When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  Montezuma is the next answer to the question—not the man himself, but his five-century afterlife. In the first century after his death, the emperor’s reputation was destroyed and upended, all in the service of justifying and explaining Spanish invasion and conquest. We have already been introduced to Montezuma the Coward, and we shall turn to the details of his character assassination in the next chapter, so suffice to note here that Spanish and Nahua sources alike depicted Montezuma as “superstitious, depressed, weak, cowardly,” a one-dimensional ruler “incapable of overcoming the fate imposed” upon him. Considering that Cortés and his promoters invented Montezuma’s Surrender, it is ironic that blaming the emperor for Aztec defeat became an appealing alternative to traditional Spanish explanations for their triumph in the Conquest. When such explanations—God’s will, Cortés’s genius, European superiority—faded in popularity in the modern era, more attention became focused on Montezuma’s alleged failure.63

  Another layer of irony was added as quasi-indigenous accounts of the war gradually emerged—most important, Sahagún’s Historia General (the so-called Florentine Codex), whose Nahuatl text slowly became available to the world in translation. The account in the Florentine Codex of the Conquest is, as we saw, a late-sixteenth-century Tlatelolca-Franciscan narrative, but it was misleadingly read for most of the twentieth century as an authentic Aztec or even “Indian” view of the Conquest. It even featured a version of Montezuma’s surrender in Nahuatl, lending the speech a linguistic veneer of authenticity and giving new life to this core aspect of the traditional narrative. Writers unsympathetic to the Aztecs used the Florentine Codex to bruise Montezuma’s reputation more than ever (mostly in the Anglophone world, for a century starting in the 1880s); but even those sympathetic to Montezuma tended to perpetuate the mythistory of the Surrender, by arguing that it was not a result of the emperor’s weakness, but of his deep-rooted belief in Aztec prophetic traditions (the Prophecy theme, in more sophisticated form).64

  This putatively pro-Montezuma trend began in Mexico and has had sporadic success there at a popular level, while working its way into academia worldwide. However, a full revisionist rehabilitation of Montezuma has yet to happen, and cannot happen without the busting of the mythistory of the Meeting as Montezuma’s Surrender. Montezuma may never avenge the posthumous bruising of his character and reputation, for the simple reason that Cuauhtemoc has increasingly served as a better candidate for the role of Aztec hero—especially in Mexico. For example, Mexican textbooks in the final decades of the twentieth century still depicted Montezuma according to the traditional narrative—as intimidated by the approach of the Spaniards and subservient to Cortés once he reached Tenochtitlan—with Cuauhtemoc’s resistance to the siege given passing attention. In this century’s textbooks, however, Montezuma’s Surrender, while still accepted as fact, is downplayed and Cuauhtemoc is given a heroic treatment; he is, Mexican students are told, a fundador de tu patria, a “founding father of your country.”65

  For the eighth and final answer, we return to another national hero, General Scott—via Napoleon.

  * * *

  As France’s Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte prepared for his 1808 invasion of Spain, he commissioned the Italian composer Gaspare Spontini to write an opera. The subject: the Conquest of Mexico. The parallel was clear: Napoleon was the heroic Cortés of the story, and Spain his Mexico. Titled Fernand Cortez, the opera even featured a fictional Cortés brother, named Alvaro, who was captured by the Aztecs and rescued just before he was to be ritually sacrificed; when the opera debuted in Paris, in November 1809, Napoleon’s brother was already installed as Joseph I, the new king of Spain, and France’s massive army dominated the peninsula.

  Spontini navigated around the incongruity of a Spanish Montezuma surrendering to a French Cortés by keeping the Aztec emperor—and his capture—offstage. The production’s bombastic music and seventeen live horses supposedly entertained Parisian audiences (Hector Berlioz found it inspirational, making it of some import in modern music history). But critics found it hard to swallow other ironies of the parallel between the invasions (for example, earlier in 1809 thousands of Spanish troops had been slaughtered outside Cortés’s hometown of Medellín; his childhood home was also a casualty) or its absurdities (such as devilish Aztec priests as substitutes for evil Spanish Inquisitors). The production was canceled before the year was out.

  As Spontini’s opera flopped, so too, gradually, did Napoleon’s war. His triumph proved to be as fleeting and illusory as Montezuma’s surrender. Spanish resistance turned into guerrilla warfare, the atrocities mounted, the British invaded, hostilities dragged on for five years until the French finally retreated from the peninsula in 1814. But the composer and his librettists (Étienne de Jouy and Joseph-Alphonse Esménard) were undeterred; they revised the opera, promoting Montezuma from an offstage reference to a character second only in billing to “Cortez” himself. In the 1817 revival, the “King of the Mexicans” was an ineffective sovereign willing to die with his empire—but then easily convinced to accept Cortés’s “friendship” and bless his romantic union with a fictional niece of Montezuma’s. As the final curtain fell, the choir sang “O jour de gloire et espérance [Oh day of glory and hope]!”

  Unlike the original propaganda piece, this version was a hit. From its debut in 1817 it remained in the repertoire of the Paris Opera through 1830, performed 218 times. Audiences were less interested in the grim realities of war—be it Napoleon’s in Spain or Cortés’s in Mexico—than they were in the comforting romanticism of the traditional Cortesian narrative, with its pivotal moment of mythistory: Montezuma’s surrender to civilization’s providential march of hope and glory. Above all, the gendering of the Conquest as a romance caught the spirit of the age. Malintzin (or an Aztec princess of invented name) emerged from a marginal or occasional character to a central one, both in histories and dramas on Cortés and the Conquest and in her own literature. In the great run of “Conquest of Mexico” operas—composed in five European nations, stretching from Antonio Vivaldi’s Motezuma of 1733 to Ignacio Ovejero’s Hernán Cortés of 1848—the story grew increasingly romanticized and a Malintzin-type character increasingly important. The lithographs of Nicolas-Eustache Maurin—a Parisian contemporary of Spontini’s who produced a popular series of prints inspired by his Cortez opera and by Giovanni Pacini’s Amazilia (debuted in 1825 in Naples)—are an early example of the Malintzin industry in art and literature that the romantic era would spawn.66

  If the revised version of Spontini’s opera was a hit, Prescott’s history of the Conquest of Mexico was even bigger; only in his case, contemporary historical events worked in his favor. At first a modest success, the book exploded when President Polk ordered U.S. forces to invade Mexico. The Mexican-American War may be largely forgotten in the United States; the irony of anti-immigration policies designed to keep Mexicans out of lands that were once theirs seems lost on the promoters and supporters of such policies. But in Mexico, the War of the U.S. Invasion is far from a distant memory. The Mexicans and Mexican-Americans interviewed for a recent study on present-day attitudes toward the Spanish Conquest tended to “emphasize a relationship between the violence of the Spanish conquest, the loss of half their land in 1848, and the violence on the U.S. border today.”67

  Nor was 1848 the last time that Mexico was invaded. Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, ruling France as Emperor Napoleon III, joined a Spanish and British debt-collecting expedition into Mexico in 1861, soon turning it into a conquest campaign. Napoleon eventually placed an Austrian archduke on the Mexican throne as Emperor Maximilian I, but for three years, until he was executed in 1867, Maximilian ruled a country that never ceased to resist its latest conquerors. The Mexican defeat of French forces at Puebla on May 5, 1862, is today commemorated by Mexican-Americans (as the Cinco de Mayo holiday) to celebrate their “Mexicanness” in the country whose conquest of Mexico launched an empire that now tries to keep Mexicans out, and whose marines still si
ng of victory in the halls of Montezuma (a song to which we shall return). The refrains of triumph and tragedy, linking empires and nations, past and present, always seem to echo back to that November day in 1519 in Tenochtitlan.

  The story of the “Conquest of Mexico” is thus a lieu de mémoire, a place of memory and meaning that has broad geographical and deep temporal range. The ways in which we can approach the topic are almost limitless. But whether our guides are doña Isabel Moctezuma and don Pablo Nazareo, Brumidi and General Scott, or Napoleon and Spontini, it always becomes clear that the “Conquest of Mexico” narrative is never just—or even never really—about the Spanish-Aztec War. Far from simply a set of historical events, the Conquest is a living locus that has been repeatedly refashioned over the centuries “to serve official, regional, and personal ends,” appropriated and reinvented “by individuals, communities, and the state” to redefine present experience.68

  At the heart of that oft-appropriated narrative is an imagined moment—Montezuma’s surrender to Cortés—that has persisted and proliferated in print and paint not because it happened, but because so many people for so many different reasons believed it happened or needed it to be so. For (and as) an invented event, the Meeting as Surrender tells us a great deal about the last five centuries of human history.

  Part II

  Tlein ticmotenehuilia aquin tlatohuani . . .

  Cuix amo nitlatohuani Cuix amo nitlatocati

  Cuix ye onipoliuh Cuix ye Onimic

  Cuix ye onitlan Cuix acmo nicmati

  “What are you talking about? Who is the king (tlahtoani)? . . .

  Am I not the king? Am I not the lord?

  Am I already defeated? Have I already died?

  Have I already been finished off? Am I no longer of sound mind?”

  —Herod, in a seventeenth-century Nahuatl drama of The Three Kings1

  KINGS OF THE BEAST. Portraits of the eighth, ninth, and tenth Aztec kings, from the 1704 English edition of Gemelli’s 1699 A Voyage Round the World. While in Mexico City, Gemelli had access to various manuscripts, such as those in the library of the great Mexican intellectual don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora. Because of the chain of copying going back to Aztec times, these portraits are early modern European in style but include elements adapted from Mesoamerican artistic traditions. Access to colonial copies of indigenous codices did not stop Gemelli from emphasizing the satanical nature of Aztec kingship and religion.

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 3

  Social Grace and Monstrous Ritual

  Every impulse of his natural Ferocity gave Way to Fear and Weakness.

  —Townsend’s 1724 translation of Solís’s History of the Conquest of Mexico

  One cannot help feeling that Montezuma was a monster and [his] sacrifice of the captives a ritual murder . . . [yet] on learning that the god wanted to come to Mexico city, he was overwhelmed with awe.

  —Maurice Collis, 1954

  I wish to be united in friendship with your King, and at his request, I will happily abolish the eating at my table of human flesh, abhorred by him.

  —Montezuma’s surrender speech to Cortés in Escoiquiz’s México Conquistada, 1798

  Surely, never were refinement and the extreme of barbarism brought so closely into contact with each other.

  —William Prescott, 1843

  Europeans, from the first Spanish conquerors who saw Mexica society in action to those of us who wistfully strive to, have been baffled by that unnerving discrepancy between the high decorum and fastidious social and aesthetic sensibility of the Mexica world, and the massive carnality of the killings and dismemberings: between social grace and monstrous ritual.

  —Inga Clendinnen, 19911

  THE NAMES OF THE TEN AZTEC KINGS CONTAIN A NUMERICAL code. By assigning a number to each letter used in their names, the monarchs can be reduced to a set of numbers. Thus the first king, Acamapichtli, becomes 56; the two Montezumas are each assigned 84; and Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor, is 77. Add the ten numbers up and they “together make 666, the number of the Beast.” In other words, the Aztec monarchy was, in its totality, a manifestation of Satan—“the Beast describ’d by St. John.”2

  This numerological wisdom was explained to Giovanni Gemelli when he visited Mexico City in the late 1690s. When the Neapolitan lawyer-turned-adventurer (and, some said, Vatican spy) returned to Italy from his five-year voyage around the world, he published a detailed account of all he saw and learned. His six-volume book enjoyed multiple editions in Italian, French, and English during the eighteenth century. Gemelli’s story was later dismissed as overly fantastical (he argued, for example, that both the Egyptians and Native Americans were descended from refugees “from that Island Atlantis”) and even as fictional (his journey helped inspire a bestselling imaginary travelogue, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days). But Gemelli did not imagine his journey, nor did he invent the people he met and the things they told him. He even had access to the incredible library and didactic company of don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, the celebrated Mexican polymath who was elderly but still alive when Gemelli visited. In other words, Gemelli’s views were not outlandish at the time; they were mainstream, and his book’s success helped to keep them that way.3

  Thus when generations of Europeans read that some people thought the ancient Aztec monarchy was diabolist—and that the proof was in the numbers—they were the recipients of a belief that had been circulating in Spain, Mexico, and elsewhere, in some form or another, for centuries. When Gemelli wrote that Aztec emperors like Montezuma regularly performed “abominable Sacrifices,” personally “ripping open the Breast” of a victim and “taking out the Heart immediately, which was thrown into the Face of the Idol, while it was still leaping,” he was summarizing commonplace knowledge. And when Gemelli noted that New Spain’s “Indians are naturally very Fearful; but excessive Cruel,” that “they are very great Thieves, Cheats, and Impostors,” and that they lack a “Sense of Honour (for they make nothing of robbing one another of it; besides the Incest they commit with their Mothers and Sisters),” he was merely repeating—and helping to perpetuate—pejorative notions about the otherness of America’s “Indians” that went back to Columbus’s time.4

  Those notions were part of the swirl of prejudicial perception and misinformation regarding Native American culture and history in the early modern Atlantic world. At the center of that swirl were, and still are, the Aztecs. Although seldom seen today as satanical, Aztec civilization continues to be viewed primarily through the lens of human sacrifice. Even at the level of a humorous book for children (such as the bestselling Horrible Histories volume whose cover is included in the Gallery), the Aztecs can be “angry” because that is an alliterative association that resonates with readers of all kinds. In such a context Montezuma has existed for five centuries, suffering a long afterlife of negative judgment. To give Montezuma a little revenge—and to solve the mysteries of the Meeting—we must first explore how and why the Aztecs became “angry,” how Montezuma became posthumously mistreated, and how the Aztecs might be seen through different lenses.5

  * * *

  For many centuries before 1492, Europeans had believed that in remote regions of the world there lived strange and alien people, some marvelous, some monstrous. Books like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, with their mixing of the realistic and the fantastic, were written in the first and fourteenth centuries respectively but still wildly popular at the turn of the sixteenth. Europeans came to the Americas expecting to find bizarre humans and outlandish cultural practices. Often they believed they found them.

  Stories circulated in Europe in the 1490s that Columbus had found islands where the people were all cannibals (who ate human flesh daily), that they had discovered one island of giants and another exclusively inhabited by women warriors. Traditional tall tales persisted for centuries, as new ones developed. European expectat
ions were not dampened by decades of living among indigenous peoples, because each new discovery encouraged the circulation of wild stories, with letters and reports from the New World often mixing accurate observations with fantastical claims. When Diego Velázquez issued Cortés orders for his voyage to Mexico, Velázquez had been living in the Caribbean for twenty-five years (since crossing on Columbus’s second voyage) without seeing monstrous humans; yet he still instructed Cortés to ascertain the truth of reports “that there are people with broad and massive ears, and others who have faces like dogs,” and to find out “where the Amazon women are.”6

  Yet while the quest for the curious and monstrous would continue across the Americas for decades, a grimmer image of “the Indian” was already being invented. As early as the 1490s, Columbus and his collaborators and successors constructed an abiding myth of cannibalism in the Caribbean (whose very name derives from the word). They were motivated by beliefs—backed up by royal law, beginning in 1503 (but based on earlier codes)—that cannibals could rightfully be enslaved. Spaniards called these alleged man-eaters caribes (“the term that they used to make free people into slaves,” as Las Casas put it), and expected (some hoped) to find them on the American mainland too. Accounts by Juan Díaz and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, published in 1520 and 1521 and based on what Spaniards claimed to see on the 1518 Grijalva expedition along the Yucatec and Mexican coastline, generated engraved imaginings of indigenous orgies of idolatry, sacrificial slaughter, and cannibalism that were reproduced for many generations. It was as if Dante’s Inferno were transformed into a kind of earthly “Indian” inferno.7

  The European imagination of satanic horror in the Americas was enormously stimulated by the Spanish discovery of a fully developed religious world in Mexico—complete with temples and statues, priests and rituals, all bewilderingly incomprehensible unless simply classified and condemned as the work of the devil. Aztec religion soon became conceived by Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic as centered on three interrelated elements: public executions, characterized from the sixteenth century up to the present as “human sacrifice”; habitual cannibalism; and the worship of monstrous, satanic “idols.” Attached to these were a set of negative stereotypes, sometimes aimed at the Aztecs in particular, sometimes smearing Mesoamericans in general: a propensity for sodomy, licentiousness, a weakness for alcohol, dishonesty, and credulity.