Mexico

He wrote the letters that justified his own unauthorised conquest to the king, and several of the flattering claims in them have not survived independent scrutiny.

Decades of successful imperial expansion are remembered chiefly through the disputed, contradictory accounts of how he died at his empire's collapse.

1325

The idea that Moctezuma took Cortes for a returning god only appears in European writing decades after the conquest, undercutting the legend that supernatural dread paralysed Aztec resistance.

-2000

The most successful sustained indigenous resistance to European colonisation anywhere in the Americas is barely known, and its organiser survives mostly through the words of people who feared him.