By FIONA RAE
You might not know that slightly unkempt and rather ordinary-looking bloke wandering around Mexico in tonight's Conquistadors, but Michael Wood is part of a wave of academics who are making history on television The Next Big Thing.
"History has never been hotter," claimed the Guardian in a report on
the World Congress of History Producers - yes, there was one and it was in Boston last year.
Some of the programmes, such as Channel 4's Plague, Fire, War and Treason, we may not see here, but the BBC's History of Britain, fronted by another wildly enthusiastic academic, Simon Schama, made fascinating viewing here last year.
Wood is the maker of about 70 documentaries and the author of several books, including In Search of the Trojan War, In Search of England and In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great.
In the first of Conquistadors' four parts, Wood retraces the steps of Hernan Cortez, the Spanish self-made lawyer who financed his own expedition to the New World in 1519 and proceeded to take it for all it was worth.
"It's a story of almost incredible endurance, heroism, greed and brutality," begins Wood.
Cortez journeyed from Yucatan to Mexico, where he met the Aztecs. His lucky break, and one that is still talked and sung about in Mexico today, was being given a slave girl called Malinche.
The much-maligned Malinche is considered a traitor as she was Cortez's language link between the Mayans and the Aztecs.
When he met the Aztecs he asked them if they had gold, because he and his men had a disease of the heart that could only be cured by gold. The reply that they did sealed their fate. Cortez headed into the interior with his men to conquer the Aztec king Montezuma.
In a further stroke of luck, Cortez arrived in the exact year that an Aztec prophecy said the god Quetzalcoatl would return to take back Montezuma's throne.
Wood's love of a good phrase and his ability not to labour his explanations drive, as he puts it, "one of the greatest events in history".
As he travels through Mexico, meeting locals, eating with Aztecs and spending miserable nights in the pouring rain at 4000m, a whiff of the conquistadors' journey and victory is discernable.
Wood's other journeys follow Francisco Pizarro in Peru, the El Dorado expedition through Ecuador and Brazil and Cabeza de Vaca, who lived with native Indians for eight years.
* Conquistadors, TV One, 9.30pm
By FIONA RAE
You might not know that slightly unkempt and rather ordinary-looking bloke wandering around Mexico in tonight's Conquistadors, but Michael Wood is part of a wave of academics who are making history on television The Next Big Thing.
"History has never been hotter," claimed the Guardian in a report on
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