Abstract

ALVAREZ, Salvador. Cortés, Tenochtitlan and the other sea: geographies and cartographies of the Conquest. Hist. graf [online]. 2016, n.47, pp.49-90. ISSN 1405-0927.

Much of Mexico’s national historiography has been constructed around the assumption that the capture of Tenochtitlan and the subsequent subjugation of the Aztec “empire” constituted, at one and at the same time, the objective and culmination of Hernán Cortés’ ambitions in New Spain. But this is simply a historiographic construction; indeed, one that deviates markedly from how the conquerors themselves conceived those events. This article explains why, despite the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and the appearance of Martin de Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio, which still depicted the “New World” as a land “separated” from Asia, in reality the conquerors and explorers of the first three decades of the 16th century always considered those lands as being geographically proximate to the Asian continent. As a result, neither Cortés nor his followers ever perceived the taking of the Aztec capital as the pinnacle of their wars of conquest. For them it was but one phase of a greater enterprise, one that they believed would take them much farther afield, as far as the so-called “Southern Sea” (mar del Sur) -the Indian Ocean- and from there to the rich islands of Asia and the China described by Marco Polo.

Keywords : geographies; cartographies; historiography; Cortés.

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