“It is difficult for us to grasp the peculiar glamour and significance the yellow metal held for the conquistadores. We respond instantly to the cool irony of a Hernán Cortés explaining to a Mexican chief that Spaniards suffer from a disease of the heart, for which gold is the only specific; but in that coolness and irony, as in almost everything else, Cortés is atypical. —Inga Clendinnen,
Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570”