When Cortés departed on another expedition, he temporarily left Tenochtitlan in the hands of his deputy, Pedro de Alvarado, who had "none of Cortés's political skills, and all the prickly honour of a chivalrous knight," Cervantes writes. The Aztec city's fate was already sealed. Tens of thousands of canoes dotted Lake Texcoco, "some, like great barges, carrying up to sixty people," writes Fernando Cervantes in Conquistadores, his masterful new history of the era.Ĭortés was greeted by the Aztec emperor Moctezuma who "appeared on a litter, borne by noblemen, with a baldachin of green feathers, fitted with jade and beautifully adorned with gold and silver embroidery." But Moctezuma himself was said to be filled with "sickening dread" over the Spaniards' arrival, and his fears would prove prescient.
Stucco towers, "painted with colorful animals and sculpted on stone" were "a marvel to behold," drawing comparisons to Venice, one observer wrote. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his band of 300 men reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in late 1519, they found a civilization of staggering beauty that dwarfed any western European city. Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest, by Fernando Cervantes
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