What else was happening during 1492?
One year, two halves. The largest empire in the Americas is still expanding when three ships reach the Bahamas - and what crosses the ocean first, in both directions, is not what the textbooks lead with.
About 7 min1438 CE – 1620 CE11 cited sources
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What you will follow
This guided story moves the same world map through 15 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.
How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.
Related subjects on the map
- Inca imperial expansion
- The Columbian Exchange
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire
- Old World epidemics in the Americas
- Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire
Sources used by this story
- Terence N. D'Altroy, The Incas, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
- R. Alan Covey, Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- Ramiro Matos Mendieta and Jose Barreiro, eds., The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian / Smithsonian Books, 2015).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 'Qhapaq Nan, Andean Road System', World Heritage List no. 1459 (inscribed 2014).
- Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History (New York: Ecco, 2018).
- Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- Francis J. Brooks, 'Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources, and Populations', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 1 (1993): 1-29.
- Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, 'Born with a Silver Spoon: The Origin of World Trade in 1571', Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201-221.
- Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, 'The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas', Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (2010): 163-188.
- Alexander Koch et al., 'Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492', Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13-36.