Aztec leaders did not take Cortés for a god, a myth invented years later in Spain

historyWikipedia1519 · Mexico

Aztec leaders did not take Cortés for a god, a myth invented years later in Spain

the gist

A widely repeated story says the Mexica people of the Aztec Empire mistook Hernán Cortés and his landing party for gods, which made their conquest easier. Historians consider this a myth. The idea came from Francisco López de Gómara, a writer who never traveled to Mexico and produced his account in Spain while working for the retired Cortés, years after the conquest. Gómara's narrative shaped later European accounts and popular imagination. Contemporary sources describe the Mexica responding to the Spanish as foreign men with strategic and political motives. The myth persisted for centuries because it offered a neat explanation for an unlikely victory. Historians now treat it as a case of propaganda shaping the record of the conquest.

so what

The story shows how a single author writing for a patron can shape what generations believe about a historic event. It also changes how we understand the conquest, which was driven by alliances, disease and politics rather than supernatural mistake.

fun fact

Francisco López de Gómara never traveled to Mexico.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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