Quote Originally Posted by Philbert
Indeed the conquest of the americas didn't include that many battles anyway. The enormous success of the conquest was mainly based on the European diseases that the American population were not resistant to, causing them to be decimated in a few years.
Indeed, many scholars today have re-estimated the population of the new world upwards from 18 million at 1492 to 80 million. To put that in perspective, that was the total combined population of Europe and Russia at the time. The ancient city of Cahokia in Illinois was estimated to be larger than London!

What we had was an unintentional biological warfare where diseases spread from village to village like wildfire. This led to the assumption by later European settlers that the land was wide open for the taking, since very few lived there.