I am not an expert in pre-colonial or Latin American history, but I do consider myself to be well educated on the scope of the bibliography of human history. I was, therefore, profoundly surprised to discover this text, which I had never remotely heard of before, but which offers one of the most singular and dramatic pre-history narrative accounts of first contact I've ever read. Truly this should be considered one of the foundational documents for the whole field of history because of its unique perspective and scope, and yet not once during my (expensive) college education in History did I hear anything about the existence of a historical account written in native language about the arrival of Europeans in America.

In many ways this reminds me of Herodotus' "Histories," being that it is comprised of accounts, written down by natives at the behest of interested interviewers, within a generation of the actual events surrounding the fall of Tenochtitlan. Similar to the "Histories," then, it represents not so much the first "history" text as it does the first "oral history" text of the New World - that is, a living document colored by the perspectives, hindsight, and political considerations of those interviewed. Nonetheless the documents are peerless in what they represent - actual, non-European perspectives on what is surely one of the most pivotal moments in human history. And we never once spoke about this in four years (though we read Herodotus about a hundred times).

Reading this, it strikes me how heavily the field concerning itself with European colonization of the Americas has been colored by the techno-cultural interpretations of those conquests popularized in "1491" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Certainly, the Aztec authors of these texts recall with appropriate awe the first sightings of the Conquistador "deer," which they ride into ferocious battle; and certainly, the arrival of a devastating plague alongside the Spanish does nothing to help the Aztec cause. But before all of that, these texts paint a fascinating anthropological portrait of a culture utterly alien in orientation and organization to that of the arriving Spanish, and indeed to our own modern one. Reading this history, one realizes that the fall of the great city had less to do with horses or smallpox than it did with the decisions made by a single man - Monteczuma - who chose to welcome the Spanish as gods, then doubled down on that decision even as they acted increasingly hostile, violent, and rapacious, against the advice of his advisors and other kings. Indeed, up until his death Monteczuma was willing to suspend any amount of disbelief to peaceably submit to Cortez, long after his people and his military leaders deserted him and launched a too-late effort to exterminate the hostile invaders.

The "great man" theory of history is in little repute these days, and yet in this story one sees echoes of our present moment, as great crises highlight just how crippling it can be to have the wrong man in power at the wrong moment. At the end of the day, it's hard to imagine Diamond and Mann are wrong about the structural elements which would lead to an inevitable European takeover of the continent; and yet, one still wonders whether Monteczuma, had he been another man, might have turned Cortez into the first Custer.