Hernan Cortes

Hernan Cortes was born in 1485 in Medellin, a small town in Extremadura, one of the poorest regions of Castile and later the birthplace of a striking number of conquistadors. His parents, Martin Cortes de Monroy and Catalina Pizarro Altamirano, belonged to the minor gentry: hidalgos with a respectable name but little money ^[1]. Through his mother he was distantly related to Francisco Pizarro, who would later conquer the Inca Empire in Peru ^[2].

At about fourteen he was sent to Salamanca, the seat of Castile's most famous university, where he spent roughly two years studying Latin and law before returning home without a degree ^[1]. The legal training was brief but real, and it shaped his later career. His letters and formal acts in Mexico show a man who understood notarial procedure, contracts, and the language of royal justice, skills that proved as useful to him as any sword.

Restless in Medellin, Cortes weighed two paths open to ambitious young hidalgos: the Italian wars or the Indies. He chose the Atlantic. In 1504, aged about nineteen, he sailed for Hispaniola, the island (today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) that served as the hub of Spain's fledgling Caribbean empire ^[2].

On Hispaniola, Cortes received land and Indigenous laborers under the encomienda system and worked for a time as a notary in the town of Azua ^[1]. The life of a modest colonial settler did not satisfy him. In 1511 he joined Diego Velazquez de Cuellar's expedition to conquer Cuba, where he served as clerk to the treasurer and was rewarded with more land and a public office in the new capital, Santiago ^[2].

His relationship with Velazquez, now governor of Cuba, swung between favor and suspicion. The two quarreled, reconciled, and quarreled again; the tension deepened after Cortes married Catalina Suarez, a match Velazquez had pressed on him ^[1]. Even so, when reports arrived from the expeditions of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba in 1517 and Juan de Grijalva in 1518 describing a wealthy mainland to the west, Velazquez chose Cortes to lead a third voyage ^[3].

Velazquez soon regretted the appointment and moved to revoke it. Cortes, hearing of the reversal, hurried his preparations and sailed from Cuba in February 1519 before he could be stopped, an act of open insubordination that made the entire venture legally precarious ^[3]. He commanded about eleven ships carrying roughly 500 soldiers, around 100 sailors, and 16 horses, animals unknown on the American mainland ^[2].

The expedition coasted Yucatan and won an early battle at Potonchan in Tabasco, where local rulers handed over twenty enslaved women. Among them was Malintzin, called Dona Marina by the Spaniards and later La Malinche, whose command of Nahuatl and Maya made her the expedition's indispensable interpreter and a key political adviser ^[4]. Farther north, Cortes founded the town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz and had its new council appoint him captain general answering directly to the Crown, a legal maneuver designed to cut Velazquez out of the enterprise ^[3]. To end talk of retreat, he ordered his ships stripped and scuttled.

Marching inland, the Spaniards fought and then allied with the fiercely independent city state of Tlaxcala, a longtime enemy of the Aztecs. Tlaxcalan warriors, joined later by other discontented subject peoples, supplied the bulk of the fighting force for the rest of the campaign; the conquest of Mexico was in large measure a war of Indigenous coalitions with Spanish leadership and weaponry ^[4]. At Cholula, Cortes ordered a massacre of assembled nobles, an episode he justified as preempting an ambush and which remains among the most debated acts of the conquest ^[4].

On November 8, 1519, the emperor Moctezuma II received Cortes in Tenochtitlan, the island capital whose causeways, canals, and markets astonished the invaders. Within days Cortes seized Moctezuma and ruled through him as a hostage ^[2]. In 1520 he marched back to the coast to defeat Panfilo de Narvaez, sent by Velazquez to arrest him, and absorbed Narvaez's men into his own force. He returned to find the capital in revolt after a massacre of celebrants ordered by his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado. Moctezuma died in the chaos, and on the night of June 30, 1520, remembered as the Noche Triste, the Spaniards fought their way out of the city with heavy losses ^[3].

Cortes rebuilt his coalition in Tlaxcala while smallpox, carried by the Europeans, devastated Tenochtitlan and killed the new emperor Cuitlahuac. After constructing a fleet of brigantines to control Lake Texcoco, he besieged the city for about three months. Tenochtitlan fell on August 13, 1521, with the capture of the last emperor, Cuauhtemoc; much of the city lay in ruins and its population had been decimated by famine, disease, and assault ^[4].

Victory transformed the rebel captain into a ruler. In 1522 Charles V confirmed Cortes as governor and captain general of the territory the Spaniards named New Spain, retroactively legitimizing his defiance of Velazquez ^[1]. He directed the rebuilding of Mexico City on the razed foundations of Tenochtitlan, distributed encomiendas to his veterans, promoted the introduction of European crops and livestock, and sponsored the arrival of Franciscan missionaries in 1524 ^[2].

His five long dispatches to the emperor, the Cartas de relacion written between 1519 and 1526, gave Europe its first detailed account of the Aztec world and argued his own case with a lawyer's care. They circulated widely in print and remain primary sources for historians, read now with full awareness of their self-serving purpose ^[5].

His authority soon frayed. A punishing overland expedition to Honduras from 1524 to 1526, during which he ordered the execution of the captive Cuauhtemoc on a charge of conspiracy, left New Spain in the hands of quarrelsome deputies and gave his enemies at court their opening ^[3]. Royal officials launched a formal inquiry into his conduct, and the Crown, wary of any conquistador growing too powerful, gradually stripped away his governing powers.

Cortes married twice. His first wife, Catalina Suarez, whom he had wed in Cuba, joined him in Mexico and died suddenly at his residence in Coyoacan in 1522; rumors that he had killed her surfaced in later legal proceedings and were never proved ^[1]. In 1529 he married Juana de Zuniga, a noblewoman from a powerful Castilian family, with whom he had several children including his heir, Martin Cortes, second Marques del Valle ^[2].

He also fathered children outside marriage, and acknowledged them. The best known was another Martin Cortes, his son with Malintzin, among the first recorded mestizo children of the conquest era and later a knight of the Order of Santiago ^[4]. A papal ruling legitimized several of his natural children.

In 1529 Charles V granted him the hereditary title Marques del Valle de Oaxaca, along with vast estates and tens of thousands of Indigenous tributaries, making him one of the wealthiest men in the Spanish world even as real political power passed to royal judges and, after 1535, to a viceroy ^[1].

Denied the governorship he believed he had earned, Cortes turned to exploration of the Pacific. During the 1530s he financed voyages up the western coast of New Spain and in 1535 personally led an attempt to plant a colony on the peninsula now called Baja California; the settlement failed, but the Gulf of California was long known as the Sea of Cortes ^[2]. The ventures consumed money and produced constant friction with the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza over rights to northern discovery.

He returned to Spain in 1540 to press his claims at court, where he found polite audiences and little satisfaction. In 1541 he joined the emperor's naval expedition against Algiers, which ended in disaster when storms wrecked much of the fleet ^[3]. His final years passed in litigation and frustrated petitions.

Preparing at last to sail back to Mexico, Cortes fell ill and died on December 2, 1547, at Castilleja de la Cuesta near Seville, at about sixty two years of age ^[1]. In accordance with his will, his remains were eventually carried to Mexico and, after several relocations, rest today in the church of the Hospital de Jesus in Mexico City, an institution he founded ^[5].

Few figures divide opinion as sharply. Any honest Hernan Cortes biography must hold two facts together: he was a commander of rare skill and audacity, and his campaign brought catastrophic violence, enslavement, and epidemic disease to the peoples of Mexico. The fall of Tenochtitlan destroyed a great Indigenous state and inaugurated colonial rule that lasted until 1821 ^[4]. Weighing Hernan Cortes achievements against these costs has occupied historians for five centuries.

The conquest also created something new. Mexico City rose on the Aztec capital's foundations and became the seat of a viceroyalty stretching, at its height, from Central America to the North American interior. The mingling of Indigenous and Spanish peoples, languages, and beliefs that began in Cortes's lifetime shaped the mestizo society of modern Mexico, where Malintzin herself remains a contested symbol of both survival and betrayal ^[4].

Modern scholarship, drawing on Nahuatl-language accounts alongside Spanish chronicles, has steadily shifted attention from the lone European hero of older narratives toward the Tlaxcalans and other Indigenous allies without whom the campaign could not have succeeded ^[5]. In Mexico today there is no major public monument to Cortes, and the quincentenary of the conquest in 2021 prompted formal debate between the Mexican and Spanish governments over apology and memory ^[6]. Among the durable Hernan Cortes facts is this one: nearly 500 years after his death, his name still starts arguments.