Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

The fact that diseases caused by Old World pathogens almost exclusively killed Native Americans was interpreted on both sides as an unequivocal sign that God or the gods supported the Spanish invaders. It added to the conquistadors’ belief in the righteousness of their gory, greedy mission. In contrast, the Mexica and Inca were left bewildered and despairing. Spanish chroniclers describe indigenous people dying by suicide, abandoning their newborn babies and murdering shamans “to see if by this means the distemper would cease.”[33] The Native Americans were ripe for conversion to what, based on the evidence they had available to them, appeared to be a far superior religion. They embraced Catholicism with a fervor that is still very much apparent: today, 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.[34] Spanish culture wasn’t adopted wholesale, however. Many of the conquistadors were young male fortune seekers who traveled alone. They settled down with women from the Mexica and Inca nobility—those who had survived the epidemics—and created a new hybrid, mestizo society that drew from both indigenous and European cultures.[35]