Born Then1519–1521
Life during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Hernán Cortés landed in 1519 with a few hundred Spaniards and won allies among the Aztecs' enemies, above all Tlaxcala. After a smallpox epidemic and a long siege, Tenochtitlan fell in August 1521. The city was rebuilt as Mexico City, and Mexica nobles and commoners came under Spanish rule.
Deaths: about 100,000 or more died in the siege of Tenochtitlan alone, many from disease and hunger.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Sengoku period 1467–1590
- Collapse of the Taíno population 1493–1530
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire 1519–1521
- Smallpox epidemic in Mexico 1520–1521
- Smallpox in the Inca Empire 1525–1527
- Ethiopian–Adal war 1529–1543
- Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire 1532–1572