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

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés 1st met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the administrative centre city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction-the prelude towards the Spanish seizure of Mexico Town and to European colonization of the mainland from the Americas-has always been the symbol of Cortés’s vivid and excellent about When Montezuma Met Cortes: THE REAL Story of the Get together that Changed Background armed forces genius. Montezuma, alternatively, is remembered being a coward who offered away a huge empire and handled off a wave of colonial invasions over the hemisphere.

But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortés uses “the Interacting with”-as Restall dubs their initial encounter-as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Sketching on rare main sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their accomplishments and failures, and the worlds in which they lived-leading, detail by detail, to a dramatic inversion of the older story. As Restall requires us through this sweeping, revisionist accounts of the pivotal moment in contemporary civilization, he phone calls into query our watch of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of background itself.