Conquistador is the story of a lost kingdom – a complex and sophisticated civilization where floating gardens, immense wealth, and reverence for art stood side by side with bloodstained temples and gruesome rites of human sacrifice. It’s the story of Montezuma – proud, spiritual, enigmatic, and doomed to misunderstand the stranger he thought a god. Epic in scope and as entertaining as it is enlightening, history at its most riveting. Conquistador is an astonishing work of scholarship that reads like an adventure thriller that records the last days of the Aztec empire and the two men at the center of an epic clash of cultures. Historian Buddy Levy offers a fascinating account of the first and most decisive of those encounters: the one between the impetuous Spanish adventurer Cortés and Montezuma, the ill-starred emperor of the Aztecs – clearly the wrong emperor at the wrong place at the wrong time. In Conquistador, Levy has an eye for vivid detail and builds a compelling narrative out of this almost unbelievable story of missionary zeal, greed, cruelty and courage.