PSA: The Foundations Forum released its first essay today, you can read it here. Thanks as always for starting your day with the Best of the West.
Today's reading time is 4 minutes.
Spotlight: Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés, 1st Marquis of Oaxaca, by an unknown artist, oil on canvas, c. 1525
Hernán Cortés was a Spanish conquistador whose expedition to Mexico dramatically altered the course of world history. Born in Medellín, Spain, in 1485 A.D., Cortés sailed to the Caribbean in 1504 and later joined Spanish colonial efforts in Cuba. In 1519, however, acting largely on his own initiative, he led an expedition to mainland Mexico that would culminate in the fall of the Aztec Empire and the expansion of Spanish rule in the Americas.
Upon landing on the Gulf Coast, Cortés formed alliances with Indigenous groups hostile to the Aztecs, notably the Tlaxcalans. With the aid of his interpreter Malintzin (La Malinche), he navigated complex political dynamics and marched inland to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. In 1521, after intense fighting, famine, and disease, the city fell. The conquest led to the collapse of the Aztec Empire and the establishment of New Spain (of which Cortés would serve as governor) under the authority of the Spanish Crown.
Cortés’s campaigns contributed significantly to the expansion of Western European influence in the Americas. The incorporation of Mexico into the Spanish Empire connected vast new territories to global trade networks centred in Europe. Spanish became the dominant language, European legal and political systems were introduced, and colonial institutions were established. Mexico would become one of the wealthiest and most important territories in the Spanish Empire, supplying silver and agricultural goods that strengthened Spain’s position in Europe and supported the broader development of Western economic power.
Cortés’s victory also marked the end of the Aztec state’s system of ritual human sacrifice and constant warfare used to secure captives for religious ceremonies. Spanish rule replaced this system with institutions rooted in European law and Catholic moral teaching. (The Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City was built directly on top of the former Aztec Temple.) Missionaries worked to convert Indigenous populations to Christianity, establishing churches, schools, and charitable institutions that became central to Mexican society. Over time, a new, blended Hispanic-Indigenous culture emerged, laying the foundations for modern Mexico. Had Cortés not sailed, Mexico, and indeed all of South America, would likely be a different place today.
Verse: 'Forbidding Mourning’ by John Donne
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Written for Donne’s wife Anne in 1611 A.D., ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ is a rich expression of love. The occasion for the poem was an impending trip to Europe for which Donne would have to leave his pregnant wife behind in England.
Pensées
‘Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.’ — Aristotle, Ethics
Anyone can do something well once, but to be excellent consistently requires discipline and practice. Conversely, if we make a habit of missing the mark, there’s little chance of us succeeding on a fluke. The 20th century philosopher Will Durant, in summarizing Aristotle put it this way: ‘We are what we repeatedly do.’
Q: Are you practising any habits that you’d rather not be? What habits could you begin building that will make you excellent in your work and life?
Diversions
The first Foundations Forum essay is out. Peter Copeland writes on why a neo-liberal politics of normie-ism isn’t going to cut it.
This dumb phone is still smart when you need it to be.
Ever heard of the remarkably well-preserved ‘St. Bees Man’? He was likely Anthony de Lucy, a 14th century Knight Hospitaller.
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