Did Moctezuma think Cortés was a god? The 1519 meeting

Hernán Cortés first met the Mexica ruler Moctezuma II on 8 November 1519, at Tenochtitlan, the island capital of what later writers called the Aztec empire. Moctezuma received the Spaniards as honoured guests and lodged them in the city; within two years Tenochtitlan had fallen to Spanish forces and their Indigenous allies.

The conversation ran through an enslaved Nahua woman given to the Spaniards, whom they christened Marina. Nahuatl speakers added the honorific “-tzin” and, lacking an “r” sound, called her Malintzin, which the Spanish in turn heard as Malinche.

How much of the story comes from Cortés himself?

Nearly all of the famous parts. The only account of Moctezuma’s words written at the time is Cortés’s own report to Emperor Charles V, his Second Letter, in which Moctezuma delivers a long speech of greeting and hands over his kingdom. Historian Camilla Townsend argues the speech may be loosely based on something Moctezuma really said, in courtly Nahuatl style, minus the surrender. Cortés had marched inland without royal permission and badly needed the king to believe a lawful handover had taken place.

The same caution applies to the claim that Cortés seized Moctezuma one week later. That timing also comes from Cortés. Historian Francis Brooks found strong evidence against an immediate arrest, and the friar Diego Durán’s mention of eighty days of confinement would place it in April 1520.

The best-known myth of all, that the Mexica mistook Cortés for the returning god Quetzalcoatl, first appears in print in 1552, in a history by Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’s former chaplain and secretary, who never set foot in the Americas. Townsend finds no meaningful evidence that any story of Quetzalcoatl returning from the east existed before the conquest. In her reading, Moctezuma’s courtly speech carried a pointed message: he did not believe the Spaniards were gods.

Gómara’s “white gods” version nonetheless quickly became the accepted story, even among Indigenous writers after the conquest, and it still turns up in school textbooks presented as if it were true.