Colonial Americas

The name of the man who ruled the Mexica Empire at its zenith translated from Classical Nahuatl as "he frowns like a lord," or "he who is angry in a noble manner." Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, who took the throne around 1502…

Before he dismantled the largest empire in the Americas, Francisco Pizarro was an illiterate youth from Trujillo, Spain, born into poverty to a family of pig farmers.

Before he was a marquis, Hernando Cortés was a mutineer.

An eagle diving toward its prey is the image carried in the name of Cuauhtémoc, the last tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, who inherited a Mesoamerican empire already fracturing from within and besieged from without.

The impulse to sail beyond the horizon transformed a fragmented planet into a single, interconnected world-system, binding previously isolated civilizations together for the first time.

The sovereignty of the Inca Empire unraveled not from a lack of strength, but from the bitter friction of sibling rivalry.

An English nickname, "Book Man," traveled with an enslaved Muslim cleric from the West African coast of Senegambia to the sugar fields of the Caribbean.