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    When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History
    Unavailable
    When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History
    Unavailable
    When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History
    Ebook783 pages13 hours

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

    By Matthew Restall

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    About this ebook

    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, at 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, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere.

    But is this really 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 primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which 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 modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 30, 2018
    ISBN9780062427281
    Author

    Matthew Restall

    Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and the youngest of his four daughters.

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    Reviews for When Montezuma Met Cortés

    4/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I think this is an important one. I recommend reading it before reading "Fifth Sun" by Camilla Townsend. Where "Fifth Sun" is detailed about the the Nahua and Indigenous historical perspective, Restall takes a broad and comprehensive perspective. I wish I had read this book before Townsend's, I feel it would have helped me understand the environment and circumstances more clearly.
      Restall has cracked my heart open, but this time it's a healing. A healing of history and memory. His research is extensive and well documented leaving a fourth of the book to notes, references and bibliography. Restall expertly draws not only on first person historical, and legal documents, but he also evaluates the historical record through its art, performance, and culture, giving us a grounded perspective in ideas, and the social psyche.
      I am Mexican, born and raised on stolen and raped land and I have always been mystified and angry about the "conquest". Restall has given me an understanding my whole self and my ancestors can rest with.
      Restall reviews the evidence and repositions conquest as war, the Spanish-Aztec war. As well, he reveals the genocidal and racist motives that undergirded that war and devastated one of the most civil and advanced societies in the Americas.
      This book is literally a work of decolonial action.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      An interesting book, about what really occurred when Montezuma met Cortés, and the genecide which occurred after. I listened to the audiobook version which was well read.
    • 1/5
      Horrible, lets just start with the cover photo. Moctezuma wasnt white and indigenous Americans didnt look like that either. Tell history correctly!

      1 person found this helpful