War & Peace Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes is doing something more strategic than describing Aztec religion; he is staging a moral contrast that makes conquest sound like cleanup. The line inventories idols the way an accountant tallies liabilities: one for war, one for labor, one for every desire. That repetition is rhetorical pressure. By the time he lands on "everything", the spiritual world he is depicting feels not rich but cluttered, transactional, almost bureaucratic. The subtext is clear: these people are governed by superstition, their devotion scattered across a marketplace of gods, so Spanish rule can be framed as rational, unified, and therefore legitimate.

Context does a lot of the work. Cortes is writing for power: the Spanish Crown, church authorities, a European readership primed to hear paganism as both threat and opportunity. The intent is to translate an unfamiliar cosmology into categories that justify intervention. By emphasizing petitions for "victory" and "prosperity", he aligns indigenous worship with the very things empires care about: war and extraction. It makes the Aztecs look like they worship conquest and productivity, which conveniently mirrors Spain's own priorities while casting them as spiritually corrupted for it.

The phrasing "honor and serve" is the quiet hinge. Service belongs to subjects; Cortes implies they are already trained for subordination, just misdirected. Convert the object of service, the logic goes, and you can convert the society. It's theology as a blueprint for administration, sanctifying violence by narrating it as salvation.