Original subtitles

It’s now finally time to introduce the two great actors in the drama that is about to

unfold.

We’ll check in with both of them in the year 1502.

The first of these characters is the most wealthy and powerful man in the world; at

least, as far as he knows.

He is the King of the Aztecs, a man named Moctezuma the Second.

The year 1502 was the year of his coronation.

Like most Mexica of his time, Moctezuma had dark, wavy hair, and was of average height.

He had an aquiline nose and a large forehead.

People who knew him recall that his voice was eloquent, courteous, and diplomatic, but

he spoke with a kind of quiet force.

Some say that he spoke so quietly that the movements of his lips could barely be seen.

Moctezuma was 35 years old.

He was the ninth King of Tenochtitlan, coming to power when the empire was at the height

of its confidence.

The people of the capital must have had high hopes that he would carry their young empire

to even greater glory.

A Mexica coronation was a drawn-out and splendid affair.

Moctezuma first went into a spiritual retreat for a few days, fasting and praying in the

temples.

Once that was done, there would have been a raucous ceremony with music, dancing, festivals,

feasts, and the arrival of visiting nobility from all over the Aztec lands.

After the coronation, it was traditional to go to war and bring back captives to be sacrificed.

For this purpose, Moctezuma crushed a number of rebellions across the empire and brought

many captives back to Tenochtitlan.

The blood would have run down the steps of the temple for days.

Moctezuma would have overseen these sacrifices wearing a headdress made of shimmering green

quetzal feathers.

We can imagine the cheering of the crowds as the new emperor raised his hands, and all

the lands of the Aztecs bowed down beneath him.

The second actor in this drama couldn't have been more different.

To find him, we will have to travel nearly 9,000 kilometers to the east, across the wide

expanse of the ocean.

Eventually, we reach the limestone cliffs of Europe and fly over forests of cypruses

and pines until we land in the small village of Medellin in Spain.

Medellin sits on the river Guadiana, dotted with conifers and olive trees, with the imposing

shape of a 10th century castle sitting on a rocky outcrop over the village.

Its houses are painted white with terracotta tiles, and in one of these houses, a 17-year-old

boy is sitting alone and studying.

He has a sickly, pale look about him.

In fact, as a child, he was so frail that his parents expected him to die of sickness

on several occasions.

At the age of 14, he had been sent to study Latin with an uncle in the city of Salamanca,

and his parents had hoped this would set him up for a legal career.

But the boy hated his time there and after two years, he returned home much to the disappointment

of his parents.

Now, it's 1502.

On the other side of the ocean, the Emperor Moctezuma is climbing that tall pyramid to

be crowned, and this teenager is stuck in his small Spanish home town.

The monotony of his life makes him irritable and unpleasant, as the 16th century Spanish

historian Francisco López de Gómara recalls.

He was a source of trouble to his parents as well as to himself, for he was restless,

haughty, mischievous, and given to quarrelling.

This boy’s name was Hernando Cortes, known to his friends as Hernan.

If you looked in his eyes at the age of 17, you may not have imagined what lay in this

boy’s future.

But perhaps you would have seen a little flicker in the centre of those eyes.

If you looked closer, it may have looked like the fluttering of flames.

Cortes was a member of a class known as the hidalgos.

They had noble ancestry but didn’t own any land, and with little by way of inheritance,

being the son of a hidalgo wasn’t the most envious position.

As Cortes approached the age of 18, he knew what path awaited him.

He wanted to go to fight in Italy where a number of wars were raging and where there

would always be demand for mercenaries.

But the closer that day approached, the more he began to hear of discoveries that were

happening on the other side of the world.

When Cortes was 7 years old, Columbus had landed in the Caribbean.

By the time Cortes was 18, the explorer Amerigo Vespucci had published a work in Latin called

Mundus Novus, or The New World.

In this work, he suggested that the lands discovered by Colombus were not the edge of

Asia, as had previously been thought, but an entirely new landmass.

The relatively new technology of the printing press had spread this idea around all of Europe

and beyond.

A frenzy for exploration had begun.

Since then, stories had began to flow back to Europe about the opportunity that might

await on the other side of the sea; veritable mountains of gold.

The more Cortes heard these stories, the more he lost his previous enthusiasm for Italy.

He soon made up his mind, as recalled by the historian De Gómara.

He considered which of the two routes would suit him best and decided to cross over to

the Indies because it seemed to him a more profitable journey than the one to Naples,

on account of the great quantity of gold which had come from there.

Cortes dallied around the port town of Valencia for two years.

He loved to gamble, a habit that never left him.

But despite this vice and others, he soon had enough money to buy passage on a ship

across the Atlantic.

He finally set sail in the year 1504 at the age of 19.

Cortes wrote down no account of his roughly two-month journey across the sea.

But one Dominican friar who wrote down his experience some years later gives us some

sense of what it must have been like.

The ship is a very strong and narrow prison from which no one can flee.

The heat, the stuffiness, and the sense of confinement are sometimes overpowering.

The bed is ordinarily the floor.

Most passengers go about as if out of their mind or in poor health.

There is a terrible smell, especially below deck.

It must have been a relief when he finally landed on the island of Hispaniola, which

is today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

This was the island where Colombus had first landed in the New World, and where the first

European settlements in the Americas began.

Christopher Colombus actually went to his grave insisting that he had not discovered

a new continent, an ironic detail considering this is the achievement we all remember him

for.

His goal had been to reach the east coast of Asia, and he never admitted that he had

failed.

But this confusion didn’t stop him from settling in Hispaniola and enslaving as many

indigenous people there as he could.

He worked tens of thousands of them to death in his gold mines.

The scale of his use of slave labour was shocking even for those at the time, and back in Spain,

the people started to refer to Columbus with the nickname “Pharaoh”.

Perhaps as many as 200,000 indigenous people were killed under his regime, which ruled

with terror and sadistic punishments over the native people.

To save the faint of heart, I won’t go into details here, but the cruelty of Columbus’

regime would have made even most Aztec kings look benign by comparison.

In the year 1500 the rumours of Colombus’ brutality became too much for the Spanish

King who had him removed from power.

But the situation hardly improve for Hispaniola’s native people.

In 1513, the first African slaves were imported to make up the devastated population of the

island.

Hispaniola set the pattern for what the European settlement of the New World would look like.

It was a steamroller that crushed all other forms of life beneath it.

This was a pattern that would be repeated countless times over the coming centuries.

We don’t know what Cortes thought of Hispaniola when he got there.

At the age of 18, he registered as a citizen which meant he was given a plot of land to

build a house and farm on, complete with a staff of enslaved locals.

Since he had a couple of years' legal training, he was given a job as a notary in a small

town for the next six years.

He witnessed legal documents and learned the ins and outs of law, right there at the edge

of the known world.

But that same boredom he'd felt as a child began to creep over him and in 1511, he gave

in to the siren call of more exciting prospects.

A man named Diego de Velazquez, twenty years older than Cortes and already a powerful man

in the New World, planned to lead an expedition to conquer the neighbouring island of Cuba

and repeat there what they had done in Hispaniola.

Cortes signed up to go with him.

He was one of only 300 men who landed in Cuba, and began the process of crushing native resistance.

It was a campaign marked by extreme cruelty and indiscriminate violence.

Cortes wasn’t a soldier.

He was the clerk to the treasurer of the expedition, responsible for noting down all the profits

acquired, and ensuring that the Spanish crown got a fifth of everything gained, as it did

from all such expeditions.

When the invasion of Cuba was complete, Velazquez was sufficiently impressed with Cortes’

legal skill that he appointed him his personal secretary.

In Cuba, they set up the settlement of Santiago, and Cortes was appointed its municipal magistrate.

As a reward, Velazquez gifted him a large estate including gold mines and even more

enslaved people to work for him.

Cortes’ power grew and it’s clear that soon Governor Velazquez viewed him as a potential

rival.

Around this time, Cortes grew his beard thick and began to dress like a king, wearing an

extravagant hat with a large plumed feather, a medallion of gold, and a black velvet cloak.

But no matter how much wealth he amassed, Cortes was never satisfied.

Once again that boredom set in, and he began looking over the horizon and wondering what

else might be out there.

His answer came in the following years as a number of expeditions began making further

advances to the mainland of the Americas itself.

In 1517, an expedition led by one Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba explored the coast of

Mexico for the first time.

They met Mayan people living here on the north coast of the Yucatan peninsula and were impressed

by their cities which were larger than anything they'd seen in Hispaniola or Cuba.

But the expedition was ill-fated.

The Spaniards repeatedly ran out of water and the Mayans – perhaps initially impressed

at their guns and steel armour – quickly realized that this small group could be easily

overwhelmed.

They were attacked and 50 Spaniards were killed, with the expedition leader later dying of

his wounds.

At this time, no one was really sure what this landmass was.

Most believed it was just another large island, while others continued to maintain that it

was the mainland of Asia.

All they knew was that a long coast stretched out on either side with an unknown amount

of land behind it.

The unlucky Cordoba expedition was followed a year later in 1518 by another, led by the

Spaniard Juan de Grijalva.

This time, the Spanish took greater protection.

They armed their ships with small cannons called culverins, capable of shooting a ten-kilogram

cannonball around 400m.

Cortes doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to these expeditions, perhaps occupied with

his work in Cuba.

But when Juan de Grijalva failed to return from his voyage, rumours and worries began

to spread.

Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba, put together a search and rescue party with the

intention of going after Grijalva and finding out what had happened to him.

For whatever reason, Cortes was chosen to lead this expedition.

He wasn’t the most obvious choice for it.

He was relatively young, only 33 years old, and he had never led an army or commanded

any kind of military post.

I think it's possible Velazquez hoped that Cortes would be killed on this expedition.

It might have seemed like an excellent way to get rid of this ambitious upstart.

But despite his military inexperience, Cortes was a good diplomat and clearly had a way

with words.

In just one month, he had convinced 300 men to follow him, and put together six ships

ready for this rescue mission to the new world.

There was only one problem; before they could set off, Juan de Grijalva, the lost Spaniard

who they were setting out to find, sailed back into port.

He had been delayed while exploring the coast of Mexico, but he brought back some incredible

stories.

He had seen cities built with tall pyramids and streets paved with stone.

He had met a delegation from a powerful king who was said to live there, and who called

himself Moctezuma.

Despite these enticing stories, this must have taken the wind out of Cortes’ sails.

He now had a fully-funded search party for someone who was no longer missing.

For Governor Velazquez, this was enough of a reason to pull his support for the voyage.

If Grijalva had come back, perhaps it wasn’t so dangerous over there at all.

The last thing he wanted was for Cortes to get the glory that came with making new discoveries.

But that restless, mischievous boy had never really left Cortes.

Perhaps his old love of gambling also played a part.

He decided that he would go ahead with the mission anyway, that he would sail to this

new land against the wishes of the governor and discover the truth about this king across

the water.

Cortes gave the order to depart as soon as possible, before Governor Velazquez could

stop him.

Velazquez had been supplying all the food for the journey, and so they would depart

with no supplies.

But they set sail anyway, departing from Santiago on November the 18th, 1518.

According to some sources, the governor heard of Cortes’ plan at the last moment and hurried

down to the docks to find his six ships already pulling away from port.

He is said to have called out to him.

Why compadre, is this the way you leave?

Is this a fine way to say farewell to me?

On hearing this, Cortes called back this famous reply.

“Forgive me, your worship, for this and similar things have to be done rather than

thought about!”

Velazquez watched as Cortes and his men set sail.

But he knew they wouldn’t get far.

They were still drastically short on food.

They sailed around the coast of Cuba for weeks but everywhere they went, they found that

Governor Velazquez had already sent orders ahead of them, telling the people of Cuba

not to give any supplies to this rogue expedition.

But enough people were willing to barter with them.

They bought up loaves of cassava bread, beef and pork pickled in brine, saltfish, and salted

biscuits, along with some live chickens.

They even ran into 200 men who had been on Juan Grijalva’s expedition, and some assorted

others who all agreed to join them.

Their numbers swelled to around 630 men, and their number of ships to 11.

They brought along 13 horses which they hoisted onto the ships with a pulley and kept on deck

throughout the crossing.

They also brought several cannons, those same light culverins that the Grijalva mission

had used.

They also brought dogs, large powerful mastiffs that had been used on European battlefields

for centuries.

Among the men were 30 crossbowmen and 12 who carried harquebuses – an early form of musket.

After weeks of going from port to port, they had enough to make the voyage across the sapphire-blue

waters.

The invasion of Mexico had begun.

Some of the main sources we have for what happens next are the so-called cartas of Cortes.

These are the letters that he wrote throughout his expedition and sent back to King Charles

V of Spain.

Sent to His Sacred Majesty, the Emperor; Our Soveriegn by Don Fernando Cortes, Captain

General of New Spain, in which he gives an account of the lands and provinces without

number that he has newly discovered in Yucatan in the year...

The letters are remarkable for a number of reasons.

For one thing, they are the only set of documents that we know were written at the time of the

invasion, by someone who was definitely there.

They also have a remarkable literary ambition, full of detail and colour.

But of course, they also have their problems as historical sources.

Cortes was not classically educated and he wouldn't have been familiar with the epics

of Greek and Latin.

But he did enjoy reading the romances that were popular in Spain at the time, tales of

daring by adventurous knights fighting aginst foreign enemies, and there's something of

that feeling to these documents.

Cortes always casts himself in the best possible light in these letters, but his years as a

notary and treasurer’s clerk had also made him well-versed in Spanish law.

This meant that all of his accounts cast him in the best possible legal light too, usually

taking pains to show that he had done everything exactly according to the law.

For this reason, his letters have to be read very carefully, and with an acknowledgment

that their relationship to the truth is often quite strained.

On the Spanish side, we also have the memoirs of two of the soldiers who followed Cortes

on his expedition, who wrote down their memories in the 1560s as they reached old age.

One of them, Francisco de Aguilar, renounced earthly wealth and retired to a Dominican

monastery, while the other, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, became a landholder in Guatemala.

Both are similarly flattering accounts of the expedition’s heroics and are also confused

by the more than 40 years that had passed since the events.

On the Mexica side, we have no indigenous accounts from the years of the invasion, and

none written before a full twenty years afterwards.

But the Florentine Codex, compiled by that Spanish priest Sahagún, does include one

remarkable account of those years.

This is known as Book Twelve, and it compiles the memories of the Mexica people who survived.

Like Bernal Díaz and de Aguilar, they are looking back from a distance of several decades.

This means that many details are questionable and things like the exact words of speeches

given by Moctezuma and Cortes are likely not entirely reliable.

But this Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex is an incredible source for how the Mexica

people remembered their experience of those years and the fall of their civilization.

The expedition of Juan de Grijalva in the previous year had caused quite a stir in the

court of the Aztec King Moctezuma.

Lookouts guarding the coast had sighted the tall ships of the Spanish off in the distance.

These Mexica people would have seen the tall white sails emblazoned with Spanish crosses,

and must have known that they were looking at something they had never seen before.

The Mexica people are often portrayed as reacting with fear or disbelief at the sight of the

Europeans, but we should be a little careful about these accounts.

Europeans delighted in sharing stories of how the fearful Aztecs believed their ships

to be floating mountains, or cities moving about on the waves.

People in Europe especially loved stories of how the Aztecs believed the Europeans to

be a kind of god.

The soldier Bernal Díaz, writing 40 years later, embellished his stories with the idea

that the Aztecs believed Cortes to be the return of the god Quetzalcoatl.

Over time, these stories became more and more specific, adding in details like the fact

that Quetzalcoatl was supposed to have pale skin.

But honestly, there's no evidence that the Mexica ever thought that the Europeans were

gods, and these stories are likely later inventions.

If the Mexica ever did believe something of this sort, they quickly dispensed with the

idea.

They must have been astonished at the first sight of Spanish ships, and with their armor,

their guns, and their horses.

But they quickly assessed the reality of the situation, that these were men from a different

place whose ships were larger and whose weapons were more powerful than their own.

As their contact with the Europeans went on, it's clear that they began to see them not

as a kind of god but as a kind of devil.

At the sight of those tall white sails off the coast, the Mexica watchmen immediately

paddled out on their canoes to investigate.

They made a traditional sign of respect as they reached the Spanish ships, mimicking

kissing the ground.

The Spanish called out to them, as the Florentine Codex recalls.

Then they embarked, launched off, and went out on the water.

The water-folk paddled for them.

When they approached the Spaniards, they made the earth-eating gesture at the prow of the

boat.

The Spaniards called to them; who are you?

Where have you come from?

Where is your homeland?

Immediately, they said it is from Mexico that we have come.

They answered them back, if you are really Mexica, what is the name of the ruler of Mexico?

They told them, oh our lords, Moctezuma is his name.

The Mexica brought with them a collection of fine textiles as gifts which they gave

to the Spanish sailors.

In return, the Spanish gave them some beaded jewellery which the Mexica received politely

but would not have been particularly impressed by.

The Spanish then left them with a promise that they would soon return.

This small group of Mexica watchmen returned to the shore, obviously a little shaken by

their encounter.

They agreed that they would travel back to the capital of Tenochtitlan and report what

they had seen.

When they got there, the king himself called them into his presence.

King Moctezuma would have made an imposing sight even to the Aztec nobility.

To these commoners, he must have been terrifying.

Many years later, in the 1560s, the Spanish friar Diego Duran interviewed an old Mexica

man who had worked in the palace for most of his life.

Duran asked him what the Emperor Moctezuma had looked like, and the man replied that

he didn’t know.

In all his years there, he had never dared to look.

These lowly watchmen would have come before the emperor barefoot and would have bowed

their heads when they spoke to him.

Meeting his eyes would have been strictly forbidden.

They gave the king the beads that the Spanish had given them.

Then, as clearly as they could, they told the king what they had seen.

Then they spoke to him.

Oh, our lord, oh master, destroy us if you will, but here is what we have seen and done

at the place where your subordinates stand guard for you beside the ocean, for we went

to see our lords out on the water.

We gave them all your cloaks and here are the fine things belonging to them that they

gave us.

They said, if you have really come from Mexico, here is what you are to give to the ruler

Moctezuma, whereby he will recognize us.

They told him everything the Spaniards had told them out on the water.

Moctezuma was clearly troubled by this news.

Strange rumours had been spreading across the region for several years now, whispers

about terrifying things that had happened to the populations of Hispaniola and Cuba

which lay right at the edge of the Aztec world.

In 1519, a canoe of native Jamaicans had landed in Moctezuma’s lands, apparently refugees

from some terrible destruction taking place there.

A strange chest had even washed up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and was brought

to Tenochtitlan for inspection.

It contained several suits of bizarre clothes the likes of which the Mexica had never seen

before, as well as a number of jewels and a sword made of a hard grey metal.

All of this troubled Moctezuma.

He was a cautious and pragmatic ruler, and his first instinct was always to seek out

more information before acting.

He told the men to tell no one of what they had seen.

He ordered them to return to the coast and establish a permanent watch in case the strangers

in their large ships returned.

Thereupon, Moctezuma gave instructions from the man from Quetlaxtlan and the rest telling

them; give orders that watch be kept everywhere along the coast at the places called Noatlan,

Tozatlan, and Mictlanquatla, wherever they will come to land.

Then the stewards left and gave orders for watch to be kept.

After that, Moctezuma summoned all his lords and showed them the beads he had been given.

They all gathered round, and we can imagine the murmurs of concern passing around the

group as all of them wondered what it could mean.

The days passed, and nothing more happened.

The Aztec new year soon came round, with all its celebration and ceremony.

As the year wore on, Moctezuma may have almost forgotten about the strange encounter that

happened on the eastern coast.

One of his favourite palace women bore him a new son.

He watched performances of jugglers and dancing dwarves, both of which he loved.

He heard the poets from the city of Texcoco come to his palace and read poetry about all

the Aztecs’ favourite subjects; the brevity of life, the valiant deaths of warriors, and

the decaying of empires.

Life in Tenochtitlan went on.

But then, as the year drew to a close, another report came to him.

More large ships had been sighted on the horizon, and more of them this time.

He immediately gave orders for a delegation to go and meet these strangers and to find

out what they wanted.

After that, King Moctezuma must have slumped down on the ornate mat that served as his

throne, and lost himself in troubled thoughts.

Cortes and his eleven ships quickly made the short crossing from Cuba to Mexico, and sailed

for several weeks along the coast.

The ships glided over the sapphire-blue waters, past overgrown sandbars and white sand beaches.

He couldn’t have known it but in the early weeks of the year 1519, he sailed over the

exact spot where, 66 million years earlier, the Chicxulub asteroid had impacted the earth.

Sailing at an average rate of 4 knots or about 7 kilometers an hour, it would have taken

the ships nearly an entire 24 hours to cross the vast ring of its crater, invisible beneath

the waves.

The weeks of sailing along the Mexican coast dragged by without incident.

Then one day, a watchman shouted that there was a canoe paddling out to meet them.

There was a man inside it dressed in the style of a Mayan peasant.

But when he got closer, they were astonished to hear him shout out in Spanish, with tears

in his voice.

Gentlemen, are you Christians?

Whose subjects are you?

This was a Spanish man by the name of Geronimo de Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked eight

years earlier when trying to sail for Cuba.

He was captured by the Mayans, along with 12 other survivors.

The Mayan people intended to sacrifice them all, he said, but he and another man named

Guerrero had managed to escape.

The two of them were soon captured by another Mayan king who kept them as slaves.

His companion Guerrero quickly grew to enjoy life with the Maya and actually seemed to

prefer it to his life back in Spain.

He married a rich Mayan woman and had children with her.

The Mayan king quickly took him on as a war chief.

Guerrero even got tattoos in the style of a Mayan warrior.

But Aguilar hated his life there.

He missed Spain, and he kept his sanity by counting the nearly 3,000 days that had gone

by, trying to keep track of which day of the week it was.

He was always waiting for his chance to get away.

When he heard news that ships were sailing past, he slipped away and ran to the coast.

One of the first things he did when he met the Spanish was to ask what day of the week

it was.

He discovered that in eight years, he had miscounted by only three.

He thought it was Wednesday, when in fact it was Sunday.

While living with the Maya, Aguilar had learned some of their language.

Cortes immediately saw how useful he could be as a translator.

He enlisted him for the voyage, promising to take him back to Cuba when the mission

was done.

Soon, Cortes and his men needed to stock up on their water supply, and so they stopped

off at a large Mayan town named Pontochan which sat at the mouth of the a river today

called the Rio Grijalva, after the expedition that had come before Cortes.

The locals had perhaps heard worrying rumours about the foreigners sneaking around their

shores in their large ships, and they made an attempt to drive the Spanish away by force.

What followed was a brief but bloody clash, Cortes' first battle in Mexico.

Although there were some experienced fighters among his troop, Cortes’ men, for the most

part, were not professional soldiers and neither were they particularly well-trained.

But they were at least capable of following orders, and they held their nerve in this

first encounter.

This was Cortes’ first chance to try out his cannons and guns, and they had the desired

effect.

The Mayans soon panicked and fled.

400 of them were killed, and the Mayan chief surrendered.

He handed over large amounts of gold.

He also gave Cortes a gift of 20 enslaved women who would follow his group for much

of their journey.

Among them, by a stroke of chance, was a woman that the shipwrecked sailor Geronimo de Aguilar

had encountered during his time as a slave.

Her name was Malintzin, and she would be arguably one of the most crucial factors in the fall

of the entire Aztec civilization.

Malintzin is one of the most enigmatic characters in this story.

She was born sometime around the year 1500, somewhere in the region where the Aztec Empire

met the Mayan heartlands.

When she was young, her father died and her mother remarried, meaning that Malintzin became

something of a surplus child.

She was sold into slavery to a group of Mayan slavers.

Some sources suggest that her family even faked her death to avoid the stigma that might

come with selling one of your children.

The life of a slave, and especially as a woman, could be a horrific existence.

When the Mayans and the Mexica went to war, Malintzin was exchanged as part of the spoils,

and went from owner to owner over the years.

This meant she picked up all the languages of the region; among them Mayan and the Mexica

language of Nahuatl.

When she was finally given to Cortes and his men as a tribute by the chief of Potonchan,

she was a veritable dictionary of Central American languages.

Cortes recognized her usefulness immediately.

In his group, he now had Malintzin, who spoke Nahuatl and Mayan, and Aguilar, who spoke

Mayan and Spanish.

This meant that the three of them were able to relay messages between them from virtually

any language in the region.

Malintzin is a complicated character.

We can never really know her motivations or to what extent she freely chose to help Cortes’

expedition.

But Cortes later said that it’s possible that without her, none of his plans could

have succeeded.

She did seem to help him with an enthusiasm that went beyond the services of a slave.

Perhaps it’s not hard to see why.

Until now, her life had been an endless chain of indignities and abuses.

But now, alongside Cortes, she commanded some degree of power and respect.

She could now change her fortunes, but not only that.

She could burn down the very society which had crushed her for so many years.

I think she would do so with a resolve that is only explained by a desire for vengeance.

With his translators in tow, Cortes could now enter into the world of Aztec politics.

He could make the Mexica understand his demands, and, perhaps most crucially, he could lie.

The work of destroying the Empire of the Aztecs could now truly begin.

Cortes sailed further up the coast of Mexico and finally settled on a landing point to

the north.

He wasted no time in raiding a number of native villages for food and supplies, and stole

any gold he came across.

From the very start, Cortes knew that he was on a potentially illegal mission.

He had defied the orders of the Governor of Cuba, Velazquez, and set out on his own.

He knew that there were elements among his men, still loyal to Velazquez.

He must have known that a mutiny was one of the biggest dangers out there in the unknown.

So, one of his first acts was to scuttle ten of his ships, ensuring that no one would be

able to sneak away and inform Velazquez of his whereabouts.

But he did leave one ship afloat.

This he sent back to Spain carrying a letter to King Charles V, along with a chest containing

the gold artefacts he had found.

Cortes knew that if he could go over the governor's head and get the blessing of the King of Spain

himself, then his expedition would be legitimate.

But he would have to tread a narrow legal tightrope.

To give himself some breathing room, Cortes immediately founded a new town on the bare

sandbanks of Mexico’s coast.

He called it Vera Cruz, or the True Cross.

It wasn’t much of a town, likely a few tents and other temporary shelters.

But Cortes furnished it with all the legal necessities including a municipal council

made up of several of his soldiers.

In a legal sense, Cortes could now claim to be the governor of this town.

As governor, he was empowered to act on behalf of the king, and without any orders from His

Majesty, he could now decide what needed to be done himself.

Only a few days after the founding of Vera Cruz, a group of Mexica men dressed in the

finest feathers and embroidered cloaks, arrived and announced themselves as the messengers

of Moctezuma.

They brought gifts of gold and incense, as well as some food.

Some other Mexica men also sat among the trees overlooking the beach.

These were Moctezuma’s finest court painters, sent with their brushes and paints to record

everything they saw.

Cortes met Moctezuma’s delegation and listened to their words with interest.

These words passed down the chain of translation to Malintzin in Nahuatl, who repeated them

to Aguilar in Mayan, and then Aguilar translated them into Spanish.

When Cortes spoke, his words went back the other way.

It must have taken a long time to hold these conversations.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the first words out of Cortes’s mouth in Mexico were to

be a distortion of the truth.

He explained that he was an ambassador sent by his king who ruled the greater part of

the world.

Cortes even told some more bare-faced lies.

He even claimed that some of his men were suffering from a disease of the heart, and

that he had heard that the precious metal gold could be used as a treatment.

He slyly asked whether King Moctezuma could help him and his sick men by giving them some

gold.

The ambassador from Tenochtitlan, apparently not sensing the danger, said that yes, Moctezuma

had a lot more gold.

Probably from that moment, the entire fate of the empire was sealed.

Cortes decided then and there that he would march to Tenochtitlan and take the entire

land for himself.

In the palace of Moctezuma, the king’s angry words were echoing down the halls.

He had summoned his chief soothsayers and magicians, and was taking out his frustrations

on them.

After all, part of their job was to predict the future by all the means known to the Aztecs;

by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms and gazing into obsidian mirrors, by casting grains of

corn onto the pages of holy books, and with the mysterious tying and untying of knots.

But all these methods had failed to predict the astonishing arrival of these bizarre foreigners.

The priest Diego Duran later wrote down the words that people remember Moctezuma shouting

at these magicians.

"It is your position, then, to be deceivers, tricksters, to pretend to be men of science

and forecast that which will take place in the future, deceiving everyone by saying that

you know what will happen in the world, that you see what is within the hills, in the center

of the earth, underneath the waters, in the caves and in the earth’s clefts, in the

springs and water holes.

But everything is a lie.

It is all pretense.”

Although he punished some of his soothsayers, Moctezuma's rage does seem to have eventually

abated.

He must have sat and pored over the images that his painters had brought back to him;

the ships with their white sails, the men in their bizarre clothes, and perhaps most

strangely, the creatures they had brought with them whose backs they rode on, creatures

that looked like some kind of deer with no horns.

Perhaps most worryingly, the foreigners had also given his ambassadors a demonstration

of their weapons.

The stories they brought back seemed almost unbelievable, as the Florentine Codex recalls.

When he heard what the messages reported, he was greatly afraid and taken aback, and

he was amazed at their food.

It especially made him faint when he heard how the guns went off at the Spaniards' command,

sounding like thunder, causing people actually to swoon, blocking the ears.

When it went off, something like a ball came out from inside and fire went showering and

spitting out, and the smoke that came from it had a very foul stench, striking one in

the face.

If they shot at a hill, it seemed to crumble and come apart.

It turned a tree to dust; it seemed to make it vanish as though someone had conjured it

away.

Their war-gear was all iron.

They clothed their bodies in iron.

They put iron on their heads.

Their swords were iron, their bows were iron, and their shields and lances were iron.

Their deer that carried them were as tall as the roof.

Many historians have caricatured Moctezuma as a weak and indecisive king.

But I don’t think that’s entirely fair.

In the coming days, he decided on a number of practical approaches to the situation.

First of all, he needed information.

He sent out messengers to all the cities of Mexico and beyond, to all the rulers and libraries

of the continent, asking if they knew anything about these strangers who had appeared so

suddenly on their shores.

The messengers would come back one by one and tell him that no one knew anything.

Moctezuma also ordered spies to place themselves in every town and village between Tenochtitlan

and the coast, and to report back immediately if the Spanish tried to move inland.

He also sent his disgraced magicians to try and redeem themselves by putting curses and

spells on the foreigners.

But despite all these measures, it's clear that the uncertainty of what was going on

did begin to take its toll on the Aztec king.

During this time, Moctezuma neither slept nor touched food.

Whatever he did, he was distracted.

It seemed as though he was ill at ease, frequently sighing.

He tired and felt weak.

He no longer found anything tasteful, enjoyable, or amusing.

When we compare what the Mexica and the Spanish knew about each other, it’s easy to see

why the Spanish advantage wasn’t simply in guns, steel, and horses.

To Moctezuma, the Spanish were a complete mystery.

They didn’t have a city that could be conquered, or wives and children that could be captured.

They had no known weaknesses.

He didn't know where they came from, why they were here, or what they wanted.

This made it very difficult for him to devise a strategy to deal with them.

On the Spanish side, things were very different.

In the days after landing in Mexico, Cortes had already sent letters home, sending for

reinforcements and providing information about the lands he had arrived in.

His letters were immediately printed and distributed around European cities.

He even sent back some artefacts that he stole from Aztec temples.

These were exhibited in town halls around Europe little more than a year later.

The German painter Albrecht Durer saw some examples of Aztec art on display in the year

1520, and he later wrote about the inspiration he drew from them.

“All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,

for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle intellects

of men in foreign parts.”

In fact, in only a few days, the Spanish had already found out everything they needed to

know to bring down the empire.

Cortes knew that there was a king called Moctezuma who ruled in a city called Tenochtitlan.

He knew that he was the most powerful king in the region who possessed a great deal of

gold.

He knew something much more important, that this Moctezuma had enemies.

These three pieces of information were all Cortes needed to devise a strategy that would

deliver a series of hammer blows right at the heart of Mexica society, and bring the

whole edifice of the Aztec Empire crashing down.

The first of these hammer blows would land on a people we’ve encountered in this story

before, the people of Tlaxcalan.

For many years now, the Tlaxcalans had despised the Aztecs.

As we’ve seen, the Aztecs blockaded and starved them.

They forced them to participate in the flower wars and killed their sons at the tops of

their temples.

Cortes knew that Moctezuma's army was vast, and that his 600 men alone wouldn’t be enough.

This meant he would need to find allies.

The moment he found out about the Tlaxcalans' hatred for the Mexica, he knew they were just

the opportunity he needed.

Cortes set out on the road to Tenochtitlan on the 8th of August, 1519.

He knew that the road to the coast would be his lifeline for supplies and reinforcements,

and so he left almost half of his company behind in the town of Vera Cruz.

He departed with 300 men, marching in their full armour, even sleeping in it at night,

fearful of surprise attacks.

Cortes himself hardly slept, as he recounted in one of his letters.

I shall not sleep until I have seen Moctezuma and observed the quality of his land.

The journey from the coast to the valley of Mexico was a distance of about 400 kilometers.

The first stretch of the journey was flat, hot, and tropical, with dense forests dotted

with Aztec plantations of maize.

After that, the land rose sharply, and those great volcanoes began to soar on either side.

Everywhere they went, villages gave them supplies of maize and gold, even some more slaves who

they used to haul their guns.

I burnt more than ten villages, in one of which there were more than 3,000 houses where

the inhabitants fought with us, although there was no one there to help them.

As we were carrying the cross and were fighting for our faith, God gave us such a victory

that we killed many of them without ourselves receiving any hurt.

When they reached the highlands, they would have passed through a cold, bleak salt flat

before the tall mountain range that walled the Valley of Mexico came into view on the

horizon.

In that harsh landscape, water became scarce and they soon ran out of food.

But finally, they arrived at the lands of the Tlaxcalans.

Cortes seems to have expected this to be easy.

He thought he would only have to explain that he was here to topple Moctezuma, and the Tlaxcalans

would welcome him with open arms.

But years of fighting the Mexica had made the Tlaxcalans a little paranoid.

In fact, when they saw the small band of Spaniards marching towards them, they sounded the alarm,

believing this to be a raid by Moctezuma.

They called up all their fighting men and marched out in full force to defend their

lands.

The Tlaxcalan warriors had their faces painted in black and white, and their war cries would

have echoed out over the mountainous slopes.

The Tlaxcalans surrounded the Spanish and fell on their lines in wave after wave.

They came very close to overwhelming them, but the glass blades of their macahuitls shattered

against the steel armour of the Europeans.

The Spanish steel swords cut through their own padded armour easily, while crossbow bolts

and gunshots tore through their closely-packed ranks and spread terror, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

I saw our company in such confusion that despite the shouts of Cortes and the other captains,

they could not hold together.

The indians were charging us in such numbers that only by a miracle of sword-play were

we able to drive them back and re-form our ranks.

One thing alone saved our lives; the enemy were so massed and so numerous that every

shot wrought havoc among them.

The horsemen of the Spanish also managed to inflict a huge amount of damage, repeatedly

swinging and charging into their ranks with their lances and spreading terror as the Aztec

source, the Florentine Codex, recounts.

The horses, the deer, neighed.

There was much neighing and they would sweat a great deal.

Water seemed to fall from them and the flecks of foam splattered on the ground like soap

suds splatting.

As they went, they made a beating, throbbing, and hoof-pounding like throwing stones.

Their hooves made holes.

They dug holes in the ground wherever they placed them.

The Tlaxcalans even managed to bring down two

of the Spanish horses during this battle, and Bernal Díaz claims that they even hacked

off one of the horse’s heads with their glass-edged swords.

But eventually, they realized it was hopeless.

The resolve of their fighters dissolved, and they retreated.

Cortes and his men had won the battle, but he was still extremely demoralized by what

had happened.

He thought the Tlaxcalans would welcome him with open arms, but instad they had put up

an enormous resistance.

Many of his men had been injured, and a few even killed.

If the Tlaxcalans were able to put up such a fight, how would they ever overcome the

much more powerful Mexica?

That night, they camped beside a stream, still short on food.

But he was still determined to get the Tlaxcalans on side.

As the new day dawned, he sent out messengers to meet them, but it was no use.

The Spaniards retreated to the top of a nearby volcano called Tzompachtepetl, where a small

Mexica shrine had been built to the gods.

They camped there, and over the next days fought off constant attacks by the Tlaxcalans

who refused all offers of peace.

Cortes’ plan seemed to be in tatters and many of his men must have begun to wonder

if they would ever make it off that mountaintop.

But finally, after three days and nights of repelling attacks, the Tlaxcalans sent messengers

to ask for peace, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

Making their sign of peace, which was to bow the head, they came straight to the hut where

Cortes lived.

Begging his forgiveness for their hostile actions and for the war they fought against

us, they said they had certainly believed us to be friends of Moctezuma and his Mexicans,

who had been their mortal enemies from the very ancient times.

After this, luck finally began to turn in Cortes’ favour.

The events at Tlaxcala sent ripples through the Aztec world.

Fewer than 300 Spanish soldiers had repelled the full force of one of the strongest armies

in the region.

Bernal Díaz recalls the effects this had on the Mexica.

Our fame spread throughout the surrounding country and reached the ears of the great

Moctezuma.

Terror spread throughout the whole land.

Now Moctezuma, the great and powerful prince of Mexico, in dread that we might come to

his city, sent five chieftains of the highest rank to our camp in Tlaxcala to bid us welcome

and congratulate us on our great victory.

These chieftains praised the Spanish for their fighting skill.

These messengers obviously sensed the danger of the situation, and told Cortes never to

trust the Tlaxcalans.

These messengers told Cortes that Moctezuma would love to welcome him to his capital of

Tenochtitlan.

But, unfortunately, it was better if he didn’t come.

The roads are bad, they said, and supplies of food in Tenochtitlan had been very low

recently.

Moctezuma was only thinking of the Spanish and their comfort, and he didn’t want them

to suffer.

Cortes listned to this speech, translated for him by Malintzin, and he thanked Moctezuma

for his thoughtful words.

But he said he didn’t have a choice.

His king had ordered him to go to Tenochtitlan, and so go he must.

Cortes would later tell one of his soldiers that he was delighted by this conversation.

He had learned that the Aztec lands were exactly as divided as he'd hoped.

Cortes quoted a line from the Gospel of Mark 3:24.

When I saw the discord and animosity between these two peoples, I was pleased, for it seemed

to have furthered my purpose considerably.

I remembered the word of the Gospels; a kingdom divided cannot stand.

Cortes and his men were soon welcomed into the city of Tlaxcala where they stayed a few

weeks, resting after their hard journey.

Cortes wrote back to King Charles V that Tlaxcala was a beautiful city, larger than Grenada.

The city is much larger than Grenada and very much stronger, with as good buildings and

many more people, and very much better supplied with the produce of the land.

But Cortes had never actually been to Grenada, and this was probably another example of his

tendency to manipulate the truth.

In fact, Tlaxcala was likely a poor place.

It had been blockaded by the Mexica, and their economic isolation would have made their lives

difficult.

But Cortes knew that he had to gain the Tlaxcalan's trust.

He ordered his men to be on their best behaviour, not to take anything that wasn’t offered

to them.

He told them not to enter the temple district of the city, for fear of offending their hosts.

While they were there, the Tlaxcalans also showed them some of their most precious relics,

as Bernal Díaz later recalls.

They said their ancestors had told them that very tall men and women with huge bones had

once dwelt among them, but had died off.

To show us how big these giants had been, they brought us the leg-bone of one, which

was very thick and the height of an ordinary-size man, and that was just a leg bone from the

hip to the knee.

I measured myself against it, and it was as tall as I am.

We were all astonished by the sight of these bones and felt certain there must have been

giants in that land.

These bones were likely the remains of the mammoths that had once roamed the Valley of

Mexico, and which Neolithic peoples had hunted to extinction.

It’s clear that the Tlaxcalans soon warmed to their guests, despite the thousands of

their warriors that they had killed.

Or at least, saw in the Spanish an opportunity to change their fortune.

They soon came up with a suggestion.

They told Cortes that there was a great ally of Moctezuma nearby in the city of Cholula,

as the Florentine Codex recalls.

They said to them, the Cholulans are very evil.

They are our enemies.

They are as strong as the Mexica, and they are the Mexica's friends.

When the Spaniards heard this, they went to Cholula.

The Tlaxcalans went with them, outfitted for war.

In reality, the Cholulans weren’t such close allies of the Mexica.

It’s likely the Tlaxcalans were lying to the Spanish, hoping that they would help them

get rid of another annoying rival.

Now before this, there had been friction between the Tlaxcalans and the Cholulans.

They viewed each other with anger, fury, hate, and disgust.

They could come together on nothing.

Because of this, they put the Spaniards up to killing them treacherously.

It’s moments like this that really undermine the idea that the Aztecs thought that the

Spaniards were gods.

If you had a god in your presence, you probably wouldn’t try to trick them like this.

But, alarmed at the thought of the Cholulan threat, Cortes agreed.

He and his men marched to Cholula, a wealthy city that once held the world’s largest

pyramid by volume.

It was a glorious place, with many tall towers.

When the Spanish arrived, the Cholulans met them peacefully.

But straight away, Cortes unleashed a tidal wave of violence.

When they had all come together, the Spaniards and their friends blocked the entrances, all

of the places where one entered.

Thereupon, people were stabbed, struck, and killed.

No such thing was in the minds of the Cholulans.

They did not meet the Spaniards with weapons of war.

The massacre at Cholula went on for two days. The whole city burned, and the Spaniards destroyed

a temple to the god Quetzalcoatl, the flying feathered serpent that was the primary god

of Cholula.

If any Mexica had ever wondered whether Cortes was the return of Quetzalcoatl, it's likely

this act would have put a stop to that speculation.

The priests of the city threw themselves from the high towers of their temples to escape

the flames.

Cortes later came up with a justification for this act.

In his letters, he claims that he had uncovered a plot hatched by the Cholulans to murder

him and his men, and that’s why he unleashed his murderous rage on the city.

But it’s not clear whether this was actually the case.

It seems more likely that this was simply an act of terror to instill fear in the heart

of Moctezuma.

The city of Tenochtitlan lay only 80 kilometers away, just behind that wall of soaring volcanoes.

Cortes' final destination was drawing near.

When Moctezuma heard of the sacking of the powerful city of Cholula and the destruction

of the temple to Quetzalcoatl, he was inconsolable, as the Florentine Codex remembers.

When the messengers got there, they told Moctezuma what had happened and what they had seen.

When Moctezuma heard it, he just hung his head and sat there, not saying a word.

He sat like someone on the verge of death.

For a long time, it was as though he had lost awareness.

He answered them only by saying to them, "What can be done, oh men of unique valor?

We have come to the end.

We are resigned.

Should we climb up the mountains?

But should we run away?

We are Mexica.

Will the Mexica state flourish in exile?

Look at the sad conditions of the poor old men and women and the little children who

know nothing yet.

Where would they be taken?

What answer is there?

What can be done?

Whatever can be done?"

Messengers were now flowing into his palace in a steady stream, some arriving just as

others were leaving.

Moctezuma had a spy in every village, and since the Spanish gave the same religious

sermon at every place they stopped, he eventually told his spies to stop repeating the same

speech back to him.

He had heard it enough times already.

With each report, the Spaniards were drawing closer.

Marching behind them came thousands of native warriors of the Tlaxcalans, as well as other

assorted people such as the Otomi.

Then all those from the various cities on the other sides of the mountains; the Tlaxcalans,

the people of Tliliuhquitepec, of Huhiexotzinco, came following behind.

They came outfitted for war, with their cotton upper-armor, shields and bows, their quivers

full and packed with feathered arrows; some barbed, some blunted, some with obsidian points.

They went crouching, pitting their mouths with their hands and yelling, singing in Tocuillan

style, whistling, shaking their heads.

Moctezuma's messengers soon reported that the Spanish had reached the gates of the mountain

passes and were preparing to cross over into the valley.

They said that the captain Cortes was looking for Moctezuma.

The king must have been terrified.

He decided to send one of his servants, dressed up in royal clothes, and bearing as much gold

as he could put together.

He hoped that if he gave the Spanish what they wanted, a meeting with Moctezuma and

the gold they seemed to crave, then they might finally leave him alone.

The messenger went out and met Cortes in the high mountain passes forested with pine trees.

They gave the Spaniards gold and banners, banners of precious feathers and golden necklaces.

When they had given the things to them, they seemed to smile, to rejoice and be very happy.

The messenger dressed as the king introduced himself as Moctezuma, and he asked the Spanish

what they wanted in the lands of the Mexica.

But Cortes was not fooled.

His Tlaxcalan allies knew what Moctezuma looked like, and they tipped him off to

the deception.

Then they told him, "Go on with you.

Why do you lie to us?

What do you take us for?

You can't lie to us.

You can't fool us; turn our heads, flatter us, make faces at us, trick us, confuse our

vision."

The Spanish marched on through the mountain passes, with the volcanoes towering on either

side and their thousands of native allies following behind.

The atmosphere among the Tlaxcalans must have been electric.

How many of them had ever dreamed that they would one day march into the lands of the

Mexica and bring vengeance on their most hated enemies?

At the news that his disguised servant had failed, Moctezuma fell into despair.

News of the Spanish advance had now spread throughout the land.

People fled, and whole towns and villages were deserted.

At this time, there was silence here in Mexico.

No one went out anymore.

Mothers no longer let their children go out.

The roads were as if swept clean, wide open as if at dawn with no one crossing.

People assembled in the houses and did nothing but grieve.

Moctezuma even ordered the roads to be blocked, but the Spanish easily overcame these obstacles,

and panic began to descend in Moctezuma's court.

The magicians that Moctezuma had sent to slow down the Spanish also returned, and they reported

that their spells had had no effect.

Even worse, some of them had experienced visions in which they saw the whole of the Aztec Empire,

all its temples and palaces, all its houses and towers, going up in flames.

It was probably the last news that Moctezuma wanted to hear.

We can imagine what Cortes and his men saw when they first crossed those mountains, and

the wide expanse of the Valley of Mexico stretched out before them.

It was the same sight that the Mexica people would have seen two hundred years before,

when they first arrived in the valley from the other direction.

About 15 kilometers away, the wide blue waters of Lake Texcoco would have stretched out,

with the white clutter of dozens of cities ringing its bank, the grasslands striated

with fields of corn, beans, chili peppers, and cotton, smoke rising from the villages

and cities.

In the water of the lake, the glittering white jewel of Tenochtitlan sat.

The closer the Spaniards marched, the more awe-inspiring the city looked.

They were amazed at the sight, as the soldier Francisco de Aguilar later wrote.

Its castellated fortresses, its splendid monuments, royal dwelling places!

Glorious heights!

How marvelous it is to gaze on them; all stuccoed, carved, and crowned with different kinds of

decoration, painted with animals, covered with stone figures.

As they approached the great causeway of the city, they must have done so with an enormous

sense of trepidation.

But there, out in the middle of the bridge, they saw a figure standing in a crown of green

quetzal feathers, surrounded on either side by warriors wearing jaguar skins and eagle

feathers.

The Emperor Moctezuma had finally come out to meet them.

Moctezuma had watched the approach of the Spanish with horror.

To him, they must have made an impressive and fearsome sight, as the Florentine Codex

recounts.

The Spaniards set off in their way to Mexico, coming gathered and bunched, raising dust.

Their irons lances and halberds seemed to sparkle, and their iron swords were curved

like a stream of water.

Their armor and iron helmets seemed to make a clattering sound.

Some of them came wearing iron all over, turned into iron beings, gleaming so that they aroused

great fear, and were generally seen with fear and dread.

Tenochtitlan was guarded by a huge army of soldiers.

Every man in the city had been trained for war since childhood, and the entire vast army

of the empire was based here.

It’s quite possible that they could have surrounded the Spanish and overwhelmed them

as the Tlaxcalans nearly had.

But Moctezuma was paralysed by fear.

Stories of the defeat of Tlaxcala and the sacking of Cholula would have resounded in

his head.

He knew that if he tried to defeat the Spanish here and failed, in full view of every citizen,

then his rule would be over.

Even a costly victory would have been unacceptable.

He decided to go out and meet this foreigner and see what he wanted.

Moctezuma must have been filled with fear as he was carried in a litter down to the

causeway of Tenochtitlan, accompanied with his warriors and wearing his finest clothes,

resplendent with shimmering feathers.

When he finally dismounted, he saw the Spaniards beginning to cross the causeway to meet him.

We can only imagine what it would have been like to see these two men finally come face

to face.

Neither of them were much given to flowery words.

The following exchange is all they said at first.

Are you not him?

Are you not Moctezuma?

Yes, I am him.

Moctezuma extended his courtesy to the Spaniards, and they were shown into the city.

They were given lodgings in a palace that had once belonged to a former king, and which

Aguilar wrote about in high praise.

The palace was a wonder to behold.

There were innumerable rooms inside, antechambers, splendid halls, mattresses of large cloaks,

pillows of leather and tree fibre.

When the Spanish arrived in the palace, they began firing off their guns in celebration

and set off their cannons, too.

The sounds would have resounded around the city streets, and the ordinary Mexica hid

in fear.

As Cortes and his men went to sleep that night in the palace of the Aztec capital, lying

on beds strewn with fragrant flowers, they would have heard the soft blowing of conch

shells echoing from the temples at midnight.

The beating of drums would have announced the arrival of the dawn.

Cortes and his men spent the next few weeks in Tenochtitlan.

They saw the sights of the great market of Tlatelolco, which Bernal Díaz remembers with

astonishment.

Among us there were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople

and all of Italy and Rome.

Never had they seen a square that compared so well, so orderly and wide, and so full

of people, as that one.

They also visited the towering temples of Teopan, noting with distaste the blood running

down their steps.

They lost no time in interrogating Moctezuma about the stores of gold he had.

The Aztec king, increasingly feeling like he was losing control of the situation, gave

up his treasury to the Spaniards.

He gave them fine pieces of carved jade, but the Spanish weren’t interested in those.

They were interested in the ornately decorated pieces of gold jewellery, headbands and chestplates,

statues, and other works of incomparable art.

The Spanish created a fire, and melted it all down into gold bricks.

The gold on the shields and on all the devices was taken off.

When all the gold had been detached, right away they set on fire all the different precious

things.

They all burned, and the Spaniards made the gold into bricks.

The Spaniards went everywhere, scratching about in the hiding places, storehouses, places

of storage all around.

They took everything they saw that pleased them.

It’s likely that Cortes had always planned what was about to happen.

But in the first weeks after his arrival in Tenochtitlan, something happened that would

give him the perfect excuse to speed up his plans.

News arrived from the coast that six of his men back in the town of Vera Cruz had been

killed in a quarrel with some local Mexica.

Cortes likely knew that it had been an accident, but he saw his opportunity and decided to

use this as an excuse to move against the Emperor Moctezuma.

The meeting started like any other.

Cortes entered the throne room with his soldiers, and Moctezuma offered them more jewels and

other gifts.

But Cortes turned them down.

He told Moctezuma that he suspected him of plotting to attack his men on the coast.

He ordered the king to go with the Spanish to their lodgings, and warned the king not

to make any noise or cry out.

The Aztec king realized immediately what was happening, and it must have sent a shiver

down his spine.

This was the thing he feared most, and he pleaded with the Spanish to reconsider.

My person is not such as can be made a prisoner of.

Even if I would like it, my people would not suffer it.

But it was useless.

Moctezuma spoke to his courtiers and told them that the great god Huitzilapotchtli had

told him that he should go and live with the Spanish for some time.

We can imagine the blank looks of these powerful men as they heard these words.

Many chiefs came and, removing their garments, they placed him under their arms and walking

barefoot, they brought a simple litter and, weeping, carried him in it in great silence.

Thus, we proceeded to my quarters with no disturbance in the city.

It would have been clear to everyone, even the common people in the street, that from

this moment on, Moctezuma was emperor in name only.

Cortes was now the true power in the Aztec Empire.

That night, Cortes arrested seventeen Mexica lords who he accused of plotting the attacks

on his men in Vera Cruz.

He had them burned alive in the courtyard of the great temple, using piles of the Aztec's

wooden swords as kindling.

Moctezuma was brought to watch with chains on his feet.

It’s said the Mexica people watched these executions in complete silence.

Moctezuma, for the most part, seems to have borne his imprisonment with dignity but resignation.

He went about his usual business, watched jugglers and poets as usual, continued to

bathe and meet with his lords.

But everywhere he went, Spanish guards went with him.

Then one day in April 1520, a messenger managed to slip the Aztec king a secret note painted

on a piece of cloth.

It showed 18 Spanish ships off the coast.

To Moctezuma, the meaning was clear.

Another group of Spaniards were arriving, and they were not the friends of Cortes.

The governor of Cuba, Diego de Velazquez, had spent the last six months since Cortes’

departure stewing in his bitterness.

He had confiscated much of Cortes’ property and land in Cuba, but this had done little

to sate his appetite for revenge.

When he heard what Cortes had done – sending news of his conquests and chests full of gold

directly back to the Spanish king, he must have exploded with rage.

He immediately summoned one of his lieutenants, a man named Panfilo de Narvaez, and ordered

him to set sail to Mexico with 900 men.

His mission was to apprehend Cortes, put a stop to his illegal mission, and drag him

back to Cuba in chains.

Cortes knew nothing of this approaching danger.

But for Moctezuma, this must have been an enormous revelation.

Up until then, Cortes had used the divisions in Aztec society to play the people of Mexico

against one another, and bring an empire to its knees.

But now Moctezuma saw that the foreigners were just as divided as they were.

With that simple fact, he saw a chance to rid himself of the ruthless Cortes.

Through whispered messages, Moctezuma was actually able to communicate with Narvaez

as he sailed up the Mexican coast.

Narvaez told Moctezuma that Cortes and his men had lied to him.

They didn't have the support of the Spanish crown.

In fact, they were little better than pirates.

Moctezuma sent messages back to Narvaez, pleading him to come quickly, telling him the best

routes to Tenochtitlan, and even sending food and gold.

But as time went on, Moctezuma grew terrified that Cortes would find out what was happening.

Perhaps he hoped that the news would scare Cortes away.

He went to the Spanish captain and showed him the painting of the ships.

He urged him to leave Tenochtitlan while there was still time.

Cortes must have exploded.

There he was, at the heart of the empire he had set out to conquer, with everything going

his way, and now the bitter old governor of Cuba was going to ruin everything.

Cortes knew he would have to march the whole 400km back to the coast and face Narvaez.

But he would have to leave enough of his men behind to continue to keep the Emperor Moctezuma

as a prisoner.

His force would be dangerously split, and all of his achievements seemed to be in danger,

as Bernal Díaz recalls.

When Cortes heard about the ships and saw the painting on the cloth, he became very

thoughtful, for he knew quite well that the fleet had been sent against him by the governor,

Diego Velazquez.

Cortes set off at the beginning of May with 80 or so men, leaving just over a hundred

behind in Tenochtitlan.

His men now marched in Aztec cotton armour, as it was lighter and easier to carry, and

it was surprisingly effective at soaking up arrows.

Cortes sent a messenger to the Tlaxcalans, asking them for 4,000 men to help him fight

Narvaez.

But considering their recent experience, the Tlaxcalans were not enthusiastic about fighting

any more Spaniards.

Instead, they sent Cortes twenty turkeys as a gift.

Narvaez landed and marched up the Mexican coast, seeking to capture the town of Vera

Cruz where only a hundred of Cortes’ men still remained.

They camped at a place called Cempoala, camping at the top of one of the town’s temples

and waiting for Cortes’ army to arrive.

They were supremely confident of success.

Narvaez outnumbered Cortes three to one, and he expected his opponent to take much longer

to cross the Mexican landscape.

When one of his men told him that Cortes’ army was only 5km away, he refused to believe

it.

Either way, he was sure that Cortes would wait until dawn to mount an attack.

He may even have been expecting Cortes to surrender.

But Cortes had been in Mexico for over a year at that point.

He had learned how to fight in that landscape, and how to turn the odds in his favour.

That night, the rain came down in torrents.

While Narvaez slept, Cortes and his men crept through the dark at midnight, the rain covering

the sound of their movements.

They climbed the pyramid stealthily, and quickly despatched the guards outside Narvaez’s

chamber, setting the temple on fire as they went.

Narvaez sounded the alarm, his men rushing from their beds and putting on their armour.

We came with such stealth that when they observed us and sounded the alarm, I was already inside

the courtyard of the camp, on the steps of the tower where Narvaez was courted with some

19 guns.

We climbed those steps so quickly that they had time to fire only one gun.

They fought up and down the steps of the pyramid, swords clashing and flashing in the moonlight

and the fires of the burning temple, the rain still pouring down.

One of Cortes’ pikemen jabbed at Narvaez and took out his right eye.

With blood gushing down his face and neck, Narvaez surrendered and was put in chains.

His soldiers were mercenaries who had been promised gold if they followed him, and had

no particular loyalty.

They surrendered, and when Cortes promised them vast mountains of gold in Tenochtitlan,

they agreed to join his company, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

Cortes promised to make them rich.

He was so persuasive, in fact, that every one of them offered to come with us.

But if they had known the Mexican's strength, I believe not one of them would have volunteered.

Far from defeating Cortes, the governor of Cuba had actually delivered fresh reinforcements

right to him.

He was now more powerful than ever, and set his sights on returning to the city of Tenochtitlan.

But without his knowledge, events in the city had taken a dark turn.

While Cortes dealt with Narvaez on the coast, in Tenochtitlan he had left in charge a man

named Pedro de Alverado.

Alverado continued to control Moctezuma as the emperor went about his daily business.

But his situation was precarious.

He had only 100 or so men and some assorted Tlaxcalan allies, but they were ruling over

a city with a population of well over 200,000.

One event would soon test the resolve of the Spanish to its utmost.

This was the festival of Toxcatl.

The Toxcatl ceremony was once intended to bring rain to the lands of the Mexica.

But like most festivals in Tenochtitlan, it had been taken over during the time of Tlacaelel

by the warlike god Huitzilapotchtli.

It now involved the sacrifice of a young man, chosen from among the people for his good

looks and charm.

He had lived the whole of that year as the god Tezcatlapoca, being showered with every

luxury.

But now his day had come.

He was dressed up like the gods and his life was to be offered up to them in sacrifice.

Moctezuma had asked Cortes for permission to carry out the festival before he left for

the coast, and Cortes had given it on condition that there would be no human sacrifice.

But now, Alverado sensed growing signs of rebellion among the Mexica.

With Cortes gone, they sensed weakness.

They stopped providing the Spaniards with food, and one Mexica girl who had been doing

their laundry was found murdered, presumably as a warning to the other Mexica not to work

with the foreigners.

Alverado even heard rumours that the Mexica were preparing to scale the walls of the palace

and rescue the captive Moctezuma, even tunneling through the walls to free him.

No doubt the Spaniard’s Tlaxcalan allies, who hated the Mexica, were happy to stoke

these rumours.

Trouble was brewing in Tenochtitlan, and on the third night of the festival of Toxcatl,

it would all come to a head.

The ceremony would have been vivid and full of colour and dancing.

The Mexica sang sacred songs and dressed in feathered headdresses and bright embroidered

clothes, as the Florentine Codex recalls.

When things were already going on, when the festivity was being observed and there was

dancing and singing, with the voices raised in song, the singing was like the noise of

waves breaking against the rocks.

But as the festival went on, it became increasingly clear that the Mexica were going to ignore

the orders of Cortes and go ahead with the planned sacrifice.

Alverado was enraged at their disobedience, and ordered his men to prepare to stop the

ceremony.

The Spaniards entered the sacred precinct dressed for war, while others in their bright

armour guarded all the exits.

It’s not clear what drove Alverado in these moments.

Quite possibly, he and his men were drunk.

But as the festival reached its climax and the drums and flutes crashed together, Alverado

let out a cold, clear command.

Let them die!

The Spanish fell upon all the gathered Mexica, and a slaughter began.

The Mexica memories of this event recorded in the Florentine Codex are full of gruesome,

specific details that read like the authentic memories of trauma.

When this had been done, they went into the temple courtyard to kill people.

Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just went on foot, each with his metal sword

and his leather shield, some of them iron-studded.

Then, they surrounded those who were dancing, going among the cylindrical drums.

They struck a drummer's arms.

Both of his hands were severed.

Then they struck his neck.

His head landed far away.

Then they stabbed everyone with iron lances and struck them with the iron swords.

They struck some in the belly, and their entrails came spilling out.

They split open the heads of some.

They really cut their skulls to pieces.

Their skulls were cut up into little bits.

Some they hit on the shoulders, their bodies broke open and ripped.

There was a stench as if of sulfur.

Those who tried to escape could go nowhere.

The Spaniards began to loot and burn the temples

of the city, lost in a frenzy of destruction.

This act had turned the whole city against them, and the Mexica of Tenochtitlan realized

that this was their chance to regain their freedom.

The drums at the top of the great temples began to beat, and an Aztec priest is said

to have cried out this bellowing declaration.

Mexica, are we not going to war?

Have courage!

Mexica commoners and soldiers alike grabbed their weapons and flooded the street.

The Spanish were forced to retreat to the palace, where they locked themselves in with

a number of their Tlaxcalan allies, and the Emperor Moctezuma.

The Mexica tried to burn down the palace doors.

Fearing that they would break through, Alverado put his dagger to Moctezuma’s chest, and

ordered him to tell his people to stop.

Moctezuma climbed onto the roof of the palace and raised his hands, calling out to his people.

Let the Mexica hear; we are not their match.

Please stop the fighting!

They only pelted him with stones, and the Spanish had to step in to guard him with their

shields.

It was clear that Moctezuma’s authority over the Mexica had ended.

With it, the power the Spanish had over the city had gone, too.

Alverado and his men settled down for a siege, trapped in the palace without food, fighting

off constant attacks, and waiting for Cortes to return.

It would take 23 days before Cortes once again arrived back at the shores of Lake Texcoco,

his forces now swelled by Narvaez’s men.

He now commanded about 1,000 Spaniards and many thousands more Tlaxcalan soldiers who

had joined him on his return journey.

The Tlaxcalans had heard about the setbacks in Tenochtitlan, but by this point they had

gambled everything on Cortes.

If the Spanish were defeated, they knew that the vengeance of Tenochtitlan would be fearsome.

So, their fates and the fate of the Spaniards were now intertwined.

But Cortes had other problems.

He had told wonderful tales to his new recruits about a glittering, golden city on the lake

where the markets held every luxury, and they would find plenty of food.

But when he arrived back in Tenochtitlan, he found it a very different place.

Bodies were hanging from the gates and towers – apparently Mexica who had been killed

for collaborating with the Spanish.

The streets were deserted, and the great markets were closed.

There were disgruntled murmurings among his new soldiers.

Cortes found Alverado and his men holed up in the palace on the edge of starvation.

The garrison in the fortress received us with such joy.

It seemed we had given back to them their lives which they had deemed lost.

That day and night, we passed in rejoicing.

These men were naturally delighted to see him.

But the city was still in open revolt, and the crowds came out every day to batter on

the palace doors and break through cracks in the walls.

Cortes ordered Moctezuma to once again go out and speak to his people.

The emperor at first refused, remembering what had happened the first time he tried

this.

But he had no choice.

He went out onto the terrace of the palace, and the crowds stretched out beneath him.

17 years ago, a similar crowd had watched his coronation in glorious ceremony.

But now their faces were set hard and unforgiving on their captive king.

Instead of the cheers and raucous music that had once graced his coronation, sources say

that the Mexica met the sight of their king with utter silence.

Moctezuma called out over the stony crowd, repeating his earlier words that they were

no match for the Spanish and that it would be better to surrender.

We are not their match.

Let there be no more fighting.

One source, known as the Codex Ramirez, includes an Aztec warrior in the crowd shouting back

to Moctezuma.

What is being said by this scoundrel Moctezuma, whore of the Spaniards?

Does he think he can call to us, with his woman-like soul, to fight for the empire which

he has abandoned out of fright?

We do not want to obey him because he is no longer our king!

Whether or not these words were actually said, this was certainly the spirit in which the

king’s words were received.

It’s not long before the first stones began to rain down on the helpless figure of the

king.

First one stone, then another fell, until the whole crowd was pelting him, and arrows

began to fly, too.

Moctezuma was struck several times before the Spanish were able to rescue him and pull

him back into the palace.

Inside, he refused any treatment for his wounds.

Moctezuma died on the morning of the 30th of June, 1520.

The Spanish burned the body, as the Florentine Codex recalls.

They hastened to take Moctezuma up in their arms and brought him to the place called Capolco.

Then they placed him on a pile of wood and set fire to it, ignited it.

Then the fire crackled and roared with many tongues of flame, tongues of flame like tassles

rising up, and Moctezuma's body lay sizzling.

It let off a stench as it burned.

Cortes knew that they could not stay in the city.

Without Moctezuma, he had no power over the Mexica people.

The people of Tenochtitlan were beginning to learn how to fight the Spanish, using the

geography of the city to their advantage, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

If at times we were gaining a little ground, they would pretend to make a retreat in order

to lure us into following them.

We could not stand up to the rocks and stones which they hurled from the roofs in such numbers

that many of our men were hurt or wounded.

Cortes hatched a plan to leave the city under cover of darkness.

They would sneak through the streets while the Mexica slept, and slip across the Western

causeway.

But it wouldn't be easy.

The city’s series of interconnected islands were joined by drawbridges that the Mexica

could raise at will, easily cutting off the Spanish and surrounding them.

Cortes and his men packed all the gold they could carry into their bags and muffled the

hooves of their horses so they would make no noise on the stone streets.

Then, they prepared to leave.

It was midnight, and there was a mist hanging over the lake.

Everything went to plan at first.

They snuck out of the palace and through the dark streets of the silent city.

But as they went, a woman by the docks spotted them, and shouted out a warning.

Mexica, come quickly!

Our enemies are leaving.

Now that it's night, they are running away as fugitives!

The entire male population of Tenochtitlan burst out of their houses, taking up their

spears and swords, and jumping into their war canoes, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

The shouts and cries and whistles of the Mexicans rang out.

Then, all of a sudden, we saw many bands of warriors descending on us, and the whole lake

so thick with canoes that that we could not defend ourselves.

On open ground, with their horses and cannons, the Spanish were unbeatable.

But in the narrow streets, on the islands broken by bridges and canals, the Aztecs knew

exactly how to fight.

They massed around the Spanish in their canoes, pelting them with countless arrows while warriors

ran them down from the rear.

The Mexica hatred of the Spanish was by this time so intense that they gave up their usual

code of honour surrounding war.

They no longer tried to capture the Europeans for sacrifice, and went straight in for the

kill instead.

One telling detail is that during this fight, the Mexica killed the Spaniards with a sharp

blow to the back of their head, a punishment usually reserved for petty criminals.

Chaos reigned.

The bodies of dead Spaniards and Mexica began to choke up the canals, and it’s said that

the last of the Spanish were able to cross the waters by running across these bodies.

Horses fell into the lake too, and legend has it that some of the Spanish who weighted

themselves down with gold also fell into the lake and sank to the bottom.

The Spanish lost virtually all of their gold as they fled.

Panic spread throughout their ranks, and for perhaps the first time since landing in Mexico,

fear overcame them.

Their retreat became a rout.

Many had perished along with their horses, and all the gold had been lost together with

the jewels, clothing, all the artillery, and many other things besides.

God alone knows how dangerous and how difficult it was, for each time I turned on the enemy,

I came back full of arrows and bruised by stones.

A reasonable estimate for the number of Spanish killed on this night is around 600.

Thousands of their Tlaxcalan allies were massacred.

But just over 400 Spaniards, Cortes among them, did manage to fight their way across

the causeway to safety.

Cortes was devastated.

It’s said he sat beneath a tree and wept.

But his determination only got stronger.

I think there's a touch of madness to him at this point.

He resolved to retake the city of Tenochtitlan from what he called the Mexica rebellion.

We can tell what was on his mind because he asked after only one person that night; he

checked that the expedition’s chief shipbuilder was still alive.

The men answered that yes, he had survived.

Cortes replied with only these words.

Let’s go then.

We have everything we need.

The people of Tenochtitlan had delivered the most crushing defeat ever inflicted on European

colonists in the New World.

This event, known by the Spanish as the Noche Triste, or the night of sorrows, would remain

that way for some time.

The Mexica of Tenochtitlan gathered all the bodies of the hundreds of dead Spaniards,

and stripped them of their steel armour and swords.

They took a number of crossbows too, although without training, these were very difficult

to use.

They captured a number of guns, although these were of course useless without bullets and

powder.

They took a Spanish cannon.

Not knowing what to do with it, they wisely rolled it into the lake.

The Mexica must have been overjoyed at their victory, but the damage done to their empire

was already enormous.

The emperor was dead, and multiple parts of the empire were now openly defying the authority

of Tenochtitlan.

The whole network of Aztec power was beginning to come apart.

Cortes, by this point, was a man possessed.

He retreated to his allies at Tlaxcala and spent the next 6 months readying himself to

return to Tenochtitlan in full force.

He gathered together an army of many thousands of native allies, perhaps as many as 100,000.

Together with his remaining 100 cavalry, 900 Spanish infantry, and 16 cannons, he marched

back to the city that had expelled him just after Christmas in the year 1520.

I addressed the men and reminded them how, for no good reason, all the natives of Tenochtitlan

had not only rebelled against Your Majesty, but had killed many men who were our friends

and kinsmen, and had driven us from their land.

I urged them to consider how much it would benefit the service of God and Your Majesty

if we were to return and recover all of what had been lost.

Bernal Díaz recalls the tactical decision that Cortes made.

Remembering our great defeat and expulsion, we vowed that, God willing, we would now adopt

a different method of fighting, and blockade the city.

When the Spanish reached the lake, the shipbuilder who Cortes had asked for on the night of the

Noche Triste began his work.

He directed Cortes’ men to cut down the pine trees that grew on the slopes of the

volcanoes, and build 12 ships of a kind known as brigantines.

These were small, two-masted ships that used a combination of sails and oars.

As they neared completion, Cortes loaded them with cannons and musketeers.

He blockaded all the main causeways leading to Tenochtitlan, just as the Tepanec forces

of King Maxtla had tried to do nearly a century before.

But with the help of his powerful warships, Cortes’ siege was much more effective.

This siege would last for four months and over that time, Cortes slowly choked the life

out of Tenochtitlan.

One factor that began to come into play around this time was the spread of smallpox among

the Mexica people.

This disease was brought from the old world by the Europeans and caused much devastation

among the population that had no inbuilt immunity, as the Florentine Codex records.

Before the Spaniards appeared to us, first an epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules.

It began in Tapeilhuitl.

Large bumps spread on people.

Some were entirely covered.

They spread everywhere; on the face, the head, the chest.

The disease brought great desolation.

A great many died of it.

They could no longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer

able to move or stir.

After many weeks of the siege, Cortes finally gave the order to advance into the city, across

its three great causeways.

The fighting was bitter and relentless, going street to street, fighting for each house

and bridge at a time, with heavy losses on both sides.

Bernal Díaz recalls the terrifying noise of these battles.

Mexican captains were yelling and shouting night and day, calling to the men in the canoes.

Then, there was the unceasing sound of their accursed drums and trumpets, and their melancholy

drums in the shrines and on their temple towers.

Both day and night, the din was so great that we could hardly hear one another speak.

Around this time, the Mexica began to use sacrifice as a true weapon of terror.

Whenever they managed to capture Spanish soldiers, they took them to the top of the temple to

Huitzilapotchtli, in full view of the Spanish armies fighting in the streets.

There, they tore out their hearts and dismembered them in full sight.

This tactic had the effect of terrifying the Spanish troops, as Bernal Díaz recalls.

I feared that one day or another they would do the same to me.

When I remembered their hideous deaths, I came to fear death more than ever in the past.

Before I went into battle, a sort of horror and gloom would seize my heart.

The resilience and bravery of the Aztecs was incredible.

As a result, Cortes found himself resorting to extreme tactics.

As his men advanced through the city, he ordered that every district they passed through should

be demolished entirely, with the rubble being used to fill in the canals and waterways so

that the Aztec canoes could not maneuver.

The Spanish army was a steamroller, slowly crushing the city of Tenochtitlan into dust.

Cortes was frustrated and angry.

He had wanted to hand the city of Tenochtitlan over to his king as a pristine jewel, but

the battle was turning it into a blackened ruin.

While the Spanish adapted their tactics, the Mexica did, too.

They learned to make evasive manouevres in their canoes and take cover from gunfire,

as mentioned in the Florentine Codex.

But when the Mexica had been able to see and judge how the guns hit or the iron bolts,

they no longer went straight, but went back and forth, going from one side to the other,

zig-zagging.

Also, when they saw that the big gun was about to go off, everyone hit the ground, spread

out on the ground, crouched down, and the warriors quickly went in among the houses.

The Aztecs even managed to lure Cortes’ large ships on to some submerged sandbanks,

stranding them and allowing them to kill their commanders.

In total, five of these ships would be lost over the whole course of the battle.

At night, the city’s defenders would sneak out and clear the rubble that the Spanish

had put in the canals, undoing their work.

But as the months of grinding battle wore on, famine and disease weakened the Mexica.

They began to eat wood and leather, even bricks crushed into powder, as remembered in the

Florentine Codex.

All the common people suffered greatly.

There was famine.

Many died of hunger.

They no longer drank good, pure water, but the water they drank was salty.

Many people died of it, and because of it, many got dysentary and died.

Everything was eaten; lizards, swallows, maize straw, grass that grows on salt flats, and

they chewed up wood, glue flowers, plaster, leather, and deer skin which they roasted,

baked, and toasted so that they could eat them.

They ground up medicinal herbs and adobe bricks.

There has never been the like of such suffering.

The siege was frightening and great numbers died of hunger.

Bit by bit, they came pressing us back against the wall, herding us together.

When the Spanish reached the centre of the city, they found the well that the Mexica

had been drinking from and destroyed it, forcing them to drink the salty lakewater instead.

So great was their suffering, and it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it.

In the streets, we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon

them.

The Aztecs fought bravely and inflicted huge casualties on the Spanish.

But the pattern was now set in stone.

They had no new supplies, no new soldiers, and no relief.

Meanwhile, a steady flow of supplies came to Cortes from the coast.

Many times his men nearly ran out of gunpowder or food, only to have it resupplied the next

day.

Soon, the Aztecs were hemmed in and were forced to make their last stand in the market of

Tlatelolco.

The Florentine codex recalls that on that final day, as the Mexica prepared for their

last stand, a light once again appeared in the sky over Mexico.

When night came, it rained and sprinkled off and on.

It was very dark.

When a fire appeared, it looked and appeared as if it was coming from the sky like a whirlwind.

It went spinning around and around, turning on itself.

As it went, it seemed to explode into coals; some large, some small, some just like sparks.

It spluttered, crackled, and snapped.

It circled the walls at the water, heading towards Coyonacasco.

There, it went into the midst of the water and disappered there.

No one struck his hand against his mouth.

No one uttered a sound.

In the great market that had once boomed with life, the Aztec forces were surrounded and

utterly destroyed.

The Mexica surrendered on the 13th of August, 1521.

The king at this point was a man named Cuauhtémoczin.

The sorrow that the Mexica felt at this moment is palpable in the Florentine Codex.

Then they took Cuauhtémoczin in a boat.

When they were about to take Cuauhtémoczin, all the people wept, saying there goes the

lord Cuauhtémoczin going to give himself to the Spaniards.

When the weapons were laid down and we collapsed, the year count was three house and the day

count was one serpent.

When Cuauhtémoczin went to give himself up, they took him to Acachinanco.

It was already dark.

The Aztec warriors marked their defeat with the

singing of this bitter lament.

Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in grief.

The houses are roofless now, and their walls are reddened with blood.

Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are splattered with gore.

The water has turned red, as if it were dyed.

We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls,

for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.

The shields of our warriors were its defense, but they could not save it.

The last Aztec emperor, Quahtemoctzin, was captured by the Spanish and tortured until

he revealed the location of all the remaining gold in the city.

There was hardly any left, since the Spanish had already taken most of it and lost it in

the lake during their retreat the previous year.

This caused a great deal of anger among Cortes’ soldiers, who he had promised vast hoards

of gold for their troubles, as Bernal Díaz remembers.

We captains and soldiers were all somewhat sad when we saw how little gold there was

and how poor and mean our shares would be.

Cortes and his men stood victorious over the smoking ruins of Tenochtitlan.

In the battle, the city had been all but destroyed.

Humiliated at his failure to take the city intact, Cortes wanted to erase all trace of

the white city that had once stood here in the lake, and the culture that had once lived

here.

Over the next years, Cortes would ensure that anything left standing after the siege was

gradually demolished.

He had its houses pulled down and its canals filled in.

He even declared that any Mexica who tried to move back into the ruined city would be

executed, and he set up a gallows in the main plaza for this purpose.

In the years that followed, Cortes enslaved vast amounts of the surviving Mexica people,

branding them with hot irons to show their status.

He put them to work destroying their own city, and building European-style buildings on their

ruins, working thousands of them to death in dangerous conditions.

He forced these workers to tear down the tall pyramids and temples of Tenochtitlan, and

build Catholic churches on their rubble.

He tore down Moctezuma’s palaces too, and built mansions for the Spaniards on their

foundations.

He even changed Tenochtitlan’s name, renaming it Mexico, because it was an easier word for

the Spanish to pronounce.

The city expanded on a grid system like the cities of Europe, erasing the shape of the

city that lay beneath.

The Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, who arrived in Mexico City four

years later, witnessed this army of Mexica slaves pulling apart their once great city,

and described the hellish scenes he saw as a plague on all mankind.

The seventh plague was the construction of the great City of Mexico, which during the

early years used more people than in the construction of Jerusalem.

The crowds of laborers were so numerous that one could hardly move in the streets and causeways,

although they are very wide.

Many died from being crushed by beams, or falling from high places, or in tearing down

old buildings for new ones.

During the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish had destroyed the Aztec dams that protected

the city from flooding, and in its early years, Mexico City was therefore prone to destructive

floods.

In the 1600s, over a century after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Mexico City grew to fill

the footprint of the old Aztec capital, and efforts began to drain the lake that surrounded

the island city.

It was hoped that by draining Lake Texcoco, fertile farmlands would be revealed underneath.

But the lakebed was too salty to be any use, and only stagnant salt flats took its place.

Still, Mexico City expanded across these salt flats at an enormous rate.

Today, it's the largest city by population in North America, with over 20 million people

living in its wider metropolitan area.

The entire lakebed was paved over with cobbles and pavestones which in modern times were

covered in concrete and tarmac.

The entire enormous expanse of Lake Texcoco has now quite simply ceased to exist.

The Aztec Empire collapsed in its entirety with the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the Spanish

did their best to eradicate the culture that it had fostered.

Religious orders like the Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominicans flooded into Mexico.

They built large monasteries in Mexico City, and converted the Mexica to their religion.

Any Aztecs books or codices discovered were burned in order to erase the peoples' memory

of their own history.

Today, only 16 books written by the pre-contact Aztecs have survived.

But the Spanish did find uses for some of the existing social structure that the Aztecs

left behind.

The systems of control where lords ruled over many peasants were kept more or less intact

and converted into a system of colonial control that allowed the Spanish empire to extract

taxes and labour from the population.

Diseases like smallpox would ultimately kill up to 95% of indigenous Mexicans, and the

people’s will to resist was severely reduced.

Today, the Aztec language of Nahuatl is still spoken by nearly 2 million people, mostly

based in rural communities in Mexico.

Several Nahuatl words also live on in the English language.

These include "avocado", "chili", “tomato”, "coyote”, and "chocolate".

The names of Aztec gods also resurface in some surprising places.

We opened the episode with the enormous flying Pterodactyl Quetzalcoatlus, its wingspan larger

than a fighter plane, soaring over the seas of the Cretaceous.

When the enormous bones of this flying creature were first discovered in North America, paleologists

saw no other option but to name it after the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent

of legend, god of the winds, of the planet Venus, and the dawn.

Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba and Cortes’ nemesis, was dismissed as governor

in 1521 when his abuse of indigenous labor became too much for the Spanish crown.

But his dismissal didn’t last long, and he was restored to office two years later

in 1523.

He died one year later at the age of 59.

On his death, he had amassed enough wealth to be called "the richest Spaniard in the

Americas."

He would never forgive Cortes.

Panfilo de Narvaez, the captain who had been sent to arrest Cortes, was released from captivity

after two years, and sent back to Spain missing one eye.

After a short break, he returned to adventuring in the Americas several years later in 1527,

and led an expedition to Florida.

But this one met an even worse fate than his mission to Mexico.

Hurricanes, shipwrecks, and disease meant that of the 600 men he set sail with, only

four managed to make it home.

Narvaez himself drowned somewhere off the coast of America.

Malintzin, the slave girl that had accompanied Cortes on his conquest and acted as his translator,

would go on to give birth to Cortes’ son.

She later married one of his soldiers, who she followed to Spain.

She was warmly received there at the Spanish court, and became a Spanish lady of high society.

But she never spoke about the early years of her life.

Hernan Cortes had landed in Mexico with only a few hundred soldiers, and in the space of

two years had destroyed an empire.

He would spend the rest of his life forever chasing the feeling of glory he had felt on

the fall of Tenochtitlan.

His tragedy is that he would never find it.

He alternated between a life of adventuring, extending the colonies of Spain and putting

down native rebellions, and the settled life of a wealthy magnate, running silver mines

in Mexico.

But neither ever satisfied him.

He returned to Spain a number of times, a celebrated conquistador, but his fame and

popularity made him a dangerous person to those in power, and perhaps unsurprisingly,

the Spanish nobility didn’t trust him.

In 1541, twenty years after his conquest, he went back to Spain and found that not a

single member of the aristocracy would talk to him.

On one occasion, he even tried to talk to the king by pushing his way through a crowd

and jumping on board the royal carriage.

The king didn’t even recognize him, and asked him who he thought he was.

Cortes replied with anger.

"I am a man who has given you more provinces than your ancestors left you cities!"

But it was all to no avail.

The glory and recognition he had hoped for would never be his.

Cortes virtually bankrupted himself with his insatiable appetite for expeditions and adventures,

and in 1541, requested a loan from the Spanish crown to resolve his debts.

He never received a reply.

Cortes died in Seville three years later, on December the 2nd, 1547, from a case of

pleurisy, an inflmmation of the tissues surrounding the chest.

He died in pain and short of breath, clutching at the area around his heart.

I wonder if he thought back to those words he spoke to the messenger of Moctezuma that

day on the beach of Vera Cruz when he told him that he and his men had a disease of the

heart, an insatiable desire for gold.

When Cortes died, he was 62 years old, embittered and alone.

Perhaps fitting for a man who had always been filled with a restless desire to move on to

somewhere else, Cortes’ bones were relocated 8 times in the following decades; first around

Spain and then over the sea to Mexico.

In the nineteenth century, the rising swell of Mexican nationalism and a strengthening

indigenous Mexican identity meant that Cortes became a figure of hatred.

He was no longer celebrated as a hero but villified as a monster.

The marker on his tomb was hidden for fear it would be destroyed or vandalised.

Finally, his bones were moved one last time, coming to rest in the Church of Jesús Nazareno

in Mexico City, next to the Pino Suarez subway station.

This is about a fifteen-minute walk from the street where this episode opened, the street

where the base of Tenochtitlan's great temple would be discovered.

There's heavy traffic here, and a bustling outdoor market with red awnings.

A jacaranda bush with purple flowers bursts over the church wall which is spattered with

graffiti.

The grave of Cortes is marked only by an orange plaque bearing only his name and the dates

of his life.

Today, he receives few visitors.

I’d like to end this episode by reading out a piece of Mexica poetry written down

in the Florentine Codex in the decades following the fall of the great island city of Tenochtitlan.

This poem gives you just a taste of the sorrow felt by the Mexica people in that age.

As you listen, imagine what it must have felt like to see the great city of Tenochtitlan

crushed beneath the iron will of the Spanish war machine.

Imagine how it must have felt to see the bustling market of Tlatelolco fall silent, to watch

your people put in chains and forced to demolish the temples that their ancestors had bulit.

Imagine what it would have been like to see your conquerors building mansions on the ruins

of your city, watching them burn the books that contained your history, and seeing your

entire way of life drain away just like the waters of the lake you once called home, seeing

the waves of concrete pave over the crumbling stones and ruined, haunted palaces of the

past.

Like emeralds, we gather the lovely songs.

Sad is my heart, I am a singer.

I sorrow because flowers are not gathered, songs are not gathered there where his home

is.

Only once shall they live upon earth!

Friends, let us still rejoice.

O friends, be not sad.

It is true the earth is nobody’s possession.

None shall remain upon it!

Feathers of quetzal are torn; paintings, they are destroyed;

flowers, they wither.

Everything goes to his home.

Only a brief moment we wander intoxicated beside you, at your side, O giver of life.

Everything goes to his home.

Even flowers, even songs!

Ah, what shall my heart do?

In vain we have come to abide for a while upon the earth.

The earth is only a place of forgetfulness.

In the end, only our songs, our flowers, will be remembered.

Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I’d like

to thank my voice actors for this episode, Jake Barrett-Mills, Lou Millington, Rhy Brignell,

Annie Kelly, and Shem Jacobs.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what

you thought.

You can follow me @PaulMMCooper.

If you’d like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes as well as

images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_of_Civ_Pod,

with underscores separating the words.

Extra-special thanks go to Yan Garcia, a Nahuatl speaker from Mexico who allowed us to hear

the language of the Florentine Codex in all its original glory.

Yan is part of a project called Wikitongues which is dedicated to preserving some of the

world's most endangered languages.

Here, Yan will tell you a little bit about this project.

Hello everyone.

My name is Yan.

I'm a contributor to this project called Wikitongues, basically a global network of grassroots linguists

who are trying to build a seedbank of every language in the world, just like the Nahuatl

language that you're listening to right now.

For more, check out wikitongues.org.

It's a nonprofit organization and they survive on donations.

If you can contribute anything, go to wikitongues.org/donate or you can also check them out at Patreon,

on patreon.com/wikitongues.

Please support Wikitongues if you can.

This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon.

You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help keep this podcast ad-free.

You also let me dedicate more of my time to researching, writing, recording, and editing

to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible.

I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen.

For now, all the best, and thanks for listening.