By Andrew Winter
1. The Aztec Empire was only about 100 years old when Spaniard Hernan Cortez arrived. The empire consisted of three ruling tribes and dozens of tributary cities and peoples. It was a loose federation, with its capital at Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. The Aztecs practiced an extremely violent form of paganism involving thousands of human sacrifices.
2. Cortez landed at Veracruz in 1519 with 530 men. Although he had been removed from command of the expedition just before setting out, Cortez ignored the order and sailed anyway. He immediately got into wars with the native peoples of Mexico, but his superior armor and weapons allowed him to defeat many armies with his small band of conquistadors.
3. When Cortez met Emperor Moctezuma II at Tenochtitlan, on an island in Lake Texcoco, their relationship was cordial, but stiff. Moctezuma kept to the Aztec tradition of hospitality, and housed the Spaniards in a palace. Eventually, however, Cortez took Moctezuma hostage, hoping to protect himself and his men from the increasingly hostile natives.
4. A little later, Cortez left Tenochtitlan to deal with a Spanish invasion force sent to destroy him. He beat Panfilo de Narvaez through brilliant generalship, but when he returned, Tenochtitlan was bristling with anger. At a feast celebrating the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, Cortez’s lieutenant Alvarado had slaughtered many of the Mexican nobles out of fear of rebellion.
5. During a riot, Moctezuma came out to calm the people, and died shortly afterward. Whether his own people killed him by stoning or whether the Spaniards killed him is uncertain. Relations between the Spanish and Mexicans only got worse after Moctezuma’s death. Finally, Cortez decided to fight his way out of Tenochtitlan by night. In what came to be known as La Noche Triste, or the Night of Sorrow, Cortez lost three-fourths of his men and native allies in an incredibly bloody battle as he tried to cross the causeway from the island of Tenochtitlan to the mainland.
6. As Cortez regrouped with more native allies and prepared to take Tenochtitlan by siege, a smallpox epidemic broke out among the Aztec peoples. The Spaniards were mostly immune to the disease, but had brought it with them overseas, and the Mexicans succumbed to the epidemic by the thousands. In the midst of this biological slaughter, Cortez executed a prolonged attack on Tenochtitlan. Slowly, Cortez beat down the Aztec defenses, until their new emperor surrendered, and the Aztec Empire was destroyed forever.
7. Cortez was a Catholic, an ambitious gold seeker, a charismatic leader, an unfaithful spouse, and a brash adventurer. No one can say he was fully good, especially when one considers his troops’ slaughter of 3,000 natives at Cholula, but neither was he fully the villainous colonizer he is portrayed to be. His soldier Bernal Diaz mentioned frequently Cortez’s focus on bringing the kingdom of God into a dark country filled with the worship of demons. Despite his clear faults, Cortez did put an end to the wholesale human sacrifice and the dark rule of the Aztecs. Obviously, the tribes subjugated by the Aztecs preferred Cortez to their Aztec overlords, as they came by the thousands to help him destroy Tenochtitlan, even in the middle of an epidemic.
8. Estimates vary wildly as to how many victims the Aztecs sacrificed to their demonic gods annually, but it may have been as many as 20,000 a year. The Aztec ruling army would often engage in “Flower Wars” with their neighbors to capture victims for sacrifice. Moctezuma gladly showed Cortez his horrific temple, literally covered in dried blood, where the emperor sacrificed children daily.
9. Although the Catholic legacy of Cortez is not unstained, it did open a path for the conversion of Latin America, as he had hoped. Less than 20 years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to St. Juan Diego, sparking the mass conversion of Mexico. Though Christendom had recently been torn apart by the Protestant Reformation, God used Cortez’s expedition to provide the world a new hope in His Mother and in the Spanish New World.
