Cortés sought to explain the novelty that he neither feared nor worshiped

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 207.

Spanish individualism was evident throughout. The most unlikely came forward with ideas—some half-baked, like the veteran of the Italian wars who, as powder grew short, convinced Cortés that he could build a vast catapult (it would prove an utter failure). There was a familiarity between soldiers and general that was unknown among the Mexicas: no Aztec warrior might dare approach Montezuma or his successor Cuauhtémoc to propose a new approach to ship construction, tactics, and logistics. Just as Alexander’s “Companions” enjoyed a level of intimacy with their king unimaginable between Darius and his Immortals, so Cortés ate, slept, and was rebuked by his caballeros in a manner unthinkable among the Mexicas.

Westerners had ventured in non-Western lands to travel, write, and record since the emergence of the Ionian logographers of the sixth century B.C. Periegetics such as Cadmus, Dionysius, Charon, Damastes, and Hecataeus—ultimately to be followed in Asia and Egypt by explorers and conquerors like the Athenian imperialists, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and Alexander the Great—had written didactic treatises on Persia (Persica) and voyages outside Greece (Periploi). In contrast, during Xerxes’ great invasion of Greece (480 B.C.), the king apparently had little, if any, information about the nature of the Hellenic city-states.

This rich Hellenic tradition of natural inquiry was continued by Roman merchants, explorers, conquerors, and scientists whose canvas widened to include the entire Mediterranean, northern Africa, and Europe. Unlike the Aztec emperors, Cortés had the benefit of an anthropological tradition of written literature describing foreign phenomena and peoples, cataloging and evaluating them, and making sense of their natural environment that went back to Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Pliny—the age-old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is inexplicable to the god Reason, if only the investigator has enough empirical data and the proper inductive method. Montezuma either feared or worshiped the novelty that he could not explain; Cortés sought to explain the novelty that he neither feared nor worshiped. In the end that is one reason why Tenochtitlán and not Vera Cruz—let alone Seville—would lie in ruins.