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By Root 1028 0

clouds heavy with war. Don't forget that the foreigners were led by a woman, a Mexican woman, from a tribe hostile to our own, but of the same race. You say: Cortes, Cortes, and you think that Malitzin - Dona Marina, as you call her — was only his interpreter. No, she was Cortes's mind, or at least half of it: there were two heads directing the Spanish expedition; the plan for the Conquest arose from the union of a noble princess from our own land and a little man who was pale and hairy. Perhaps it would have been possible - I felt it would - to establish a new era in which the invaders' qualities - which I believed divine - would be fused with our own more ordered and refined civilization. Perhaps it would be we who absorbed them, with all their armour and horses and mortars, to appropriate their extraordinary powers for ourselves, to have their gods sit down to eat at our gods' banquet… MYSELF: Wishful thinking, Montezuma, so as not to see your prison bars! Yet you knew there was another way: you could have resisted them, beaten them, overcome the Spanish. That was the way your grandson chose when he organized a conspiracy to free you… and you betrayed him, you lent the Spanish what was left of your authority to quell your people's rebellion… Yet Cortes only had four hundred men with him at the time, he was isolated in an unknown continent; and what's more he had fallen out with the authorities of his own government across the sea. Of course, whether for Cortes or against, the fleet and army of Emperor Charles V's Spain was a threat to the New Continent… Was it their intervention you were afraid of? Had you already realized that the balance of forces was crushingly against you, that defiance of Europe was hopeless?

MONTEZUMA: I knew we weren't equals, but not in the way you speak of, white man. The difference that held me back was not something to be weighed or measured… It was not the same as when two highland tribes - or two nations on your continent - seek to dominate each other, and courage and strength in battle decide the outcome. To fight an enemy you must move in the same space as he does, exist in the same time. Whereas we watched each other from different dimensions, without quite touching. The first time I received him, Cortes violated all the sacred rules and embraced me. The priest and dignitaries of my court covered their faces before this scandal. But to me it was as though our bodies hadn't touched. Not because my position placed me beyond any alien contact, but because we belonged to two worlds that had never met, nor could meet.

MYSELF: King Montezuma, that was Europe's first real encounter with the Other’. Less than thirty years had passed since Columbus had discovered the New World, and so far it had been nothing but tropical islands and mud-hut villages … Now the first colonial expedition of a white army was meeting not the famous ‘savages’, survivors of a prehistoric golden age, but a complex and wealthy civilization. And it was precisely at that first meeting between our world and yours — I say your world as an example of every other possible world - that something irreparable happened. This is what I ask myself, what I ask you, King Montezuma. Faced with the unexpected, you were prudent, but hesitant and submissive too. And your approach certainly didn't spare your people or your country the massacres and ruin that have been going on for centuries. Had you met those first conquistadores with determined resistance perhaps that would have been enough to get the relationship between the two worlds going along different lines, to give it a different future. Warned by your resistance, the Europeans would perhaps have been more prudent and respectful. Perhaps there was still time for you to root out the dangerous weeds just sprouting in European minds: the conviction that they had the right to destroy everything that was alien to them, to plunder the world's riches, to spread the uniform stain of misery and wretchedness across every continent. Then the history of the world would have taken a different