When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  As colonial sources tend to simply repeat the same list of wild animals, let us step sideways here into the archaeological evidence from the Great Temple project. Among the 126 (and growing) caches of objects collected and ritually buried by the Aztecs, direct zoo-related evidence has recently been found (inspiring a Mexican newspaper to run a 2014 story titled “Montezuma’s Zoo Is Not a Myth”). One cache contained more than nine thousand animal bones, most of them from Mexican gray wolves. Some wolf bones had also been placed in other caches. Thus far, more than twenty individual wolves have been identified, some with entire skeletons. Not only do animal bones outnumber human bones found beneath the Great Temple precinct, but wolf remains alone rival human ones in quantity. Now an endangered subspecies of gray wolves, the Mexican wolf was native to northern Mexico in Aztec times; some, perhaps many, of the depictions of coyotes in sixteenth-century codices are now thought to be representations of this wolf, the smallest gray wolf subspecies.15

  At least one of the wolves uncovered by archaeologists suffered from arthritis and dysplasia, and could not have survived to the age that it did unless being cared for in captivity. That fact, combined with the location of most wolf bones within or adjacent to the zoo complex, as well as references in colonial sources to the inclusion of wolves in the “Wild Beasts” section, strongly suggests that at least some of these wolves had lived in the zoos of Montezuma and his predecessors.

  The remaining categories of living things in the zoo comprised human beings. One was that of deformed humans—“monstrous men and women, some crippled, others dwarfed or hunchbacked” (in Tapia’s words). Motolinía claimed that the court was “served” by “dwarfs and little humpbacks” that were “intentionally made so in childhood by breaking and disjointing their bones.” According to Solís, fathers were inspired to maim their children in this way because the palace of “Buffoons” and “Monsters” contained apartments where these “Errors of Nature” were given instruction and meals. Modern Mexican historians took that interpretation a step further, arguing that it was the uncharitable Spaniards who assumed Montezuma kept a palace of the deformed out of “morbid curiosity.” In fact, his motivation was “humanitarian” (one such historian asserted); the palace’s purpose was “so the state could directly care for them.”16

  Women—the final category of living things—lived in the palace, or compound of houses, designated for the emperor. This is not to suggest that women in Aztec society were viewed or treated like animals, or even that Montezuma saw them as zoo creatures. Women enjoyed considerable status in Aztec culture, albeit one restricted to gender-specific roles (as was the case worldwide). But the conquistadors and Spanish chroniclers described the residential palaces of Montezuma’s wives and concubines as if the women were a category of royal possession. Colonial accounts claimed that Montezuma took for himself the noblemen’s daughters who most appealed to him, although this was surely more a matter of strategic alliance and political control than one of the emperor’s taste; the royal practice of polygyny was so fundamental to the maintenance and structure of the empire that Aztec scholar Ross Hassig recently wrote an entire book about it (women, he argues, were “the dark matter of Aztec history”). I suggest that the identities of such women, combined with their maintenance in a discrete compound, make it useful and appropriate to consider them part of the zoo-collection complex. For our purposes, it is crucial to understand that the zoo, as conceived by the Aztecs, included human beings; people too could be collected.17

  The Nuremberg Map labeled buildings on the edge of the city as Domus ad uoluptase D. Muteezuma (“The Pleasure-House of Lord Montezuma”). Claims by conquistadors that the palace contained astonishing numbers of women soon settled into the figure of a thousand, repeated for centuries with the same assurance as the invented numbers of sacrificed humans. Herrera’s phrasing of it in 1601, copying from Gómara, was fairly typical: in this palace, “few men slept; but there were a thousand women; although others say there were three thousand, and that is more probable, taking into account the ladies, servant women, and slave women.” Herrera also mentioned the detail, repeated by many others, of Montezuma’s fecundity; in Ogilby’s words, “he was likewise much given to Women, but it was only to such as were counted his Wives; of which he is said to have had no less than a hundred and fifty with Child by him at one time.”18

  HOWEVER WE CATEGORIZE the living things in Montezuma’s zoo complex, it clearly contained hundreds of species of flora and fauna, and thousands of people (some as part of the collection complex, many more as workers), offering us tantalizing glimpses into life at court and in the imperial city. Those glimpses are sharpened a little more by the nonliving or material objects also collected by Montezuma—the details of which can be gleaned from colonial accounts, conquistadors’ lists of loot and booty, and archaeological evidence.

  Cloth and clothing is one example. Cortés claimed that Montezuma wore four outfits a day, “all new, and he never wore them again.” Whether that was an exaggeration or not, the emperor certainly seems to have maintained a wardrobe that amounted to an important part of the royal collections—as evidenced by the spectacular apparel included in the first two big shipments of gifts and loot sent to Spain by Cortés.19

  The first shipment, sent from Vera Cruz in July 1519, comprised some 180 objects, many presented to Cortés and the other captains on board one of the ships anchored offshore. This haul of treasure was entrusted to Francisco de Montejo and Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero, who ignored Cortés’s wishes and stopped in Cuba to show off the loot, before sailing on to Spain. The shipment was inventoried in Seville on November 5, so it is quite possible that on the very day of the Meeting in Tenochtitlan, high-ranking Spaniards in Seville were feasting their eyes on a sample of the kinds of clothes, featherworks, and jewelry that were in massive quantities in Montezuma’s collections. (The loot, accompanied by a group of Totonac men from the Gulf coast, then toured several Spanish cities before traveling north to Brussels.)20

  The second shipment was assembled after Tenochtitlan was captured, and sent from there in May 1522; it was actually a trio of shipments, two intended for the king, one to be distributed according to detailed instructions among thirteen churches and twenty-three church and state officials. Almost none of it reached Spain—it was captured by Jean Florin, a French corsair, to Cortés’s “great chagrin”—but various inventories survived. One of them lists this war booty as comprising 116 items, almost all featherworks. Many of these must have been taken from Aztec warriors or from Montezuma’s collections in the city. Feathers and featherworks thus make up another important category of nonliving things in the royal collections. They were highly valued and, by all accounts, spectacular. The feather headdresses that were part of the shipment that reached Seville in November 1519 left Oviedo breathless; “there was just so much to take in.”21

  Featherworks overlap with clothing (as many were used as such), and with another collection category, armor and weaponry. Aztec shields were often adorned with featherwork, examples of which were included in both the 1519 and 1522 treasure shipments. Considering the brutal war that Spaniards waged in order to plunder Montezuma’s collections, it is not surprising that Montezuma’s armory caught the Spanish imagination. Generations of descriptions, from Cortés on, were used by Solís to compose his long one of the manufacture, maintenance, and display of various weapons in a two-building armory. The artistry and splendor of these weapons reflected not only the “Opulency” but also the “Genius” of Montezuma the “Martial Prince.”22

  Aztec emperors also collected what we would classify as objects of art, and indeed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these objects have ended up in the art musems of the modern world. Two categories of such objects are works of sculpture produced by “cutters of stone, workers in green stone mosaic, carvers of wood” in the workshops within the zoo-collection complex; and metalworked jewelry and figurines. Cortés, Tapia, and Gómara all mentioned small “carve
d pieces” worked from precious metals, and figurines “so realistic in gold and silver that no smith in the world could have done better.” The emperor’s “gold and silver-smiths, and copper-smiths” were described by Sahagún, and much later Gemelli noted that he had read and heard in Mexico City that Montezuma had kept “all sorts of Birds, and Beasts, and Sea-Fish in his Salt Fishponds, and River-Fish in fresh Water. If any kind could not be had, he kept them in Gold, and for Grandeur.” In other words, the living zoo was paralleled by a nonliving one of representations of the empire’s creatures.23

  Montezuma was also a collector of books. His library must have held many hundreds of the painted scrolls and screenfolds that were almost all destroyed in the war and during the subsequent centuries of Spanish colonial rule; their heirs were the early colonial codices. Artists called tlacuilloque (plural of tlacuillo), of whom “there was never a shortage, for the office passed from father to son and was highly esteemed,” painted with a pictographic writing system. As Tovar later explained to a fellow Jesuit, Aztec artists “had figures and hieroglyphs with which they painted” and could thus “draw whatever they wished.” Díaz called them “very skillful [sublimados] painters.” When the Spaniards arrived on the Gulf coast in 1519, a group of tlacuilloque quickly painted them and their possessions in scrolls destined for Tenochtitlan (as depicted in one of the frames in our Gallery’s “Picturing the War”).

  The library there also included Aztec histories, structured as annals. These year-by-year sequences of events give an impression of objectivity, of lists of simple facts, although early Aztec history was primarily origin and migration mythology, while later Aztec history was highly partisan and political, charting the glorious rise of the empire. Montezuma’s library (“a great house for all his books”) also included tribute lists detailing the items each subject city and province of the empire owed to the emperor; again, some of these were created or re-created in the early colonial period, giving us some sense of what the lost library looked like.24

  Two of the most important tribute lists, known to us as the Codex Mendoza and the Matrícula de Tributos, detailed the feathers, precious stones and metals, jaguar skins, and sacks of cacao delivered by each province—and also shells, mostly unworked Spondylus shells from Cihuatlan, on the empire’s Pacific coast. The inclusion of shells on tribute lists and in caches of offerings around the Great Temple is evidence that they formed a part of the royal collection, both unworked and as carved artworks. In one group of eleven caches of offerings, buried during the construction of an expansion of the Great Temple in the 1470s, shells and other items from the sea (such as coral and bones of fish or marine animals) were layered to represent the cosmological layers of the underworld. The connection of these objects to water also linked them to Tlaloc, the deity of rain and fertility to whom the Great Temple was partially dedicated (Tlaloc effigies were also in this same group of caches). The conquistadors and chroniclers ignored or dismissed shells and related objects (they were of little value to Spaniards). But they were of great symbolic value to the Aztecs, reflecting the belief that Montezuma ruled over sea as well as land, and that his zoo should therefore include objects and creatures that came from those waters.25

  I COULD CONTINUE CLASSIFYING, listing, and detailing for many pages the innumerable things collected by Montezuma, but the point is made: he was a collector. More than that, he was a collector imperial and extraordinaire, one of the great collectors of human history; collecting was at the very heart of his identity as emperor. So how did he do it? How was the zoo-collection complex built and maintained, and what was its relationship to the people of the city surrounding it?

  “It is true that I have silver, gold, feathers, weapons, and other objects and riches in the treasure of my parents and grandparents,” Montezuma told Cortés, “kept from a long time ago until the present, as is the custom among kings.” This statement is most likely apocryphal (it comes from Gómara, and he and Cortés tended to put words into the Aztec emperor’s mouth, words designed to appeal to their own emperor, Carlos). But the implication that the royal collection had roots going back into the fifteenth century and earlier is surely accurate, supported by the layers of buried objects discovered around the Great Temple. Montezuma neither created his zoo-collection from scratch nor invented the concept. He both inherited it from his ancestors and also competed with the king (tlahtoani) of Tetzcoco across the lake; Nezahualcoyotl, who ruled an important city-state but was subordinate to Montezuma, maintained his own zoo-collection complex (according to his descendants).26

  Like any collection, then, the royal Aztec one must have started small and gradually grown; like the empire itself—of which it was a product and reflection—the collection contained a growth dynamic, inherited by Montezuma along with the animals and objects. Art historian Amara Solari has identified seven mechanisms of procurement, loosely copied here (using groups of seven is our invention; the Aztecs would have preferred fours or eights). Foremost among these mechanisms were the spoils of war (including religious statues or objects taken from the temples of defeated towns), and the wide variety of animals, birds, pelts, feathers, clothing, precious stones, and other objects brought to Tenochtitlan four times a year as tribute payments from subject towns. Tribute’s purpose was to show the magnificence and authority of the Aztec nation, claimed Durán, so subject peoples were awed by “the grandeur” of the Aztecs, by “the ease with which they did what they wanted.” Tribute proved to the people that the Aztecs were the lords of creation, and Montezuma was like “the sun, warming you with his heat and fire, the most excellent Lord of Created Things.”27

  Merchants and ambassadors also brought in items through two ways: diplomatic exchange and commercial trade. The empire’s long-distance traders, called pochteca, were a large and prestigious group in Aztec society. They plied an extensive network of trade routes that had evolved centuries before the Spanish invasion and which survived for centuries after it. The pochteca traded for themselves, and for the emperor and his court, thus supplying both the massive markets in the capital and the royal zoo-collection. Merchants also acted as, or accompanied, ambassadors, as Sahagún detailed in his Historia (with a whole book of the Florentine Codex devoted to the pochteca). The famous shipboard exchange of 1519, mentioned earlier, was an example of a long-standing tradition of diplomatic gift giving in Mexico.28

  Other mechanisms of acquisition featured a more direct involvement by Montezuma. Specialized craft manufacturing was maintained in the city, some of it apparently within the palace complex itself, and a portion of the production went straight into the emperor’s collections. Smaller collections within the empire were also subject to royal requisition; for example, Durán tells a story of the requisition by the first Montezuma of all the plants from a garden in Cuetlaxtla, on the Gulf coast, replanted in the royal Aztec nursery at Huaxtepec, gardens that Díaz called “the best that I have ever seen in all my life.” Finally, the whimsy of the emperor played a role, for he collected whatever “caught his fancy.” The phrase is by Motolinía, who claimed that,

  a trustworthy Spaniard, when in the presence of Moteuczoma, saw a sparrow hawk that was flying in the air catch his fancy. To show off his greatness in the presence of the Spaniard, Moteuczoma gave orders that the hawk be brought to him; and so great was the zeal and the numbers of those who went after it that the wild hawk was caught and delivered to him.

  Or he hunted birds himself; Nahua informants told Sahagún that one of the ways that Aztec emperors “amused themselves” was to “hunt birds with a bird-net [tlatlapechmatlauia].”29

  Once acquired, all the many categories of living and nonliving things were placed in their corresponding locations in the zoo-collection complex; some would remain there, others would become interred as sacred offerings (from the beautifully crafted ceremonial knives to the skeletons of wolves uncovered centuries later). Colonial accounts and archaeological evidence support the Nuremberg Map’s impression that the zoo-colle
ction complex was arranged adjacent to and surrounding the city’s ceremonial center (with only the botanical gardens located off the island on the lakeshore). Parts of the collection were probably housed within Montezuma’s palace complex, with the animal zoos immediately to the east, and the aviaries, armory, and library adjacent to the west. According to Tapia and Gómara, “gold plates and bars, jewels, and carved pieces,” as well as “gold and silver and green stones” were kept in rooms that Montezuma accessed through the aviaries.30

  On the one hand, therefore, the zoo-collection was a network of elite spaces, belonging exclusively to Montezuma and his family, located in a city heart that was dedicated to religious ceremony, political rule, and royal life. Montezuma was, according to Cortés, particularly keen on bird-watching; some aviaries and zoo patios supposedly had galleries or “Apartments capable of receiving [the emperor] and his whole Court,” where, for example, they could observe the birds of prey and enjoy “the Diversion of Hawking.”31

  On the other hand, it took hundreds, if not thousands, of specialists and workers to build and maintain theses spaces, create the crafted artifacts, and take care of the animals. The aviaries and animal cages were extensive and sufficiently well designed (“big cages made of very thick timbers very well cut and put together”) to inspire specific comment in the colonial sources, where note was also made of the staff. The Nahuatl term for zookeepers was tequanpixque, and according to Sahagún’s informants they were numerous. Cortés claimed the aviaries alone “gave Employment to above Three Hundred Men, skilful in the Knowledge of their Diseases.”32

  THIS BRINGS US TO our final way of looking at the zoo-collection complex: How did all the animals, birds, plants, people, and objects reflect the Aztec cosmology or view of their empire and the universe? What did the zoo mean?