Hernan Cortes This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Mexico Travel Story - A Japanese Travel Experience

   www.travelmexicoplus.com/stori - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/21/2007   Last Visited: 4/23/2008

   As an act of piety, Cortes had all 400 destroyed andas though that were insufficient vowed that he would build a Christian church on the site of each razed temple. He actually succeeded in fulfilling nearly half his vow: there are now about 160 churches in and around Cholula (although the local people, emulating Rome, claim that the figure is precisely 365).
   
   Quetzalcoatl, wandering the central plateau, is said to have spent twenty years in Cholula, preaching and teaching, before he went on down to the coast and sailed away, with a promise one day to return. The pyramid erected here in his honor is the largest structure of antiquity in the New World and has dark underground passages that twist and turn but seem to have no end.
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   Oaxaca, incidentally, has given its name to the title conferred on Hernan Cortes as one of his rewards for conquering Mexico: he was known as the Marques del Valle de Oaxaca.
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   Hernan Cortes, commander of the first conquistadors, called the country New Spain because of its resemblance in climate, size, and fertility, he wrote to Old Spain.
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   The fact is, "Cortes was able to carry out his really awe inspiring feat only because the bulk of the Mexican people welcomed him as a deliverer from the unbearable oppression of the Aztecs. Indeed, when Mexico City fell, it took all his address to prevent his Indian allies from slitting the throats of his prisoners. In any case it is true that "Cortes put an end to Aztec power. And yet, while destroying that civilization (or, rather, its political and religious structure) "Cortes became the founder of modern Mexico, unless we are willing to deny all meaning to the word. For "Cortes was a builder, however much we may deplore the violence that preceded the building."
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   For one thing, there is the inspiring facade of the largest cathedral in the two Americas; there is the National Palace, which was built by Cortes on the site of an Aztec palace; there is the great Aztec calendar stone, which was found very near and which, for the visitor to Mexico, is a kind of loophole onto the past. He cranes his neck to peer through, to catch a glimpse of that tortured, vanished world smoldering in the burning sun.
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   Aztec tradition already current twelve hundred years ago spoke of a white, bearded man, tall and powerful, wise and skillful, who preached goodness and persuaded the people to righteousness."* It was this legend, of course, that was so useful to Cortes (without his knowing it) in accomplishing the incredible feat of subduing, with a small band of men, the enormous empire of the Aztecs.
   
   The temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacin is splendidly decorated with carvings of serpents' heads, for the name of the god is apparently a combination of the words quetZal (a bird famous for its sumptuous plumage) and coatl (the serpent). According to Toltec religion, which encompassed an astonishingly profound knowledge of astronomy, there occurred a highly critical time of danger for the nation every fifty two years, and the wise and benevolent Quetzalcoatl was the god who had the power to avert the danger. When the high priest, who was also an astronomer, standing atop the pyramid, observed that the stars were continuing to behave as they were supposed to, he announced the good news that thanks to Quetzalcoatl the time of danger was now safely past. The Plumed Serpent, to quote the book on Mexican myths, "is the most important of the gods worshipped by the ancient Indians." He is also as much a symbol of the country as the Virgin of Guadalupe; in fact, the two deities the bearded white god and the dark Indian virgin are the two faces of Mexico. Yucatan, to Acapulco
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   The ancient Indians had, of course, numerous legends associated with the White Lady and the Smoking Mountain, those two overwhelming, features of the Mexican horizon, and Cortes is said to have lowered a soldier into the crater of Ixtaccihuatl to get sulphur to replenish the Spanish supply of gunpowder during the arduous days of the conquest.
   
   Coftes is also, of course, as most schoolboys know, intimately associated with Cholula. Though we call Cholula a village, it is actually more like a cluster of villages scattered over the countryside. When Cortes passed through, on his way to the capital, his Indian mistress, a girl named Malinche, informed him of a plot against his own life and the lives of his men. In reply, he lured some three thousand Indians into precincts sacred to the Aztecs and there massacred them. Further, atop the great pyramid of Cholula he erected a giant cross.