Ep 13: Aztec-Spanish War (Part 1)

We’re back in the Americas! The Aztec-Spanish War was so much more than the narratives centered around Hernán Cortés versus Moctezuma II. We look at the history of Mesoamerica, historical sources and the events leading up to the war.

Maps uploaded by u/jabberwockxeno on Reddit

Further readings:

The 1513 Requirement in Spanish and in English

The Aztec Empire, an ongoing graphic novel series

Hernán Cortés‘ letters to Charles I

Florentine Codex (Project Gutenberg)

Pages from the Mendoza Codex

The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Bernal Díaz del Castillo)

Sources:

Berdan, Frances, and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, eds. The Essential Codex Mendoza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Carballo, David M. Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Cortés, Hernán. Letters of Cortés : Five Letters of Relation to the Emperor Charles V. Translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt. New York: Putnam, 1908. https://archive.org/details/lettersofcorts01cortuoft/.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, Janet Burke, and Ted Humphrey. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Pub. Co, 2012.

Gabbert, Wolfgang. ‘The Longue Durée of Colonial Violence in Latin America’. Historical Social Research 37, no. 3 (2012): 254–75.

Hassig, Ross. Mexico and the Spanish Conquest. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.

Krippner-Martínez, James. Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico, 1521-1565. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

León Portilla, Miguel, ed. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Expanded and Updated ed. Boston, Mass: Beacon, 2007.

Nichols, Deborah L., and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs. Oxford Handbooks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003.

———. When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History. First edition. New York, NY: ECCO, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018.

Russell, Philip L. The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: Book 12 – Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico. Translated by Arthur James Outram Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City, Utah: Univ. of Utah Press, 1975.

Smith, Michael E. “The Aztecs Paid Taxes, Not Tribute.” Mexicon 36, no. 1 (2014): 19-22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43857654.

———. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. The Peoples of America. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

———. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.