Hernán Cortés

Hernán Cortés was the Spanish conquistador whose invasion of Mexico in 1519 inaugurated the book’s account of Spanish expansion in the Americas and whose methods supplied a template for later colonial ventures. His decisive role was not simply military: by targeting Indigenous political leadership and taking over the institutions through which tribute and labor were organized, Spanish conquerors could turn conquest into a durable system of extraction.

Invasion and a Strategy of Conquest

Cortés’s expedition was part of a rapid expansion that followed Christopher Columbus’s sighting of an island in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Spain’s colonization of the Americas gathered force with the invasion of Mexico in 1519, followed roughly a decade and a half later by Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to Peru and, two years after that, Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition to the Río de la Plata. Over the next century Spain conquered and colonized much of central, western, and southern South America, while Portugal claimed Brazil to the east. Within this larger sequence, Cortés’s campaign is presented as a formative precedent.

The method associated with Cortés was to capture an Indigenous leader, claim the accumulated wealth attached to that position, and compel the population to provide tribute and food. The Spanish then established themselves as the new elite and took control of existing arrangements for taxation, tribute, and, especially, forced labor. Conquest thus worked through political authority as well as armed force: the seizure of a ruler could open access to resources and institutions on a far wider scale than the conquerors could have managed alone.

Tenochtitlan and the Seizure of Authority

Cortés and his men arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, on November 8, 1519. Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor, chose to welcome them peacefully despite advice from his counselors. The account compiled after 1545 by the Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagún describes what followed: the Spaniards seized Moctezuma, and the sound of their firearms spread fear among the people. The emperor’s capture made the central political figure himself a means by which the newcomers could exert power.

The demands that followed show how authority was converted into supplies. The Spanish required white tortillas, roasted turkey hens, eggs, fresh water, wood, firewood, and charcoal; Moctezuma had commanded that these provisions be supplied. They also took precious objects, melting gold into bars and removing valuables from the ruler’s storehouse at Totocalco. The account names necklaces, feathered arm bands, bracelets, gold bands set with shells, and Moctezuma’s turquoise diadem among the objects taken. The episode joins political subjugation to material appropriation: access to the ruler’s stores and the resources commanded in his name became part of the same process.

From Conquest to Colonial Rule

The military conquest of the Aztecs was completed by 1521. Cortés, as governor of the province of New Spain, then divided what the book calls the most valuable resource—the Indigenous population—through the encomienda. Under this institution, a Spaniard known as an encomendero received a grant of Indigenous people, who were required to provide tribute and labor services. In return, the encomendero was charged with converting them to Christianity.

The encomienda had existed in fifteenth-century Spain during the reconquest of the south from the Moors, but in the New World it took a more pernicious form. Its structure joined a religious obligation to compulsory service and tribute, placing those demands under the authority of the Spanish recipient. Cortés’s governorship therefore marks a transition in the narrative from defeating a political power to reorganizing society under colonial rule. The system relied on the existing population and its productive capacity, while redirecting both toward Spanish control.

A Model Repeated in Virginia

The book explicitly connects Cortés’s template to later English colonization. When settlers sponsored by the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607, their first plan was to capture the local chief and use him to obtain provisions and compel the population to produce food and wealth. The English, like the Spanish before them, initially expected others to supply what the colonists needed rather than planning to grow their own food. The proposed strategy resembled the one associated with Cortés, Pizarro, and Francisco de Toledo.

The contrast between the two settings is also significant. The English arrived within territory claimed by the Powhatan Confederacy, whose ruler, Wahunsunacock, learned of their presence and regarded their intentions with suspicion. The book’s comparison does not make the political circumstances identical; it shows how a recognizable colonial ambition—to secure provisions and labor by controlling Indigenous authority—could travel from one imperial project to another. Cortés’s importance in this account lies partly in that afterlife: the conquest of Mexico became an example later colonists sought to reproduce.

Historical Significance

Cortés’s role is used to explain why differences between colonizing societies cannot be reduced to differences in knowledge or intentions. In contrasting the later paths of the United States and Mexico, the book argues that their divergence did not arise because one set of leaders knew better than another. The choices available to presidents and elites were shaped by institutional constraints. Cortés’s conquest belongs to the earlier history of those arrangements: the Spanish seizure of political leadership and appropriation of tribute and labor helped establish a colonial order organized to enrich a new elite at the expense of the wider population.

The account therefore presents Cortés both as an individual conqueror and as the origin point of a repeatable political method. Capture the leader, command the resources gathered around that office, and take over the machinery through which people were taxed and made to work: the pattern connects the arrival at Tenochtitlan to the encomienda and, in the book’s comparison, to the ambitions of English settlers in Virginia. It is this institutional legacy, rather than military success alone, that gives his campaign its wider significance.