CORONADO

Smallpox quickly spread throughout the Caribbean, though it did not reach Cuba until Cortes had left from there for Mexico. But the next year, when the Cuban governor sent an envoy to rein in Cortes and Cortes persuaded him to stay instead, the disease arrived in Mexico: one of the men on the envoy had it and infected the household in Cempoala where he was held.

Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of change: a quincentennial commemoration, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 86:

[Per Bartolome de las Casas,] …the infection spread from one Indian to another, and they, being so numerous and eating and sleeping together, quickly infected the whole country.

According to a 1948 study by S. F. Cook and L. B. Simpson, the population of central Mexico in 1519 when Cortes arrived, was roughly eleven million. By the time of the Coronado expedition in 1540, it was less than seven million; by 1597, three million.

Smallpox greatly aided Cortes in vanquishing the Aztecs, and transformed what might have been “just” a military defeat for the Aztecs into a human catastrophe.

And though the import of Indian slaves to Spain was forbidden in 1502, the Spanish in Aztec Mexico found local precedent for a kind of Indian slavery:

Viola and Margolis, pp. 31-2:

Aztec society was tightly stratified and contained many hereditary classes [including slaves]…. Warfare brought new lands and riches in the form of goods and slaves. … A century before the [Spanish arrived], … the Aztecs were in the habit of appropriating entire village populations, moving them into more controllable regions, and forcing them to work on state construction projects. Conquered peoples were forced to pay tribute …. [and] human beings for slavery or [religious] sacrifice.

It seemed to the Spanish almost natural to carry on this system in some form. And there was precedent in Spain’s settlement of the Canary Islands: encomienda. It was a trade the conquered natives couldn’t refuse:

You learn Spanish and Christianity and work for me for the rest of your and your family’s lives, and I provide infrastructure and protection, except you can’t rebel against me who conquered you. In Mexico, this seemed like just more of the same that the Aztecs had brought on those they had conquered.

As this tended to exploit the natives in ways Las Casas complained about, the Spanish crown modified it and eventually abolished it, at least in Mexico, but not everywhere.

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