
History of the Conquest of Mexico
Cortés lands with six hundred men and topples an empire of millions. Prescott, half-blind and never in Mexico or Spain, told it so vividly historians still pry the conquest from his version.

Cortés lands with six hundred men and topples an empire of millions. Prescott, half-blind and never in Mexico or Spain, told it so vividly historians still pry the conquest from his version.

Fewer than two hundred Spaniards seized the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532, and Hemming traces the forty years of rebellion and reprisal that followed, giving Andean witnesses equal weight with Spanish ones.

The hemisphere Columbus reached held cities larger than Paris, an Amazon farmed into orchard, and forests burned into pasture on purpose. What later settlers took for wilderness was a continent emptied by epidemics.

Fifty years on, writing in Guatemala, one of Cortés's foot soldiers set down the conquest of Mexico as the ranks saw it. He never got over his first sight of Tenochtitlan.