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Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Matthew Restall's 2003 book on popular beliefs about the conquest.

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Matthew Restall’s 2003 book on popular beliefs about the conquest.

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Cortés enters Tenochtitlan 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 1
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.

Proof 1 source

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.
Source: Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, written by Matthew Restall in 2003.

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