WHO WAS THERE FIRST?

He came with 500 soldiers.

The Aztecs had hundreds of thousands.

Within two years, the Aztec Empire was gone.

How?

Almost everything written about the Aztecs

was written after the empire fell.

By the people who defeated them.

Except one source.

🔊 What is the Florentine Codex?

In the 1500s, a Spanish friar named Sahagún spent decades interviewing Aztec elders who remembered the conquest. He wrote their accounts in Nahuatl — the Aztec language — alongside Spanish translations.

The Codex contains the words of Aztec elders who lived through these events. But those words were selected, translated, and edited by a Spanish friar, decades later. Is this a primary source or a secondary source?

THE INVISIBLE WEAPON

When the ships crossed the Atlantic, they carried something deadlier than any sword or cannon.

60,000,000

Estimated Indigenous population of the Americas — before and after European contact.