is false.
The problem, is, as you say, that the Incans only had access to cloth armor, copper axes, and stone clubs, as I said in my comment. They eventually developed guerilla tactics, but such tactics are not effective when you are sieging your capital, trying to take it back from invaders. Also, I cordially invite you to try and organize the digging of ditches when 50 to 90 percent of your population has been killed, most of the rest are in rebellion because your rule was, frankly, never terribly popular, and the remaining percentage are currently facing down a thousand pound warhorse. I would also like to point out that decently training a pole-armsmen is no easy feat when you have never done it before, and your empire is in disarray.
Also, the Spanish had plenty of experience in the European style of warfare based on cavalry supported by foot, since the European cultures had access to horses for many centuries at this point, whereas the Incans and other cultures and empires that arose in the Andes had access to the llama. Llamas are not, shall we say, renowned for their martial prowess. It takes time to develop new ideas and technologies in the face of change in the best of time. Saying "oh come on, just dig ditches and train spearmen" is a tad unrealistic.
Especially given the types of firearms available to conquistadors of the age. They weren't crew-served weapons, or machine guns, or even breech-loaded rifles. If you were lucky it was a flintlock, and even with that you're not going to be firing very frequently or accurately.
> covered with tens of thousands of people waiting to attack. When they did, the entire population was slaughtered by the 20 conquistadors on horseback
That's completely and utterly ridiculous. What were the conquistadors? Supermen?
How do you propose to defeat a band of 20 knights on warhorses, in plate armor from head to foot, bearing pole-arms and swords, using an army of bewildered lackeys armed with stone age technology?
It's been a long time since I've read any pre-Columbian history, but I seem to remember that in addition to infectious disease, a lot of the South American empires were easy to conquer because the subjects generally hated their rulers, and the Spanish had no trouble finding indigenous allies.