When Hernan Cortes came before God for his particular judgment he, no doubt, would have had many sins to answer for. However, the ending of the Aztec Empire, and the massive human sacrifices that was its core institution, would not have been among them.
What he and his men accomplished was simply astounding from a military point of view against odds so high as to verge on the ridiculous.
Hernan Cortes, one of the most fascinating of the Great Captains of History! I have always thought these words from Lepanto were perfectly applicable to him:
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces – four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
Cortes was a Crusader. Always greedy for gold and lands and titles, he was no less greedy for the conversion of souls to Christ. He pleaded with the Spanish Crown to send out priests who loved not wealth and ease, but who would meekly preach the Gospel and bring the souls of the Indians to Christ. As a ruler he stressed fair treatment of the Indians, and it was noted at the time that although he often came into conflict with Spanish settlers, the Indians usually liked and respected him, and looked to him for protection. Endlessly resourceful and endlessly optimistic, he pulled off the equivalent of a military miracle and helped establish the foundations of a new civilization.
Las Casas, who was ever the foe of Spanish mistreatment of the Indians, had nothing but good to say of Cortes:
“And as to those who murmur against the Marqués del Valle [Cortés], God rest him, and who try to blacken and obscure his deeds, I believe that before God their deeds are not as acceptable as those of the Marqués. Although as a human he was a sinner, he had faith and works of a good Christian, and a great desire to employ his life and property in widening and augmenting the fair of Jesus Christ, and dying for the conversion of these gentiles… Who has loved and defended the Indians of this new world like Cortés?… Through this captain, God opened the door for us to preach his holy gospel and it was he who caused the Indians to revere the holy sacraments and respect the ministers of the church.”
What!!? Peaceful indigenous peoples living alone attacked ruthlessly by racist Europeans!
Reparations have already been made to them LKL.
62 million innocent hearts ripped apart in Americas pyramid. Planned Pyramid and others like it. Offered up to the very same false God that the Aztecs used.
The God of unholy fear.
The Spanish colonization of the New World has long been demonized, first by the Black Legend and later by revisionist “historians”.
Spain freed itself from the Muslim Moors and immediately after spread the Faith to the New World. Should I reach my retirement one of my hopes is to travel the US in a classic Mustang and check out the ancient adobe churches in the Southwest US.
Cortes deserves much better press than he gets. I was not aware of the encomium from De las Casas. For me, that settles it.
And even without that, he is an exemplar of refusing to admit defeat under any circumstances. And because he so refused, he won.
This is where I sigh again at Aztec Batman…
Cannibalism of the victims was a sideline of the Aztecs. Saint Peter Claver who ministered to the slave ships’ victims said that the slaves, one third of whom died in passage, believed that they were to be cannibalized.
It seems that cannibalism was routine in Africa as well.
Without God, every evil is accepted.
Cortes, like many, was a mix of the righteous and the profane. He does not fare well under today’s secular version of woke morality but then the killing of the unborn did not fare well in his time.