Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
Remember the Maine?
By Hugh Thomas
Cortés, during his campaign to conquer the ancient empire of the Mexica—the word which anthropologists would now have us use when we talk of the Aztecs—wrote to the emperor Charles V that he hoped to offer him an empire as great as the one he already had in Germany. As we know, he was able to do it. His distant cousin, Pizarro, offered the emperor the Inca empire; and other conquistadors, such as Gonzalo de Quesada, were able to fill in territories lying between Peru and Mexico. Thus was founded one of the greatest of European political enterprises.
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