The Rest Is History - 384. The Fall of the Aztecs: The Adventure Begins (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

The meeting of the controversial Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and the formidable Emperor Montezuma in 1519 was one of the great hinge moments of world history, and the beginning of the end for the mightiest of the New World empires: the realm of the Aztecs.  The build-up to this extraordinary encounter is at once a thrilling adventure story and a tragic tale of violence, brutality and loss. It’s a story of temples and sacrifices, exploration and imperialism, with cataclysmic consequences for human history. Join Tom and Dominic in the first episode of this sensational saga, as they follow the young Cortés across the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, where the search for gold comes at a terrible price … *Dominic’s book The Fall of the Aztecs is available now from bookshops across the UK - the perfect Christmas present!* *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in New Zealand and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the city of Tenochtitlan, the drums were beating. All morning, the streets had been buzzing with excitement. Old and young, rich and poor, men, women and children, everybody had heard the news. After weeks of tension, after all the whispers and rumors, the strangers had entered the valley of Mexico and had reached the far side of the lake. In just a few hours, they would be on the causeway.

And then, at last, the people of the city would set eyes on these extraordinary newcomers from across the sea. Now there was silence. A last hush before the storm. The sun blazed down the tension hung in the air heavier and heavier and then an invisible tremor ran through the spectators on the rooftops a breathless gasp of excitement on the edge of the Aztecs by top historian of Mesoamerica, Dominic Sandbrook. So Dominic, this is the latest volume in your series of books written for

children. And do you know, I think it's the episode in history that I find most fascinating that I kind of don't know much about. Yes. Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you for that wonderful reading. I think you do incredible justice because this is the meeting, isn't it, of old world and new, of Europe and Central America, of Cortez, the Spanish adventurer, and Moctezuma, the great king of the Aztecs. Yes. I should say, Tom, North America, before we get letters of complaint from our many, many Mexican listeners. But yes, thank you. That's very kind of you.

This is the moment on the 8th of November, 1519, when Hernan Cortes and the Aztec Emperor Montezuma meet on the causeway outside the great city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. It's one of the mostway outside the great city. It's in Oshetland, now Mexico City. It's one of the most famous meetings in all history. It is an absolutely extraordinary historical moment. I mean, it's the closest Europeans would ever come to meeting aliens, I suppose. And the same, by the way, for the Mesoamericans. This sort of clash of civilizations, the meeting of these two men, there's been so much debated. It's not just the meeting of these two men that has been so much debated. It's not just the meeting of two individuals, but it carries so much baggage now, doesn't it? Because it's a foundational moment in the story of colonialism, of European imperialism, of the Columbian exchange between the great land masses of our planet, the old world and the new,

exchange of viruses, foods, habits, all of these kinds of things. So it's an incredibly loaded moment. And to write about it for children also reminds you that it's an extraordinary adventure story, but also a very tragic adventure. I mean, it's a story not just of adventure, but of horror as well. And actually to balance all that for kind of 10-year-old readers is a massive challenge. Because it's a story that at the moment is very, very contested. I mean, the issue of whether it is a great adventure story, even that is up for grabs. And almost every aspect of it is furiously debated. And it's a very, very kind of live historiographical area. So there are a number of really quite radically revisionist books have come out recently about it.

So it's simultaneously a thrilling story, but also kind of mysterious in the way that, say, the truth of the Cathars or the origins of Islam, which are other fields of historical inquiry that likewise, scholars have quite radically revised over recent years. So it's a doubly thrilling episode, I think. It is. I agree with you. So it reminds me, when I was writing it, on the surface, it looks like the story of Alexander the Great. So a huge epic journey, lots of battles, adventures, meeting strange people, all of this. And the Spanish themselves, Sir Hernan Cortes, they undoubtedly had that at the back of their minds. I mean, they were really interested in kind of classical parallels.

They're kind of cosplaying as Romans and Greeks, aren't they, throughout the whole thing? Absolutely, they are. But then, as you say, there's this additional dimension, which is that the story that has come down to us, and lots of people already know some of the lineaments of that story, so they'll know the Aztecs thought the Spanish were gods. The Aztecs surrendered their kingdom because they were so transfixed with fear because the coming of the Spanish had been foretold, all of this stuff. A huge amount of that traditional story is probably completely wrong. And on top of that,

the Spanish sources, they may be lying to us. They may have been lying to themselves about what happened, but they also may have completely misunderstood what was happening. So our glimpses of the story are always through kind of dirty window panes where we're struggling to make out what's really going on. And that's the fun of it. Yeah. Telling an adventure story that's also a mystery story where you can't actually be sure who is on whose side, who's calling the shots, what's actually going on here. And that's what makes it such a riveting episode of human history, I think. And also, I guess, an aspect of it that is less a feature of the children's book, but will be, I guess, something that will be preying on the minds of everyone listening to

this, is that these questions about, did Moctezuma surrender to Cortes? Did the Aztecs think that the Spaniards were gods? All these kinds of questions. These are not just about what happened in the early 16th century. These reverberate into the present day. So they are politically incredibly sensitive. And so that is also a huge part of this story. And I think that just before we get onto the story, one other thing that we should clear up is that this is an episode where even what you should be calling the various people is incredibly complex. So we're going to be calling them the Aztecs. Is that right? So the word the Aztecs was coined, what is it, 19th century?

18th century. And then popularized in the 19th as a way of distinguishing the Mexica. So the people who live in Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico, from modern Mexicans. But you're right, they never called themselves the Aztecs, rather like the Vikings didn't call themselves the Vikings, I suppose. So we'll call them Aztecs. But it'd be weird if you don't use... If people are interested in Aztec society, we had one of the great historians of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend, in one of our early episodes

of The Rest is History. And her book, Fifth Son, wonderful book, the subtitle is A New History of the Aztecs or the Aztec World or whatever. Yes. And I remember when she came on, we discussed this and we agreed. And I think that if Camilla Townsend, whose book I cannot recommend highly enough, on a bonus episode, Dominic, I listed the five great books that have influenced me. I think if there was room for a sixth, I might well include The Fifth Son. I think it's fat good a book. So if it's good enough for Camilla Townsend, I think it's good enough for us to call them the Aztecs. One other, the names of the two great protagonists in this, you've called him Montezuma. I've called him Moctezuma. Which should we go for? Montezuma? Well, if we call him Montezuma, that's fine. Or Moctezuma. The funny thing is he wasn't called

either. No, of course not. It's a very, very long Nahuatl name. I'll tell you what he was called. He was called Motecuzoma Xocoyotzin. I mean, I think that's a mouthful and people won't know who we're talking about. Montezuma is the most common in English. Okay. Well, let's call him Montezuma. And Cortes, the Spanish leader, you've called him Hernan Cortes, but he's more probably Hernando or even Fernando. Is that right? Yes, exactly. He was probably christened Hernando, but most people call him Hernan. So everybody's name is wrong, basically. Everybody's name is wrong and every aspect of the story is contested.

So that's what makes it kind of fun. What fun. Okay, well, let's kick off then. So should we begin with Cortez? I think it does make sense. Because we have looked at the Aztecs in that earlier episode we did very much earlier, which if you haven't heard, we commend to you. So let's look at Cortés. So Cortés is the protagonist. Cortés drives the story, really. Or does he, Dominic? Because again, that's something that's contested as well, isn't it?

It is. So we'll come to that later. Well, let's pretend that he is for the time being. And let's put Cortés into his context. There's a wonderful book called Conquistadores by Fernando Cervantes, who's a Mexican historian. And one of the things he really says is people want stereotypes and caricature of the Aztecs. Now they do that with the Spaniards and they just say, oh, they're terribly greedy. They're rapacious, all of this kind of thing. And actually you have to understand them in their world. So Cortes is probably born in 1484 or 1485. And Tom,

that makes him a direct contemporary, a friend of the rest of his history, Catherine of Aragon. But he's born in a much more obscure world. He's born in Extremadura, which is on the far fringe of Spain near the Spanish border. His father, Martin Cortes, boasted of being a Hidalgo, being a knight, but probably was sort of fallen from grace a bit, impecunious kind of gentry. People used to say of him, he doesn't even have enough money to own his own horse, this kind of thing. So Hidalgo is a son of somebody who counts as something, basically.

Exactly. Yes. And Catalina, Cortes's mother, she is related to a very well-known family now, a family from just up the road in Trujillo, because they're in Medellin in extra Majura. The family she's related to are called the Pizarro's. So Cortes is a distant relative of the Pizarro brothers who, of course, will go on to be instrumental in the conquest of Peru, which is an extraordinary kind of coincidence. The Cortes are not incredibly poor. They probably owned a beehive and a little mill and a vineyard, and they had a house in the center of Medellin. Medellin itself, and I think this actually

probably matters, Medellin is a violent place. It's a place where violence is not uncommon because it's on the frontier. It is famous in Spain for its lawlessness and its feuding and its faction fighting and punch-ups in the town square and stabbings and things like this. It has lots of stalks as well. And lots of castles. Yeah. So there's lots of castles in the area, very famous for it.

Hugh Thomas, who wrote a huge book on the conquest of Mexico that I think a lot of historians would now say has some sort of elements that are probably not quite right because he takes everything the Spanish say really on trust. He says of Cortes, Cortes emerged from a world of rebellion, war, and conspiracy, second to none. So that gives you a sort of sense of the immediate context in which he is growing up. And actually, there are quite a few conquistadors who come from that world in extra madura. This kind of hard landscape, unforgiving, lots of feuding, all of this stuff. And Cortés is growing up during the period in Spanish history known as the Reconquista. So when he is seven or eight years old, he and his

family must have heard news of the fall of Granada further south in 1492. So this is the period when the Spanish, well, I say the Spanish, when the armies of Castile, newly allied through marriage to Aragon, so through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, Christian Catholic monarchs, when they are carrying the gospel of A, Christianity, and B, Spain and sort of Spanishness, they're carrying it south. They are conquering Muslim towns. Ferdinand of Aragon is possessed.

We talked about this in our Columbus episodes of this great sense of Christian mission. He believes that it's his destiny to unite not just Spain, but actually- Conquer Jerusalem in the long run. Yeah. The Mediterranean world in the name of God, that one day a monarch will do this, and why shouldn't it be him? They take Granada, the last outpost of what would once have been called Moorish rule, and they start to have forced conversions of Muslims. And of course, famously Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews. So there's a sense of religious militancy there when Cortes is growing up. That is very important. Tom, I can see you're itching to say something.

Is it true that Cortes' father was actually there? I've read conflicting reports on this. I think it probably isn't true. So Cortes's life, his early life, isn't completely obscure and uneventful and unexciting. Yeah. Because why would people record it? I just wonder though, because the surrender of Boabdil, as he comes to be called, the King of Granada, he marches out and he hands over the keys of the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella. And then he goes off and he bursts into tears about it. And this is the Moors, the last sigh, as in the Rushdie novel. And this portrayal of a weak, tearful king surrendering. I mean, would this be part of the story that Cortez is growing up with?

That's very well observed, Tom. That's very well observed. I hadn't thought of that, but that's a really good point. Yeah, there are a lot of formulas in the story of the conquest of the Aztecs and the conquest of Mexico, the so-called conquest of Mexico. There are a lot of devices that you can recognize from medieval chronicles, classical tales, biblical tales, and you start to think, did that really happen? And I wonder, yes, the image of that non-Christian ruler who bursts into tears and surrenders his kingdom. Cortez has grown up with that story. And the listeners should bear that in mind for when we come to later on. So what do we know about Cortez? We know he probably, when he was young, did some stuff in the local church of St. Martin. He's clearly literate.

He can read and write. He's said to be quite pious. There's no reason to doubt that he would be pious. I mean, lots of people at the time would be pious. Nothing exceptional about that. But he really doesn't want to be a priest because he takes a different path. Now, I said he's literate. That's really important because he's obviously reading things.

It's an age not just of ballads, but of books. And it's an age of chivalric romances. We talked about this in our Columbus episodes. So Cortes would undoubtedly be familiar with the most popular romance of the day, which is called Tiron Le Blanc, Tiron the White. And it's the story of Christian knights fighting the Ottomans. They're kind of recapturing Constantinople or something. Constantinople, yeah, they do. Yeah. And carrying out amazing feats, sort of scaling castle walls and marrying maidens and defeating infidels and all this sort of stuff there's also a book called amadis de gaula again a story about knights fantastical lands and actually one of the

great conquistador narratives by bernal diaz he says when he gets to the valley of mexico he says it reminded us all of a scene from Amadis. So we got to this place, it's to Palapan, and it looked just like the fantastical castles that we'd all read about, the pyramids. So they go with all that in their heads. I think that's really, really important. And so is this giving the young Cortes this notion of idealgia, this sense that to properly be someone, you have to go out and be a knight errant, be someone who goes out and kind of takes your chances. If you just sit around and do nothing, then you're a nobody. I think so. I think so because he clearly doesn't want to sit around

and do nothing. He goes off, first of all, to Salamanca, a great university in Salamanca, and he does some legal studies. We don't know that he actually did formal kind of training and became a graduate, but he definitely goes to what one of his professors calls a great nursery of scholars and gentlemen. He goes there and he studies. Then after a couple of years, he decides he wants to seek his fortune in some way. He could have gone to Italy. The Spanish are fighting in Italy. And there's some talk that he went to Valencia and thought about taking ship to Naples, but he doesn't end up doing that. He's got a better idea. So this is the late 1490s. Now, Columbus has already discovered or sailed to the New World, and Columbus's monopoly has

been scrapped. So lots of Spaniards are now going west to try and seek fortunes of their own. And after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, Cortes decides that he will go west himself to seek his fortune because a kinsman of his sort of family connection called Nicolás de Abando has been made governor of Hispaniola, of the great island that today is Haiti in the Dominican Republic. And so this would be like in 2060, choosing as a young man to go off to the new colony on Mars. Yes, yes. Musqueville. Right, exactly. It would be like you're in the late 19th century in the United

States on the eastern seaboard, and you hear that a relative has become sheriff of a new town in Colorado or something. And there might be gold mines nearby, and you decide to go out and seek your fortune. It's that kind of thing. Except that the sense that they literally know nothing about what might be out there is still absolutely part of the climate. It's incredibly dangerous to cross the seas, and who knows what is waiting for you when you get there? Right, exactly. To go west at this point, I imagine you must have a particular quality of courage. Yes. And I think that tells us something about Cortez's character

because his family clearly wants him to be a notary, to be a kind of clerk, like a lawyer. And the point of studying law would be that you would work maybe in the royal bureaucracy or something, expanding royal bureaucracy. Cushy, secure. Yeah. But he doesn't choose that. He's clearly restless and he wants to seek his fortune in some way. So off he goes over the Atlantic. The voyage would take you eight weeks, but it's an established thing by now. Because I said there was a lot of faffing around, he actually doesn't end up going until

1506. Because he falls out of somebody's window, doesn't he, whose wife he's trying to seduce. Exactly. Very Don Giovanni behavior. He's either climbing up or climbing down. There are different accounts. Breaks his leg. Breaks his leg. So he ends up pitching up in Hispaniola, in Santo Domingo, in the capital of Hispaniola, where his family connection, Nicolás de Ovando, is the governor

and has started building the governor's house and a hospital and so on and so forth. And he does a little bit of work for Ovando. He works for a time, it seems, at a sugar mill. And eventually he gets a job as the notary of a new town called Azua de Compostela, which is on the south side of the island, Hispaniola. Just before we talk about how boring his life is, life on Hispaniola is very violent as well. There are about 300 Spaniards on Hispaniola at this point. We talked in the Columbus episodes about the native people, the Tainos. At this point, the Spanish are repressing the Tainos with ferocious, ferocious ruthlessness. They're setting dogs on them. They are rounding them up and making them work in gold mines. The Tainos

are dying in massive numbers because of disease, because their ecosystem has been destroyed, because they're suffering genuinely terrible trauma, mental, psychological trauma, at the collapse of their entire world because of the arrival of all these Europeans. And the poor queen, golden flower, who gets captured and she gets hanged. She does. And actually when Cortes arrived to see Obando, Obando is off dealing with the aftermath of what's happened to this queen. So yes. And the Spanish also, by the way, they've already started to bring in the first African slaves because the Tainos are dying in

such massive numbers. They say, listen, we've already been using African slaves in the Canary Islands. Cortes would undoubtedly have seen that, by the way. He'd have seen slaves for sale in Seville before he sailed. He would also have probably seen slaves on the docks in the Canary Islands where his ship would have stopped, which was a standard thing on the voyage over. So I said he was brought up in a world of violence. He's seen an awful lot of violence and suffering on Hispaniola. Hispaniola is as close as anywhere in the early 16th century to being kind of hell on earth, I think it's fair to say. However, Cortes' life on Hispaniola is very boring. So Cortes is the notary of this dusty new town, nothing going on there. And actually for somebody who's made this big journey to try and seek his fortune, he's now

just found himself doing the same thing he would have done back in Spain, basically filling in ledgers and being a pen pusher. But in slightly sweatier circumstances. Exactly. So the glimpses we have of him, he's a womanizer. He likes playing dice and gambling, but that's standard. So he does like gambling. Yeah, he does like gambling. I think that's an important part of his character. He is a gambler and he always will be a gambler. He probably gets into some drunken fights. There's a story that he has a scar on his chin

through having a fight about a woman. But the truth of the matter is, I think there is a sense at the turn of the 1510s that Cortes, this ambitious young man, that his great gamble of crossing the Atlantic rather than getting the cushy job back in Spain, that hasn't really worked. He's kind of going nowhere.

So what opportunities are there? Because if Hispaniola has effectively been pacified, is, as you say, turning into hell on earth, what further opportunities for expansion are being provided to someone like Cortes that he can join up with? Well, this is the thing, Tom. So to make sense of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, you have to understand that the whole process of conquest and colonization, and this will sound

such a ridiculously tasteless comparison, but it's like an island hopping holiday. The historian Matthew Restle talks about links in a chain. You go to one island and that opens up the next and then the next and so on and so forth. So the next island on is Cuba. And in 1511, Cortes hears that one of the richest men on Hispaniola, who is a landowner called Diego Velazquez, he is going to go off to Cuba in pursuit of a Taino rebel called Hatuey. And once he's got Hatuey, he's going to try and conquer and colonize Cuba, which is also inhabited by Taino people. And Velázquez is an important man to know. He's rich.

He had fought at Granada. He had been there in the battles against the Moors. He had been on one of Columbus's voyages, I think his second voyage. He's a man of size, isn't he? He's a big, hefty bloke. Yes. He's a jolly man, actually, Velazquez. He's very hospitable. People say he's a good man to know. His dinner party is very good, all this kind of thing. He's going off to Cuba and Cortes thinks, sod the notary job in the middle of nowhere. I'm going to go with him. I'm joining. Yeah.

So he goes with him. Now, Hathaway has gone off to Cuba and there's an interesting thing here, which is a preview of what is coming. There's a famous story that Hathaway arrives in Cuba, and he meets up with the local Taínos. Clearly, they must speak the same language. And he says to them, there are these fellows coming from Hispaniola. They are terrible men. They're the Spanish. And he says, they are obsessed with this god. They have a god that they worship. And points to a basket and he says this is the god of the christians this is the god they are desperate to get their hands on and the basket is full of gold yeah well whether this story happened who knows or whether it's one of these many many tales that are talked and there's another famous line he says isn't there where he finally gets captured and he's about to be burnt alive. And one of the friars who's come with Velázquez says to him, for goodness sake, be baptized and then you'll go to heaven. And Hathaway says, well, who will be in heaven? Will you Spaniards be in heaven? He says,

yes, of course, we'll all be in heaven. He says, in that case, I will not ever, ever be baptized because I do not want to spend eternity with the Spaniards. Exactly. Yeah. I'd rather be in hell than have eternal life with monsters like you. People like you. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And actually, we lose sight of Cortez on Cuba. But what undoubtedly happened is a process of colonization that was extremely brutal. So I will mention one character who's going to be very, very important in Cortez's story, who we know was there. This is a guy called Panfilo Narvaez. And Panfilo Narvaez

had already been involved in the conquest of Jamaica. And he had kind of waded through blood on Jamaica. And he did so again on Cuba. And there's a very famous scene where he goes into a village and the villagers have all prepared food to welcome him and his troops. And there's a very famous scene where he goes into a village and the villagers have all prepared food to welcome him and his troops. And it's been negotiated by a friar and he orders his troops to kill everybody anyway. And the friar bursts sort of into tears and goes up to him and begs for these people's lives. And Narvaez laughs at him and says, don't you like what our Spanish lads have done? And all this kind of thing. And the friar ends up being Bartolome de las Casas, the great kind of spokesman for the native peoples of the Caribbean, who says they have souls. They could be good Christians.

You shouldn't be enslaving them and butchering them and all this kind of thing. And Cortes would have sailed out with Las Casas had he not broken his leg, jumping out of that woman's bedroom. And they will know each other throughout their lives. They may well have been at university in Salamanca at the same time. Yeah. Probably not great friends, but they might have come across each other. But Narbáez, he will come back. But also Las Casas, because his comments on Cortes' claims and stories are a kind of rare example of a Spaniard expressing suspicion of what Cortes is saying.

Yes. So fascinating. Exactly. Exactly. So Cortes is there. Cuba has been conquered. Everything has worked out as far as he's concerned. Velazquez hands out what are called encomiendas to all his comrades.

So these are little farms and estates of their own. This is again a preview of what will happen eventually in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. There's already a sort of exchange where they are bringing in pigs, sheep, crops, and things like that from Europe. So transforming the landscape and sending back to Europe shipments of gold for the Spanish monarchs who are demanding money the whole time. Now we've invested in these operations. We want to see a return. So they're the shareholders. Exactly. A good way for listeners who are unfamiliar with the story to think about it is, I mean, it sounds like such a weird way to think about it, but I was thinking about the film, The Social Network and the foundation of Facebook and all these companies, all these rival kind of tech

entrepreneurs at the wild west of technology. They're seeking investment, but they need to show a return. They've all got lawyers who are going to end up suing each other and fighting each other and all this kind of thing. And they sometimes team up, but they're always ultimately out for themselves. That is exactly the same ethos as the one that the conquistadors. And you need to decide, are you going to sign up with a tech company that's growing or are you going to blaze your own path? And that's basically the problem for Cortez. He's not yet in a position to be his own agent. No, he's not. So he's kind of Velazquez's man. He has his own country estate. He seems to have had his own little iron foundry. He may have had his

own little gold mine, or at least a place where he was digging for gold. At first, he is Velazquez's secretary. Velazquez starts to build his own capital at Santiago de Cuba. Cortes is his secretary. But there are some signs that Cortes actually doesn't like being somebody else's creature. He wants to be his own man. So there's a massive row they have. Cortes has been flirting or carrying on with this woman called Catalina Suarez, and she thinks he'd promised to marry her. He says, no, no, no, I'm never marrying you. Velazquez throws him into prison, actually sacks him from his job and stuff. And afterwards, Cortes basically has to apologize. He has to marry her. And he's described afterwards as being very downcast and humble, as if he'd been the lowliest servant.

And Velazquez seems to forgive him and makes him the chief magistrate again of Santiago. But Cortes clearly has a bit of a grudge about this. He's basically been forced to marry this woman that he didn't want to marry. And humiliated publicly. And he's been humiliated and he still has not, you know, he is the assistant to the CEO. He's the PA rather than being the CEO himself, which is what he wants to be. And so presumably he knows that the only way that he can kind of escape from that subordinate position and establish a command for himself is if there are lands even further west. And so the Spanish having reached Cuba, presumably are, well, Columbus had tracked the coast of what we now know is Central America. So the Spaniards know that there are more lands out there. Should we take a break at this point? And when we come back, look at the process by which the Spanish and in due course, Cortez himself arrive on the shores of continental America.

So we'll see you in a few minutes. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Or like Stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. So that, Dominic, final words of John Keats' great sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer, where he compares his experience reading a translation of Homer to Stout Cortez, the first European to gaze out from a peak in Darien across to the Pacific Ocean. And so that's an allusion to a great moment of discovery in 1513, except that Keats gets it wrong, doesn't he? Because Stout Cortez is not part of the expedition

that sees the Pacific Ocean for the first time. No. So the guy who actually did it was a guy called Basco Nunez de Balboa. So this is while Cortez and Co. were kind of rampaging through Cuba. So Balboa had gone to Panama. He doesn't know Panama as part of the American mainland.

As far as he's concerned, it's probably like a big island, a big, long, narrow island. And he had crossed the jungle and he had been the first European to lay eyes on the waters of the Pacific. And Balboa is one of many such people that historian Matthew Restle calls them armed entrepreneurs who have set out from Spain, who have come to the Caribbean, and then they're using it as a jumping off point. I use the phrase island hopping in the first half of this episode. They've used it as a jumping off point

to find new territories. So during the 1510s, while Cortes is kind of there being pushed around by Diego Velázquez in Santiago de Cuba. Being made to marry women and- Exactly. Blot a dot and-

And fill in for him. Yeah, oh, terrible. Some Spanish colonists have landed on the coasts of what we now would call Colombia or Venezuela. There's a guy with a splendid name, Juan Ponce de Leon. Oh, he's the one who goes off looking for the fountain of youth. He does indeed. Yeah. In Florida, right? Yeah. So he has found a massive island, which he calls La Florida, the flowery one,

the place of flowers, which of course is not an island an island it's a peninsula but he thinks it's an island and so i said before but i guess it's known as a great host and he's probably having these dinner parties parties banquets at his house in santiago where they are talking about what is out there to the west and there has been rumors sort of sea captains and sailors say they have seen you know a shape on the horizon which is probably a great land out there maybe another island who knows the local people the tainos such of them that are left they say that there are people who sometimes paddle across and say that it took them six days by canoe and of course the tainos must have come from the American mainland at some point centuries

earlier. So the Spanish are sitting there in Cuba and they are thinking, there must be something there. There's probably something. And in 1517, a guy called Francisco Hernández de Córdoba sets off as an old soldier on a voyage to the west and he finds these little islands finds an island called the Isla Mujeres which is off the coast of what is now Cancun the great resort spring break resort for our American listeners so the island of women the island of women because they get there and they find statues of goddesses. So even at that point, it's pretty obvious, I think, to the Spanish

that this is a bit different from the Caribbean, that the people here, who we now know as the Maya, that they have a level of sophistication, shall we say, that is higher. They're technologically more adept. They probably have more stuff than the Tainos. At some point, some people paddle across to Hernandez de Cordova's ships in canoes. These are Maya. And he says, what's the name of this country? And the story goes that their chief says Yucatan. And he says, oh, right, the Yucatan. Brilliant. Great tourist port name. But actually, what the guy was actually saying was something like, I don't know what you're saying.

Or he was saying to his friends, who are these weird fellows? I don't understand what they're going on about. So it's K. That's how it came to be called, the Yucatan. And it's obvious to them when they get to the mainland that there are villages and towns. There are buildings made of stone. There are thatch roofs.

There are pyramid temples. This is not Cuba or Hispaniola. This is the big league now. This is sort of proper stuff. They get as far as what's now Campeche, and there they are very discomforted because they see some temples with evidence of sacrifice, possibly human sacrifice. So pools of blood. They meet some priests who basically warn them off and say,

if you stay here any longer, we'll kill you. How are they saying this? How are they communicating this? This is the thing, Tom. We don't know. There's no way that the Spanish could have... Was it through the language of mime? I fear it was.

Yeah, I think there probably is an awful lot of... Physical theatre. It's so interesting because in the accounts that we have you know it's sort of the chieftain said this or whatever but how do they know what i did yeah they have no way of knowing so again this is where the story starts to get so murky so either it's done through physical theater or they are projecting what they think onto what the chief is saying or they're literally just making it all up. Precisely. So all the stuff about human sacrifice is very controversial among historians of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Because how much of this is true, how much of this is Spanish projection, or how much is this Spanish justification of their bad behavior?

But it's not entirely made up, is it? No, it's not entirely made up. There definitely is human sacrifice. And Andes, he goes further up the coast. At some point, he is attacked by the locals. There's a lot of firing of arrows and hurling of spears. He is badly wounded. His men go back to Cuba.

He's not dead yet, but he dies after he gets back to Cuba. However, crucially, when he gets back to Cuba, but before he dies, he says to all the people, the bigwigs that gather around his bedside or whatever, there are temples there. There are towns there. This is a bloody big place. Has he seen gold? I don't think he has seen colossal quantities of gold at this point. The person who sees gold is the person who goes next.

So Diego Velazquez, who is the governor of Cuba, by the way, for those people who are interested in our pronunciation of Spanish names, we're a very diverse podcast. The rest is history. So we've agreed, haven't we, Tom, to have a lot of linguistic diversity in our Spanish pronunciation. Sometimes we'll do a Castilian accent. Sometimes we'll do accents from Latin America because we want everyone to feel included. Sometimes from Fawlty Towers. association sometimes we'll do a castilian accent sometimes we'll do accents from latin america because we want everyone to feel included sometimes from faulty towers yeah exactly the full the full diverse range exactly sometimes it's andrew sax's manuel sometimes it's the spanish of cervantes you just have to wait and find out which one it's going to be so anyway january 1518, Velazquez thinks, I really want to be the man who finds out what's out there. And he gets his nephew, who is a guy called Juan de Grialba.

And his nephew is this sort of dashing young fellow. He's in his, I think his early twenties or mid twenties. A knight errant type. A knight errant. Yeah, exactly. Grialba gets four ships. He gets 200 men. So it's a big expedition.

He has some cannons. He has people with crossbows. He has people with arquebuses who are the kind of, I don't really understand how an arquebus works. It's like an ancestor of a rifle or musket or something, isn't it? Yeah. Kind of. And.

Yeah. I just want to do that sound effect again. And he's got some dogs. He's got horses. I don't know that he does have horses i know he has dogs i'm not certain about horses cortez of course will take horses which are very yes it's crucial part of it so gravel goes off he goes to the island of cozumel which is a great diving destination today he kind of follows anandas to cordoba's route he arrives near campeche he picks

up some water some maya attack him but he fires his cannons and they all run away. He goes all the way around the Yucatan Peninsula. He ends up on the coast of what is now the Mexican state of Tabasco. And there, the people are actually quite friendly and they offer him fish and they offer him beans and stuff like this. He gives them some nice glass beads. Crucially, they give him one or two trinkets of gold. Grijalva thinks, oh, you know, because gold has always been the thing that has really interested the Spanish on Hispaniola and Cuba. People always think the Spanish are driven mad by gold for some demented reason of their own.

There's actually a really good reason to be interested in gold. Gold is so easily portable and it's also very easily divisible among your company and it doesn't rust. Precisely. divisible among your company and it doesn't rust precisely you can take it back to spain and you can use it to buy you know a nice farm nice estate elevate your family that's the point about gold you know there's no point getting resources that you can't travel with so that's why people want gold so grauver continues on this sort of voyage he finds another island where he's even more discomforted than

Hernandez de Cordoba was the first time because he finds tons of altars, tons of skulls, a lot of blood splashed around. And he and his men call this island the Isla de Sacrificios, the Island of Sacrifices. So they're now thinking, you have to get inside the Spaniards' heads. They're excited, they're greedy, they want the money. They genuinely believe in Christians. They want to convert people. But at the same time, there's an element of dread. They're like astronauts landing on an alien planet. It's the final frontier. Yeah, absolutely it is. It is science fiction quality to it.

Absolutely it is, Tom. And a lot of science fiction is inspired by these moments, isn't it? Lots of stories of human colonization, of alien worlds, and so on. I mean, this is very much kind of Captain Kirk era Star Trek. Yes, absolutely it is. So good news for Grialva. He looks over to the mainland from this island, and he sees a load of blokes on the beach waving white flags. They eventually go across, the Spaniards, and these people turn out to be the people called the Totonacs. And they are very friendly. We don't know much about the Totonacs. A lot of their history is uncertain. They were very famous. They had very fancy clothes. They had nice sandals and all this

kind of thing. But they were particularly well-known in Mesoamerica for their extraordinary facial decorations. They were great fans of plugs. Do you like a plug? Love a plug. So they would put kind of crystal plugs through their ears and their noses and their lips. Yeah. Now you can imagine for the Spaniards, I mean, it's equally bizarre, of course,

for the Totonacs to see the Spaniards. Yeah, of course. But for the Spaniards, they think these are very surprising looking individuals. It's a long way from Seville. It is a long way. Yeah, you've come a long way now from the tapas bars of Seville. Now the Tottenhacks speak a language the Spanish have not heard before,

which is called Nahuatl. Isn't it Nahuatl? It depends how you pronounce it, Tom. I think it's Nahuatl. As I said, we're a linguistically diverse podcast. So how on earth does Spanish speak to them? I do not know. They probably use Maya interpreters who maybe have a smattering of Nahuatl and perhaps have picked up some Spanish. Anyway, it is the Totonacs who first say to the Spaniards, there's this massive empire in land run by people who push us around and are much richer than we are. And so these are the Mexica, what we would call the Aztecs. They say there's this great city, the city of the Mexica. And there, the Totonacs say, we send them tribute twice a year. We send them cloaks. We send them some of the lovely clothes that we embroider. We send them jewels. We send them feathers. We send them cacao beans and all

this stuff. And these people, say the Totonacs, are really rich and powerful. They live in houses made of stone. They have very strict laws. They have rules. And the Tottenhacks give them a funny detail. They say they gather in public to see justice being done. Of course, what the Tottenhacks are saying is these are people with a regimented state and with a bureaucracy that we don't have. And, you know, a sense of civic order and all this kind of thing, which the Tottenhacks

clearly think is extraordinary. But of course, when the Spanish hear this, the Spanish know, oh, this is like a European kingdom. This is a regulated, organized, urban civilization. Or perhaps the emperor of China. Yes. I mean, is there ever any mention of the possibility that this might actually be China or Japan or something? Not actually be China, but I think they're conscious that this is possibly a gateway to China or Japan.

They're still talking about this, by the way. The Columbus dream of getting to Asia is still very much alive and well of getting to Asia. They are still thinking about this as the gateway to Asia. They don't think it is Asia, but they think it's maybe the stepping stone to it. So the Tottenhacks have said this, which is obviously crucial. Then they do something else. They start to bring the Spanish. They say, look at all this lovely stuff we have, gold ornaments, gold tiaras, gold little figures, and all this kind of stuff. And Grialva, you can imagine him. He's been sent by his uncle and he's like,

brilliant. Whoa, this is it. And he says to their spokesman, their chief, you've got a lot more of this. And the chief, because he's showing off, because he wants to boast about the riches of his people and their land, because he's hospitable, he says, loads, we're rolling in it. I can get gold dust from the hills. He says, my men can bring you a pipe of gold dust as long and thick as a man's finger. He says, our streams run with gold. We can turn it into plates and bars and whatever you like. You just name it. Oh dear. Foolish, my friend. Very, very foolish.

And of course, Grialba, his eyes are glittering, Tom. And then something else really important happens. Another bloke arrives on the coast. And what's actually happened is, while the Spanish have been messing around, putting in for water, talking to Totonacs and whatnot, rumors of their coming have percolated inland. So at this great city that the Tottenhacks have mentioned, reports have arrived from the coast that there are strangers. They haven't come on canoes. They've come in these strange wooden, people say wooden mountains. Vast structures. Yeah. Vast structures, like huge temples made of wood that float in the water. They wear red cloths or hats on their heads to guard against the sun. Their skins are very white, much whiter than ours. They all have long beards, but their hair only comes down to their ears. Because Dominic, isn't it, there's a possibility that Multisuma has been

aware of these strange structures appearing along the coast even earlier? Yes. Because they've been going for quite a while. I mean, this is kind of like a president in the White House being alerted to the intrusion of unidentified flying objects off Jupiter or something. Exactly. Exactly. He undoubtedly, the Aztecs undoubtedly, will have heard reports of this. And in fact, the guy who arrives now on the coast has been sent from the city. He is a guy called Teocla Macazqui, and he has a brilliant title, Tom, which I envy.

His title is he's the keeper of the house of darkness. That's a great name. Now he arrives from this city that the Spanish have just heard reports of, and he has tons of gifts. He has gold necklaces. He has gold bracelets. He has feathers. He has jewels. He has himself rode out to the Spanish ship, the flagship. He arrives, he speaks the same language as the Totonacs, Nahuatl. And he says, here are these lovely gifts. Here you go. Very nice to meet you. The Spanish are delighted.

They're very hospitable. The girl says, will you have some nice turkey with us? Yeah, lovely. All good. They give him some wine. He loves the wine. He's delighted by the wine. He's never had anything like that before.

The Spanish, they've slightly run out of gifts now. So they give him some bead necklaces and some ship's biscuits, which is kind of a terrible gift. The lesser of two weevils. But he smiles weakly and says, thank you very much. Lovely to meet you. Of course, you're always welcome. And then off he goes.

Now, Grialva is sitting there on his ship and he thinks to himself, this has gone brilliantly. This is so much better than I could have dreamed of. There's a civilization there with cities. They have tons of gold. They all seem very friendly. This is great. So what he doesn't do, Tom, which is absolutely crucial, because otherwise we'd be doing all these podcasts about Juan de Grialva. Yeah.

He doesn't go after them to the city because he hasn't been told to. Well, but also, Dominic, I mean, it's not just that. To go herring off into the middle of a country with an enormous great empire and terrifying temples and they've seen all the blood and things. I mean, you'd have to be mad to do that or insanely brave. Or a gambler, Tom. So Grialva doesn't do that. He's only got a couple of hundred men and some dogs and stuff. He's not going to do that. That would, as you say, be mad.

He thinks, I'll have a little potter up the coast, carry on going, see if there's more stuff. However, in the meantime, he says to one of his lieutenants, a guy who will definitely be featuring a lot in this story, who is a guy called Pedro de Alvarado, who is a swashbuckling, a big, charismatic, flamboyant character. He says to Alvarado, who is a swashbuckling, a big charismatic flamboyant

character. He says to Alvarado, right, listen, you go back to Cuba, go to my uncle, show him all the gold, tell him I'm going to carry on and see what's further up the coast, but you go back there now. Alvarado does just that. He dates one of the ships. He goes off back to Cuba. He arrives in Cuba in the early autumn of 1518, an absolutely crucial moment in this. He goes to Santiago, the capital, shown in to see Velazquez, and he says, look at all this. This is what we've seen. And these are the blokes that we've met. This is what's going on. Velazquez is delighted. This is what he dreamed of. So what Velazquez needs is Cuba's all right, but it's not the bee's knees.

If he can get this land with all this gold, so much the better if he can stake his claim. However, he has to move quickly because some other Spanish entrepreneur will get there first. And he's particularly worried about the bloke who is on Hispaniola, the governor of Hispaniola, who is Diego Colon, who is the son of Christopher Columbus. He has to get there before Colon does. Right. And so this is what's going back to your early days of Facebook comparison. Right. Exactly. That you can't afford to let a competitor get a competitive advantage. Exactly. Exactly, Tom. So Velazquez thinks, Grialva's gone up there, I'll send another relative, someone I can rely on. He's got a

couple of cousins who've got their big estates in Cuba. He says to them, chaps, do you fancy going on the voyage? And they don't because they think I've already got my estate on Cuba. What do I need to go over there for? You know, it's very risky. But Dominic, is there a man of hunger, aptitude, ability lurking around who seems to be a bit of a loser and who therefore can be kept safely under Velazquez's thumb? That's exactly it, Tom. He doesn't want someone who's too good. He doesn't want somebody who's shown himself to be incredibly swashbuckling and enterprising. He wants somebody who's basically can be pushed around. Somebody who he knows... A functionary.

A functionary. Somebody who's good at form filling. As one of the accounts puts it, he needs a man of much heart, but little spirit. It's the greatest mistake that Velazquez would ever make because the man he picks is, of course, Hernan Cortes. And on that bombshell, I think we should draw a line there, Dominic, under our first episode. I know that you wanted to carry on for much longer, but I think we've really run out of time. But that's fine because we can have as many

episodes as we want and need to tell this story because it truly is, to reiterate, I think this is one of the supreme narratives in the whole of world history and well worth taking time over. So if you want to wait for the subsequent episodes, that's fine. If, however, you are a Spanish conquistador kind of consumer, you don't want to hang around. You want to get out there immediately. You want to get them at once. Then you can do that by joining the Rest Is History Club, where you will find all the episodes in this series waiting for you. So, you know, be a Cortez, go out, get them. And we will see you either in a few minutes or in a few days.

But either way, hasta luego. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

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