Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Conquistadors are dark figures from a modern perspective, warlords from the Spanish

Empire who brought disease and violence to Central and South America.

Hernan Cortez is one of the most infamous, known for his defeat of the Aztec Empire.

But the reality of that history is more complicated than you might realize. He would never

have been able to defeat the Aztecs without the help of a different native tribe, the Laxcalanese,

and it was their incredible ingenuity that handed him the most important victory of the war.

Cortez was a man whose ego could not be contained. When he was sent to the new world, he was supposed to submit to the authority of the governor

of Cuba, who just wanted him to survey modern-day Mexico and report back.

Cortez ignored this order, and in 1519 took his men further inland to conquer the kingdom

of Tenochtitlan.

Some of Cortez men were loyal to the governor

of Cuba, and so Cortez ordered the men who were loyal to him to disassemble their ships so that the

Cuban loyalists couldn't sail back to Cuba. But Tenochtitlan proved more difficult to conquer

than Cortez had hoped. It was a massive sprawling metropolis, situated in the middle of an even larger lake,

Lake Texcoco. If the Spanish tried to use their horses to ride into the city, they would be

sitting ducks on the various bridges that connected the city to the mainland.

Cortez suddenly wished that he had all those ships that he ordered his men to disassemble.

But then again, it's not as if they could have carried them from the ocean to the lake. But it turns out

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