When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  48.The blame assigned to Alvarado for the Toxcatl Massacre seems universal; the only split is between those arguing that he imagined an Aztec plot (gaining confirmation through torturing seized Aztecs) and those asserting it was real (e.g., Torquemada stated that the Aztecs had set up huge cauldrons in which to cook the Spaniards; MacNutt 1909: 247). A superb recent study of the Toxcatl Massacre is Scolieri (2013: 90–126).

  49.From the Annals of Tlatelolco, in Lockhart (1993: 256–73; quotes on 256, 258; on its dating, 37–43; I have made only superficial adjustments to Lockhart’s translation); its relatively early date, language, and authorship do not of course make the Annals intrinsically more accurate or reliable than any other source, Spanish or Nahua, but nor should it be given less weight than conquistador accounts written during the same decades.

  50.Ezquerra in EC: 561–79. Either a copy or the original was in 2013 moved and placed at first-floor level on the exterior of the Royal Palace in Madrid. The Montezuma statue is one of ninety-eight statues of Spanish kings (with Montezuma and Atahuallpa viewed as such, by dint of the Spanish acquisition of their empires), created in the late eighteenth century and frequently moved around royal gardens and palaces since then (so I cannot be entirely sure I am standing in Aranjuez, or in another garden, in that old photograph).

  51.Myers (2015: 231, 260).

  52.Mass murder: The FBI defines it as the killing of four or more people in one location in a continuous act; although these killings took place in a wartime context, the rulers were captive and probably in chains (most sources claim this), suggesting that the FBI’s definition is met. See fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder.

  53.Díaz CXXVI (1632: f. 104v; 1910, II: 238) (Y Cortés lloró por el y todos nuestros Capitanes y soldados: e hombres huuo entre nosotros, de los que le conociamos y tratavamos, que tan llorado fue, como si fuera nuestro padre); Prescott (1994 [1843]: 399–400, 410–15, quote on 400); MacNutt (1909: 267). A common verdict is that of Vásquez (1991: 11) on the accounts by Díaz and Aguilar (1988 [c.1560]: 191), that the infirm veterans had no reason to lie, “owed nothing to Cortés or the Crown” (debían nada a Cortés o la Corona), and thus their versions “reflected the pure truth” (reflejaron la verdad pura). Also see “A Lamentable End,” the image that opens this chapter.

  54.Clavigero, quoted by MacNutt (1909: 268).

  PART IV

  1.Epigraph sources, in sequence: Jaúregui (2008 [1557]: 74–77) (whose translation I have modified slightly, to emphasize meaning, at the expense of poeticism) (Qué campos no están regados / con la sangre, que a Dios clama, / de nuestros padres honrados, / hijos, hermanos, criados / por robar hacienda y fama? / Qué hija, mujer, ni hermana / tenemos que no haya sido / mas que pública mundana / por esta gente tirana / que todo ha corrompido?); Keegan (1993: 3).

  CHAPTER 7: THE EPIC BOXER

  1.Epigraph sources, in sequence: Solana (1938: 425) (el caso de C y de C, difiere; fué el púgil épico, y luchó por su rey; fué el cruzado místico, y luchó por su Dios; fué el galán quijote, y adoró a su dama); Solís (1704: unnumbered prefatory p. 2) (Il est certain que Cortez avoit ses défauts, comme tous les autres hommes: il n’étoit peut-être pas si delicat en Politique, ni si reflexif que Solis nous le dépeint); Duverger (2005: 27) (Antes que hombre, Cortés es un mito, un mito con facetas que siempre se han disputado escuelas de pensamiento concurrentes e ideologías rivales, de tal manera que cada una de ellas pudo concebir a “su” Cortés: semidiós o demonio, héroe o traidor, esclavista o protector de los indios, moderno o feudal, codicioso o gran señor . . . ); CDII, 13: 293–301; translation mine but indebted to the one by Kevin Terraciano in Restall, Sousa, and Terraciano (2005: 66–71), also adapted for Restall and Asselbergs (2007: 18–19).

  2.The bust really was shipped to Italy in 1823 (to a distant descendant of Cortés’s in Palermo), where it remains today; a copy is in the Hospital de Jesús. The date of Alamán’s letter to the Spanish authorities is variously cited as 1836 and 1843. My paragraphs on the history of Cortés’s remains are drawn from Duverger (2005: 21–26, 368–71, App. V); Martínez Ahrens (2015) (the quote is from El País [Uno de los grandes misterios históricos de América; el mayor enigma de Hernán Cortés]; I thank Kris Lane for sending me the link to this article); notes from my visits to the Hospital de Jesús.

  3.Carvajal (2010) (la glorificación cruel y arrogante del genocidio y un insulto al pueblo de México; falta de conocimiento; homenaje a un hijo de esta villa).

  4.Although the theft of the Martín statue was presumably a political statement, it is historically appropriate; when he was five or six, Martín was sent to Spain to live as a page to Prince Philip, and he never saw his mother again (a point also made by Lanyon 2003: 122, who saw Martín still in situ in 2001). My field notes from visits to Mexico City, 2009 and 2016; Krauss 1997. Other statues of Cortés in Mexico are likewise in obscure locations, yet still inspire ire. One erected in the 1930s in the garden of the Hotel Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca, for example, was denounced by Romerovargas Iturbide (1964, III: 186), who called for the removal of this “insult to the Mexican people” (es burla para el pueblo mexicano); the hotel was destroyed at the turn of this century to make way for a Costco and a chain supermarket, and the statue saved by the hotel’s last owners but no longer on public view (Martínez Baracs 2011: 85–87; and personal communication, January 2016 and June 2016). Romerovargas Iturbide (op. cit.) likewise demanded the replacement of the equestrian statue of Carlos IV (aka El Caballito), which was farther down the Paseo de la Reforma from the Glorieta de Cuauhtémoc mentioned earlier, with a new statue of Montezuma; Carlos IV is now in a far smaller square in the city; no glorieta to Montezuma has been placed on the Paseo de la Reforma.

  5.Written in his History of the Indians of New Spain, first published in 1541, six years before Cortés’s death; Motolinía (1951 [1541]: 273) (I have used Steck’s translation here). Different versions of a section of this chapter were published as Restall (2016a; 2016b).

  6.For a page-long footnote listing a significant sampling of Cortés biographies and books that are effectively such, stretching from Gómara (1552) to Sandine (2015), see Restall (2016a: 33–34). “Myth”: Duverger (2005: 27), quoted in this chapter’s epigraphs. There is much fine work by literary scholars on Gómara (e.g., Roa-de-la-Carrera 2005; Carman 2006; Adorno 2007).

  7.My thanks to Michael Kulikowski (personal communication, May 5, 2014), for help in translating the motto. Josephus’s account of The Jewish War, which culminated in the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in the First Jewish-Roman War, in a.d. 70, would have been available in Latin to Gómara, who provided the full motto at the very end of his Conquest of Mexico (1552: f. 139v; 1964 [1552]: 410). On Spaniards and the ancients: for example, Francisco de Jerez (who fought in South America) wrote in 1534 that Spaniards achieved more, against greater odds, than the armies of ancient Rome; Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, a veteran conquistador writing at century’s end, likewise argued that Spanish success was even more astonishing than the most famous feats of the Greeks and Romans (Vargas Machuca 1599: ff. 25v–26v; 2010 [1612]: 92–96; Restall 2003: 1, 27–28). Such comparisons were commonplace by the seventeenth century (e.g., Juan de Solórzano’s 1631 Discurso y alegación en derecho in JCB, Codex Sp 26: ff. 7r, 76).

  8.Lupher (2003: 8–42).

  9.Gómara (1552b: 26v) (por quanto el hizo muchas, y grandes hazañas en las guerras que, alli tuuo, que sin perjuycio de ningun español de Yndias, fueron las mejores de quantas se han hecho en aquellas partes del nuevo mundo, las escrivire por su parte: a imitacion de Polivio, y de Salustio que sacaron de las istorias Romanas q[ue] juntas, y enteras, hazian, este la de Mario y aquel lo de Scipion).

  10.Gómara (1552b: 2, 58). “Official history”: Kagan (2009: 160). As Kagan deftly observes, Gómara started his book while working for Cortés (although perhaps not as his secretary-chaplain, a common assumption that Martínez Martínez 2010 disputes), finishing it just a few years after the old conquis
tador’s death; but it was Cortés’s son, (the legitimate) don Martín, who commissioned the Historia. Martín hoped that the book would inspire the king to restore some of the privileges that his father had once held. Gómara, for his part, saw the Historia as an elaborate job application, which he hoped would lead to his appointment by the king as official chronicler of the empire (coronista de las Indias). Martín Cortés also wrote letters in support of Gómara’s ambitions, as the writer’s advancement could only help his own plans advance. As it turned out, neither achieved his goals; but Gómara’s laudatory treatment of Cortés and his critical account of the conquest wars in Peru has resonated across centuries of literature, both scholarly and popular.

  11.Cervantes de Salazar (1546: f. 4r) (also see Elliott 1989: 41; Restall 2003: 15; Lyons 2015: 133–230). My translations from Villagrá (1610: f. 16v; 1933: 54; block quote from 1610: ff. 30v–31r; but also see 1933: 65).

  12.Díaz CCXII (1916, V: 291; also quoted by Lupher 2003: 14). “Antiquity”: Quoting an early English edition: Solís (1724: unnumbered first page of Preface). Solís was widely read until replaced partly by Robertson’s account of the 1770s and then firmly by Prescott’s of the 1840s (Kagan 2009: 268–73). “BRITISH”: Dilworth (1759: title page; 1801: British youth comment not on title page).

  13.E.g., Vasconcelos (1941); Alcala (1950); Lyons (2015); to some extent Benito (1944). “Boxer”: Solana (1938: 425) (el púgil épico; el cruzado místico).

  14.“Caesar Borgia” quote by the Argentine novelist and literary critic Enrique Anderson Imbert (1962: 33); other quotes by the Mexican scholar José Valero Silva (1965: 40); both quoted in Mizrahi (1993). Also see Carman (2006: 49–50). An earlier version of The Prince was circulated in 1512, but it was in Latin in manuscript form, and Cortés had already been in the Caribbean for eight years. It is possible, perhaps probable, that the ideas on political action that ended up being most closely associated with The Prince were circulating sufficiently in the 1510s that they reached Cortés in Cuba (as Mizrahi 1993 suggests); but by framing such a possibility not in terms of the larger context of the intellectual world of the pre-1520 Spanish Caribbean, but in terms of a specific Cortés-Machiavelli link, the tradition of Cortés as exceptional and foundational—as legendary—is merely reinforced.

  15.Alcalá (1950: 168); Mizrahi (1993: 109–11) (I thank Russell Lohse for sending me this article).

  16.Valadés (1579: 204–105 [sic]); my translation from the Latin original (Nolim deprimere magnanimitatem Romanorum . . . Sed maioribus praeconiis nouaque maiestate verborum efferenda est inaudita fortitudo Ferdinandi Cortesii & religiosorum qui nouos illos orbes adierunt . . . cum ea parte Indiarum, quae in nostras manus venit: haec infinitis partibus amplior est . . . Hic itaq suã virtutem exercuit bonus ille Cortesius . . . sacrificiisq illorum diabolicis . . . maxime heroicum) (also see a Spanish version in Palomera 1988: 413–14).

  17.Valadés was born in Tlaxcallan in 1533; his Rhetorica Christiana (1579), written entirely in Latin, was the first book by someone of Native American ancestry to be published in Europe. His father was the conquistador Diego Valadés, who arrived with Narváez in 1520, survived the war, fathered a son in Tlaxcallan, and was awarded a coat of arms for the heroic action he claimed he had performed in the war. Of the friar’s Tlaxcalteca mother, her willingness and treatment, we know nothing; neither Diego Valadés, father or son, wrote about her. DCM: #1070; AGN and AGI testimony by Diego Valadés, the father, in Palomera (1988: 153–59). Long-lasting tradition: see Torquemada (1614, III: 191–97; 1986 [1614]: 3, 166–69; Bk. 16, Ch. 13); the narrative promoted by Mexican Bishop Lorenzana; Wood (2003: 85–94); Pardo (2004: 20–24).

  18.Muñoz Camargo (1892 [1592]: 189–205; 1998 [1592]: 195–205) (nos llamamos cristianos, porque lo somos por ser hijos del verdadero Dios; no hay más de un solo Dios verdadero); also see Gibson (1952: 28–31); Pardo (2004: 23, who noted that mythistories like that of the 1520 Tlaxcallan meeting have “the odd quality of giving historical turning points an air of inevitability”); Martínez Baracs (2008); Cuadriello (2011).

  19.Mendieta (1870 [1596]: 210–11 on Cortés’s support for the Twelve); Phelan (1970: 92–102); Pardo (2004: 2–4); Restall and Solari (2011: 67–89).

  20.Mendieta (1870 [1596]: 174–75) (meter debajo de la bandera del demonio á muchos de los fieles . . . infinita multitud de gentes que por años sin cuento habian estado debajo del poder de Satanás . . . el clamor de tantas almas y sangre humana derramada en injuria de su Criador . . . como á otro Moisen á Egipto). For further discussion and citations, see Chapter 5.

  21.Mendieta (1870 [1596]: 174–75). Further proof was the fact that, just as God had given Moses an interpreter to speak with the pharaoh of Egypt, so did God “miraculously provide” Cortés with interpreters (Malintzin, or Malinche, and Gerónimo de Aguilar). The conquistador captain showed “great zeal” and “diligence” everywhere he went, “in the honor and service of God and the saving of souls”; he “toppled idols, raised up crosses, and preached the faith and belief in the one true God” (op. cit.: 175–77, 182–84, 211–12, 228) (Cortés elegido como otro Moisen para librar el pueblo indiano . . . sin alguna dubda eligió Dios señaladamente y tomó por instrumento á este valeroso capitan D. Fernando Cortés, para por medio suyo abrir la puerta y hacer camino á los predicadores de su Evangelio es este nuevo mundo . . . comenzó Lutero á corromper el Evangelio . . . á publicarlo fiel y sinceramente á las gentes que nunca de él habian tenido noticia . . . proveido miraculosamente . . . se confirma esta divina eleccion de Cortés para obra tan alta en el ánimo, y extraña determinacion que Dios puso en su corazon . . . este su negocio . . . tan buen celo como tuvo de la honra y servicio de ese mismo Dios y salvacion de las almas . . . derrocase los ídolos . . . levantase cruces y predicase la fe y creencia de un solo Dios verdadero).

  22.Saavedra (1880 [1599]); Vecchietti (n.d.); García (1729 [1607]: 94) (Y aunque la reverencia, i postracion de rodillas que aora hacen los Indios de Nueva-España à los Sacerdotes, se la enseñò D. Fernando Cortès, Marquès del Valle, de felice memoria).

  23.“Fanaticism” to “Christ”: Abbott (1904 [1856]: 44), although the argument is made to various degrees of subtlety from Robertson in the 1770s through the twentieth century. “Sincerity” to “waver”: MacNutt in Cortés (1908: I, 207). “So far as” to “Faith”: Braden (1930: 80).

  24.Valadés (1579: 205 but “105” erroneously printed as the page number). Villagrá (1610: f. 18r, f. 16; using the translations in 1933: 55, 54). Note that in 2009–14 Manuel Martín-Rodríguez published a three-volume study of Villagrá and his writings that I did not use here.

  25.Archival: Obvious examples are in conquistador probanzas in AGI Justicia and in AGI México 203, but less obvious ones include a little-known document in JCB, Codex Sp 138, f. 6. Engaging for its rare use of sarcasm in an official report, it was written by don José Ignacio Flores de Vergara y Ximénez de Cárdenas, who served as the senior Spanish official in Bolivia in the early 1780s (his title was president of the Audiencia of Charcas). For his role in the suppression of the Tupac Amaru rebellion in 1781, he earned the nickname “Pacifier of Peru” (el Pacificador del Perú), but he also came under attack from a royal judge (an oidor) sent to report on the president’s actions. In his defense, Flores de Vergara scoffed that the oidor would have tried to discredit even Cortés himself. In doing so, wrote the president, the oidor would have dismissed Cortés’s burning of his ships as a “meagre feat,” likewise his entry into Mexico “without losing more than a very few men.” No doubt he also would have called Cortés “crazy” for leaving Pedro de Alvarado in charge when he left Tenochtitlan to meet the Narváez expedition, and “stupid and lazy” for taking so long to besiege the city. Not that Flores de Vergara was comparing himself to Cortés, he insisted—adding, “I’m not that vain” (poca Asaña; sin haver perdido mas que mui pocos hombres; loco; tonto y floxo). Epic: Lasso de la Vega (1588; 1594); Saavedra (1599; 1880 [1599]).

  26.Lasso de la Vega (1601);
Weiner (2006: 93–120).

  27.Lasso de la Vega (1588: f. 4v) (Con Dulce son, de nuevo se derrama / De mi invencible Abuelo la grandeza / Los trabajos, peligros, y braveza / Con que tiene ganada eterna fama). Gerónimo was a son of don Martín, who had inherited the title of Marqués del Valle from his father.

  28.Invincible: Saavedra (1880 [1599]: 20, 33) (Con animo invencible y fortaleza / del gran Cortés). Lasso: See “Portrait of the Conqueror as an Old Man” in the Gallery. Among the many imaginary portraits of Cortés a fair number derive from two images created in his lifetime. One, the Weiditz Medallion, has survived (and is frequently reproduced). The other is long lost but must have been commissioned to hang in the church of one of the hospitals Cortés helped endow; it would have featured the Marquis gazing piously upward, no doubt on his knees praying. Numerous images of Cortés descended from that lost painting. A few show him in blatant religious pose, but most of them show his head in a slightly pious gaze, either grafted onto a body (as in the full-length portrait still hanging in the Hospital de Jesús) or a bust—as in the engraving used in all three of Gabriel Lasso de la Vega’s works praising Cortés, with the Latin caption glossed as: “Fernando Cortés, Invincible Leader, Aged 63” (Lasso de la Vega 1588: f. 2r). The other image in “Portrait of the Conqueror as an Old Man” is a frontispiece to the 1778 Italian edition of Robertson’s Storia di America [The History of America], with captioning translating to “Engraved from an original first made when he had achieved the conquest of Mexico” (Robertson 1778, III: frontispiece). This image is probably one of many that evolved from the rendering used with Lasso’s poems. On Cortés portraits: Romero de Terreros (1944: 19, and figures following 36); Duverger (2005: “Álbum de Fotos” following 440). Valiant: Vargas Machuca (2010 [1612]: 92, 96); Díaz (1632: unnumbered prefatory material, p. ii, by fray Diego Serrano, head of the Mercedarians; el ilustre y esforçado Cauallero); Mendieta (1870 [1596]: 173). Torquemada, whose Monarquia Indiana drew heavily upon (by modern standards, plagiarized) Mendieta, has the same phrase in the Prologue to his Book 4 (1614: I, 373; el famosísimo y venturosísimo capitan D. Fernando Cortés [que despues fué meritísimo marqués del Valle]). Another term that some poets could not resist was “courteous,” because it played on the conquistador’s surname (e.g., Thevet 1676: 75), although it was not an obviously martial quality, as noted by Luis de Vargas Manrique in the final lines of a sonnet that preceded the prologue to Lasso de la Vega (1594): “He is the son of courtesy, and of courage, and although the son of both, he chose his mother’s surname [Este es el hijo de la cortesia, / Y del valor, y aunque de entrãbos hijo, / Escogio de la madre el apellido].” Presumably Lasso was amused by the joke, which rather damned Cortés with faint praise, but it was too subtle to trouble don Gerónimo Cortés. (I am grateful to Miguel Martínez for helpfully discussing these lines with me.)