When Montezuma Met Cortes

The same is true of the names Montezuma and Moctezuma. As mentioned in the Preface, although they are the most common modern forms for the name, Spaniards and other Europeans used them as early as the sixteenth century. Various other renderings used in early sources, such as Muteeçuma, are reproduced in my translations. The emperor’s real name was Moteuctzoma, which in his own day would never have been uttered without the -tzin suffix to make it reverential: Moteuctzomatzin (“moh-teh-ook-tsoh-mahtseen”). After his death he began to be referenced with a second name, Xocoyotl, using the reverential form Xocoyotzin (pronounced “shock-oy-ott-seen,” and meaning “the Younger,” as another emperor named Moteuctzoma had ruled in the fifteenth century). It is not clear how often, if at all, the name Xocoyotzin was used in Montezuma’s lifetime.

Mesoamericans did not call themselves Nahuas or Mayas or any of the other ethnic group names we use. Nor did the Aztecs have a term that translates tidily as “Aztec Empire.” The Mesoamerican sense of identity was highly localized, tied to the city-state (in Nahuatl, the altepetl). Even the term Mexica was often applied specifically to those from the southern, dominant part of Tenochtitlan—people also called Tenochca, as opposed to the Tlatelolca of the smaller part, Tlatelolco. The closest that Nahuas came to using a phrase of group self-identity was nican tlaca, “here people” (or i nican titlaca, “we people here”). Outsiders—ranging from other Nahuas subject to the Aztecs to unconquered groups such as the Mayas—called the Aztecs Culua or Culhúa. This was a reference to the altepetl of Culhuacan, just south of Tenochtitlan (and today part of Mexico City); in Mesoamerican folk history, this seems to have been the town where the Aztecs settled before founding Tenochtitlan. But it also may have been because the people of Tetzcoco’s regions of the Aztec Empire called themselves Acolhua.1

fray Juan de Zumárraga arrives as Mexico’s first bishop

eline of key events may be useful.
I use the terms Aztec, Mexica (pronounced “mesh-EE-ka”), and Nahuas (“NA-wahs”) to refer to specific groups of people within the Aztec Empire. Some scholars refer to the empire as the Triple Alliance, in order to emphasize the roles played in the empire’s creation and maintenance by its three dominant cities: Tenochtitlan (the city of the Mexica, and the empire’s great island-capital), Tetzcoco (an equally splendid lakeside city), and Tlacopan (smaller but also significant); I use the phrase too (sometimes as “the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire”). Further explanation of ethnic terminology is included in the Appendix, along with a diagram aimed at helping those more visually oriented (I am one of you)

first published in Madrid in 1632.

Juan Miralles’s catalog of the many inconsistencies and outright errors that pepper the True History turned into a book-length study, Y Bernal Mintió [And Bernal Lied