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what I now see in the absence of our lords, unbeknown to them. It is not just a fantasy, just a dream; I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’* Now he was claiming to have had a vision of some kind. Cortes must already have been thinking that chance, or God, was delivering the Mexican leader into his power. ‘For I have long (for five days, for ten days) been anxious to look far away to the mysterious place whence you are come, in the clouds, in the mists. So this is the fulfilment of what kings have said, that you would graciously return to your water, your high place, that you would return to sit upon your mat and your throne, that you would come.’† Too easy: Cortés was being recognised as a promised messiah, by none other than the leader of the country he hoped to conquer. ‘And now that has come true, you have graciously arrived, you have known pain, you have known weariness, now come on earth, take your rest, enter into your palace, rest your limbs; may our lords come on earth.’§

Coités was not slow to take advantage of this astounding appearance of fealty on the part of the Mexican ruler, but he did not simply accept the apparent submission to him personally, as perhaps he could have. What further behaviour, after all, might an Aztec expect of him, if he had claimed to be a returning god? And how would his own men react? Instead he reinforced Motecuhzoma’s wonderment at the miraculous origin of his mission, and wove in a little flattery at how far the ruler’s reputation must have travelled. But immediately Cortés appealed to his own duties to his own God and king as he saw them, imposing them heavily on his interlocutor. He even ended with a gesture at a sermon.

An eyewitness recounts:

Cortés replied through our interpreters [lenguas, ‘tongues’], who were always with him, especially Doõa Marina [Malin-tzin], and told him that he did not know with what to repay him, neither himself or any of us, for all the great favours received every day, and that certainly we came from where the sun rises, and we are vassals and servants of a great lord called the great emperor Don Carlos, who has subject to him many great princes, and that having news of Motecuhzoma and of what a great lord he is, he sent us here to see him and ask him that they should be Christians, as is our emperor and are we all, and that he and all his vassals would save their souls. He went on to say that presently he would declare to him more of how and in what manner it must be, and how we worship a single true God, and who he is, and many other good things he should hear, as he had told his ambassadors …*

This exchange in Nahuatl and Spanish records a moment of destiny when the pattern was set for the irruption of one language community into another. It happens to be exceedingly well documented on both sides, but it is not unique. These pioneer moments of fatal impact have happened throughout human history: as when, on 11 July 1770, Captain James Cook of Great Britain’s Royal Navy encountered Australian aboriginals speaking Guugu Yimidhirr in what is now the north of Queensland; or in the first century AD, when a South Indian named Kaundinya came ashore at Bnam in Cambodia, and soon married its queen, called Soma (or Liuye, ‘Willow-Leaf’, in the Chinese report), so transplanting Sanskrit culture into South-East Asia.

This book traces the history of those languages which, in the part of human history that we now know, have spread most widely. Somehow, and for a variety of reasons, the communities that spoke them were able to persuade others to join them, and so they expanded. The motives for that persuasion can be very diverse—including military domination, hopes of prosperity, religious conversion, attendance at a boarding school, service in an army, and many others beside. But at root this persuasion is the only way that a language can spread, and it is no small thing, as anyone who has ever tried deliberately to learn another language knows.

* Better known in the corrupted form Montezuma. Phonetically,