Many of the accounts of the Aztecs that we have were not written by them. They were written by the Spanish who conquered the Aztec empire (including Moctezuma’s greeting to Cortés). What do the Spanish (Cortés and Díaz) find noteworthy about the Aztecs and their empire? How might their background and social position have influenced what they saw and described? Did they see everything they described, or were things described to them by others? Did they think the culture that they were writing about was lesser than their own or equal to it? How does the Aztec explanation of the Spanish conquest of Mexico reinforce yet differ from the Spaniards’ versions? What do you think explains those differences?
