Antiques.(differences between histories of Mexico and the US)(Brief Article)

What, then, must have been the emotions of the Spaniards, when, after working their toilsome way into the upper air, the cloudy tabernacle parted before their eyes, and they beheld these fair scenes in all their pristine magnificence and beauty! It was like the spectacle which greeted the eyes of Moses from the summit of Pisgah, and, in the warm glow of their feelings, they cried out, "It is the promised land!"

William Hickling Prescott,

History of the Con quest of Mexico, 1843

By the time the Pilgrim fathers were making their settlement in North America early in the seventeenth century New Spain already had a world famous metropolis--Mexico City Everything was centered in the city, from the government to the university that was chartered in 1551, only thirty years after Hernan Cortes captured the city, to the religious establishment and viceregal society.

Thomas Gage, a renegade English Dominican priest who was in Mexico City about 1625, described it as having a population of between thirty-five and forty thousand Spaniards and two or three times as many Indians. At least fifteen thousand coaches circulated through the streets, which were lined with fine shops, particularly goldsmiths. Both sexes were "excessive in their apparel," and precious stones and silk imported at great expense from the Orient were commonplace. Many gentlemen wore "a hatband and rose made of diamonds, and a hatband of pearls is common in a tradesman." There were about fifty religious establishments in the city, which Gage called "the fairest that ever my eyes beheld."

Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist, visiting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wrote that the viceroys erected buildings that "would have graced the finest streets of Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg." This grandeur was the legacy of the "enlightened despotism" of the viceroyalty. The viceroy "represented and incarnated the Majesty of the King." Like the proconsuls of ancient Rome, the viceroy governed, administered, judged, superintended ...