Hernan Cortez
(1485 – 1547 CE)
He came for gold, found glory, and left nothing but ghosts—and somewhere, beneath the ruins of Tenochtitlan, you can still hear them counting.
“God gave us the disease—and the cure was gold.” —attributed to no one, because even God wouldn’t take credit.
The lake is on fire. The temples are bleeding. Somewhere under the screaming, the drums of Tenochtitlan are still pounding like the heartbeat of a dying god. Hernán Cortés, illegitimate lawyer’s son from Medellín, Extremadura, stands in his steel carapace watching an empire drown beneath him, grinning like a man who has finally found a problem money can solve—with enough bullets.
It’s August 13, 1521, the final act of the Mexica world. The causeways are slick with blood and corpses, Spanish muskets and Tlaxcalan spears turning the floating city into a slaughterhouse. Cortés doesn’t blink. He can’t. He’s got sand in his eyes, guilt in his soul, and the unshakable conviction that he’s doing God’s dirty work better than God ever could.
This is the man who burned his ships—not out of bravery, but because he knew his crew were cowards. He conquered a civilization of millions with five hundred men, a handful of horses, and a talent for weaponized charisma. Cortés didn’t discover Mexico. He consumed it, bite by bite, feeding a smallpox-riddled Christendom one golden mouthful at a time.
The Bastard from Extremadura
Cortés was born in 1485, a second-string noble bastard in the kind of family that couldn’t afford its own armor polish. Sent to study law, he ditched the books for adventure—because why memorize Latin when you can stab it? At nineteen, he shipped out to Hispaniola, then Cuba, where he proved himself too ambitious to be trusted and too useful to be ignored.
Governor Diego Velázquez sent him to Mexico to “explore.” Cortés heard “invade.” The difference, as always, was paperwork.
With about five hundred soldiers, a few dozen horses, and a couple of cannons, he sailed west in 1519 toward a land dripping with rumors of gold and gods. His men were mercenaries, criminals, and zealots—a startup army for the apocalypse. When Velázquez tried to revoke his command mid-voyage, Cortés casually committed mutiny and kept sailing. He’d decided that the New World was big enough for both of them—as long as Velázquez stayed in the old one.
When they landed at Veracruz, Cortés promptly burned the ships. “We’ll either conquer or die,” he told his men. They decided conquering sounded slightly better.
The Conquistador’s Toolkit: Religion, Steel, and Audacity
Cortés was the original influencer of atrocity: part diplomat, part warlord, part pathological opportunist. His secret weapon wasn’t just steel—it was understanding that fear scales better than faith.
He allied with the Tlaxcalans, sworn enemies of the Aztecs, who provided him with tens of thousands of indigenous warriors eager to help dismantle their oppressors. It was the world’s first case of outsourcing genocide.
When he finally met Emperor Moctezuma II in Tenochtitlan, Cortés played the role of polite apocalypse. Moctezuma thought he was meeting a god. Cortés knew he was meeting a man with too much gold and not enough paranoia. The conquistador smiled, bowed, and promptly took his host prisoner in his own palace.
The audacity was biblical. Imagine walking into the Vatican, shaking hands with the Pope, and then locking him in the broom closet while you redecorate.
When Empires Collide
The Aztecs eventually realized their divine guest was just another European with an allergy to empathy. The city erupted. Moctezuma was either killed by his people or murdered by his captors—depends who’s telling the story, but everyone agrees it was a bad week to be Emperor.
Cortés, outnumbered and besieged, was forced into a midnight retreat—the infamous Noche Triste (“Sad Night”) of June 30, 1520—where hundreds of Spaniards drowned in the canals under the weight of stolen gold. Cortés supposedly wept beneath a tree afterward. Most likely, he was just calculating the interest loss.
But the bastard came back. He rebuilt his army, rallied his allies, and laid siege to Tenochtitlan for months. The lake city turned into hell on water. Famine, disease, and artillery did the rest.
When it was over, he’d erased a civilization so advanced it had running water and astronomy while Europe was still burning witches. His victory was total. His justification? Divine destiny. Because nothing says “God’s will” like cannons in a marketplace.
The Golden Hangover
Back in Spain, Cortés expected to be hailed as a new Alexander. Instead, he was treated like an inconvenient lawsuit. The crown thanked him, then quietly took everything. Kings like gold—but not men who remind them they didn’t earn it.
Cortés spent his later years battling Spanish bureaucracy—a more terrifying opponent than any Aztec army. He returned to Spain in 1540, bitter, wealthy, and paranoid, constantly suing for recognition. Even his death in 1547 was anticlimactic: no glorious duel, no jungle fever, just a slow fade into obscurity in a rented room near Seville.
The man who toppled an empire died a line item in an accountant’s book.
Legacy: God, Guns, and Good PR
Cortés didn’t just conquer Mexico; he invented the modern playbook for empire. His name became synonymous with audacity and annihilation. To Spaniards, he was a hero of faith and courage. To the conquered, he was the face of apocalypse.
Centuries later, history tried to file the edges off his armor. Painters gave him noble posture. Hollywood made him dashing. Textbooks called him “ambitious.” The Mexica called him Malinche’s puppet—a man led by greed and lust disguised as destiny.
Today, he’s remembered with the queasy awe reserved for nuclear scientists and serial killers: a man who achieved the impossible by proving that “impossible” just means “not enough blood yet.”
Cortés was many things—a conquistador, a monster, a visionary—but above all, he was a mirror held up to the European soul. When he looked into it, he saw God smiling back. The rest of us just see smoke and bones.
Warrior rank #200
Sources:
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. London: Penguin Classics, 1963.
Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Harper & Row, 1984.
Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico. Harper & Brothers, 1843.
Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
The Bible of Bad Decisions: Conquistador Edition, Vol. 1 (unverified field notes).
“How to Lose Friends and Influence Empires,” satirical pamphlet, anonymous, circa 1522.
