A version of the Prophecy explanation is also included in the Historia by the Dominican friar Diego Durán, who drew upon Nahua sources from Tenochtitlan in the 1570s. It appears as well in the account that don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl wrote to promote the role in the war played by his great-great-grandfather, Ixtlilxochitl, the tlahtoani of Tetzcoco. Ixtlilxochitl insisted that prophecies and omens did not bother Montezuma, but that his subjects generally “held as very true the prophecies of their ancestors who predicted that this land would be possessed by the children of the sun” (a phrase he picked up from Gómara); and that the arguments in Montezuma’s court over how to welcome Cortés were irrelevant, because “the outcome was predetermined.”24
Back in Milan in 1522, Calvo had drawn upon the Second Coming as an explanatory model, and once Franciscans and other priests began to preach in Mexico, generations of Nahuas made the same connection. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Franciscans and Nahuas deliberately drew upon millennarian models to rewrite the distant and recent Mexican past—a process that both Christianized Nahua history and Nahuatlized Christianity. A wonderful example of that cultural interplay, one that reveals how Nahuas sought to use the Prophecy theme to understand the Conquest story, is The Three Kings, a drama written in Nahuatl around the end of the sixteenth century.
This Epiphany play centers on the reactions of Herod, as tlahtoani of Jerusalem, to the three Magi as they approach the city to announce the birth of Christ. The story’s details blatantly evoke the Meeting, as it came to be constructed by this time: an ancient prophecy predicts the coming of a new king; the strangers come from the east and follow a star that evokes the comet and other omens that supposedly unnerved Montezuma. Herod welcomes the Magi with speeches that echo Montezuma’s speech to Cortés: “Ascend to your home, your altepetl [city]. Enter. You are to eat, since it is at your home that you have arrived.” Herod then undergoes a transformation, just as Montezuma does in the Conquest’s traditional narrative. He threatens and insults his priests, becoming both enraged by the threat to his right to rule (“Am I not the king?” [Cuix amo nitlatohuani]) and unnerved (“I am about to faint!”). The story’s origin is biblical (in Matthew, Chapter 2, Herod turns troubled and angry). In other words, Nahuas in the late sixteenth century did not see the story of Herod and the Magi through their memory of the Meeting and Montezuma; on the contrary, the Meeting and Montezuma were imagined and reinvented through the lens of biblical tales like this one. The play, like quasi-indigenous accounts such as the Florentine Codex, tell us little about what actually happened in 1519 but offer great insight into how later indigenous generations used Christianity to rewrite and understand the past.
Although Herod did not suffer Montezuma’s sudden demise, The Three Kings shifts in order to retain echoes of the Spanish-Aztec War: at the moment in the Conquest story when Montezuma disappears, Herod goes from representing him to representing the Aztecs who resisted the invaders. There is violence, the Magi leave the city (as the Spaniards did on the Noche Triste). But, in the end, this is the Epiphany story, and the essential parallel is between the birth of Christ and his coming to Mexico; the Magi, who seem at first to be stand-ins for the first Spaniards, turn out to be Nahua lords embracing the new and true faith. The motives and reactions of Herod, like those of Montezuma, are ultimately eclipsed by the prophesied, providential sweep of Christianity’s arrival.25
During the sixteenth century, the Prophecy theme became embellished with a few details that subsequent writers picked up to add dramatic flavor. For example, Francisco de Aguilar, a veteran conquistador remembering the war some forty years later, was one of the first to add that the Aztecs believed “bearded and armed men” were prophesied. That “fact” has reappeared ever since; a pithy example is in the verses that Lewis Foulk Thomas placed in Montezuma’s mouth in his 1857 play, Cortez, the Conqueror:
O! then, alas! The ancient prophecies.
That did foretell the downfall of our race,
By bearded white men from the Eastern seas,
Are near fulfilment.26
Another detail that was added to the prophecy story—and which blossomed to become its central feature in the twentieth century—was the idea that Montezuma believed Cortés to be a manifestation of Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec deity supposedly destined to return and rule. Cortés made no mention in his account of the Meeting, or in any of his writings, of Quetzalcoatl; nor does he claim to have been taken for a returning god. But there was a rich and complex mythology surrounding Quetzalcoatl throughout Mesoamerica, and as it evolved under the influence of Christianity it became attached to the prophecy theme underpinning the Surrender. We shall return to Quetzalcoatl in the next chapter, so suffice to note here that most scholars would agree that Quetzalcoatl’s return is “a postconquest elaboration of an indigenous tradition” (in the words of Quetzalcoatl expert Davíd Carrasco); the evidence suggests that such an elaboration took place after Montezuma’s death and the war’s end.27
Nonetheless, the story became central to the mythistory of the Meeting. In Juan de Escoiquiz’s “heroic poem” of 1798, Montezuma declares to Cortés that “I am persuaded / that the great King who has sent you / is descended directly from the feared / Quezalcoal [sic], architect of the extensive / Mexican Empire,” and that “the infallible prophecy of Quezalcoal . . . was fulfilled when you came to this kingdom.” The “Conquest of Mexico” became a highly popular theme in the nineteenth century. In one typical rendering of the Meeting as Surrender, explained by the prophecy theme, “some tears fell from Montezuma” as he accepted that “the predictions of our ancestors” had been fulfilled and that he thus had to “offer all my kingdom” in “obedience” to Cortés’s king. The prophecy, tailor-made for the Spaniards, anticipated men coming from the east, “differing in habit and customs from us, who were to be lords of this country.” “Signs in the heavens” confirmed that the Spaniards were “the people we looked for.” After all, Montezuma and his predecessors had “ruled these nations only as viceroys of Quetzalcoatl, our god and lawful sovereign.”28
The fact that Montezuma did not mention Quetzalcoatl in his speech, as recorded by Cortés, has not deterred modern writers from inserting it. As one recent version of the traditional narrative put it: “Obviously Montezuma was recounting the story of Quetzalcoatl.” On the other hand, others have seen the entire prophecy story as a metaphor for Mexico’s destiny, with Montezuma’s belief less important than the faith and acceptance of all his people. In one of the theatrical dialogues by Mexican poet and playwright Salvador Novo, Cortés’s indigenous interpreter, Malintzin (here Malinche), explains the Conquest to the nineteenth-century French empress of Mexico, Carlota. Belief in Quetzalcoatl underpinned Mexico’s surrender, but the symbolic capitulation to Cortés was Malinche’s, not Montezuma’s. Says Malinche, her people
awaited, going back many generations, the return of Quetzalcoatl. CARLOTA.—And they believed he arrived, with Cortés. MALINCHE.—He arrived as him. For me, at least.29
In other words, Malinche is Mexico, and Cortés-Quetzalcoatl is her god, to whom she had no choice but to surrender.
The notion of belief in the prophecy myth being more expansive—not just Montezuma believing Cortés to be Quetzalcoatl, but the Aztecs taking the Spaniards to be gods—goes back to the mid-sixteenth century. Francisco de Aguilar mentioned it, as did Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, who wrote in his Chronicle of New Spain that as the Aztec commoners watched the Spaniards enter Tenochtitlan, some said, “These who come from where the sun is born must be gods.” The old men and those familiar with local lore and prophecy, said, “These must be those who have come to command and rule over us and our lands.” In Herrera’s telling of 1601, they “sighed, saying, those must be the ones sent to rule us and our lands, for they are so few yet so strong to have defeated so many men”; the Surrender is presented as so inevitable that it is accepted by Aztec elders before it even happens, before Montezuma has yet to deliver his spe
ech.30
In the eighteenth century, the Scotsman William Robertson’s bestselling account included Aztecs in the streets thinking the conquistadors were “divinities,” while Montezuma welcomes Cortés with a speech centered on the prophesied return of relatives, people descended from the same ancestors, with legitimate right to “assume the government.” This was another detail of the prophecy theme incorporated early on into the traditional narrative; in the words of the friar Gregorio García, the Aztecs were “of the same lineage as don Hernando Cortés, as Moteçuma told him.” No wonder, as one recent retelling of the traditional narrative puts it, “Montezuma was happy to regard Cortés and the Spaniards as descendants of Quetzalcoatl.”31
Conquest history has very often been interpreted through contemporary filters (think of Brumidi’s frieze), and that is true of one final way the Prophecy theme of the Surrender has been seen: the arrival, welcome, and speech of surrender as a moment of peace, of calm before the storm of war. This was how it was viewed, rather poignantly, by Mexican writer Francisco Monterde in 1945. The Meeting as providential and peaceful must have resonated in a Mexico that had witnessed generations of violence (following the outbreak of the revolution in 1910), while the world was likewise torn apart by war. The Surrender promised a peace that would be destroyed, thereby setting the stage for the tragedy and triumph of the Conquest. This was not unlike the late-sixteenth-century indigenous perspective on the Meeting, which must have seemed pregnant with a tantalizing promise of peace to the survivors of decades of violence and of lethal epidemics. And indeed Monterde borrowed liberally from the Tlatelolca-Franciscan phrases in the Florentine Codex. Says Montezuma, “It was prophesied that you would come to your city, that you would return to her, and it has come to pass. Be welcome; rest yourself. Our lord has arrived in his land.” Cortés replies, “Be reassured, sir; we all love you.”32
UNIVERSAL LOVE FOR MONTEZUMA has not, however, been central to how the Meeting has been depicted. On the contrary, the second theme in such depictions has been that of the Coward, with Montezuma’s surrender explained by his own weakness of character and failing as a ruler. His cowardice likewise explains how he ends up a prisoner of the Spaniards, unable to prevent the subsequent Aztec revolt, resistance, and yearlong war that follows his death. Thus at the Meeting, Montezuma “surrendred up his Right to his Catholick Majesty of Spain, in the presence of all his Peers, to their no small amazement”—according to Ogilby’s 1670 version of this variation. Those “Peers” were “much discontented” with Montezuma, “because he had without the least resistance or consideration settled a handful of Strangers to domineer over his whole Dominions, by which his weakness and pusillanimity, he was now a Prisoner, like a common Malefactor, which had formerly govern’d so mighty Territories.” In this account, there is no speech of surrender, nor any mention of prophesy, nor an attempt to reconcile the “pusilanimous” emperor with the valiant one described elsewhere in Ogilby’s compendium; Montezuma simply loses his nerve and turns over his throne.33
We shall turn in detail to Montezuma, and the ways in which he has been imagined and misunderstood over the centuries since his death, in the next two chapters. But it is worth briefly mentioning now how Montezuma the Coward came to be invented and kept alive, especially because his nurturing in the twentieth century helped to perpetuate the mythistory of the Meeting as the Surrender.
The canon of early Spanish accounts, and the traditional narrative they birthed, used a pair of arguments regarding Montezuma’s role in the Surrender. One was a simple, circular logic, based on a complete acceptance of the truth of the Surrender: because Montezuma gave up his empire without a fight, he must have been cowardly and weakened by superstition, by the power of prophecy; and thus because he was weak and cowardly, he gave up his empire. The other argument used Montezuma’s ignoble personality as a foil for Cortés’s heroic one: Sepúlveda was one of the first to summarize this dyad in print, comparing the “noble, valiant Cortés” with a “timorous, cowardly” Montezuma. Such a pairing has proved irresistible to Cortés biographers and Conquest storytellers, from Gómara (“cowardly little man”) to Prescott to the present. The main goal of that negative depiction of the emperor, however, has been to glorify Cortés and highlight his fortitude and potency as the anti-Montezuma; Montezuma as Coward helped explain the Surrender, but it was a by-product of the traditional narrative’s explanation of the “Conquest of Mexico” as the product of Cortés’s heroism and skill, combined with the guidance and intervention of God. Thus Montezuma the Coward was important to explaining the Meeting, but less central to explaining the entire Conquest story.34
It is hardly surprising to find Spanish accounts belittling Montezuma. But it may be surprising, and is therefore more interesting, to discover that in the sixteenth century there developed among Nahua accounts a version of Montezuma the Coward. There is no single Nahua account or perspective on the Spanish-Aztec War, or even one that can accurately be termed “the Aztec account.” But there were various manuscripts written by Nahuas in the century after the war that told its story from the viewpoint of that author and his hometown—allowing us to speak of Conquest accounts from Tlatelolco (such as the Tlateloca-Franciscan Florentine Codex), Tetzcoco (the account by the mixed-race Nahua nobleman Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl), Tlaxcallan, and so on. In those various accounts and within their micropatriotic perspectives, Montezuma does not fare very well.
Alva Ixtlilxochitl does not insult Montezuma, but he does note that the day the emperor was killed, “the Mexica insulted him, calling him a coward and an enemy of his homeland.” This is not necessarily a Tetzcoca perspective, as Ixtlilxochitl seems to draw heavily here on Gómara, but it does evoke the highly critical Tlatelolca view in the Florentine Codex, in which Montezuma “was greatly afraid” at the approach of the invaders in 1519; “he seemed to faint away; he grew concerned and disturbed . . . he was afraid and shocked.” Earlier Tlatelolco accounts certainly blame the Tenochca—that is, the Mexica on the Tenochtitlan side of the island, which fell first to the invaders during the siege of 1521—but they do not scapegoat Montezuma the way that later accounts do. For example, a Tlatelolca account written in Nahuatl around 1545 ignores Montezuma altogether, claiming that Cuauhtemoc had actually been made king (tlahtoani) of the Tlatelolco part of the city before the war:
The Spaniards arrived four years after Cuauhtemoctzin was seated as ruler of Tlatelolco, when war was waged there. When the war was over, there was no tlahtoani in Tenochtitlan. Only a dwarf named Mexicatl Cozoololtic, whose calves were as round as balls, as his name suggests, and some of his friends, were in charge.
The manuscript’s focus is the fate of Cuauhtemoc, who was hanged by Cortés four years after the war, with the blame assigned squarely on the upstart Tenochca dwarf, Mexicatl. One could argue that Mexicatl’s traitorous behavior acts as a metaphor for Montezuma’s surrender, but I think far more likely it is a larger metaphor for Tenochca unreliability and illegitimacy.35
Similarly partisan and micropatriotic were accounts written by Tlaxcalteca. The mixed-race Tlaxcalteca Diego Muñoz Camargo, for example, wrote a Historia de Tlaxcala in 1592 in which the Tlaxcalteca converted to Christianity before all other Nahuas, making their conversion possible by defeating the Aztecs. In this Tlaxcallancentric narrative, the Meeting became the Surrender because the Tlaxcalteca had succeeded in terrifying Montezuma with the “great victory and capture of Cholula” by “our Spaniards and the people of Tlaxcala.” Thus a few days after the “victory” in Cholollan, “the captain Cortés was very well received by the great Lord and King Moctheuzomatzin and all the Mexican Lords.” The Aztec ruler is “great,” and yet weak in the face of the moral power of the Spaniards and Christianized Tlaxcalteca.36
Whether promoting a Nahua city-state or Cortés’s genius, the use of Montezuma the Coward to explain the Meeting has made for some feeble arguments. The Italian traveler-writer Gemelli, for example, like Ogilby, Montanus, and many others before hi
m, attempting to explain how the fearsome Aztec emperor was so easily “terrify’d” by the approach of the Spaniards, weakly resorted to the emperor’s own sudden weakness. In Gemelli’s 1699 account, Montezuma decided that as “there was no putting a stop to this Evil,” he might as well make “a virtue of Necessity” and welcome the conquistadors into Tenochtitlan. In such versions of the story, Montezuma goes instantly from being a bold ruler to being a passive actor in the tragedy. He is almost infantilized—or feminized, in line with the perceptions of female roles and behavior at the time. For example, he is easily tricked into becoming a prisoner, and when Cortés asks him “to swear Fealty to the King of Castile,” he does it, “with the Tears standing in his Eyes” (possibly a sign of weakness, or emotion inappropriate to a ruler; but perhaps, on the contrary, reflecting a medieval Iberian notion of lordly tears as a mark of commitment to a significant act, a subtlety presumably lost on Gemelli).37
Montezuma’s cowardice, and hence arrest or imprisonment, is not only as much of an invention as the Surrender (as we shall see in a later chapter); it actually adds to the nonsensicality of the Surrender (logically, each renders the other redundant). Yet, faced with its repetition in the traditional narrative, poets and playwrights and authors of all kinds have attempted to twist the arrest into an explanation of the Meeting as Surrender. For this, the third theme—that of the Ambush—we turn to the brilliant Spanish poet Gabriel Lasso de la Vega.
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 7
