Conquistador

by Buddy Levy

  At dawn the next morning Cortés roused his men, briefly discussed tactics with his captains, and then set off into the rising sun toward the capital city of Tlaxcala. When they reached a small village, they encountered two of the Cempoalan messengers, who huddled along the roadside, wailing in tears and shaking in fear. They had been caged and were being prepared for sacrifice, they explained, but had managed to escape when news that the Spaniards had crossed the border wall sent the city into commotion. They reported to Cortés that he and his men were heading into an ambush. The Tlaxcalans and their Otomi allies fully intended to attack, sacrifice, and even eat them.22

  Cortés had very little time to contemplate the implications of this warning, for as soon as they advanced out onto a flat plain, they saw on the horizon a horde of armed Otomi warriors, perhaps a thousand strong, who signified an imminent frontal attack by chanting and stomping, blowing conch-shell trumpets and pounding on drums, and shaking spears and bows at the oncoming Spaniards. The instruments, employed at the front, were used for tactical communication and to direct troop movements. The unit leaders bore tall feathered standards called cuachpantli, which could be seen from great distances, and armies followed these standards.23

  Hoping to avoid a conflict, Cortés, along with Malinche, Aguilar, and a few others, went forward. They brought notary Diego Godoy to legally record the proceedings, and they presented the warriors with a handful of prisoners taken in the previous day’s skirmish. This gesture of peace, however, served only to antagonize the Otomis, who shrieked and whistled and leaped up and down shouting out the name of their town in defiance, as was their warfare practice. Then they began throwing darts and spears.24

  With conflict imminent, Cortés spoke encouragingly to his men, instructing his infantrymen to thrust the points of their swords through the enemy’s bodies. The cavalry he urged to lope at half-speed, leveling their lances at the Indians’ heads, and to avoid having the lances grabbed and the riders pulled from the horses. He ordered them not to break ranks under any circumstances, no matter how dire. The crossbowmen and harquebusiers would support the flanks, and he urged them to fire constantly once the battle commenced. With a few final words of inspiration, Cortés and his force rushed forward.

  The initial attack went well for the Spaniards. In the first few hours they killed and wounded a great number of the Otomis, who began to retreat into stands of woods and the mouth of a narrow canyon. Encouraged by the relative ease of their assault, Cortés pushed his men forward, but an astounding sight on either side of the ravine, extending to the open plains, gave him pause, and he reined his horse hard. The scene was truly daunting: an assemblage of warriors the likes of which he had never before witnessed, a massive army of perhaps forty thousand Tlaxcalan warriors, stood in great lines above and around them, stretching across an enormous plain. The naked common soldiers were brightly painted, and among them many chiefs and leaders continuously stomped and chanted and shrieked, their bodies draped in ornate feather costumes, their war helmets, embedded with gold insignia and precious stones, glinting in the morning light.*15 25

  Bernal Díaz later wrote of the encounter, “They put so much fear into us that many of the Spaniards asked for confession.”26

  Though the numerical odds certainly did not favor him, Cortés understood that order, discipline, and superior weaponry were his only hope of survival. He moved his army cautiously forward in a tight quadrangle, stumbling with difficulty over undulating, broken ground that slowed even the horses. Soon an advance force of Otomis, whose excellent archers and throwers hurled missiles at them, stormed forward; the Indians threw darts and even stones as they came into hand-to-hand combat. Cortés’s well-trained forces remained orderly despite the onslaught. His harquebusiers and crossbowmen fired volley after volley at the charging enemies, and his infantrymen inflicted great damage with their tempered steel blades, which shattered their opponent’s brittle obsidian swords on contact and impaled the mostly naked Indians. As a result of an embargo initiated by Montezuma, they possessed not even cotton armor.

  Throughout the day Cortés pressed his army forward and repelled the Tlaxcalans, who poured forth again and again in unceasing droves, many mowed down in their tracks by cannon fire. Once or twice the sheer number of Indians was so overwhelming that the Spaniards did break ranks, but Cortés and his generals managed to reorganize them, and they somehow maintained their marching, four-sided fighting force of just over three hundred. During the repetitive attacks, cavalryman Pedro de Moron was yanked from his mare and slashed repeatedly with obsidian swords, and though three cavalrymen came in support and pulled him to safety, his mare was killed and decapitated, and Moron himself died a few days later. But the Spaniards had inflicted a great deal of damage with their crossbows and guns and cannons, and miraculously, at day’s end, the Otomi front guard and supporting Tlaxcalans retreated.

  The Spaniards nursed their wounds, which were considerable, in a small abandoned hilltop village called Tzompach, which provided overlooks for guards. Cortés must have been somewhat encouraged that—other than Moron, who was fatally wounded—not a single Spaniard had died in the battle. But the rest of the troops he inspected were in dismal condition. Many were cut and bleeding, badly wounded. These unfortunates were cauterized and dressed with more searing fat obtained from slain Indians. Most of the horses were injured—slashed and bludgeoned even through their protective armor—and some limped, or stood lamely. Cortés himself began to convulse from bouts of malarial fever. Using an abandoned pyramid as a fort, he had some of his blacksmiths and carpenters fix broken crossbows and fashion more arrows. It was a tense and windy night on the deserted hilltop village. The Spaniards knew they had narrowly escaped with their lives, but they did not know that part of the reason they had been “spared” lay in battle tactics. The goal of the Tlaxcalans (as later with the Aztecs), and indeed the design of their weapons, was to wound or injure in order to be able to take live prisoners for sacrifice, not necessarily to kill enemies on the battlefield. Great honor was bestowed on warriors who brought in leaders or chiefs alive. Cortés and his men lay in fear of what tomorrow might bring.

  That night, his men hungry and exposed to the elements, Cortés brought Malinche and Aguilar to interrogate a few prisoners. One of the men was especially defiant, boastful, and arrogant. According to Malinche, he was related to Xicotenga the Elder, chief of the capital city of Tlaxcala. He warned Cortés that Xicotenga the Elder and his son, also named Xicotenga, were assembling more than 100,000 troops and that the Spaniards should surrender or else be defeated, captured, and then die at their captors’ hands. Undaunted, Cortés gave him and a few other prisoners beads and sent them away with a stern message: we come in peace and wish only to pass through your lands on our way to see and speak with Montezuma. We come as your allies and brothers, but if we are further impeded, we will annihilate everything in our path. When these released prisoners made it to the camp of Xicotenga the Younger and conveyed to him Cortés’s message, he simply scoffed. According to Bernal Díaz, the brash young warrior “replied that we could go to the town where his father was, and they would make peace with us by filling themselves with our flesh and honoring their gods with our hearts and blood.”27

  The next day the Tlaxcalans did not attack. Instead, they sent a delegation bearing a significant amount of food, including more than three hundred turkeys and hundreds of baskets of fresh maize cakes. Though Cortés and his men needed and relished the food, he quickly surmised that these gifts were merely a ruse to allow spies to assess the condition of his men, animals, and weaponry. He immediately had these men arrested and confined, and he decided that next morning, fueled by the fowl and cakes, he would march and meet the Tlaxcalans head-on if they had not by that time agreed to a truce.

  Sunrise over the headland afforded Cortés and his men a daunting vista. Through the clear, cold air they could see the great army of the Tlaxcalans amassed on the cinderland below them, their mixed troops (i
ncluding Otomis) finely bedecked for battle and arranged in tightly bunched squadrons. The thump of drums and mournful moans of conch shells resonated across the sprawling expanse. The Spaniards said their prayers, mustered and mounted, and marched and rode into what Bernal Díaz described as “a dangerous and perilous battle.”28

  Led by Xicotenga the Younger, a massive army swarmed the valley, the red-dyed warriors shrieking as they surged forward. But Cortés and his well-schooled divisions had planned for a mass attack, and his disciplined ranks held tight, despite a horrendous initial attack in which “stones sped like hail from their slings, and their barbed and fire-hardened darts fell like corn on the threshing floor, each one capable of piercing any armor or penetrating the unprotected vitals.”29 The Tlaxcalans hurled stone-tipped spears and charged, protecting themselves with leather-covered wooden shields.

  But their numbers were so great as to prove a disadvantage. When they charged en masse, tightly bunched, they became easy targets for sustained crossbow volleys; the Spanish arrows mowed down dozens of warriors at a time. Artillerymen fired cannons into the mass—each heavy metal ball dropped many men and caused havoc and confusion among the Tlaxcalan squadrons, some of which dispersed. Seeing this disorder, Cortés sent cavalry in teams of four, which would gallop out, their riders slung low, slashing the steel swords with devastating impact, cutting down scores of warriors, then wheeling the horses back to their lines to rest and regroup, while another team went out. The Iberian horses and their riders, working in unison, became a killing machine, and the effect was terrifying for Xicotenga the Younger and his troops, who had never witnessed such efficient and frightening foes. To complicate matters, Xicotenga the Younger and one of his main captains were embroiled in a bitter dispute over tactics, so that even when directly ordered, young Xicotenga’s captain proved insubordinate, refusing to support his leader or dispatch troops to his aid. Try as he might, despite sending wave after wave of his own men to their deaths, Xicotenga the Younger could not extricate the Spaniards from their position. As the Tlaxcalans retreated, they dragged their dead and wounded from the field, attempting to conceal their losses by scooping handfuls of dirt and parched grass from the ground and tossing it into the air, creating a low-lying dust cloud. By nightfall, both sides had returned to their own camps.30

  Spanish losses were again astonishingly minimal. Though fifty or sixty men had been wounded, and now all of the horses were cut and at least slightly injured, only one Spanish soldier is reported to have died that day, and Cortés made sure he could not be discovered by the enemy. He ordered this man (and a few others who died later, from their wounds or the elements) to be buried deep beneath a house to avoid detection; he thereby hoped to maintain the perception that he and his men were immortal. The Spaniards remained in the hilltop village, utterly exposed on the ground. The night temperatures dropped dangerously low, and biting wind howled down from the surrounding snow-covered mountains and volcanoes. With his men hungry and shivering, Cortés dispatched yet another messenger to Tlaxcala, reiterating his desire for peace and brotherhood.

  In Tlaxcala, the high council met, perplexed by their force’s failure in the battlefield and wishing to determine the reason for it. The council gathered their finest wizards and shamans and soothsayers to look toward the stars for answers. They carefully studied the alignment of the constellations, consulted prophecies, and sacrificed many slaves, and after much contemplation, they returned to the council with the determination that though the Spaniards were not necessarily gods, still they received their power (as their own gods did) from the sun.31 Therefore they must be attacked at night, when their powers were diminished. The notion was debated vigorously, especially among the chief Tlaxcalan military advisers, who were less than confident in night warfare, which they rarely if ever employed. After much argument, they agreed upon a night attack. As quietly as they could, some ten thousand Tlaxcalan warriors moved into position on the plain below Cortés’s encampment.

  The night was clear, illuminated by the rising autumn moon, and as usual Cortés had sentries posted on all sides of his camp. The sentries noted mysterious movements below and reported them immediately to Cortés, who roused his men quietly and whispered commands to his captains. They were to descend the hill in small divisions, conceal themselves in ditches and low depressions in the ground and in the maize fields, and when ordered, they were to erupt from the ground in a counterambush. As the Tlaxcalans approached, Cortés took his cavalry and small, fast regiments of harquebusiers and cannons and caught the Tlaxcalans unprepared on the open ground. The vaporous shadows of the horses and their thundering charge, the lightning flashes and deafening explosions of cannon fire, sent Xicotenga’s forces fleeing in terror. The horses easily overtook many, wounding great numbers and killing more than twenty. The rest fled to report the grim news of the defeat to their leaders and soothsayers. Word of these miraculous victories would soon spread across the land, borne by terrified messengers to the Valley of Mexico.32

  The Tlaxcalan high council met again, now utterly stymied. Many, including the sage Xicotenga the Elder, concluded that the Spaniards had proved themselves invincible during both day and night, and he argued that they ought to make peace now. But his son, brash and warlike, argued that he had seen the slain beasts of these supposed teules and had personally seen numbers of the soldiers wounded. They bled and, he believed, died as men. Divided, the Tlaxcalans agreed to once more send messengers to the Spanish camp to discover what they might.

  Cortés was pleased by his night victory, though the warring was taking a toll on the men, some of whom were now hypothermic (a condition they would not have understood), and many, including Cortés, were suffering from malarial fever and salt deprivation. The mood in the camp was mixed, with some renewed grumblings among the ragged men about going home, and Cortés was forced to assuage their morale with promises of wealth, adding that it was better “to die in good cause than to live dishonored.”33

  About this time Cortés noted with great interest a small entourage of six Aztec nobles entering his camp on the hill, where he had now been for over a week. During the entire campaign between the Tlaxcalans and the Spaniards, Aztec runners and spies had kept the emperor apprised daily of the battles and outcomes. Montezuma seemed dismayed by the fierce Tlaxcalans’ (whom he himself had failed to pacify) inability to subdue their foes. Now he sent the Spaniards a small embassy and their servants bearing an array of gifts: cotton garments, some lovely feather pieces, and a good deal of gold. The Aztec nobles expressed Montezuma’s congratulations on their successful battles and warned Cortés not to trust the Tlaxcalans. Then they proposed a deal. Montezuma offered these gifts to Cortés and would submit to becoming a vassal of Spain, paying to the king an agreed-upon annual sum in tribute in the form of gold, slaves, women, and jade, if Cortés and his men would agree to return home immediately, forgoing their intended trek to Tenochtitlán, which would be too difficult anyway.

  Cortés thanked the Aztec nobles kindly and willingly took the gifts but declined to return to Spain just yet. He expressed once again that he had specific instructions from his own emperor to personally visit Montezuma, and he did not wish to disappoint his ruler. He really had no choice in the matter. He bade them to return to Montezuma, explain the situation to him, and request once more a formal meeting.

  A few days after the night raid, an entourage of fifty Tlaxcalans arrived with food, which revived the Spanish troops both physically and mentally. The famished men were gorging on roasted fowls, warmed maize cakes, and local figs and cherries, when Malinche informed Cortés that a good number of these “messengers” were actually spies, for she had seen them inspecting the perimeter of the camp and making notes concerning the condition of the men and horses. Cortés, enraged, had the men arrested, then questioned under physical duress. He was able to induce confessions from most. They were indeed spies sent by Xicotenga to assess the camp and troops for signs of weakness. As brutal punishment a
nd to send a definitive message, Cortés assembled seventeen of the Tlaxcalan spies and had some of their thumbs amputated, then sent them back to Xicotenga with a clear warning: Submit or we will destroy you.*16 34

  At least some of the dismembered spies made it back to Tlaxcala to display their maimed hands, because shortly afterward a delegation returned bearing much food and a message that soon the great warrior himself, Xicotenga the Younger, would arrive to make peace. The next day he indeed came, surrounded by many other Tlaxcalan noblemen and chiefs from the four main towns. They brought some gifts, apologizing for their modest nature but explaining that they were poor and that effective trade for goods had been impeded by their Aztec enemies. The warrior told Cortés that he was impressed with the captain’s artistry on the battlefield and that the Spanish soldiers had defeated his finest, most skilled warriors. He apologized for the attacks on the Spaniards but explained that he had truly believed them to be allied with Montezuma and the Aztecs, their arch-enemies. The Tlaxcalans regretted not having been able to defeat the Spaniards, for they were a proud and defiant people, but now they were impressed and honored the Spaniards’ military superiority. They wanted a truce. Xicotenga the Elder would be willing to strike a deal—they would agree to become vassals of Cortés and his king, if he would allow them to accompany his army in an attack against Montezuma and Mexico. Xicotenga the Elder had extended a personal invitation for Cortés and his men to come to Tlaxcala to rest from their battles, where they would be hosted like royalty.

  Hernán Cortés nodded. He now had an army he believed sufficient to confront this man Montezuma, whoever he was and however powerful he might be.35