In the Aztec telling of the Spanish conquest, accounts of earlier warnings or omens of disaster abound. One of these was described as follows in the Florentine Codex: “Ten years before the arrival of the Spaniards an omen first appeared in the sky like a flame or tongue of fire. . . . For a full year it showed itself. . . . People were taken aback, they lamented.”33 That ominous appearance was illustrated in the Duran Codex, presented here in Visual Source 13.1, showing the Aztec ruler Moctezuma observing this omen of death from the rooftop of his palace. Some scholars suggest that such stories reflect a post-conquest understanding of the traumatic defeat the Aztecs suffered, for other evidence indicates that the Aztecs were not initially alarmed by the coming of the Spanish and that, instead, they viewed the Europeans as “simply another group of powerful and dangerous outsiders who needed to be controlled or accommodated.”34