Original subtitles

The year is 1517, a quarter of a century has passed since Christopher Columbus stumbled

across the islands of the Caribbean, launching a period of continuous Spanish presence in

the New World.

There was money to be made here, and yet the mainland remained to be explored.

This curious continent offered even greater financial promise, its potential captivating

the ambitious mind of one power-hungry royal bureaucrat, Hernán Cortés.

It would be Cortés who would tire of his government position, and risk pushing boundaries

never before breached by Europeans.

Would he really be able to control and defeat the Aztecs?

There was this young man by the name of Hernán Cortés on the island of Cuba.

He was an official that worked under the governor Velázquez.

He was very ambitious.

Cortés is a fascinating fellow.

He is from Extremadura, the western part of Castile.

He was fairly well-educated for a man of his time.

He comes from the very, very lowest rank of nobility in Spain, individuals called hijo

de algo.

That means son of somebody.

They come from a known lineage.

He became a colonist, and he spent some time in Hispaniola, where he was actually a notary.

It was like a dead-end job.

So he joined the expedition to actually settle the island of Cuba.

Hernán Cortés was smart, and he was ruthless.

Rising swiftly through the ranks of the Cuban government, by the age of 33 he had

been promoted to municipal magistrate by Governor Diego Velázquez.

With this respected position came a generous encomienda, the right to force labor and take

whatever he liked, whenever he liked, from the island's indigenous people.

In Cuba he became quite wealthy, but the truth of the matter is that actually he comes from

relative obscurity.

He was never the protagonist of any great events in the conquest or colonization of

either Hispaniola or Cuba, and it seems that he might have been chosen for the role by

Velázquez because Velázquez thought that he could actually manipulate him or keep him

under his control.

But Cortés was growing hungry for more.

He sought adventure.

He dreamt of glory.

Nowhere better to fulfill these boyish needs than beyond the confines of the Caribbean.

Only there, in Mesoamerica, could he ever rise to become the most famous of all the

conquistadors.

So there's a peculiar feature of the Spanish and European presence in the New World.

Columbus' voyage, as we know, is in 1492.

And for fully 25 years, a quarter of a century, the Spaniards remain in the Caribbean.

And it's because the early Spanish experience in the New World was actually quite disappointing.

These were not people, the native Caribbeans, who built large cities.

They hadn't accumulated vast amounts of precious metals.

Even their agriculture was relatively non-intensive.

So in other words, there didn't seem to be much incentive to further Spanish exploration.

But during that period, nevertheless, they're sending out feeler expeditions down to Trinidad

along the northern coast of South America, Venezuela, what's now Colombia, the southern

coast of North America in Florida.

Indigenous mainlanders were wooed and interrogated by the Spanish on these exploratory trips.

The colonists sought healthy, farmable land and the labor to work it.

And yet just about everything, no matter its long-term potential, paled in comparison

to their ultimate desire.

The Spanish had this insatiable thirst for gold.

Gold to Spaniards was not just a kind of monetary thing, nor was it a mere embellishment.

It was a symbol of honor, of grandeur, of stature.

It had a kind of web of symbolic meanings around it that made it far more than just

a precious metal.

Twelve years after the death of Queen Isabella, the Spanish crown had landed with her grandson,

Charles.

The young king's desire for total power across Europe required gold, vast supplies of this

precious metal which could buy him his dominance.

And who was already exploring the mysteries of the New World, where legend spoke of cities

built from this rare treasure?

Charles was about to offer the full weight of his support to the conquistadors and Cuba's

governor, Diego Velazquez.

Velazquez had commissioned two voyages of exploration within the general confines of

the Gulf of Mexico.

Francisco Hernández de Córdoba commanded the first expedition to the Yucatan Peninsula.

He and his crew faced fierce resistance from the Maya population.

Many never returned.

One of a handful of survivors was Bernal Díaz, who returned to Cuba with gripping

tales of a highly advanced, vastly powerful civilization.

They had explored part of the Yucatan Peninsula and they had obviously heard rumors that there

were other polities farther north worth exploring.

One year later, Díaz would return in search of this marvelous, dangerous metropolis.

With him was Governor Velazquez's nephew, the explorer Juan de Grijalva, and 200 men

armed with gunpowder weaponry.

Gruesome tales of guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Campeche, leading to dozens of

fatalities and injuries, including Grijalva being hit by three separate arrows and breaking

two of his teeth.

Was Grijalva missing, or worse, dead?

Who would track down and finally bring him home to the safety of his uncle, Governor Velazquez?

Meanwhile, Cortés grew restless.

He yearned for his very own opportunity to storm the mainland and secure its bounty.

The idea that he brought to Velazquez was to go in search of Juan de Grijalva.

And so it was initially seen as a recovery mission.

So in 1519, he was ordered by Velazquez to undertake an expedition.

Shortly before leaving on the expedition, his ambition and arrogance began to put doubts

in Velazquez's head.

So he changed his mind and told Cortés he was not to sail.

The message from the governor got there in time, but Cortés chose to ignore it and sail

toward Mexico in 1519.

There are 10 ships, probably some 500 men all told, which is unquestionably the biggest

expedition that had been launched at the time.

And it becomes clear rather quickly that although Cortés had been telling Velazquez that he

was just going to go off and find Grijalva, or he was just going to go off and do more

reconnaissance, that he had an ulterior motive.

He follows the traditional path to go to the east coast of Yucatán, encounters Maya groups

around to the west coast of Yucatán, and then up the Gulf of Mexico, encountering natives,

having battles, taking on water, but also gaining huge amounts of information.

At last, a truly promising discovery.

A landscape flush with exotic creatures and colorful plants, populated by an indigenous

people whose civilization appeared to be remarkably advanced.

Finally, on Good Friday of 1519, they make a more or less permanent camp near what is

now Veracruz, Mexico.

They then declare themselves an independent city and in essence abrogate their contract

with Diego Velazquez.

They send out smaller expeditions to look at the surrounding area.

They entertain emissaries from the Mexica, folks who we call the Aztecs, and make the

decision that there is more here than meets the eye.

It was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Cortés must have been trembling with excitement.

The determined conquistador knew that he and his men were teetering on the precipice of

an immeasurable wilderness, home to a countless number of highly developed civilizations and

cultures.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Americas are a really varied and in many places a densely

populated landscape.

There's peoples in tropical areas, in deserts, as well as the Incan highlands or the highlands

of the Andes.

There are large numbers of peoples in parts of the Amazon basin and also in the American

Midwest around the Mississippi River.

The most densely populated regions are in temperate and tropical areas, particularly

around Central Mexico, what we talk about as Mesoamerica or Middle America.

In the north there are what we talk about as the Aztec, the Mexica people who speak

Nahuatl.

To the south there are Maya peoples who speak Mayan languages.

So we think of Mesoamerica as this fairly unified cultural area, even though we have

many different native groups.

There are certain common cultural aspects which they all share, such as a base-20 number

system, such as a complex calendar system.

Certainly Mesoamerica was one of the most densely populated areas on the globe.

Back in Cuba, Governor Velazquez was furious.

Cortes had actively chosen to ignore his clear and strict orders.

He was no longer welcome or safe to return home, and so his only option was whatever

lay ahead.

If he was to stand any sort of chance at surviving out here, Cortes knew he must find an effective

way to communicate with the Maya and Aztec people.

At the beginning of the Cortes expedition, when the Spaniards land on Cozumel, just off

the coast of Yucatan, they hear word that some Spaniards who had been shipwrecked there

six years earlier had survived.

And particularly one called Jerónimo de Aguilar comes running out of the woods.

First they don't even recognize him as a Spaniard.

He starts speaking in Spanish.

He wants to know what day it is.

He's been living among the Maya of Yucatan ever since his shipwreck and has learned Maya.

He's had to learn Maya in order to survive.

He then is incorporated into the expedition.

Then when they begin to enter the Aztec Empire, there they have an encounter with a local

indigenous group where the men who rule give the Spaniards 20 girls.

One of those girls, the Spaniards baptize Doña Marina.

She spoke both Nahuatl and one of the more common Maya languages.

So through Doña Marina and de Aguilar, they could communicate with the vast majority of

all native peoples in central Mexico.

Cortes would soon grow reliant on Doña Marina, his translator, negotiator, and indispensable

cultural mediator.

Without her, Cortes and his men would never have survived.

They then organized themselves in order to go inland.

And this is the dramatic moment because in an expedition of 10 ships, 500 and some men,

about half of those men were sailors.

They figured that, heck, by June, they were going to be home with the wife and kids.

And all of a sudden, this guy says, sorry, we're going inland.

You have two choices.

You can go dandle your child on your knee or you can become filthy rich.

It's up to you.

What we then do, we keelhaul all the ships and we dismantle them.

We take all of the metal fittings, all of the blocks, all of the lines, all the sails,

and we store it.

The hulks we burn.

Now, a lot of romantic authors of the 19th century have seen this as a cataclysmic moment.

You're either with me or you're against me and I just burn the ships.

There's no way you can get home.

Well, I mean, that's a delightful idea.

It's quite romantic.

But the truth is those ships had been in tropical waters probably for two to three years by

that time.

If you leave the ships in the water, they are going to disintegrate.

So you might as well pull them out, salvage all the material that you possibly can because

you can always rebuild them.

Remember, half of your crew are sailors and their ship's carpenters and all the like.

You can rebuild those ships.

And so even though we see the burning of the ships as this very dramatic turning point,

it really wasn't.

It was quite practical.

Six months had passed.

Cortés, having explored great lengths of the coastline, was by now highly aware that

the region's preeminent power were the mighty Mexica.

The Mexicas, or better known as the Aztecs, were an extraordinarily hierarchical society,

not that different to Spanish society in some ways.

The leader known as the Tlatoani of the Aztecs was in that time Moctezuma.

Their society began in the 11th and 12th century somewhere to the northwest in a process of

migration that may have lasted 200 years.

They entered into the well-watered area of the central basin of Mexico, what we now know

as the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is located.

They set up a capital in the middle of a lake, Lake Texcoco in central Mexico.

From the middle of this lake, they built a capital city, the capital of Tenochtitlan,

which was the capital of what became what we might think of as the Aztec Empire.

The city itself could have housed as many as a quarter of a million people, many, many

times the size of London at the same period.

And they then used military force to expand their power and control beyond the central

basin of Mexico until it encompasses from north central Mexico all the way down into

Central America.

But the truth is, most of the Aztec Empire was not a formal political entity, but rather

it was an imperial system which was based upon the payment of taxes.

We'll leave you alone if you pay your taxes to us.

The Mesoamerican tradition in terms of religious and cosmological views is that just like humans

need to eat, gods need to eat.

That meant sacrifices during particular parts of the year.

Some sacrifice took the form of things like everyday items like corn or maize, but particularly

in important periods it would have been human or blood sacrifices.

August 1519, forever enticed by the scent of power, Cortes requests a meeting with Mexica

ruler Moctezuma.

He's swiftly rejected.

Seeking to meet Moctezuma, Cortes sought a different approach.

He would lead his 600 Spaniards, including a handful of horsemen, dragging their ship's

cannons into the jungle, heading inland towards the Aztec leader's home, Tenochtitlan.

It seems that Doña Marina was able to explain to Cortes that the Aztecs actually had this

rival indigenous group that hated them vehemently and would ally with the Spanish.

The Tlaxcalans were an independent, almost autonomous, resistant community who hated

the Aztecs more than anyone.

Folks have calculated that probably as many as 100,000 Tlaxcalans then begin to fight

alongside of the Spaniards.

The Spaniards then move on to the important cultural center of Cholula, where the local

elements attempt to annihilate the Spaniards by attacking them in the night, working in

concert, we believe, with the Mexica of Mexico City.

The Spaniards learn about the plot, thanks to Doña Marina, and are able to foil it.

And then the entire expedition of Spaniards and natives enter into the valley of Mexico.

Exhausted, Cortes and his men finally emerge from the claustrophobic forest to a mesmerizing

sight.

Masterfully crafted waterways flowing through a vast city, overlooked by magnificent pyramids.

This was the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

Standing on the ridge, looking down into the central valley of Mexico, the central basin,

it would have just been quite literally mind-boggling to see a population center of hundreds of

thousands of people, and then this crystalline lake with a city placed in the middle of it.

When we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, we were astounded.

These great towns and temples and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone,

seemed like an enchanted vision.

Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream.

It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things

never heard of, seen, nor dreamt of before.

November 8th, 1519.

Cortes and his men arrive at the gates of the city.

This was a risky tactic, leaving his army open to attack.

Perhaps Moctezuma was superstitious or simply anxious that the tense atmosphere might tip

over into violence.

Either way, he offered the Spaniards a peaceful welcome.

They're put in one of the palaces in the central religious district of the Mexica.

In the midst of all this splendor, they noticed these large pyramids that were temples, and

they saw that they were blood-soaked.

And they were horrified to learn that this blood was because of human sacrifice.

Of course, human sacrifice for them is horrible, and they continually complain about it.

The Mexicas seem to diminish it a little bit for their benefit.

As the months passed, this uneasy truce began to crumble.

Political aggression and coercion poisoning the relationship between Cortes and his host.

Cortes seizes Moctezuma as his prisoner, locking him in his own palace.

Historic documents suggest he turned the Aztec into a puppet ruler.

Now, using his hostage, the man who had welcomed him in as his mouthpiece, Cortes was in charge

of Tenochtitlan.

But back in Cuba, Governor Velazquez had not forgotten Cortes' disobedience in setting

sail against his orders.

After a couple of months, word reaches Cortes that Velazquez had sent out a punitive expedition

to stop Cortes.

So he takes half the Spaniards away with him.

He quite possibly is taking a large number of his native allies also.

Flanked by 400 of his soldiers, Cortes marched out to confront the army sent after him by

Governor Velazquez.

The city was left under the control of his second-in-command, the violent, paranoid,

and unpredictable Pedro de Alvarado.

Alvarado becomes concerned about what he sees as plots against the Spaniards.

And all of this comes to a head during the celebrations of the Mexica month of Toshcat.

The creme de la creme of the Mexica nobility are engaged in a ritual dance in one of the

major courtyards.

Alvarado believes that this might be a triggering event for a rebellion.

And so he orders his men to fire on the native celebrants, killing many of the leaders of

the Mexica.

One Aztec account of the massacre describes how the Spaniards entered the sacred patio

to kill people.

They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off both his arms and his head.

They struck others in the shoulders and tore their arms from their bodies.

Some tried to escape, but the Spaniards murdered them at the gates while they laughed.

In any war, men who are willing to be violent without hesitation tend to rise up through

the ranks.

And that is Pedro de Alvarado.

His entire career is about him being the man who's willing to stick his neck out to attack

without mercy.

He's psychotic, mass murderer, serial killer, I mean, whatever kind of modern anachronistic

phrases we want to use.

He's that kind of guy, the archetypal bad conquistador.

They're not all like that, but he's about as bad as it gets.

Cortes comes back victorious.

He finds the city in complete uproar.

Tenochtitlan is now in the midst of a violent Aztec uprising.

They attack the palace of Moctezuma in order to expel the conquistadors.

And in the scuffle, Moctezuma was killed, possibly by a rock thrown by an Aztec.

The more likely story is that the Spaniards kill Moctezuma.

The Spaniards then on La Noche Triste, the sad night, are forced to flee the city or

perhaps be massacred themselves.

The Mexica could have annihilated them, but they didn't.

They are allowed to leave the central basin and go back over to Tlaxcala.

A bitter, humiliated Cortes formulates his plan to deliver a final crushing blow to the

Aztecs.

In Tlaxcala, they regroup.

Cortes calls for all of that materiel, all that equipment that we left back in Veracruz

to be brought up to Tlaxcala.

And they cut lumber, and they build 12 small gunships here in Tlaxcala, which I'd like

to point out is landlocked.

There's no big water around Tlaxcala.

And then they carry them over the mountains back into the Valley of Mexico for the final

siege against the city.

Tenochtitlan was essentially an island reliant on the surrounding rural communities.

Cortes knew a direct attack could fail, but that a war of attrition, cutting off the city

from crucial supplies, would starve the Aztecs into surrender.

Unless you control all canoe traffic, all water traffic, you cannot seal that city off.

You can cut the water supply, you can do all sorts of things, but it's almost impossible

to seal the city off.

And so the 12 gunships, known as brigantines, become very important.

They patrol the water and help to keep the canoe travel to a minimum.

During the time that they are laying siege to Tenochtitlan, a disease has already taken

hold on the city.

The population begins to die from this European disease.

Waste piled high across the once pristine streets of the city.

Its people cowed by starvation, disease, the deaths of their children and their elderly.

Their lives ruined.

The Mexica resistance had been defeated.

So on the 13th of August of 1521, the Spaniards and their 100,000 or more native allies are

victorious in taking the city.

Hernan Cortes had somehow led an expedition of a few hundred starving, exhausted men and

overthrown an island city home to a quarter of a million people.

It had taken him over two years.

The Spanish Empire owed him some six million new subjects, not forgetting an additional

85,000 square miles of stolen land.

It was to be coined New Spain and Cortes was to be its first governor.

When the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital ends, the Spaniards then quickly begin

to insist that their conquest has been achieved because that way they can then write their

merit reports and get their rewards.

And any ongoing violence or resistance by indigenous peoples can then be classified

as a rebellion.

Over time, that kind of myth of a rapid conquest and a completion becomes consolidated with

this idea that in 1521 Tenochtitlan becomes Mexico City, becomes the city of Mexico.

In fact, that process is a very gradual and slow one.

The city of Tenochtitlan was devastated, never again to rise to its former glory.

As generations passed, an Aztec culture mortally wounded by Spanish violence was lost to history.

You have to think of the conquest not ending in 1521, but really beginning in 1521.

The conversion of these lands into New Spain takes place over many, many, many generations.

And only gradually does it become called the city of Mexico, which is still an indigenous

name because its original people are the Mexica.

So in the Nahuatl language, Mexico is the place of the Mexica.

So Mexico then becomes Mexico, Mexico, but only very gradually.

The state-level activity changed because there were new overlords.

The Mexica have been replaced by the Spanish.

But in terms of daily rituals, things did not change very much at all.

People woke up in the morning, they made their tortillas, they worked in their fields.

By and large, life went on as it had before.

It takes several years for the Christianization effort to begin.

You no longer have human sacrifice, by and large, because the Spaniards are very careful

about that.

The biggest change is the imposition of taxation on the natives by the Spaniards.

This is the encomienda.

So you are required to pay taxes and provide labor to a Spanish colonist.

And many of these colonists were not pleasant people.

They were extracting everything they possibly could from the land in order to benefit themselves.

That's why they fought in the war.

And so we have true, true mistreatment of the natives at the hands of the Spaniards

in the years and decades after the Spanish arrival.

For half a millennia, literature has gushed with legendary tales of the conquest of the

Mexica, repeating a lie telling of great bravery and cunning, with Cortes and his men painted

as white gods, utilizing superior warfare and political manipulation to outsmart Moctezuma

and achieve a righteous victory.

But modern historians have begun to question this popular narrative.

Cortes may not have had as much control or influence as was first believed.

A few hundred Spaniards, led by Cortes, were able to march from one valley down into the

valley of Mexico and then right into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

How were they able to do that?

I think there's only really two obvious explanations.

One is the one that the Spaniards put forward.

They're really, really clever.

They are manipulating local political arrangements.

They've got the Tlaxcalans as their allies helping to defend them.

They're maybe convincing people to be interested in Christianity.

In other words, an explanation that gives all the credit to the Spaniards.

How do they get into the city?

Then the argument is, well, Montezuma the Aztec emperor is a coward.

He's very superstitious.

He's kind of overwhelmed by the Spaniards.

That's one explanation.

That's the one you'll find in some form or another in almost all the accounts that are

written over the centuries.

So I think that explanation is completely wrong.

And it's blatantly Hispano-centric.

There's another explanation, which I think is better evidence and makes more sense.

And that is that Montezuma is the opposite of being a superstitious coward.

He is very much in control of the situation.

He sees and has been tracking these invaders since before they even arrived in Mexico,

when they were sailing down the coast of Maya country.

He's very curious about them.

He wants to draw them into his city in order to control them, study them, learn from them.

They are not a threat.

There's just a few hundred of them.

He has tens and tens of thousands of soldiers that he could use to destroy them if he needed

to.

And he doesn't want to do that.

He puts them up in his father's palace, right in the center, right next to his palace and

studies them.

And they are there for six months as his guests.

He goes hunting with them.

They play games together.

They learn each other's languages.

And so the story that Montezuma actually surrendered and that they were kind of controlling the

empire through him, as ludicrous as it is, is easily believed because most of the Spaniards

who are there at the end of the war, the thousand who were there in August of 1521, the vast

majority of them weren't in that situation.

They'd come later.

Well, they had been outside the city during that moment.

But it presents us with a kind of a wonderful conundrum, I think, with a solution that really

kind of blows our minds in terms of thinking what's really going on during this time period.

It has been seen that the Spaniards were thought of as white gods.

Well, this is something which generally Spanish writers were casting back onto the events.

We see none of that from the native sources themselves.

To mention it, certainly in the context of Mexico, is completely incorrect.

The Cortés mythology has presented the idea that Cortés was always in control, that he

was a master manipulator.

It seems, however, that that's far from the truth.

When Cortés landed in Mexico, the Aztec empire was in turmoil.

Under Montezuma, he had become much more oppressive.

He demanded greater tribute from the tribes that they had conquered.

He had conducted a great purge against his political enemies.

There had been a three-year famine that led to widespread suffering.

Tlaxcalans were skillful enough to enroll Cortés into their own rivalry against the

Aztecs.

This proved to be a crucial moment in the expedition because the Tlaxcaltecas are going

to be the main allies that Cortés is going to have.

So we need to remember that conquistadors, their success or failure depends sometimes

in the way that they're allowed to insert themselves in those much longer story that

was happening between indigenous polities.

By embellishing the heroic exploits of the Spaniards in Mexico, it's easy to disguise

the devastating impact of smaller, insidious European parasites brought upon the indigenous

populations in Mesoamerica.

Just as the Caribbean islands had been devastated by European pathogens decades earlier, now

the mainland was to be struck with the same deadly force.

Disease, probably smallpox, hits Mexico in April 1520.

The core of the Aztec empire, right in the middle of the military conquest.

Disease just destroyed them.

The Aztecs had been defeated.

Their vast territory is now just another distant corner of King Charles' Spanish kingdom.

People could no longer ignore this growing empire or the rumors of its fearless conquistadors.

These stories concerned Charles.

Four thousand miles away, the self-proclaimed heroes seemed to be doing entirely as they

pleased, drunk with power, basking in the untold riches of the New World.

What could the crown do if this army of skilled killers decided to break away, taking Spain's

gold and land with them?

Charles needed to seize control before it was too late.

Conquistadors are great first wave, but you don't want to trust the government of colonies

to conquistadors.

One of the patterns of the Spanish conquest is the willingness of the crown to give conquistadors

huge amounts of power before or immediately after they succeed at conquests.

But inevitably what happens, usually within a decade or so of the conquest, is that the

king, or very often his ministers, want to bring that control back to the monarchy and

not leave it in the hands of conquistadors.

In 1524, Charles establishes his Council of the Indies.

This was an administrative and advisory body for the New World, a way to better govern

these increasingly important colonies, whilst regulating and controlling the conquistadors.

These figures who established themselves in the Americas are seen as a kind of alternative

nobility, competing with the traditional nobility in Castile, and that's one of the main reasons

why the crown seeks eventually to exert much greater control over the conquistadors.

So Cortes for a long time is largely in political control of the Valley of Mexico, and eventually

Charles V decides to send out Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza to become the viceroy.

That period where these men are acting with a great deal of autonomy and independence

begins to come to an end.

It doesn't mean that conquistadors were not powerful, or were not rich, but they were

not in control, and I think this was crucial.

Cortes, after his conquest, gained a great deal of fame and notoriety, tremendous wealth.

He was given titles by the Spanish monarch, lands, recognition.

But Cortes, you know, was really an ambitious man and never happy with what he'd accomplished.

There was always more for him.

He's the most powerful man in the Americas, a lord of men.

He has a hundred thousand native Mexicans working on his private estates.

He's got everything he could ever want, but in 1524 he leaves it all behind to push on

further south into Guatemala, into central Mexico, in what become a series of disastrous

expeditions.

And so this began to erode his standing within Spanish society, although the monarch continued

to support him for what he had done.

So ultimately, you know, he did wind up with some lands and some wealth and some status.

Nothing like he'd achieved during the conquest.

But he is still revered as probably the greatest conquistador.

Hernan Cortes would eventually return to Spain.

On December 2nd, 1547, he would succumb to dysentery, choking to death on his own inflamed

lungs.

Cortes was dead, but his conquest of the Mexica had opened the new world up to a tidal wave

of European activity.

The conquest of Mexico changes everything, because now the Spaniards have seen that Native

Americans can build vast cities, there's populations of tens of thousands, that they do practice

intensive agriculture, very productive agriculture that sustains populations in the millions.

That they have accumulated vast amounts of precious metals and other forms of wealth

and valuable goods.

And so the conquest of Mexico leads to an explosion of Spanish exploration and conquest

and settlement throughout the Americas.

Mexico City would eventually rise from the ashes of Tenochtitlan.

And whilst the Aztecs may have been defeated, the largest civilization in the Americas had

not yet felt the relentless force of the conquistadors.

One impoverished Spaniard, Francisco Pizarro, found himself buoyed by wild tales of another

golden city, and grew desperate to discover the impossible riches which lay in wait to

the south.

He trekked to Peru, the land of the Inca.