When Montezuma Met Cortes
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Kislak Painting #2 thus promotes a core theme of Conquest mythistory: Spanish superiority and the indigenous perception, even acceptance, of that superiority as something supernatural, possibly divine and providential. Such a vision of the story, an encounter of civilization and barbarism with its inevitable outcome, is clearly a setup for the Meeting. That is no doubt why the artist leapt straight to that moment for Painting #3. As a result, the battles outside Tlaxcallan and the massacre in Cholollan (today’s Tlaxcala and Cholula) are not depicted in the painting series; this was a tidy way to avoid events that were problematic and usually presented in the traditional narrative in contrived, contradictory ways (detailed in later chapters). Instead, Tlaxcalteca warriors appear in Painting #3 as a background presence, allies hidden behind advancing conquistadors. (If there is any echo in this painting of what had happened in Cholollan, it is in the passivity of Montezuma’s entourage, portrayed as dignitaries and servants, not a force of warriors; readers of Díaz, Solís, and their ilk would have learned that the massacre intimidated the Aztecs and their emperor into subjection.)13
Cortés’s pose in Painting #3 is intended to illustrate an oft-repeated detail of the Meeting, that the Spanish captain attempted to embrace Montezuma, but was stopped from doing so by his brother or other noblemen (here it is the emperor himself whose hand seems to gently dissuade Cortés from coming closer). That moment of physical awkwardness likely did take place, and therein lies its function: as a tiny element of verisimilitude, it helps persuade the viewer of the truth of the entire scene and its larger meaning—Montezuma’s surrender, Cortés’s triumph.
Montezuma’s appearance, his features and clothing, are pure European fantasy and imagination—combining visual stereotypes of the “Orient” and of the American “Indian”—but the artist invented a recognizable figure who is also at the center of Painting #4 (also in our Gallery). The busy composition of the fourth painting features dozens of feathered Aztec warriors in the foreground, beneath a wall; on top of the wall is a crowd of Spaniards, with Montezuma in their midst. His gesture is the same as in the previous painting, only this time he is gesturing to his people to stop the fighting that has overtaken Tenochtitlan.14
Note that in the leap from Kislak Painting #3 to #4, the action has jumped again, across the 235 days in which the Spaniards (according to the traditional narrative) lived in the royal palaces in Tenochtitlan, effectively controlling the empire through the emperor—whom Cortés, in another brilliant move, had taken prisoner while also developing a close friendship with him and convincing him to make a notarized statement of surrender to the Spanish king. Spanish-Aztec détente had collapsed when Pedro de Alvarado attacked Aztec celebrants during a monthly religious festival, while Cortés was on the coast confronting the expedition sent by Velázquez. Cortés returned to war in Tenochtitlan. As Painting #4 picks up the story, the unruly, barbarous Aztecs have abandoned their once-revered leader and are hell-bent on expelling the invaders. The caption reads: “Finding themselves surrounded in the Mexican palaces, the Spaniards make Montezuma appear on a rooftop and from there calm them [the Aztec mob], but an Indian threw a stone and others shot arrows, which killed him.”
The four canvases that constitute the second half of the Kislak Painting series follow the traditional narrative’s emphasis on loss and recovery, catastrophe and redemption. Paintings #5 and #6 (not included in the Gallery) depict two moments in July 1520 when the Spaniards bravely and miraculously escaped destruction at Aztec hands. The defeat during the Noche Triste (as Spaniards came to call it; the Tragic Night) is composed as a heroic battle scene, with Olid, Sandoval, and Alvarado on horseback in the foreground, glancing back at the tangle of Aztec and Tlaxcalteca warriors. Cortés is a smaller figure, but dead center, well lit, also on horseback, and brandishing his sword. Again identified in the key as “1,” in both the fifth and sixth paintings, he is undeniably still the principal hero of the epic. Cortés’s stoicism and heroism are further emphasized in Painting #6’s depiction of the Battle of Otumba. There he rallied the survivors of the nocturnal escape from Tenochtitlan for a heroic last stand. In this painting, Cortés is in the foreground stabbing an Aztec warrior in the chest, while the other Spanish captains turn the tide of battle in the background.
Sacrifice and survival set the scene for triumph in the final pair of paintings. Kislak Painting #7 is again a continuous narrative, with the full title of “Conquest of Mexico by Cortés, No. 7” (in the Gallery). The painting is a highly fanciful reconstruction of the siege that the Spaniards and their indigenous allies laid to Tenochtitlan in the spring and summer of 1521. The geographical setting is distorted, the architecture absurdly European. Months of horrific urban conflict are compressed into a single glorious tableau in which there are more conquistadors sweeping across causeways into the city than there are indigenous allies fighting Aztec defenders. In the traditional narrative, this is overwhelmingly a Spanish victory, achieved through perseverance and the ingenious use of brigantines built especially to enforce the siege of the island-city. Reflecting that spin, the painting places a brigantine prominently in the foreground, its technological superiority echoing that of the galleons in Painting #2. The Tlaxcalteca, Tetzcoca, and other allies (who in reality outnumbered the Spaniards some 200:1) are restricted to a small group in the distant right corner, led by Spaniards on horseback and not even engaged in the battle.15
One might expect this canvas to be the finale, but there is a coda to the story: in the traditional narrative, Montezuma’s surrender is repeatedly confirmed by his restatement of it, by his loyal efforts to calm the mob (costing him his life, as shown in Kislak Painting #4), and by his successor’s surrender. Painting #8 thus shows Cuauhtemoc, looking almost identical to Montezuma, standing in a canoe that has been boarded by three conquistadors, allowing them to capture him. As if justifying the subsequent torture of Cuauhtemoc, in the effort to find the missing royal treasure (an incident not shown here), the painting includes piles of gold bars in Aztec canoes. As the caption explains: “Guatemoc [sic], the last king of Mexico, fleeing with his men in canoes that carry gold, silver, and other jewels.” His capture “concluded the siege of Mexico in the name of His Majesty.”
Whether we view the three-act drama of the traditional narrative through the Kislak Paintings, or whether we suspend our disbelief and surrender to the historical-novel pleasures of Cortés or Díaz or Solís or Prescott or Madariaga or Thomas, the pivot of the story is always the Meeting. It is thus impossible to see the story differently—to turn the mythistorical traditional narrative of the glorious “Conquest of Mexico” into reality’s grim and messy Spanish-Aztec War—without asking these questions: How has the Meeting been seen and explained over the past five centuries; and why?
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In the premodern world, without jets and smartphones, the movement of information was—from our perspective—extremely slow. News from the Americas (from “the Indies”) took weeks or months to reach Europe, longer when ships were wrecked or lost, when documents were damaged by fire or water, or when witnesses died. Yet, despite all this, word traveled; stories spread, letters were copied and delivered, pamphlets set and printed.
Thus it was that Cortés was able to establish his account of the Meeting with Montezuma, and the events surrounding it, remarkably quickly. And yet, his was not the first account to spread across Europe. In March 1521, while Spaniards and their indigenous allies fought bloody battles besieging Tenochtitlan, Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire) d’Anghiera received copies of two letters that Spanish settlers had sent from Cuba. The missives included descriptions of the Aztecs, their emperor, and their capital city. Peter Martyr made copies of the letters, as others must have done too. Since the 1490s, Indies news had traveled this way, and pamphlets describing Spanish expeditions along the coasts of Yucatan and Mexico, including that of Cortés, had been printed in Nuremberg and other northern European cities as early as March 1520. Soon after Peter Martyr read them in Spai
n, such descriptions had reached as far as Germany, been translated, set with wood-carved illustrations, and printed.16
We have already seen an image (at the start of Chapter 1), and read an excerpt, from one example: the newsletter titled Late News of the Land that the Spaniards Discovered in the Year 1521 Named Yucatan. It was probably made possible by the communication system of the Fugger banking family, based in Augsburg but highly active in Spain, especially in its commercial capital of Seville. Printed in Augsburg in late 1521 or early 1522, this newsletter was the first printed account of the Meeting that we know of today. The passage is worth quoting in full:
The Captain of the Spaniards made peace with the king Madozoma, lord of the Great Venice, and asked him to allow him and his people to see the city, and the king promised, and then went back to the city and called his advisors about him and told them that he had promised the Christian that he could come into the city, but his men answered that they would not permit such a thing, as the Christian would capture the city if he were allowed to enter it, so they imprisoned the king so that he could not allow the Christians to enter the city, and then the king told his people to kill him, as he could not keep his word, and to make his son king, and the people did as their king commanded and made his son king.17
This account of the Meeting has been almost completely ignored by historians for the last five centuries. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss. It is too short to be a compelling narrative, it is remote (anonymous and in German, as opposed to eyewitness Spanish accounts), and peculiar (the narrative twist of “Madozoma” ordering his own assassination is unique, not found in other Conquest accounts, perhaps borrowed from a medieval folktale).
Yet this briefest of accounts is important for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, as the first printed description of the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan, it is not influenced by Cortés’s published version of events. It omits any mention of surrender; the riddle of why Montezuma allowed the Spaniards to enter the city is solved with the statement that he and Cortés “made peace.” On the other hand, it offers variations on the theme of Montezuma’s capture and death, squeezing narrative detail into the paragraph in an attempt to make sense of the story. As such, it is typical of the dozens of versions of the Meeting that were written down in the decades and centuries that followed. No two accounts were identical—all shuffled the details around differently, omitting some, adding or inventing others—yet all sought to give the Meeting, and the events around it, a ring of truth, to tell a story that was wondrous and yet logical and credible, to add “corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and inconvincing narrative.”18
The crucial detail of Montezuma’s surrender, missing from that earliest German account, was very quickly insinuated into the story—a shift that can be seen happening over the course of 1522, when news from the New World was brand-new. In another German newsletter printed in Augsburg, for example, surrender, not peace, was offered as the solution to the riddle of the Meeting. In this pamphlet, the emperor “Mantetunia” makes a laudable decision to capitulate. The account makes no mention of his death or of the war at all; his response to the Spaniards is presented as right and admirable, logically obviating the need for warfare:
When Mantetunia heard that these people had come from the most powerful lord of the whole world, he received them honorably and submitted obediently to your Imperial Majesty, and told them that this was due to the prophecies handed down to them from their ancestors that one day a lord of the whole world would find them, and come to them with the people who lived in their land in ancient times and from whom they are descended.19
Significantly, this newsletter was printed at the very end of 1522, almost two months after Cortés’s Second Letter was published—in Spain, but by a German printer. That same month, an Italian printer and bookseller named Andrea Calvo published in Milan a tiny book that consisted of an excerpt from Cortés’s Second Letter, very loosely translated by Calvo himself. The excerpt focused almost entirely on the description of Tenochtitlan (“Temistan”) and Montezuma (“Moralchie,” oddly enough), culminating in Cortés’s astonishing claim that the subjects of this “great King . . . do all that I command in the royal name of Your Highness.” Calvo then completed his booklet with a paragraph attempting to explain such an unlikelihood, composed by him but in Cortés’s voice (also worth quoting in full):
The principal reason that this great King and all the others of this New Spain have so peacefully accepted Your Majesty as lord is because they say they are not native to this country but that a King from the east once came to conquer the said country and left his people to guard it and departed. Then, after a certain time he returned and found that all his people had taken wives of the country and thus no longer wished to obey him. He therefore had to leave, but threatened to return with an army so great that they would be forced to do what they would not do voluntarily. Since those times, their ancestors and they themselves have lived in fear of the coming of the said King; and now, seeing that a Captain of Your Majesty was conducting himself in a similar way [simili deportamenti], they actually believed him to be their Lord and thanked God that he had not sent forces to destroy them but to treat them with love, and with this they all voluntarily offered to be subjects of Your Majesty.20
The difference between the account from early 1522 and the two from December of that year is striking. Cortés’s version of the Meeting as a surrender had quickly taken root. Five centuries later, it remains well rooted and still flourishing.
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Calvo imaginatively attempted to make plausible Cortés’s improbable explanation of the Surrender (let us now give it a capital S), by drawing upon the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ, thus turning Cortés’s arrival into a Second Coming for indigenous Mexicans. In trying to make sense of the Surrender, Calvo was at the start of a literary and historical tradition that has preoccupied writers of all kinds on both sides of the Atlantic for half a millennium. To navigate the hundreds of texts and images that make up that tradition, I have identified three themes that run through it, and dubbed them the Prophecy, the Coward, and the Ambush.
There is evidence that in the first few decades after the war, some people viewed the Meeting not through the lens of Cortés’s lie, but as a brief moment in a bloody invasion; in other words, they remembered the war as just that, a war. Hints of this view survive in accounts from Tlatelolco, the part of the island-capital where the final battle of the siege was fought, and also in remarks made by fray Bartolomé de Las Casas—one of the few Spaniards in a position both to denounce the Surrender as immoral fiction and to write so much that many of their words have survived (we shall be hearing later from both the Tlatelolca and the good Dominican friar). Nonetheless, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Cortesian account of the Meeting was strengthened by the success of the 1552 bestselling biography of Cortés by Francisco López de Gómara, and also by the writings of influential Franciscan friars in Mexico (especially Mendieta, Motolinía, and Sahagún). Meanwhile, indigenous views evolved from war memories to complex understandings of the Spanish arrival seen through the prism of Christianity. Perspectives on the Meeting thus seldom questioned it as the Surrender, instead seeking to explain it using some variant on the themes of the Prophecy, the Coward, and the Ambush.21
The theme of the Prophecy was central to Cortés’s account and it remains the predominant theme to this day. The canon of early accounts by conquistadors and royal chroniclers—Cortés, Gómara, Díaz, Herrera, Solís, each one copying the previous ones—depicted the Surrender as an intertwined trio of moments: Montezuma’s first speech of welcome and surrender on the day of the Meeting; his imprisonment by Cortés; and the emperor’s second surrender speech, made tearfully before the Aztec nobility and notarized by the Spaniards. We shall return later to the (alleged) seizure of the emperor and his second Surrender; for now, suffice to note that in the traditional narrative the seizure
is a soft arrest, to which Montezuma effectively acquiesces, as explained by his two statements of surrender. Those speeches, in turn, are explained by this crucial claim: Montezuma believed that the arrival of the Spaniards had long been prophesied and anticipated. Some variants were extensive, with Montezuma giving lengthy speeches (as in the Cortés version that we read earlier) and Cortés giving long replies; others were stripped down to the essential elements of Montezuma expecting the Spaniards, welcoming them to the city, and offering his allegiance to the Spanish king in fulfillment of the prophecy.22
During the sixteenth century, the Prophecy explanation was embraced and developed the most by a pair of intertwined groups—the Franciscans who came to convert the Nahuas to Christianity and then to educate their elite and tend to their new parishioners; and those Christianized and educated Nahuas themselves. Fascinating Conquest histories emerged from this cultural melting pot. The best known is fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s collaboration with “as many as eight or ten” educated Nahuas from Tlatelolco; the result was the final book in a twelve-volume study of Nahua culture and history known to us as the Florentine Codex. Although the first draft was written in Tlatelolco in 1555, the earliest surviving manuscript version is from 1580. It can rightly be called a Tlatelolca-Franciscan account. It is thus an example of what I call quasi-indigenous sources (a scholar of Peru has called the Andean equivalent “nativelike”); to call the Florentine Codex a native or indigenous source is to misleadingly eclipse its Franciscan content and complex coauthorship. The Florentine Codex’s version of the story heavily emphasizes the Prophecy not only as the reason why Montezuma surrendered his empire, but indeed as an underlying explanation for the Conquest.23