When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  left for the seashore; he left behind don Pedro Alvarado, Tonatiuh. Then he asked Moteucçoma how they celebrated the festival of their god. He said to him, “How is it? Set up all the equipment for it and do it.” When Tonatiuh gave the order, Moteucçoma was already being detained, along with Itzquauhtzin, the tlacochcalcatl of Tlatelolco. At this time they hanged the nobleman of Acolhuacan, Neçahualquentzin, at the wall near the water. The second who died was the ruler of Nauhtla, named Cohualpopocatzin. They shot him with arrows; when they had shot him, he was burned while alive.

  In this version, then, Qualpopoca’s burning, Montezuma’s arrest, and the rounding up of other Aztec lords all happen in May, as Toxcatl begins—its celebration encouraged by Alvarado, planning to attack. The Annals go on to describe the costumes and singing and dancing of the celebrants, culminating on the second day with a sudden three-hour onslaught (the drummers were targeted first; “they struck off their hands and lips”). Montezuma and Itzquauhtzin try to restrain the Spaniards. The violence seems to subside; twenty days pass; the Captain returns to the city “uncontested.” But “the next day we pursued them, and there was clamor, with which the war began.”

  Tzinti yaoyotl, the war began. In the traditional narrative, at this point the story is halfway over. But in the Annals of Tlatelolco, ten of its twelve pages are devoted to the fighting and killing of the year that followed this moment. In sources in Nahuatl and in quasi-indigenous accounts, the temporal distortions are very different from those of the traditional narrative; memory and attention are devoted to the devastating disruption and mortality of the year after Montezuma’s death, and even to the ensuing decades of protracted warfare.

  And what of Montezuma’s fate? “In the year Two Flint Knife, Moteucçoma died; it was also when Itzquauhtzin, the tlacochcalcatl of Tlatelolco, died.”49

  * * *

  When I was six years old, I saw Montezuma. I cannot remember the moment, but I know it happened because I have photographic evidence: a moldy old Kodak slide of me standing in the gardens of the Royal Palace at Aranjuez, squinting in the Spanish sunshine, with a row of statues in the background. The statues are unidentifiable in the photograph, but I know now that the one closest to me was—according to the engraving on its stone plinth—“Montezuma. Emperor of Mexico. D. Yr. 1520” (Montezuma. Emper[ad]or de Mexico. M[uert]o A[ñ]o 1520). There is no hint as to how or why the emperor died in 1520, and I doubt my six-year-old curiosity extended that far.50

  But now, in contrast, I am fascinated both by the question of Montezuma’s mysterious demise and by the significance of the various claims and supposed solutions. So this is what I think happened that fateful final week of June 1520, and this is why the contrast between reality and the traditional narrative matters.

  The fifth of the set of five verdicts on Montezuma’s death that began this chapter pointed at the Spaniards. A young museum employee in Mexico City (with the surname Moctezuma, as it happens) recently told an interviewer an interesting variant on that verdict. In the story familiar to her, she said, “the Spaniards killed Montezuma, inserted a pole through him, and then held him up on his balcony, making him look as if he were alive. Then his people stoned him, thinking he had sided with the conquistadors.” This seems to borrow from the legends surrounding the 1099 death of El Cid (posthumously propped by a pole on his horse to help rally demoralized troops). But it is also a solution that wants to have its cake and eat it too: although the Spaniards committed the murder, both Spaniards and Aztecs had homicidal intent and believed they succeeded. And therein, I think, lies some truth.51

  I do not doubt Montezuma appeared on a rooftop, thereby placing him in danger as the battle raged below, projectiles flying in all directions. The general fact of it was recorded too often to be a complete invention, just as the Meeting itself was not made up (the fiction was its meaning as Surrender). We cannot be sure if he spoke, or attempted to do so, but if he did, his speech and the Aztec responses, as recorded in Spanish chronicles and subsequent histories, are mostly—if not entirely—imaginary. I suspect that he was attempting to speak to somebody below, and that he suffered an accidental blow from a stone in the attempt.

  That wound, as deep or shallow as it may have been—or even just the rumor of such a wound—was a godsend to the captains who dispatched Montezuma and the other captive members of the regional royal family. For this was a mass murder of the entire Aztec kingship or tlahtohcayotl. The tlahtoani of each city-state that made up the empire’s Triple Alliance, as well as the royal governor of Tlatelolco, were all executed: Cacama of Tetzcoco (“stabbed forty-five times,” according to Alva Ixtlilxochitl); Tlacopan’s tlahtoani; and Itzquauhtzin of Tlatelolco. These deaths are well evidenced, lacking the controversy or mystery surrounding Montezuma’s death. Nor should this mass murder surprise us; in fact, it would be surprising if the rulers had not been killed. Conquistador fatalities were mounting as the days passed. The Spanish captains were becoming increasingly fearful and desperate. Montezuma no longer served any purpose. He may have been wounded, or he may have been capable of resuming a leadership. Either way, leaving him alive was a needless risk. At that moment, the overwhelming Spanish priority, all that mattered, was to slaughter the enemy and escape their city to safety. Executing the captive tlahtohcayotl—then throwing their perforated bodies out to the Aztec mob—might have improved their chances. Thus in the bloody chaos of battle did a handful of captains—there is no reason to assign blame or control specifically to Cortés—put the emperor and his fellow kings to the sword.52

  Montezuma’s murder by the Spaniards is thus logical and expected in the context of the mass execution of all the tlahtoque. His possible wound from a stone or arrow, or even the fact that he came close to receiving such a wound, gave the Spaniards the idea of blaming the Aztecs. This leads us to what is most important about the entire riddle of Montezuma’s death: the persistence of the Spanish claim that they were not responsible. If the conquistadors were so willing to admit that the other rulers were executed, and indeed to admit to the killing of indigenous rulers on other occasions (from Atahuallpa and Sagipa to Montezuma’s own successor, Cuauhtemoc, hanged by Cortés five years later in a Maya town), then why not admit to Montezuma’s murder? Why did Cortés and other survivors from the company deny it, and why did subsequent tellers of the traditional narrative elaborate upon that denial? Indeed, why go as far as Díaz did, claiming “Cortés and all the captains and soldiers wept as though they had lost a father” (tears, once again, marking the moment)? That imaginatively implausible detail was repeated by Clavigero in the next century, and by Prescott in the next (believe it if you can, was MacNutt’s sardonic aside). Those authors were not alone in indignantly defending the conquistadors and denouncing the “monstrous imputation” that Cortés was guilty; why?53

  Because Montezuma’s murder by Spaniards undermined the Surrender. Imagine Montezuma’s life as a sequence of dominoes, stretching from the Meeting to his death. In the traditional narrative, those dominoes stood in a tidy row, connecting the Surrender at the Meeting to the conquistadors weeping over his death; in between lay the characterization of the 235 days as a consolidation of Spanish control over the empire and of the emperor’s friendly subservience to Cortés. Nudge the domino at either end and the whole row goes down, destroying the Spanish justification for their invasion and all it entailed. And while writers in later centuries were not as invested in the maintenance of Spanish Conquest justification, they were still bound by the logic of the traditional narrative. Why would “Spaniards take the life of a king to whom they owed so many benefits” (as one put it)?54

  According to the traditional narrative, because Montezuma surrendered, it was Aztecs, not Spaniards, who were motivated to kill him. In fact, because Montezuma did not surrender, but conquistadors claimed he did, it was they who were motivated to kill him—and to deny it. The traditional narrative transformed a murderous moment in a messy and chaotic war into a clean and clear twist in the
plot, with “Cortés and all the captains and soldiers” emerging as victims themselves. The astonishing absurdity of that contrivance could not remain hidden, and for centuries it has bubbled under the traditional narrative. Our challenge now is not to pick a side or assign blame—and in particular it is not to demonize Cortés, as that only serves to give him the control he lacked and feed his legend (to which we now turn in the next chapter). Rather, it is to reorient the narrative to emphasize disorder and the role of multiple protagonists, thus to better understand the war and its outcome.

  We are left, then, with a pair of contrasting images for this chapter’s closing scene. In one, the conquistadors weep over Montezuma’s body. In the other, they commit mass murder in cold blood, repeatedly stabbing the chained and unarmed Aztec leaders. The first sets up the traditional narrative of the war’s second half, in which Cortés leads his men to safety and then builds a righteous alliance for the recapture of the imperial capital. The second guides us into a more realistic understanding of the bloodbath into which Mexico would be plunged in the year that followed.

  Part IV

  What fields have now not been watered

  With blood crying up to God,

  Spilled from our honest parents,

  Our sons, our servants, our brothers,

  Fighting theft and rape?

  What daughter, sister, or wife

  Have we been able to guard

  From being used like a whore

  By these vile and ruthless tyrants

  Who corrupt all that they touch?

  —Michael de Carvajal, “Complaint of the Indians in the Court of Death,” 1557

  Warfare is almost as old as man himself,

  and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart,

  places where self dissolves rational purpose,

  where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount,

  where instinct is king.

  —John Keegan, A History of Warfare, 19931

  CONQUERED MEXICO. In the frontispiece to Juan de Escoiquiz’s epic poem, México Conquistada: Poema Heroyca, angels hold aloft a version of the “Fat Cortés” portrait widely reproduced in the eighteenth century; below, a maiden queen representing Spain sits on a throne, handing the word of God to another maiden, whose feathered headdress and subordinate position mark her as representing the Aztecs or “conquered Mexico.” The providential theme of the engraving—with the Conquest justified by civilization’s superiority over barbarism, and guided and planned by God, using Cortés as His agent—is central to the Conquest’s traditional narrative, which Escoiquiz’s poem helped perpetuate (it was published in 1798, a few years after Cortés’s bones were reburied in a grand mausoleum commissioned by the viceroy).

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 7

  The Epic Boxer

  He was the epic boxer [el púgil épico], and he fought for his king; he was the mystical crusader [el cruzado místico], and he fought for his God; he was the quixotic gallant [el galán quijote], and he adored his lady.

  —Mateo Solana on Cortés, 1938

  Cortés certainly had his faults, like all men; he was perhaps not as politically adroit, nor as contemplative, as Solís describes him to us.

  —Preface to the 1704 French edition of Solís’s History of the Conquest

  Rather than a man, Cortés is a myth, a myth whose aspects have always been disputed by concurrent schools of thought and ideological rivals, in such a way that allowed each one to think of “their” Cortés: demigod or demon, hero or traitor, slaver or protector of the Indians, modern or feudal, a greedy or great lord.

  —Christian Duverger, 2005

  The true aid, after God’s, was what we gave them . . . because the Spaniards were few and so poorly supplied and were going through lands where they would not have known the way if we had not shown them; a thousand times we saved them from death.

  —Rulers of the altepetl of Xochimilco, 15631

  HOW SHOULD THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE MEETING BE CELEBRATED in the city where the historic encounter took place? The viceroy of New Spain had the perfect answer to that question.

  Exactly 275 years after the Meeting, the Count of Revillagigedo had Cortés’s bones dug up and reburied at the site where the Aztec emperor had welcomed the legendary conquistador. By entering the ground on that spot and that day, Cortés symbolically reentered Mexico in triumph.

  The date was November 8, 1794. The bones were placed in a crystal urn, topped by a bronze bust, in a mausoleum in the church of the Hospital de Jesús. The building was the palace, still standing today, that Cortés had constructed for himself on the site of the Meeting. It was converted into a hospital and religious foundation just a few years later when a larger mansion was built for him. The kingdom’s leading dignitaries all witnessed the reinterment ceremony (although not the viceroy, who was recalled to Spain just months before the event), and they heard a sermon by fray Servando Teresa de Mier. The young Mexican-born Dominican was a rising star in the capital. His sermon of November 8 has not survived, but he presumably waxed lyrically about Cortesian triumphs and the providential purpose of the Meeting, no doubt mentioning the great Calendar Stone and other Aztec monuments recently dug up and displayed in the city.

  Fray Servando probably flirted with controversy but cannot have said anything too controversial, or he would have been arrested—as he was the following month, a week after a now-famous sermon that he delivered before the new viceroy on the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was stripped of his doctoral degree and his right to preach and exiled from Mexico; the text of his sermon was burned. The earlier sermon on Cortés was probably destroyed at the same time. Even though Teresa de Mier was exiled for his comments on the Virgin of Guadalupe, St. Thomas, and (since 2002, St.) Juan Diego—not for his Cortés eulogy—the history of the conquistador’s bones proved once again to be a magnet for controversy and conflict.

  Although Cortés had died in Spain, and in December 1547 his body had been buried in Santiponce (outside Seville), his remains had been disinterred in 1567 and shipped to Mexico. That reburial was intended to be a grand and symbolic affair, but Cortés’s three sons had meanwhile become ensnared in a half-baked plot to overthrow the viceregal government in Mexico City. By the time the bones reached Mexico, the illegitimate don Martín (Malintzin’s son) had been brutally tortured and remained imprisoned, while the legitimate don Martín and his brother Luís had been exiled to Spain. Cortés’s remains were thus quietly interred in Tetzcoco. His triumphal reentry into Mexico-Tenochtitlan would have to wait.

  As it turned out, the wait was only two more generations. When, in 1629, don Martín’s grandson, don Pedro Cortés, died, the viceroy decided that alongside his body in the Franciscan monastery in Mexico City the bones of his great-grandfather would also be buried. The conquistador was, at last, now within Montezuma’s capital. But, as always, there was a catch: don Pedro had died without an heir; Hernando’s line was extinguished and buried with his own bones.

  The surging popularity of Cortés in the decades surrounding his move to the new mausoleum in 1794—reflected in literature and art (as we shall see shortly)—would soon run into a new controversial chapter. Lucas Alamán was a prominent Mexican scientist, historian, and politician who in 1823 started his first term as a minister in the government of the newly independent Mexico. Despite his political career, he was a monarchist sympathizer and shuddered to think how anti-Spanish sentiment might inspire the destruction of Cortés’s remains. That year, therefore, shortly before the mausoleum was smashed, he illicitly hid the urn behind a beam in the Hospital de Jesús, spreading the story that the tomb had been opened and the bones secretly shipped to Italy.

  Alamán never publicly revealed what he had done, but in 1843 (ten years before his death) he filed a burial record with the Spanish Embassy, requesting it remain classified for a century. Sure enough, the location of Cortés’s urn was thus a mystery fo
r much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—dubbed recently by a Spanish newspaper as “one of the greatest historical mysteries of the Americas” and “the biggest enigma surrounding Hernán Cortés.” Spanish officials honored Alamán’s request (or simply forgot about the document) until 1946, when an official made the burial record public. The bones were found, removed, and declared to be those of the long-dead Marqués del Valle.

  A furor erupted over what to do with them. Various suggestions were made as to how best to commemorate the infamy with which Cortés was then viewed: grind the bones to dust, for example, or throw them into the Atlantic Ocean. Hoping to put the cat back into the bag, Mexican officials simply returned Cortés to his hiding place in a corner of the hospital. The strategy worked. His bones are still there, marked only by a simple plaque: “Hernán Cortés 1485–1547.” The location is obscure, photography is restricted, and there are seldom visitors.2

  Cortés’s memory enjoyed an equally bumpy ride across the centuries in another medium of commemoration, that of the public statue. Not until 1890 was a statue erected in his Spanish hometown of Medellín. High on a plinth in militaristic pose, fully armored with his foot on an Aztec “idol,” the conqueror still stares east over the little town and toward the Indies. The statue seems to celebrate both the local boy made good and Spanish arms in the spirit of the epic poems by the likes of Escoiquiz and Vaca de Guzmán; it is ironic that within a decade, most of what remained of the Spanish Empire would be taken by a younger nation that had appropriated Cortés’s victory over Montezuma and commemorated it in public art—not in a small provincial town, but in the capital’s Capitol.