Fernando Cortez was a Spanish soldier. He was born in 1485 at Medellin and died in 1547. In 1504 he went to the West Indies, where the governor of Cuba, Velasquez, gave him command of a fleet which was sent on a voyage of discovery. Cortez left Santiago de Cuba in 1518 with eleven vessels, about 700 Spaniards, eighteen horses and ten small field-pieces. He landed on the shore of the Gulf Of Mexico, where he ordered the vessels burned so that his soldiers couldn't desert him. After inducing the Totonacs and Tlaxcalans to ally with him he marched towards Mexico where he was amicably greeted. He responded by seizing the monarch Montezuma and treating the people cruelly so that they resisted him. After a struggle in which 100,000 Mexicans reportedly died, the city was taken and shortly after the whole country subjugated. In 1528 he returned to Spain, only to return to Mexico two years later and remain there for a further ten years, discovering the peninsular of California. Returning to Spain he was neglected, and following an expedition to Algiers in 1541 he spent the remained of his life in solitude. Research Fernando Cortez
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