When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  GIFTS OF WOMEN. “Cortes receives Donna Marina w[i]th other female Slaves as a present from the Cacique of Tabasco” was included in A World Displayed, first published in London in the 1760s. Its visual details reflect the symbolic imagery of the traditional narrative, long established by this time, including Cortés’s imperious pose, his armored men arrayed like early modern cavalry, and the “Indians” wearing only feathers, with a feathered headdress indicating the local ruler (“cacique”). But there are heavy hints here of a darker theme, not shocking to sixteenth-century Spaniards or eighteenth-century readers of English, but suggesting to us a different perspective on the war of invasion: the trafficking in teenage girls as sex slaves.

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 8

  Without Mercy or Purpose

  In this year the prostitutes who were supposed to be daughters of Moteucçoma died. The Christians said, “Let women be brought, your daughters.”

  —Codex Aubin

  We receive many grievances and abuses from the Spaniards, for them being amongst us and we being amongst them.

  —Thirteen royal and noble lords of the Valley of Mexico, in Tlacopan, to the king, 1556

  War makes ordinary people do horrible things. Frightened soldiers in foreign lands murder the locals without mercy or purpose. One wishes that this happened rarely. In truth, it happens all the time.

  —Adam Gopnik, 2015

  Before Cortés lops off a messenger’s

  hands and has another trampled,

  before the branding and burning,

  there is wonderment

  and, for a moment, endearment

  as Cortés dances, off beat, around

  the long neck of his field piece.

  Stroking it, he whispers into its mouth,

  then cocks his ear to the darkness.

  —Xochiquetzal Candelaria, “Cortés and Cannon”1

  AS CORTÉS STOOD OVER THE WARM BUT LIFELESS BODY OF HIS wife, he must have known he would be accused of murder.

  In an episode of the Spanish television drama Carlos, Rey Emperador, Catalina Suárez catches her husband kissing and groping Malintzin in an upstairs hallway of his new Mexican palace. The resulting argument continues into their bedroom, where Cortés demands her respect. “I am your husband, I am governor of New Spain!” he yells. “I have a whole world at my feet, here I am a god—a god!”

  “You’re a demon!” Catalina shouts back at him. “An insane demon!” As she reaches for paper, threatening to write a denunciation to the king, he grabs her by the throat. The action cuts to the rowdy dinner party downstairs, where Malintzin sits looking worried, and then cuts back up to the bedroom—where Catalina lies dead in Cortés’s arms.2

  For television audiences in the Spanish-speaking world, the depiction of Cortés as a megalomaniac and murderer—and specifically as an uxoricide—offered not a shock but a confirmation of the popular belief, going back at least into the nineteenth century (certainly in Mexico), in the conquistador’s guilt. As we read earlier, Cortés’s antihero legend, while primarily a modern phenomenon, bubbled under his heroic legend even in his own lifetime. Thrust into the invasion’s lead role by his fellow conquistadors, he had claimed it with such duplicity, avarice, and self-righteousness that he spent the rest of his life fighting lawsuits, official investigations, and accusations of all kinds—including the murder of rivals and royal officials. It was thus inevitable that Catalina Suárez’s death, sudden and witnessed by him alone, would raise suspicions. Indeed, in 1529, the question of his guilt in the matter, prompted by a lawsuit filed by doña Catalina’s mother, became an official part of the Crown’s massive residencia inquiry (the timing surely not coincidental). It has remained a mystery ever since, a small corner within the sprawling edifice of Cortesian legend.3

  So was Cortés guilty? Or does it not matter?

  The royal inquiry into doña Catalina’s death resulted in an implied acquittal. That is, the initial gathering of testimony produced insufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation. Some witnesses, like Gerónimo de Aguilar, insisted his guilt was clear and common knowledge. A few of Catalina’s maids said that right after her death they saw bruises on her neck, and a broken necklace on the floor. On the other hand, others testified to her chronic illness, her frequent fainting and periodic pain; her nephew and a couple of other men said she died of a disease of the womb (“mal de madre”).4

  Modern verdicts have also gone both ways. Abbott’s opinion was still, in the nineteenth century, the majority one: that the accusation derived from the fact that her death “was so evidently a relief to Cortez, and so manifestly in accordance with his wishes,” but despite his “many and great faults,” such a crime was “quite foreign to his character. The verdict of history in reference to this charge has been very cordially Not proven.” More recent historians have been less generous:

  Certainly a man who did not flinch at torture, who believed women existed for men’s convenience, who had been drinking—and who probably had threatened his wife before—might have ended by strangling a spouse who harped on his bad behavior.5

  This takes us closer to what concerns us here. For I suggest that Cortés’s innocence or guilt is unimportant. With Montezuma’s murder, the questions of who did it, whether or why they lied, and where fingers were pointed, all have significance. But in doña Catalina’s case, what matters is where the details, the context, and the implications of the alleged murder lead us.

  * * *

  The incident took place in Cortés’s new palace, still under construction, in Coyohuacan (Coyoacan)—the altepetl, just outside Tenochtitlan, where Spaniards based themselves for three years while the capital city was being rebuilt. Doña Catalina died in October 1522, three months after arriving from Cuba. She was not alone in traveling to Mexico after hearing word of Tenochtitlan’s fall. For example, her maids accompanied her, as did her family members, and their inconclusive testimony would help perpetuate the mystery of her death.

  Many Spaniards would eventually testify in the inquiry, and the detailed account by one has caught the attention of modern historians, and for good reason. During the All Saints Day dinner, on the fateful evening, doña Catalina was overheard chatting with Francisco de Solís (a captain in the war, a leader in the Ávila cohort, and a Cortesian loyalist). “You, Solís,” said doña Catalina, “you don’t want to employ my Indians in things other than what I’ve ordered, yet you don’t let them do what I want.” “But, señora, it is not I who employs them,” responded Solís, “the privilege [merced] is yours to employ and command them.” Remarked Catalina: “I promise you that before many days pass, I shall do something with what’s mine and won’t have to answer to anyone.” At this, Cortés exclaimed, “With what’s yours [con lo vuestro], señora, I don’t want anything [yo no quiero nada]!”6

  At this rebuff, doña Catalina stormed up to her room. The double entendre of Cortés’s remark seems clear, and one can imagine the conquistadors enjoying a good laugh. According to the above witness, the other slave-owning women (las otras dueñas) also laughed. The dialogue may be apocryphal (after all, other witnesses described Catalina leaving because she felt unwell, and several told of her falling ill earlier that day while walking in the orchards owned by the black conquistador Juan Garrido). But even if it is, it illuminates an environment in which ownership of “Indians” was a regular dinnertime topic, in which multiple hierarchies of race and gender were in play, and in which men (and perhaps women, but only Spanish women) joked about sex and slaves.

  Those slaves were, for Spaniards, the spoils of war, be they Taínos from Cuba or Nahuas in Mexico, and there was a nameless, numberless quantity of them in the Coyohuacan house that night, along with African and other Mesoamerican slaves and servants also long lost to us. But there were other indigenous people present too, adding layers of context to the dinnertime conversation. For example, before doña Catalina had arrived from
Cuba, another woman had also made the journey, a Taíno woman with whom Cortés had lived in Cuba prior to marrying doña Catalina. He had named her Leonor Pizarro (his maternal grandmother’s name), and she was—so far—the mother of his only child, a daughter to whom he had given his mother’s name: Catalina Pizarro.

  It was suggested that Cortés’s affection for Leonor had motivated his reluctance to marry doña Catalina (seducing her was one thing, marrying her another, and only agreed to after heavy-handed intervention by Velázquez—although he was baby Catalina’s godfather). It was also claimed that doña Catalina came to Mexico only after learning that her husband had already sent for Leonor (doña Catalina’s arrival was a surprise, claimed Díaz). It is not clear if Leonor brought her daughter too, nor do we know how long Leonor lived in Mexico. It seems quite possible that she was the same Leonor Pizarro who was briefly one of doña Catalina’s maids, and who later married the conquistador Juan de Salcedo. But the half-Taíno Catalina Pizarro outlived her father, who remembered her with rare and revealing affection in his will (in the same document he disinherited his son Luis for planning to marry a niece of comrade-turned-enemy Vásquez de Tapia). Cortés admitted he had drawn income from the properties given to Catalina as a dowry, and ordered that she be reimbursed. In the end, the dowry was taken by doña Juana de Zúñiga—Cortés’s second wife and now widow—who blocked Catalina’s marriage to Francisco de Garay’s son and sent her to a convent in Spain. Cortés’s affection for half-Taíno Catalina was thus sufficient to anger both his Spanish wives.7

  The Spanish and Taíno women in the Coyohuacan house were, not surprisingly, outnumbered by Nahua women. There were untold servants and slaves, many used as sex slaves by the conquistadors. Ana Rodríguez, one of doña Catalina’s maids, claimed that “don Fernando courted ladies and women who were in these parts”—and that made his wife “jealous.” Vásquez de Tapia later claimed that between arriving from Cuba and leaving for Honduras, Cortés “had slept with at least forty Mexican women.” Another conquistador said the Coyohuacan house was full “of the daughters of the lords of this land.” Partisanship and exaggerations aside, Ana Rodríguez was surely right in referring to a scene that was widespread during and after the war, that Cortés participated in, and that doña Catalina found distasteful (and, no doubt, distastefully familiar). And because several of the Nahua women were not slaves but of high status, yet nonetheless forced or obliged to participate in this scene, and consequently impregnated, we know details.8

  One was Montezuma’s senior daughter, Tecuichpochtzin, who had been baptized doña Isabel Moctezuma Tecuichpo—the “Isabel” a nod to her royal status (reflected in the Gallery’s “Family Matters”). During the war, while still a girl, she had been betrothed to her father’s two successors, Cuitlahua and Cuauhtemoc. She survived the siege, and in the 1520s went on to marry a series of conquistadors. The first two, Alonso de Grado and Pedro Gallego, soon died, but her marriage to Juan Cano produced five children and lasted until her death in 1551. Tecuichpo held Tlacopan in encomienda, maintained noble status, and achieved lasting fame. When Gemelli visited Mexico City in the 1690s—the viceroy at the time was the Count of Montezuma, a descendant of the famous emperor, although mostly descended from Spanish aristocrats—he commented on families claiming descent from Aztec royalty, particularly from the children of “Tecuhich potzin.” Most were descendants of her and Cano.9

  But one of doña Isabel’s children was Cortés’s, apparently fathered in the Coyohuacan house after she had already married Gallego (claimed Vásquez de Tapia). One can only speculate as to the circumstances of the conception of the child, but it was within a month or so of doña Catalina’s death, as the child was born in 1523; baptized Leonor Cortés Moctezuma, she eventually married a Spaniard.10

  It was also known “very publicly” that Cortés had “slept with two or three of Montezuma’s daughters”; that he “kept” one, baptized doña Ana, as a “girlfriend” (amiga) during the months of the Phoney Captivity; and that in the same months he also impregnated a sister or cousin of hers. A few conquistadors claimed this was doña Francisca, a sister of Cacama and his many brothers, and that as the Spaniards prepared to fight their way out of Tenochtitlan (on the eve of what would become the Noche Triste), Aztec noblewomen were assaulted—and Cortés took “a final opportunity to rape the sister of the king of Tetzcoco” (in the words of a modern historian). Reading through the various accusations, it seems likely that during the first half of 1520, Cortés and other captains kept as concubines, or eventually raped, at least two of Montezuma’s daughters (renamed Ana and Inés) and at least two of Cacama’s sisters or daughters (renamed Ana and Francisca). All were killed right before or during the Noche Triste save for one of the Tetzcoca “princesses,” a doña Ana. She survived to later marry two conquistador veterans of the war—Pero Gutiérrez, then Juan de Cuéllar, supposedly arranged by Ixtlilxochitl (her uncle or brother). Doña Ana may well have been in the Coyohuacan house in 1522.11

  ANOTHER OF THE NAHUA WOMEN in the Coyohuacan house was also already well known in the tiny conquistador community. Before arriving in Mexico, doña Catalina would surely have heard of the “Indian” slave girl with a knack for language, whose role as interpreter had earned her freedom and the honorific doña Marina (in Nahuatl, Malintzin). But did doña Catalina know, before she arrived, that Malintzin was pregnant, and that her own husband was the father? We do not know, nor do we know if Malintzin was still living in Cortés’s house, nor exactly when she gave birth. But she was certainly living in Coyohuacan, and present in the Cortés residence much of the time, and the son that she bore Cortés—whom he named Martín, after his father—may even have been born shortly before doña Catalina’s death.12

  In the extensive testimony given in Cortés’s residencia inquiry that relates to his sexual behavior, it is noteworthy that Malintzin receives almost no mention. Spaniards were more concerned with the question of doña Catalina’s death, with Cortés’s relationships with Montezuma’s daughters, and with his alleged carnal knowledge of women who were related to each other (“with cousins and with sisters,” or with a crude attempt to seduce a woman whose “daughter he had publicly slept with in Cuba”). When Malintzin is mentioned, it is mostly as part of a similar accusation: for example, that in his house “he was sleeping with Marina, who was a local woman [de la tierra], by whom he had some children, and with a niece of hers”; or that “he lay carnally with two of Montezuma’s daughters and with Marina, the interpreter, and with a daughter of hers,” and that “two or three Indians were hanged from a tree inside the house” in Coyohuacan, on Cortés’s orders, because “they had slept with Marina.”13

  What are we to make of this? The rumors that Cortés slept with relatives of Malintzin are surely untrue (she was herself a teenager during the war). Those accusations thus reflect the fact that to Spaniards at the time, it was a certain kind of incest that was objectionable, not the use and abuse of indigenous women, which was widespread and endemic to the war and its aftermath. As for the tale of the hanged “Indians,” if true it reflects the theme that emerged from the details surrounding doña Catalina’s death: that in the 1520s, “Indians” were Spanish possessions, to be commanded or killed, given away or sold, kept or impregnated, as their “owners” wished. We would be wrong to imagine the tale as a sign of Cortés’s romantic jealousy over Malintzin. In his will—the same final testament that revealed his affection for his daughter Catalina and her Taíno mother, Leonor (“probably Cortés’s first love,” one historian speculated; perhaps his only one?)—there is no mention at all of Malintzin.14

  And yet, several centuries later, the dark reality of sex and slavery in the 1520s had become this imagined dialogue:

  Cortez.

  My sweet interpreter, most eloquent,

  Thy tongue interprets ’twixt these tribes and me:

  Let they meek eyes interpret love for me.

  Marina.

  Can Cortez speak of love to
his poor slave?

  Cortez.

  Ay, by my soul! For I do feel it here.

  O! my dear captive, thou hast captured me!

  No more art thou my slave, for I am thine.

  Marina.

  I am thine own.

  Cortez.

  My love, my life, my joy!

  Marina.

  O! My beloved lord!15

  By the time this poet—the American Lewis Foulk Thomas—had placed a red-hot romance at the heart of his 1857 play, Cortez, the Conqueror, the supposed love affair between Cortés and Malintzin had become common fodder for the page and stage. Malintzin had been ignored for centuries (note that in the cited comments from 1529, conquistadors already felt the need to identify “Marina” as “a local woman” or as “the interpreter”). But, starting in the early nineteenth century, several Malintzins were gradually invented.