Hernan Cortes

Tommy the Hamburger is here again, and this is Historical Depravity, where we dig up the polished bones of history, crack them open, and show you the rot they tried to dress up as greatness. They called these people kings, visionaries, captains of industry, patriots, reformers, whatever flattering bullshit helped the blood dry faster. I'm here to show you what they actually were. Hernan Cortes still gets protected by the conqueror myth. In that version, he was a brilliant explorer and military genius who toppled a mighty empire with nerve, steel, horses, and dazzling strategy. The story gets framed as one of almost cinematic daring: a few hundred Spaniards against impossible odds, a clash of civilizations, an inevitable transfer of history from one world to another. Even the bloodier versions often preserve the same basic posture. Harsh methods maybe, but epoch making achievement. Cruel by our standards perhaps, but a founder all the same. That version is colonial perfume sprayed over a mass grave. The real file is not audacious man changes history. The real file is conquest through deception, hostage taking, massacre, siege, looting, forced labor, and the opening of a colonial order that treated whole peoples as material to be subdued, converted, worked, and stripped. Myth says founder. Reality says a bastard who helped smash a civilization for empire, profit, and personal advancement, then got remembered as if the destruction itself were a kind of gift. That distinction matters because conquest histories get washed in grandeur faster than almost anything else. Once the horses, armor, maps, and impossible odds enter the room, people start talking like scale of ambition somehow redeems the butchery. They get hypnotized by the how and forget to stay angry about the what. Yes, Cortes was cunning. So what. Cunning in the service of betrayal is still filth. And betrayal is exactly where this story starts. Cortes did not arrive in central Mexico as an honest military antagonist announcing his intentions plainly. He advanced through a mix of opportunism, false assurances, hostage politics, coercive spectacle, local rivalries, and the extraction of information through interpreters and intermediaries. The whole enterprise depended on getting close enough, fast enough, to turn uncertainty into dominance. That is not noble encounter. That is predatory entry. Fuck me sideways, colonial history loves to retell this like a chess match. It was not a chess match. It was armed intrusion by men already trained to smell wealth, exploit division, and call theft providence. Cortes's background in the Caribbean matters because he did not invent his methods from nothing. He emerged from an early Spanish imperial world already soaked in enslavement, extraction, and devastation. The Caribbean had already shown what conquest meant in practice: forced labor, demographic catastrophe, religious cover, and gold lust dressed up as royal duty. By the time he moved on Mexico, he was not some innocent adventurer wandering into moral darkness. He was a product of a system that had already learned how to make domination pay. The alliance story requires special handling because it is one of the places defenders like to hide. Yes, indigenous enemies of Mexica domination joined with Cortes. That is historically real and important. But the existence of indigenous alliances does not cleanse the conquest. It shows that empires produce enemies and fractures. Cortes exploited those fractures brilliantly and ruthlessly. He did not arrive as a liberator committed to shared sovereignty. He used local grievances as fuel for a larger Spanish project that would consume allies too once they were no longer useful. That is what makes the alliance myth so dirty when simplified. It turns anti Mexica resentment into retroactive absolution for Spanish colonialism. No. One domination helping weaken another does not make the second domination just. Tlaxcalans and others were not signing up for a future of equal coexistence under mutually negotiated dignity. They were stepping into a power struggle that Cortes intended to own. Montezuma's seizure belongs in the center of the file because it captures the logic of the whole enterprise. A ruler welcomed or at least managed diplomatically becomes a hostage inside his own capital. That one move alone should permanently strip away the romance. Cortes did not win some clean battlefield triumph and then receive surrender. He inserted himself through uncertainty and then used capture, fear, and political dislocation to turn the city into a trap. And then comes the violence that defenders always try to shrink into military necessity. The massacre at the Toxcatl festival is one of the clearest receipts. Unarmed celebrants attacked during a sacred gathering, blood spilled into ceremony, terror detonated in the middle of public life. That is not the unavoidable friction of two formal armies colliding. That is conquest showing its actual face: fear the population, strike when vulnerable, then explain later that everything had become regrettably difficult. After the Spanish were temporarily driven out and regrouped, the siege of Tenochtitlan brought the real colonial method into full view. Cut off supplies. Break resistance. Destroy the city physically. Turn disease, alliance warfare, starvation, and continuous assault into one crushing machine. The glory version of the story wants to remember tactical brilliance. Fine. Tactical brilliance deployed to starve, batter, and annihilate a city is still tactical brilliance in the service of atrocity. And this is where the disease question has to be handled honestly. Europeans did not need to understand germ theory to benefit from epidemics they carried into immunologically vulnerable populations. Smallpox and other diseases devastated Indigenous societies on a scale almost impossible to think about cleanly. That devastation was not morally separate from conquest just because microbes did part of the killing. Colonial violence and epidemic collapse fed one another. Populations weakened by disease became easier to dominate, and domination worsened the social destruction disease had already started. That matters because the old myth loves to talk as if Spain merely arrived while disease did the real work. No. Disease was part of the catastrophe, but conquest shaped how that catastrophe became political subjugation, labor extraction, cultural destruction, and demographic collapse rather than shared human tragedy. The looting matters too. Gold, silver, tribute, temple wealth, elite goods, anything meltable or portable, all of it became part of the appetite. Cortes and the men under him were not abstract civilizational carriers. They were greedy as hell. Treasure was not incidental. It was one of the engines. The same people who later got described as founders were also men tearing apart a world and immediately translating its substance into movable wealth for crown, crew, and self. And once military victory was consolidated, the labor regime followed. Encomienda was not some picturesque colonial arrangement. It was domination structured through forced Indigenous labor, tribute exaction, and social hierarchy backed by violence. Conversion talk and imperial legality gave it a moral costume, but underneath sat the same fact: the survivors of conquest were to work under the masters who had broken them. If you destroy a political order and then yoke the remaining population into labor under your beneficiaries, that is not civilization. That is plunder getting organized. And that moral costume mattered because the Spanish crown and church language helped turn naked greed into supposedly lawful mission. Read the royal and religious justifications closely and you can watch the trick happen in real time. Gold becomes providence. Enslavement becomes order. Forced conversion becomes salvation. Territorial seizure becomes rightful sovereignty. That is one of the oldest imperial scams on earth: first crush a people, then write a holy and legal vocabulary explaining why the crushing was actually a gift. Cortes did not just wield swords and alliances. He wielded the confidence that empire could always hire priests and lawyers afterward to tell the story correctly. The cultural destruction belongs in the indictment no less than the killing. Temples, codices, ritual life, intellectual systems, elite structures, and political legitimacy all came under attack. The Spanish did not simply replace one set of rulers with another. They advanced a civilizational claim that Indigenous religion, knowledge, and sovereignty were inferior or demonic and therefore disposable. That is why colonial conquest always carries an extra layer of obscenity. It wants not only your land and labor, but the story of why you deserved to lose them. The victims here are not just the dead in battle or siege. They are the people dispossessed afterward, the survivors driven into tribute and labor, the communities hollowed out by disease and war, the social worlds broken by forced conversion and colonial administration, and the generations made to live under a political order born in invasion. The demographic catastrophe across central Mexico did not come from one cause alone, but conquest and empire shaped how thoroughly human life could be converted into loss. And then comes the false legacy, which may be the most enduring insult of all. Cortes becomes founder, builder of New Spain, world historical figure, bridge between civilizations. That language always asks the dead to disappear so the winners can sound profound. Mexico did not begin because a Spanish invader destroyed Tenochtitlan. Colonial rule is not automatically redeemed because a later society emerged from its violence. History produces successors all the time. That does not absolve the men who built succession out of fire. This is also why the claim that he merely acted according to the standards of his age is cowardly. His age absolutely rewarded conquest, greed, and Christian imperial arrogance. That is true. It is also true that people in his own world debated treatment of Indigenous peoples, colonial abuses, and the moral status of conquest. Everyone was terrible then is the refuge of people who want historical context to do the work of moral anesthesia. File Cortes correctly, then. File him not as a daring explorer or tragic founder, but as a conquest operator whose talents were bent toward seizure, manipulation, massacre, and extraction. File the hostage politics, the alliance betrayal, the Toxcatl slaughter, the siege of Tenochtitlan, the looting, and the labor regime as one continuous project. File the civilizational language as the lie that made the rest sound noble. And file the legacy myth for what it is: a way to make empire look like destiny and destruction look like birth. Cortes did not create a new world by brilliance alone. He helped wreck an existing one through force, opportunism, and colonial hunger, then let later centuries call the wreckage accomplishment. Schoolbooks, statues, and patriotic summaries helped with that laundering. They turned invasion into foundation myth and made Indigenous catastrophe sound like the cost of getting history started. That filth still lingers now. That is the depravity on record. The myth is smaller now, the stink is stronger, and the body count is still the body count. See you in the next grave I have to dig up.