Hernán Cortés (1485 - 1547) was a Spanish conquistador who led the expedition that overthrew the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521 and brought much of what is now Mexico under the rule of the Crown of Castile. [1] His campaign, fought with a small Spanish force, large numbers of Indigenous allies and the assistance of epidemic disease, destroyed the city of Tenochtitlan and inaugurated the colony of New Spain. [2] The conquest caused an enormous loss of Indigenous life and is among the most consequential events in the history of the Americas. [3]
Early life
Hernán Cortés was born in 1485 at Medellín, in the Spanish region of Extremadura, to a family of minor gentry. [1] He left his law studies at Salamanca and sailed for the Caribbean in 1504, settling on Hispaniola. He took part in the Spanish conquest of Cuba under Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1511 and was rewarded with land, Indigenous labourers and a position in the colonial administration, becoming a magistrate of Santiago de Cuba. [2]
The expedition to Mexico
In 1518 Velázquez appointed Cortés to command an expedition to the mainland, then revoked the commission; Cortés sailed regardless in February 1519 with roughly six hundred men, in defiance of his governor. [1] He then had his ships disabled to prevent any return.
Central to the campaign was an enslaved Nahua woman known as La Malinche, who served as interpreter and adviser, and the recruitment of Indigenous peoples resentful of Aztec tribute demands, above all the Tlaxcalans, who supplied the great majority of the fighting force. [3]
The fall of Tenochtitlan
Cortés reached the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in November 1519 and was received by the ruler Moctezuma II, whom the Spaniards soon held as a hostage within his own city. [2] On the road to Tenochtitlan his troops carried out a massacre of unarmed nobles at Cholula, and during his absence in 1520 his deputy Pedro de Alvarado ordered the killing of celebrants at the Templo Mayor, provoking a general uprising that drove the Spaniards from the city with heavy losses on the night remembered as the Noche Triste.
Cortés regrouped in Tlaxcala, built brigantines to control the lake, and laid siege to Tenochtitlan in 1521. A smallpox epidemic introduced by the Europeans had meanwhile killed a large part of the city's population, including the ruler Cuitláhuac. [3] After a siege of some three months the city fell on 13 August 1521 and was largely destroyed; the last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured and later executed. Mexico City was built over the ruins.
Governor and later expeditions
Charles V confirmed Cortés as governor and captain-general of New Spain in 1522, and he oversaw the early colonial settlement, the imposition of the encomienda system of forced Indigenous labour, and the first missionary campaigns. [1]
Summoned to Spain in 1528, he was created Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca and admitted to the Order of Santiago, but returned to Mexico without the governorship. [2]
Death and legacy
Cortés returned to Spain in 1540 and spent his final years pressing claims at court with little success. [1] He died at Castilleja de la Cuesta, near Seville, on 2 December 1547.
The conquest he led destroyed an established civilisation, imposed colonial rule across Mesoamerica and set in motion a demographic collapse in which the Indigenous population of central Mexico fell by an estimated ninety per cent within a century, chiefly through introduced disease compounded by war and forced labour. [3] Cortés remains a deeply contested figure, commemorated in Spain as a conqueror and widely regarded in Mexico as the agent of that catastrophe. [2]
