The story of the Spanish conquest, as it has been commonly understood for 500 years, goes like this: Montezuma surrendered his empire to Cortés. "We have not forgotten this issue and continue believing they should offer an apology for the invasion," he said during a news briefing in October. Twice this year, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly asked the Spanish crown to apologize for atrocities against native people. The meeting of Montezuma and Cortés - in what today is Mexico City - and the true story of the conquest that followed it still weigh heavily in Mexico half a millennium later.
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"But then what really got me interested was this question, 'If it's a lie, how has it lasted for 500 years?' " "The more that I thought about, the more I decided it just didn't quite make sense," he tells NPR. (Montezuma was Mexica, but the term Aztec is often used to denote the triple alliance of civilizations that made up his empire.)Īccording to Cortés, Montezuma immediately recognized the divine right of the Spanish and the Catholic Church to rule these lands and he surrendered his empire.īut according to historian Matthew Restall, author of the book When Montezuma Met Cortés, this is simply wrong. Bernal's leader, Hernán Cortés, walked them down a causeway leading into the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, and was greeted by this land's most powerful man: Emperor Montezuma II.
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"It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before," wrote conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. The city later revolted, forcing Cortés and his men to retreat.Īnn Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Imagesįive-hundred years ago, two men met and changed much of the world forever.Ībout 500 Spanish conquistadors - ragged from skirmishes, a massacre of an Indigenous village and a hike between massive volcanoes - couldn't believe what they saw: an elegant island city in a land that Europeans didn't know existed until a few years before.
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Although the Spanish forces numbered some 500 men, they managed to capture Aztec Emperor Montezuma II. The Spanish conquistador led an expedition to present-day Mexico, landing in 1519. An artistic rendering of the retreat of Hernán Cortés from Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, in 1520.