Spanish Conquistadores
(1493–1600 CE)
The Americas
Brotherhood Rank #193
They came ashore like men who had already burned their way out of hell and were eager to prove they’d earned their escape. Sails reefed, steel sweating under the Caribbean heat, boots rotting from salt and ambition — a brotherhood sewn together from bankrupt hidalgos, bastard noblemen, runaway debtors, deserters, zealots, thugs, and the occasional true believer who thought God wanted more gold in His altars. Their ships exhaled them across the surf in jagged little detachments, each man already calculating what he might carve out of this new world: a village to sack, a chief to ransom, a woman to claim, a gold vein to follow like a vein in God’s own wrist.
The jungle didn’t greet them. It recoiled. They hacked their way in anyway — moving in loose wolf-pack files, sweating through gambesons, crossbows slung, arquebuses wheezing like consumptives, and blades gleaming with a fanatic’s promise. The first thing they learned was that the New World bled easily. The second thing they learned was that it bled forever. Villagers fled, then rallied, then died under iron blades they’d never seen before. A Spaniard with a steel breastplate could wade into a knot of spear-armed defenders and come out red to the elbows, eyes bright as if sanctified, shouting his lineage to whatever God might still be listening.
The brotherhood formed itself in heat and rot — not chivalric, not noble, but bound by a shared hunger so deep it hollowed them into weapons. They marched under the banners of kings, but their real allegiance was to plunder, reputation, and whatever captain could promise the next impossible victory. Nights around their fires glowed with stories of cities paved in gold, temples stuffed with treasure, empires waiting to be broken open like sacrificial animals. Some doubted. Most didn’t. They weren’t here to doubt. They were here to take.
And when resistance stiffened — when a village fought back with obsidian blades that sliced their horses or arrows that found soft flesh between ribs — the brotherhood answered with methods they’d perfected in Iberia during centuries of crusade and reconquista: fire, chains, dogs, mutilation, terror. They treated the unfamiliar like heresy. They moved through forests and highlands with the fierce cohesion of men who believed the world was theirs by divine right, and that any god worshipped by others was simply waiting to be replaced.
This was the early shape of the Conquistadores — not yet a myth, not yet the scourge of continents — just a hard, hungry collection of killers who had stumbled upon civilizations richer and more fragile than anything they’d ever imagined. They marched forward, and history cracked under their boots.
The brotherhood didn’t begin with Cortés or Pizarro. It began with the Caribbean garrisons — Española, Puerto Rico, Cuba — where Spanish war-culture metastasized into something leaner, meaner, and stripped of Old World pageantry. Here, men learned how to fight in humidity that rotted bowstrings, in forests that devoured formations, and against foes who struck from ambush with terrifying coordination. The Conquistador psyche developed in these islands: strike fast, terrify faster, take hostages, seize food, break resistance, ride hard, hang rebels, repeat. Hunger and gold fever welded them into a single body.
From this crucible the great campaigns were born. Cortés took the template and weaponized it. His warband behaved like a single predatory organism: scouts whispering back what lay ahead, Tlaxcalan allies swelling their ranks, steel-clad cavalry smashing through shield lines while the infantry closed in with sword and buckler. Their battlefield personality was surgical brutality — break the enemy’s leaders, capture the nobles, sow panic, exploit the retreat. Their mobility bordered on the insane; they marched through swamps, climbed volcanic highlands, and rebuilt brigantines in the middle of a siege as if hardship were another superstition to be conquered.
At the center of their psychology was a cold, calculating cruelty. Not chaotic sadism — strategic cruelty. They understood terror as a battlefield multiplier. Executions were staged with witness populations in mind. Torture was applied not for pleasure but for information and compliance. Entire towns were burned to erase resistance networks. Dogs were unleashed because a mastiff tearing through defensive lines broke morale faster than any arquebus. These acts weren’t aberrations — they were doctrine.
Yet the brotherhood maintained fierce internal discipline. Punishments for theft from the common treasury could be limb-removal or hanging. Disobedience on campaign got men dragged behind horses. Religious rites were observed even as atrocities unfolded around them — priests carrying crucifixes over piles of corpses, offering absolution to men who had spent the morning cutting down defenders or burning shrines. They believed themselves chosen instruments, and belief is the oxygen of conquest.
When the Conquistadores struck the mainland — Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru — they did so with wolfish cohesion. They adapted fast: learning native logistics routes, exploiting tribute resentments, stitching together enemy factions into expedient alliances. They didn’t defeat empires alone; they infected them with civil war. The fall of Tenochtitlán and Cuzco was as much anthropology as combat — the brotherhood understood how to break an imperial nervous system.
Their weapons were extensions of their collective temperament: the espada ropera and montante for close-quarter ferocity, crossbows for steady pressure, arquebuses for shock and thunder. Horses became terror-engines, trampling through formations unused to mounted attack. Steel armor turned duels into massacres; obsidian blades shattered on breastplates while Spanish sword thrusts turned defenders into butchered heaps. Their lethality wasn’t measured in glory but in ratios — small Conquistador contingents routinely killing hundreds in engagements because the technology gap was so obscene.
Their ruthlessness was legendary. At Cholula, thousands were killed in a single orchestrated bloodletting. In the Andes, resistance leaders were garroted, burned, or dismembered as warnings. During the siege of Tenochtitlán, starving civilians were slaughtered wholesale. In Guatemala, forced labor systems ground communities into exhaustion. They waged war with the relentlessness of men convinced that mercy was a liability.
But they were loyal — to plunder shares, to their captains, to a warped sense of honor that demanded courage in impossible moments. When a Conquistador column broke, it broke only after extraordinary pressure. More often, it didn’t break at all. They fought through fevers, starvation, mutinies, ambushes, and landscapes that seemed to conspire against them. Gold was a powerful engine, but so was pride — the conviction that Spain’s enemies, pagan or imperial, deserved obliteration.
Their legend metastasized quickly. Chronicles painted them as chosen warriors subduing heathen lands. The brotherhood embraced these stories, polishing their own mythology even as the realities grew more monstrous. Songs, letters, royal decrees — all fed a narrative that turned conquest into destiny. Their impact was apocalyptic. The fall of native empires triggered demographic collapse through violence, forced labor, and disease. Landscapes were reshaped. Cultures were shattered. Entire world orders ended under their boots.
By the late sixteenth century, the brotherhood was mutating into colonial bureaucracy. The wild bands dissolved into viceroyalties, encomiendas, estates. Steel helmets gave way to powdered wigs. But the memory lingered — a century when a few thousand hard, hungry men cracked open continents and drowned civilizations in blood.
History remembers kings. The New World remembers the Conquistadores.
And the earth still bears the scars of where they passed.
NOTABLE MEMBERS
Cortés fought like a man in constant negotiation with catastrophe, forever betting his life against impossible odds and somehow winning more often than reason allowed. He held his warband together through charisma, bribery, brutality, and an uncanny ability to sense weakness in both allies and empires. The siege of Tenochtitlán carved him into a legend — part tactician, part warlord, part opportunist riding a tidal wave of indigenous alliances and Spanish ambition. He made decisions with the cold efficiency of a surgeon removing a tumor: swift, clean, and indifferent to the body count. His legacy is a ruinous paradox — civilization breaker, state builder, genius marauder — remembered equally in chronicles and in the long, unquiet memory of those who fell to his advance.
Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475–1541)
Pizarro carried the brutality of the Caribbean campaigns into the high Andes, shaping it into something that resembled destiny and murder braided together. Cajamarca remains his signature: a trap sprung with mathematical cruelty, annihilating an empire’s leadership in the span of a heartbeat. He fought with the patience of a vulture and the audacity of a gambler who had never learned the meaning of fear. The siege of Cuzco turned him into the architect of an imperial autopsy — carving out the Inca world piece by bleeding piece. His death, hacked apart in Lima by the followers of a rival, felt almost inevitable; a life spent in violence rarely ends cleanly.
Pedro de Alvarado (c. 1485–1541)
Alvarado moved through Mesoamerica like a wildfire wearing steel. Known for his red hair and for the speed with which he reached for massacre as a solution, he commanded troops with a mix of dynamism and terror. The Cholula killings, whether fully orchestrated or opportunistically exploited, branded him as one of the Conquest’s purest practitioners of annihilation-as-strategy. His campaigns in Guatemala were defined by relentless pursuit, forced labor, and a willingness to break entire populations to achieve submission. When he died crushed under his own horse during a rebellion, some chroniclers wrote that fate had finally caught the man even fear struggled to outrun.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cortés, Hernán. Cartas de Relación. Madrid: Historia 16, 1985.
Xerez, Francisco de. Verdadera Relación de la Conquista del Perú. Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1984.
Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Thomas, Hugh. The Conquest of Mexico. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Lane, Kris. Pizarro: The Conquest of Peru. Routledge, 2014.
Martínez, Alfonso. The Totally Reliable Field Guide to Negotiating with Conquistadors, Featuring Tips on Not Being Immediately Disemboweled. Seville: Imaginary Press, 1621.