When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  IN HIS EPIC POEM Mexicana (the 1594 extended edition of his Valiant Cortés), Lasso depicted the opening moments of the Meeting by borrowing details from the Cortés-Gómara traditional narrative, including the giving of necklaces and the thwarted embrace of the emperor (“to nobody is such licence given”). But his emphasis is on the grandeur of the imperial entourage, the pomp and circumstance of the Meeting; an epic moment fit for epic verse. As the canto’s subtitle announces, this is about Cortés’s “reception with great acclaim by King Moteçuma and his Court.” Montezuma is “unbeaten and exalted” and “great and powerful.” At this first meeting, there is no surrender. Montezuma lavishes luxurious gifts and palatial accommodations on his guests, leaving Cortés in his new lodgings without returning to deliver a speech of capitulation. Instead, Lasso ends the canto with the sidebar story of “nine Spanish soldiers” killed on the coast. The tale’s twist is the next canto, titled “Cortés Imprisons King Moteçuma.” In a ruthless but valiant move, the captain turns the tables on the emperor. Montezuma’s speech is an indignant one, but he has been outwitted and successfully ambushed.38

  Lasso had spotted one of the massive contradictions built into the traditional narrative: If Montezuma had surrendered, why did Cortés need to seize him and put him in irons? Gómara had spun the seizure as a masterful act of daring—“no Greek nor Roman nor anyone since there have been kings has done anything equal to Hernando Cortés in seizing Montezuma, so powerful a king, in his own house, in a place so fortified, among a multitude of people having no more than 450 Spanish comrades, and allies.” Authors since then have copied or echoed Gómara, or buried the contradiction of the imprisonment beneath an emphasis on the Surrender, sandwiching it between the emperor’s two speeches of capitulation—the engraving on the frontispiece to Díaz’s True History captures that approach, with Cortés reaching out to manacle a Montezuma whose passive, seated pose suggests the seizure is merely a symbolic confirmation of his surrender. Lasso’s solution—the Meeting as Ambush—would appeal in particular to Protestant writers less sympathetic to the conquistadors. In early modern English accounts, for example, Montezuma’s surrender is taken for granted as a known fact, with the subsequent placing of the emperor in fetters presented as a gratuitous act of hostility, an example of dishonorable Spanish ingratitude. In one version of an illustration of the ambush used in various eighteenth-century books (and included in our Gallery), the caption sarcastically read “Spanish Gratitude.”39

  Ever since Lasso’s Valiant Cortés, the pomp and circumstance of the Meeting has proved irresistible to dozens of poets and playwrights. Like Lasso, Lewis Foulk Thomas did not wish to mar the moment with a surrender speech that might have undermined the majesty of the imperial host and the logic of the narrative. The American’s play, while a lesser-known and indeed lesser work in every way, similarly emphasized how the emperor sought to welcome the invader

  In manner worthy of thy high estate,

  As our accredited and honor’d guest,

  And our own dignity as royal host.

  Yet, as with Lasso’s poem, the Meeting is pregnant with Montezuma’s undoing. In Thomas’s drama, the Aztec ruler’s passivity is determined by his belief that the Spanish arrival “was long foretold us by our Gods,” while the Spaniards see the peaceful and elaborate welcome of the Meeting as a perfect cover for their conquest plans. Realizing that Montezuma assumes the Spanish presence is temporary, Cortés and Alvarado murmur to each other: let him “eject us—if he can.”40

  One might imagine that Protestant American writers like Thomas and John Abbott—whose 1856 Cortez biography was part of his Makers of History series—would embrace the Ambush theme unambiguously as typical of Spanish treachery (or “gratitude”). Certainly they were the heirs to a negative view of Spanish colonialism that swirled around the Protestant world for centuries (and was dubbed, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Black Legend); Abbott saw a morality tale in Velázquez’s violent conquest of Cuba, which his own country had recently invaded: “God has not smiled upon regions thus infamously won. May the United States take warning that all her possessions may be honorably acquired.” Yet Abbott had imbibed Prescott and the canon of Spanish sources. Thus while he skips Montezuma’s surrender speech, he still has Montezuma confessing to Cortés “his apprehension that the Spaniards were the conquerors indicated by tradition and prophesy as decreed to overthrow the Mexican power.” The Meeting initiates a “kind reception” and “extraordinary hospitality” by Montezuma, turned by Spanish “sagacity, courage, and cruelty” into a “marvelous” triumph, in which they brought “both monarch and people into almost entire submission to their sway.” Such an unappetizing stew of the Prophecy and Ambush ingredients, spiced with a touch of the Black Legend, was typical of how the Meeting as Surrender was served up in the century to follow.41

  There is one great question simmering under all these themes, as they flowed through the centuries in their efforts to make sense of the mythistory of the Meeting as Surrender: Why cling to Cortés’s lie and that mythistory? Before picking up the clues scattered in this chapter and systematically answering that question, let us linger for a moment on a twist to the Ambush theme. That twist flips the theme on its head, and makes Montezuma the trickster.

  For example, in the Conquest account by a minor English writer named W. H. Dilworth (it was first published in 1759), the speech given by the emperor at the Meeting is an original mix of elements from Dilworth’s imagination and from Solís and other Spanish chroniclers. There are hints that Montezuma may be on the verge of surrender: he returns the “profound reverence” offered by Cortés, and admits that “we believe that the great prince you obey is descended from Quezalcoal [sic].” But Dilworth’s Montezuma is far from naïve, ignorant, or passive. He tells Cortés that he has realized that the Spaniards are not gods, but “made like other men”; that their horses are “large deer, tamed and trained”; and their guns are “barrels of metal” using “compressed air striving for a vent.” Furthermore, he concedes that these descendants of “Quezalcoal” have not come to rule, but “to model our laws and reform our government”—as if the Spaniards were not invaders, but political consultants.42

  Cortés responds with a speech asserting that Spaniards are “more intelligent than your vassals, because born in a climate of more powerful influence,” and yet he claims only to be an ambassador for his monarch, who, he reassures Montezuma, “desires to be your friend and confederate.” The Aztec emperor accepts this “confederacy and friendship,” later signing a “treaty of commerce and alliance,” and then “a voluntary acknowledgment of that vassalage which he owed to the King of Spain as successor to Quezalcoal.” There is a crucial catch, however. For in Dilworth’s version, Montezuma’s “whole aim in this transaction, was to forward the departure of his guests, without any intention to fulfil the terms of his submission for the future.” In short, the emperor has been playing an elaborate diplomatic game, in which his surrender is bait dangled repeatedly before an arrogant invader.43

  There are other versions and variants on this notion of Montezuma’s Surrender as feigned, as a bait to ensnare the invaders. An early example appears in a document authored by the leaders of two Nahua towns—probably late in the sixteenth century, but fraudulently claiming to be written in 1519 and signed by Cortés in 1526. In this version, the Spaniards and their indigenous allies are in Tenochtitlan because “the malicious plan of the great Montezuma consisted of having us there as guests, showing us false affection” in order to spring an ambush. Similarly, a recent retelling of the traditional narrative has Montezuma acting on divine orders “to encourage the Spaniards to relax their guard” and Cortés stunned by “his good fortune,” for the emperor “had, in effect, handed over the keys to his kingdom.” None go far enough—if the Surrender is a trick, does that not undermine the traditional view of a cunning Cortés and a stumbling Montezuma? But flipping the Ambush theme thereby flips the assumption of who is in co
ntrol, itself an intriguing clue as to what really happened at the Meeting.44

  * * *

  The entry of Cortés and his fellow conquistadors into the city was a joyful triumph. The Spaniards, wounded and weary from weeks of combat against wily native warriors, were dizzy with relief. Both the country outside and the streets inside the city were “filled on both sides with innumerable Indians” yelling the “shouts and gestures” of “their major fiestas,” the same loud welcome used for “applauding and blessing new allies.” This enthusiastic popular reception led to a lavish feast, with the invaders lodged in “some very beautiful houses and palaces,” where they heard speeches that acknowledged the sovereignty of the king of Spain with “courtesy and affection.”45

  As much as this sounds like a typically imaginative depiction of the Spanish entry into Tenochtitlan on the day of the Meeting, it is in fact drawn from later Spanish descriptions of the entry into Tlaxcallan two months before the company reached Tenochtitlan. The “new allies” were the Tlaxcalteca, and this meeting was not, of course, the Meeting. But sidestepping into this alternative triumphal entry helps us to answer the question, Why did the mythistory of the Meeting as Surrender quickly grow deep roots and continue to flourish for half a millennium?

  This, the Tlaxcalteca episode, introduces the theme of the Spanish and European culture of triumphal entry as the first of a series of answers to that question (for those counting, I propose eight answers).

  In the traditional narrative of the Spanish Conquest, the war and peace with Tlaxcallan is presented as anticipating the subsequent war with the Aztecs—but with a twist. Because pre-Conquest Tlaxcallan was later styled, by Spaniards and Tlaxcalteca alike, as a república ruled by “Senators” (los Senadores), Cortés’s triumphant entry evoked triumphant entries into Rome. In typical images of the moment (the Gallery includes one), the Tlaxcalteca wear togas and their buildings look more Italian than Mesoamerican. Cortés’s march into the city of Tlaxcallan anticipated his entry into Tenochtitlan; “the Senators” came out to welcome the Spaniards, as Montezuma and his nobles would do. But the Tlaxcallan entry marked the start of a permanent peace and acceptance of Christianity; the entry into Tenochtitlan would lead to a long war. The Tlaxcalteca, as future allies ruled by senators, were the good “Indians,” in contrast with the bloodthirsty and recalcitrant Aztecs. (Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, a virulently prejudiced conquistador, saw the “respectful, courteous, and brave” Tlaxcalteca as the exception that proved the rule.)46

  The triumphal entry into Tlaxcallan was thus a salve for the pain of what happened after the entry into Tenochtitlan. By being the one entrance into a city with permanently positive results, it helped to legitimize, by association, the march into the Aztec capital. Its significance—and its gradual development over the centuries into a grander, more enthusiastic and unambiguous moment than it surely was—was also its connection to the larger Spanish culture of urbanism and triumphal entries. Spanish civilization was profoundly urban, and entries of procession or triumph into cities were deeply resonant and symbolic moments. Drawing upon centuries of medieval tradition, itself threading back in time to ancient Rome, Spaniards expected a ritual surrender by a defeated lord at the city gates, followed by a triumphal entry into that city, celebrated by the populace. That tradition was reinforced in 1492, when the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, accepted the surrender of Boabdil outside the gates of Granada; Boabdil had been the last ruler of the last remaining Islamic kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, so Granada’s capture had strong political and religious significance for Spaniards. I can find no evidence that any of the conquistadors at the Meeting were also at Granada in 1492, but many of their fathers and other relatives surely were—including Cortés’s own father, Martín.

  Cortés would go on to make a number of entries into Tenochtitlan (or into the city of Mexico, as Spaniards came to call it). Each of those was used to reinforce the notion of that first arrival as a triumphal entry, each one serving to reiterate the Meeting as the Surrender. Just as later Spanish accounts exaggerated the entry into Tlaxcallan of 1519, so did they imagine Cortés’s entry into Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1526 as another great triumph; he “returned to Mexico, where he was received by the inhabitants with the same demonstrations of joy that they used to show one of their emperors.” When Juan de Escoiquiz ended his thousand pages of “heroic poetry” on the war of conquest with the lines “Cortés entered triumphant, and to the Empire / of Spain was added that hemisphere,” he was referring specifically to the fall of Tenochtitlan on August 13, 1521; but the larger referent was to the initial triumphant entry.47

  August 13 happened to be the feast day of St. Hippolyte, whose celebration rapidly evolved in sixteenth-century Mexico into a ritual annual reenactment of the Meeting. “In memory of that event and happy victory,” as Diego Valadés put it in 1579, a festival and “solemn prayers” were celebrated each year. The anchor of the celebration was a procession out of the central plaza to the “magnificent temple” of St. Hippolyte, built on the city’s edge where the Noche Triste had claimed the greatest Spanish casualties. Both religious and civil authorities processed out and back to their respective buildings on the plaza—the archbishop to the cathedral, the viceroy and the president of the Audiencia to their respective palaces of government—thereby ritually reentering and reclaiming the city as a Spanish seat of power. The annual procession specifically referenced moments of defeat in 1520 and then triumph in 1521. But the march into the city was also a ritualized reenactment of that first Spanish entry of November 8, 1519, not as the ambiguous arrival that it actually was, but as the providential triumph that it was later claimed to be.48

  This first answer to the big question—why has Cortés’s lie survived as truth for so long?—is thus the European cultural tradition of the triumphal entry. That cultural tradition leads us to the second answer: the dire circumstances of the moment when that lie was first put to paper. The genesis of the invention of the Meeting as Surrender was October 30, 1520, when Cortés sat down with paper and ink to describe to Carlos, the young king of Spain, the events of the previous fourteen months. But rather than simply draw upon his memory of the war’s events, Cortés drew upon a cultural reference point that all Spaniards shared—that of the triumphal entry into a city—and reimagined the Meeting both as a triumphal entry and as the milestone moment in the story.

  For the context in which Cortés composed his Second Letter to the king was utterly bleak. His campaign was a disaster. Most of the Spaniards who had accompanied him from Cuba were dead. Without the arrival of reinforcements (sent embarrassingly by his nemesis, Governor Velázquez), Spanish numbers would have been so low as to oblige a hasty retreat to the Caribbean. The great island-city was not only lost, it had never been captured. Its seizure was a sham. Months of restricted lodging in the center of Tenochtitlan had given way not to Spanish control of the capital, but to the violent eviction of the invaders from the valley. The survivors were now more dependent than ever on their Tlaxcalteca allies. Cortés and the other captains faced mortal enemies to the west, in Tenochtitlan, and to the east, in Cuba; they had no choice but to invent a tale of victory, in the hope that the defeat of their Aztec enemies might disarm their Spanish ones.

  The Second Letter is Cortés’s composition, and thus its contents—whether seen as eyewitness reporting or political artifice—are always credited to him. But surely we must resist the temptation to credit the Meeting story entirely to him; to do so would be too facile, too slavish to the legend of his alleged genius. Seeing the Meeting as a Surrender—with the war in 1520 as a rebellion, and the task ahead as a recovery of a prize already won once—was patently appealing, comforting, morale-boosting. It turned a messy war full of atrocity and chaos into a simpler, nobler narrative. It must have begun circulating among the surviving Spaniards in Mexico before Cortés wrote it down. By October 1520, the Spaniards must have collectively begun to remember the Meeting rather fondly. Tenochtitlan, a
s a lieu de mémoire—a place evoking meaningful memories—was a highly complex such locus for the conquistadors, and it would become even more so for those who survived the second half of the war. In view of what the Spaniards subsequently experienced in Tenochtitlan, culminating in the slaughter of most of the conquistadors during their Noche Triste, the survivors surely saw through rose-tinted lenses the weeks in November 1519 when they were welcomed and feasted by Montezuma.

  The dire circumstances under which the Surrender was invented lead us in turn to the next answer to the question, because the need in October 1520 to justify the war in progress birthed the need in the decades and centuries that followed to justify the war’s outcome. Much of what happened in the war came under scrutiny in its wake; in the 1530s and ’40s, Cortés’s political stock fell and his actions during the war were put under the microscopes of scores of private lawsuits and a massive royal investigation. But one looks in vain in the thousands of pages of legal documentation—preserved in the imperial archives in Seville—for statements denouncing Montezuma’s Surrender as fiction. That is a place none of the conquistadors, giving testimony before lawyers and Crown officials, were willing to go. Nor were such officials interested in asking outright if the Surrender was a lie. It was simply there, in the background, as something believed, accepted, but seldom directly confirmed or discussed.49

  I have searched sixteenth-century documents and books for years, looking for insight into how the Meeting was talked about in Mexico in the generation or two after the war. Most references are one-liners. But a couple of more detailed and defensive mentions are worth quoting. One was a letter sent to Carlos V in 1553 by Ruy González, a veteran of the Spanish-Aztec War. The aged conquistador was incensed by Las Casas’s Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which had been published in Seville the year before and was now circulating in Mexico City, where González lived as an encomendero (recipient of indigenous tribute and labor) and former city councilman. How dare the bishop “call us conquistadors tyrants and thieves and unworthy of the name of Christians,” say “we came here unlicensed [illegally],” and “cast doubt on [the legitimacy of] Your Majesty’s rule”!50