‘Assess the significance of the leadership of Cortes for the conquest of Mexico and its immediate consequences’
Cortes is a man who historians have studied for a long time and there is a vast amount of evidence about him and the conquest that he led to Southern America. The evidence clearly indicates that Cortes was the driving force behind the conquest of Mexico. In 1519 Hernan Cortes and his men landed in Tenochtitlan in search of power and wealth. Word quickly spread to the king, Montezuma. He heard that men had arrived from a faraway land with ‘sticks that spit fire and deer as big as houses’ had landed on the coast. This panicked the Aztec people as they believed in a fatalistic religion that predicted that Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of war, would return in that exact year to punish them. This set up an instant tension between the two oppositions that meant Cortes would have to lead his men if they were going to conquer this land in the name of God. It’s obvious that Cortes was a very confident and cunning man, as he disobeyed the rulings of the Governor of Cuba and went unbeknownst to the current ruler of Spain, Charles V. This put a huge amount of pressure on Cortes because he either succeeded in his campaign for power or he would be sentenced to death. Leading a group of five hundred men into a strange and unknown land was never going to be a simple task but the characteristics of Cortes’ leadership were a driving force in the conquest of Mexico. This becomes evident from the examination of such contemporary sources as ‘Conquistadors’ by Michael Wood and letters from Cortes himself to Charles V that detail the key events of the conquest. As it is clearly shown Cortes was a highly intelligent individual but he was also an opportunist. When he arrived in Tenochtitlan he capitalised on the divisions of the different tribes and managed to get some of the