When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History Audiobook (Free)

A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the Americas

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, in the entrance to the administrative centre city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction-the prelude towards the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to Western colonization from the mainland from the Americas-has long been the mark of Cortés’s daring and excellent about When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History military genius. Montezuma, alternatively, is remembered being a coward who offered away a huge empire and handled off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere.

But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortés uses “the Getting together with”-as Restall dubs their initial encounter-as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare principal sources and forgotten accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs as well, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, as well as the worlds where they lived-leading, detail by detail, to a dramatic inversion of the outdated tale. As Restall requires us through this sweeping, revisionist accounts of the pivotal instant in contemporary civilization, he phone calls into issue our watch of the annals of the Americas, and, indeed, of background itself.