people, who had never seen or heard gunpowder before. One of these conquistadores was Hernán Cortés, the stiff-necked Spaniard who brought back huge quantities of gold from Mexico after his campaigns of 1519–21, in which his troops crushed and overthrew the Aztec empire, deposing and probably murdering its last emperor, Moctezuma II. Some of this gold was the treasure that Albrecht Dürer saw displayed in the Brussels town hall in 1520;
