American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlán was next.

  III

  Unlike most of the Caribbean peoples the Spanish encountered, the inhabitants of Mexico had a good deal of experience with warfare. To be sure, Aztec warriors were trained in highly individualistic fighting techniques, since the aim of battle was not to kill masses of the enemy, but rather to capture and bring back a single worthy opponent to be sacrificed at the following year’s ceremonies of fertility.63 Still, those fighting skills were formidable. And when combined with the Aztecs’ enormous numerical advantage, they were more than a match for any invading army out of Europe. As the European interlopers’ own accounts make clear, individual Indian warriors repeatedly showed themselves the equal, and more, of any among the Spanish militia. The story of one Aztec soldier who, in hand-to-hand combat, fought off a handful of Spanish horsemen—“when they could not bring him down, one of the Spaniards threw his lance at the Indian, who caught it and fought for another hour before being shot by two archers and then stabbed”—was but one among innumerable such reports from the conquistadors themselves.64

  The Indians’ battlefield experience, however, was the result of complex political rivalries that had existed in the region for centuries, rivalries the Spanish under Hernando Cortés were able to turn to their advantage. As one scholar of Aztec military strategy recently has emphasized, “while the Spanish conquest is now seen as a major watershed in the history of the New World,” to the various competing Indian polities at the time “the Spanish were simply another group, albeit an alien one, seeking to gain political dominance in central Mexico.” As such, although the first people the Spanish confronted, the Tlaxcaltecs, could easily have defeated the conquistadors, they saw in them instead potential confederates against their traditional adversaries.65 It was thus with a formidable army of Indian allies—at one point Cortés refers to 150,000 warriors who accompanied his band of less than a thousand Spanish soldiers—that the conquistadors marched on Tenochtitlán.66

  Rather than meeting resistance when he approached the great city, Cortés was greeted in friendship and was welcomed by Montezuma. In retrospect this behavior of the Aztec leader has usually seemed foolish or cowardly or naïve to Western historians. But Mesoamerican political traditions had always dictated that war was to be announced before it was launched, and the reasons for war were always made clear well beforehand. War was a sacred endeavor, and it was sacrilegious to engage in it with treachery or fraud. In fact, as Inga Clendinnen recently has noted: “So important was this notion of fair testing that food and weapons were sent to the selected target city as part of the challenge, there being no virtue in defeating a weakened enemy.”67 In this case, therefore, not only was there no reason for Montezuma to suppose Cortés intended to launch an invasion (the Tlaxcaltec troops who accompanied him could have been part of an effort to seek political alliance), but Cortés had plainly announced in advance that his purposes were not warlike, that he came as an ambassador of peace.

  Once the Spanish were inside the city’s gates, however, it soon became apparent that this was a far from conciliatory mission. In the midst of a great public celebration of the feast of the god Huitzilopochtli, the Spanish, led by Cortés’s ruthless lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado, entered and surrounded the ceremonial arena. It was filled, recalled the sixteenth-century Spanish historian Bernardino de Sahagún, with “nobles, priests, and soldiers, and throngs of other people.” Still unaware of the conquistadors’ intentions, says Sahagún, “the Indians thought that [the Spanish] were just admiring the style of their dancing and playing and singing, and so continued with their celebration and songs.” Then the assault began:

  The first Spaniards to start fighting suddenly attacked those who were playing the music for the singers and dancers. They chopped off their hands and their heads so that they fell down dead. Then all the other Spaniards began to cut off heads, arms, and legs and to disembowel the Indians. Some had their heads cut off, others were cut in half, and others had their bellies slit open, immediately to fall dead. Others dragged their entrails along until they collapsed. Those who reached the exits were slain by the Spaniards guarding them; and others jumped over the walls of the courtyard; while yet others climbed up the temple; and still others, seeing no escape, threw themselves down among the slaughtered and escaped by feigning death. So great was the bloodshed that rivulets [of blood] ran through the courtyard like water in a heavy rain. So great was the slime of blood and entrails in the courtyard and so great was the stench that it was both terrifying and heartrending. Now that nearly all were fallen and dead, the Spaniards went searching for those who had climbed up the temple and those who had hidden among the dead, killing all those they found alive.68

  As word spread of what was happening, Aztec soldiers appeared and drove the Spanish into the royal quarters where they held Montezuma prisoner. Before this event had occurred, the ruling nobles and priests had expressed unhappiness with Montezuma’s apparent weakness when confronted with these heavily armed strangers. Now, when Montezuma appeared on the palace rooftop, in chains and accompanied by Spanish soldiers, and appealed through a spokesman for peace, the populace revolted. According to Sahagún: “One of them spoke out, ‘What is he saying, this whore of the Spaniards?’ “And a siege of the palace began. Montezuma was killed in the ensuing battle. Two weeks or so of intermittent struggle later, says Sahagún, Cortés demonstrated the “courage and skill” that all “brave captains [do] in the time of greatest need.” He ordered a retreat from the city under cover of night.69

  In retreat, however, Cortés left behind an invisible killer that would prevent the Aztecs from following and destroying his broken army, and that would begin the process of wreaking his revenge: the microscopic smallpox bacillus. Smallpox was a fearsome killer wherever it existed, but among a people with no previous exposure to the disease it was catastrophic. It first had appeared in the New World in 1518 on the huge and dying island of Hispaniola, a sort of dreadful coup de grâce to that once enchanting place’s dwindling few survivors.70 After being released among the Aztecs, wrote Cortés’s secretary Francisco Lopez de Gomara, “it spread from one Indian to another, and they, being so numerous and eating and sleeping together, quickly infected the whole country. In most houses all the occupants died, for, since it was their custom to bathe as a cure for all diseases, they bathed for the smallpox and were struck down.” Gomara continues:

  Those who did survive, having scratched themselves, were left in such a condition that they frightened the others with the many deep pits on their faces, hands and bodies. And then came famine, not because of a want of bread, but of meal, for the women do nothing but grind maize between two stones and bake it. The women, then, fell sick of the smallpox, bread failed, and many died of hunger. The corpses stank so horribly that no one would bury them; the streets were filled with them; and it is even said that the officials, in order to remedy this situation, pulled the houses down to cover the corpses.71

  The epidemic seems to have lasted for about two months, during which time, and for months after, Cortés was reorganizing his defeated forces and marching on and burning smaller towns in the region.72 Once the disease dissipated—having devastated the city’s residents and killed off most of the Aztec leaders—Cortés prepared to attack again. First, he had ships constructed that were used to intercept and cut off food supplies to the island capital. Then he destroyed the great aqueduct that brought fresh water to the city. Finally, the Spanish and their Indian allies laid siege to the once brilliant white metropolis and its dwindling population of diseased and starving people.

  “Siege,” as Inga Clendinnen has observed, was for the Aztecs “the antithesis of war.” Viewing it as cowardly and dishonorable, “the deliberate and systematic weakening of opposition before engagement, and the deliberate implication of noncombatants in the contest, had no pa
rt in their experience.”73 But it had been the European mode of battle for many centuries, deriving its inspiration from the Greek invention of ferocious and massively destructive infantry warfare.74 To the Spanish, as to all Europeans when committed to battle, victory—by whatever means—was all that mattered. On the other side, for reasons equally steeped in ancient tradition, the people of Tenochtitlán had no other option than to resist dishonor and defeat until the very end.

  The ensuing battle was furious and horrifying, and continued on for months. Tenochtitlán’s warriors, though immensely weakened by the deadly bacteria that had been loosed in their midst, and at least initially hobbled by what Clendinnen calls their “inhibition against battleground killing,” were still too formidable an army for direct military confrontation. So Cortés extended his martial strategy by destroying not only the Aztecs’ food and water supplies, but their very city itself. His soldiers burned magnificent public buildings and marketplaces, and the aviaries with their thousands of wondrous birds; they gutted and laid waste parks and gardens and handsome boulevards. The metropolis that the Spanish had just months earlier described as the most beautiful city on earth, so dazzling and beguiling in its exotic and brilliant variety, became a monotonous pile of rubble, a place of dust and flame and death.

  Because of the way the city was built on canals, however, burning was not always the most efficient means of despoliation. Often “we levelled the houses to the ground,” recalled Bernal Díaz, “for if we set fire to them they took too long to burn, and one house would not catch fire from another, for each house stood in the water, and one could not pass from one to the other without crossing bridges or going in canoes.”75 Every day the Spanish crushed houses and other buildings in the city, and piled the debris into the canals; and each night the Aztecs dredged the canals in a desperate effort to keep the waters running free. Some captured Indians finally told the Spanish just how bad things were for the city’s residents. Recalled Cortés:

  We now learnt from two wretched creatures who had escaped from the city and come to our camp by night that they were dying of hunger and used to come out at night to fish in the canals between the houses, and wandered through the places we had won in search of firewood, and herbs and roots to eat. . . . I resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn and do all the harm we could. . . . and we fell upon a huge number of people. As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach, that the dead and the prisoners numbered more than eight hundred.76

  With the advantage finally theirs—even if it was against “wretched . . . unarmed . . . women and children in the main”—Cortés and the Spanish pressed on. “That day,” wrote Cortés, “we did nothing save burn and raze to the ground the houses on either side of that main street, which indeed was a sad sight; but we were obliged to do it, there being no other way of accomplishing our aims.” They moved their forces to another section of the city where they slaughtered and captured more than twelve thousand people. Within a day or two they had another multitude of helpless citizens penned in: “They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelins or stones with which to attack us.” More than forty thousand were killed in that single day, and “so loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed at the sound.” Indeed, because “we could no longer endure the stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world,” recalled Cortés, “we returned to our camps.”77

  But not for long. The next morning the Spanish were in the streets again, mopping up the starving, dehydrated, and disease-wracked Indians who remained. “I intended to attack and slay them all,” said Cortés, as he observed that:

  The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it. Countless numbers of men, women and children came out toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned amid that multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench. . . . And so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them.78

  In all their writings on the Aztecs, the Inquisition-loving Spanish—like most Western writers who have followed them—expressed indignant horror at their enemies’ religious rituals involving human sacrifice. And indeed, the Aztec toll in that regard was great. Perhaps as many as 20,000 enemy warriors, captured in battle, were sacrificed each year during the peak of the Aztecs’ brief reign as the lords of central Mexico—although what one conquistador said of the reports of Inca human sacrifice may hold true here as well: “These and other things are the testimony we Spaniards raise against these Indians,” wrote Pedro de Cieza de Leon in 1553, “endeavoring by these things we tell of them to hide our own shortcomings and justify the ill treatment they have suffered at our hands. . . . I am not saying that they did not make sacrifices . . . but it was not as it was told.”79 Las Casas claimed the same was true of the reports from Mexico—“the estimate of brigands,” he claimed, “who wish to find an apology for their own atrocities,”—and modern scholars have begun to support the view that the magnitude of sacrifice was indeed greatly exaggerated by the New World’s conquerors, just as it was, for the same reasons, by Western conquerors in other lands.80 Even if the annual figure of 20,000 were correct, however, in the siege of Tenochtitlán the invading Spaniards killed twice that many people in a single day—including (unlike Aztec sacrifice) enormous numbers of innocent women, children, and the aged. And they did it day after day after day, capping off the enterprise, once Tenochtitlán had been razed, by strip-searching their victims for any treasure they may have concealed before killing them. As an Aztec chronicler recalled: “The Christians searched all the refugees. They even opened the women’s skirts and blouses and felt everywhere: their ears, their breasts, their hair.”81 Lastly, they burned the precious books salvaged by surviving Aztec priests, and then fed the priests to Spanish dogs of war.

  This initial phase of the Spanish bloodbath in the region finally over, Cortés now returned to camp where he spent three or four days “attending to many items of business. . . . concerning myself with the good order, government and pacification of these parts.” What this meant, first of all, as he says in his very next sentence, was the collecting and dividing up of the gold (“and other things, such as slaves”) that were the spoils of the carnage. Although much had been destroyed or lost in the fury of the battle, these valuables included “many gold bucklers,” which he promptly melted down, “plumes, feather headdresses and things so remarkable that they cannot be described in writing nor would they be understood unless they were seen.”82

  Through prior arrangement with his king, Cortés’s share of the loot was one-fifth. In gold and jewelry and artwork, that was a fortune, probably more than $10,000,000 in 1990 American currency. In terms of slaves, it meant at least 3000 human beings for his personal and private use, not counting about 23,000 Indian “vassals,” even after the Crown reduced his holdings in 1529. Immediately setting his slaves to labor in the placer mines, he drove them until they dropped. Before long, almost all of them had died from neglect and overwork. No matter how quickly he moved to replenish his human capital (an individual slave cost only six or seven pesos because they were so plentiful), Cortés killed faster than he could purchase or commandeer. By the time of his own death in 1547 his personal holdings in Indian slaves, despite constant infusions of new bodies was barely one-tenth of what he started with.83

  Meanwhile, Tenochtitlán effectively was no more. About a third of a million people dead, in a single ci
ty in a single lake in the center of Mexico. And still this was just the beginning.

  Smallpox and other new diseases—new, at least to the Indians—were now rippling out in currents of destruction across the Mexican and Central American landscape. The microbes moved even faster than the ambitious conquistadors on their horses, but the conquistadors moved as quickly as they could. And few if any were as ambitious as Pedro de Alvarado, who had led the temple massacre during the feast day ceremonies for the god Huitzilopochtli. Alvarado and his compatriots headed south, seeking gold for their coffers and flesh for their mines. Others headed north. Like parasites feeding on the remains of whatever was left alive once the winds of epidemic fever had passed over the native populations they encountered, the Spanish adventurers invaded, conquered, and enslaved the peoples living in the rest of Mexico and in what today is Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.

  No one knows how many they killed, or how many died of disease before the conquistadors got there, but Las Casas wrote that Alvarado and his troops by themselves “advanced killing, ravaging, burning, robbing and destroying all the country wherever he came.” In all, he said:

  By other massacres and murders besides the above, they have destroyed and devastated a kingdom more than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiest in the way of fertility and population in the world. This same tyrant wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers, together with the others, have killed more than four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the year 1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill the remainder.”84