Revisiting The Mexican Conquest

n November 8, 1519, a few hundred Castilian soldiers and horsemen led by Hernán Cortés entered the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan. The city, larger than most European capitals at the time, seemed to shimmer and float atop Lake Texcoco. Recording this fateful encounter in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote that he and his fellow soldiers wondered “if what they were seeing was perhaps a dream.”