Can't Go Back, Won't Move On

Everything has come to this. Cortes and allies attack Tenochtitlan, and the Mexica fight back until all that is left are their broken spears...

The gloves come off in the Spanish strategy as the captains mutiny against Cortes and force his hand in permitting all out warfare to the death. Gonzalo de Sandoval, the boy wonder, leverages this as an opportunity to carve his mark on the scalp of history.

Desperate times come from desperate measures, and in the wreckage of the Aztec capital a new generation of leader will arise to restore Mexica glory... and in the process becomes a founding myth for a nation he'll never know.

With the Spanish colonial counterattack defeated, total victory felt inevitable to Cortes. That is, until word reached him that all was not quiet on the western front...

Cortes begins to face his blowback in the form of the Velazquista counter-response. Led by Panfilo de Narvaez, Spaniards will see themselves at war with other Spaniards in a struggle to see who will determine the future of "New Spain."

The Spanish arrive in Tenochtitlan... and immediately begin to try and cover their tracks. One soldier, Bernal Diaz, takes in the glory of the Aztec capital even as he wrestles privately with the weight of Spanish crimes in achieving their ultimate goal.

Cortes' gang begin their march to Tenochtitlan by attempting to court the Tlaxcallan Confederacy... bittermost enemies of the Aztec Empire. Leading this confederacy is Xicotencatl, a man who sees inside the heart of the Spaniards and finds not their salvation, but the same bottomless appetite for conquest he despises in the Aztecs. Still, as they say, the enemy of my enemy...

The Spanish conquest of Mexico becomes a two-front war as two representatives of the Cortesista mission are sent back to Spain in order to repeat the myth of the conquest until it becomes its legal justification.

The Spanish-Aztec War would not have been possible were it not for the voice of one woman acting as the bridge between Spanish and indigenous speakers. But the act of translation is not a neutral one, and through it Malintzin found herself able to create a new reality in place of the old, and in doing so gave herself up to the evolution of historical memory...

The history of Moctezuma in the Spanish-Aztec War is the history of competing visions of the event's history in total. Coward? Zealot? Strategist? The choice is yours...

Cortes begins his journey into history fleeing from the burning bridge he left behind in the Spanish Caribbean, staking everything he had on a megalomaniac vision of conquest that nearly tore his expedition apart before it even started. But as rumors of a great empire start to reach his men, the most famous Spanish colonizer turns to fabricating the written record to rewrite blind luck into histor...

On the eve of the Spanish arrival, the Triple Alliance which has held together the Aztec Empire is coming apart. Decades of interference in Texcoco's sovereignty by Tenochtitlan's tlatoque has left Texcocan prince Ixtlilxochitl looking to avenge his homeland's dishonor, even if it means tearing the empire apart.

Just as the Aztec Empire was reaching its zenith, another was forming just across the sea... the Spanish. Far from the monolithic state of historical memory, it was instead of patchwork collection of feuds and feudalistic impulses led by men like Diego Velazquez, the governor of the Cuban territory, who would stop at nothing to remake the New World in the image of the Old... and fashion himself a...

This week, Tlacaelel, nephew, brother and uncle to five different tlatoque of Tenochtitlan, created the ethos and the mechanisms of the Aztec imperial war machine in history's shadow... and put this machine of an empire on a collision course with itself.

In this episode, the Mexica exit myth and enter history and find an unlikely leader to help them found the empire that would carry them into history.

In the first episode of our season on the Spanish-Aztec War, we meet the god of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli, and understand the price to pay for the patronage of a heavenly lord.