When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  Another conquistador, Francisco Gutiérrez, arrived in the Indies in 1517, joining the war in Mexico in 1520, right after the Tepeaca massacre. It is not clear if his first wife was Spanish or indigenous, but after the war she died and Gutiérrez married a Nahua woman, settling in Tenochtitlan; she bore him most of the ten children he had fathered by the 1550s. Similarly, Juan Galingo, a crossbowman who joined the second half of the war in Mexico, married a Nahua woman when his Spanish wife died. Some men followed the opposite pattern: for example, Bartolomé “Coyote” Sánchez, a veteran of the Spanish-Aztec War who received the town of Coyotepec in encomienda, married a Nahua woman in the 1520s; then in the 1540s, after her death, he married a Spaniard. Likewise Juan Pérez de Arteaga, who was called Pérez Malinche because he served as Malintzin’s guard during the war (and learned fluent Nahuatl), married a Nahua who was renamed Angelina Pérez; they had six children. Much later, after her death, he married the daughter of another conquistador.48

  We only know about any of these relationships because there was marriage, formal concubinage (in the case of indigenous royalty or nobility), or children. These examples must be taken, then, as the seemingly consensual tip of an iceberg of nonconsensual ones. For every Spaniard who we know left a Taíno wife in Cuba, hundreds left behind in the islands concubines, mistresses, and victims of rape. Likewise, for every Nahua woman who appears in the records, often nameless, as the wife or mother of a conquistador’s child, there must have been many hundreds who were temporarily connected in some sense—including involuntarily—with a Spaniard.

  Evidence of sexual slavery and forced promiscuity takes the form of passing comments in Spanish sources—all small but adding up to an undeniable but oft-overlooked and dark reality. For example, Cervantes de Salazar claimed that Cortés, while in Cuba, was too sick to leave the island because “his friends said that he had syphilis [las bubas], because he was always a womanizer [amigo de mujeres], and Indian women infect those who go with them much more than Spanish women do”—the final line revealing Spanish attitudes as salt in the wound of their treatment of Taíno women. Other hints come from remarks in archival sources: “the natives are very jealous, and nothing causes them greater pain than when one goes with their women.” The comment’s context is advice by Cortés to a cousin on his voyage to Asia, but Cortés knew nothing of Asians (as was clear from the rest of his letter), and he clearly had “Indians” in mind.49

  Díaz makes passing mention of the acquisition of local women dozens of times: the phrase “good Indian women” or “pretty Indian girls”—buenas indias or hermosas y buenas indias—peppers his long account. The references range from a comment that one Spanish sailor impregnated various indigenous women during the war, to half a dozen descriptions of Spanish quarrels over buenas indias; most comments, however, simply note that “we took some women and girls.” The frequent mention of how these captive women looked reveals why they were hunted: on one Sandoval-led sortie, the Chalca and Tlaxcalteca did most of the fighting, because “our soldiers . . . were chiefly occupied in hunting for a pretty Indian girl [una buena india] or getting some loot”; they return with “some fine pieces of Indian women” (pieza—“piece” or “catch”—was a hunting and slaving term, referring to an acquisition of high or full value); “here we grabbed some very good indias and loot”; on one occasion, they surprised a family “in their house and took three Indian men and two girls, pretty for indias, and an old woman”; one small group of conquistadors attacked a hamlet and “we seized thirty chickens and a local kind of melon . . . and three women; and so we had a great Easter”; battle spoils frequently included “many indias and children”; at times they took so many girls, Díaz described the haul as a montón (“a pile”).50

  After the sacking and enslaving at Tepeaca and Tetzcoco, there were complaints that the night before the formal dividing up and branding of captives, the Spanish captains stole for themselves “the best Indian women” and “the good pieces”; on other occasions, “in the night the captains took from the pile the good and pretty indias that had been put aside for branding.” After that, Díaz claimed, the conquistadors hid “the good indias” they had grabbed in camp or among the Tlaxcalteca, claiming they were servants, so the captains would not take them for themselves—to keep or to brand and sell. Some of these girls, admitted Díaz, remained with their conquistador captors for several months—long enough for it to be known throughout the company “who treated well the Indian women and servants he had, and who treated his badly.” The women who had been most abused, come auction time, tended “to suddenly disappear and never be seen again.”51

  Further hints can be found in quasi-indigenous sources. The line from the Codex Aubin, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, referring to the death during the Noche Triste of “the prostitutes who were supposed to be daughters of Montezuma,” evokes community memory of how Spanish demands for sex slaves turned Aztec girls into concubines and perverted the purpose of diplomatic marriage alliances. Above all, the line reminds Nahua readers that the ultimate victims were mochpochuan, “your daughters.”52

  Two other quasi-indigenous sources contain variants on the same passage, describing the raping and looting that swept Tenochtitlan as it fell to its besiegers. The Mexica memory of Spanish conquistador lust for two things is in one Nahuatl account wrapped into a single hunt:

  On every street the Spaniards took things from people by force. They were looking for gold; they cared nothing for jade, precious feathers, or turquoise. With the women they looked everywhere, in their vaginas, up their skirts; with the men, they looked everywhere too, under their loincloths and in their mouths; and they picked out and took the beautiful women, with yellow bodies.

  In the Spanish version of the same text, the passage is reduced to its essence: “they took nothing but gold and the pretty young women.” But in another Nahuatl source, gold goes unmentioned, leaving an emphasis on the assault: “the Christians searched all over the women; they pulled down their skirts and went all over their bodies, in their mouths, in their vaginas, in their hair.”53

  Spanish commentary on indigenous reactions is rare, but Cortés’s complaint that indigenous men “are very jealous” echoes in other accounts. For example, Díaz described an incident on the Honduras expedition in which the leaders of a town that had been attacked, seeing “their women taken,” sent envoys with “small bits of gold jewelry” to “beg Cortés” to return the captives. He agreed, if they would deliver food; when they did as asked, and Cortés decided to keep three of the women anyway, “all the Indians of that town” attacked the camp “with darts, and stones, and arrows,” injuring a dozen Spaniards “as well as Cortés himself, in the face”—a detail added by Díaz, one suspects, because it seemed just deserts.54

  On other occasions, of course, indigenous leaders used women, even family members, to cement agreements and protect their towns. Díaz’s casual description of the granting in 1519 by the so-called Fat Cacique of his niece and seven other “indias, all of them daughters of caciques,” conveys the normalcy of this distribution of teenage girls from the viewpoint of the conquistadors (and, presumably, of the local noblemen too). Hints as to the Spanish reaction confirm our suspicions: they are interested in “the golden collar and gold ear-rings” that each girl wore, and when “they were baptized, the niece of the Fat Cacique was named doña Catalina, and she was very ugly; she was led by the hand and given to Cortés who received her and put on a brave face [con buen senblante].” No doubt this was laughed over many times (the ugly one given to Cortés and given his wife’s name); men at war make jokes about sex and local women. One wonders if the poor girl—at whose expense the joke was ultimately made—was ever told why the foreign men smirked around her.55

  For what is missing in all the documents and chronicles—what we must fill in with our imaginations, as best we can—is the terror of the experience for these teenage girls. At the fall of Tenochtitlan, “some women escaped” from being s
eized and made sex slaves by “putting mud on their faces and dressing in rags.” But to imagine the larger picture, we need more than a snapshot image from the sacking of the Aztec capital, and more too than the example of Malintzin as a teenage slave whose experience was typical in some ways but surely not in others; instead, we must think of the other nineteen girls passed into the Spanish camp along with her, and of the Fat Cacique’s niece and the other seven girls “given” to the same conquistadors; and the thousands of others “given” or taken, the “piles” of captured girls—consigned to a fate of sexual slavery, dragged across the country as the war developed, passed among the unintelligible invaders to satisfy their bodily needs as the violence mounted.

  The paucity of information on such girls and women, combined with the sheer volume of victims, makes it all the more crucial for us to remember those individuals we can, and to try to imagine what this war and its aftermath was for them—even if all we know is that in 1549, María Xocoto was a forty-one-year-old slave in the Cuauhnahuac sugar mills, that she apparently looked her age, that she was a native of Cuauhnahuac, and that she was probably forced into sexual servitude when she was twelve, as Spanish-indigenous forces swept her hometown, killing or enslaving her family.56

  * * *

  “So great was the haste to make slaves in different parts” of New Spain, claimed Motolinía, “that they were brought into the city of Mexico in great flocks, like sheep, so they could be easily branded.” The thirty-ninth charge made against Cortés in his residencia inquiry stated that (in Cuauhnahuac and Huaxtepec) he “and the people who came with him killed many Indians, and then branded more than five hundred souls as slaves.” Statements of slaughter and enslavement like these, and many others quoted in this chapter, give the impression of a steady stream of numbers—of hundreds and thousands whose total tally is unclear. Any exploration of a history of warfare runs into questions of demographic scale, and that is particularly true in the Mexican case, where the impact of mass enslavement and civilian massacres must be considered alongside battle casualties and the impact of epidemic disease—let alone questions of pre-Columbian population levels, of conquistador numbers, and of numbers of indigenous allies during the war. Indeed, one of the mythistorical themes of the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico” has been that of numbers of people.57

  The conquistadors and other Spaniards tended to downplay their own numbers, laying the foundation for the canard that an empire of millions was conquered by a “handful” of conquistadors: the conquest was achieved by “an isolated handful of Spaniards against a powerful and warlike race”; “unbelievable success came to Cortés with a handful of men and a few horses”; “with a mere handful of adventurous men” he “performed the greatest feat” in history, “toppled the most warlike of all American empires,” and “subjugated a highly cultured people whose numbers ran into the millions.” Thus by the same token, indigenous numbers were exaggerated, as Cortés and others boasted about the wealth of the land they had discovered and the scale of their triumph over it. That exaggeration has resurfaced in multiple ways over the centuries—from the numbers of victims of Aztec sacrificial ceremonies to the numbers of Tlaxcalteca warriors allied with the Spaniards; from the population of Tenochtitlan to the mortality rate from smallpox during the war.58

  There is no doubt that some 450 Spaniards sailed from Cuba, reaching Cozumel in February 1519; fewer than three hundred, perhaps as few as 250, walked into Tenochtitlan in November that year. Does that make the achievement of the surviving “handful,” and Cortés’s supposed military genius, even more impressive? Not quite. In August 1521, at the war’s conclusion and the city’s surrender, there were at least 980 surviving Spaniards in the Valley of Mexico, and well over a thousand across Mexico. So how did the conquistador presence fluctuate and how do the real numbers help change our view of the war?

  The first fact is that many more Spaniards entered the war than those original 450. In the thirty months between Cortés’s departure from Cuba and the war’s end, I estimate that at least 2,600 Spaniards crossed to the Mexican mainland, and I suspect the actual number was at least three thousand. At their most numerous moment, there were fifteen hundred. Cortés and Narváez then led them into the Tenochtitlan trap that became the Noche Triste, and a month later a thousand of them were dead. Over the next year, total numbers crept back up, getting close to fifteen hundred again, although never quite reaching it due to battle losses. So by the time Tenochtitlan was captured, almost two-thirds of all those who came to Mexico had died. If we account for the small number who left for the islands or Spain during the war (Ordaz was one), the conquistador mortality rate was below 65 percent; but if more Spaniards arrived than my estimated twenty-six hundred, the rate was closer to 70 percent.59

  Most Spaniards died as a result of wound-related infections or injuries from the arrows, small blades, and obsidian-studded clubs used by Mesoamerican warriors. But hundreds were taken alive and ritually executed in Tenochtitlan during the Noche Triste battle, and at least seventy-five suffered the same fate in June 1521, when Aztec defenders resoundingly won an engagement during the siege. A small minority died at the hands of other Spaniards. The point here is not that a few thousand conquistadors, instead of a few hundred, defeated a great empire, but that Tlaxcalteca, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican warriors inflicted such heavy casualties on the invaders that two-thirds of them died in the war. This was not an astounding victory of a handful led by a brilliant general; it was a punishing, costly war in which Spanish defeat was regularly averted by new arrivals—not to mention the tens of thousands of indigenous “allies.” If Cortés really was in charge, then for every man whom he led to victory, he led two to their death.

  A cluster of small but significant points stem from this reality check on conquistador numbers—points all to do with the capacity of the invaders to retain their toehold in Mexico and inflict violence upon the local population. For example, the enormous force of eleven hundred who came with Narváez in April 1520 were the exception to a pattern of steady flow; that is, men came in groups as small as half a dozen, but with regularity throughout the war, providing reinforcements at a useful and relatively undisruptive rate. They also brought with them additional horses, crossbows and harquebuses, powder and shot, and other supplies. Weaponry was not the smoking-gun explanation for Spanish victory (one “Cortés” television documentary, drawing upon the modern military variant on the traditional narrative, declares Cortés’s “secret weapons” to be steel swords and crossbows, cannon and harquebuses, mastiffs and horses—which “the natives” thought were “dragons”). In fact, those weapons did not offer great offensive advantages, but permitted small, tight, strong defensive positions. Spanish weapons were useful for breaking the offensive lines of waves of indigenous warriors, but this was no formula for conquest, which small Spanish companies did not and could not have achieved. Rather, it was a formula for survival, until Spanish and indigenous reinforcements arrived; the story, in other words, of the Spanish-Aztec War.60

  These factors all helped to determine the mindset of the conquistadors, to which we shall turn in a moment. But first, what of the indigenous side of the numbers question? For much of the last century it was believed that the indigenous population of Mexico before the Spanish-Aztec War was as much as 25 million, with more than a million living in the Valley of Mexico (a hundred to two hundred thousand of them in Tenochtitlan). As the region’s indigenous population was perhaps as low as a million by 1600, the demographic impact of Spanish conquest and colonization was thus a population loss of 96 percent—an unprecedented demographic disaster. The major culprit has usually been identified as smallpox (the Variola major variant of orthopoxvirus), with the initial epidemic sweeping through central Mexico at the end of 1520, killing up to half the residents of many towns and cities—including Tenochtitlan—in just two months.61

  These numbers have repeatedly been challenged, in a spirited debate that has simme
red among scholars for decades, with lower figures now accepted by many scholars (but seldom appearing in books and documentaries aimed at larger audiences). We saw earlier that the island-city of Tenochtitlan could not have held as many as a hundred thousand residents; more likely there were some 60,000, with hundreds of thousands in the other cities around the lake, and more like 5 to 10 million in the Aztec Empire and Mexico as a whole. Likewise, we cannot be so sure that Mexican towns were cut in half in a matter of months, just because Motolinía asserted it as fact decades later. Sweeping verdicts on the causes of Aztec defeat—“the miraculous triumphs” of the conquistadors were “in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox”—no longer hold up.62

  But that does not mean we can discount or dismiss the demographic impact of the diseases the Spaniards brought with them. For there remains strong evidence that epidemics of smallpox and other diseases devastated Mesoamericans during the war, and a 90 percent population decline (from 10 million to 1 million) in eighty years is still highly shocking. What it does mean is that we must look carefully at the smallpox evidence to see exactly how it affected the course of the war, in particular in conjunction with other factors. Specifically, the war’s outcome can in large part be explained by the intersection of the smallpox factor with internecine conflict among the Aztec leadership and the role played by the Spaniards’ indigenous allies—who were also impacted by epidemic disease. As Hassig noted, epidemic mortality within both the Aztec and the allied leadership added to the disruption of normal patterns of warfare. I would add that this did not facilitate Aztec defeat per se; rather, it made the war more protracted and less clearly guided. Aztec (then Mexica) leadership was interrupted, allied indigenous leadership was fractured, and high mortality rates opened up possibilities for upstarts and parvenus, further destabilizing the indigenous political landscape. In sum, if total indigenous numbers were not as high as once thought, with fewer Mexica both at the start of the war and as defenders of Tenochtitlan during the siege, and smallpox and other diseases killed fewer people than once thought, then outright slaughter, starvation, and enslavement accounted for more casualties at all stages of the war than has been recognized.63