When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

The first months that the company spent on the Gulf coast of Mexico were largely consumed by factional maneuvers and negotiations (to which we shall turn shortly). The initial reports sent to Spain from Mexico stemmed entirely from the Cortés-Velázquez feud. On July 1, another ship reached Vera Cruz from Cuba, sent by Velázquez with news that he had been granted that adelantado license to settle the mainland (and thus be governor of whatever he conquered). It took the rest of the month for the company to develop a response; on the 26th, Alonso Puertocarrero and Francisco de Montejo sailed for Spain with letters to the king and other officials (they also carried that first massive shipment of gold, jewelry, and other luxury goods, mentioned in the previous chapter). But the political machinations and double-dealing was just getting under way. Although the letters were fiercely anti-Velázquez, Montejo hedged his bets by making an unscheduled stop in Cuba, where he showed his friends the treasure from Montezuma that was to be delivered to the king of Spain. Word quickly reached Velázquez, who sent a ship to intercept them. Montejo and Puertocarrero surely knew he would, for they slipped into the Atlantic by an unusual route.

  Meanwhile, in Vera Cruz the factional jostling had become violent. With the letters and treasure on their way to the king, the Cortesian faction moved against a cohort of particularly staunch Velazquistas; two of them, Juan Escudero and Diego Cermeño, were hanged. In Cuba, the governor dispatched an envoy (Gonzalo de Guzmán) to Spain to persuade the king that Cortés was a traitor and should be arrested, and he began to assemble a large invasion force to go to Mexico and do just that. Led by Pánfilo de Narváez, it was more than double the size of Cortés’s original company. Crown officials on Hispaniola, learning of these preparations, sent Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón to stop them; instead, Vásquez joined Narváez.

  Montejo and Puertocarrero reached Seville at the beginning of November (just as the conquistadors who had stayed behind were descending into the Valley of Mexico, days before the Meeting). Unfortunately, Velázquez’s chaplain, Benito Martín, was in the city (he had brought over Velázquez’s successful adelantado petition). The chaplain persuaded customs officials to embargo the ships and Montezuma’s treasure, forcing Montejo and Puertocarrero to pursue an audience with the king—without the treasure. Joined by Cortés’s father, Martín, they chased the king to Barcelona, only to find he had already left for Burgos; not until March, seven months after leaving Vera Cruz, did they catch up to Carlos in Tordesillas, to find both Bishop Fonseca and Velázquez’s agent Guzmán already making their cases. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Narváez’s massive company of eleven hundred men left Cuba for Mexico.

  The stakes were now very high, with the fate of thousands of Spaniards in the balance. However, the two sides were not divided by principles or ideas, nor were any of the men particularly loyal—if at all—to Cortés and Velázquez; their loyalty was to their own cohorts, and their perception of which path led to wealth and status (and this was even true of King Carlos). Therefore, as spring came on, Velázquez found his efforts to get Cortés declared a traitor, arrested, or killed stymied. For Carlos was rightly fascinated by reports of Montezuma’s treasure, and had it sent to him from Seville. Although Fonseca allegedly hid some of it from the king, it was enough for judgment to be deferred. In effect, Carlos was willing to give Cortés and his faction a chance, as long as they could produce more of the same. That attitude was more or less that of the men who sailed with Narváez; contrary to the traditional narrative’s claim of more Cortesian brilliance, it took little more than tales of Tenochtitlan, from men who had just been living there for half a year, to convince the Narváez company to join the Cortés company.

  Velázquez’s purpose had hardly been to send reinforcements to aid Cortés; yet that, effectively, is what happened. By quadrupling (at least) the conquistador force within Tenochtitlan, Velázquez made it possible for some Spaniards to survive the Noche Triste. That irony, combined with the fall of Tenochtitlan over a year after that, might seem to have been the final straw for the Velázquez faction. But neither Velázquez nor Fonseca nor their allies were ready to give up. Within months of Tenochtitlan’s fall, a royal envoy (Cristóbal de Tapia) reached Mexico from Hispaniola, empowered to take over the government of the new territory (and arrest Cortés if he resisted). The captains who had fought in the siege of 1521 were not going to let that happen, and Tapia was met on the coast and paid off.

  Still undeterred, Velázquez assembled yet another expedition of invasion in Cuba, this one led by the governor of Jamaica, Francisco de Garay, and by Grijalva. It did not land until 1523, by which time envoys from Spain had brought documents confirming Cortés as governor-general of Mexico and undermining the legality of Garay’s new colony (intended to comprise Pánuco, northeast of the Aztec Empire). Like Narváez and Tapia before him, Garay was more interested in lucrative negotiations than civil war, as was the Cortés faction in Tenochtitlan—where the Jamaican governor was given a cordial reception. But when Garay fell ill and died, after a Christmas Day dinner in Cortés’s house, there were rumors of foul play—“a murmur as if Cortez had poyson’d him, to rid himself of a Partner in his Government,” as Ogilby later put it, “for it had been generally observ’d, that his Ambition suffer’d no Equal.”32

  Still the great factional feud persisted. Cortés’s Letters to the King (the Third in 1522 and Fourth in 1524) had grown increasingly long and marked by paranoid rants against his enemies—not just Velázquez and Narváez, but Tapia and Garay, and even old Diego Colón and Fonseca himself. The tone of Cortés’s accusations, combined with mounting counteraccusations that Cortés had abused his position in multiple ways, played into Fonseca’s hands (a handful of Noche Triste survivors returned to Cuba in 1520 and testified that Cortés ordered slaughter and enslavement of “Indians,” encouraged cannibalism among indigenous allies, and stole gold that should be shared with other conquistadors and the Crown). At the supposed peak of Cortés’s success, the moment of his appointment as governor-general, the king also appointed four royal officials to assist him (in effect, to police him). Both Fonseca and Velázquez died in 1524, but that same year the four royal officials arrived and began immediately to undermine what authority Cortés had in Mexico.33

  Meanwhile, Velázquez had left Cortés another parting gift. Cristóbal de Olid, one of the few captains who had survived the entire Spanish-Aztec War and remained loyal to Cortés’s cohort, set off in January 1524 to conquer Honduras for Cortés. But he stopped in Cuba en route, where Velázquez turned him; Olid took violent possession of Honduras for himself, denying Cortés’s authority. Cortés ranted to the king that he was “thinking of sending for the aforementioned Diego Velázquez and arresting him” in order to “cut out the root of all the evils that [stem from] this man, so that the other branches wither.” Alarmed, Crown officials dispatched a judge (Ponce de León) to Mexico to conduct a full-scale inquiry into Cortés’s actions. Meanwhile, as Olid had seized the man Cortés had sent to arrest him, Cortés decided to travel to Honduras himself—a lengthy, pointless expedition with enormous cost in resources and human lives. In his absence, Spaniards in Tenochtitlan formed into two violent factions; Cortés’s cousin Rodrigo de Paz, who headed the pro-Cortés faction, was arrested and tortured to death by the other faction. A counterattack brought the Cortesian group back to power before his return from Honduras in 1526, but a few days later Ponce de León reached the city and immediately suspended Cortés as governor. The ghost of Velázquez had won another round. After eighteen difficult months, Cortés left for Spain. He would never again rule New Spain in any capacity. As the great historian of Spain Sir John Elliott memorably put it, “Fonseca’s hand stretched beyond the grave.”34

  And yet the feud was still not dead. Family and cohort members who were or had been tied in some way to Cortés or Velázquez continued to fight in the law courts for decades. Letters written by Cortés’s parents throughout the 1520s have survived, and they show an intense preoccupation with waging a political and l
egal battle against the faction of Velázquez, Narváez, Garay, and their allies. Those letters are a mere drop in the bucket; the legal records of investigations and lawsuits stemming from the feud run to thousands of pages (and those are just the documents that have survived).

  In sum, this was far from a simple, short-lived battle between two men, in which one emerged the absolute victor; it was a relentless political war of attrition between two factions.35

  WITHIN THOSE TWO LARGE FACTIONS were numerous smaller ones, the cohorts that made up all conquest companies and groups of early settlers in the Spanish Indies. Individual action was seldom possible in the conquistador world. The indigenous perception that the conquistadors “had no lord, they all looked like brothers in their clothing, way of talking and chatting, eating and dressing” was a reading not of egalitarianism, but of informal group clubbishness. Hierarchy was social, not military (there was no formal army in the Indies). The men of conquistador companies survived and prospered—or perished—due to cohort loyalties, and even when cohort members betrayed each other, as they often did, there was usually another cohort or faction involved. Half a dozen examples should suffice (as cohort details are infused through these chapters).36

  How do we know who made up specific cohorts and factions among the conquistadors of the Spanish-Aztec War? In some cases, surnames or hometowns offer evidence. As it was common to travel to the Indies with close relatives, cohorts centered on groups of brothers or other family members. The roster of the over two thousand men who fought in the war is full of brothers, sons, nephews, and cousins. In addition to family members, there were numerous hometown comrades with ties of blood and marriage that are invisible to us but which held cohorts together. The five Alvarado brothers have already been mentioned; other examples include the three Monjaraz brothers, the four men from the Andalucian village of Alanís (who all used Alanís as a surname and were probably kinsmen), and the five Alvarez brothers with their cousin Francisco de Terrazas (one of the brothers died in the conquest of Puerto Rico, but the other four fought in Mexico with their cousin, who was a captain).

  There are also other clues. Near the end of his account of the war, Bernal Díaz wrote brief biographies of dozens of the conquistadors—some a paragraph, some a single sentence—which the historian John Fritz Schwaller cross-listed with the clusters of signatures on the recently discovered First Letter, sent to the king from Vera Cruz in 1519. The correlations confirm cohorts such as those centered on the Monjaraz and Alvarez brothers, and suggest other members (for example, the Alvarez brothers may have been close to the two Carvajal brothers, and to the Alaminos men). They also reveal other cohorts, such as one centered on three of the men who owned horses: Vásquez de Tapia, Francisco Donal, and Cristóbal Ortiz. Three of the captains who formed the core of another cohort were Rodrigo de Castañeda, Francisco de Granada, and Ojeda el tuerto (“one-eyed,” because of the Maya arrow that took out an eye on the Grijalva expedition). The Basques also made up a loose cohort, centered on four men from Vizcaya (Biscay), Pedro Vizcaíno (a crossbowman who settled in Chiapas after the war), Cristóbal Rodríguez, and the brothers Martín and Juan Ramos de Lares; the most prominent Basque in the company (from the Guipuzcoa region) was Ochoa de Elejalde.37

  Another cohort comprised veterans whom Díaz and others referred to as the viejos; these “Old Men” were Andrés de Paredes, Santos Hernández, and Lorenzo Suárez. They had fought together in the Conquest of Cuba. Although Paredes died in the Mexican war, four other men of that name joined the company (and perhaps Old Man Paredes’s cohort). Suárez “el viejo” achieved notoriety for murdering his Spanish wife (more on him later). Hernández (dubbed the Buen Viejo, according to Díaz) might have had the dubious distinction of fighting in more conquest companies than any other Spaniard of his generation: beginning in 1502, he participated in campaigns throughout the Caribbean, then survived the Spanish-Aztec War, fought in invasions from Pánuco to Guatemala, dying around 1558 in his seventies or eighties.

  Men who survived the war are more likely to appear in the archival record, especially those who lived into the 1530s, and even more so those who testified in the massive residencia investigation into Cortés. What men said about whom adds further clues as to the ties and loyalties of cohort and faction. The swirl of such relationships that surrounded Cortés himself was highly complex, yet Cortés, like other men of the company, was part of a cohort of relatives and hometown comrades: Puertocarrero was a native of Medellín, and a distant cousin to Cortés on his father’s side; Diego Pizarro, related to Cortés on his mother’s side, was a loyal captain until his death in the second half of the war; also killed late in the war was the young Alonso de Monroy, who served as one of Cortés’s pages and may have been a relation.

  Perhaps the best-known member of this cohort was Gonzalo de Sandoval, who shared Cortés’s hometown of Medellín, and consequently sought out Cortés when he arrived in Cuba in 1517 (aged about twenty). He remained so consistently loyal and invaluable to Cortés that his 1961 biography was titled The Constant Captain, reflecting his reputation in the traditional narrative. He fell ill on the 1528 voyage back to Spain with Cortés and Andrés de Tapia, dying at a roadside inn before reaching Seville (Díaz invented a touching deathbed scene featuring the three conquistadors, but in fact Cortés traveled on, leaving Sandoval to be robbed by the innkeeper and to die alone).38

  Andrés de Tapia illustrates how complex cohort loyalties could be. He was related to Velázquez by marriage, and probably came to the Indies to join him in Cuba as a household (and cohort) member. But he had also known the Cortés family in Medellín, and once he joined the Cortesian company, he remained an unswerving loyalist—tied, perhaps, as much by self-interest and a friendship with Sandoval as anything else. Tapia was one of several men who formed a loose Velázquez cohort in Mexico, and who managed to survive the vicissitudes of factional politics during and after the war. Olid was another on-and-off Velazquista, having been a teenager in the governor’s household in Cuba; he saw that his best interests lay with the Cortés faction throughout the war, when he acted as one of the dominant captains, not switching sides again until 1524. Francisco de Montejo was also in the governor’s cohort, but succeeded better than the decapitated Olid in playing both sides until acquiring his own governorship (even if it took decades and the blood of thousands to achieve).39

  At the heart of the Velazquista cohort were the men whom Cortés loyalists seized during the months of factional quarreling at Vera Cruz (in the traditional narrative, they are “arrested” by Cortés): Juan Velázquez de León, a kinsman of the governor from his hometown of Cuéllar, and a stutterer with a reputation as a fighting man; Gonzalo de Umbria; Diego de Ordaz; Juan Díaz, the friar; a pageboy of the governor’s named Escobar; and Pedro Escudero, who in his role as a constable in Cuba had imprisoned Cortés in 1515 under the governor’s orders. Cortés clearly begrudged him that, for while a kangaroo court sentenced two men to be hanged and Umbria to lose a foot, only Escudero was executed. A couple of sailors were flogged, but the others were all released after a few days, probably as a result of negotiations between Cortés loyalists and Ordaz—who thereafter served as a cooperative captain throughout the war.40

  THE FEUD BETWEEN the Cortesian faction and the Velázquez-Fonseca faction was in a way a manifestation of the larger system, a complex version of the Crown-conquistador relationship. Put another way, the Cortés-Velázquez feud was one corner of a triangle, the primacy of cohort loyalty was a second, and the third corner was the complex system of patronage and reward that formed the skeleton of the Spanish royal state; many officials, settlers, and conquistadors—not just a famous handful—were the flesh on those bones. The sinews of the state—which was a loose collection of kingdoms, dominated by Castile, with Spain still in its genesis—were the ties of kinship, hometown, and the contractual agreements that underpinned business ventures and conquest companies. Navigating this system was not easy; indeed, its very challenges were i
ntrinsic to its maintenance of hierarchy, to ensuring the perpetuation of the elite—and above all, in every sense, the monarchy.

  Elliott, who has long grasped this system, once commented that Cortés “played the game according to the rules, but these had been laid down by the Spanish Crown.” Thus he ended up “a disappointed and disillusioned man” because he “had overlooked the most important fact of all: that those who devise the rules are likely, in the last round, to win the match.”41

  I agree that the Crown was bound to win in the long run, in Mexico as in Peru and elsewhere in the Americas; after all, the system was the Crown’s. But we lose sight of the significance of that fact if we imagine that Cortés might have won the match, that he resented not winning, and that his disillusionment (if it was real) had basis to it. Cortés played the game reasonably well (he was good with words) but not exceptionally well (he was too quick to betray, deceive, and lie). His abilities as a conquest company leader were limited (there are other explanations for the events in Mexico, as we have already begun to see), and he was deluded in hoping to retain the governorship of Mexico, or even to be appointed viceroy. Yet he enjoyed considerable power and excessive wealth in the last two decades of his life, as he surely knew. He also seemed to believe sincerely in the king’s divine right to be the fountainhead of the system (as most Spaniards did), in the evident truth that God and the pope had tasked the Spanish monarchs to bring the New World into the fold of Christian civilization. In other words, if we believe the Cortesian legend, his disappointment seems logical; however, if we see him more realistically as a mediocre captain with a talent for survival and deceit, he did better than might be expected. If we remember that this was the Crown’s game, that Cortés bought utterly into the game but that he was just one among many players, it becomes easier to see past the distortions and oversimplifications of the Cortesian narrative.