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- [00:01]
A
So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam, Edelman, Frame and Free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. He was the man who single handedly conquered an empire. The bold captain who stepped off a ship with just 500 men, marched into a city of 200,000 and brought the most powerful state in the western hemisphere to its knees. Well, maybe that's the version you heard in history class. But here's the thing. That story, it leaves out most of what actually happened. You see, Hernan Cortes wasn't the invincible military genius that the Spanish made him into. His military experience, by his own era's account, was almost non existent. He was actually a college dropout, a secretary, and a mid level bureaucrat running gold mines in Cuba who, when he finally sailed for the mainland, wasn't even doing it legally. And the place he sailed to was a place that was lined up with dominoes just waiting to fall. Indigenous warriors who had been waiting for a chance at revenge. An enslaved teenage girl, a microbe that no one could see that would do most of the killing. Cortes didn't orchestrate the fall of the Aztec empire. He just lit the match. And the country he left behind is still trying 500 years later to figure out how to make sense of a history written by conquistadors and the conquered. So what actually happened on the shores of Mexico when Cortez famously said, burn the boats? Well, today we're gonna find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to history. What's up, people? And welcome back to history Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history. From all time, forever. Yes, that is what I do here as I try to learn about everything that's ever happened on the planet. And oh boy, every single day there's new history getting made, so there's no time to waste. And we have a fantastic episode to dive into today. Now, before we begin, I just want to say a few things. First, I want to say thank you to you, dude. Statistically and ladies, sometimes I want to say thank you for tuning into the show. Because every time you click on an episode and comment support, whether on YouTube or Spotify, it really helps us out. It helps the show grow, it helps keeps the light on in the tent, and it helps keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I also want to give a big shout out to the Greek freak himself, the legend of the camp. Christos, how are you, my friend? What's up, everybody? Christos, we don't have a ton of time because we also have another person that's joining us. It's my pal David.
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B
So, Sanchez, what's up, dude?
- [02:52]
A
David is a pal of mine, an Ecuadorian himself, also partially Spanish, a mestizo, perhaps.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And grew up in South Florida and actually was one of the first people that was like, dude, you need to read about Hernan Cortez's life in a book that he read called Conquistador. Is that true? Yes. And it basically chronicles his entire sort of conquest, if you can call it that, and expedition into the Yucatan and specifically dealing with the Aztecs.
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B
Yes, I think it's. If you guys are interested, the book's called Conquistador by Buddy Levy. It is my favorite book I've ever.
- [03:26]
A
Well, great news. If you clicked on this episode, you don't even need to read it because we're going to go through all the beats, and I'm sure Sanchez is going to fill in any gaps. Now, where does our story begin? You're probably thinking Mexico. You're wrong. It actually begins in 1485 in a dusty little town in western Spain called Medellin, in a province called Extra Madura. Now, Extra Madura roughly translates to the shitty part. Yeah, it's like the extreme, harsh land. And it was poor. It was hot and it was tough. It was a region of, like, farmers and soldiers and, like, you know, some nobles, but, like, minor nobles who just kind of made it work. And this one corner of Spain produced some of the most consequential conquistadors in history, including the very man talking about today. Now, Cortez was born into a family of what they call Hidalgos, which is a fancy way of saying that they had status but no money. You know, they had, like, maybe a, you know, a name or they had, like, some type of lineage that was important, but without the money, it's like, what. What are we been doing? Now, his father was an infantry captain of what they say is distinguished ancestry, but slender means. His mother was, get this, distantly related to the same Francisco Pizarro that would later conquer the Incans in Peru. So one family tree produced two of the men who would, I mean, basically dismantle the Americas, which is Just pretty crazy in its own right. Now, young Hernan was not doing great. He was a sickly young boy. And his own biographer and chaplain, Francisco Lopez D. Gamora, described him as pale and ill. That's how he was described in his early years, that he was just sort of sickly and sort of, I guess, insignificant, you could say. But fortunately for Hernan grew out of it. And by the time he was a teenager, his parents had a plan. They were like, all right, you're 14, you're going to get shipped off to Salamanca to study Latin and prepare for just kind of like a standard issue, like, upper middle class, comfortable legal career. And that lasted for a long time. And by a long time, I mean like two years, 24 months. You see, Cortez hated it. He was bored and restless and wanted to do something different, wanted something more. And so he dropped out of college and kind of went home. And his parents were pissed. And now instead of getting back, you know, like this future lawyer that they had planned on, they get back like a teenager with no plans, no profession. And he's pale still, probably, and a personality that his own friends and chroniclers would describe as ruthless, haughty and mischievous. I mean, hottie, like, like arrogant, not like, hot. Now you can imagine what his enemies would say about him. Now, here's the thing. Cortez hadn't come home with nothing. He had come to a Spain that was full of possibilities. Now, while he was failing out of Salamanca, news of Christopher Columbus's voyages were pouring back across the Atlantic. I mean, the craziest stories you can imagine, like gold and people making crazy money by, like, men that had nothing but just bravery and willingness to sail into the unknown. It was kind of like crypto lowkey. Like the way you hear about, like, guys in Miami making millions of dollars. People are like, wait, should I get into crypto? This is the crypto of the time. They're like, wait, should I go on an adventure and, you know, make some money and, you know, like, make a name for myself? And those stories landed on a very specific kind of young man. This is a hidalgo, after all, right? He has status and no money in a country that had just finished a 700 year war to drive the Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula. The reconquista ended in 1492. This is the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And this basically means that's, you know, the Spain that Cortez was growing up in as a young boy was a country that, you know, had just won. They were Victorious, they, you know, got rid of, you know, these. What they would say are, you know, Muslim invaders in the Iberian Peninsula. And as a result, the whole country was on fire. There was religious fervor. There was military confidence and a belief that conquest and conversion in gold, it wasn't just tolerable or permissible. It was like their duty from God. So for a frustrated young man like him, going to, you know, the New World or to the Americas isn't just an adventure. It's the only thing that really spoke to him as a young man. So in 1504, at just 19 years old, he boarded a ship and sailed for Hispanola, and he would never live in Spain again. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow, and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion, camp, history, camp, and Camp Gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. Now, the legends of Cortez will skip this part, but when Hernan arrived in the Caribbean, he wasn't a conqueror. He wasn't a military genius. He wasn't some brave sailor. He was a clerk. Literally, like, for the first several years on Hispaniola, the island that today is, you know, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Cortez did what all young Spaniards had to do when they were fresh off the boat. He registered as a citizen, got, like, a little piece of land and just kind of worked as a farmer and then, like, took odd jobs as, like, a notary. But here's the thing. The Cortez that the world remembers, that bold conquistador, like, with a sword and speeches and all these, you know, troops and stuff, was first shaped by years of dull administrative work. He learned the legal codes of Castile. He learned how Spanish colonial bureaucracy actually works. And those two years that he'd, you know, hated back at college in Salamanca, plus a decade of, you know, just kind of working, like clerical work in the colonies, would later help him pull off something that almost no other conquistador ever managed. But first, he was about to get a lot more experience. So in 1511, Cortez joined an expedition led by Diego Velasquez de Collar to conquer the island of Cuba. Now, Velasquez got appointed governor of the new colony, and Cortez became clerk to the treasurer. So he was awarded what they call an encomeda, which, in the brutally polite language of Spanish colonialism, was officially a grant of an indigenous tribute. So what does that mean? It was a grant of human beings, native people that were forced to work his land and his mines under a system that, I mean, they called it like a tribute. It was slavery. And he got the first house in the new capital of Santiago, and. And he raised cattle, he ran gold mines, worked by, you know, the enslaved indigenous labor, and became a successful colonial operator. Now, by the time Cortez ever set foot in Mexico, you have to understand the scope of his life up until this point, he had already spent 15 years inside the machinery of Spanish colonial conquest. He hadn't just heard about violence against native people. I mean, he is enabling it, profiting from it. And he hadn't just witnessed forced labor. He had a system that was imposing it. You know, he was an experience colonial administrator who knew exactly how the game worked. And this was just the world he was already in. But he was unusually good at it. He was, at this point, charismatic and patient and knew how to build networks and how to politic and make himself useful to the most powerful men on the island and ultimately how to slip away from under them when the right time came. So by the late 1510s, he was the mayor of Santiago de Cuba, one of the most prominent men on the entire island. And then in 1517 and 1518, a series of Spanish expeditions sailed west from Cuba. And they started to come back with stories. I mean, crazy stories. Stories of, like, giant stone monuments and brightly dressed people in cities along a coastline that no European had ever mapped before. And, you know, these beautiful gold statues and jewelry and, you know, they were trading things in small quantities and hinting at this vast wealth somewhere deeper inland. And there was a, you know, mainland that was out there with a silver civilization that none of them had any idea about. And Diego Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, decided that he wanted it. Now, the question was for Diego, like, all right, who do I send to go get all this money? Well, in October 1518, Governor Velasquez signed an agreement appointing Hernan Cortez as captain general of a new expedition to the mainland. Now, on paper, you're probably like, oh, it's a promotion. You know, I mean, he got bumped up from, you know, just like, helping out the treasurer and helping out, you know, this governor, now, he's, like, in charge of something. But in actuality, it was the beginning of one of the most, I mean, one of the craziest, like, insubordination acts in modern history. You see, Velasquez's official instructions were very narrow. Cortez was supposed to find an earlier missing fleet. Look for any Christians that were being Held captive by the natives of Yucatan. Do a little exploring here and there, maybe trade a little, get a gold necklace. But he was specifically not authorized to colonize anyone, not to conquer anything. He was just like a. Like a. Like a exploratory captain that was, you know, still tied to this governor. But Cortez moved fast, faster than Velasquez expected. And within a single month, he gathered six ships and 300 men, using, again, his administrative skill, the gifts of, you know, his connections and his politics and what one biographer simply calls his impeccable ability as a speaker. So he spent his own money, he pulled in his own investors, and he was building something way, way bigger than Velasquez had ever authorized. And of course, Velasquez, being a shrewd governor, he started to panic. You know, he was jealous and suspicious and increasingly aware that he had just handed a ton of power and license to a guy who didn't really respect him. And the governor made the only move that he could think of. He decided to revoke that command. Now, this is the moment that everything changes. Cortez gets wind of Velasquez's plan. He's like, yo, he's about to take my claim to go conquer all these people and get all this money. And. And we don't know how exactly, but it doesn't really matter. He just ran. He literally just made a run for it. So in November of 1518, before Velasquez could formally pull the plug, Cortez jumps on his ships and takes all his men and sailed out of the harbor at Santiago de Cuba, taking this entire expedition with him. And he didn't sail straight to Mexico. He moved along the Cuban coast port by port, basically, like, recruiting more men and more supplies and weapons and everything else he needed for the expedition. And Velasquez sent furious orders demanding that he returned. But for Cortez, he didn't care. He ignored all of them. So by the time he was ready to leave Cuba, officially, he had turned a six ship expedition into 11. So now he had 508 soldiers, 100 sailors, and most importantly, 16 horses. You see animals. The people of Mexico had never seen animals that in the months ahead would become weapons even more terrifying than, you know, guns or anything like that. So he had now sailed in open defiance of the most powerful Spanish official in the Caribbean. So to be clear, this was not an official mission of the Spanish Crown. This was, technically speaking, like a mutiny. Velasquez could have had Cortez just straight up, like, hanged for treason. Now Cortez's only way out was to win so completely that all of a sudden the crown back in Spain would be like, hey, don't do it again, but you're fine. Like, literally, he couldn't afford to fail. So on February 18, 1519, Hernan Cortez set sail from Cuba towards the mainland of Mexico. At this point, he's just 33 years old. And here's the crazy part. This is the part that a lot of people don't always cover. Cortez did not topple an empire because he was, like, a brilliant general. Like, at this point, he wasn't like, you can hear from everything we've said, like, you know, his military experience, as Britannica would put it very bluntly, was almost non existent. He didn't topple the Aztecs and the massive empire that they had because his weapons were unbeatable or because, you know, native people thought that he was God or because he had some, you know, secret strategy that no one knew. He toppled this empire because the empire was already toppling. The world that he was sailing towards was a vast, sophisticated, you know, fractured Mesoamerican civilization with cities larger than a lot of cities back in Spain. I mean, it's bigger than Madrid. This is an economy that is more complex than, like, most of Europe. A religion that, you know, for, you know, the better part of its existence demanded some type of blood sacrifice and a ruling power that millions of people quietly wanted to see destroyed. So I'm sure at this point, you're like, how does a runaway conquistador doing a mutiny against the governor and the crown of Spain with 500 men bring down literally millions of people in a land that he had never been to. Well, to answer that, we have to leave Cortez on the deck of a ship real quick and look at the world that he's about to land on. So let's fast forward over to the Yucatan. The world is urban, sophisticated, and in some ways even more advanced than, you know, the place that they left back in Spain. And at the heart of all of this sat a city called Tenochtitlan. Now, Tenochtitlan was built on an island in the middle of a vast lake, Lake Texcoco in the Central Valley of Mexico. The city was connected to the mainland by these enormous stone like highways, basically, and threaded through with canals lit at night by torches, and home to somewhere of like 200,000 people. Now, to put that in perspective, Tenochtitlan was bigger than London. It was bigger than Paris, almost bigger than any city in Europe at the time. So when the Spaniards first laid eyes on it, several of them wrote that they thought that they were dreaming. One soldier in particular, this guy Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who later wrote one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the entire conquest, described it as something out of a fairy tale. Like, he's literally talking about floating gardens, these giant white towers, pyramids, like, coming out of the water. Like, he said it looked like an enchantment. Like, truly, you have to put yourselves in the mind of these conquistadors. Like, they're coming to this place, and they can't believe what they're seeing. And the people who ruled it were called the Mashika, the dominant power in what historians later called the Aztec empire. But the Aztec empire wasn't really an empire in the way that we usually think of it. It was a tribute system. So the Masha didn't directly govern most of the peoples that they conquered. They just demanded payment. So they're like, give us food and gold and slaves and, most notoriously, human beings for sacrifice. So hundreds of these communities that were subjected to this sort of tribute system, scattered across central Mexico, were forced to send tribute to Tenochtitlan year after year, generation after gener, including powerful ones like the Tlascalans, who had managed to stay independent. Look, they hated the machika with a depth that was kind of hard to overstate. And this is the part that the popular story doesn't really talk about. The Mexica had spent the better part of a century making enemies all around them. By 1519, the empire was politically fractured, and there was a lot of ideological resentment, and they were just waiting for something to crack it open. And Cortez didn't know any of this when he stepped off of his ship onto the beach. But very quickly, he was about to find out. So By April of 1519, Cortez landed on the eastern coast of what is now modern day Mexico. And within weeks, he founded a town. And this is actually a big deal because, remember, Cortez had sailed from Cuba in defiance of the governor Velasquez back in Cuba. His expedition had been authorized to explore and trade, not to settle or anything like that. So as long as he stayed like a expedition leader, he was still legally under Velasquez's authority, which meant that Velasquez could recall him or arrest him or just have him killed at any moment. So Cortez did something very clever. He founded the town of Villa Rica de la Veracruz, literally the rich town of the True Cross. And this was eventually shortened to just Veracruz. He had his men formally constitute themselves as the town's first citizens. And the citizens then elected a town council. And the town council, in its very first official act, elected Hernan Cortez as their captain general and chief justice. You see what that just did. Cortez legally transformed himself. He's no longer Velasquez's lieutenant. He's now no longer, you know, like, connected to this guy at all. He's now an elected municipal official who answered directly to one person, and that's the king of Spain. Now, Velasquez's authority had been bypassed completely. Not through violence or anything like that, but just through paperwork. And this is why those years of doing paperwork in the Caribbean were so essential to Cortez. This is why it was important that he studied legal codes as a notary and even some of his time, probably at law school. It gave him the knowledge of how to play the system. So, you know, he committed treason against the governor of Cuba and made it completely legal, which is pretty crazy to think about. Now, around the same time, Cortez acquired the two most important translators of this entire conquest. I mean, these two people are difficult to overstate their importance. The first was a Spanish priest named Geronimo de Aguilar who had been shipwrecked on the Yucatan many years earlier. And he was living with the Maya and actually learned their language fluently. The second person was a woman. Her name was Malinchin. Now, Melinchin was born in the year 1500 into a noble Nahua family in the Gulf Coast. Her father was a chief, and her childhood, by all accounts, was fairly comfortable. And then her father died, her mother remarried, and to protect the inheritance of a new son from the new marriage, Melinchin was, depending on the source, either sold or given away. Either way, she was a child, and she was now suddenly enslaved. She was traded across the Yucatan Peninsula, master to master, eventually ending up amongst the Chontal Maya, where she learned their language and survived. Now, by the time she was a teenager, she was fluent in two of the most important languages in all of Mesoamerica. Her native language of Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica and Chantal Maya. Then, In March of 1519, after a battle in Tabasco, she was one of 20 enslaved women given to Cortez as basically like a peace offering. And at the time, she was just 19 years old. Now, obviously, the Spanish, very Catholic, are going to baptize her, and they renamed her at Marina. And then they handed her kind of like property to one of Cortez's senior captains. And this is the moment that her life pivots, because Cortez discovers, basically by accident, that she could speak this specific language of Nahuatl. Now, suddenly, she became one of the most valuable people on the entire expedition. You see, Cortez could speak Spanish to Aguilar, who then would translate into Maya for Malachin, who then would translate to Nahuatl for, you know, whatever Mesoamerican ruler they were trying to negotiate with. Now, within months, Malachin had taught herself Spanish. She no longer needed Aguilar to actually translate. So she was now Cortez's direct and exclusive interpreter, and way more than that, too. She became his strategist, his political advisor, and a cultural translator. She understood the politics of, you know, dozens of city states that Cortez had never even heard of. So the historian Camilla Townsend has put it pretty bluntly. Without Melachin, the Spanish would have never succeeded in this story. But Cortez, in his official letters to the king, never talked about her, because if he had, he would have to admit how dependent he was on her. Now, in Mexican memory today, she's one of the most contested figures in the country's history. To some, the Malanche is a traitor who handed her people over to a conquistador. To others, she's just an enslaved teenager who had been ripped from her family as a child, sold into slavery, and never really had a choice in any of this. And the truth is, maybe that she was a brilliant survivor of a system that really gave her no good options, who really, at the time, used the only leverage that she had, which is her ability to translate all these languages and navigate her way through a war. So she would later bear Cortez a son. His name was Martin, and he's often called one of the first mestizos. These are the children of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry and literally the foundation of, like, the modern Mexican identity in a lot of ways. Now, Malachin herself would pass away in 1529, in her late 20s from the very same smallpox about to devastate the empire that she helped strategize against. But for now, let's go back to Cortez. By the summer of 1519, he had his first alliances along the coast with the people called the Totonax. These are Mexica tributaries who are absolutely sick of paying tribute. And his men were getting a little nervous. Some wanted to just call it a day, go back to Cuba. And there was actually a real talk of mutiny amongst his soldiers and his sailors. And Cortez understood with the very same cold clarity that he used in Veracruz that he could not afford to give his men a way out. So he removed the exit. Altogether. In July of 1519, he ordered all the ships be destroyed. It's one of the most famous moments in this entire conquest. And the popular saying, you know, of like, burn the boats or burning his ships, it's actually slightly off. He actually scuttled them. So he stripped them of anything useful and then kind of sank them off the coast. But the message is the same, and it's very simple and brutal. There's no going back. We're either going to make it work or we're going to die. Now, in August of 1519, with no ships and no way off the mainland, Cortez started to go inland. He had about 400 soldiers, 16 horses, and, like, a handful of small cannons, and, crucially, thousands of Teutonac warriors and porters who had agreed to come with him. So he wasn't leading a purely Spanish army. He was leading a coalition of people that were against these tributes. And he was walking straight into the territory of the most dangerous people in central Mexico. The Tlaxcalans were the Mexica's oldest and fiercest enemies. So for a century, the Mexica had been trying and failing to conquer them. The Tlaxcalans had stayed independent through just like, pure military stubbornness and a deep multigenerational hatred of this capital city, Tenochtitlan. So when Cortez arrived in their territory, they assumed that he was actually working for the Mexica. So they attacked him. And the fight was brutal. The Tlaxcalans nearly destroyed the expedition. Multiple battles, day and night, assaults and ambushes. But the Spanish, with their horses and, you know, gunpowder, and, crucially, their Teutonic allies, managed to actually hold the line through several weeks of combat. And then in early September, something extraordinary happened. The Tlaxcalan leadership made a decision. They'd spent hundreds of years fighting the Mexica, and they looked at this invader from across the sea, and all of a sudden, they didn't see an invader. They saw a tool, a possible way to finally break Tenochtitlan. They stopped fighting Cortez, and they actually joined him. Now, without the Tlaxcalans, the conquest of Mexico probably doesn't happen. Cortez would have been wiped out within weeks. The Spanish version always likes to tell it like, you know, the Spaniards were out there conquering because the Spaniards are the best. But the people who actually did most of the fighting, and matter of fact, most of the dying were Mesoamerican warriors who had their very own reasons to destroy this empire, Right? Like, as they say, there's, you know, like, no alliances or only interests. And these people had the same interests. Now, fortified with thousands of Tlaxcalan soldiers, Cortez kept on marching. In October of 1519, he came to a city called Cholula. And now Cholula is one of the great cities of Mesoamerica. I mean, a religious center, a trade hub, and, you know, perhaps a hundred thousand people. And also great hot sauce. I shall add. It's one of my favorite hot sauces. A lot of these cities are named. We've hit a bunch of hot sauces so far. Did we bumped in Tabasco? We hit Chula. I mean, we got to hit, like, Hank's red probably soon. Chipotle's next, I hope. Now, this city, you got to understand, is dominated by an enormous pyramid that is dedicated to the God Ket Codel. You probably heard of him, and it was politically aligned with the Masha. Now, what happened there is one of the darkest moments on this entire campaign. The Spanish version is like this. They're resting at a city. Mein uncovered a plot. The old Cholulan woman reportedly warned her that the Masha were planning an ambush. 20,000 Aztec warriors waiting just outside the walls to slaughter all the Spaniards in their sleep. So Cortez had to defend himself. He decided to strike first, and he summoned the city's nobles to a courtyard and then, you know, blocked the exits. And his soldiers, joined by thousands of these vengeful tlash clans, poured through the gates and killed everyone they could find. And the death toll of this is disputed. Cortez himself, writing to the King, claimed that 3,000 had died. Another Spanish witness said 30,000. Modern archaeology, including the excavation of a mass burial in the central plaza, suggested that it might be somewhere between, like, 2 and 6,000. Now, the Mexica account recorded later in the Florentine codex, tells a different story. It says the Cholulans were unarmed. There was no plot. They were lured into the courtyard and then butchered without warning. The Nahua chroniclers wrote they were treacherously and deceitfully slain. Now, we can't know for certain which side is closer to the truth, but we can say this, that the archaeological evidence shows the dead included women and children, despite Spanish claims that they had been spared. Now, whether you call Cholula preemptive defense or just a calculated terror campaign. It broke something. It sent a message through all of central Mexico. The strangers will kill on a massive scale, without warning, in your most sacred spaces. Now, after this, some cities actually joined Cortez out of fear, others out of opportunity. And some sent like emissaries to Tenochtitlan, begging Moctezuma to do something, anything, to stop this. And Moctezuma, sitting in his palace on the lake, was running out of time to decide what he would do next. Now, in early November of 1519, Cortez and his combined Spanish Tlaxcalan totonak force began the final approach. They crest a giant mountain pass and they looked down into the valley of Mexico and they saw the city. Bernal Diaz wrote about that moment for the rest of his life. He said the soldiers couldn't speak. They couldn't say anything. The white stone walls of the temples, the towers rising out of the water, the giant like causeways or like these massive highways stretching across the lake like roads built by gods. Nothing they had ever seen, nothing they'd ever heard of had prepared them for this moment. On November 8, 1519, Hernan Cortez crossed the causeway into Tenochtitlan, and the Mexica emperor Moctezuma II actually came out to meet him. Hey, guys, crazy story. So the good people at Brunt Workwear sent me boots. They actually sent me two pairs, and I'm not making this up. They said, hey, wear them to an actual job site, beat them up, and if you don't like them, just send them back for a full refund. I was like, there's no way. That's true. One for a few reasons. 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Anyway, that is bruntworkware.com camp. Use the promo code link is in the description, and tell them that the good people here at the campsite sent you. Let's get back to it. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I just want to state the obvious. You're not going to hire a chiropractor to do brain surgery. And if you're going to go fight in the octagon, you wouldn't hire a guy that watches a lot of ufc. And if you have a personal injury case, you're not going to just, like, hire your buddy that's good with contracts because you know that when you're hurt, it's because someone else was negligent. You don't want just, you know, lawyer Y vibes. You want real lawyers. And that's where Morgan and Morgan comes in. They are America's largest injury law firm, with over a hundred offices nationwide and more than 1,000 lawyers. Crazy thing, they've recovered over $30 billion for over 500,000 clients. They've got a real track record of fighting to get people full and fair compensation. So if you are ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan and their fee is free unless they win. Yes, free. You literally don't pay anything unless they win your case. That's how confident Morgan Morgan is that they can get compensation for you and your injuries. So for more information, go to for the people.comgagon that is f the people.com g a g n o n or dial pound law that is £529 and let them know that you got sent by the people here at the campsite. Also, this is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show. Now, you've probably heard a story about this moment, and it goes like this. Moctezuma believed Cortez was the returning God Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent prophesied to come from the east. And he welcomed the Spaniards into a city because he thought they were these divine angels. But most modern historians don't actually believe this. The Cortez was mistaken for a God thing was, you know, one of the most persistent myths in pop history. And in the last few decades, scholars like Camila Townsend that I mentioned earlier and Matthew Ral have basically dismantled it. The evidence suggests that the Quetzalcoatl prophecy story was almost certainly invented after the conquest, partially by the Spanish, to make their victory look like it was, you know, divinely ordained. Like this was fate. It was, you know, something that was supposed to always happen, and partly by indigenous chroniclers trying to make sense of the catastrophe in some type of religious language that they were used to. Moctezuma's own people, including the Cholulans, who had just been massacred in the town before, clearly did not think that Cortez was a God because, you know, they fought with him. Now, the more likely truth is this Moctezuma let Cortez into the city because he was being a smart, shrewd politician that was running this massive city. By this point, he had been watching the Spaniards for months. He had sent, you know, like, lookouts and emissaries. He sent gifts. He tried bribery and intimidation and diplomacy, and none of it had really worked. So by November, he had a choice. He could go to just open war with a man whose army was now reinforced by tens of thousands of Mesoamericans, these united enemies who knew the terrain better than anyone. Or he could go the other route and invite the Spaniards into a city where, at the very least, he could control the situation and study them and choose his moment. So he chose to invite them in. And it would be one of the most consequential mistakes any mesoamerican ruler ever made. So for about a week, the Spanish lived inside the palace of Moctezuma's late father. And they were fed, given gifts. They were given access to the city. They walked the markets. They climbed the temples. They saw the racks of human skulls in the sacred precinct, and the priests covered in dried blood. And the great pyramid where the hearts of sacrificial victims were removed daily. And they were horrified. To the Spanish, the religious practices of the Mexica, they weren't cultured. They were proof that this civilization needed to be conquered for the sake of God himself. And one of the crazy things is, while the Spanish were touring the city, they were also being toured. You see, Moctezuma was smart. He was watching them and counting their men, counting their horses, counting their weapons. But both sides were taking measurements. And then on roughly the fifth or the sixth day, Cortez did something that no one saw coming. He took Moctezuma hostage. He marched into the emperor's palace, surrounded himself with armed Spaniards, and told him, through the translator, Malachin, that he was to come live with the Spaniards on their compound as a guest. But not really. The emperor of the most powerful state in Mesoamerica was now effectively a prisoner in his own city. And through him, Cortez started to issue orders, orders that were obeyed, at least for a little bit, because they appeared to come from Moctezuma himself. Cortez had taken an empire by the throat without a single battle for the capital. It was like an unbelievable gamble. It's one of the ballsiest things you could ever do as a military leader, and probably the fact that he didn't have any military experience is why he did it. Any, you know, shrewd, you know, general would be like, hey, this is never going to work. The Mexica could have wiped out the Spanish literally in an instant. There were a few hundred Spanish inside the city and 200,000 Aztecs surrounded by water and causeways, and a population watching its emperor become a puppet. And the fact that this held, even temporarily, is one of the craziest moments in this entire conquest. But it couldn't last forever. In April of 1520, the news reached Cortez that he had a new problem to deal with. Diego Velasquez, you remember him? There's the governor of Cuba, the man that Cortez had betrayed, basically caused, like, a mutiny against. Well, he had finally sent a force to arrest him. Panfilo de Narvaez had landed on the coast with about 1100 men, twice the Size of Cortez's original expedition. And the orders were very simple. Bring Cortez back to Cuba in chains, and we're going to kill him. So now Cortez had to leave Tenochtitlan to go deal with him. And in his place, he left a captain named Pedro de Alvarado in command of the Spanish garrison inside the city. Now, Alvarado was reckless. He was a hothead, you know, he was a man with none of Cortez's political sophistication and all of the cruelty. So now, while Cortez was gone, Alvarado massacred a temple full of innocent, unarmed people. In May of 1520, the Mexica were celebrating a religious festival called the Toxcatl in the Templo Mayor, the Great Pyramid in the heart of the city. The Spanish had given permission for it to proceed. And thousands of Mexica nobles and priests and warriors gathered in the temple courtyard in ceremonial dress. They were unarmed. They were dancing and singing and celebrating. And then Alvarado's soldiers attacked. They sealed all the exits. They cut down dancers and singers, and I mean hundreds of them, in what indigenous chroniclers later describe as indiscriminate slaughter. Historians still debate why he did it. Some accounts will say that Alvarado believed an uprising was being planned against him. Others say he was just afraid. The indigenous account says that he was being greedy and that the warriors were wearing gold. Now, whatever the reason, the city exploded. The Mexica rose up, and they besieged the Spanish compound, and they fought to retake their city. Now, when Cortes rushed back from the coast, having defeated Narvaez and absorbed most of his men into his army, he found his garrison trapped, his hostage emperor losing what little authority he had left and a population that was done with the conquistadors. Now, Cortez brought Moctezuma onto a rooftop to try to calm the crowd. The crowd, depending on which source you believe, either killed him with a stone or the Spaniards killed him when he was no longer useful. The Mexica and the Spanish accounts have obviously disagreed on this for, like, 500 years now. What everyone agrees on is this. By the end of June, Moctezuma was dead and the Spanish had to get out. So on the night of June 30, 1520, they tried to flee Tenochtitlan under the COVID of darkness, carrying as much gold and treasure as they could load onto their horses. The Mexica caught them on these causeways. That's the only way in and out. You have to cross a lake and there's just a highway. So what followed has been called the in Spanish memory. Le noche triste, the night of sorrows. About 400 Spaniards drowned or were killed or captured, and about 4,000 of their indigenous allies were also killed. Many of the Spaniards drowned in the lake, ironically dragged down by the gold that they had been unwilling to leave behind. Now, Cortez, kind of, according to legend, escaped just barely and sat down under a tree on the mainland the next morning and wept. The empire had won. For a single fleeting moment in the summer of 1520, the Mexica had done what no one else in Mesoamerica had managed so far. They had actually defeated the invaders. They had driven them out of their city, and the trap had finally snapped shut. And at that point, it was over. But for Cortez, this was far from the end. Now here, the story stops being about Cortez, really, because the thing that finally broke Tenochtitlan wasn't Cortez. It was a microbe. While the Spanish were retreating and regrouping and kind of trying to, you know, put their armies and, you know, their people together in Tlaxcalan territory, smallpox was already there. It had crossed the ocean on one of the ships, and it spread into the network of trade and tribute that actually fed Tenochtitlan. And then, you know, it actually hit the city itself. The Mexica had no immunity, and no one in the Americas did. And within months, smallpox killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population of Tenochtitlan. It killed Kuala Hua, Moctezuma's brother, who had been chosen as the new emperor after the Noche Trista. It killed nobles and generals and priests, all the people who would have actually organized any type of resistance. The defenders of the most powerful city in Mesoamerica were being killed by something that they couldn't see, they couldn't name, and certainly couldn't fight. A new emperor was raised up, a young, fierce, deeply committed warrior named Cuauhtemoc. He was about 23 years old, and he had military experience, and he did not believe that the strangers were gods. And he was determined, almost like divinely so, to fight them to the end. But the city that he had just inherited was already half empty. When Tenochtitlan was dying from disease, Cortez was building even stronger. The Spanish had grown up in a Europe where smallpox was endemic. Most of them had already survived it as children and carried this lifelong immunity. So when the, you know, in the Tlaxclan territory, he ordered the construction of 13 small ships, the brigantines. And they could be carried inland in pieces and then assembled at the edge of Lake Texcoco. He gathered men, he absorbed the defeated soldiers, and he won over even more indigenous allies. And then by Spring of 1521, now he had a real army. And so when he marched back on Tenochtitlan, he commanded somewhere between 800 Spaniards and tens of thousands of indigenous warriors. And the siege began May 22nd of 1521, and it lasted 93 days. And it is one of the most brutal urban battles in the history of the world up until that point. Cortez used the brigantines to control the lake and, you know, cut off canoes and intercepted food and attacked multiple sides at once. He destroyed the aqueducts that would actually bring water into the city, and he cut off the causeways. The city was built to be, you know, just impenetrable. And now it was suddenly cut off from food and water and reinforcements and, most significantly, any type of escape. And then he fought his way in the Mexica, fought back with everything they had. I mean, Cuauhtemoc directly, you know, ordered his defenses from the temples. Women joined the warriors on the rooftops. They dragged Spanish prisoners up to the altars and sacrificed them in plain sight of Cortez and his army, A deliberate, defiant act, telling the invaders, we are the same exact people that we once were, and we will not break. But at this point, they were starving and they were sick. And according to historian David Bowles, the final days were just a city where blood was smeared on the walls, where worms were moving through the corpses of the dead, and where the survivors were so weak from dysentery and starvation that they could barely even lift up their weapons. But yet they still fought. And then on August 13, 1521, Guatemak got into a canoe with his wife and his closest advisors and tried to slip across the lake to call for reinforcements from the countryside. And a Spanish brigantine intercepted them. He surrendered with just one condition. That his people be allowed to leave the island to go find food and that his wife be unharmed. He was brought before Cortez, and he even reportedly offered Cortez his own knife. And he asked to be killed. But Cortez refused. The siege was over. The Aztec empire, as we knew it was over. And what followed was horrendous, to say the least, even by the standards of 16th century warfare. The Tlaxcalan swept through the city, killing, looting, and burning everything in sight. Modern historians believe that the true death toll of the siege itself, the Mexica civilians and defenders and the soldiers, the indigenous allies, is somewhere in the hundred of thousands. The city had looked like, you know, just a dream, like 20 months earlier. It was now completely destroyed. The pyramids were broken. The canals were just full of bodies. The great temple of Huitzilopochtli, the heart of the Mexica religious world, was about to be torn down and replaced with a Catholic church. The lake itself, the lake that had actually made Tenochtitlan possible, would be slowly drained over the coming centuries. And today, the city the Spanish built on top of it, Mexico City, sits on what used to be water. Guatemalac himself was tortured. The Spanish burned the soles of his feet with oil, trying to find out where the rest of the gold was hidden. And they never found most of it. He never broke. He remained the puppet ruler that was left of Tenochtitlan for four more years, until Cortes, on an expedition to Honduras him on charges of treason that even some of his own soldiers thought were just invented. His last reported words were directed at Cortez. He said, I knew what it was to trust your false promises. At the time of his death, he was just 26 years old. And by this time, Cortez was no longer just an invader fighting for survival or glory. He. He's standing on the wreckage of a civilization that he helped destroy, and he has to figure out now what to do with it. I mean, the conquest was over, but the reckoning of what he had done hadn't even began. For a few weeks after the surrender, Cortez sat inside the wreckage of one of the most beautiful cities on earth, the most beautiful city Cortez had ever seen, and tried to figure out what to do with it. He sat down and he wrote five letters. They are known today as the Cartas de relation, the letters of relation addressed to Charles V, King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor. They are some of the most carefully constructed pieces of self justification in the history of European colonialism. Cortez wrote them with all the skill that he had learned as a notary in Hispaniola. You know, very precise and loyal lawyerly and, you know, tons of Latin legalisms, full of claims of loyalty to the crown, full of, you know, strategic emphasis on the gold and the territory that he brought into the Spanish Empire and a lot of very deliberate omissions. He almost never named Malachin. He minimized the role of the Tlaxcalans. He framed every massacre as a defensive necessity, and he framed every act of conquest as a holy mission sent from God. He was quite literally writing the first draft of his own history. And it actually worked. In 1522, Charles V officially confirmed him as governor and Captain General of New Spain. While the letters traveled across the Atlantic, Cortez got to work on the ground. He made a decision that would basically shape the next five centuries of North American history. He rebuilt the city on top of the rubble of Tenochtitlan. He drained sections of Lake Texcoco. He laid out streets along the old Mexica grid. He ordered the construction of a cathedral directly on top of the ruins of Templo Mayor, the great pyramid that was dedicated, the holiest site in the Mexica religious world. To this day, you can stand in the Zocalo, the main square of Mexico City, and look at a Spanish Catholic cathedral built from the literal stones of the temple that it replaced. And he named the new capital Mexico City. The system he built was based on ecomenda, the same model that he had grown up with in Cuba, but now is applied to, I mean, the whole continent. Spanish settlers were granted control over entire indigenous communities who were forced to provide labor and tribute in exchange for protection and Christianization, which would shape the social hierarchy of Latin America for, like, the next 300 years. Now, for a while in the early 1520s, Hernan Cortez was the most powerful European in the Americas. But then it all started to fall apart, because, you see, the Spanish crown had a problem. Hernan Cortez had done exactly what they wanted. They, you know, he handed them an empire. He had filled their treasury with gold. He brought them more territory than they even knew what to do with. And he had also done it by openly mutinying against a Spanish governor governing his own private army for two years without any type of royal authorization, and demonstrating, frustrating that a charismatic man with the right army and the right charm could carve out his own kingdom 5,000 miles away from anyone who could stop him. In Britannica's careful phrasing, Cortez had become, quote, fully conscious of the vulnerability of a successful conqueror whose field of operation was 5,000 miles from the center of political power and the Council of the Indies. The body that was actually, like in Madrid, that managed all of Spain's, you know, colonial projects, was just as conscious of this exact reality. They had read his letters. They knew, as it was put, that Cortez was popular enough amongst the indigenous people and powerful enough amongst the conquistadors that he could just establish Mexico as an independent kingdom if he Wanted to. And that was their biggest fear. So the crown started to try to clip Cortez's wings. In 1524, Cortez left Mexico City to lead an expedition into Honduras to put down a rebellion by one of his own captains. And while he was away, his enemies in Mexico City started to move against him. They started to seize his property, and they spread rumors that, oh, Cortez, he died. Yeah, off an expedition. He's gone. They started actually dismantling his whole administration. And when he returned to 1526, he found that the entire colonial government that he built was now against him. He sailed back to Spain in 1528 to plead his case directly. And there, finally, the Crown showed its hand. They granted him this big, noble title, the Marque de Valla de Oaxaca. The. Literally, like the Marques of the Valley of Oaxaca. And granted him this big estate and this big income. And then in 1535, gave an actual. Gave all the real political power, the title, you know, of the. What they call the Viceroy of New Spain. Basically, the guy who's actually going to run this new colony to someone completely different. A loyal Spanish nobleman named Antonio de Mendoza. So Mendoza got the throne, and Cortez just got, like, the title with some income in an estate. So for the rest of his life, Cortez would be wealthy, he would be honored. I mean, he had the title, but he would never again be the absolute ruler of this territory that he risked his life to conquer. He was a national hero, but just on paper now. The remaining years of his life are some of the strangest parts of this entire story. He sails back to Mexico and tries to regain his old authority. He fails. He launched expeditions to find new lands, hoping to discover, like, another empire that he could just do the same thing with and, you know, rebuild his reputation. He sailed up the Pacific coast and discovered a peninsula that he thought was an island. And he named it Santa Cruz. We call it Baja California today. He returned to Spain in 1541, at 56 years old, and he joined Charles V on a military campaign against the city of Algiers in North Africa. That campaign was a complete disaster. Cortez, the conqueror of empires, washed from the deck of a ship as Spanish forces were scattered by storms and Algerian defenders. He reportedly volunteered to lead the assault himself. And the king's officers just ignored him. He spent his final years in Spain fighting a bunch of lawsuits. I mean, property and inheritance and old accusations. He wrote petition after petition to the king asking for recognition, asking for, you know, this audience with the crown that never Came. According to one historian, in his final months, he was wealthy but embittered. On December 2, 1547, Hernan Cortez died at a manor in Castilleja de la Cuesta, near Sevilla. And the cause is variously given as dysentery or some other type of illness. His final wish was that his body be returned to Mexico, to the country that he had destroyed and rebuilt and asked to be buried there. And it actually took decades to honor that request. His remains were moved several times over the centuries, and today they actually lie in a chapel in the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno in Mexico City, an old hospital that Cortez himself founded that still operates to this very day. The chapel is not generally, you know, open to tourists. There's no statue of him in the public square of Mexico City. There's no monument. The man who built the capital of Spanish America is buried in it, but kind of just invisibly. And that, in a way, is sort of perfect, because the truth is, Mexico has spent 500 years trying to figure out exactly how to remember Cortez. The Spanish empire that he helped create would last for 300 years. New Spain would extend from what is now the southern United States all the way down through Central America and even parts of the Caribbean. The colonial system that Cortez put in place, the encomienda, the forced labor, the racial caste hierarchy, and, you know, just the straight up extraction of gold and silver from the New World to fuel the European economy, would shape the entire trajectory of the Western hemisphere. But that's just the political side of Cortez's legacy. Cortez didn't just bring new economy and soldiers to Mexico. He brought, without knowing it, the deadliest biological event probably in human history, the disease that they call the great dying. In the century after the conquest, smallpox and measles and typhus and influenza and a half dozen other Old World pathogens swept through the Americas. The Mexican population, which historians estimate was roughly like 20 million people in 1519, collapsed to barely more than a million within a century. I mean, think about that number. The death toll has been estimated to somewhere between like 80 and 95% of the entire pre contact indigenous population. It is, I mean, in raw human terms, very likely the deadliest event ever in the history of our species as human beings. And Cortez didn't plan it. He didn't understand what he had unleashed. He was a man of his time. And, you know, the germ theory of disease would not exist for like another 300 years. But here's where things get kind of confusing, because despite all of that horror, something else new came into being. A new people, a new language, a new country. Modern Mexico is what historians will sometimes call a mestizo nation, a people of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African history. The literal foundation of Mexican identity is the marriage between the conquerors and the conquered. In certain ways. I mean, Martin Cortez, the son of hernan cortez and malachin, is often called the symbolic father of that identity, the first mestizo. He was born into a country that did not yet exist, to a mother who had been enslaved to a father who had conquered her very people and a future as a colonial nobleman whose existence was, I mean, just literally a paradox in and of itself. And that paradox is still real today. I mean, Just recently, in 2019, the President of Mexico, Andres Manuel lopez obradar, wrote a public letter to the king of Spain, Philippe vi, and to pope Francis. And the letter asked, after all this time, for an official apology for the abuses of the Spanish conquest. There are still open wounds, he said. It's better to recognize that abuses were committed and mistakes were made now. Spain refused. The Spanish government issued a statement vigorously rejecting the demand, saying, the events of 500 years ago could, you know, not be judged by modern standards. Spanish conservative leaders called the demand an insult. Mexican legislators in the capitol responded by proposing the removal of statues of cortez and columbus from public spaces. Streets named for the conquistors were renamed. But then, in November of that same year, a descendant of moctezuma himself met a descendant of Cortez in a Mexico city chapel, and they embraced. Both of them cried, and the descendant of Cortez said, roughly translating to, I want to ask your forgiveness for all the bad things that happened. The descendant of Moctezuma replied again in not a perfect translation, in the end, we are all family now. And then, In August of 2021, exactly 500 years to the day after cuatmoc surrendered in the canoe, Lopez obradar, the former president of Mexico, stood in front of a replica of the templo mayor built in the central square of mexico city. And he spoke not to Spain, but to the indigenous people of his own country. And he asked them formally, on behalf of the Mexican state for forgiveness. He said, today, remember the fall of the great tenochtitlan, and we apologize to the victims of the catastrophe. And, I mean, that is kind of the world that Cortez made, a world where the descendants of the conquered run the country that he built, a world where the descendants of the conqueror live in a Mexico that no longer carries his name on the streets, where two countries can't agree on what happened or even how to feel about it. He conquered, he invaded, he founded, he destroyed, he rebuilt, and all of it is true. And I think it's difficult for history to just pick one. I mean, I think all of us want history to be simple. We want there to be the good guys and the bad guys. You have the. You know, the conquerors that are evil and mean, and then you have the conquered that are helpless victims that couldn't do anything. A clean line between us and them. And for 500 years, that's kind of how the story was told by Cortez in his letters, by chroniclers who came after him, by textbooks and statues and streets, by the men who won. But the truth is not simple. And it, you know, doesn't have to be.
- [59:23]
B
You know, it.
- [59:24]
A
The. The truth rises up, even, you know, the ground itself, because Mexico City is actually sinking as much as 15 inches a year in some areas. Remember, the city that the Spanish built is on top of a lake, a Lake that 500 years later, is still pulling the cathedral down into the soft mud where Tenochtitlan was actually floating. And that says to me that, like, you can't bury the civilization. No one can. Because, you know, what came out of that collision? It wasn't just tragedy. It was a people, a language that literally carries the language of Nahotl inside its Spanish. I mean, words like chocolate, tomato, coyote, avocado. These are words that the world now speaks, not even knowing where they came from. I mean, food and faith and music. A country that exists nowhere else on earth because nowhere else on earth did two worlds slam together in this way and somehow learn to coexist with each other. Mexico is the beautiful child of two worlds. One of the conquerors and one of the conquered, Born of one of the most brutal things to ever happen in history, one of the most, you know, savage massacres and brutal deaths that humanity ever experienced, and also produced one of the most beautiful things. A country, a people, a history. And it's not simple, but, you know, the people that live inside it and live with it, those are the ones who ultimately decide what it becomes. And that, my friends, is a brief history on the life of Hernan Cortez. I mean, what a fascinating story. I mean, it has everything, and there's, like, backstabbing and, you know, political maneuvering and greed and death and beauty and birth. Like, it's got everything in it. It's an interesting thing because I don't like, it's not something I ever like, ask my Mexican friends. Like, I view my Mexican friends just like you are a people of a country, like in the way that I view like Canadians or like, you know, like Spanish or French. Like, I don't think of them as like, oh, there's a history of oppression and I have like, you know, fair skinned Spanish looking Mexican friends and then super indigenous, you know, dark skinned Mexican friends. And I don't see them differently. I'm just like, yeah, you guys are all Mexican. But I wonder if they see themselves in a light where they're like, oh, we were oppressed or we were conquered and it's not fair. Or if like what that relationship is, you know, I mean, you're Ecuadorian. Like what do you think?
- [61:45]
B
Yeah, I mean I never, I mean I always grew up thinking I was Ecuadorian. Then I would meet, I mean I'd go to Ecuador every year and there's like five, four, really dark haired, no body hair Ecuadorians. And I'm like, yeah, we're the same.
- [61:56]
A
Right?
- [61:57]
B
And, and then like I, my dad's 100 Spanish and my mom is like 5 9. I'm like, you're not.
- [62:04]
A
Because your dad's Spanish. Your mom is also Spanish, but she's,
- [62:07]
B
she was born in Ecuador.
- [62:08]
A
Born in Ecuador to a.
- [62:09]
B
And her parents were born in Ecuador.
- [62:11]
A
And they eat guinea pig.
- [62:13]
B
Yeah, they guinea pig.
- [62:14]
A
They're Ecuadorian.
- [62:15]
B
Culturally, Culturally, Yeah. My, my great grandmother on my mom's side is Swiss and then the grandfather's Spanish and they moved to Ecuador.
- [62:23]
A
But culturally I feel like they move there.
- [62:26]
B
They moved to Ecuador to start a brewery.
- [62:27]
A
I thought you guys were from, from there. I thought there was like part indigenous.
- [62:30]
B
Oh my great. No, I mean I have like 4% indigenous in me.
- [62:34]
A
But now you must have indigenous Ecuadorian family.
- [62:37]
B
I don't, I mean everyone's like, comes from Spain. Really. Like you look at them and genetically they're Spanish.
- [62:42]
A
Interesting.
- [62:43]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:43]
A
I mean, but like our pal Jaime, Jaime's Mexican. He's indigenous, he's indigenous. Yeah, yeah, but I've, he doesn't ever bring this up.
- [62:50]
B
He might be Neanderthal.
- [62:52]
A
It goes further. Is there anything, I mean, you read the book Conquistor. Was there anything that was omitted from our abridged? I mean certainly there was things that were omitted, but anything that stuck out to you that were omitted from our synopsis?
- [63:03]
B
I mean there's very small details. I think my favorite part of the book that you didn't cover was that you didn't go over was like, obviously, Mexicans had never seen horses before, right. And they thought they were just these alien creatures. And Cortez wanted to keep that mystique. So if horses died in battle, he would bury them in secret. In secret. So they didn't see them actually buried.
- [63:26]
A
Oh, wow.
- [63:27]
B
He want them.
- [63:28]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [63:28]
A
He didn't want them to think, like, oh, we can kill these things. He wanted to be like, yo, this is like a car. Yeah, yeah. Like, you can't take it out.
- [63:34]
B
Or like, a spaceship, Like. And then. What's funny? And then, like, this, obviously, how history works. Right After I read this book, I picked up Empire of the Summer Moon. And that book is about the Comanches. And they were. This is 200 years after. And these were, like, aces on the horse. Like, they would ride them like surfboards in secret. And I'm like, these boys right here.
- [63:53]
A
Yeah.
- [63:53]
B
Yeah. And I'm like, wow. Like, if Cortez never goes to Mexico, he doesn't bring horses to this continent. Comanches aren't causing all this.
- [64:00]
A
Our entire idea of, like, the American Indian.
- [64:02]
B
Yeah.
- [64:03]
A
Is completely different because Cortez brings horses over.
- [64:07]
C
Yeah.
- [64:07]
B
Yeah. Wow. And then, like, the. There are stories about, like, the soldier. I mean, these guys were, like, hiking into, like, the mountains of Mexico. They're like. They're getting altitude sickness. And, like, it was really, like, they. No one wanted to be there.
- [64:18]
A
Right.
- [64:19]
B
Like, they hated it every second of it. And then, obviously, when they go into the city, you described it, like, how beautiful it was. And that's what always. I wish we had, like, some, like, visual.
- [64:27]
A
Oh.
- [64:28]
B
Of what it must have looked like.
- [64:29]
A
Could you grab a photo of, like, ancient Tenochtitlan? I'd be so curious to know. Like, I'm sure they've done renditions of it, but, like, that moment.
- [64:37]
B
Yeah.
- [64:37]
A
I mean, I like. Pizarro has, like, similar sort of chronicles of, like, going down the Amazon into, like, Peru and, like, seeing, like, these massive cities of gold that, like, he writes back. But, like, I think a lot of, like, the City of Gold lore comes from, like, Pizarros El Dorado. Yeah, exactly. Like, but it's just a crazy thing to think. Like, on the one hand, what they did was obviously brutal and wrong.
- [64:56]
C
Right.
- [64:56]
A
Like, the colonial projects are always, you know, extremely fraught with moral hazard. But, I mean, the experience of going there must have been insane.
- [65:04]
C
Yeah.
- [65:05]
A
You know, like, you just. You and, like, a bunch of dudes that are miserable. I mean, imagine seeing that, like, Like, I couldn't even fathom. And it's on a lake. Like, this picture doesn't even do it justice because it's surrounded by water. It's literally a haven on, like, a moat on. Literally on an island on a lake. Yeah. And, I mean, that's a topographical view. And it's just crazy to think, damn, it's.
- [65:29]
B
It's insane. And then I, like, obviously, you had also touched on this, but, like, him making the decision to, like, hey, this isn't about trade anymore. This is about diplomacy. The second he's like, oh, we can talk to these people we found. I mean, like, finding the priest who can speak one language and then getting a prisoner who can speak that language and then another language and you can all translate it and, like, oh, we're gonna stay here. I'm gonna build this colony. We're going to Montezuma. We're gonna do diplomacy. I love that. And, like, him taking the boats in the secret of the night and, like, kind of trespassing the orders.
- [65:59]
A
Like.
- [66:00]
B
Like, I watched this video on him after I read the book, and, like, back then, obviously, like, now it's less of the case, but, like, everything was about, like, legacy back then and having your name be remembered, and he, like, he yearned for that so much, he's like, didn't have a crazy.
- [66:11]
A
Getting a call from Jaime.
- [66:12]
B
Oh, let's do it.
- [66:13]
A
Okay. Jaime, que pasa?
- [66:17]
C
You're. You're a camp.
- [66:18]
A
I'm doing the pod right now, but I need to ask you. You're live on the air.
- [66:23]
B
Okay.
- [66:23]
A
It's me, Christos, and David Sanchez. We just did the episode on Hernan Cortez, and I'm curious. Could you tell me, are you. Yeah, yeah. David's uncle, technically. So I'm curious, like, ethnically or genetically? You're indigenous.
- [66:42]
C
Correct.
- [66:43]
A
Do you know what kind?
- [66:47]
C
Indian from, like, part of Mitch, and then India. Reallo, from South Texas.
- [66:54]
A
I see now.
- [66:55]
C
And then everyone. Yeah, go ahead.
- [66:57]
A
Now, like, Cortez is a conquistador that goes into. Sorry, I'm getting interference on the mic. I want to make sure it doesn't mess it up. He's a conquistor that goes into Tenochtitlan and massacres the whole city and then sort of inadvertently infects them all with smallpox and the. I'm so curious. What do you think, like, the relationship with, like, obviously, Mexicans are on a monolith, and I'm not asking to speak for all Mexicans, but, like, could you share the perspective of what many Mexicans think about the legacy of Cortez.
- [67:28]
C
Well, you have to remember that he. He went for the Aztecs, and a lot of. He. He. He allied with a lot of Indian tribes. He didn't like them either.
- [67:39]
A
Exactly. So there's a lot of people that were aligned against them. They were aligned with or aligned with him against the Aztecs. Right.
- [67:48]
B
Yeah.
- [67:49]
C
And a lot of these tribes, they weren't even from the. From the local area. Right. They were from northern Mexico. They were from, like, anywhere in Mexico, and they dispersed back to their. Wherever they were from. And they might not hold the same amount of resentment, you know, generations after towards him.
- [68:10]
A
Right.
- [68:11]
C
As the people that stayed in the
- [68:13]
A
area, but some of them do.
- [68:19]
B
Yeah.
- [68:19]
C
Even the current president does.
- [68:21]
A
Yeah, I know. I saw the president wrote a letter to Pope Francis being like, yo, say sorry, dude.
- [68:25]
B
Wait, no, that's the. The new one. Yeah, the new one. I don't. You're saying the new.
- [68:30]
A
The Jewish one. Sorry, the Jewish.
- [68:32]
C
Yeah, the Jewish lady.
- [68:34]
A
She's not happy about Cortez.
- [68:36]
C
Yeah, the non Catholic Jewish lady.
- [68:39]
A
All right, well, I feel like you're showing your political hand here, but. Okay, well, that gives me a little bit of scope. Ah, dude, I should have worn my Mexico jersey for this one. Dang.
- [68:48]
C
Yeah. Can we redo that episode?
- [68:49]
A
Okay. All right. No, I'm not gonna read it. Okay. I'll hit you back later.
- [68:53]
C
Okay.
- [68:53]
A
Please.
- [68:54]
B
Yeah. Jaime brings up another good point, and I'm sure you mentioned this, but, like, the tribes, like, on the coasts and like, all the tribes that Cortez surround, like, like, encountered on his way to the capital. Hated him. Yeah. And it was a lot to do with taxes.
- [69:07]
A
Yeah. Like, the tributes. Like, hey, you're making us, like, sacrifice our kids to your God. Like, you're making us give gold and money and slaves. Like. Yeah, we don't want this either.
- [69:16]
B
Yeah.
- [69:17]
A
Taxation without representation.
- [69:18]
B
Yeah.
- [69:19]
A
Kind of the start of every revolution, right? Yeah. Squeezing us too hard.
- [69:22]
B
Yeah. And then I had a conversation with Matt Matthew Broussard, very funny comic, loves history. And he was like, man, like, they.
- [69:30]
A
They.
- [69:31]
B
They kind of backstabbed Montezuma and they slaughtered all these people. And then I'm like, yeah, but they were also, like, killing kids. You know, they were, like, sacrificing children. I. I don't really feel remorse for, like, the tribes back then.
- [69:40]
A
Yeah. Which let the record show, some of the accounts of that I think potentially are over exaggerated.
- [69:45]
B
Really.
- [69:45]
A
Like, I think there. There certainly was human sacrifice that. I don't think that's Disputed by anyone. But, like, there's been some accounts where it's like hundreds of thousands of people in a day were sacrificed. And I think it was from, like, Jesuit, like, priests that were going down there, like, describing the horror. And it's difficult to know if it was literal or not, but. No, that's a good point. It's like, yeah, dude, what happened to them was wrong. Like, getting massacred is terrible, but, you know, it's also sort of unfortunately, the. The tone of history itself.
- [70:12]
B
Yeah, but also, like, it. He brought Catholicism to the Western hemisphere.
- [70:15]
A
Let's go. Let's go. Catholic, dude. Catholics. Never did anything wrong.
- [70:18]
B
Never did anything wrong.
- [70:20]
A
Nice. Well, I'm curious what you guys think. I mean, if you're a historian, if you've studied this, if you've read books on Cortez or, you know, the Conquistors, broadly speaking, I would love to know your thoughts. If there's anything that I missed, if you yourself are just like a. I don't know, like a Mexican citizen, and you're experienced or worldly in this specific feature of Mexican history, I would love to know what your thoughts are. I'm open to any and all truth. It doesn't have to be, you know, holistic. Just could be your experience and your perspective. So please drop a comment on YouTube, Spotify. And before we go, I just want to say thank you so much. If you are interested in religious content. Well, great news. We have an entire channel called Religion Camp. We actually did a whole episode on Aztec child sacrifice, if you want to check it out there. If you are a fan of, you know, just deep dives, crazy rabbit holes, conspiracies, and all sorts of mysteries of the unknown, well, Camp Gaggon is the place. And if you like talking about everything that's ever happened, well, great news. History Camp is here for you every single week. Thank you all so much. David Sanchito. Thank you, Christos. Thank you. And I will see you all in the future to talk about the past, peace,