Veracruz

Veracruz is a port city on the Gulf coast of Mexico, near where Cortés landed in 1519. Sapiens uses the landing as the Aztecs’ first encounter with an unknown people.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind	Yuval Noah Harari	turning point	Beach where Cortés landed in 1519: the Aztecs’ first meeting with a wholly unknown people.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari (2014)

Source: Original · Readwise highlight

Within a century of the landing at Vera Cruz, the native population of the Americas had shrunk by about 90 per cent, due mainly to unfamiliar diseases that reached America with the invaders.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: In 1519 Cortés landed on the beaches of today’s Vera Cruz with about 550 men, claiming to be a peaceful emissary of the king of Spain. The Aztecs, who believed they knew the whole world, did not know what to make of the strangers and hesitated while he marched inland with local allies. Within a century of the landing, the book says, the native population of the Americas had fallen by about 90 per cent.
• Why it matters: It marks first contact in the book’s account of the Aztec collapse, told as an alien invasion.