When Montezuma Met Cortes
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SHOCK AND AWE. Kislak Conquest of Mexico Painting #2, Oil on canvas, late-seventeethcentury Mexico. Labeled “The Arrival of Cortés at Veracruz and the Reception by Moctezuma’s Ambassadors,” and later “Veracruz No. 2.”
Reproduced by permission of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation.
THE MEETING. Kislak Conquest of Mexico Painting #3, Oil on canvas, late-17th century Mexico. Labeled “The Meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma,” and later “Volcano of Mexico. No. 3.”
Reproduced by permission of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation.
STONED. Kislak Conquest of Mexico Painting #4, Oil on canvas, late-seventeenth-century Mexico. Labeled “Moctezuma Stoned by His People.”
Reproduced by permission of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation.
THE CONQUEST. Kislak Conquest of Mexico Painting #7, Oil on canvas, late-seventeenth-century Mexico. Labeled “The Conquest of Tenochtitlan,” and later “CONQUEST OF MEXICO BY CORTÉS. No. 7.”
Reproduced by permission of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation.
SPANISH INGRATITUDE. “Spanish Gratitude. Cortes orders Motezuma to be Fetter’d” is a 1741 English example of a widely used early modern illustration. An imperious, bearded Cortés points a baton of office at a feather-dressed Montezuma, whose wrists are being chained by another Spaniard. The caption is sarcastic, as the “fettering” shows Spanish ingratitude for Montezuma’s surrender.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
TRIUMPHAL ENTRIES. “Hernan Cortés enters Tlaxcala in triumph.” From a 1798 Madrid edition of Solís’s Historia de la Conquista de México. Every reinvention of every Cortesian city entry reinscribed the Meeting as a triumph.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
HIS HEART WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE. As reflected on the cover of this volume in the multimillion-selling Horrible Histories series, human sacrifice is at the heart of its tongue-incheek take on Aztec civilization and its conquest.
Courtesy of Scholastic Inc.
SACRIFICING HUMANS. “The Human Sacrifices of the Indians of Mexico,” showing executions taking place atop a highly stylized and imaginary Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, first appeared in 1601 and then in numerous publications through to the present century. Its bizarre architecture, horned devils, and sinister sacrificial setting made Mesoamerican culture utterly menacing.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
IDOL WORSHIP. “Uitzilipuztli: Principal Idol of the Mexicans,” from the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Générale des Voyages Possible of 1754, is a version of an image of Huitzilopochtli and the heart sacrifice that appeared in various European books from the late sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
DIVINE IMAGES. In the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (top), Huitzilopochtli represents the fifteenth month in the Aztec calendar, Panquetzaliztli. The Codex Tovar, completed around 1585 by the Jesuit Juan Tovar, and here depicting Huitzilopochtli (middle) and Montezuma (bottom), drew upon indigenous sources to create a hybrid perspective on the Aztec past (similar to that of books created in the same decades by Sahagún, Durán, and other friars).
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Bibliothèque national de France.
RUFFLED FEATHERS. The frontispiece (top) to Ogilby’s America (1670), depicting native Americans of all kinds as feathered, with “America” embodied as a topless woman wearing the emblematic feathered skirt and headdress; and Montezuma (bottom) (“The Last King of the Mexicans”) as a generic, feathered Native American warrior prince.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
A NOBLE SAVAGE. Montezuma—in an Italian edition of Solís’s History, based on the portrait sent to Florence in the 1690s—as young and virile, yet unthreatening as generic, feathered, and Orientalized.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
THE ZOOKEEPER. One of the illustrations added to the manuscript of Sahagún’s Historia (aka the Florentine Codex) conveyed the extent of Montezuma’s zoo complex with sample images of birds and beasts, a building and a zookeeper.
Original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
PICTURING THE WAR. Images of the Spanish-Aztec War, from a 1733 Italian edition of Solís’s History of the Conquest of Mexico: an Aztec embassy submissively offers gifts; Spaniards show off cannon, while an Aztec artist draws the scene (to be shown to Montezuma); a horse head taken by Aztec warriors; and an eagle carrying off a careless Aztec zookeeper.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
CARVED IN STONE. Portrait of Montezuma at Chapultepec. Carved in 1519, damaged by order of the Spanish viceroy in the 1750s. A portrait of Montezuma’s father, the emperor Axayacatl, and at least three predecessors were also deliberately destroyed in the Spanish colonial period. Montezuma’s name glyph is to the viewer’s left of the portrait (the head, headdress, and speech scroll).
Drawing by Patrick Hajovsky, reproduced with permission.
CORTÉS OUTWITS. “Cortes outwits and takes leave of Velasquez,” an illustration from Dalton’s Stories of the Conquests of Mexico and Peru for Victorian-era young adults, depicting Cortés giving an insouciant wave of his hat to a glowering Governor Velázquez. Cortés as heroic rebel (answering to the higher authorities of God and King) held obvious appeal to young readers.
Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
CORTÉS RENOUNCES. “Cortés renounces the title of General given to him by Velázquez, and the Townspeople [el Pueblo] reappoint him by election,” an Antonio Rodríguez engraving for the 1798 edition of Solís. The artifice of the formal, legal proceeding is underscored by the imaginary setting, complete with carpet and canopy. Following the traditional narrative, Cortés is the center of attention, both visually and via the caption’s assertion of popular election.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
CORTÉS ORDERS. “Cortés orders the ships to be sunk,” another 1798 Rodríguez engraving, centers the legendary (and fictional) moment on Cortés’s commanding gaze over his handiwork and the horizon he has determined not to cross until the conquest is achieved.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
BURNED. The Cremations of Montezuma and Itzquauhtzin: This trio of illustrations from Sahagún’s Historia General (Florentine Codex) show two Spaniards throwing their bodies into the lake.
BURNED. The Cremations of Montezuma and Itzquauhtzin: This trio of illustrations from Sahagún’s Historia General (Florentine Codex) show two Mexica lifting Montezuma’s body out, for it to be cremated.
BURNED. The Cremations of Montezuma and Itzquauhtzin: This trio of illustrations from Sahagún’s Historia General (Florentine Codex) show the body of Itzquauhtzin moved and differently posed.
Original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
I CONTROL MONTEZUMA. From Dan Abnett’s Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire, a graphic version for young readers that captures well many of the elements of the traditional narrative: a clever Cortés controlling a passive Montezuma, happily complicit in his own manipulation; and a hotheaded Pedro de Alvarado destined to wreck the peace.
© The Rosen Publishing Group, reprinted with permission.
MONTEZUMA SURRENDERS SOVEREIGNTY. The emperor, seated on his throne, repeats his speech of surrender to Cortés, before a Spanish notary and the astonished Aztec nobility. Following the traditional narrative, the Aztecs weep. In the middle frame, Spanish and Aztec armies fight in the field (the 1520 Battle of Otumba), but in the lower one, Cuauhtemoc is captive—thus restoring the equilibrium of Montezuma’s surrender. From a 1733 Italian edition of Solís’s History of the Conquest of Mexico.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
WHERE IS MART�
�N? This Monument to Mestizaje was originally erected in 1982 in Coyoacan, the former Aztec altepetl where Cortés made his headquarters right after Tenochtitlan’s fall. Sustained protest forced the sculpture’s relocation to an obscure park, where it is seldom seen (coincidentally not far from the location of the Meeting). The statue of Martín as a boy, standing in front of his parents (Cortés and Malintzin) was stolen and remains missing (see top photo).
Author’s photograph.
PORTRAIT OF THE CONQUEROR AS AN OLD MAN. Almost all portraits of Cortés are apocryphal or imaginary, but many derive from an original, long-lost painting of the Marquis gazing piously upoward, probably on his knees praying—as reflected in the engraving (top) used in all Lasso de la Vega’s works praising the conquistador (1588, 1594, and 1601), and with gaze adjusted (bottom) in a 1778 Italian edition of Solís’s History.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
A CLEMENT CORTÉS. Nicolas-Eustache Maurin, “Clémence de Fernand-Cortès.” One of a series of early-nineteenth-century lithographs created in Paris, depicting the “Conquest of Mexico,” with fictional characters interspersed with historical ones.
Courtesy of the California State Library, Sacramento.
ONCE AND FOR ALL. The events in Tenochtitlan of 1520–25 were recorded on this page of the Codex Aubin, a Nahuatl-language annals written by an educated Mexica man in the late sixteenth century.
Reproduced by permission of the British Museum.
FAMILY MATTERS. The second page of the Codex Cozcatzin, an early colonial manuscript from Tenochtitlan, shows Montezuma sitting on a high-backed throne (tepotzoicpalli), beside the hill-cactus glyph for Tenochtitlan—at the top of which is the miter or Aztec crown of the huey tlahtoani. Facing the emperor is his daughter, doña Isabel Moctezuma Tecuichpo, dressed like her father, with the royal headdress glyph above her head to mark her status as principal royal heir (not her brother, don Pedro Moctezuma Tlacahuepantli, who sits behind her).
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque national de France.
TO MAKE CORN BREAD. “Marina and other women given to Cortez” appeared in various eighteenth-century accounts of the Conquest, illustrating the moment when “the Cacique [ruler] of Tabasco gave to Cortés twenty Indian women, to make corn bread for his troops” (as the Abbé Prévost put it, in his 1754 Histoire Générale des Voyages, from which this image is taken). Behind this portrayal of civilization’s contrast to barbarism is a grim contrast between “Indian” innocence and the services these girls were forced to perform for the conquistadors.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
MEXICO CITY IDEALIZED. Detail from a map of the city painted around 1692 onto a biombo, the Japanese-style folding screen popular in elite Mexican homes of the seventeenth century (oil on canvas 213 x 550 cm). The arrow marks the walk we take in the Epilogue.
Based on the original in the Museo Franz Mayer.
LONG LIVE TENOCHTITLAN! The location of the Meeting (“El Encuentro”) was marked in the late twentieth century by this concrete plaque, attached to the outside wall of the Hospital de Jesús. Often damaged or defaced (this example reads, “Genocide! Long Live Tenochtitlan!”), it was recently replaced by a Meeting scene in colored tiles.
Author’s photograph.
About the Author
MATTHEW RESTALL is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and the youngest of his four daughters.
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Copyright
WHEN MONTEZUMA MET CORTÉS. Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Restall. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Sara Wood
Cover artwork © Carlos Maria Esquivel/Bridgeman Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JANUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-242728-1
Version 01092018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-242726-7
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