The natives of Mexico were people of a different stamp. The Aztecs were _pueblo_ or town Indians, highly organized as soldiers, skilled in arts and crafts, with a developed civilization and certain intellectuality. They were highland folk, the Mexican plateau lying at seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, protected by mountain fastnesses. It was, in fact, an empire of the New World such as, in some respects, might compare with those ancient semi-barbaric empires of the Old World, in times more ancient. Its conquest by Cortes was an affair of great enterprise and toil, entailing heavy loss and suffering on the part of the Spaniards, and at one time their defeat, from which only a superhuman rally saved them, at the Battle of Otumba. There was one specially weak point about the Aztec rule. It was a hegemony, exercised over various other Mexican races, who hated Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, and his people. Cortes was skilful enough to take advantage of this flaw in the Mexican armour, to fan the jealousies of the subject tribes, and enlist them to march against Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mexico. These allied Indians, when the place fell, themselves committed the most unheard-of barbarities on the Aztec population, such as shocked the Spaniards, who were unable to restrain them. The Conquest of Mexico was effected by 1521, and the success, the romance, the adventure, and the objects of gold and silver sent by Cortes to Spain, and the loot of the soldiers, fired the imagination of the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Darien to other quests. The settlers at Panama had heard of another empire where gold was to be had for the taking, perhaps richer and greater even than that of the Aztecs. This was Peru, and Francisco Pizarro and Diego Amalgro set sail from Panama to explore and conquer that unknown region along the sunset shores of America to the south. This adventure too was an arduous one, not by reason of the opposition of savage natives, for the Incas of Peru were a gentle and philosophical people, animated by a remarkable social system, and they offered little resistance to the white men and the formidable men-animals, or horsemen, and their guns. It was famine that assailed Pizarro and his followers, and insufficient support. Also he, like Cortes, had to contend with the jealousies and double-dealing of the Spanish Governor of the Indies. As for Peru, its coast was barren, as it is to-day, and only after surmounting the dreadful fastness of the Andes, amid the inclement climate of a region twelve to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, was the Inca Empire reached and subdued. Here lay Cuzco, the Mecca of Peru, and Cajamarca, a more northern capital. The stores of gold recovered seem to have filled these Spaniards' expectations, and great renown was the result of this conquest, which was completed by 1533.