History is an ongoing conversation with the past whose participants include not only academic historians but also amateur enthusiasts, politicians searching for justifications, nationalists seeking to build nations and victims hoping for redress. History is often composed from heroic legends that obscure more than illuminate the facts of what actually happened. And those overlooked facts, if they still have attachments to living people, become history’s restless ghosts, moaning in the night and rattling their chains for attention.
Matthew Restall has been trying to get at the truth behind the Spanish conquest of the New World for years. The Penn State history professor’s previous book, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, looked broadly at Spain’s subjugation of what has since been called Latin America. His conclusion: The conquest wasn’t accomplished by tiny bands of steel-helmeted conquistadors facing down armies of native warriors with a few muskets. Spain couldn’t have overpowered the empires of the Americas without the help of native allies—large numbers of them who hoped to enlist the Spaniards in their local struggles.
Restall focuses more narrowly in When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (Ecco/HarperCollins), which sifts through the falsehoods and uncertainties that have accrued around the encounter between Spanish adventurer Hernando Cortés and the Aztec emperor Montezuma. In case anyone thinks the significance of that event is confined to Mexico, Restall shows that the dubious story of Montezuma’s voluntary submission to Spain is carved in stone at the U.S. Capitol as a prelude to American Manifest Destiny.
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Like a detective piecing through misleading clues and conflicting eyewitness testimony from a crime scene (and with the authorial skill of a good mystery writer), Restall shows how the conquistadors strung together chains of lies and half-truths to cover their ignominy, gild their accomplishments and assert their property rights before a Spanish court and Roman Catholic clergy whose members were often skeptical of their claims. Like lyrics to an old blues song or lines from Homer, parts of their much-repeated tales were composed from extant ideas in the authors’ culture, including the return of the missing deity and the triumphal processions into subjugated cities. While some of their accounts speak in wondrous words of the civilization they destroyed, the conquistadors also sought to dehumanize the Aztecs as idolaters and cannibals; the latter charge continues to be repeated despite evidence to the contrary.
When Montezuma Met Cortés demonstrates that history is no simple matter and that much of what we think we know is probably wrong.
