which native american empires did spanish conquistadors conquer?

Spanish conquistadors most famously conquered the Aztec Empire in central Mexico and the Inca Empire in the Andes, along with several powerful regional kingdoms and confederacies across the Americas. These conquests unfolded between roughly 1519 and 1572 and reshaped the political map of the Western Hemisphere.

Major Native American empires

• Aztec Empire (Triple Alliance) : Centered in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City), the Aztec Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan was overthrown by Hernán Cortés and thousands of Indigenous allies between 1519 and 1521. The final defeat came with the siege and fall of Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521.

• Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) : Spanning much of the Andes from modern Colombia to Chile, the Inca Empire was conquered in a protracted campaign that began with Francisco Pizarro’s capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 and ended with the fall of the last Inca stronghold in 1572.

Other powerful states and regions subdued

While not always called “empires” in the same way as the Aztec and Inca, several large, complex Native polities were also conquered or gradually brought under Spanish rule.

• Tarascan/Purépecha state (Michoacán) : A major rival to the Aztecs in western Mexico, the Purépecha kingdom was subdued in the 1530s and incorporated into the Spanish colonial system.

• Highland Maya and other Mesoamerican polities : The Spanish conquest of Guatemala and Yucatán targeted numerous Maya kingdoms and city-states; it took many decades and was only fully consolidated in the 17th century.

• Various Central Mexican confederacies : Campaigns such as the “war of Mexico’s west” and the Chichimeca War gradually expanded Spanish power over large Indigenous regions north and west of the former Aztec heartland.

How these conquests unfolded

• The Spanish relied heavily on Indigenous allies who opposed or had been subjugated by these empires, such as Tlaxcalans against the Aztecs and Huanca or Cañaris against the Incas.

• Epidemics, internal civil wars (like the Inca conflict between Atahualpa and Huáscar), and the shock of new military technology compounded the impact of relatively small Spanish forces.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.