rs. Thus, their purpose seems to be somewhat different from that of the other writers. Their audience is their fellow Aztecs, though the act of writing down these accounts does ensure that their own version of events will not be entirely lost. In presenting the story of the conquest to the conquered, the Aztec writers employ an approach that seems to have little of the urgency of protest in it. The brutality of the Spanish conquest is widely known. Yet the Aztec accounts of these events seem rather flat and remarkably matter-of-fact in tone. When a kingdom is destroyed and its defenders massacred, Western conventions demand more fire in the telling and a clear statement of grievance.
The Aztec writers, however, did not share these conventions. These accounts were mainly written within the lifetime of those who participated in the events. They were drawn from personal observation or from eye-witness accounts or were recorded versions of oral accounts that had been in circulation since the conquest. As early written works from a culture with a lo
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