In that case, however, conquistadores contributed nothing directly to the societies' destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything.
Francisco Pizarro and his small group of conquistadors stunned the king’s much larger force with guns and horses, neither of which they had seen before.
In the early 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors conveyed it west across the Atlantic, where it ravaged native communities and contributed to the downfall of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires.
The Aztecs formed out of an alliance of three major cities in modern day Mexico in about 1430, just 89 years before Cortez and his conquistadors showed up.