When Montezuma Met Cortes

A re-evaluation of the meeting between the Spanish adventurer and the Aztec ruler that challenges history's perspective about the conquest of the Americas. On November eight, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas has long been the symbol of Cortes's bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortes uses "e;the Meeting"e; as Latin American history professor Matthew Restall dubs their first encounter as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortes and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortes's and Montezuma's posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself. "e;A new, startlingly persuasive picture of what actually happened during the Spanish Conquest, based on a radical question: What if the tough, canny leaders of these native military empires didn't suddenly fold up like wet cardboard at the arrival of a couple of hundred bearded oddities from some faraway place?"e; Charles C. Mann, author of 1491