In 1521, Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés completed the invasion of Mexico’s most powerful empire. His glorified tale starts out with just a few hundred Spaniards landing near Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, and includes everything from the supposed betrayal of a Nahua women against her own people to the Spanish overcoming a vastly larger Aztec army in one of the biggest cities of the world at the time.
The problem is, five centuries after the Aztec capital toppled, researchers are reexamining the narrative of Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan that comes mostly to us through the eyewitness accounts of Cortés’ soldiers, an account by historian Francisco López de Gómara based on interviews with Cortés, and the latter’s own letters.
“All of this is really just Spanish men aggrandizing their own story,” says David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who studies the Aztecs.
A combination of Indigenous accounts preserved in various codices and reading between the lines of the Spanish accounts is revealing a more nuanced story in which the Spanish heavily depended on Indigenous allies like the Tlaxcalans and the Texcocans who were also searching for an opportunity to put an end to Aztec hegemony in the region.
