Event
Cortés enters Tenochtitlan
Cortés and his party enter the Mexica capital on 8 November 1519.
- Dates
- 8 Nov 1519
- Place
- Tenochtitlan
According to Hernán Cortés
- interventions Moctezuma II Nov 1519
- involved Moctezuma II
According to Florentine Codex
- appears in Florentine Codex
- appears in Florentine Codex
According to Matthew Restall
- appears in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Cortés and his party enter the Mexica capital on 8 November 1519.
Connections 8
interventions
-
Moctezuma II
Nov 1519
gave the speech that Cortés reports
According to Hernán Cortés
Primary record
1
This speech is Cortés's report to his king. Restall argues that the Cortés-as-god story grew later; see the story.
- Hernán Cortés 8 Nov 1519 led the Spanish party Primary record 1
involved
- Hernán Cortés Primary record 1
-
Moctezuma II
According to Hernán Cortés
Primary record
1
Cortés reports that Moctezuma made this speech. It is his report to his king.
appears in
- Letters of relation of Hernán Cortés Primary record 1
-
Florentine Codex
According to Florentine Codex
Primary record
2
The Nahua account of the first gifts of gold given to the Spaniards on the road to the city.
-
Florentine Codex
According to Florentine Codex
Primary record
2
Book 12 itself says Moctezuma thought the Spaniards gods and that this was Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl come to land. The book was put down decades after, under a Franciscan friar. Restall argues that Franciscan writers appear to have invented the Cortés-Quetzalcoatl link after the conquest.
-
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
argues the god story was invented after the conquest, and that Moctezuma's welcome was a courtesy, not to be read literally
According to Matthew Restall
Scholarship & press
3
Restall's words as printed in a classroom lesson sheet, with its brackets; the book itself was not read, and no scholar who disputes him was read.
Timeline 3 dates
- Nov 1519 Moctezuma II intervened in Cortés enters Tenochtitlan According to Hernán Cortés
- 8 Nov 1519 Cortés enters Tenochtitlan
- 8 Nov 1519 Hernán Cortés intervened in Cortés enters Tenochtitlan
Proof 3 sources
-
Letters of Cortés: the five letters of relation to the Emperor Charles V, volume 1 (English translation by Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1908; the Second Letter is dated 30 October 1520), G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London (scan on the Internet Archive), 1908.
Primary record
from what you tell us of your great lord, or king, who has sent you here, we believe, and hold for certain, that he is our rightful sovereign
I spent from the eighth of November, 1519, to the beginning of May this present year.
-
Florentine Codex, Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico (Nahuatl text gathered under Bernardino de Sahagún in the 1500s; English translation by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, second edition, 1975), School of American Research and the University of Utah; the manuscript is on the Getty Research Institute's Digital Florentine Codex, 1975.
Primary record
As if they were monkeys they seized upon the gold.
For in truth they thirsted mightily for gold; they stuffed themselves with it; they starved for it
Thus he thought — thus was it thought — that this was Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl who had come to land.
And Moctezuma had acted thus because he thought them gods, he took them to be gods, he worshipped them as gods.
-
Moctezuma and Cortés: primary source analysis activity (Stanford History Education Group lesson, hosted by the University of Connecticut), reproducing excerpts of Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003), Stanford History Education Group, via the University of Connecticut, 2021.
Scholarship & press
For this reason, Franciscans such as Motolinía appear to have invented the Cortés-Quetzalcoatl identification after Conquest.
Thus Moctezuma’s assertion that he and his predecessors were just safeguarding the rulership of the Mexica empire in anticipation of Cortés’s arrival is not to be taken literally.
Page history 1 change
- Add 55 stories, each checked against its sources96e92fe6
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