When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  That principle is a romantic one; his self-sacrifice is really to love. His final two words—“Farewel Almeria”—are a reminder of the love quincunx that has driven the plot: Montezuma loves Almeria (daughter of the deceased “Indian Queen”), who loves Cortés, who loves Cydaria (Montezuma’s daughter), but she is betrothed to Orbellan (son of the “Indian Queen”). Dryden’s Montezuma is certainly the tragic hero of the tale, but he is also the emperor who, in the end, one way or another, simply gave up.58

  Montezuma’s role was central in the “highly unstable edifice of synecdoche, analogy, and allusion” by which Spaniards reconstructed Aztec history and religion, and reinvented its gods, in order to make just and moral “the Conquest.” And although Protestant Europeans and Americans would come to condemn the Spanish conquests, their view of the Aztecs and the tragic, doomed Montezuma was taken from that Spanish reconstruction. Thus in England as much as in Spain and Mexico, Montezuma’s peaceful and willing surrender to Cortés—his role as the emperor who simply gave up—was not just important, it was the most important thing he did, the defining element in his biography.59

  Yet therein lies the rub. Montezuma did not surrender to Cortés. It is neither plausible that he did, nor easily reconciled with the images and evidence of him as a ruler that survived from the early sixteenth century; indeed, the emperor who voluntarily gave up his empire is particularly difficult to reconcile with the king of the cannibals. Over the last five centuries, Montezuma has thus evolved into a particular kind of contradiction, one oft repeated but never resolved. Sahagún’s claim that Montezuma participated unflinchingly in sacrificial rituals himself, but that when he heard descriptions of the Spaniards he “trembled with fear and almost fainted,” is echoed over and over by modern writers. The Mexican writer of children’s books Heriberto Frías wrote in 1925 of “the sadly famous Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, doubly cursed as a great general of rapacious, conquering armies and as the Supreme Pontiff of wily, stultifying priesthood.” English diplomat and historian Maurice Collis confessed in 1954 that “one cannot help feeling that Montezuma was a monster and the sacrifice of [his] captives a ritual murder.” Yet this monster, quickly believing that Cortés was a returning Quetzalcoatl, “was overwhelmed with awe” at the prospect of the god’s approach. Here was the sadly famous emperor portrayed as a lilylivered serial killer.60

  Because understandings and images of Montezuma grew so emblematic and stereotypical in the decades and centuries after his death, he no longer needed to be anchored to historical reality. As a generic “Indian” prince, he could be drawn or described as any artist, playwright, or historian wished—as Dryden entertainingly proved, and as was reflected in the engraved portraits of the early modern centuries (examples of which are in the Gallery). As a result, of course, the early modern and modern Montezuma became increasingly removed from the Montezuma that died in 1520.

  TO MAKE BETTER SENSE of these many Montezumas, of the emperor’s multifaceted afterlife, let us linger on his posthumous personalities. These should be seen not as distinct textual or visual portraits, but as threads that run in confused and contradictory ways through the vast quilt of Montezuma imagery. Montezuma the Monster has already been introduced, and is primarily a personification of the Aztec stereotypes already discussed. This emperor was the cannibal king, the dark lord who “fed now and then of man’s flesh, sacrificed” but preferred to have children “slain and dressed for his table.” This Montezuma did not merely preside over the culture and kingdom defined by idolatry, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, but led it by example, removing hearts himself, literally getting his hands dirty. Yet the vast majority of such portraits, from Sahagún to Collis, Gómara to Ranking, mixed such characteristics with others, thereby contributing to the contradictions.61

  Another personality, mixed in uneasily with the Monster, was that of Montezuma the Magnificent. The deepest origins of this Montezuma lay in the years of the emperor’s reign (1502–20), in how his kingship was projected onto his subjects, and in the memory of that image among survivors of the invasion war. This personality comes closest to the real Montezuma, the man who mastered the difficult job of ruling an empire. However, that historical Montezuma was muted after the invasion by the duplicitous, capitulating Montezuma of Cortés’s Letters, and the weak and cowardly Montezuma of Gómara’s telling. It is only later in the century that the Magnificent begins to reemerge, and he does so in surprising (and, predictably, contradictory) ways and places.

  For example, the Spanish poet Gabriel Lasso de la Vega was devoted to promoting the Cortés legend, most notably in a pair of long epic poems. But for Lasso, Montezuma was not the anti-Cortés of so many Spanish accounts; rather, he was a great ruler of an awe-inspiring kingdom, an epic figure, powerful and indomitable, as befits the poet’s verse. Lasso’s position was that the greater the “Indian” emperor, the greater the triumph of the man who beat him, and indeed, that argument is made clear in a brief essay appended to Lasso’s Mexicana of 1594.

  Written by one Gerónimo Ramirez, the essay insists that “the Indians of New Spain were not bellicose, but neither were they cowardly, simpleminded, ignorant, without ingenuity or skill or way of living.” Far from being “weak-hearted and feminized (as some have said),” they were “very skillful at arms” and “fought valiantly.” To deny “the spirit and fortitude of the Indians” is “to diminish the merit that Cortés won in conquering them.” As for “the astonishing name and power of Moteçuma, King of Mexico,” no other ruler in the Americas approached “the grandeur of his kingdom, neither in the number of vassals nor in the abundance of riches.” Only the ferocious resistance of the Tlaxcalteca could be said to “diminish the power of this supreme [superbissimo] king.”62

  The Montezuma the Magnificent of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was usually tempered to various degrees of disconnection with the Monster. In the America of Montanus and Ogilby he is virtually a model monarch; his domain is vast, due to “his Valor and good success in the Wars,” but he is at the same time “a wise and good Prince, just, affable, and tender of his Subjects good.” His only flaw is his fanatical devotion to his “Satanical Religion.”63

  A particularly vivid modern manifestation of Montezuma the Magnificent is in the 1964 book of that name by Mexican lawyer and historian Ignacio Romerovargas Iturbide (although only published in Mexico, and long out of print even there, the book resonates across Mexican websites in the present century). Romerovargas sought to make of Montezuma a model statesman who might inspire modern imitators. He was a “great reformer and educator” who was “the only ruler of his time in the world who required the compulsory education of every member of society.” He allocated state lands to those who had served the community well. He built a great hospital and orphanage. His palace of dwarfs, albinos, and deformed people was a state home for humane care, not a place of “morbid curiosity, as it was interpreted by the Spaniards, who spoke so much of charity but understood it poorly and never practiced it.” He opened up his storehouses in times of drought or crop failure. His legal system was not equaled in Europe until after the French Revolution. He protected trade and maintained peace throughout the empire. With his “deeply artistic temperament,” he turned Tenochtitlan into a massive urban artwork, an engineering and architectural masterpiece. He was powerful and feared, but also “loved by his people to the point of being almost adored,” and seemed sometimes cruel only due to his extreme devotion to justice.64

  How can this compelling if imaginative emperor be reconciled with the cruel coward of Spanish depiction? Romerovargas himself poses the question, and answers it by arguing rightly that the Spaniards were invested in a negative characterization of the Aztecs, a view that tainted their portrait of the ruler; he rejects, therefore, the Monster. But he cannot resist the myth of the returning Quetzalcoatl, leading him to resort to Montezuma the Fearful (my label for another posthumous personality). Following so many before him, Romerovargas gives the emperor a dramatic p
ersonality change in the face of the Spanish invasion. Believing a “far off king” had sent the invaders, this “sublime figure” and “national hero” let them in, but once “taken by surprise and imprisoned” he could not withstand “the physical and moral tortures” of his captivity, and was “tormented and reduced to impotence.” Romerovargas is keen to promote the martyrdom of the fallen emperor, but the contrast with his pre-invasion magnificence makes him a rather pathetic martyr.65

  This tempering of the Magnificent with the Fearful, like the other contradictory personality threads, went back into the early modern centuries. By the time Sepúlveda called Montezuma “timorous and cowardly” in 1543, the story of the emperor’s capitulation was well established as fact, with a derogatory view of his alleged faintheartedness hot on its heels.66 Montezuma the Fearful was an easy target, a convenient scapegoat. In the Historia by Sahagún and the one by Durán, Aztec defeat in the war was blamed squarely on Montezuma, specifically on his fearfulness—his superstitious, depressed, weak, cowardly demeanor. This tidy way of explaining the conquest through a reimagined Montezuma was surely the prevailing view as much among Nahuas as among Franciscans (as reflected in Sahagún’s Historia). Montezuma was the antithesis of an exemplary tlahtoani: a warrior-king who failed to lead his armies; a Great Speaker who had little to say. Durán took the interpretation a step further, inventing a mirrored pair of personalities for the first and second Montezumas—the one (ruled 1440–69) explaining the Aztec Empire’s expansion, the other (ruled 1502–20) its collapse.67

  The Sahagún-Durán historical fiction stuck—as historical fact. Gemelli, writing a century later, translated “Montezuma” as “Wise Lord,” for he was “Grave, and Majestick, a Man of few Words, and discreet, which made him much honour’d, and fear’d.” Yet faced with ominous portents and predictions of “some great Calamity” by his astrologers, this same emperor was quickly reduced to “Repentance,” passively awaiting “his Ruin, to be wrought by the Children of the Sun, coming from the East.” In a variant on this theme (in a 1778 heroic poem by Joseph María Vaca de Guzmán), in which “the terrible Montezuma” was not loved by his people at all, but was “the most arrogant King” (almost a Magnificent Monster), the emperor nonetheless sank quickly into “a mortal lethargy” when “the great Cortés” appeared on the horizon. Likewise, Ranking depicted a warlike and bloodthirsty Montezuma who set up “a stone of excessive size” to accommodate the increase in human sacrifices, beginning with 12,210 victims at his coronation; yet this same man was overcome with emotion when offered the crown, his acceptance thrice “interrupted by tears,” and at Cortés’s approach seventeen years later “was terribly perplexed by his [own] superstition and fears.” The emperor of Gemelli, Vaca de Guzmán, Ranking, and Romerovargas, and myriad interpretations in between, whether feared or loved (or both) by his subjects, always crumbles in the face of prophesied doom.68

  The irony of the renewed popularity in the twentieth century of the Quetzalcoatl myth was that writers sympathetic to the Aztecs ended up perpetuating Cortés’s lie about the surrender. Thus the traditional narrative of Cortés’s triumph and Montezuma’s failure became enhanced, not undermined, by an indigenist attention to the Aztec cultural context. Montezuma the Fearful increasingly appeared in print in the twentieth century. French historian Jean Descola—whose history of the invasion, written in the 1950s, was titled Hernán Cortés; or The Return of the White God—offered a slightly updated version of the traditional narrative, in which the genius and awesome destiny of Cortés (based, as so often, on a reading of Cortés himself and Gómara) was reinforced by the ancient prophecies, terrifying omens, and providentialism of the Quetzalcoatl myth. Similarly, the Mexican Jesuit priest and scholar Esteban Palomera, who studied the sixteenth-century Franciscan Diego Valadés from the 1940s to 1980s but was also a devotee of Maya history, concluded that the legend of Quetzalcoatl, “pregnant with fatalistic omens, influenced the religious soul of the [ancient] Mexicans, especially the superstitious spirit of Montezuma.” Valadés, whose 1579 book was Palomera’s subject, makes no mention of the Quetzalcoatl-Montezuma myth; Palomera was simply articulating the conventional wisdom of his own era.69

  By the twenty-first century, judgments passed on Montezuma the Fearful had piled high, with Internet commentary added to books of all kinds and languages. As the Prophecy interpretations of the Meeting showed (in the previous chapter), the defeat of the empire has again and again been blamed on Montezuma’s “superstition,” “delusion,” his naïve “fatalism”; he was “blinded,” “paralyzed with foreboding, confused and indecisive;” he was simply “frightened.”70

  Over the centuries since Montezuma’s death, as these three personalities developed and collided with each other to create a complex mythology about the emperor, how was he drawn and painted? What did the Monster, the Magnificent, and the Fearful actually look like? Early colonial visual representations of the emperor tended to follow those that had survived the Spanish invasion, in which artists attempted not to create a faithful likeness of the man but to depict his status and power, his essence as emperor. In some of these images (and in some in our Gallery), there is perhaps the echo of Montezuma the Magnificent. And in later illustrations, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depictions of the Meeting or of Cortés’s seizure of the emperor portray him as crestfallen, head drooping in defeat. Nonetheless, there is an overarching motif to the five centuries of Montezuma portraiture, one present in almost every image: feathers. The final personality is thus Montezuma the Feathered.71

  THE USE OF FEATHERS as an iconic shorthand to convey native peoples of the Americas is strikingly ubiquitous. It began immediately: Columbus returned from his first voyage to the Americas in March 1493, and the following year a mural in one of the Borgia palaces in Italy already featured American “Indians,” naked save for feathered headdresses. Clearly, and not surprisingly, Europeans already had at their disposal an icon of dress (or lack thereof) to represent the alien or the Other; feathered dress had for long been associated with Turks and other “Oriental” peoples. So, just as they expected to find in the Americas freakish people, barbaric customs, monstrous idols, and tales of the expectedly unexpected, so did they assume that these “Indians” would wear feathers, and often nothing else. With the discovery that many native societies in the Americas did indeed value bird feathers and had developed dazzling featherwork cultures—from the Aztecs to the Tupí of Brazil—the stereotype deepened. By the seventeenth century, the feather was exclusively the “Indian” image, the early modern equivalent to the icon for a smartphone app.72

  The role of the feather was thus simple and it was used everywhere—on maps, engravings, paintings, and sculptures. An elaborate but fairly typical example is the frontispiece to Ogilby’s America (included in the Gallery); the word was included as the book’s title, but it was rendered redundant by the presence of feathers on all the “Indians.” At the same time, feathers were also used to convey differences among “Indians,” as perceived by Europeans; an “Indian” wearing only a feathered headdress was more barbaric or of lower status than one with feathered skirts or anklets, and a complete garb of feathers conveyed a ruler.

  De Bry included a vaguely identified Montezuma as a generic feathered “Indian” ruler in the frontispiece image to his Peregrinationes in Americam of 1601, and—inevitably—Montezuma emerged during that century as the most feathered of them all. The first European-style portrait of Montezuma to be printed was by a Frenchman, André Thevet, in 1584. He gave his subject classical garb and an ambivalent stare, an ambiguity of dress and gaze that reflected the contradictions that had already become embedded in descriptions of the emperor, both in Thevet’s own writings (where he is “philosophical, virtuous, misguided and even diabolical,” as a recent study observed) and in the larger literature. Thevet’s portrait held hints of the Monstrous, the Magnificent, and the Fearful—but also the Feathered, for in addition to feathers on his head and spea
r, the emperor is pointing to an elaborate feathered shield, as if to draw attention to its symbolism and his kingship.73

  Thevet’s portrait was borrowed widely for centuries, sometimes unaltered, sometimes changed to reflect different combinations of the contradictory textual depictions that such images often illustrated. In the Ogilby and Montanus version, Montezuma wears nothing but feathers, the classical toga gone, his outfit that of a warrior prince. There is little of the Fearful here, and one can imagine that English readers of Ogilby recognized something of the tragic, savage, but “Glorious Prince”—the kingly Noble Savage—that Dryden had put onstage just a few years earlier.

  Another variant was the full-length and colorful painting by a Mexican artist, sent to Cosimo de’ Medici in the 1690s (it still hangs in Florence, in the Medici Treasury). The painting was copied in engraved form and appeared that way in various books, including Italian editions of Solís’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (such as the one in our Gallery). This image gives the impression of a noble, barbaric lord (hints of the Magnificent), but despite the spear he is somewhat effeminized (evoking the Fearful). Above all, he is Montezuma the Feathered, an allegory vacated of meaning so that he can represent anything or nothing. Like the disembodied feathered headdress that is the image for the “Moctezuma” station in the Mexico City subway, he is an icon, not an individual. He is the prince with a personality so contradictory that it crumbles and disappears, leaving instead the icon of Indianness, the image of a generic heathen prince—one who might, for example, be an Aztec general leading an Inca army.74

  * * *

  “When I was young and runnin’ wild, I talked with Montezuma,” began a ditty sung by British sailors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and perhaps for a century or two before that). “Now Montezuma said, says he to me, Friend Jim, I wish you’d go to sea. / And smite each person you might see, who happens to be my enemy. / And so said Montezuma, said Montezuma to me.”75 Reducing Montezuma to a generic ancient king, a single stereotype, made him a fitting topic for popular song. Just as Henry VIII’s pop-song characteristic was his six wives, Montezuma’s was his impotence or tragic demise as ruler.