Moctezuma II
Death

In the subsequent battles with the Spaniards after Cortés' return, Moctezuma was killed. The details of his death are unknown, with different versions of his demise given by different sources.

In his Historia, Bernal Díaz del Castillo states that on 29 June 1520, the Spanish forced Moctezuma to appear on the balcony of his palace, appealing to his countrymen to retreat. Four leaders of the Aztec army met with Moctezuma to talk, urging their countrymen to cease their constant firing upon the stronghold for a time. Díaz states: "Many of the Mexican Chieftains and Captains knew him well and at once ordered their people to be silent and not to discharge darts, stones or arrows, and four of them reached a spot where Montezuma could speak to them."

Díaz alleges that the Aztecs informed Moctezuma that a relative of his had risen to the throne and ordered their attack to continue until all of the Spanish were annihilated, but expressed remorse at Moctezuma's captivity and stated that they intended to revere him even more if they could rescue him. Regardless of the earlier orders to hold fire, however, the discussion between Moctezuma and the Aztec leaders was immediately followed by an outbreak of violence. The Aztecs, disgusted by the actions of their leader, renounced Moctezuma and named his brother Cuitláhuac tlatoani in his place. To pacify his people, and undoubtedly pressured by the Spanish, Moctezuma spoke to a crowd but was struck dead by a rock. Díaz gives this account:

They had hardly finished this speech when suddenly such a shower of stones and darts were discharged that (our men who were shielding him having neglected for a moment their duty because they saw how the attack ceased while he spoke to them) he was hit by three stones, one on the head, another on the arm and another on the leg, and although they begged him to have the wounds dressed and to take food, and spoke kind words to him about it, he would not. Indeed, when we least expected it, they came to say that he was dead.

Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún oversaw the recording of two versions of the conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Tenochtitlán-Tlatelolco viewpoint. Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, which indigenous scholars composed under Sahagún's tutelage, is an illustrative, Spanish and Nahuatl account of the Conquest which attributes Moctezuma II's death to Spanish conquistadors. According to the Codex, the bodies of Moctezuma and Itzquauhtzin were cast out of the Palace by the Spanish; the body of Moctezuma was gathered up and cremated at Copulco.

And four days after they had been hurled from the temple, came to cast away Moctezuma and Itzquauhtzin, who had died, at the water's edge at a place called Teoayoc. For at that place there was the image of a turtle carved of stone; the stone had an appearance like that of a turtle.

History of the Indies of New Spain by Dominican friar Diego Durán references both Spanish and indigenous accounts of Moctezuma II's death. Durán notes that Spanish historians and the former conquistador he interviewed recall Moctezuma dying to Aztec projectiles. However, his indigenous text and a historical informant claimed that Cortés' forces stabbed Moctezuma to death. In other indigenous annals, the Aztecs found Moctezuma strangled to death in his palace.
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