In February 1519 Hernán Cortés, accompanied by some 350 Spanish soldiers, set off from Cuba with a fleet of eleven ships, stopping at several places along the Gulf of Mexico before proceeding to march inland toward Tenochtitlán (teh-noch-TEE-lan), the capital of the Aztec Empire. Along the way, he learned something about the fabulous wealth of this empire and about the fragility of its political structure. Through a combination of force and astute diplomacy, Cortés was able to negotiate alliances with a number of the Aztecs’ restive subject peoples and with the Aztecs’ many rivals or enemies, especially the Tlaxcala. With his modest forces thus greatly reinforced, Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519, where he met with Moctezuma. Visual Source 13.2 presents an image of that epic encounter, drawn from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a series of paintings completed by 1560. They reflect generally the viewpoint of the Tlaxcala people.

The woman standing behind Cortés in Visual Source 13.2 is Doña Marina (sometimes called La Malinche), a Nahuatl-speaking woman who had been a slave in Maya territory and was given as a gift to Cortés’s forces in April 1519. She subsequently became an interpreter for the Spanish, as well as Cortés’s mistress. Doña Marina appears frequently and prominently in many of the paintings of the era. (See the Portrait of Doña Marina.)