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What impressions did the Europeans have of the Aztecs that Cortés brought to Carlos V, and what became of them?

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Daniel: What impressions did the Europeans have of the Aztecs that Cortés brought to Carlos V, and what became of them? (Answer compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

This is a major subject in its own right. We quote here just a few brief excerpts from the excellent book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock (2023) - highly recommended for further reading:-
Cortés’s sensational return attracted a lot of attention and he was very well received. Charles [Carlos V] was understandably enthusiastic... and was so delighted with the [Aztec] entertainers that he sent them on to Rome to amaze Pope Clement VII.
Thanks to an Augsburg medallist named Christoph Weiditz, we are able to take a peek at these [Indigenous travellers] and witness their marvels... Finally, [at the end of the series of pictures] Weidnitz depicts an Indigenous woman, a striped sash tied around her head, with an extravagant, matching feather robe in red, white and green. This is a rare record of a female traveller (although in largely invented regalia), and the text reads: “In this manner go Indian women, not more than one has come out”.

[These pictures] remind us that they [the Nahua travellers] were there, and that people saw them, talked and wrote about them, painted them, even spoke with them. A small thing, but so often forgotten...
[However] Once they drop out of the limelight of court, the details become sparse, and sometimes contradictory, though they were much better treated than the vast majority of Indigenous people brought to Europe in this period.
Indigenous travellers were vulnerable to the germs that would attack their contemporaries across the Atlantic. Diseases such as measles, typhus, influenza, plague, dysentery and smallpox were all endemic and lethal to Native people, who lacked much immunity from previous exposure...
From the earliest encounters, Native peoples were seen by Europeans as a commodity to be exploited...

Picture source:-
• Image scanned from our own copy of Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin & Leipzig, 1927.

See others of Weidnitz’s illustrations: ‘Games and Other Amusements of the Ancient Mesoamericans’

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