Hernán Cortés

Hernán Cortés was a Spanish conquistador who led the expedition that destroyed the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521. With a few hundred Spaniards, tens of thousands of Indigenous allies who had their own reasons to fight the Aztecs, and the help of a smallpox epidemic, he besieged and captured Tenochtitlan, one of the largest cities in the world. The conquest was carried out with massacres, enslavement and torture, and it opened three centuries of Spanish colonial rule over Mexico.

Cortés was born around 1485 in Medellín, in Extremadura in the Kingdom of Castile, the son of Martín Cortés, a minor nobleman of small means. He spent about two years in Salamanca, probably studying Latin and some law, before leaving for the Americas. In 1504 he sailed to Hispaniola, where Christopher Columbus had founded Spain's first colony, and received land and Taíno labourers.

In 1511 he joined Diego Velázquez in the conquest of Cuba, a campaign marked by the killing and forced labour of the Taíno population. He became a magistrate in Santiago de Cuba, acquired gold mines and an estate worked by Indigenous labour, and married Catalina Suárez, a relation of Velázquez by marriage.

Two earlier Spanish voyages had found the coast of Mexico and heard of a rich inland empire. In 1518 Velázquez chose Cortés to lead a third expedition, then tried to cancel the commission when he came to distrust him. Cortés sailed anyway in February 1519, with about eleven ships, some 500 soldiers and sailors, enslaved African and Indigenous servants, thirteen to sixteen horses and a few cannon. On the island of Cozumel he picked up Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard shipwrecked years before who had learned Maya. After defeating the Maya of Potonchán in battle, he received twenty enslaved women as tribute. Among them was a Nahuatl-speaking noblewoman later known as Malintzin, Doña Marina or La Malinche, whose skill as an interpreter and adviser became indispensable to him; she later bore his son Martín.

On the Gulf coast Cortés founded the town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz and had its new council make him captain answerable only to the king, a device to escape Velázquez's authority. He then had most of his ships run aground and stripped so that his men could not turn back. The Totonacs of Cempoala, a people recently brought under Aztec tribute, became his first allies.

Marching inland, the Spaniards fought a series of battles with the Tlaxcalans, a powerful Nahua state that had resisted the Aztec Empire for decades. Tlaxcala's leaders then chose alliance, and its warriors became the backbone of the Spanish campaign. In October 1519, at the sacred city of Cholula, Cortés and his allies killed thousands of people, many of them unarmed nobles and townspeople gathered in a temple courtyard, and burned part of the city. Cortés later justified this as a pre-emptive strike against a planned ambush; many historians see it as deliberate terror to intimidate the Aztec capital.

On 8 November 1519 the Spaniards entered Tenochtitlan, built on islands in Lake Texcoco, and were received by the ruler Moctezuma II. Within days Cortés took Moctezuma prisoner in his own palace and tried to rule through him. In 1520 he left the city to defeat a force under Pánfilo de Narváez sent by Velázquez to arrest him, absorbing most of its men. In his absence his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado attacked the nobles celebrating the festival of Toxcatl in the temple precinct and slaughtered hundreds of them. The city rose in revolt. Moctezuma was killed at the end of June; Spanish accounts say he was struck by stones thrown by his own people, while some Indigenous accounts say the Spaniards killed him. On the night of 30 June 1520, the Noche Triste, the Spaniards and their allies fled along a causeway and lost hundreds of Spaniards and many more Tlaxcalans, along with much of the gold they had taken.

The survivors recovered in Tlaxcala. Meanwhile smallpox, probably brought by a member of Narváez's force, spread through central Mexico in late 1520, killing a very large part of the population, including Moctezuma's successor Cuitláhuac. It was one of the first great epidemics of the Columbian exchange, and Indigenous accounts describe people dying in their houses, unable to move, with no one left to bury them. Cortés rebuilt his alliances, had brigantines built to control the lake, and in May 1521 laid siege to the city, now led by the young ruler Cuauhtémoc. The siege lasted about three months. The defenders fought street by street while famine and disease spread; Cortés had the city demolished as he advanced, and Tlaxcalan and other allied armies, numbering in the tens of thousands, carried out much of the fighting and killing. On 13 August 1521 Cuauhtémoc was captured and the city fell. The fall of Tenochtitlan cost the lives of perhaps a hundred thousand or more defenders and inhabitants; survivors were robbed, raped and enslaved, and Cuauhtémoc was tortured by having his feet burned to make him reveal where gold was hidden.

Charles V appointed Cortés governor and captain general of New Spain in 1522. On the ruins of Tenochtitlan he built Mexico City, and he distributed Indigenous towns to his followers as encomiendas, grants of labour and tribute that bound the population to Spanish masters. He asked the crown to send friars, and twelve Franciscans arrived in 1524 to begin mass conversion. His wife Catalina died suddenly in his house in 1522, and he was later accused, though never convicted, of killing her.

In 1524 he led a disastrous expedition to Honduras to punish a rebellious captain, taking Cuauhtémoc with him; on the march, in 1525, he had Cuauhtémoc and other Indigenous lords hanged on a charge of conspiracy. Royal officials took advantage of his absence, and the crown, wary of his power, never let him govern again. Travelling to Spain in 1528, he was received by the emperor, made Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca with vast estates and tens of thousands of Indigenous vassals, and married a noblewoman, Juana de Zúñiga. He later explored Baja California; the Gulf of California is still sometimes called the Sea of Cortés.

Cortés returned to Spain for good in 1540 and joined the emperor's failed attack on Algiers in 1541. He died at Castilleja de la Cuesta near Seville on 2 December 1547, and his remains were eventually taken to Mexico City.

Cortés told his own story in long letters to Charles V, which presented him as a loyal servant bringing a new empire to the crown. The soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the conquered peoples left their own accounts. Book XII of the Florentine Codex, compiled in Nahuatl by Indigenous scholars working with the friar Bernardino de Sahagún, describes the massacre at Toxcatl, the epidemic and the siege from the side of the people of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala shows the war as a Tlaxcalan victory in which the Spaniards were partners. These sources, collected by the historian Miguel León-Portilla as the vision of the vanquished, have shaped modern understanding that the conquest was also an Indigenous civil war, and that its long-term catastrophe was demographic: the population of central Mexico fell by most estimates by more than three-quarters during the sixteenth century through epidemics, war, forced labour and displacement.

In Spain Cortés was long celebrated. In Mexico, where national identity came to be built on the Aztec past, he is a reviled figure, with almost no public monuments, and Diego Rivera painted him in the National Palace as a cruel and diseased conqueror.