For roughly fifteen thousand years, two halves of the human species had developed without knowing the other existed. On one side of the Atlantic, peoples had built empires, written codices, raised pyramids taller than anything in contemporary Europe, and waged war with weapons of wood, stone, and obsidian. On the other side, a cluster of warring kingdoms had spent seven centuries fighting over a single peninsula, and in the process had refined steel, gunpowder, the ocean-going ship, and the mounted lancer into instruments of state power. In 1492 those two worlds touched. Within a single human lifetime, one of them had conquered the heart of the other.
It is difficult to name a sequence of events from the last six hundred years that changed the planet more completely. The Spanish conquest of the Americas did not simply add new shapes to European maps. It fused two hemispheres that had evolved in isolation, redrew the balance of military power from the Andes to the Great Lakes, and produced a method of conquest that European empires would run again and again for the next four hundred years. This is, at its core, a war story, and it is the war story behind the WoFun New World collection. It is also a story about how the tools of one war became the weapons of a hundred wars that followed.
Two Ways of War
When a Spanish soldier and an Aztec warrior faced each other in 1519, almost nothing they carried was familiar to the other man. That unfamiliarity, more than any single battle, is the key to everything that happened next.
Mesoamerican armies fought with weapons of extraordinary craftsmanship and lethality within their own logic. The macuahuitl, a flat wooden club edged with rows of obsidian blades, could open a man, or a horse, with a single stroke. The atlatl flung darts hard enough to punch through quilted armour, and the bow and sling were used in disciplined volleys. Aztec and Maya fighters wore the ichcahuipilli, a vest of cotton soaked and pressed until it could turn a stone-tipped point, and they organised their best soldiers into military orders whose members had to take captives in battle to earn their rank. The Inca, further south, were if anything more advanced in metalwork, fielding bronze axes and star-headed maces, alongside slings that could throw a stone hard enough to dent a steel helmet. The Inca state could march tens of thousands of men along a road network that ran the length of a continent.
What none of these armies had ever seen was iron, a horse, or a firearm. And there was a deeper difference still. Many Mesoamerican wars were fought to capture the enemy alive, not to destroy him on the field. The Spanish, hardened by the long reconquest of Iberia and the brutal campaigns of the Italian wars, fought to kill, to break, and to keep killing until the enemy could not stand. Toledo steel, plate and mail, the crossbow, the matchlock arquebus, the small field gun, the war dog, and above all the warhorse, formed a system of violence designed for annihilation. Two ways of war met, and only one of them was prepared for the kind of fight the other intended.
The Conquistador War Machine
The men who carried that system across the ocean were not a royal army. They were armed entrepreneurs. A conquistador expedition was a private venture, licensed by the crown but funded by debt, plunder, and the personal fortunes of its leaders, who expected to be repaid in gold, land, and the forced labour of the conquered. The numbers were astonishingly small. Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with a few hundred men. Francisco Pizarro confronted the Inca empire with fewer than two hundred.
On the battlefield, those small numbers were multiplied by a combined-arms package that the Americas had no answer to. Cavalry was the great shock. Peoples who had never seen a ridden animal faced armoured men on horseback who could ride down fleeing infantry and shatter a formation before contact, the same role that the Conquistadors Cavalry fills on the tabletop. Steel won the close fight decisively, since a sword that did not shatter and armour that turned stone gave each Spaniard the staying power of several opponents. Crossbow bolts and arquebus fire, slow to reload but terrifying in effect, broke morale as much as bodies.
Yet technology alone did not topple empires, and the conquistadors knew it. Their true force multiplier was political. Cortés did not march on the Aztec capital with five hundred Spaniards. He marched with tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan and Totonac warriors who hated their Aztec overlords and saw in the newcomers a chance to settle old scores. Pizarro arrived in the middle of an Inca civil war and recruited the losing side. The conquest of the Americas was, in large part, an indigenous war that the Spanish learned to ride.
Three Empires, Three Different Wars
The popular image of the conquest is of a single lightning stroke. The reality was three very different wars, and the differences between them teach the real military lesson of the age.
The Aztec war was the fastest and the most famous. Between 1519 and 1521, Cortés exploited Aztec political fault lines, survived a catastrophic night-time retreat from the capital, and returned to besiege the island city of Tenochtitlan with a fleet of small ships on the lake and a host of indigenous allies on the causeways. The warriors of the Aztec military elite, the eagle and jaguar orders represented by the Aztec Elite Warriors, fought ferociously to the end, but the city fell. The detailed tactical story of that campaign, the siege, the brigantines, the street fighting, is told in full in the companion article Clash of Empires: The Spanish-Aztec War.
The Maya war was the opposite of a lightning stroke. The Maya world was not a single empire with a single capital to seize. It was a patchwork of city-states and kingdoms, and that fragmentation, which looked like weakness, proved to be its greatest military strength. There was no emperor to capture, no centre whose fall would end the war. Spanish campaigns in the Yucatán ground on for decades, and the warrior traditions embodied by the Maya Elite Warriors outlasted city after city. The last independent Maya kingdom, the Itza at Nojpetén, did not fall until 1697, more than a century and a half after the conquistadors first arrived.
The Inca war began with one of the most audacious strokes in military history. At Cajamarca in 1532, Pizarro's tiny force ambushed the emperor Atahualpa in the middle of his own army, seized him, and held him for an enormous ransom in gold and silver before executing him. The seizure of the emperor and the capital seemed to end the war, but it did not. Inca resistance regrouped, rose in a massive rebellion that besieged Cuzco in 1536, and then withdrew into the mountains, where a neo-Inca state held out at Vilcabamba until 1572. The soldiers of that long resistance, the heirs of the Inca regiments captured in the Inca Elite Warriors, fought a war of survival that lasted four decades. The pattern across all three is clear. Where a state was centralised, the Spanish could decapitate it quickly. Where power was diffuse or resistance could regroup, conquest was slow, costly, and never quite complete.
The Weapon No One Carried
The single most lethal force in the conquest was carried by no soldier and aimed by no general. It travelled in the breath and on the skin of the invaders, and it killed on a scale that no army of the age could approach.
The peoples of the Americas had no immunity to the diseases of the Old World, and smallpox in particular tore through populations that had never encountered it. The timing was strategically decisive. As Cortés prepared his final assault on Tenochtitlan, a smallpox epidemic swept the city, killing warriors faster than any battle and carrying off the emperor Cuitláhuac, who had been leading the defence. A city fighting for its life lost a huge part of its strength to an enemy it could not fight.
In the Andes, disease arrived before the conquistadors did. An epidemic, almost certainly smallpox spreading overland ahead of the Spanish, killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his designated heir in the 1520s. Their deaths triggered the very civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar that left the empire divided and bleeding at the exact moment Pizarro landed. Disease did not merely thin the ranks. It killed rulers, broke chains of command, and in Peru it opened the political wound that the conquest then drove a blade into. Any honest account of why so few defeated so many has to put the epidemic alongside the horse and the gun.
The Horse Goes North
Here is the most far-reaching military consequence of all, and it worked against the conquerors as much as for them.
Horses had once lived in the Americas and had been extinct there for roughly ten thousand years. The Spanish brought them back, breeding them on the ranches of Mexico and the northern frontier. From there, through trade, through raiding, and through escape, horses spread north across the grasslands. The dispersal accelerated dramatically after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 scattered Spanish herds, and within a few generations the peoples of the Great Plains had been transformed. Nations such as the Comanche and the Lakota became mounted societies of extraordinary skill, hunting bison and waging war from horseback, and the mounted warriors of the Great Plains Tribes Cavalry belong to that revolution. The Comanche in particular built a horse-borne power on the southern Plains that checked Spanish, Mexican, and later American expansion for the better part of two centuries.
In the eastern woodlands the transformation came from the other great military export, the gun. The Iroquois Confederacy acquired firearms from European traders and combined them with forest mobility and ruthless strategy to dominate a vast region during the seventeenth-century wars over the fur trade. These were not the same fighters as the conquistadors faced in Mexico, and they fought a different war in different country, but they were fighting with weapons the conquest had introduced to the hemisphere. The horse and the gun, the two tools that had let a few hundred Spaniards overthrow empires, did not stay in Spanish hands. Within two generations they had armed the peoples who would resist European expansion across an entire continent.
The Template
Step back from the individual campaigns and a pattern appears that outlasts the sixteenth century entirely. The conquest of the Americas produced a formula for empire, and Europe would use it for the next four hundred years.
The formula had a small number of parts. Send a compact expeditionary force with a decisive technological edge. Find the cracks in the local political order and recruit the disaffected as allies and auxiliaries. Let the unintended weapon of disease do work no army could. Then convert military victory into an extractive economy that pays for the next conquest. The European powers that carved up India played princely states against one another exactly as Pizarro played the sides of the Inca civil war. The pattern repeated across Africa and the Pacific. The borders, the languages, and the power structures of half the modern world were set in motion by the war that began when Cortés burned his ships and marched inland.
That is why this collection covers more than one conflict. The Spanish conquistador, the Aztec eagle warrior, the Maya defender of his city, the Inca soldier in the mountains, the mounted hunter of the Plains, and the woodland fighter of the east are all part of a single story, the long aftershock of the moment two worlds collided.
Bring the Collision to Your Table
The New World collection illustrated by Vyacheslav Batalov gathers all six of those forces into one range, designed for skirmish gaming where each figure is an individual warrior rather than a block in a line. Batalov's double-printed miniatures arrive in full colour, pressed from a Plexiglass sprue and slotted onto their bases with no paint and no glue, and the individual basing, round bases for infantry and rectangular bases for cavalry, suits the small, fast, narrative games the collection is built for.
The range spans the whole confrontation. The Conquistadors field swordsmen, shooters with crossbow and arquebus, and cavalry. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca each bring elite warriors, line warriors, and light infantry, the full social pyramid of Mesoamerican and Andean armies. The Great Plains tribes and the Iroquois add the mounted and woodland forces of the conquest's long northern aftermath. For players who want everything at once, the New World Full Pack in 18mm delivers all eighteen regiments, 315 figurines, on nine Plexiglass sprues, while the 28mm Full Pack provides the same 315 figurines on eighteen sprues for players who want more detail on each warrior. Both let you put conquistadors, Aztecs, Maya, Inca, and the peoples of North America on the table together and refight the collision that made the modern world.
If you would rather focus tightly on the most famous campaign of all, Cortés against Tenochtitlan, the Spanish-Aztec War range offers a dedicated two-army experience, and the companion article linked above walks through that war in tactical detail. Either way, you are not just collecting miniatures. You are holding the pieces of the most consequential war of the last six hundred years.