Quotes About Conquest

After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

From Bartolomé de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their arrival brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. "We, Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms," reflected Pedro Cieza de León, the traveler in postconquest Peru. "For wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path.

The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism

In this he was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by Pedro Pizarro. Had Wayna Qhapaq "been alive when we Spaniards entered this land," the conquistador remarked, "it would have been impossible for us to win it.… And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land.

More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott's was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John Hemming's Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no successor, despite a wealth of new information.) "The Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely ignored," Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me.

De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

Inka satrapies;

Blinded by the shine from Potosí silver, the Spaniards paid little attention to conquered peoples' excremental practices.

Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to "the good hand of God," which "favored our beginnings" by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that he might make room for us." Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease.

Dazzled as he was, Cortés was also aware that with a single command Motecuhzoma could order his army "to obliterate all memory of us." The Spaniards counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the tlatoani in his own palace, making him first their captive and then their puppet.

Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

Like so many other French generals in the Peninsula, he was soon to find that victory is not the same thing as conquest.

I like the moment when I break a man's ego.

I want to make the conquest of the moon the United States' goal for the 21st century and, through that goal, to make us a great and good and happy country for generations to come.

I love winning more than anything, so, yeah, winning.

Julius Caesar's victories in Gaul were in significant part a result of the disunity of the Celts there, and of his ability to divide and conquer, both politically and militarily.269

internal disunity made Ireland vulnerable to conquest by a united Britain.

expedition returned in triumph to Rome with captured British slaves marching behind them in the procession.12

For thousands of years, imperial conquests have been launched by Asians, Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, as well as by Europeans.

We are critical of the priests who burned the paper books of the Aztecs because contemporary Europe looked down upon the non-Christian Americans and wanted to destroy their heathen beliefs. But we ourselves have so little esteem for these same beliefs that although the most important ones were recorded by the early Spaniards, we reject them as the fables of primitive nations.

for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.

and when he did come they had no walls to stop him)

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.