should be known with regard to the government of New Spain. The whole of his time was occupied for the present in reclaiming a great part of his possessions which had been sold to raise a fund that prayers might be offered up in the churches for his departed soul; but this was done with an evil design, that people might think he was really dead. All this property, besides that which had been set apart for the masses for the repose of his soul, was purchased by an inhabitant of Mexico named Juan Caceres the wealthy.
Diego de Ordas finding that Cortes, since the arrival of Leon, had lost his former authority, and that many persons had even the shamelessness to neglect and make him feel the little estimation in which they held him, he, with his usual dexterity of mind, profited by this circumstance to regain the good graces of our general, and advised him to assume all the outward splendour of a grandee, to receive his visitors seated on a canopied throne, and not to allow himself to be called merely Cortes, but to be addressed as Don Hernando Cortes. He at the same time particularly reminded him that the factor was a creature of the comendador-mayor Don Francisco de los Cobos,