When Montezuma Met Cortés

A re-evaluation of the meeting between the Spanish adventurer and the Aztec ruler that challenges history's perspective about the conquest of the Americas. On November eight, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant