Questions

• How did Cortés understand and represent his defeat of the Aztecs?
• How did indigenous writers make sense of this defeat?

Primary Sources

• Cortés, Hernán, Letters from Mexico, trans. Anthony Pagden, Yale University Press (New Haven, 2001), letters 2 and 3.
• OR
  
• Schwartz, Stuart, ed., Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico, St. Martin’s Press (Boston, 2000).

Required Secondary Readings

• Clendinnen, Inga, ‘‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico’, Representations, vol. 33 (1991), pp. 65-100.
• OR
• Fernández Armesto, Felipe, ‘Aztec Auguries and Memories of the Conquest of Mexico’, Renaissance Studies, vol. 6, issues 3-4 (1992) (available in the library in hard copy)

Additional Readings

• Brooks, Francis “Motecuzoma Xoyocotyl, Hernán Cortés, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo: The Construction of an Arrest,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 75:2 (1995).
• Leon-Portilla, Miguel, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, Beacon Press (Boston, 1966).
• Schroeder, Susan, ‘Looking Back at the Conquest: Nahua Perceptions of Early Encounters from the Annals of Chimalpahin’, Chipping Away on Earth: Studies in Prehispanic and Colonial Mexico in Honor of Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Lancaster, Ca, 1994).