Smallpox, Cortés' sinister advance in the conquest of Mexico

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It is well known how the diseases transmitted involuntarily by the Spanish (and their African slaves) who moved to the Indies since the end of the 15th century had a devastating effect on the native American populations. Although with different opinions, not only the scope of the various diseases that took the form of an epidemic and devastated the inhabitants of the New World, but rather what phenomenon was the most determining – the wars of conquest, the application of an economic and social system. perverse, exploitative and cruel colonialism or the aforementioned diseases – the truth is that historical demographers of the stature of Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, Noble David Cook or Massimo Livi-Bacci have provided decisive knowledge regarding such a terrible and macabre subject. ND Cook himself pointed out that, in terms of mortality caused by diseases of Eurasian and African origin, the flu killed twenty percent of the indigenous people, smallpox thirty-five, and measles another twenty-five percent, all of this. before 1540 . As we see, smallpox stood out very early on.

Produced by the Variola virus , the disease first appeared on the island of Hispaniola (the current island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1507, but reappeared with force at the end of 1518. In a short period of time it It claimed the lives of about a third of the surviving aborigines (since the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the BTC Users Number Data island in 1492). These details are known to us thanks to the information that the Hieronymite friars who, at that time, ruled the island, sent to Charles I. By then, the disease had also reached Puerto Rico. And he also had to arrive in Cuba. On the other hand, and although other diseases have been proposed, it is very feasible to think that the Inca emperor Huayna Cápac probably died as a result of smallpox in 1530, or perhaps a few years before, since this question is also subject to controversy.



But how did smallpox affect the conquest of Mexico? It was with the arrival from Cuba of the army of Pánfilo de Narváez, a lieutenant of the governor of said island, Diego de Velázquez, appointed with the purpose of arresting and punishing the wayward Hernán Cortés, who had undertaken the conquest of the Mexica Empire without permission. of his superior. Already in March-April 1520, smallpox reached the city of Cempoallan from Veracruz, which, inhabited by the Totonacs, had been the first to join the Cortesian cause a year before. An important question is whether smallpox was the only disease that affected the aborigines, since symptoms have also been detected that seem to indicate the presence of typhus and measles. In a very important source, as it reflects the Aboriginal point of view, the so-called Historical Annals of Tlatelolco, one can read.