Yet weaponry alone clearly would not enable Cortés’s tiny force to overcome a large, densely populated society of about twenty-one million. Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses offered Cortés and his men some advantage over the forces they met and help to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. Aztec forces soon drove the conquistadors from the capital, but Cortés built a small fleet of ships, placed Tenochtitlan under siege, and in 1521 starved the city into surrender. They seized the emperor Motecuzoma II, who died in 1520 during a skirmish between Spanish forces and residents of Tenochtitlan. In 1519 Cortés led about 450 men to Mexico and made his way from Veracruz on the Gulf Coast to the island city of Tenochtitlan, the stunningly beautiful Aztec capital situated in Lake Texcoco. The conquest of Mexico began with an expedition to search for gold on the American mainland. These conquests laid the foundations for colonial regimes that would transform the Americas. Between 15 Hernán Cortés and a small band of men brought down the Aztec empire in Mexico, and between 15 Francisco Pizarro and his followers toppled the Inca empire in Peru. During the early sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors (“conquerors“) pressed beyond the Caribbean islands, moving west into Mexico and south into Panama and Peru. Spanish interest soon shifted from the Caribbean to the American mainland, where settlers hoped to find more resources to exploit. Note: All of the passages below are quoted verbatim.īentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, vol. Do you still agree with what you thought after reading the primary sources? How do the primary sources included here on-line help you to decide which interpretation you think is best? Make a note of which interpretation you think is best before starting the project. Note where they disagree with each other. Make a list of what these authors agree upon.

To begin to develop a sense of how complicated the history of the conquest of Mexico is, look at some of what some popular textbooks have to say.

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