Out of the eastern horizon, strange white shapes drift across the water. Not canoes. Not trading vessels. Floating mountains. What the peoples of the Americas witness that day will change their world forever, and it begins nearly three decades before Hernán Cortés ever sets foot in Mexico.
This episode traces the origins of one of history's most consequential collisions: Christopher Columbus's desperate campaign to win royal backing for a voyage into the unknown, the fall of Muslim Granada and the expulsion of Spain's Jewish community that reshaped a kingdom's finances and ambitions, and the brutal, disease-ravaged colonisation of Hispaniola and Cuba that followed.
Along the way, a young adventurer named Hernán Cortés cuts his teeth in the conquest of Cuba, before defying his own governor's orders and sailing west into legend.
What began as rumours of gold and vast stone cities beyond the horizon becomes the opening act of the conquest of Mexico.
Why did Spain gamble everything on Columbus's voyage? How did Europe's first moral debates over indigenous rights take shape? And what drove Cortés to risk disgrace, poverty, or death rather than turn back?
Join Joseph Parkinson as Ancient to Recent begins the story of Hernán Cortés and the conquest of Mexico.
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