Mexico, 1519–1521
Cortés & Moctezuma
Six hundred men, an empire of millions, and the collision that made the modern world.
what's actually going on
The conquest of Mexico is globalisation's first shock: two sophisticated worlds meeting with no shared reference points, and the decisive weapons being disease, alliances and information asymmetry rather than steel. It set the template — resource extraction, demographic catastrophe, cultures written over — that the entire modern debate about empire and its afterlives is still processing. Eight podcast episodes on it were downloaded tens of millions of times; the great novels of it are still being written.
the books that prove it
- AztecNYT bestseller of its year
- Mexicofrom the master of the deep-time place saga
The Fall of the Aztecs is history podcasting's flagship blockbuster — demand far exceeds current book supply.
more through this doorway
- Aztec Autumn
- Malinche
- The Hummingbird's Daughter
- Captain from Castile
- Night of Sorrows
- The Conquest
From the catalogue — matched on this period's subjects.
Six scenes from inside this moment — each one opens onto a real book.