There, he won over the local Indians and was given a female slave, Malinche—baptized Marina—who became his mistress and later bore him a son. She knew both Maya and Aztec and served as an interpreter.
His mistress, Marina, was a great help in this endeavor and succeeded in convincing Montezuma to cooperate fully. This victory marked the fall of the Aztec empire. The Spanish conquistador led an expedition to Honduras in and in returned to Spain to see the king.
In , he returned to Mexico, now known as New Spain, and found the country in disarray. After restoring some order, he retired to his estate south of Mexico City and sent out maritime expeditions from the Pacific coast.
In , he returned to Spain and was neglected by the court. He died in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! During his campaign for the White House in , Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is born in the Oriente province of eastern Cuba. The son of a Spanish immigrant who had made a fortune building rail systems to transport sugar cane, Fidel attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba. His forces then marched on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan modern Mexico City , where Moctezuma welcomed him.
The Spaniards were driven out of Tenochtitlan and nearly wiped out, but they ultimately returned and laid siege to the city. Particularly strategic were communities which had been subject to the Aztecs, who had heavily taxed the people and practiced human sacrifice.
What happened next is unclear. He returned with thousands of Indian allies, who opposed the Aztecs. After a four month siege, during which time Aztec defenders succumbed as much to disease and starvation as to the force of arms, the new Aztec king Cuautemoc surrendered. By , most of central Mexico was integrated under Spanish control in the kingdom of New Spain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , — The strange end of the Aztec nation remains one of the most fascinating events in the annals of human societies.
Why did a strong people defending its own territory succumb so quickly to a handful of Spaniards fighting in dangerous and completely unfamiliar circumstances? The answers to these questions lie in the fact that at the time of the Spanish arrival, the Aztec and Inca Empires faced grave internal difficulties brought on by their religious ideologies; by the Spaniards' boldness, timing, and technology; and by Aztec and Inca psychology and attitudes toward war.
The Spaniards arrived in late summer, when the Aztecs were preoccupied with harvesting their crops and not thinking of war. From the Spaniards' perspective, their timing was ideal. A series of natural phenomena, signs, and portents seemed to augur disaster for the Aztecs. A comet was seen in daytime, a column of fire had appeared every midnight for a year, and two temples were suddenly destroyed, one by lightning unaccompanied by thunder.
These and other apparently inexplicable events seemed to presage the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and had an unnerving effect on the Aztecs. They looked on the Europeans riding "wild beasts" as extraterrestrial forces coming to establish a new social order. Defeatism swept the nation and paralyzed its will. The Aztec state religion, the sacred cult of Huitzilopochtli, necessitated constant warfare against neighboring peoples to secure captives for religious sacrifice and laborers for agricultural and infrastructure work.
Lacking an effective method of governing subject peoples, the Aztecs controlled thirty-eight provinces in central Mexico through terror. When the Spaniards appeared, the Totonacs greeted them as liberators, and other subject peoples joined them against the Aztecs. Montezuma faced terrible external and internal difficulties. Historians have often condemned the Aztec ruler for vacillation and weakness.
But he relied on the advice of his state council, itself divided, and on the dubious loyalty of tributary communities. The conquistadors arrived in Mesoamerica with steel swords, muskets, cannons, pikes, crossbows, dogs and horses. None of these assets had yet been used in battle in the Americas. The Aztec fought the Spanish with wooden broadswords, clubs and spears tipped with obsidian blades.
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas they came from a war-oriented culture that had seen battle against other European nations for dominance and against North Africans for sovereignty. The conquistadors arrived in Mesoamerica with better guns and had been trained in tactical strategies.
They deployed a cavalry that could chase down retreating warriors, dogs trained to track down and encircle enemies and horses capable of trampling adversaries. Up against large armies of Spanish and Indigenous forces, surrounded and cut off from the mainland, and with a population succumbing to an unknown, devastating virus, the Aztec Empire was unable to fight off the invading Spanish conquistadors.
Weiner, Stanford University Press , , p. Oldstone, Oxford University Press , , p. War in History, vol. Accessed May 18, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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