Daily Inspiration Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes is selling awe as a weapon. The sentence reads like travel writing, but its real job is political: to render conquest not just plausible but urgent, profitable, and righteous in the eyes of a distant Spanish court. He doesn’t merely report a temple; he stages it as a spectacle so vast it defeats language itself. “No human tongue is able to describe” is a classic maneuver of empire: when words fail, the listener is invited to supply the missing enormity, and skepticism is quietly disarmed.

The choice of “temples” matters. Cortes frames Indigenous architecture through a familiar European category, making the unfamiliar legible while also positioning it for judgment. He offers reverence with one hand and pretext with the other: if the built environment is this sophisticated, then the civilization is worthy of extraction; if it is “temple” space, it can be recoded as idolatry needing correction. Either way, the narrator wins.

Then comes the clincher: measurement by analogy, “room enough for a town of five hundred families.” This is not neutral scale; it’s an accounting tool. Families are units of settlement, taxation, labor, and conversion. Cortes translates sacred space into colonial real estate, implying that the land can be repurposed, populated, and governed. The “lofty wall” becomes both marvel and metaphor: a bounded precinct inviting penetration, a city awaiting administration.

In context, this is a leader writing to justify an unauthorized gamble. He turns architecture into evidence: of wealth to seize, of enemies formidable enough to make his victory heroic, and of a world that, by being describable in European terms, can be claimed.