When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  In fact, the accounts by Alva Ixtlilxochitl are no more biased or partisan than the pro-Cortés canon, and arguably the exaggerations are more easily peeled away to see a revealing and persuasive picture beneath. That picture suggests that it was the Tetzcoca, led by Ixtlilxochitl as tlahtoani, who played as crucial a role in the war in 1521 as did the Tlaxcalteca—and arguably a more crucial one. Sources differ as to how and when he became tlahtoani; perhaps in the autumn of 1520 (as I suspect), but certainly by the spring of 1521, he was recognized as such by the Spaniards and by his subjects in Tetzcoco, many of whom had slipped back home from Tenochtitlan, and would continue to do so as the balance of power in the valley shifted. Ixtlilxochitl would rule Tetzcoco until his death in 1531. (Coanacoch, meanwhile, remained in Tenochtitlan as the Mexica-recognized tlahtoani until being captured by Spaniards in 1521, along with Cuauhtemoc and the Mexica-recognized tlahtoani of Tlacopan; Cortés hanged all three in Maya country in 1525.)59

  We might take with a pinch of salt the claim by Alva Ixtlilxochitl that his ancestor captured a great Mexica warrior in hand-to-hand combat outside Ixtlapalapan, ritually burning him alive to send a message to Coanacoch and Cuauhtemoc. But such combat was characteristic of Aztec warfare and helps us to see the conflict as an internecine Aztec war rather than part of “the Spanish Conquest.” Furthermore, Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s brief description of the Ixtlilxochitl-led campaign to cement Tetzcoco’s rise to prime position in the valley rings true in terms of its details: having defeated Ixtlapalapan on the lake’s southern shore, to prevent the Mexica using it as a base against Tetzcoco, Ixtlilxochitl then led northward sixty thousand Tetzcoca warriors, accompanied by twenty thousand Tlaxcalteca and three hundred Spaniards. The object was to neutralize the third altepetl in the Triple Alliance, Tlacopan. The allied force defeated the Mexica at Xaltocan, a small island-altepetl in the lake’s northern waters, before sweeping through the lakeshore towns down to Tlacopan. “At dawn, they sacked the city and burned as many of the houses and temples as they could,” wrote Alva Ixtlilxochitl, also “killing as many as they could” in the course of a week of battles with Mexica warriors in the Tlacopan region. The victorious army returned to Tetzcoco, where the Tlaxcalteca were granted “permission to leave, and they returned to their lands rich in plunder, which was what they always sought.”60

  This was warfare fought according to local tradition and precedent, both in its timing (during the war season) and its purpose (two altepeme joining forces to curb the regional power of two others and to acquire spoils). Spanish sources and the traditional narrative do not disagree with the facts of the campaign; they simply appropriate it as one conceived and directed entirely by Cortés. Likewise the supposed winning of support for the allied cause among towns on the eastern side of the valley; in reality, these were Tetzcoca subjects, following the lead of their own king. Spanish sources also follow the Cortés-Gómara lead in blaming unrest among the conquistadors in Tetzcoco on Nárvaez loyalists and Velazquistas, crediting Cortés with the bold restoration of discipline with the hanging of Antonio de Vallafaña; but the obvious fact that the Spaniards were pursuing a Tetzcoca-Tlaxcalteca agenda surely stirred up factional conflict, resolved by the dominant captains, not by Cortés alone. Finally, the reluctance of the Tetzcoca to maintain a war front against the Chalca cities (along Lake Chalco south of Ixtlapalapan) was presumably a source of unrest among the Spaniards; Sandoval had attempted to extend the alliance’s control down there, using Spanish horsemen and Tlaxcalteca warriors, but it was in vain. Other captains also led assaults against the southern towns, doing enormous damage and forcing families not killed or enslaved to flee; Aztec canoe-based warriors repeatedly returned, though, turning the war into one of attrition.

  In the traditional narrative, the first half of 1521 comprised a brilliant campaign by Cortés, as he gradually took control of the valley and put his siege of Tenochtitlan in place. Setbacks and incidents not well fitting to this narrative have been explained in terms of the unreliability of “Indian” allies, the bloody-mindedness of the Aztecs, and the vast logistical challenges. But viewed through the lens of the Tetzcoca agenda, the war’s unfolding makes more sense. The Tetzcoca and their Tlaxcalteca allies sent companies of warriors where they—not the Spaniards—wanted. Their goal was not to establish permanent territorial control, but to force a town into accepting Tetzcoco or Tlaxcallan as the dominant regional capital to which tribute would henceforth be sent—thus explaining why the campaign comprised dozens of raids and minor campaigns, with the same towns “taken” by the conquistadors over and over. Spanish captains tried in vain to turn the assaults into a concerted attack on Tenochtitlan, failing when indigenous warriors went home with spoils and captives rather than staying in the field continually. Nobody in this war was a soldier in a standing army, but while the Caxtilteca were a long way from Castile and committed to their semilegitimate enterprise, the Nahua fighting men expected to stay home once the war season wound down in April.

  The war should have ended in May, therefore, as a standoff. Had the Spaniards simply left at that point, the region would have settled down for the rest of 1521 into a postwar recuperation, with the Aztec Empire dismantled, and the new powers consolidating their tribute-paying regions: a Tlaxcalteca Triple Alliance, stronger than ever; a Tenochtitlan reduced in power and reach; a Tetzcoco unified under Ixtlilxochitl.

  But rather than leave, the Spaniards grew in number—by May there were more than seven hundred, and even as men died, by August total numbers approached a thousand. These men greatly outnumbered the survivors of the original company, and they were keen to get their share of slaves and spoils. Their horses, harquebuses (the clumsy hand gun of the day), and crossbows grew in number too. As did their willingness to kill: sackings and slave raids, disguised as the punishment of rebels, proliferated. When Xicotencatl (the son) expressed reluctance in May to keep fighting after the war season, a handful of Spanish captains conspired with some Tetzcoca nobles and a Tlaxcalteca rival (named Chichimecateuctli): Xicotencatl was seized and hanged. Chichimecateuctli was probably the architect of the conspiracy, but he found the captains quick to believe Xicotencatl was a traitor and to kill him for it. As for the Tetzcoca, their city had been turned into a massive war camp, complete with the newly constructed brigantines designed for the direct assault on Tenochtitlan. They must have understood that the only way to get their city back was for that final assault to take place, and successfully. There was no turning back for Tetzcoco.61

  The siege of Tenochtitlan, then, might perfectly validly be seen as both a dramatic denouement to the Tetzcoco succession dispute begun in 1515, with Ixtlilxochitl the last-standing brother triumphantly reuniting the regions of his father’s domain; and as a violent tipping of the balance of power within the old Triple Alliance, with Tetzcoco knocking Tenochtitlan down to second partner. The degree to which Tetzcoco’s triumph was a Faustian bargain, with the Spaniards and the Tlaxcalteca playing major and minor devils, respectively, was not immediately apparent.

  The war itself was of course a horrific disruption to family life in Tetzcoco. But its immediate aftermath, what the Spaniards claimed as their “conquest,” was not a radical suspension of a tranquil and static prewar past, but an extension of a political history that had always combined volatility with adaptability. In this case, deeper adaptations were required, most notably religious conversion and the recasting of governmental structures. But the importance of the altepetl was recognized by the new Spanish authorities, who designated it as one of only four urban centers in the Valley of Mexico to be a ciudad, “city.” And the Tetzcocan royal family continued to rule, according to traditional patterns of legitimacy. As had been Aztec practice throughout the valley for many generations, cohorts of brothers inherited the throne, then sons of the next cohort, with claims underpinned by blood ties to Mexica royalty in Tenochtitlan.62

  Thus when Ixtlilxochitl died, he was succeeded by three of his brothers, don Jorge Yoyontzin (to 1533), don
Pedro Tetlahuehuetzquititzin (to 1539), and don Antonio Pimentel Tlahuitoltzin (to 1545); the latter’s nephew (and a son of Coanacoch), don Hernando Pimentel Nezahualcoyotzin, would then rule as tlahtoani and gobernador for two decades. Ixtlilxochitl’s postwar rule thus ushered in a return of governmental stability, with the succession dispute and lethal warfare of 1515–21 a relatively short disruption to the otherwise calm dynastic century and a half from Nezahualcoyotl through his great-grandson Pimentel. The dynasty would lose control of the city’s top political office after that, but would persist as landed aristocracy for centuries. Tetzcoco’s decline as a regional power would likewise be very gradual, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century.63

  THE TETZCOCA PERSPECTIVE on the war is thus crucial and eyeopening. But there is one final optical strategy we can take to see around that gorilla (the myth of Cortesian control): we can try to see the 1520s from the viewpoint of the Mexica (the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco). From that perspective, a world disrupted in 1520 by the prolonged presence of foreign guests in the capital, culminating in the shocking attack on unarmed Toxcatl festival celebrants in May, was then set right by the costly but stunning victories of June and July. Most of the newcomers had been killed, scores of them in the ritual executions that suitably honored captors and captives. In Ochpaniztli (which began early September), a new huey tlahtoani, Cuitlahua, assumed office, and tribute from across the empire was delivered in Tenochtitlan as scheduled.

  But equilibrium had not quite been restored. Tribute no longer came in from the east, as towns that had been under Tetzcoca control now suffered sweeping Tlaxcalteca-Caxtilteca attacks, or they switched allegiances to the expanding Tlaxcalteca Triple Alliance. Auspiciously, perhaps, at the onset of the month of Tititl (the Festival of Shrunken Things), Tetzcoco itself broke away from its Triple Alliance with Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan. A shrunken empire was hardly an empire at all. In Etzalqualiztli (the Bean-Eating Festival), it was more than beans that were in short supply; the island-city was becoming encircled by its enemies, cut off from the world it had so recently commanded. By the end of Miccailhuitontli (the Small Festival of the Dead), the dead were piled high in the streets; as Huey Miccailhuitl (the Great Festival of the Dead) began, the metropolis was sacked, the dead burned in great funeral pyres, the survivors made slaves or refugees.

  From the perspective of the Spaniards and the traditional narrative, August 1521 completed the bloody birthing of New Spain, of three centuries of colonial rule. As a 1697 French version of Las Casas’s Destruction of the Indies put it, “Mexique” was the name of “a great Empire, of which Montezume was the last King; Fernand Cortez entered it in the year 1519, seized that Prince, and conquered the whole country.” Solís, having devoted hundreds of pages to the war, wrapped up the story in a single final paragraph: after “the Conquest of the Capital City,” the lords and “Tributary Princes” of the fallen empire came “to do Homage to the Conqueror”; thus “in a short time was erected that noble Monarchy, which merits the name of New Spain.”64

  For the conquistadors, the business now was to continue to pacify (pacificar) and settle (poblar). All local people were to be enslaved or allotted as sources of labor and tribute to encomenderos (conquistadors granted such “Indians” in trust, or encomienda). Ongoing hostilities with “Indians” were classified as the suppression of “rebels.” Cooperative “Indian allies” (indios amigos)—those who had fought for what the Spanish perceived as their cause, and who now accepted Christianity and the labor and tribute demands of the new settlers—were granted the privilege of local self-rule. Top billing in this category were the Tlaxcalteca. As conquest apologist Vargas Machuca later put it, “don Hernando Cortés entered and kept Mexico with their help. . . . After which, all the remaining provinces of New Spain were conquered in the briefest of times by the Marquis del Valle.”65

  Solís’s closing line is dated in its enthusiasm for the war—“A Wonderful Conquest, and a most Illustrious Conqueror, among those which many Ages rarely produce, and of which there are but few Examples in History!”—but its finality continues to be reflected in today’s accounts. A (literally) graphic example is a recent version for young readers, which neatly captures the spirit of the traditional narrative in cartoon images and captions. At Cuauhtemoc’s surrender, “Cortés was delighted”; he had “won the war.” But “sadly the great city of Tenochtitlan was in ruins” and “the glorious Aztec civilization has been destroyed.” However, “Cortés built Mexico City on the site of Tenochtitlan.” The penultimate frame depicts a ruined, empty city; the final frame, a courtyard with Spanish buildings.66

  The three elements of that impression—the finality of the Conquest at war’s end in August 1521, the sharp break between a city obliterated and a brand-new one built on the same site, and Cortés in charge of it all—are fundamental to the traditional narrative, and are fundamentally wrong. From other perspectives—the advantages of hindsight, the weight of historical evidence, the memories of indigenous communities—the 1520s look very different. From the specific viewpoint of the surviving Mexica in Tenochtitlan, their world did not simply contract with the end of empire; it also expanded. Examples of expanding horizons included the introduction into Tenochtitlan in 1519 of Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards; the experience, the following year, of epidemic diseases brought by those foreigners (most notably a smallpox epidemic that struck around October, killing thousands, including Cuitlahua); and the acquisition of new material objects (for example, in the fighting at Xochimilco in the spring of 1521, Spaniards noticed that Mexica had attached Spanish swords to wooden lances, giving them deadly steel points). What’s more, at the war’s end in the valley in 1521, the Mexica and other Nahuas did not cease to fight; on the contrary, they went out as warriors and colonists, far to the north and south into Maya kingdoms in Yucatan and Guatemala. Others traveled as far as Spain, a few as representatives of Aztec nobility, many as slaves (a pair of ships crossed the Atlantic in 1528 with two of Montezuma’s sons, three Tlaxcalteca princes, a son of the Mexica ruler of Tenochtitlan, and more than thirty Nahua servants and slaves).67

  Nor was it only Spanish religion, culture, and language to which the Mexica were increasingly exposed; young noblemen soon became fluent in Latin, taught (and some eventually teaching) at the college opened in the Tlatelolco district of Tenochtitlan (the New World’s first European-style institution of higher learning). For Spaniards, the Tlatelolco college was a New Spain institution. But its pupils were all Nahuas, and for them it was an institution in the life of postwar Tenochtitlan.

  Tenochtitlan’s death turns out to be a myth, created by the chronological cutting of the cake at August 13, 1521. The emphasis by historians on Cortés dividing up urban lots among the conquistadors in 1522, or Alonso Gracía Bravo measuring the central grid or traza in 1524, or the “seventh great plague” (as Motolonía called it) of forced construction work for the indigenous builders of Spanish palaces, have all acted as nails in that mythical coffin. For while Tenochtitlan was largely in ruins that August—a hellscape of rubble, corpses, and half-starved survivors—it was neither dead nor abandoned. A reduced Aztec population, scarred from battle and smallpox, remained in the capital. In the early days and weeks, those not “too sick to leave” no doubt stumbled out along the causeways, “so thin and yellow and dirty and stinking that it was pitiful to see them” (as Díaz put it). But that was to find food and escape the sacking of the city—the raping and slave-taking and torturing for information on hidden treasures that followed every urban assault since the Cholollan Massacre. Within months, if not weeks, the Mexica reclaimed their neighborhoods and homes, gardens, and chinampas—despite a gallows supposedly set up in the main plaza to hang returnees.68

  Before the siege, Cortés had imagined the city as ideal for a segregated and secure settlement, with Spaniards on the island and “Indians” across the water in lakeshore towns. But the reality of the early 1520s was the opposite. In 1521, the conquistadors settled
on the shores, most of them in Coyohuacan, to the south of Tenochtitlan; ironically, the Spaniards had to ride up the same causeway they had traveled in November 1519 in order to reach the city they had so massively damaged and did not yet occupy. Even when they did start to move into new buildings, starting in 1524, they did so only within the traza, the gridded central zone reserved for Spanish administrative buildings and houses—the very concept of which, in addition to the location, was Aztec. Churches were built on the foundations of temples. Palaces were built on palaces. Plazas, streets, and canals remained in place. Aztec space persisted underneath or within Spanish-Aztec space.69

  Most of the city still comprised the five Aztec neighborhoods that had originally been separate altepeme. Each altepetl survived, its name intact but with a prefixed saint’s name: Santiago Tlatelolco in the north; and surrounding the traza, the four that comprised San Juan Tenochtitlan—Santa María Cuepopan, San Sebastián Atzacoalco, San Pablo Teopan, and San Juan Moyotlan. But perhaps even more notable than continuities of space and polity, people and neighborhoods, was the astonishing perpetuation of Aztec royal rule.

  Going back at least to the first Montezuma, the Aztec emperor had appointed a high official to act as a viceroy or first minister, with the title of cihuacoatl. Montezuma’s own brother, Tlacaelel, had served as his cihuacoatl; and Tlacaelel’s grandson, Tlacotzin, served as cihuacoatl to the second Montezuma. Not only did Tlacotzin survive the war, but he survived within a besieged Tenochtitlan, acting (according to Cortés) as a negotiator between the Mexica and the allied forces in the closing weeks of the war. After the war, he retained his title of cihuacoatl and—with Cuauhtemoc as a captive tlahtoani—effectively ascended to the throne, now named don Juan Velázquez Tlacotzin. Indigenous annals and codices include him in the succession of rulers, following Cuauhtemoc. In the Codex Aubin he appears as ruler beside the entry for 1523 (reproduced in our Gallery); above his head is a pictograph of a woman-headed snake (cihuatl means “woman”; coatl means “snake”). The traditional responsibilities of the cihuacoatl seem to have included the infrastructure and functioning of Tenochtitlan itself, and sure enough Tlacotzin took on that role in the early 1520s. For example, he reopened the great city market and renamed it after himself; it just happened to be located adjacent to his own (rebuilt) residence.70