Daily Inspiration Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes is selling scale, and he’s doing it with the cool specificity of an inventory. “Fully forty towers” reads like an auditor’s tally, not a traveler’s awe. That’s the point. Numbers and measurements are a conqueror’s most persuasive adjectives: they translate an unfamiliar city into a format legible to distant patrons, lawyers, and monarchs who will decide whether this campaign becomes a career or a hanging offense.

The comparison to Seville is the rhetorical pivot. Cortes doesn’t just marvel; he calibrates. By benchmarking Indigenous architecture against the most resonant skyline his Spanish readers would know, he collapses the alien into the competitive. It’s not simply “impressive for them,” it’s “impressive by our standard.” That move carries subtext: the New World is not a peripheral wilderness but a rival center of wealth and civilization, which implies both prize and threat. If something can out-tower Seville, it can bankroll an empire - and it can justify the violence required to seize it.

Even the detail about “fifty steps leading to its main body” is strategic. It conjures bodily experience - the climb, the exertion - so the reader can feel the height without seeing it. Cortes is building credibility while building a case: these are not villages to be raided, but sophisticated polities to be taken, governed, and taxed. Admiration here doubles as appropriation. The towers rise in his prose so they can be lowered into Spain’s ledger.