Cortés vs Moctezuma: should an empire conquer or endure?

Your city dazzled me, but a throne built on tribute and dread is a throne waiting to be taken.

You call it dread; my people called it order, and my lake-city ran on canals while your ships rotted in the harbor.

Order that greeted strangers as gods invites its own undoing—I simply walked through the door you held open.

And through that door came not conquest but plague and ash; you did not defeat an empire, Cortés, you outlived one you could never have built.