When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The opera was written in Venice in an effort to improve Vivaldi’s financial state. It did not much help; he died eight years later a pauper in Vienna. But in retrospect the composer’s choice of topic and his invention of a love story to “cast some sweetness onto the bloody triumphs of the conqueror of Mexico”—to borrow a line from the caption to one of Maurin’s lithographs of a century later—anticipated the flurry of attention to Cortés and Montezuma during the era of Romanticism. Vivaldi’s opera was not just a link in the long chain of (often absurd) dramatizations of the Spanish-Aztec encounter, from The Indian Emperour to Captain from Castile; it was a link in the greater chain of the appropriation, distortion, and invention of the Meeting and the events surrounding it.

  The twenty-first-century revival of Motezuma, which has now been staged in cities across Europe and the Americas, and the Mexican reaction to its plot, reminds us that the “Conquest of Mexico” has never ceased to be a topic of entertainment, debate, celebration, and conflict. Furthermore, this has been because its story and its appropriation is so often about something else—about reviving a career (Vivaldi in 1733) or saving a library (the legal dispute of 2002–05) or indulging in a fantasy that European colonial expansion was about romance, or at least a fitting setting for romance, with happy endings that might act as metaphors for civilization’s joyful triumph over barbarism.

  THERE IS STILL ONE final stop on our time travel of a walk in this extraordinary city—as if Vivaldi’s Motezuma being sung, with Nahuatl phrases added, in the Art Deco theater where the Aztec-Spanish aqueduct once poured fresh water into Tenochtitlan was not mind-boggling enough. Step out of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and walk across lanes of traffic to the immediate southwest; in the 1692 map, one steps out of the convent of Santa Isabel and across the street into the complex of buildings and gardens that was the convent of San Francisco (hence the old name of the street).

  In the 1520s, when the new Tenochtitlan, eventually to be called the city of Mexico, emerged phoenixlike from the old capital’s rubble, Spaniards and Nahuas claimed or returned to city blocks between streets and canals to build homes. One group of new settlers were the Franciscan friars, preaching poverty but armed with sufficient wealth and power to claim a large section of the city upon which to construct their church and convent. Equivalent to four city blocks, with access to fresh water, the canals, and the lake, the massive plot was the site of much of Montezuma’s old zoo complex.25

  Where the emperor’s gardeners and zookeepers had tended plants and birds, the indigenous slaves of the friars maintained an orchard and gardens, chicken coops and fishponds. Where Montezuma had studied the natural world, Franciscans pondered how to obliterate all memory of Montezuma’s world. Gradually, the ghosts of the zoo beneath the convent faded. And then the convent itself shrank and faded—walls and buildings razed, plots sold or stolen, a city street carved through its heart in the nineteenth century, and in the next century a skyscraper raised in one corner. The Torre Latinoamericana, once the tallest building in Latin America, still offers a panoramic view of the city to visitors—for whom Montezuma, his zoo, his empire, and the reasons for their passing are buried as deep into Tenochtitlan’s bedrock as the skyscraper’s foundations.

  Acknowledgments

  MOST BOOKS ARE MADE POSSIBLE BY A HOST OF HELPING HANDS, and this one is no exception. Numerous authors and students, scholars and librarians, colleagues and friends, audience members with challenging questions and email correspondents with interesting observations—you have all made crucial contributions. My apologies go to those of you who did not make it, simply through oversight on my part, onto this page or into the notes.

  This book’s sources are translated from Nahuatl, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Latin. All translations are by me, unless otherwise stated; however, as I do not claim full fluency in all those tongues, I have benefited from the assistance of various colleagues, who are thanked individually in the relevant notes. Their help is illustrative of how myriad moments of generosity allow a project like this to reach completion.

  Three decades ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford University, I took a seminar offered by a brilliant young scholar on the Conquest of Mexico. I was introduced to Cortés’s Letters to the King in a way that planted the seed of my future career and—it now turns out—this book. That scholar was Felipe Fernández-Armesto. This is a lesser book than Felipe would have written on the topic, but it is nonetheless infused with his influence. I will always be grateful to him.

  During the years that this book developed, while reading the work of many scores of scholars, I found myself turning repeatedly to a relatively small group who have all produced multiple books and articles over decades. They deserve specific mention for influencing my thinking through at least half a dozen, and in some cases over a dozen, publications each (not all included in the Bibliography): Rolena Adorno, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Davíd Carrasco, Inga Clendinnen, J. H. Elliott, Felipe Fernández-Armesto again, Ross Hassig, James Lockhart, José Luis Martínez, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Barbara Mundy, Susan Schroeder, and Hugh Thomas.

  Many friends and colleagues were exceedingly generous with their time and thought, reading various drafts, sections, and earlier versions of the book. I am deeply grateful to all of them. They include Felipe yet again, Susan Evans, Miguel Martínez, John Fritz Schwaller, Stuart Schwartz, Peter Villella, and Louis Warren; in particular, Richard Conway, Kris Lane, Denise Oswald, Robin Restall, Amara Solari, and Linda Williams gave many hours of their time and many pages of feedback, providing invaluable encouragement and insightful comments that influenced and improved the book in manifold ways. The project was also fueled through countless conversations and correspondences with Daniel Brunstetter, María Castañeda de la Paz, James Collins, Garrett Fagan (conversations and classroom discussions over many years with Garrett were particularly encouraging and influential), Martha Few, Michael Francis, Jorge Gamboa, Enrique Gomáriz, Amy Greenberg, Ken Hirth, Ronnie Hsia, Mark Koschny, Enrique Krauze, Andrew Laird, Domingo Ledesma, Mark Lentz, Russ Lohse, Andrea Martínez, Iris Montero, Ian Mursell, Linda Newson, David Orique, David Orr, Michel Oudijk, Emma Restall, Kathryn Sampeck, Stuart Schwartz, Tatiana Seijas, Emily Solari, Ian Spradlin, Mark Thurner, Peter Villella, David Webster, Caroline Williams, and many others whom I have shamefully forgotten to list; and also with some of the doctoral students with whom I have worked at Penn State—and who have blessed me in so many ways—Samantha Billing, Jana Byars, Laurent Cases, Scott Cave, Mark Christensen, Spencer Delbridge, Scott Doebler, Jake Frederick, Kate Godfrey, Gerardo Gutiérrez, María Inclán, Emily Kate, Rebekah Martin, Megan McDonie, Ed Osowski, Robert Schwaller, Michael Tuttle, and Christopher Valesey.

  Similarly, the book would not be what it is, if it existed at all, without my tirelessly professional yet limitlessly amiable agent, Geri Thoma (of Writers House), and my extraordinarily talented and tactful editor, Denise Oswald (of Ecco and HarperCollins), as well as Emma Janaskie and her colleagues at Ecco. My amateur designs for the diagrams and maps were transformed by the skills of professionals at the press, and by my colleagues Larry Gorenflo and Janet Purdy.

  The book was also made possible by the amazing professionals of the John Carter Brown Library (especially, in 2013–14, Valerie Andrews, Adelina Axelrod, Susan Danforth, Dennis Landis, John Minichiello, Susan Newbury, Maureen O’Donnell, Kim Nusco, Allison Rich, Neil Safier, and Ken Ward); by archive and library professionals such as Angelica Illueca and the staff of the Sutro Library in San Francisco, Gary Kurutz and the staff of the California State Library in Sacramento, Marcia Tucker and her colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the dozens of professionals at the AGI, AGN, BL, BnF, and MQB (spelled out at the start of the Bibliography) who have helped me over the last decade. Likewise I am grateful to Arthur Dunkelman and the Kislak Foundation, to Chuck diGiacomantonio and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, and to Tom Price and the Polk Home and Museum. I also thank all those audienc
e members of talks given between 2013 and 2017 on the project at the colleges or universities of Brown, George Washington, Irvine, London, Princeton, Utah Valley, Vanderbilt, and Yale, as well as those of Bogotá: your comments and questions helped guide the book in numerous ways.

  I am blessed with loving parents, parents-in-law, and daughters (Clifford, Judy, Kathy, Mariela, and Robin; Sophie, Isabel, and Lucy), whose apparent faith that what I do matters (a dubious proposition) is more uplifting than they can imagine. The girls have long been my muses, and their baby sister, Catalina, has inspired this book in ways I cannot begin to express.

  It is rightfully customary to thank the spouse or partner who has endured living with the author during the writing process. In this case, Amara deserves not only gratitude for her endurance and tolerance, but also credit for the innumerable ways in which she contributed to the project’s intellectual development and final fruition. As well as being the graceful author of my personal happiness, she is in effect the gracious and brilliant coauthor of this book.

  STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA SPRING 2017

  Appendix

  Language and Label, Cast and Dynasty

  THE DIAGRAM BELOW REPRESENTS THE OVERLAPPING MEANINGS OF the terms Aztec, Mexica, and Nahuas. Aztec seems to have been an eighteenth-century invention. Mexica (pronounced “mesh-EE-ka”) refers to the people of the city of Tenochtitlan or Mexico (in Nahuatl, -co is a locative, so that Mexico means “the place of the Mexica”). Note that the Mexica were not a distinct ethnicity; they were part of the larger (and very much still surviving) ethnic group of the Nahuas (pronounced “NA-wahs”), whose language was (and is) Nahuatl, and who have for many centuries lived throughout central Mexico and in some regions to the south.

  Mesoamerica is the name that scholars have given to the greater civilizational area that stretched from northern Mexico into Central America, comprising the Nahuas, the Mayas, and scores of other ethnic groups. Thus I sometimes refer to Mesoamericans, avoiding the problematic term Indian (unless translating indio, as Spaniards tended to call all indigenous peoples; because the Americas were initially thought to be close to Asia, Spaniards called them las Indias, “the Indies,” and their people indios—names which stuck).

  Diagram: “Aztec”

  Mesoamericans did not call themselves Nahuas or Mayas or any of the other ethnic group names we use. Nor did the Aztecs have a term that translates tidily as “Aztec Empire.” The Mesoamerican sense of identity was highly localized, tied to the city-state (in Nahuatl, the altepetl). Even the term Mexica was often applied specifically to those from the southern, dominant part of Tenochtitlan—people also called Tenochca, as opposed to the Tlatelolca of the smaller part, Tlatelolco. The closest that Nahuas came to using a phrase of group self-identity was nican tlaca, “here people” (or i nican titlaca, “we people here”). Outsiders—ranging from other Nahuas subject to the Aztecs to unconquered groups such as the Mayas—called the Aztecs Culua or Culhúa. This was a reference to the altepetl of Culhuacan, just south of Tenochtitlan (and today part of Mexico City); in Mesoamerican folk history, this seems to have been the town where the Aztecs settled before founding Tenochtitlan. But it also may have been because the people of Tetzcoco’s regions of the Aztec Empire called themselves Acolhua.1

  As you can see, the more one explains, the more complex the topic becomes. Bear in mind, then, that Aztec and other terms are familiar shorthand for a complex identity history.

  The same is true of the names Montezuma and Moctezuma. As mentioned in the Preface, although they are the most common modern forms for the name, Spaniards and other Europeans used them as early as the sixteenth century. Various other renderings used in early sources, such as Muteeçuma, are reproduced in my translations. The emperor’s real name was Moteuctzoma, which in his own day would never have been uttered without the -tzin suffix to make it reverential: Moteuctzomatzin (“moh-teh-ook-tsoh-mahtseen”). After his death he began to be referenced with a second name, Xocoyotl, using the reverential form Xocoyotzin (pronounced “shock-oy-ott-seen,” and meaning “the Younger,” as another emperor named Moteuctzoma had ruled in the fifteenth century). It is not clear how often, if at all, the name Xocoyotzin was used in Montezuma’s lifetime.

  Montezuma is one of the sixteen Spanish and Nahua protagonists in the history of the Spanish-Aztec War who are mentioned most often in this book. Here are their brief biographies:2

  Pedro de Alvarado was born in 1485 and settled in the Indies in the 1510s. A captain on the Grijalva and Cortés expeditions to Mexico, he remained a loyalist of the Cortesian faction, along with his four brothers (Gonzalo, Gómez, Jorge, and Juan). Together, the Alvarados were a formidable cohort, wielding more authority and making more decisions than has generally been recognized. Pedro was and is generally assumed to be responsible for the 1520 Toxcatl Massacre in Tenochtitlan. I do not dispute his reputation for cruelty; on the contrary, in that regard he was typical, not exceptional, among those conquistadors who survived the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21). He led one of the three Spanish siege forces in 1521, and later led expeditions to highland Guatemala and northern Peru. He was granted a coat of arms. He died battling the Mixton Revolt north of central Mexico in 1541.

  Cacamatzin and Coanacochtzin were two of the many sons of Nezahualpilli, the tlahtoani (king) of Tetzcoco; along with Ixtlilxochitl, they were the chief claimants to the throne when their father died in 1515 (see the Dynastic Vine). As Cacama (the -tzin is a reverential suffix) had the support of his uncle, Montezuma, he was confirmed in office. He met the Cortés-led conquistador company at the edge of the Valley of Mexico in November 1519 and led them to the Meeting (as it is termed in this book) in Tenochtitlan. Later caught up in the political machinations surrounding the Phoney Captivity (see Chapter 6)—Spaniards claimed he plotted against them and his uncle—he was murdered in June 1520 along with the other two Triple Alliance tlahtoque (Aztec imperial kings). Coanacoch succeeded him to the throne of Tetzcoco, but when his brother Ixtlilxochitl and the Spaniards marched into the city on the last day of 1520, Coanacoch fled to Tenochtitlan. Ixtlilxochitl captured him there during the siege and replaced him as ruler of Tetzcoco. In 1525, on Cortés’s orders in a Maya town, Coanacoch was hanged, along with Cuauhtemoc and the captive ruler of Tlacopan—a repetition of the 1520 group murder of the triple tlahtoque.

  Hernando Cortés was born in Medellín, Spain, c. 1485, and immigrated to Hispaniola in 1504 or 1506. He became the iconic conquistador, as much a legend and myth as a historical figure. As lead captain of the third expedition to Mexico, he has been hailed for five centuries as the heroic and brilliant creator of the “Conquest of Mexico.” He has also been called a slaver, assassin, uxoricide, mass murderer, traitor, embezzler, and thief. I argue here that he was unexceptional in either regard, as leader or war criminal. He served as the first captain-general and governor of New Spain but was removed from office in 1528 and did not again hold a senior administrative post in Mexico. Elevated to the high nobility as Marqués del Valle in 1529, he ran his vast estates (staffed by indigenous slaves) and fought lawsuits in Mexico from 1530 to 1540, before returning to Spain and dying there in 1547.

  Cuauhtemoc, more properly Cuauhtemoctzin, was born c. 1500 and thus was young when he became huey tlahtoani of Tenochtitlan, emperor of the Aztecs, in January or February 1521, following the death (probably from smallpox) in December of Cuitlahua—his predecessor, cousin, and a brother of Montezuma’s (see the Dynastic Vine). Because Tetzcoco, the second-ranked city-state in the empire’s Triple Alliance, had switched to join the Spanish-Tlaxcalteca alliance at the end of 1520, Cuauhtemoc was only ruler of a rump empire. He led the Mexica for a seven-month defense of the capital city, surrendering on August 13. Cortés and Julián de Alderete tortured the captive emperor by burning his feet, in order to discover where the tlahtoani had hid the imperial treasure. Taken on the Cortés-led expedition to Honduras in 1524, he was implicated in an alleged plot of the surviving tlahtoque of the old Triple Alli
ance; all three captive kings were hanged in the Maya town of Acalan-Tixchel. The fraudulent discovery of his bones in a village church in the state of Guerrero in 1949 caused lasting controversy in Mexico, where he has since been increasingly lauded as a national hero (to Montezuma’s expense).

  Ixtlilxochitl, another of Nezahualpilli’s sons, refused to accept the Montezuma-backed appointment of his brother Cacamatzin as tlahtoani of Tetzcoco in 1515 (see the Dynastic Vine). He became de facto ruler of Tetzcoco in 1521, baptized don Fernando Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, becoming confirmed as tlahtoani and gobernador some time in the early 1520s, ruling until his death in 1531. In accounts of the war written by his great-great-grandson, don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, he plays a crucial leadership role both in the 1521 campaign to capture Tenochtitlan and in subsequent expeditions in Mesoamerica.

  Malintzin was given to the Spanish company by the Maya rulers of Potonchan in 1519, while still a slave in her early teens. Because she was a Nahua who had been living among Mayas, she spoke both Nahuatl and Yucatec Mayan, and thus served as one of the interpreters used by the Spaniards; by the end of the war, she was the principal interpreter, given the honorific doña or -tzin. In 1522 she gave birth to a son, fathered by Cortés, named Martín (taken by his father to Spain in 1528, where he grew up as a page to Prince Philip). Little is known of her life before 1519 or after 1522. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries she was appropriated by multiple cultural and intellectual movements—from Romanticism to the (Mexican) Revolution to second-and third-wave feminism—to create a complex “Malinche” mythology that is remote from the historical Malintzin. (Her name is explained in the Preface.)