The Fall of the Indian Empire

How could just a few hundred Spaniards conquer the Americas? Open this book to see the full story of the Spanish conquest.

Did the emperors of the Indigenous American empires really submit as soon as they met the conquistadors?

Were Indigenous warriors truly savages who worshipped human sacrifice and lived on raw flesh?

Did the native peoples ever win battles during the Spanish conquest of the Americas?

Why didn’t the vastly more numerous Indigenous people fight back after their emperor was killed?

Did Indigenous American civilization disappear solely because of Spanish military aggression?

Matthew Restall, renowned historian and former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, combed through a vast trove of sources, from the ruins of Indigenous civilizations and native manuscripts to the conquistadors’ own accounts. Unearthing little-known historical details and examining the significance behind every source, he has written a major work that brings together the finest research on the history of the Americas across the ages.

Open this book and follow the story from the conquistadors’ first encounters with native peoples to see the full history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.