Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode seven, The City of Dreams. Thank you. In the year 1526, an investigation was launched.

Its scope was massive. Its purview international.

Judges and clerks and lawyers gathered in musky, candlelit courtrooms on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

From the seat of the blossoming Spanish Empire in Castile to its most recent possession of New Spain, the area we now call Mexico,

witness after witness swore oaths before God and gave their testimony.

Priests and mercenaries, sailors and soldiers, great lords and dawns, interpreters,

artists, cooks, even laborers, and they all had one thing in common.

They all had been eyewitnesses to arguably the single most pivotal event in North American

history.

And as the lawyers scribbled down each man's words, compiled their documents, and built their

cases, one name came up again and again and again.

Cortez.

It was a name some of the witnesses despised and others worshipped. Everyone seemed

to have a story to tell about this man Cortez. Some gave accounts of monstrous crimes against

humanity, of cruelty and deception and murder. Others told stories of bravery, audacity,

and cleverness, of superhuman guile and bottomless guilt.

One man wrote that Cortez had, quote, no more conscience than a dog, end quote.

But what the lawyers wanted to know, what they were trying to figure out, is what exactly

had happened just a handful of years earlier.

How had this nobody, a poor aristocrat of no real importance, who'd never commanded men in

battle before in his life, brought a 3,000-year-old culture to its knees?

...