500 Men vs an Empire: Hernán Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico | Part 4 | Ancient to Recent | Episode 60

The broken spear lies on the road.

We have torn our hair in grief.

Florentine Codex For days smoke drifted above the waters of Lake Texcoco.

Great black columns rose from the charred timbers of what had once been the Rome of the Americas.

The broad avenues that had bustled with merchants, nobles, and priests lay buried beneath shattered stone.

The canals, once crowded with thousands of canoes carrying flowers, food, and every luxury imaginable, were choked with rubble, broken timber, and the dead.

where the beating of the temple drum had once echoed across the lake, there was now only the crackle of smouldering ruins.

The great pyramid still stood, but scarred by cannon fire, blackened by smoke, and surrounded by streets reduced a little more than fields of broken masonry.

The smell was beyond description.

Burned wood, rotting flesh, stagnant water, the sweet, sickly odour of death hung over the valley.

Those few inhabitants who remained, wounded, starving, weakened by disease that caused fits of coughing and left great marks upon their body that left them writhing in agony.

Those that could still summon the strength to pull themselves to their feet wandered silently through the ruins searching for missing relatives, gathering what little food could still be found and trying to make sense of a world that had ended in the space of a few terrible weeks.

Only months earlier, this had been a great metropolis, a city that had astonished the strange men whose coming had thrown the cosmos into anarchy.

The gods who drank daily of the blood sacrifice required to maintain the order of the universe had fallen.

The fifth sun had risen.

The world had ended.

The broken spear lies on the road.

We have torn our hair in grief.

Florentine Codex For days smoke drifted above the waters of Lake Texcoco.

Great black columns rose from the charred timbers of what had once been the Rome of the Americas.

The broad avenues that had bustled with merchants, nobles, and priests lay buried beneath shattered stone.

The canals, once crowded with thousands of canoes carrying flowers, food, and every luxury imaginable, were choked with rubble, broken timber, and the dead.

where the beating of the temple drum had once echoed across the lake, there was now only the crackle of smouldering ruins.

The great pyramid still stood, but scarred by cannon fire, blackened by smoke, and surrounded by streets reduced a little more than fields of broken masonry.

The smell was beyond description.

Burned wood, rotting flesh, stagnant water, the sweet, sickly odour of death hung over the valley.

Those few inhabitants who remained, wounded, starving, weakened by disease that caused fits of coughing and left great marks upon their body that left them writhing in agony.

Those that could still summon the strength to pull themselves to their feet wandered silently through the ruins searching for missing relatives, gathering what little food could still be found and trying to make sense of a world that had ended in the space of a few terrible weeks.

Only months earlier, this had been a great metropolis, a city that had astonished the strange men whose coming had thrown the cosmos into anarchy.

The gods who drank daily of the blood sacrifice required to maintain the order of the universe had fallen.

The fifth sun had risen.

The world had ended.