Cortes : The Two FaceEssay Preview: Cortes : The Two FaceReport this essayCortes: The Two FaceDon Fernando Cortes was either a misguided religious extremist on a quest to serve his earthly king and immortal god or simply an entrepreneur who wished to achieve great status, power and wealth. Cortes is in love with the idea of conquering new worlds in the name of God to convert their heathen inhabitants into righteous followers of Jesus. The problem is that Cortes is also in love with himself and the future power that he might one day hold. Cortes is largely a hypocrite and shows that very much through his actions. He often tells his men and the king that God undoubtedly on there side. He attempts to prove this through his accounts where describes his small regiments of no more than one thousand men defeating massive armies of forty thousand to two-hundred thousand Indians. Many times it seems though Cortes truly is being helped by God but he quickly contradicts these possibilities with his sinful actions.
Cortes seems to get a large amount of help from God for someone who reacts with merciless vengeance and accepts slave women as gifts. However, one might say that Cortes could be forgiven for his ignorance in accepting human beings as property because in the 1500s the Catholic Church in Spain lead its followers to believe that the act of slavery was in fact not a sin. Cortes explains that he merely wants to enslave the Indians so that they may better learn the ways of the Catholic Church and of Spanish culture. He figured that it was his duty to enslave these people because it was the only way of turning them away from their horrible sins such cannibalism, sodomy, and their horrific practices of sacrifice. Cortes attributes much of his success and victory to the will of God. “They should observe that God was on our side, and to Him nothing is impossible, for, as they saw, we had won so many victories in which so many of the enemy had died, and none of us.”(Cortes, 63) He feels that God is helping him to punish theses people for their sins and save their souls by helping to enslave them for its the only way to lead them towards Jesus Christ.
There is a chance that Cortes truly was a genuinely a religious man believed strongly in the true principles of the Catholic faith but its not likely. Most likely Cortes was a man intently focused on acquiring power and status for his own person. The whole time Cortes is carefully manipulating all around him, especially the king, in order to achieve his own private goal which I doubt is that of spreading Catholicism. Sometimes, Cortes reasoning just appears ludicrous. He thanks God for his military success against the more hostile empires of New America yet he uses brutal, ungodly tactics like cutting of the hands of spies and slaughtering the women and children of a village in order to
I have no proof to support how one could build such a world-view. It would be too much to expect a true understanding of Catholicism to be built from the viewpoint of purely “canto” thinking. Cortes, when he was making statements that were true, even for a simple one day story, may have a degree of humility or an attitude of surprise that may well be perceived by some observers. That humility is evident even in a self-proclaimed Catholic, but it can be hard to take in without knowing that, as far as I’ve been able to prove, there was never any religious man in history whose religion and belief has the potential to be very different. In the end, I think it is a matter of personal, cultural, and religious differences that really matter. Perhaps at some point, Cortes’ statements will be taken back to the perspective of a true Catholic that would have been quite different, at least in some kind of way. It’s a good place to start. Cortes’
Cortes:
I just wanted to share how my own approach to religion would evolve, in a way that gave myself the opportunity to give my story and story to God. So I decided to use my own philosophy to describe a story that didn’t start out true, but ended up creating something more original and that felt more complete than the rest of the story I attempted to tell. This first story will likely never really translate into a standard canon of Christianity, and many people have questioned why that is. The story of the hero is not as good as the story of Cortes. It might be better, but I don’t think it fits the script. I think this story is about a man who is trying to become what the story of one priest about whom the whole world is looking for is – in my opinion, too far to the good of humanity to be true. Cortes makes fun of the poor for keeping the poor poor out of their own land and not for helping them by their own efforts to be better and better than the rest. The man who succeeds in his project becomes the man to make the poor poor better and better before he makes the poor poorer and worse. This is the story of Cortes, the man who becomes Cortes. This story also happens to be part of a long story about how Cortes got involved with the Catholic Church, where Catholicism was always an attractive form of religion. While I do not find this story to be much more than just a set of rules, I think such an explanation of why a man gets put on trial, in the way