Alliance and ambush
Hernan Cortes left Cuba in February 1519 with roughly five hundred men and, after landing on the Gulf coast and acquiring an interpreter, Malinche, who proved essential to his diplomacy, marched inland gathering indigenous allies, most significantly tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors who had their own long-standing grievances against Aztec dominance. He entered the capital Tenochtitlan peacefully in November 1519 and was received by the emperor Moctezuma II, though the two sides’ uneasy coexistence collapsed the following year after a subordinate Spanish officer massacred Aztec nobility during a religious festival, triggering an uprising that forced a chaotic Spanish retreat on the night of 30 June 1520, with heavy losses on both sides. A smallpox epidemic then swept through the Aztec population that autumn, killing enormous numbers even as Cortes regrouped his forces. Spanish and allied troops besieged Tenochtitlan from May 1521, and the city fell on 13 August 1521 with the capture of the final emperor, Cuauhtemoc.
A record filtered through colonial supervision
Spanish accounts dominate the surviving record, including Cortes’s own letters to the Spanish crown, written to justify a campaign he had launched without proper authorisation, and a much later memoir by the soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo composed decades afterward from memory. Indigenous testimony does survive, most notably in the twelfth book of a Franciscan friar’s compiled history, presented in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish columns with accompanying illustrations, along with a Tlaxcalan pictorial history commissioned specifically to document that community’s contribution to the Spanish cause in hopes of colonial reward. Historians caution, however, that almost no genuinely unmediated pre-conquest Nahuatl text survives, since most indigenous accounts were recorded only after 1521 under the supervision of Spanish friars or by indigenous students trained within Christian schools, meaning even the most valuable non-Spanish sources passed through a colonial filter before reaching the form in which they survive today.
Alliance and disease over weaponry
Cortes succeeded chiefly by exploiting divisions that already existed within Mesoamerica rather than through Spanish military technology alone, since the several hundred Spaniards under his command were vastly outnumbered even by their own indigenous allies, tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans and other groups resentful of Aztec tribute demands and willing to see the empire that dominated them weakened by any means available. The Wikipedia account itself notes that cannons, firearms and steel weapons gave the Spanish real but not overwhelming advantages against Aztec forces, meaning alliance-building mattered at least as much as equipment in explaining the campaign’s outcome. The catastrophic smallpox epidemic that struck the city in 1520, introduced without any deliberate strategy on the Spanish side, killed a substantial share of the population in the very period when organised resistance most needed strong leadership and manpower, weakening Aztec capacity to respond just as Cortes was regrouping after his own near-disastrous retreat from the city months earlier.
A legend traced to its source
Historians disagree on several points central to how the conquest is usually told. Whether Cortes actually held Moctezuma prisoner soon after entering the city, as tradition holds, has been questioned by scholars working from close analysis of Spanish personal writings, some arguing captivity began considerably later than commonly assumed. The popular idea that Moctezuma and other Aztec leaders believed Cortes to be the returning god Quetzalcoatl, supposedly paralysing resistance, is treated with real scepticism by ethnohistorians, who note Cortes never made this claim himself in his letters and that the idea appears to originate only in European writings from the 1540s, well after the conquest. Reported omens said to have predicted the empire’s fall are similarly doubted as likely retrospective inventions helping the Mexica explain a defeat after the fact rather than genuine warnings recorded beforehand. Even Moctezuma’s death itself, whether by Spanish or Aztec hands, remains unresolved between competing accounts.
Disease as the real mass killer
Disease dwarfed combat as a cause of death, with the smallpox epidemic alone estimated to have killed several million people, part of a wider death toll from conquest and disease running into the millions against the roughly two hundred thousand Aztec dead more directly attributable to fighting itself. The fall of Tenochtitlan brought the Aztec and neighbouring Purepecha empires under Spanish control, and colonial administrators built Mexico City directly atop the ruins of the conquered capital, establishing it as the seat of the new Kingdom of New Spain. Franciscan missionaries arrived within a few years to begin a sustained campaign of religious conversion, while a new colonial hierarchy placed Spanish conquerors and their descendants above indigenous populations for centuries afterward. Indigenous allies who had fought alongside the Spanish, particularly the Tlaxcalans, documented their own contributions extensively in hopes of favourable treatment, while other groups whose support went less documented found their own historical role correspondingly overlooked in the colonial record.
A myth that dissolves under scrutiny
The conquest of the Aztec Empire is worth studying as a case where the standard dramatic narrative, a doomed emperor paralysed by supernatural dread facing a technologically superior invader, dissolves considerably once the specific claims behind it are checked against their actual origins, several of which turn out to trace no further back than European writers working decades after the events they describe. The genuine drivers of Spanish success, indigenous alliance-building exploiting real preexisting grievances against Aztec rule and a catastrophic epidemic that struck at the worst possible moment for organised resistance, offer a less mythic but more historically defensible account than the Quetzalcoatl legend does. Readers interested in disease’s role in conquest, in how colonial-era documentation shaped whose contributions to major historical events survived in the record, or in the mechanics of exploiting indigenous political division will find this a genuinely rich subject, provided they approach the more cinematic details with appropriate scepticism.