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When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History

Amazon.com Price:  $31.95 (as of 02/05/2019 02:50 PST- Details)

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Description

A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the Americas

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, on 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 military genius. Montezuma, then again, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions around the hemisphere.

But is this truly what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortés uses “the Meeting”—as Restall dubs their first encounter—as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare number one sources and overpassed accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and screw ups, and the worlds wherein they lived—leading, step-by-step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in brand new civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself. 

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