When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The incident has a certain irresistible, cinematographic charm. It also captures a few of the key elements of the legendary Cortés personality, in their formative stage—he is seductive and persuasive, adventurous and victorious. This is just what Gómara intended with the anecdote; he ends the chapter with the comment that “through such dangers and detours runs the road that the very best men take to reach their good fortune.” Chroniclers and historians have been following his cue ever since. For example, in his 1942 biography of Cortés, Salvador Madariaga used this incident to show how the conquistador’s “winning way” would shape his life: “he was gifted with that most precious yet most rare of combinations: presence of will with presence of wit.”20

  Velázquez’s role in the story is just as important, for it feeds into the larger part played by Cuba’s governor in the traditional narrative of Cortés and the Conquest. The basic outline of their relationship is this: In 1518 Velázquez selected Cortés to lead an expedition of exploration into what turned out to be Mexico; the governor changed his mind before Cortés left Cuba, but Cortés left anyway, denying Velázquez’s authority over the expedition throughout the war against the Aztec Empire; as a result, Cortés claimed full credit for the “Conquest of Mexico,” being confirmed as governor-general of the new kingdom in 1522, despite a concerted legal campaign by Velázquez. The anecdote above thus anticipated a complex conflict, one in which an angry Velázquez is outwitted by a triumphant Cortés, seduced into—literally—sleeping with the enemy.21

  As with so much of Conquest history, Cortés and Gómara together established the narrative regarding Diego de Velázquez. According to Gómara, Velázquez was “greedy [codicioso]” and “extremely womanly [mugeril ]” (meaning he was swayed and influenced by women to the extent of being himself feminized); he was also quick-tempered and vengeful, constantly “very angry with Cortés,” or “furious and indignant.” By contrast, throughout his dealings with the Cuban governor, Cortés was portrayed by Gómara as calm, confident, and capable; justified in his positions and destined to triumph. Velázquez was, in other words, a foil for Cortés, the anti-Cortés, the villain of the piece. He is the man who—before Montezuma appears on the scene to take on the role—exhibits the opposite characteristics to Cortés in order to highlight the great man’s qualities.22

  There is, of course, another side to this story. Bartolomé de Las Casas was living in Cuba during these years, and personally knew both Velázquez and Cortés (whom he knew later in Mexico too). Las Casas recorded his version in his Historia de las Indias, not published until 1875 (by which time Gómara’s book had sold out dozens of editions in multiple languages for centuries). But we can freely compare the two, and the friar’s indignation over Gómara’s apocryphal anecdote is far more convincing. According to him, Cortés was the governor’s disloyal secretary, caught stealing documents in order to file complaints against his patron. Furious, Velázquez had arrested Cortés, threatened to hang him, but after a few days had cooled off and released him (“but he did not want to go back to receiving him in service as his secretary”). Gómara’s version was “all a big lie, and any sensible person could easily judge.” After all, “Velázquez was governor of the whole island,” but Cortés was just

  an ordinary man [hombre particular], not to mention his crony and secretary, whom he had held captive and wished to hang, which he could have done, justly or unjustly. So how can Gómara say that he did not wish to speak to him for many days and that he had come armed to ask him what complaints he had with him and that he came to be his friend and that they held hands and that they slept that night in the same bed!

  Furthermore, continued Las Casas, “I saw Cortés during those days, or very shortly afterwards, very bowed [bajo] and humble, like the very lowliest crony [mas chico criado] that Diego Velázquez might wish to favor.” Cortés was lucky to have been spared, then, and he knew it, for the governor demanded respect at all times, “and nobody sat down in his presence unless they were very much a gentleman [muy caballero].” If he had sensed

  from Cortés even a pin prick of pride or presumption, he would have hanged him, or at least exiled him from the land, where he would have cowered without raising his head for the rest of his life. Thus did Gómara attribute to Cortés, his master, what in those days one would not even, while awake, imagine could possibly happen, let alone dream it while sleeping.

  As for Velázquez, his image as an obese, bad-tempered buffoon is restricted only to later pro-Cortés propaganda. Even Las Casas, who was famously unforgiving of conquistador brutality, had this to say about the Cuban governor:

  He was very much a gentleman in his bodily appearance, and consequently amiable; he did become fat, but still lost little of his gentility; he was prudent, and when people thought he was being slow [grueso: thick], he was deceiving them . . . when he was in conversation he was very affable and gracious [humano], but when it was necessary or if he was angry, those before him trembled, and he always wished to be treated with complete respect.23

  Velázquez was a member of the first generation of Spaniards to come to the Americas. A Castilian nobleman from Cuéllar, he later became known as Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, in part to distinguish him from the famous seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez (not a relation). He was possibly a young veteran of Ferdinand and Isabella’s war against the Muslim kingdom of Granada in the 1480s, and thus a witness to the ritual surrender to the Catholic monarchs at the city gates—his presence there, if true, would prove to be ironic in view of the fact that he missed the Meeting, whose reconstruction as a surrender drew upon the 1492 triumph at Granada as one of its models.

  In 1493, Velázquez joined Columbus on his second Atlantic crossing, faring better than did Columbus himself in the years that followed. Successfully navigating the politics of the early Caribbean, Velázquez attached himself to Columbus’s brother, Bartolomé, and then to fray Nicolás de Ovando, Hispaniola’s governor. He showed himself as willing as any conquistador to treat the indigenous people of the islands with merciless violence. The massacre of the so-called queen of the Taíno, Anacaona, and her followers on Hispaniola, was mostly his doing. He captained the Spanish conquest of Cuba with unflinching brutality. The burning of Hatuey was also his doing (Cortés was a witness). By 1516, when three Jeronymite friars took over as commissioners in Hispaniola—in charge of all the Spanish colonies, but highly ineffectual—Velázquez was arguably the most powerful man in the Indies. In 1517, two events made his position even stronger. First, the young King Carlos reached Spain to assume the throne, and in the ensuing shake-up at court, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos, who had been Ferdinand’s principal councilor for Indies affairs, returned to favor; he was Velázquez’s uncle-in-law. Second, an expedition that Velázquez sent to explore the coasts of a large island adjacent to Cuba returned with tantalizing evidence of a wealthy, well-settled new land.24

  That “island,” of course, was the peninsula of Yucatan, whose coastline led to Mexico. Francisco Hernández de Córdoba led the expedition, designed to explore but mostly to plunder and enslave “Indians” on the “island” (as we have seen, the so-called discoverers were also enslavers). He and two partners provided three ships. Although they “discovered Yucatan,” they met with fierce resistance from the local Mayas. For once, Gómara’s one-line summary of the expedition seems apposite: although Hernández de Córdoba “brought nothing back from the expedition but wounds”—from which he soon died in Cuba—“he did bring back word that the land was rich in gold and silver, and the people were clothed.” Cortés had neither the connections nor funds, neither the initiative nor reputation, to be part of the Hernández de Córdoba expedition.25

  Indeed, not only did Cortés not participate in the 1517 expedition, but Velázquez passed him over when choosing leadership for both that and the subsequent expedition to Yucatan. Why? Might it have been because he was ordinary, without a track record of leadership, a mediocrity, and—above all—un
trustworthy? Velázquez also had family members to choose from, such as his twenty-eight-year-old nephew, Juan de Grijalva, commissioned to lead the 1518 expedition. Grijalva had also proved his mettle, not only in the 1511 conquest of Cuba but also on a slaving expedition to Trinidad in 1517 (while Hernández de Córdoba was receiving fatal wounds on the coasts of Yucatan). Meanwhile, Cortés had been enjoying the comfort and safety of life in Cuba, and was not even asked to join the 1518 company.

  Other Castilian hidalgos (lesser nobles) did accompany Grijalva: Pedro de Alvarado, Alonso de Ávila, and Francisco de Montejo all went as captains; they were the principal investors in the expedition, after the governor and his nephew. These men would go on to help lead the invasion of Mexico as captains, and in the 1520s and ’30s bring conquest violence to the kingdoms of the Mayas. But by 1518 they had also participated in more expeditions than had the relatively inactive Cortés; Montejo, for example, had explored and fought in Panama with Pedrarias de Ávila. Other men on the 1518 expedition would go on to participate in the wars in Mexico: fray Juan Díaz, chaplain to Grijalva and author of an eyewitness account of the expedition, was one; the notary Diego de Godoy was another; so too was Bernal Díaz; yet another was Bernardino Vásquez de Tapia, who would play a leading role as a captain in the Spanish-Aztec War, surviving to live as a founding settler and councilman in Mexico City into the 1550s.26

  Cortés was conspicuously absent from an expedition about which he was later rudely dismissive, accusing Grijalva of having sailed back to Cuba “without having done anything at all.” Gómara claimed that Grijalva was so pathetic that “he wept” when some of the men opposed returning to Cuba. The later claim that Velázquez was frustrated by Grijalva’s failure to found a colony, that the governor regretted “having sent an idiot [bobo] as a captain,” does not ring true. On the contrary, Grijalva did exactly as instructed. He was not supposed to settle or conquer. Velázquez intended to do that, once the king had granted him the title of adelantado of the newly discovered lands; and in the wake of the Hernández de Córdoba expedition, the governor had sent envoys with his petitions to Hispaniola and Spain.27

  Looking past the distorting filter of the pro-Cortés comments of later years, it is clear that the Grijalva expedition was significant for its personnel, its discoveries, the knowledge it garnered, and the groundwork it laid. The four ships charted more of the coastline of Yucatan—still thought to be an island—than had Hernández de Córdoba, and the Gulf coast of Mexico was also explored. Totonacs, as well as Yucatec and Chontal Mayas, were engaged in attempted communications, exchanges of material goods, and in battle. Although the Spaniards did not know this in 1518, they had made first contact with the Mexican mainland, with Nahuatl-speakers, and with the Aztec Empire.

  At the point on the coast that the Spaniards named Ulúa, local subjects of the Aztecs tried to tell the visitors about the “Culhúa”—a name used widely across the empire and beyond for the Aztecs. Spaniards misunderstood (hence the place’s name), but they grasped that a large and wealthy kingdom was nearby, and that some or all of these “islands” might constitute a mainland. As fray Juan Díaz reported, here were people who “lived in stone houses, and had laws and regulations, and public places assigned for the administration of justice.” They had fine clothing, gold, abundant food, and were “skillful [ingeniosa]” in various ways. Even Gómara, who was ruder still about Grijalva than Cortés was, listed more than 350 handcrafted items acquired through trade and theft on the expedition. Far from doing nothing at all, Grijalva had discovered a civilization and possibly an empire, charted the way to them from Cuba, established friendly relations with a people who lived at one of the entry points to that empire (the Totonacs), and even set a precedent for communicating with local people (Grijalva used various interpreters, including a pair of bilingual speakers, anticipating the double-interpreter system for which Cortés would later claim credit). In turn, Montezuma now knew of these foreigners, their ships, weapons, and proclivities. The scene was set, the encounter of empires was now inevitable. And Cortés had nothing to do with it.28

  In the political maneuverings that consumed the small Spanish community on Cuba after news of the Grijalva expedition reached the island (before Grijalva himself had even returned), Velázquez worked to persuade various men to lead a third expedition. Baltasar Bermúdez supposedly balked at the cost, which the governor sought to place mostly on the expedition’s leaders (Velázquez, sniped Gómara, “had little stomach for spending, being greedy”). Two Velázquez relatives, Antonio and Bernardino, were considered too, as was Vasco Porcallo. The conventional narrative of this moment was that while these were “all Persons of great Courage and undoubted Qualifications” (in the words of a 1741 English account), Velázquez “wanted a Man who should be entirely at his Devotion.” In other words, the governor struggled to find a man who was capable both of leading an expedition and of bringing it back to report to him; that is, up to the task, but not so ambitious that he would betray Velázquez and carve out a province for himself. In the words of Solís, he sought “a man with much heart, but of little spirit.”29

  As with almost every detail of Cortés’s life before Mexico, this moment in the story is tainted by hindsight. Because all the historians from Gómara to Solís to Madariaga went on to write of Cortés as a man with heart and spirit, the logic of the narrative requires Velázquez to have sought a lesser man. By having Velázquez anticipate betrayal, Cortés’s triumph seems ordained. By having Velázquez seek mediocrity, Cortés’s success seems justified.

  All of which masks three intertwined realities. First, the material goods and detailed information from the mainland put the governor in an impossible situation; any Spaniard who could win a license to invade and settle, or even just explore and raid, was now going to do just that, as soon as possible. The situation was fine-grained sand in Velázquez’s hands.

  Second, these expeditions were dangerous and expensive, so men able and willing to provide and supply ships were inevitably going to be leading members of the expedition company, regardless of how closely they were related to, or trusted by, Velázquez. Third, most of the men of some standing and wealth who had accompanied Hernández de Córdoba or Grijalva, or both, were going to likewise play leading roles—such as the Alvarado brothers, Montejo, Alonso de Ávila, and Francisco Maldonado. This was also true of lesser-ranked men whose experience on the earlier expeditions made their inclusion likely—such as Juan Álvarez, pilot and ship’s master (maestro); Juan de Camacho, who was also a pilot; Martín Vásquez (who became one of Montezuma’s so-called guards and later brought his Taíno wife from Cuba to Mexico), Alonso de Ojeda (who lost an eye on the Grijalva expedition but lived another half century), Juan Ruiz, Domingo Martín, and many others.30 Add to these factors the ties of kinship, of hometowns in Spain, and the partnerships and dependencies of business activities in the islands, and the cohorts of personnel on each of the ships become inevitable—or, at least, far more of an organic process than the traditional narrative of gubernatorial selection implies.

  In view of all this, Cortés emerged as the expedition’s leader by virtue of his very lack of qualification; he was the ultimate compromise candidate. Where Velázquez erred—and he seems to have realized his mistake almost immediately—was in underestimating Cortés’s duplicity. Cortés was, above all, a survivor, and in the lethally dangerous world of the sixteenth-century Spanish Indies, that made him highly untrustworthy.

  Assuming this revised portrait of Velázquez and Cortés is accurate, how can we reconcile our new perspective with the events that followed? In the traditional narrative, Cortés sails to triumph and glory in Mexico, while the Cuban governor spends the next five years fulminating and plotting against his former secretary, until 1524, when his fury and frustration send him to his grave. How might we view that story differently? I suggest we shift our viewpoint in three ways, by looking at events through the lenses of (first) the Cortés-Velázquez feud, (second) the role pla
yed by cohort and faction, and (third) the nature of the Spanish political system.

  * * *

  The Cortés-Velázquez feud has tended to be seen through the distorting lens of the Cortesian legend, as a conflict that served to create a villainous Velázquez as foil to Cortés the emergent hero—with the governor consumed by “illiberal jealousy,” by fear and envy of “Cortés’s superior personality.”31 But it serves us better to see the enmity between the two men as an increasingly bitter and brutal feud that was often violent—verging on provoking civil war—and maintained by factions of family and supporters for years.

  We need momentarily to jump ahead of the story here, in order to detail how the feud not only exploded in 1519 but lasted through the 1520s, influencing that decade’s events. The conflict was pursued unceasingly through gossip and letters and lawsuits, in which Velázquez’s faction had the early advantage of access to Bishop Fonseca and the court, while Cortés’s faction later made use of the platform of the rapidly developing Cortesian legend. But the conflict was also a violent war that cost lives, often resulting from Cortés’s poor judgment and spiteful defense of his perceived domain.