conquistadores

Cultural  

1. The Spanish military leaders who established Spanish rule in the New World by overthrowing Native American governments. (See Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro.)

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Example Sentences

But the preoccupations among the conquistadores are plunder, religious conversions or, in Magellan’s case, an impulse to bring the world to his feet by making it navigable.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 23, 2026

Peru's largest archaeological sites are located outside Lima in places such as Cusco, which was the capital of the Inca Empire and fell to Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

From Reuters • Nov. 22, 2023

Wikipedia, in reference to this sixteenth-century bloom of conquistadores, says of Extremadura that its “difficult conditions pushed many of its ambitious young men to seek their fortunes overseas.”

From The New Yorker • Jan. 6, 2020

Spanish conquistadores came to this region in the 16th century seeking the fabled Seven Cities of Gold.

From New York Times • Nov. 6, 2019

In that case, however, conquistadores contributed nothing directly to the societies’ destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond