by Buddy Levy
Cortés and his men threw many priests to their deaths. Once inside the shrine to Xipe Totec, he saw that the Christian idols were gone, so he paid the Aztecs back in kind by heaving their statues down the steps. Then the Spaniards set the shrine ablaze and fought their way back to the palace, igniting what houses they could on their return.
Though Cortés would later bluster that this raid was a great “victory which God had given us” and further claim that “the loss of this tower so much damaged their confidence that they began to weaken on all sides,”5 the sortie had been expensive, resulting in the destruction of the mantas (and their abandonment) and the deaths of dozens of soldiers. Cortés took priests as prisoners, but these men had virtually no bargaining or diplomatic value, so that the assault on the temple proved to be nothing more than a symbolic morale builder. Even if Cortés believed he had won the tower, he hadn’t the manpower to keep it.
The excursion had afforded Cortés a demoralizing view of the city, which he could see was universally armed. Only the Tacuba causeway remained partially intact; the bridges on all the others were dismantled. He knew that the Tacuba causeway was the shortest of them all, and it now appeared his only remaining lifeline to the mainland. He had no way of knowing how long the causeway would remain usable and whether, even now, its bridges were being removed. Then one of the Spaniards, a soldier and astrologer named Botello who could read and write in Latin and had traveled to Rome, approached Cortés’s advisers. For the last few days, he said, he had been casting lots and reading spirits and signs in the stars; the spirits had told him that if they did not leave the capital this very night, neither Cortés nor any of the Spaniards would survive.6
Cortés did not like the sound of this omen when it was whispered to him. He made up his mind, and his captains concurred. They must flee at midnight while the causeway could still be crossed; otherwise they were all doomed.
Cortés hated to let loose the gemstone that he had once held firmly in his hand. The prospect of explaining the loss to his king was unsavory, but the reality of the situation, coupled with the counsel of his trusted captains, confirmed that he had no choice. The sage Botello had foretold a stormy night shrouded in darkness, and the fact that the Aztecs were less proficient in nighttime warfare contributed to Cortés’s decision. Once again when faced with a crisis, he made a well-considered decision and sprang into action.
But what would they do about Montezuma’s immense treasure? The sheer bulk and volume of the booty presented a logistical problem. Carrying the munificence away in broad daylight under peaceful conditions would have been burdensome enough; but doing so stealthily, at night, and potentially while waging war hardly seemed possible. Cortés and his men pried open the sealed door to the palace treasure room and began to parcel out the treasure, separating the precious metals from the stones and the featherwork. Most of the gold was smelted and forged into hefty ingots, which could be accurately weighed for proper division. The haul was an astounding eight tons of gold, silver, and gemstones. They could not possibly cart it all on this run, so they divided it by importance. The royal fifth was laid aside and packaged—it must be protected at all costs by handpicked Spanish guards, portaged by eighty Tlaxcalans, one fit mare, and a few lame and wounded horses. Next was Cortés’s personal fifth, as arranged through clever legal writing in the writ founding Villa Rica. The Tlaxcalans, uninterested in the gleaming metals, carried off armfuls of the iridescent quetzal feathers in bundles and bales.7
Cortés then gave permission for his men to fill their personal bags with what gold and treasure they could carry, though he cautioned them that weapons and food would serve them better in their present endeavor. “Better not to overload yourselves,” he warned; “he travels safest in the dark night who travels lightest.”8 Narváez’s men, seeing the fantastic spoils for the first time, went into a frenzy and ignored their new commander’s advice; they loaded themselves heavily, stuffing their wallets, boxes, and bags to bursting. The seasoned Cortés men, including veterans like Bernal Díaz, were more sensible, taking mainly what they could carry directly on their person, aware of the travails to come: “I declare,” remembered Díaz, “I had no other desire but the desire to save my life, but I did not fail to carry off…stones very highly prized among the Indians, and I quickly placed them in my bosom under my armor, and later on, the price of them served me well in healing my wounds and getting me food.”9
The plunder secured, Cortés instructed his carpenters to destroy some palace walls and use this timber, as well as ceiling beams, to construct a portable bridge. It must be long and sturdy enough, he said, to span gaps in the causeway as well as bear the weight of the men, horses, and spoils as they crossed. The carpenters performed this ingenious feat of spontaneous engineering, but the bridge was awkward and unwieldy, requiring forty Tlaxcalans at a time to carry it; Cortés directed 150 Spanish soldiers to flank and cover some 200 bearers who would portage the bridge in shifts.10
Cortés placed 200 foot soldiers under his new second-in-command, Gonzalo de Sandoval. This vanguard would march directly behind the portable bridge and be supported by Diego de Ordaz, Francisco de Lugo, and two dozen skilled cavalrymen. Malinche would be heavily guarded up front, along with Cortés’s priests, Father Olmedo and Father Díaz. Next, Cortés would lead the main militia, aided by a few captains. Behind them would come the bulk of the Tlaxcalan soldiers, who would also convey some key prisoners and dignitaries, including one of Montezuma’s sons and two of his daughters.11 The rearguard would be captained by Pedro de Alvarado and Velázquez de León, along with sixty more cavaliers.
Just after midnight in the black hours of July 1, 1520, Hernán Cortés and company heard a brief mass and then fled Tenochtitlán, marching and riding into a dense fog. Forcing open the heavy palace gates, the Spaniards moved out as quietly as they could under sustained summer showers. The rains that Montezuma and his people had prayed for during the Festival of Toxcatl had finally arrived, and many residents sought the comfort and shelter of their homes, so that the streets were quieter than they might otherwise have been.
The central plaza of the sacred precinct was eerily silent. The outlanders moved quickly, stealing along the empty streets past the Temple of the Sun, moving unhindered to the ball court, then striking west onto the Tacuba causeway. The expedition—men and horses and whimpering war dogs—trotted forward like some weird nocturnal millipede, making it across the first few intact bridges and to the first major breach in the causeway. They were readying to install the portable bridge when the cry of a woman’s voice pierced the night. “Méxicanos!” she wailed. “Come running! They are crossing the canal! Our enemies are escaping!”12 Soon guards sounded the alarm, and other sentries dashed to the top of the Great Temple. Within minutes drums pounded from the pyramid tops, accompanied by the howl of conch shells. Then the voice of a priest came echoing through the drizzle and mist: “Captains, warriors…follow them in your boats. Cut them off and destroy them!”13
As Captain Margarino, in charge of the portable bridge, yelled instructions to the Tlaxcalans, Aztec soldiers sprinted for their dugouts and shortly many canoes were pouring forth in pursuit, the oarsmen churning the lake to froth. Hurrying, Margarino got the bridge installed, and lines of soldiers sprinted across, pushing and shoving as they went two or three abreast. The bridge worked well, but the combined weight of the men and bearers loaded with weapons, and the tamping and compacting of the horses, wedged the bridge firmly into place; it was nearly cemented, and pull as they might, the strong Tlaxcalans could not budge it. The Spaniards and their allies were now strung out along the causeway, making it impossible to form organized ranks to fight. Then the first of the canoes arrived along the causeway banks, signaled by arrows and darts whooshing like birds of prey through the blackness. Still the bridge was stuck. The Spaniards had no choice but to abandon it and run for their lives.14
The Aztec canoes poured along either side of the Tacuba causeway as the Spanish vang
uard reached gaps and bridgeless sections, creating panic and confusion. Bernal Díaz recalled the attack:
The whole lake was so thick with canoes that we could not defend ourselves, since many of our men had already crossed the bridge…a great crowd of Mexicans charged down on us to remove the bridge and kill and wound our men, who could not help one another…One disaster followed another. Because of the rain, two horses slipped and fell in the lake. Just as we saw this, I and some others of Cortés’s detachment struggled to the other side of the bridge, but we were borne down by so many warriors that, hard though we fought, no further use could be made of it. The channel or water gap was soon filled up with dead horses, Indians…servants, bundles, and boxes.15
This place, the Toltec Canal, became a scene of chaos and anguish for the Spaniards. Disorder and confusion became general. In the dark, their numbers pressed together, the cavalry proved useless. Soon every man fought for himself, with growing numbers of Aztecs arriving. In the melee, horses reared and foundered, falling into the water, kicking and bucking, some swimming aimlessly, riderless, only to drown. The chants and war whoops of the blood-crazed Aztecs sent men headlong into the water gap, and so many drowned there that it was said a human bridge of the dead formed. Aztec accounts recalled that “the canal was soon choked with the bodies of men and horses, they filled the gap in the causeway with their own drowned bodies. Those who followed crossed to the other side by walking on the corpses.”16
Cortés fought his way across, but he too plunged into the water, where he was grabbed by warriors who tried to drag him off. Two of his men hacked him free and hauled him ashore. Cortés made the length of the causeway nearly to Tacuba but there remounted and wheeled his horse back to help others and learn the condition of the rearguard. It was disastrous. Cortés found Alvarado stumbling along on foot, bleeding profusely, dragging his own sword in one hand and an enemy spear in the other. His horse had been killed from underneath him. Shaken, he reported that Juan Velázquez de León, his cocaptain of the rearguard, lay dead on the road, riddled with arrows.17 The trailing detachments took a terrible beating, swarmed from behind on land, and from either side of the causeway, bludgeoned with clubs, speared, many dragged away, pulled into canoes, those not killed taken prisoner for sacrifice. Most of them were Narváez men, weighed down by the excessive gold they carried.
Alvarado gathered some men and offered to guard what little remained of the rear while Cortés and the rest struck for the safety of the mainland. The beleaguered Spaniards and remaining Tlaxcalans limped and staggered like ghouls to the outskirts of Tacuba, making the relative safety of the city at first light, weird broken bands of luminance angling through the fog. Cortés called for a makeshift muster to take quick stock. Dawn illuminated the brutal reality of the previous night, thereafter referred to by the Spaniards as La Noche Triste—The Night of Sorrows. Nearly six hundred Spaniards perished that night, including the bulk of the Narváez men, along with a great number of horses and as many as four thousand Tlaxcalans.18 Also lost was most of the gunpowder, all the cannons, and perhaps most searing of all the smelted ingots, the gold and silver bars, the royal fifth and Cortés’s fifth, all vanished in the cold dark waters. Somewhere buried in the brackish bottom of Lake Texcoco lay most of Montezuma’s immense treasure. For a few minutes Cortés, utterly stricken with grief, mourned, standing in the rain beneath a giant ahuehuete tree (cypress), his hands and face bespattered with mud and blood.19 But he did not allow himself more than a moment’s regret. He took stock of the situation and regrouped.
He assembled the remains of his haggard company in the Tacuba plaza. The dead or missing included Chimalpopoca, Montezuma’s son, and one of his daughters; Lares, one of Cortés’s finest horsemen; and Botello the astrologer, along with his horse.20 Cortés walked among his tattered, shivering ranks and was relieved to find his dear Malinche. He embraced her, thankful that she had survived the nightmare. His other chief interpreter, Jerónimo de Aguilar, also miraculously lived. Two dozen horses remained, but all of them were injured, none able to raise more than a trot. Captains Gonzalo de Sandoval, Diego de Ordaz, Alonso de Ávila, Cristóbal de Olid, and Pedro de Alvarado, all wounded and requiring treatment, lived.21
Cortés rarely dwelled on the past, and on that dismal July morning following La Noche Triste he once more, despite the tremendous losses, thought only of his present condition and what the future might hold. Looking around, he inquired about the fate of one man in particular—the master carpenter and shipbuilder Martín López. Where was he? Had he survived? Malinche went about the ghastly, ruined squadron and returned, calmly assuring Cortés that yes, Martín López was alive and with them, though he was wounded. This news reassured Cortés, who mounted his horse with renewed fire. Another ambitious idea was germinating in his mind. “Well, let’s go,” he said, “for we lack nothing.”22 Despite the disastrous night, the loss of more than half of his force, and near death for them all, Cortés already had a plan for reconquest. He led the remainder of his bloodied and limping force to the north, then into the rising sun to the east, heading for friendly Tlaxcala, more than fifty miles away.
AT daybreak the Aztecs suspended their onslaught (a tactical mistake, for the Spaniards were devastatingly weak and vulnerable) to celebrate their victory. They had driven Cortés and most of his men from the city. A small contingent of eighty Spaniards had failed to make it across the Tacuba causeway and sneaked back inside the Palace of Axayacatl, but the inflamed Aztec warriors soon captured them and washed them in preparation for sacrifice. The Aztecs fished the dead and dying from the water, removing bodies from the canals and the lakeshore, separating Tlaxcalans from Spaniards. According to Aztec accounts, they then “loaded the bodies of the Tlaxcaltecas into canoes and took them out to where the rushes grow; they threw them among the rushes without burying them, without giving them another glance.”23 The slain Spaniards were stripped of their clothes and lay in bare piles looking to the Aztecs like “the white blossom[s] of the cane.”24
Aztec warriors walked the causeway, picking spilled plunder from the muck: random gold and silver bars, necklaces and jewelry, and—most coveted—occasional sheaves of quetzal feathers. But they found very little. Most of Axayacatl’s treasure sank during the night. Still some persisted, swimming and wading out into the water, feeling about with their hands and feet. Along the causeway they found many Spanish weapons—muskets and swords and crossbows—lying scattered, the tools of conquest thrown aside in the tumult and confusion. They unearthed lost and strewn coats of mail and breastplates, shields of metal, hide, and wood. The carnage had been heaved asunder, helmets squashed into the mud by the hooves of crazed horses.25
Any Spaniards who managed to survive the night were now dragged to the temple tops and held down screaming, their hearts cut still pulsing from their chests and brandished aloft in victory, spoils of war and bloodfood for the god Huitzilopochtli.26 Later their bodies would be ingloriously dismembered, their heads skewered onto their own pikes and spears and swords and exhibited for all to see, thrust into the ground like monstrous fence-posts, alternating between blood-drenched, butchered horse heads.27
Although the Aztecs commonly ceased or suspended a battle in order to celebrate and consummate victory through ritual, in this case their time might have been better spent killing the rest of the Spaniards. The nighttime rout was already slightly uncharacteristic of traditional Aztec warfare, as they had killed at a greater pace and percentage than they had wounded, perhaps reflecting their anger at the death of Montezuma, at having their city held hostage for so long, and at the Spaniards’ consortium with the Tlaxcalans. Whatever the case, while the Aztecs who had taken prisoners painted themselves in ochre and red, bathed in blood, and ceremonially cannibalized the slain,28 and while the victors danced at the Great Temple steps to flaming brazier light, the Spaniards were getting away.
HERNÁN Cortés drove his train of ragged interlopers north over the top of Lake Texcoco, small bands of Az
tec raiding parties attacking them constantly. He organized his vestigial force into rough squadrons: Tlaxcalan guides led the least injured and most capable to do battle up front, in the rear, and at the flanks, while the bulk of wounded men—Spaniard and Tlaxcalan alike—stayed in the center. The most seriously debilitated rode slumped on horseback; others limped behind or leaned on makeshift crutches or wooden walking sticks. Straggling and exhausted men, delirious from lack of sleep, clutched at horses’ manes and tails to pull themselves along; others were so spent and hurt that they had to be carried by Tlaxcalan porters.29
For two days Cortés pushed his haggard and failing company, fighting on the periphery as they went. They skirted three shimmering lakes and banked toward shadowy mountains looming in the east, arriving at the town of Tepotzotlán. The ablest soldiers held their weapons ready, expecting a confrontation in the streets, but the town was deserted, the inhabitants having fled to nearby villages.30 Here the troops rested in plazas and under awnings, sacking the place for water and whatever food they could rummage. They found maize, and boiled and roasted some, gnawing it down and larding stores away for the continued flight.
They rode next day into the rising sun, still harassed by bands of Aztec attackers, which kept them always on the defensive. The Spaniards followed their guides onto the plains, sleeping on the broken ground and leaving again at daybreak, passing just to the north of the famous ceremonial city Teotihuacán, with its mile-long Avenue of the Dead, its massive and stunning Pyramids of the Sun and Moon all vine-choked and shrub-covered, the once-great city having been abandoned years before the Aztecs arrived. Still, the place retained a powerful, even hypnotic religious importance, and as recently as the previous year Montezuma had made pilgrimages there with his highest priests every twenty days to offer sacrifices. The Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlán exhibited many architectural features borrowed from this magical and mythical ancient city.31
