Review: Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the great mysteries of history has to be why Montezuma capitulated as he did to Hernan Cortes. It’s a pretty easy what-if to contemplate that, if he’d followed what appear to have been his instincts, he’d have either held out longer or he’d have been able to give sufficient resistance to buy his Aztec empire some time. Imagine how history would be different if, given an additional decade, the Aztecs had been able to acquire even a few of the horses and guns the Spaniards used. They might never have “won” against the colonizing forces, but they might not have left the vacuum of political power that they did.

Buddy Levy’s history sets out to address that question in part, but it does so by telling the larger narrative of the conquest. To his credit, Levy seems to want to challenge the Spanish-centered narrative that we necessarily know – after all, the victors get to tell the story. The trouble is that there are almost no sources for the Aztec perspective. We get suppositions about what Montezuma and his allies were thinking, but there’s no way Levy or anyone else can really know.

As a result, there’s a vacuum in the narrative as well. Levy’s structure compels him to fill in that mystery, and there are times it feels clumsy. Above all, I have a hard time forgiving him for a throwaway observation that Montezuma may well have fallen prey to what we know today as Stockholm Syndrome in which he came to identify with his captors rather than with the community he’d known his whole life.

Is that possible? Maybe. It feels like a stretch to me, but the real issue is how the sources we do have might indicate that. And Levy isn’t especially forthcoming there.

I always feel compelled to caution that an absence of a sense of the sources may be a result of my listening to this rather than reading it. It may be that Levy has footnotes that, as a reader, I could follow but that are invisible (or inaudible) to a listener.

What emerges, though, is both too much speculation and – in the spaces where we clearly do have documentation – overly detailed accounts of skirmishes and battles. We’ll get the casualty counts of a conflict, complete with the names of each wounded conquistador, and then I’ll realize I’ve lost track of the implications of the battle itself – unless, as always, it was about Cortes’s relentless pursuit of conquest.

There are some powerful questions in play here. Beyond Montezuma’s motivation, we have the challenge of weighing the morality of the Aztecs. They deserve our sympathy for being exterminated, but they were clearly bloodthirsty themselves. Levy has a moment where he imagines Cortes bewildered by the fact that a religious ceremony without a human sacrifice was as alien to the Aztecs as a Catholic Mass without the eucharist. That’s a striking way to put it, but I like to think that any feeling human would have been horrified at the sight of those human sacrifices. That is, the genocide that followed is one of the great crimes of human history, but the violence and terror that sustained the Aztec empire seem criminal to me as well.

The ultimate challenge, though, is to balance the details we do have with the larger narrative in play. Near the end, Levy declares that the battle for Tenochtitlan was the costliest battle – in terms of life – in world history. That’s a striking claim, but it’s one that doesn’t seem supported by the context of the larger story.

There’s a lot to learn here – I’m glad to revisit the story and get the level of detail we do – but I think this falls short of the ambition it holds for itself.


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