Hernán Cortés was a Spanish naval commander and explorer, sent to the Americas as a conquistador, a conqueror in service to the Spanish empire. In 1519 Cortés and his soldiers landed on the Yucatán peninsula, in what is now the southern part of Mexico. His mission was to colonize the region in the name of the Spanish Crown. This task required them to subdue the most powerful empire in the region, that of the Aztec, a mighty warrior people in possession of a great deal of gold and silver. The Aztec regularly sacrificed prisoners from local tribes to their war god, Huitzilopochtli. In the local religion, Huitzilopochtli had argued over the morality of human sacrifice with Quetzalcoatl, a white-skinned god usually represented as a feathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl had been driven off by Huitzilopochtli, but it was said that Quetzalcoatl would return in a “year of 1-Reed”—occurring once every fifty-two years—to reclaim his dominance of the region. The year 1519 happened to coincide with the Aztec “year of 1-Reed.” Although historians have begun to dispute the idea, it has long been believed that the Aztec took the lighter-skinned Spanish warriors to be representatives of Quetzalcoatl.