Cortés, Hernando

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Cortés, Hernando (1485–1547), first of the Spanish conquistadores. Cortés overthrew the Aztec empire, conquering its capital, Tenochtitlán, in 1519 and deposing the emperor, Montezuma. In the poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’ (1817), Keats takes him as the type of an explorer looking at previously unknown lands, although in fact it was Balboa rather than Cortés who was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

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