Reign of Blood

We left our story in 1518.  Diego Velasquez de Cuellar is the governor of Cuba and de facto the most powerful man in Spain’s New World colonies, and he’s brought the business of conquest under his control. He’s set his sights on the Yucatan, a peninsula to the west of Cuba which, unbeknownst to him, is just the tip of iceberg. But Velazquez has a problem.  He needs people who are capable, experienced, and wealthy to lead a series of expeditions he hopes will end with him at the head of a new phase of conquest and expansion. . He also needs men who are loyal to him to stick to the plan. After the first expedition ends in disaster, the second expedition under Juan de Grijalva has made contact with emissaries from the long-rumored powerful king from a great city to the west. Now, against the advice of his closest lieutenants, he’s tapped Hernan Cortés to lead the third expedition, a decision he would soon regret. Meanwhile, in Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma learns of these mysterious strangers from beyond the the great ocean probing the eastern coast of Mexico, and he begins taking steps to engage them.

This is the first side bar episode, and the goal for these is exactly what the name suggests: to pull out of the main narrative so we can focus on one very important aspect of the story. For this first sidebar, we’re going to dig into the source material we have for the Conquest. In History, sources are everything, and they come in many forms. There are primary sources, of course, accounts of people who witnessed events. There’s also archeology, of which there has been an abundance in recent decades. And there’s the body of scholarship including complete historical narratives in English as old as 175 years and as recent as 2023. We’ll cover all the source materials that fall into each of these categories, including all the important books in publication today.

In Episode 5, we explore the rise of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon as they emerge from the Reconquista as the most powerful political force in Europe. We'll explore how an Italian sailor based in Portugal devised a plan to sail west to Asia and corner the lucrative spice market, convinced Queen Isabella of Castile to fund and equip him with three ships to make the voyage, and how those events led to the birth of the Spanish empire in the Americas almost by accident. Lastly, we'll meet Hernan Cortéz, a notary from a minor noble family from Extremadura in western Castile, who arrives in the new Spanish Caribbean colonies in his early 20s and quickly makes a name for himself.

In the 4th installment of Reign of Blood, we dive deep into the history of the Iberian Peninsula – modern day Spain and Portugal –  and discuss the origins of the Spanish civilization that would come to dominate the world. We’ll spend a good amount of time on the “Reconquista,” –  the slow, centuries-long advance of the small Christian kingdoms of northern Spain into Muslim controlled Spai to the south – and we’ve explore how the experience of the Reconquista shaped the politics and identity of the people and the institutions of those kingdoms on the eve of their journey west to the New World.

We pick up the story of the Mexica in 1425 and follow them on their astonishing rise to dominate the other, more powerful Aztec city states – and eventually all of Central Mexico. We’ll chronicle the reigns of the emperors of the new Triple Alliance that emerges after the war against the Tepanecs, and we'll meet the great Aztec heroes from Nezahualcoyotl, the longtime Acolhua king of Texcoco, as well as Ahuitzotl, perhaps the greatest Mexica emperor of them all. And we’ll bring the story of Aztec civilization to its apex in the early 1500s under Emperor Moctezuma II, as he concentrates power over the Empire of the Triple Alliance exclusively within the Mexica nobility.

In this second episode of Reign of Blood, we’ll take a deep dive into the origins and the early rise of the Mexica, the tribe of Aztecs who were the last to migrate out of the mythical land of Aztlan – according to their origin myth – and into the Valley of Mexico. We’ll separate the history from the legend and tell this astonishing story of an unsung group of nomads who overcame tremendous obstacles to build a city in the middle of a lake and set themselves up for future greatness.

In the opening episode, we take a 30,000 foot view of Mexico at the time the Spanish arrive around 1500 AD. We’ll discuss all of the major players on the Mesoamerican mainland, their different cities, cultures, and languages and how they all interacted and evolved to create the world the Spanish found once they landed.

There’s a small monument in square in modern-day Mexico City that commemorates the spot of the final battle between the Spanish and the Aztecs, and it reads, “On 13 August 1521, the City of Tlatelolco, so heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, finally fell into the hands of Hernán Cortés. It was neither a victory nor a defeat, but the painful birth of Mexico and all Mestizo people.” Reign of Blood is the story of this ‘painful birth,’ an epic that history has recorded as the Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs. It’s the seminal drama of the modern world, and 2021 marks the 500th anniversary of its culmination It’s the story of the collision of two remarkable civilizations, each ascendant iterations of the ancient religious, political, and economic institutions of their respective continents. It’s the story of the flawed men and women fated to negotiate this collision – their lofty ambitions, their petty personal rivalries, and their struggles to overcome the limits of their own imaginations. And it’s the story of blood – the blood that Mesoamerican peoples believed was a gift from the gods, and what those same gods demanded back through human sacrifice to keep their universe in balance; the blood flowing through Spanish veins that they believed made them superior to their New World adversaries; the blood of Christ so central to the Catholic faith that zealous Spaniards and a ruthlessly righteous church sought to spread across the continent; and the oceans of blood that were spilled during this “painful birth of Mexico and all Mestizo people.”