At a glance, the fall of the Aztec empire in the early 16th century seems like one of history’s clearest before-and-after moments: a powerful empire crushed almost instantly by a handful of Spanish conquistadors. But that picture, vivid as it is, has long obscured the more complicated reality of what was destroyed, and what endured. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Caroline Dodds Pennock and scholar of civilisational collapse Luke Kemp examine why the Aztec imperial system fell so quickly, why ‘collapse’ is a loaded term, and what lessons it leaves behind.
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