Fall Asleep to the ENTIRE Story of Hernán Cortés — How One Expedition Changed the Americas Forever

You can now find me on Spotify 🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0JZW8iO... This video tells the story of Hernán Cortés — the nobleman from one of Spain's poorest corners who sailed to a continent he had never seen, forged alliances with peoples who had every reason to fear him, and in the space of two years brought down the most powerful empire in the western hemisphere. Born in Extremadura in 1485 to a family with distinguished ancestry and very little money, Cortés drifted through law school, notary training, and Caribbean colonial life before landing on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1519 with eleven ships, roughly five hundred soldiers, and no authorization from the governor who had sent him. He sank his own fleet to ensure there was no going back, founded a town to give himself legal standing independent of that governor, and began marching inland toward a city no European had ever seen. What made the conquest possible was not Spanish firepower alone — it was politics. The Aztec empire was vast and feared and resented by nearly every people living under it, and Cortés understood this from almost his first weeks on the mainland. The Totonacs, the Tlaxcalans, the people of Texcoco — one by one, for their own reasons, they joined him, and the force that ultimately besieged Tenochtitlan was overwhelmingly indigenous. La Malinche translated his words and his intentions into a language the empire understood. The Tlaxcalans provided the soldiers who fought on the causeways. Cortés provided the horses, the cannon, the steel, and the strategic intelligence to hold it all together — through the massacre at Cholula, through the taking of Moctezuma as a hostage, through the catastrophic retreat of the Noche Triste, and through the methodical, devastating eighty-day siege that ended on August 13, 1521, with Tenochtitlan in ruins. #HistoryForSleep #DriftThroughHistory #HernanCortes #AztecEmpire #SpanishConquest