When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The casting of Cortés as destined for greatness from the moment of birth has forever distorted accounts of his early years—indeed, of his entire life and the Conquest story. Biographies composed as part of accounts of the “Conquest of Mexico,” from the sixteenth century into the twentieth, are overwhelmingly hagiographic in nature. All imagine the pre-1519 years as a preparation for greatness, with Cortés as a young man pregnant with an incipient and energetic genius, eager to burst forth upon the world.

  The tone was set primarily by Gómara. His Conquest of Mexico, started during the old conquistador’s final years, under the patronage of Cortés’s son (don Martín), was a foundational hagio graphy of the Cortés legend. Did direct access to Cortés give Gómara important original material, revealing anecdotes, and unique insight into the man? For centuries, readers of Gómara have assumed that his book has such qualities, encouraged by his “clear and unaffected prose” and the inclusion of a few critical judgments (of Cortés’s treatment of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, for example). In fact, Gómara made it perfectly clear that his book’s purpose was not an objective and accurate depiction but rather the glorification of its subject. Las Casas insisted that Gómara was Cortés’s crony (criado) and personal historian, and “he only wrote what Cortés himself told him to write” (although more likely he wrote what don Martín wanted him to write).4

  In Gómara’s book we find the three key characteristics of almost all subsequent accounts of Cortés’s early life. The first is providential destiny (later to be fully developed at the hands of Franciscan writers). Take, for example, the trio of close calls with death that Gómara had the young Cortés survive. First, he was saved from fatal childhood illness by the piety of his wet nurse. Then, as a carousing teenager, he was rescued from the violent anger of a jealous husband by the intervention of the mother of the woman he was caught visiting. Finally, he was saved from shipwreck on his initial crossing of the Atlantic Ocean when on Good Friday a dove appeared—“a good omen” and “a miracle,” “sent by God”; the bird guided the lost vessel and its despairing passengers to Hispaniola, reaching the Caribbean island on Easter Sunday.

  The details of these three moments were sparse, but Gómara set a pattern to be followed throughout his book, one that loosely echoed the similarly little-known early life of Christ: as a man, Cortés was flawed, but he was blessed, to be spared by God through various means for higher purposes.5

  The second characteristic of traditional Cortesian biography, prom inent in Gómara’s foundational account, is the construction of the young Cortés as a frustrated genius, impatiently awaiting the heroic stage upon which he was destined to perform. He abandoned the study of law in Salamanca after only two years, “fed up with, or regretting, studying,” which “weighed upon and angered his parents,” and as a teenager in Spain “he was boisterous, haughty, mischievous, and liked weapons.” But, in Gómara’s telling, this was because the scale of Cortés’s abilities and ambition was too great for his homeland. For “he was very clever and capable in all things” (in the 1578 English version: “of a good witte and abilitie”), and he was “determined to get on and go away.” He chose the Indies over Italy because he supposedly knew the new governor on Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, and there was “much gold” there. In the early En glish version, Cortés “was a very unhappy ladde, high minded, and a lover of chivalrie, for which cause he determined with himselfe to wander abroad to seeke adventures.” “His Nature was boiling, hasty, various, addicted to Arms,” as a French version put it; “so that his Genius seemed rather destined to exploit high and Martial affairs, then to decide a controversie in Law either by Tongue or Pen.”6

  As accounts of the Mexican conquest and of Cortés’s life multiplied over the centuries, so did these biographical themes become reduplicated and reiterated. Cervantes de Salazar began a chapter of his 1560s Chronicle of New Spain with the statement that “It was Hernando Cortés whom God, along with those of his company, chose as his instrument for so great a matter.” He borrowed Gómara’s smattering of early anecdotes, adding some twists; thus Cortés quit Salamanca after two years because—rather than despite the fact that—he was “very talented,” for he only needed two years to master grammar.7

  Similar variants perpetuated the themes through the seventeenth century—most notably in the chronicles by Díaz and Solís—and into the eighteenth, when Robertson worked them into his top-selling History of America (unchallenged until Prescott’s volumes of the 1840s). Robertson emphasized Cortés’s innate and impatient military abilities. Thus the young Spaniard dropped out of university because student life was ill-suited to “his ardent and restless genius.” And despite his immersion in “active sports and martial exercises” he became “so impetuous, so overbearing, and so dissipated” that his father dispatched him “abroad as an adventurer in arms.”8

  Robertson, following the Spanish chroniclers of the preceding centuries, upon whom he based his book, offered no details of the Hispaniola years. He simply told readers that when life as a colonist on Hispaniola was unable to “satisfy his ambition,” Cortés joined Diego Velázquez in his expedition to Cuba. Robertson then glossed over “some violent contests with Velázquez, occasioned by trivial events, unworthy of remembrance,” to focus on a portrait of a turbulent youth mellowing and maturing into a prudent and graceful man of “winning aspect” and “extraordinary address in martial exercises.” No details of Cortés’s life on Cuba are offered either, only the verdict that on that island he mastered, “with what is peculiar to superior genius, the art of gaining the confidence and governing the minds of men.”9

  This brings us to the third characteristic of biographies of Cortés’s early life: the treatment of time. Cortés arrived in the Caribbean when he was nineteen or twenty years old; he left Cuba when he was thirty-four; he died at sixty-three. His years before the expedition to Mexico thus made up more than half of his life, and a good portion of his adult life. Yet less than 2 percent of Gómara’s book was devoted to the pre-Mexico years. Over the centuries, instead of digging up more (or more reliable) information about the early Cortés, historians offered even less. Some (like Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, writing in the 1560s) created abbreviated versions of the Gómara stories; others (like the poets Lasso de la Vega and Saavedra) jumped straight to the departure from Cuba, thereby more or less following Cortés’s own account in his Letters to the king. The more that Cortés became the archetypal conquistador, the legendary conqueror of the Aztecs, the more his pre-Mexican life (and the real Cortés) disappeared.

  Robertson, for example, dispensed with Cortés’s seven years on Hispaniola in these two lines: the young Spaniard arrived in 1504 and “was employed by the governor in several honorable and lucrative stations. These, however, did not satisfy his ambition,” so in 1511 he left for Cuba. The eight years on Cuba were given a few pages. But the two years of the Spanish-Aztec War were given 128 pages. A more extreme example is Thevet’s short biography, in which the Caribbean years are literally sailed right through: Cortés, “aged nineteen years, Anno 1504, was bound for the Indies, and embarqued in the Ship, of Alonso Zuintero an inhabitant of Palos de Moguer, who took along with him four more laden with Merchandise, and Sailing towards the West, he found out the Kingdom of Mexico”—which he immediately proceeded to subdue.10

  Thevet’s complete elision of fifteen years is perhaps forgivable, given that his biography is only a few pages long. Robertson’s disproportionate allotment of space is likewise understandable—his narrative target was the Spanish-Aztec War. And although such writers perpetuated a distorted view of Cortés’s life, they were simply part of the great chain of misperception, inheriting and passing on the myths, half-truths, and omissions. Yet the misleading impression given that Hispaniola and Cuba were mere brief stops on the way from Spain to Mexico surely raises this question: What on earth was Cortés doing for that long decade and a half in the Caribbean?11

  * * *

 
Keats, it turned out, was wrong. It was not “stout Cortez” who “with eagle eyes star’d at the Pacific—and all his men / Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” despite the claim by the English poet in his famous sonnet. It was Vasco Núñez de Balboa and an African slave who in 1513 were the first non–Native Americans to see that ocean. Keats seems to have been reading Robertson and conflated his accounts of Balboa first seeing the Pacific with Cortés first seeing Tenochtitlan. Or perhaps the poet merged the two moments on purpose. After all, “stout Cortez” was the emblematic conquistador, the archetype of a European amazed by what he had discovered; for Keats, he fit the bill.12

  For us, however, it does matter that Cortés never set foot—let alone the first Old World foot—“on a peak in Darien.” It matters that there was unceasing Spanish activity across the entire Caribbean basin, its islands and its surrounding mainland coasts, during the fifteen years that Cortés was there—activity in which the budding conquistador played a very minor role. Indeed, there is evidence of him participating in only one expedition of exploration or conquest, the invasion of Cuba.

  Not that Cortés was inactive. He was assigned allotments of indigenous villagers on both Hispaniola and Cuba. Called encomiendas, these grants gave their holders the rights to the labor and tribute products of their subjects.13 Encomiendas were not land grants, but their holders often claimed nearby lands, as was the case in these early Caribbean years; nor did encomiendas give license to enslave villagers, although they were often treated as slaves. Thus Cortés, like his fellow Spanish settlers, used his encomiendas to run a cattle ranch and sent “his” Taínos to look for precious metals (especially river gold). He was literate (as his later Letters to the king attest), and for some years worked as the official governmental notary in Azúa, a tiny Spanish settlement near Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. Later, on Cuba, he appears to have served for a time as Diego Velázquez’s secretary (that is, as the governor’s personal notary). He lived with a Taíno woman, whom he had baptized as Leonor Pizarro (as we shall see later, they had a daughter, whom he named Catalina, and whom he would recognize fondly in his will).

  Cortés certainly participated in the Velázquez-led Spanish invasion of Cuba in 1511. It is not clear how much fighting he did. He may have done some, but there were some 330 Spaniards in the invasion company and they met little resistance (the greatest opposition came from the Taíno leader Hatuey, who had fled from Hispaniola; he was captured and burned). The claim by an anonymous writer in the 1550s that Cortés effectively orchestrated the Cuban conquest and that Velázquez did very little “due to his obesity” smacks of Gómara-style partisanship and is not supported by any archival evidence.14

  All these activities mark Cortés as being an ordinary or typical Spanish settler in the early Caribbean. There are no signs of him being particularly “restless” or “ambitious.” He failed to initiate a single expedition. He followed rather than led, and even then, he did not follow far. He participated in none of the campaigns that Spaniards undertook during these fifteen years to locate, raid, or attempt to conquer other islands or sections of the circum-Caribbean mainland. It was Alonso de Ojeda and Diego de Nicuesa, not Cortés, who explored and fought indigenous warriors along the coasts of Colombia and Central America (some said Cortés was supposed to be on that expedition but was prevented from going by a bad leg—or a bout of syphilis). It was Francisco Pizarro, not Cortés, who explored and fought alongside Balboa and Pedrarias de Ávila in places like Darién. It was Juan Ponce de León and Juan de Esquivel, not Cortés, who discovered Florida and conquered Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and Juan Díaz de Solís and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón who first found the Mexican coastline. Nor was it Cortés who discovered Yucatan and the Mexican mainland in 1517, or who led the second expedition there in 1518. Typical of the distorted impression given in centuries of accounts of these early explorations and conquests is the image chosen to illustrate The American Traveller; covering Spanish activities in the Caribbean from the 1490s to 1518, Cortés does not appear until the very last of the three hundred pages, yet it is his portrait that faces the title page.15

  Some writers, faced with the incompatibility of the Cortés legend and his early record in the colonies, simply imagined his participation in some campaign or another; Velázquez chose him because “he had already helped conquer what is now Nicaragua” is an example of such inventions. Even Maurice Collis—whose 1954 Cortés and Montezuma overwhelmingly follows the trail of Cortesian hagiography left by Gómara, Solís, Robertson, et al.—spots the red flag that is Cortés’s quiet life in the Caribbean. Insisting that Cortés “was a military genius and a great man of affairs,” Collis mused why his friends on the islands seemed not to notice, or at least not think to write such observations down; he wondered if Cortés was “himself unaware” of his “latent powers,” and asked why “was he content to remain for fifteen years in the little world of Cuba doing little more than amuse and enrich himself?” Collis’s weak answer to his own question—“One can only surmise he was waiting his opportunity”—avoids the obvious conclusion: Cortés lived an ordinary life on Hispaniola and Cuba because he was an ordinary man of ordinary abilities.16

  There is a purpose to deflating the myth of Cortés’s Caribbean years. For in inflating the Cortesian legend, the traditional narrative has hidden or downplayed the earlier careers of other Spaniards. Men like Juan Ochoa de Elejalde, a Basque veteran of the conquest wars on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, who fought as a captain throughout the Spanish-Aztec War, going on to participate in the bloody campaign in Tehuantepec; he held Nahua villages in encomienda and owned indigenous and African slaves. Or men like the Alvarado brothers. Not just the infamous Pedro, but Gómez, Gonzalo, Jorge, and Juan, who all arrived between 1510 and 1517 to fight in the islands, going on to play leadership roles in Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere—winning reputations as men of violence, if not cruelty. Or the men who had originally crossed the Atlantic on one of Columbus’s voyages. An example of one who sailed with the first Columbus crossing (1492) is the pilot Diego Bermúdez, who participated in later expeditions to Florida and various Caribbean islands before dying in the Spanish-Aztec War (Bermuda is named after his brother, also a ship’s pilot). An example of one who joined the final Columbus crossing (1502) is Sancho de Sopuerta, who fought Taínos on Hispaniola and Cuba, sailed with Grijalva, and barely survived the wounds he received both on the Noche Triste and during the siege of Tenochtitlan (according to his own florid claims); he lived in the city with his Nahua wife in the 1520s.17

  Such men are crucial to understanding the Spanish-Aztec War. As veterans of campaigns against indigenous communities they brought with them experiences and expectations that partly shaped the war. Higher-ranking veterans, men with resources to invest in the company, brought with them their status as captains, horsemen, or comrades with ties of loyalty to other veterans. They did not expect to take orders, but to act within cohorts and factions to promote their interests and safeguard their investment. Furthermore, all veterans of Caribbean campaigns, regardless of rank and status, had become accustomed to two ways of interacting with, subduing, and profiting by indigenous people: violence, often extreme, often deployed against unarmed families; and slave-raiding, ideally on a large scale.

  The quebrantamiento, the great “breaking” of the Taíno population of the first decade of the century as a result of violence, enslavement, and overwork in placer gold mining, led to a decade of slave-raiding across the Caribbean—from Florida to the northern coasts of South America. The islands in between were decimated. Tens of thousands were enslaved; the slaughter and disruption to family life and food production caused the indigenous population to drop within a generation by hundreds of thousands (or by millions, as some have claimed—from Las Casas to some modern scholars). Then a smallpox epidemic hit the region in 1518, prompting a dramatic increase in the issuing of slave-raiding licenses. Faced with increasingly poor “harvests” of �
��Indians,” Spaniards in the Caribbean jumped at the opportunity to reap the benefits of an untapped newly discovered mainland; under these circumstances, the decisions of hundreds of men to join the Cortés company in 1518, betray Velázquez in 1519 and 1520, or join the war in 1520 and 1521 should come as no surprise.18

  These three themes—the ubiquity of conquistador factionalism; the development of habitual violence against indigenous communities; and the centrality of the enslavement of indigenous people—will be explored in various ways in this and successive chapters. As we work our way first through the events of 1519 and 1520, and then through the 1520s and beyond, these themes will help us to grasp the war’s gruesome reality. They will also help us to see through the traditional narrative’s mythistory of Cortesian control—the compelling fiction of the general as a master conductor, bending to his will a massive orchestra of diverse players, leading them all to the Conquest’s final triumphal chords. The evidence plays a more somber tune.

  To that end, let us turn now to Diego Velázquez and his relationship with Cortés, the relationship that spiraled into the great factional feud at the heart of the company, outliving that company, the Conquest war, and its principal protagonists.

  * * *

  One night in Cuba, Cortés and Velázquez slept in the same bed together. Or so Gómara claimed. In his telling of the tale, the two men had fallen out over a Spanish woman—Catalina Suárez, whom Cortés had seduced and then shown reluctance to marry (more on her unhappy fate later). Velázquez had locked up Cortés as a result. But he escaped and found the governor at a ranch where he was camped out. “Diego Velázquez was afraid, seeing him armed and at such an hour; he begged him to dine with him, and to rest without suspicion.” Cortés responded that he only wished to know what accusations the governor had made against him; he insisted the governor remained “his friend and servant.” Then, wrote Gómara, “they held hands as friends, and after much conversation they lay down together in the same bed, where Diego de Orellana found them in the morning, when he came to tell the governor how Cortés had escaped.”19