by Hugh Thomas
Alvarado set off. The distance was, of course, considerable. Even now to travel by land from Mexico to Guatemala is a challenge. Aldous Huxley wrote of the journey from Oaxaca to Chiapas with awe. But he did not travel by foot or on a horse, as Alvarado did, seeing for himself the long line of the Pacific coast.
Alvarado took with him about 330 men, of whom 120 were horse, the rest infantrymen. He had four pieces of artillery, which he arranged to be pulled by Indians,8 and he had a strong force of crossbowmen and musketeers. It was a family expedition from the beginning. With him rode his brothers—Jorge, Gonzalo, and Gómez—all of whom had accompanied Cortés on his dramatic journeys, as well as two nephews, Diego and Hernando de Alvarado, and his future son-in-law, Francisco de la Cueva. He had a chaplain in the shape of Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, the Mercedarian who had been with Cortés: He was responsible for 2,500 conversions before the end of 1524, when he died.9 All these friends and relations worshipped Pedro de Alvarado. In addition, Alvarado had with him a substantial number of “natives” from central Mexico—perhaps six thousand or seven thousand men, according to Antonio de Luna, in an inquiry of 1570—including, it would seem, both Mexica and people from Tlaxcala, the Spaniards’ chief allies. There seem also to have been a prudent number of black African slaves.10
Alvarado took a month to reach Soconusco, a territory well known for its chocolate and, then as now, for its beautiful, large women. Jorge de Alvarado was allocated that place as an encomienda by his brother, Pedro (Cortés himself had had it for a year or two).11 It had been fully conquered by the Mexica only in the early years of the century, in the days of Montezuma, but it had been sending semiannual tribute to the Mexica in Tenochtitlan for forty years before that.12 It was known for its supply of beautiful green feathers from the quetzal bird. Probably the plumage in the famous headdress in Vienna derived from birds from here.
The Alvarados were now on the verge of entering present-day Guatemala. At that time, three dominant peoples lived there: the Quichés, the Cakchiquels, and the Tzutúhil. All were close in social structure to the Mexica, and their priests said that they and their leaders originally came from Tollan and Teotihuacan. Beyond were a warlike tribe called the Mam. Archaelogists argue that there had been three waves of invasion from the north. These northern invaders had brought with them the idea of cremation rather than burial, they used caves (in which they deposited deities) for worship, they had a cult of war, they had good metallurgical traditions, they had experimented with a bicephalous system of government in the style of Rome or Sparta, they had sunken ball courts with vertical walls, they preferred tortillas to tamales, and they had regular commercial relations with Tenochtitlan. They fought with grenades of pottery sometimes filled with fire, sometimes with wasps or hornets: they decapitated prisoners; and they had bark on which to write painted genealogical trees. Their people wore cotton clothing: the women sarongs, the men loincloths. They had above all brought down from old Mexico the god of rain, Tlaloc, and some of his companions in the pantheon of Mexican deities such as Xipe Totec, the terrifying flayed fertility god, and Xolotl, the evening star who was Quetzalcoatl’s half brother. Their calendar contained, as did that of Tenochtitlan, a sacred cycle of fifty-two years. They did not celebrate human sacrifice on anything like the scale that was practiced in the sixteenth century by the Mexica, which makes one see that the legends suggesting that the practice had much increased in the last generations before the arrival of the Spaniards were probably right. Famous opponents were the only ones to be routinely killed.13
Though the Quiché and the Cakchiquels were plainly related, they had fought one another for years over possession of cacao and cotton fields. That was what marked them. Had the Spaniards not come, the region would probably have been eventually conquered by the Mexica.14 The land, Alvarado reported to his leader, Cortés, was so thickly populated that “there are more people than Your Excellency has governed till now.”15 Like all comments at that time on populations, or the size of armies, that was an exaggeration. But archaeologists have found pyramidical mounds of old Guatemala in which there were fifteen million shards, perhaps from about half a million vessels, suggesting that the mounds must have been built in the early Christian era by ten to twelve thousand laborers.
The country included the Cuchumatan highlands, the most sensational nonvolcanic region of Central America. The name may signify “that which has come together with great force,” but it can also mean, in Nahuatl, “place of the parrot hunters.” There are also the jungle lowlands of Petén and a chain of active and geologically young volcanic peaks, which can be seen from the sea and which inspired Disraeli’s famous comment about the aging Whig cabinet of 1868.16
Guatemala was also the land of Popol Vuh, a poem composed in the fourth century A.D. about the creation of the world. By 1500 it probably had as many versions as there are dialects of Maya, but the one that has survived is that of one of the leading clans of the Quiché. The book that contained it was traditionally said to have been obtained as a result of a journey to the Atlantic or Caribbean coast and would be consulted by the lords of Quiché when they sat in council. The Quiché referred to the volume as “The light which came from near the sea.” Other names for it were “Our place in the shadows” or “The dawn of Life.”
The existence of this remarkable poem along with high-class pottery, elaborate ball courts, and dance platforms for the performance of religious and historical music dramas, as well as the Annals of the Cakchiquel,17 made Guatemala one of the most sophisticated countries the Spaniards set out to conquer. Repetitive, contradictory, and often incomprehensible to the modern reader, Popol Vuh has about it an unquestionable profundity, which makes it a landmark of indigenous literature.
Once beyond Soconusco in January 1524, Alvarado sent messages to the lords of Guatemala asking them not to impede his progress but to submit themselves to him as the representative of Charles the Emperor. If they resisted, he declared, he would make war on them. He understandably received no reply. Such communications were relatively easy, since Nahuatl was understood in many Quiché and Cakchiquel towns. So Alvarado’s mercenaries from Tlaxacala or Tenochtitlan could talk together easily and secure supplies at least of maize made into tortillas, or into drink (atole), or even boiled in a leaf (tamale), as today.
Alvarado moved on, passing Zapotitlán, the land of the sapodilla plum. Afterwards, the journey became more difficult since they were obliged to continue along the coastal plain, the llanura costera, between the sparsely populated Sierra Madre de Chiapas, which rises to about 4,000 feet at its border with Oaxaca and to 10,000 feet on the southeast frontier into Guatemala and the Pacific Ocean. The mosquitoes never left the Spaniards, who suffered thereby more than if they had met ferocious enemies. These, too, they encountered, though on a small scale. On February 19, they struck inland and up the hillside. This was the first time that any European had seen, much less visited, these Pacific-facing hills.
The pueblos of the mountains were small clusters of twenty-four to thirty-six mud-walled houses with palm-leaf roofs. The only certain item in these houses was a tripodal stone for grinding corn—a rounded or rectangular slab of hard igneous rock whose grinding surface would have been worn in the center. The villages were usually undefended, there were no avenues or fine plazas, nor, indeed, any kind of urban planning. What they did have, though, was much superb monochrome or bichrome pottery made into bowls, pots, and incense burners with three legs, as well as figurines and whistles.
Popol Vuh seemed to have forecast the Spaniards’ arrival: “And it is not clear how they crossed the sea, They crossed over as if there had been no sea. Where the waters were divided, they crossed over.” The Quiché people were, therefore, on a war footing. They fell on Alvarado’s indigenous mercenaries with pleasure. Their temporary success was set back by Alvarado’s horsemen. But the Quiché had heard of the menace of the horsemen and recovered to attack the Spaniards from above, in a valley under the volcano Santa
María, approximately where there is now the city of Quezaltenango (Xela in Maya). The attack was eventually held and pressed back, the Quiché leader Tecún Umán being killed, perhaps by Alvarado himself. The Maya insisted that Tecún Umán immediately became a god, in the shape of an eagle with quetzal plumes.18 The legendary ability of many Quiché to become animals impressed even Alvarado.
After the battle, the Spaniards rested several days, only to receive yet another attack by another Quiché army, numbering, so Alvarado grandly put it, twelve thousand. This was also defeated by a clever Spanish combination of artillery and cavalry. After this, the Quiché agreed to seek peace and invited Alvarado to negotiate with them at Utatlán, their main city, a characteristic hilltop fortress town, known for the legend of the so-called “marvellous Kings,” Gucumatz, who died in 1425, and Quicab, who died in 1475.19 Those mythical individuals have reminded some learned archaeologists of the great god Quetzalcoatl in Mexico (Ehecatl, in Guatemala) and there were in Guatemala certainly the circular temples with which that deity had been associated in Tenochtitlan. There were ceremonial plazas and buildings that served as tombs, painted temples, and good avenues alongside pyramids as in Teotihuacán. The fine pottery from here included many figurines. The Spaniards duly went there in March, by then knowing of the tribal hatreds between the Quichés and the Cakchiquels, with the last-named of whom Alvarado had just made an alliance and who were said to have provided him with four thousand men.
Alvarado found the city closed. Rightly afraid of being trapped with his horses and all his followers if he went inside, he camped outside the walls. There he received a visit from two lords who emerged from inside Utatlán. The discussions went badly, and Alvarado imprisoned them. This infuriated the other Quiché leaders, who ordered an attack. Alvarado responded by putting the city to the torch and, in the fire, amid sporadic fighting, the leaders whom he had captured were burned.20
Alvarado was later accused of inhumanity in this instance: A number of Spanish witnesses were asked in interminable later lawsuits in Spain if they knew that when “the said Pedro de Alvarado was the captain … at Utlatan [sic] and at Guatimala [sic] … certain lords came in peace and said Pedro de Alvarado seized them and burned them for no good reason other than that he wanted to know if they had any gold.”21 The accusations never ended, but Alvarado was never charged.
In April 1524, Alvarado turned on the Cakchiquel who, from their capital at Quahtematlan, had observed with pleasure the defeat of their Quiché enemies. All the same, they were fearful of the Spaniards with their guns, their horses, and not least, their terrifying war dogs. They urged Alvarado to take his army against the people of Atitlán, another town of the Cakchiquels, who had already shown their hostility to Spaniards by killing four messengers who had come to propose a pact. So on April 17, 1524, Alvarado led a detachment of sixty horse, 150 foot, and a large unit of Cakchiquels toward Atitlán. After a skirmish with Tzutu Indians by a lakeside, they reached their destination with ease. But the city was deserted, for the people were justifiably terrified. Alvarado did, however, find some Indians and sent them to tell their lords that he would make peace with them if they returned and declared themselves vassals of the King of Spain. The lords soon accepted these conditions, but whether they understood what they had undertaken is doubtful. The word vassal is not easily comprehended.
In May, Alvarado embarked on a new journey to the south of Guatemala to Panatcat (Escuintla), where some of Alvarado’s indigenous allies, especially some who had come with him from Texcoco, were caught off their guard and slaughtered. Alvarado punished the town by burning it. He continued onward, passing through Atepac, Tacuilulá, Taxisco, Moquisalco, and Nancintla, and across the river now known as the Río Paz, into what is now El Salvador. Everywhere the meeting between the Spaniards and the naturales was similar: The former were received in peace; the naturales then abandoned the town and fled to the hills, where they planned a resistance. The only serious battle was at Achiutla, the gateway to El Salvador, where about six thousand fighters launched a serious attack and killed many of Alvarado’s indigenous allies. No Spaniards died, but some were wounded, including Alvarado himself. An arrow went through his leg and left him for a time crippled, one leg seeming for a long while shorter than the other. Alvarado’s life was for several months at risk because of infection.
Alvarado eventually continued into El Salvador, putting up with further attacks at Tlacusqualco and halting at Cuzcatlán, the most important of these towns, where the Spaniards would shortly found a settlement that they named San Salvador. One of Alvarado’s soldiers, Román Lópes, would testify later that, on the way to this city, the population of all the towns en route “came out in peace and Alvarado then burned them and made slaves of the people and branded them.” Pedro González de Nájera, who had come to New Spain with Narváez, said the same: “This witness was with Pedro de Alvarado and was present when those concerned were burned because they desired to burn them.”22 The lords in this last place offered food, fruit, cloaks—and obedience. But they then fled to the hillside as usual. After two and a half weeks, the Spaniards moved on to Ixmide, which they reached on July 21, and where soon, because of the date, they decided to found Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala (the day of Saint James, Santiago, is July 25). It would become the main city of the colony, though it suffered several changes of site (one can still see the narrow causeway that Alvarado and his men used to storm the old city). Alvarado gave this new city several municipal councillors or alcaldes ordinarios (Diego de Rojas from Seville and a son of Leonora de Alvarado, Baltasar de Mendoza) while his brother Gonzalo became the alguacil mayor (chief constable). Thus the ways of Spain were once again transferred to a new site in an unknown country.
Here, eight months after leaving Mexico, Alvarado and his men rested. All his surviving indigenous troops except the loyal people of Tlaxcala made their way homeward. But “Tonatiuh” himself imposed on his Cakchiquel allies a tribute in gold, which he said that they had to pay even though they were helping him so substantially. The lords of the Cakchiquels refused and recommended all their people to abandon the cities and take refuge in the hills. The friendship between Alvarado and these people was thus broken.
But once again old hatreds were the best allies of the invaders. The Quichés and the people of Atitlán were happy to fight against their Cakchiquel enemies, even under new circumstances. The Cakchiquels had, however, learned new tactics from their months of alliance with the Spaniards, whom they forced to return to Quetzaltenango. Diego de Alvarado, nephew of Pedro, took two years reducing Cuzcatlán, while Gonzalo, his uncle, conquered the territory of the Mam between Chiapas and the Quiché. Gonzalo de Alvarado was named by his brother to conduct this campaign after it became evident that an abortive plan to burn the Spaniards at Atitlán in 1524 had been suggested to the Quiché leader, Chugna Huincelet, by the Mam, Caibil Balam. Chugna was killed, but his son Sequechul wanted to avenge him. Sequechul offered to guide Gonzalo to “the great and rich territory” of the Mam, which boasted what he explained was an abundant treasure.
For a year or so the initiative for further conquests lay with Gonzalo de Alvarado, not Pedro, who took many months to recover from the wound in his leg. Gonzalo had been in the Indies since 1510 and had been with Cortés throughout the great campaigns of conquest. He was devoted to his famous family and had even married into it since his wife, Bernardina, was his niece, being the daughter of Jorge de Alvarado (who himself had married Luisa de Estrada).
In July 1525, Gonzalo de Alvarado left Tecpán-Guatemala for the country of the Mam with forty horse, about eighty infantry, and two thousand or so Mexica and Quiché Indians, who acted either as porters or warriors in the early stages of the battles. He was delayed by the onset of rains. They went first to Totonicapán, on the edge of the Mam land, then to what they named the Río Hondo, “the deep river,” and seized the town of Mazatenango, which they re-christened San Lorenzo. Marching beyond that pueblo toward Hueh
uetenango, they met a Mam army from Malacatán. But Gonzalo de Alvarado charged it with his horsemen, and the Mam leader Cani Acab was killed by the Spanish commander himself with his lance. As so often after the death of a leader, the native resistance collapsed, and Gonzalo occupied Malacatán, whose inhabitants swiftly accepted to become vassals of the King of Spain.
