When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The conquistadors and other Spaniards had a trio of relatively simple answers to that question. Primarily, the zoo-collection complex in its totality meant wealth; it confirmed that the empire of the Aztecs could make its invaders and colonists prosperous. That perspective was reflected in how the collection was described by Spaniards, with an emphasis on precious metals (which, unlike stone figurines or feathered shields, had an immediate and fungible value in Europe), and often as part of a description of markets and market goods. Put together, the great markets and the massive zoo-collection complex were evidence not just of the richness of the land, but of well-oiled mechanisms for concentrating that wealth in a capital city—an ideal basis for a colony.33

  Another Spanish explanation was that the zoo, in particular the wild animals and reptiles, was just further evidence of Aztec satanic barbarity—because the zoo could be tied to the Aztec stereotype of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Early colonial assertions that the animals were fed human flesh were few, but Díaz echoed Gómara’s comment on the hellish noise of the zoo, adding details on the diet of “bodies of sacrificed Indians.” Like so many “facts” about the Aztecs, this detail was passed on across the centuries, so that by the nineteenth it had evolved into a portrait of the zoo whose wonder was offset by the terrible truth that “the snakes and beasts” were fed with “the flesh of men sacrificed,” and that the hissing, howling, and yelling of the animals made the zoo seem like “a dungeon of hell and dwelling place of the devil”—which “it was indeed,” as another building attached to the zoo complex was an ornate “chapel” in which, at night, “the devil appeared unto” Montezuma. The detail of the devil has disappeared from discussion of the Aztecs, but the man-eating zoo animals linger on.34

  A third Spanish explanation for the zoo-collection complex was that its splendor and organization were a reflection of Montezuma’s grandeur. In other words, it was “the custom among kings” (as Gómara noted); or (as Solís put it), the zoo was “a Custom established from all Antiquity, by the Number of Wild Beasts any Prince had in his Possession, to make an estimate of the Grandeur of the Possessor.” This explanation comes very close to what I think the zoo-collection was really about. But the history of this perspective also contains a twist, one that is fascinating, ironic, and worth a brief digression. For while medieval European kings kept menageries of hunting animals and birds of prey, and maintained armories and treasuries, it was not in fact their custom to develop massive zoos and collections—that is, until after Montezuma’s zoo-collection was discovered and plundered, and objects from it and descriptions of it circulated around Europe.35

  Medieval European princes and bishops had maintained treasuries of holy relics, which “served as signs of accrued sacral authority” (similar to the function of royal Aztec collections). But starting in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, such collecting practices shifted to include material objects, more secular than sacred, that represented the outside world. This new culture of collection was part of a larger European cultural development; it spread through all ranks of society where it was affordable, and the idea and popularity of Kunstkammern and Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities and wonder) would lead eventually to galleries and museums. Explanations include religious changes (the Protestant Reformation and the questioning of the sacred status of relics) and the rise of European overseas empires.36

  But an additional factor, usually overlooked, is crucially and ironically important: the cultural impact of those shiploads of objects—diplomatic gifts, war booty, and loot from Montezuma’s palaces—sent to Spain and to other parts of the Hapsburg domain (including the Spanish Netherlands, parts of Italy, and Austria). The shift in royal collecting practices in sixteenth-century Europe was thereby influenced by the discovery of royal Aztec collections and their partial appropriation by Carlos V. Beginning in the 1520s, the Hapsburg collections developed to reflect the empire that the royal family was acquiring—just as Montezuma’s collection had reflected his empire—and even featured some of the exact same objects.

  There was even a further twist: among the chests of objects sent throughout the 1520s (and Cortés alone dispatched at least seven shipments between 1522 and 1529), items taken from Montezuma’s collections and elsewhere in Mexico were mixed in with objects commissioned by Spaniards and created by indigenous craftsmen. For example, Cortés claimed that during his months in Tenochtitlan with Montezuma, he “drew” various “things” (such as jewelry, crucifixes, bowls) that the emperor then “had made in gold,” and which were intended for Carlos as part of the Royal Fifth (the 20 percent tax owed to the king on everything of value acquired during a conquest campaign). Even before the Cortés expedition reached Mexico, thousands of Spanish objects had entered the Aztec Empire as a result of gift exchanges and trading by Grijalva and others. Some must have gone into Montezuma’s collection, in turn inspiring the objects that went back to Spaniards; Gómara and Las Casas claimed that the gifts given to Cortés by Montezuma’s ambassadors in 1519 had originally been prepared for Grijalva. In other words, from the earliest moments of contact, the material cultures of the Spaniards and Aztecs had begun to influence each other—one dimension of which was the seeding of early modern European collection culture by the concept and objects of Montezuma’s zoo-collection complex.37

  The link between Montezuma’s zoo and the development of zoos in Europe was less immediate and more tenuous. This was partly because the zoo and its living occupants were deliberately destroyed in 1521, and partly because its remnants could not easily be shipped to Europe (unlike nonliving looted objects from the collection); the conquistadors tried to ship zoo animals, but “many died” (as Cortés admitted). Descriptions of the zoo became shorter and less frequent over the centuries, while it was included less and less frequently in maps of Tenochtitlan. Although there were exceptions (such as the Ramusio Map), the general trend over the early modern centuries was for the zoo to be vaguely depicted but not labeled (as in a 1564 French version), then to be folded into the gardens (as in a 1580 Italian one or a 1634 print made in Frankfurt), and then eclipsed altogether (as in a 1754 image that was subsequently reproduced often). Chorographs, or slightly elevated views, of Tenochtitlan included in early modern books tended to identify “the Pleasure House and Garden,” but not the zoo. Even in the late twentieth century, when Aztec studies exploded as a field, the zoo and aviaries were not given archaeological attention (their potential for illuminating the Aztec past is far less than that of the Great Temple, hardly justifying the destruction of early colonial churches and other buildings). The only book written about Montezuma’s zoo is a children’s book.38

  Montezuma’s zoo was thus an astonishing novelty to foreign observers of the sixteenth century because they had no frame of reference with which to understand its purpose and meaning. There was nothing like it in Europe, and there would not be for centuries. As Romerovargas Iturbide observed, by “ordering the creation of zoological parks three centuries before Darwin,” Montezuma seemed to modern observers far ahead of his time. In fact, as with the development of nonliving collections, the Aztec zoo complex was so ahead of the development of modern zoos as to suggest it may have acted as a foundational precedent. Descriptions of it surely influenced the development of royal menageries in the early modern Europe—the most famous of which was incorporated into Louis XIV’s palace and garden complex at Versailles. Of course, the Aztec genesis of the modern zoo was soon forgotten; the concept became seen as a European invention. Those courtly menageries evolved in the eighteenth century into a handful of public, urban zoos, the earliest of which was in Vienna (from 1752). Zoos then opened across European capitals in the early nineteenth century (starting in Paris in 1793), spreading to North America with the founding in 1859 of the Philadelphia Zoo (which labels itself “America’s First Zoo,” with nary a nod to Montezuma). The concept eventually returned to Mexico City with the opening of the zoo in Chapultepec in 1924.39

  * * *


  In 1527, Cortés sent his father a tiger. The cat, probably an ocelot, came with a letter, which began:

  Sir: here in my house, there has grown up since it was very little a tiger [un tigre], and it has turned out to be the most handsome animal that has ever been seen, for in addition to being very pretty it is very tame and walks freely about the house and eats at the table whatever it is given; and it therefore seems to me that it could go on the ship very safely and will escape the fate of so many that have thus died. I implore Your Mercy to give it to His Majesty, for in truth it is booty to be gifted.40

  What are we to make of this nugget of historical detail? Is it no more than a curiosity? Historians have certainly made nothing of it, although the letter survives in the Spanish archives, and has even been published.

  I suggest that the tale of Cortés’s tiger is in fact very meaningful, that its significance lies in its connection to empire. But while the more obvious connection, that of European colonialist plundering, is interesting, I think the link back to Aztec animal collecting is more important. Cortés kept a tiger because Montezuma had kept tigers; he wanted it to be given to Emperor Carlos because the Aztec emperor had acquired such animals as symbols of his power and majesty. That ocean-bound ocelot thus takes us to the very meaning of Montezuma’s zoo-collection. For the zoo was a stunning statement about empire.

  The incorporation of local and foreign objects, of things living and crafted from across the empire and beyond, underpinned the Aztec understanding of the world, their empire, and the man who ruled it. The zoo-collection complex allowed Montezuma to develop and maintain “an image of himself, and the Aztec rulers who preceded him, as semi-divine” (in Solari’s words). Natural objects represented and reflected the geographical and ecological scope of the empire, crafted objects its political scope. Aztec methods of collection, organization, and categorization—as well as their completist impulse (Alva Ixtlilxochitl and other chroniclers emphasized how “there was not lacking” in the zoos a single species)—revealed an ambitious desire to know about and control the world.41

  Thus through his zoo-collection complex, Montezuma could attain universal knowledge, the ultimate acquisition. That made him unique among his subjects, so much so as to connect him directly to the gods; for only the creator deities and the emperor who ruled their creations could have universal knowledge. It was therefore imperative that Montezuma collect the Spanish newcomers in order to know them. Their arrival on the edges of his empire made his universal knowledge incomplete. By acquiring them—not surrendering to them or slaughtering them—he was able to study and understand them, thereby restoring the wholeness and universality of his imperial knowledge.

  Montezuma’s zoo-collection complex legitimized “his placement at the apex of the Aztec social hierarchy and at the center of the known world.” The emperor’s physical presence in the heart of Tenochtitlan was highly symbolic. The physical epicenter of the known world, the world Montezuma knew and ruled, was the Great Temple. It represented the world vertically: the massive pyramid embodied the earth, the twin temples at its top embodied the heavens; the base, and the layers of sacred offerings below it, embodied the underworld. But the Great Temple was also the center of the world in horizontal terms: imagine its pyramid as the entry point of a stone landing in a pond (or, to use the metaphor from Aztec mythology, the spot where an eagle with a serpent in its mouth landed on a cactus); the first ripple in the pond is Tenochtitlan’s center, with its ceremonial precinct, its temples and palaces and zoos; the next ripple is the island-city itself; the next is the Basin of Mexico, then the empire of the Aztecs, then the rest of Mesoamerica, bounded by seas.42

  Montezuma was able to look down upon his city, his world center, from a sacred place—literally. A short distance to the west of the island-capital, across a causeway and on a gentle hill overlooking the lake, was Chapultepec (where today’s zoo is). Montezuma had inherited a palace complex at Chapultepec, one with elaborate gardens, its own zoo and aviary, and bathing pools, all centered on a spring, which for almost a century had provided Tenochtitlan with fresh water via a twin-channel aqueduct. Montezuma not only liked to spend time at Chapultepec, but he seems to have expanded the entire complex considerably, including a restoration of the aqueduct in 1507. Then in 1519—when conquistadors had already set foot in his empire—he made his presence on the hillside permanent. There he had a portrait of himself carved into the rock, more than six feet tall, with a view of Tenochtitlan and the imperial heartland. By facing the rising sun and standing beside the source of fresh water, the stone Montezuma was “conceptually related” to the Great Temple, with its twin patron deities of the sun and rain. By fixing himself into the rock near his predecessors, at least four of whom (including his namesake, the first Montezuma) were also portrayed on the hillside, Montezuma laid claim to a permanent dynastic legitimacy.43

  Astonishingly, although severely damaged, the portrait survives. It is important for that reason alone, and because “it is, perhaps, the last Aztec monument.” But it is also important for what it tells us about the emperor, his self-image and the image he projected onto his people. His name glyph alone—a deceptively simple-looking cluster of pictorial elements—conveys a highly complex set of metaphors. The glyph conveyed both the name of Montezuma and his status as supreme ruler, as central to the world as the sun itself. In the Chapultepec carving, as in most surviving stone carvings of the name glyph, a speech scroll is included—evoking both his imperial office of tlahtoani (recall that the term literally meant “speaker”), and his fame, carried across the empire as his name was spoken. At Chapultepec, as in Tenochtitlan, the emperor conveyed to his subjects his status as an individual man of prowess, as an elite representative of his lineage, and as the epitome of kingship—and all this after the Spanish invaders had already set foot in his empire.44

  Montezuma was the first Aztec king to turn his name glyph into “an icon of divine kingship,” and the glyph thus literally symbolized his efforts to elevate his status and office to new levels of cosmic significance. That ambitious political promotionalism in turn reflected his record as ruler; when the Chapultepec portrait was carved, he was seventeen years into his reign, aged fifty-two, a man who was allegedly just months away from surrendering his city and empire to a small force of foreigners. Yet the historical sources on Montezuma’s reign, while they are sparse and distorted by the cultural filters of the colonial period, overwhelmingly support the impression given by that stone portrait, making the later image of Montezuma the capitulating coward even more paradoxical and unbelievable.45

  Montezuma was directly descended from Acamapichtli, the dynastic founder, who became tlahtoani in the 1360s. According to some early colonial sources, that title became elevated to huey tlahtoani (“great speaker”), beginning with the fourth ruler, Itzcoatl (historians often treat the two titles as “king” and “emperor,” as I have done here). The huey tlahtoani was chosen from among the relatives of the last ruler by a council of Aztec noblemen and members of the royal family, including the rulers of Tlacopan and Tetzcoco (the junior partners in the empire’s Triple Alliance). In practice, the succession tended to go to brothers before sons, as each generational cohort held onto power for as long as possible: for example, Montezuma’s father and two uncles had ruled before him, and when he was killed, it was his brother Cuitlahua who succeeded him. In other words, the throne did not automatically pass to the eldest son, as it did in European monarchies; a prince had to prove himself before being chosen, and (according to Durán), Montezuma, already thirty-five, was selected “for his great valor and excellent deeds.”46

  Accounts of Montezuma’s accession and coronation were, of course, all written in the Spanish colonial period, so we cannot be sure which details were invented or distorted. That said, Montezuma was apparently unanimously selected to succeed his uncle in 1502. It is possible that he took the name Moteuctzoma, “Angry Lord,” at his succession. But more likely he renamed his great-g
randfather Ilhuicamina as Moteuctzoma, thereby further cementing his legitimacy. A small investiture ceremony took place immediately, with the four-day public coronation festival not held until the following summer, after the war season. That gave Montezuma a chance to lead a campaign and return with prisoners of war, to be executed with due ceremony during the coronation. A stone was carved on all six sides to commemorate the event; displayed in the plaza, the stone connected that day to the day the earth was created, signaling Montezuma’s sacred title to rule the world.47

  Of particular significance to the events at the end of his reign, Montezuma also invited the rulers of eight city-states not yet paying him tribute to attend the coronation (some, like Cholollan, he later conquered; others, like Tlaxcallan, were still independent in 1519). Supposedly this was unprecedented; in any case, they all attended, were showered with gifts, shown lavish hospitality, given hallucinogenic mushrooms during the execution of prisoners, and danced in disguise at the height of the festivities in the city center. If the anecdote is at all true, it suggests that the new emperor understood well how power could more effectively be exercised through diplomacy combined with the implied threat of violence, rather than simply through brute force. (The conquistadors who were shown similar hospitality in the city in 1519 and 1520 would surely have heard the story, if not from their hosts then from the Tlaxcalteca officials who accompanied them. Not surprisingly, and as we shall see in the next chapter, Spaniards reacted rather differently to Montezuma’s message.)48

  Of the two uncles of Montezuma who had ruled as emperor before him, the first was Tizoc. Tizoc’s reign of only six years was cut short by an allegedly unnatural death (in 1486); according to colonial sources, his disinterest in military campaigns and imperial expansion led to his regicide by poisoning. Whether this story is accurate or not, it shows that the Aztec understanding of kingship in the sixteenth century included the notion that a tlahtoani might prove to be weak and lacking in martial spirit; furthermore, such a ruler could be removed from office. Yet, despite the Tizoc precedent, and despite the derogatory interpretation of Montezuma’s response to the Spanish invasion, no colonial sources depict Montezuma as Tizoc-like before 1519. On the contrary, not only do colonial sources almost uniformly emphasize Montezuma’s personal bravery in military campaigns, but some even exaggerated his hawkish stature (claiming, for example, that under him the Aztecs campaigned as far away as Nicaragua).49