When Montezuma Met Cortes, Matthew Restall
When Montezuma Met Cortes, Matthew Restall
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When Montezuma Met Cortes
The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History

Author: Matthew Restall

Narrator: Steven Crossley

Unabridged: 16 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/30/2018


Synopsis

A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the AmericasOn 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.

About 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Avery on March 17, 2018

This book's mission is actually a very cool one: it exposes the story of "Montezuma welcoming Cortez as the reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl" as a long, storied fabrication that actually began with the confusion of the conquistadors themselves. Evidence is presented that Cortez was neither a hero nor a......more

Goodreads review by Jake on March 02, 2018

It's meticulously researched and Restall brings up some interesting ways in which to think about history, I'll give him that. But if I had known the book was going to amount to a 350 page literature review with no real narrative to speak of (for example, the book starts with The Meeting, then shifts......more

Goodreads review by Randal on May 10, 2018

Likely a polarizing title. OK, back up. All stories of conquest are polarizing; victor writes the history, etc., until recent pushback has gotten more vanquished tales in print. Columbus / Cortés are taking their kickings these days. But this one is likely to create a rift between scholars of Mesoam......more

Goodreads review by Danny on May 15, 2021

Allow me to give to you the deafening bias that so stains every conclusion of this author that, after only a few pages, makes it difficult to see anything else: Cortes = Bad Honestly, this “dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Cortes” is a clear illustration of what is wrong wit......more

Goodreads review by James on August 09, 2018

Next year will be the 500th anniversary of Cortes's entrance into Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec peoples of Mesoamerica. Such a long span of time helps explain the story's blurring. Much of what we think we know of the Aztecs and the Spanish conquest of Mexico is wrong. Restall calls his his......more