The Conqueror Who Could Not Return: Hernán Cortés

di IOAKIM IOAKIM (Autore)

Ioakim Ioakim, 2026

He died in a house near Seville on December 2, 1547, sixty-two years old, waiting for the audience with the king that the king kept not granting. He had conquered Mexico. He had destroyed the most sophisticated civilization in the Americas. He had sent the treasure of the Aztec empire to Charles V and built Mexico City on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. He had sailed back to Spain three times, and each time the court received him with the honors due a great conqueror and sent him back with diminished authority. The third time he came back he did not go back to Mexico. He died near Seville waiting for the audience. The audience was never granted. He is Hernán Cortés. The conqueror who could not return. The Conqueror Who Could Not Return: Hernán Cortés is a literary novel that enters the consciousness of the man who arrived in a world he did not understand and destroyed it — who came from Extremadura with five hundred and eight men and sixteen horses and burned his ships on the Mexican coast and marched to the most magnificent city in the Americas and spent two years destroying it and twenty-six years discovering that the king does not need the man who made him powerful. The book follows the full arc of a life organized around the thing that could not be undone. Extremadura and the minor nobility that produced the disproportionate share of the conquistadors. The expedition to Mexico in defiance of the governor who tried to stop it, the burning of the ships, the march through the mountains toward Tenochtitlan. The first sight of the city in the lake — the silence of the soldiers who had no words for what they were seeing. Moctezuma's reception, the hostage-taking, the Massacre of Toxcatl that provoked the uprising, the Noche Triste when more than half the force died on the causeway in the rain and darkness. The rebuilding of the force, the brigantines on the lake, the seventy-five-day siege that consumed the city block by block. Cuauhtémoc's capture and torture. Mexico City built on the ruins. Malinche — the indigenous woman given to him as a slave who became the interpreter and the advisor whose linguistic mediation made the conquest possible, who bore his son, who was left behind when he sailed to Spain. The letters to Charles V, the political argument for the retroactive ratification of the unauthorized conquest. The returns to Spain that produced the title and the material wealth and the consistent denial of the political authority. The king who accepted the treasure and withheld the governance. The question the novel organizes itself around: what does it mean to have done the thing that cannot be undone and to discover that the thing has made you permanently unnecessary? The Conqueror Who Could Not Return is the fifth book in The Legend Series by I. Ioakim.

• Autore: IOAKIM IOAKIM
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Ioakim Ioakim
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798237391831