Spanish Conquistador, Vanguard of the Colonial Conquest That Overthrew the Aztec Empire
Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) was a Spanish conquistador who in 1519 landed on the coast of Mexico with an expedition of only a few hundred men, and, by allying with tribes who were the Aztec Empire’s old enemies, exploiting the smallpox epidemic brought from Europe to devastate the local population on a great scale, and the technological advantages of his own force’s horses and firearms, at last took the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1521, wholly destroying this most powerful native empire of Mesoamerica and laying the foundation for Spain’s colonial rule in the Americas that would last nearly three hundred years. This conquest objectively opened a process of centuries of colonial oppression and cultural destruction of the native American civilizations, bringing grievous calamity upon the local native peoples — a heavy cost that cannot be avoided in judging this history of the "Age of Discovery."
After landing on the coast of Mexico, Cortés by tradition ordered his own ships scuttled or burned, cutting off any possibility of his men shrinking from battle and returning to Cuba, forcing the whole expedition to burn its boats and press on inland — this extreme display of resolve was thereafter widely cited as a historical example of the decision-making strategy of "leaving oneself no retreat and going all in."
Cortés exploited the deep resentment of the oppressed vassal tribes within the Aztec Empire (such as the Tlaxcalans) toward Aztec rule, allying with them to attack together, while the smallpox virus the Europeans unwittingly carried spread on a great scale among a native population lacking immunity, causing terrible loss of life; in 1521 Cortés’s allied force at last took the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the last emperor Cuauhtémoc was captured, and this once-prosperous city in the lake was thereafter razed to ruins, on which present-day Mexico City was built.
The Spanish conquistador accounts and the native-perspective sources such as the Florentine Codex ordered from Aztec survivors’ oral testimony differ markedly in their narrative of the conquest, and modern scholarship increasingly values combining both sources for a fuller understanding of this history of conquest.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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