Latin America usually means the lands of the Americas where Spanish or Portuguese became the main languages, from Mexico and the Caribbean down to the tip of Chile. The term Latin America itself only spread in the middle of the nineteenth century, used by South American writers and by French officials eager to stress a shared "Latin" culture. The history it names begins much earlier. When Europeans arrived, the Americas were home to tens of millions of people, with estimates for 1492 ranging very widely, from around 40 million to over 100 million. Some lived in small farming and foraging bands; others lived in cities as large as any in Europe.

The Maya

The Maya lived in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. They never formed a single empire. Instead, rival city-states such as Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque and Copán were ruled by sacred kings who built stepped pyramids and fought, married and traded with one another. Historians call the high point of these cities the Classic period, roughly AD 250 to 900. The Maya developed the most complete writing system in the ancient Americas, mixing signs for whole words with signs for syllables, along with an elaborate calendar and a symbol for zero. Most of their writing was carved in stone. They also wrote books on folded bark paper, but Spanish friars burned many as works of idolatry, and only four Maya books survive.

In the ninth century many cities in the southern lowlands were abandoned. Scholars still debate why, pointing to drought, constant warfare and soil exhaustion working together. The Maya themselves did not vanish: cities in Yucatán kept going, and millions of people speak Mayan languages today.

The Mexica

The people often called Aztecs called themselves the Mexica. Arriving as newcomers in the Valley of Mexico, they founded Tenochtitlan around 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco. They fed a growing city by building chinampas, raised garden plots built up from the mud of shallow lakes, which produced several harvests a year. In 1428 the Mexica joined the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, which soon dominated central Mexico.

This was a tribute empire. Conquered towns usually kept their own rulers but sent cloth, cacao, feathers, food and warriors to the capital. Tenochtitlan may have held around 200,000 people, linked to the shore by causeways and supplied by aqueducts. Religion demanded human sacrifice, mostly of war captives, to keep the sun moving and the world alive. Spanish writers exaggerated the numbers to justify conquest, but recent excavations of skull racks in Mexico City confirm that sacrifice took place on a large scale. Historians try to hold both facts at once: a brilliant urban civilization and a state built on fear and tribute.

The Inca

In the Andes the Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the "land of four parts," governed from Cuzco. Expansion began under the ruler Pachacuti from around 1438, and within a century the empire stretched some 4,000 kilometers from present-day Ecuador to central Chile. The Inca economy had no money and few markets. Instead, households owed the mit'a, a labor service owed to the state, working state fields, building roads or serving in the army. The state stored food and cloth in thousands of storehouses and gave it back as rations and gifts. A road network of tens of thousands of kilometers carried relay runners and armies across mountains and deserts.

The Inca had no writing in the usual sense. They kept records with quipus, knotted cords used to keep records of numbers such as census counts and tribute, and perhaps of stories as well. Quechua, the language they spread, is still spoken by millions in the Andes.

Other peoples mattered too. The Taíno of the Caribbean islands, the Muisca of the Colombian highlands, who worked gold into offerings, the Mapuche of southern Chile, and the Tupi and Guarani peoples of the Brazilian coast and forests each had their own ways of life. The great empires were also young: the Mexica and Inca states had been powerful for less than a century when the Spaniards arrived, and many of their subjects resented them, a fact that would matter enormously in the conquest.

Worked example: the great market of Tlatelolco

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier who marched with Cortés, wrote his history of the conquest decades later as an old man in Guatemala; it was published in 1632. He described the market at Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlan's twin city: rows of traders selling gold, cloth, slaves, cacao, ropes, sandals, tools and food, with officials checking measures and judges settling disputes. Some of his fellow soldiers, he said, had been to Rome and Constantinople and had never seen a market so large and so well ordered.

What can a historian do with this? First, it is good evidence that the city impressed even its conquerors. Second, it is a source written by a participant with reasons to make the conquest look grand, since a mighty enemy makes a mightier victory. Third, it can be checked against other sources, including the Florentine Codex, compiled in the 1500s by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars who wrote in their own language. Reading the conqueror and the conquered side by side is the basic method of this course.