War, politics and the conquest of Mexico

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-235
Author(s):  
Ross Hassig
Keyword(s):  
1994 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 512
Author(s):  
Colin M. MacLachlan ◽  
Serge Gruzinski ◽  
Eileen Corrigan

1949 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-274
Author(s):  
James A. Magner

To Understand the conquest of Mexico, one must recognize the various human factors and the variety of motives that entered into the titanic struggle for mastery of the land. In the letters of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V, the whole gamut of ambitions—personal, national, grossly material and highly spiritual—are revealed. There can be no doubt that Cortés and the Spaniards with him were moved in the first place by a spirit of personal adventure and a desire to better their fortunes. As the panorama of the Aztec Empire opened itself before his eyes, the dream of expanding the Spanish domains came to Cortés as a justifying cause for his forward movement, so that escape or retreat appeared as treachery to his King. At the same time, as a product of the Spanish crusading era, he beheld himself in the rôle of a spiritual hero bringing the doctrine of Christian Redemption to heathen tribes sunk in idolatry and human sacrifice.


1947 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Philip Wayne Powell

To the English-speaking world the conquest of Mexico was the achievement of Hernán Cortés, thanks largely to the entertaining account by William Hickling Prescott. The brilliance of the Cortesian exploits, plus Prescott’s popularity, have combined to cause this historical distortion by overshadowing the fact that there were many conquests of Mexico, just as there were, and are, “many Mexicos.” Hernán Cortés merely began the subjugation of Mexico by his victory over the Nahua Confederacy. Some later conquests were more difficult, more expensive in lives and mgney, and far more time-consuming than that of Cortés, but they lack their Prescotts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber Brian

2021 represents the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. This essay addresses the rendering of the events that culminated in the Spanish domination of that region in two texts associated with the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). The first is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, a bilingual manuscript written collaboratively with Indigenous intellectuals in Nahuatl with a Spanish translation and accompanied by nearly two thousand illustrations that represent a third text. Completed in 1579, under increasing scrutiny by religious authorities, the manuscript was confiscated and sent to Europe, eventually coming to reside in the Medici Library in Florence. In 1585, Sahagún, authored Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España, which sought to revise the narrative of the conquest found in Book Twelve. Sahagún’s revision reveals how the narrative of the conquest changed in the hands of the Franciscan friar as the sixteenth century drew to a close.


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