Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

by Buddy Levy

  Cortés rode into a ghost city. His larger army required more quarters; Montezuma had provided them, sending the bulk of Narváez’s men to lodgings nearby. Cortés and his men returned to the Palace of Axayacatl. On his arrival Alvarado rose, shaken and war-weary, his emaciated men gaunt from lack of food and shriveled by thirst; recently they had been forced to scratch holes in the earth of the courtyard, over which they knelt to slurp from brackish seeps. They looked upon the arrival of Cortés as a happy miracle. “The garrison in the fortress received us with such joy,” Cortés recalled, “it seemed we had given back to them their lives which they deemed lost; and that day and night we passed in rejoicing.”8 But the festive mood of their reunion was short-lived. Cortés demanded an explanation for the massacre. Alvarado recounted the signs of rebellion, the rumors of impending attack and sacrifice, and the fear that Narváez had been on his way to free Montezuma. In the end, he explained, it had been a preemptive strike to avoid an Aztec attack at the conclusion of the festival, which, by all the information he possessed, had appeared certain.9

  Cortés’s face flushed with anger. “But they [the Aztecs] told me,” barked Cortés, “that they asked your permission to hold their feast and dances.” Alvarado could only nod sheepishly, agreeing, underscoring that to prevent the Aztecs from attacking, he chose to strike first. Cortés fumed, berating Alvarado, shaking his head that it was a poor decision, a madness, and saying that he “wished to God that Montezuma had escaped and he had never had to listen to this story.”*36 10 He stormed off, and they spoke of it no more. His only punishment of Alvarado was to informally demote him in rank, replacing him as second-in-command with the less volatile and more predictable Gonzalo de Sandoval.11

  Anxious to mend a strained relationship, Montezuma waited expectantly in the courtyard to be received, but Cortés was in no mood for it. When two of Montezuma’s attendants approached requesting a meeting, Cortés flew into a violent rage, cursing and swearing that they could go to hell: “Visit him? Why, the dog doesn’t even keep the market open for us, or see that they send us food to eat.”12 When some of his captains heard Cortés’s tirade, they hustled over to calm him. Had the emperor not ascended the wall and spoken reason to his people, they reminded him, the Spaniards would all have perished. This admonishment from his own men only enraged Cortés further, and his rant continued: “Why should I be civil to a dog who was holding secret negotiations with Narváez, and now, as you can see, does not even give us any food?”13 The attendants must tell Montezuma to open the markets immediately, or there would be hell to pay. Cortés stomped away with Malinche hurrying behind, refusing for now either to receive or to speak in person with Montezuma. (Later they did have one or two last fateful parlays, translated by Malinche and Aguilar.)

  Despondent, Montezuma was led back to his domicile in the garrison, his leg chains dragging on the slate stone. Once revered as godlike, the highest mortal in all of Mexico—the nearest to a god—he now slunk imprisoned, withered and enchained and bereft of dignity. He had forsaken his people. When Malinche came to ask him to open the market so that the Spaniards could acquire food, he admitted sadly that he no longer had the power to do so. He did not believe anyone would listen. But after a time he suggested that one of the remaining lords, whose reputation remained unsullied, might have success. Cortés, through Malinche, agreed, saying that Montezuma should choose whomever he thought best for the job. Montezuma selected his brother, Cuitláhuac, who was unchained from his shackles and set free. Cortés did not know it at the time, but he had released a demon.14

  Instead of procuring food for the Spaniards, whose presence he had argued against permitting from the moment of their arrival, Cuitláhuac met with the few remaining nobles who had survived the massacre, the last vestiges of the great council. Montezuma had fallen under a spell cast by the Spaniards, he reported, and charmed as he was, he no longer possessed the capacity to rule the Aztecs. It was a conclusion they had already come to themselves.15 In a very short time, in a move unprecedented in the history of the Aztec peoples, the council annulled Montezuma’s powers and bestowed the title of tlatoani on Cuitláhuac: he was now emperor of the Aztecs.16

  When food failed to come, Cortés saw that his original scheme to win Tenochtitlán in a bloodless political overthrow would not come to fruition. The next morning at sunrise he sent a messenger toward the coast to keep the command at Vera Cruz apprised of the situation in the capital, but within a half hour the man returned, “beaten and wounded and crying out that all the Indians in the city were preparing for war and had raised all the bridges.”17 Within twenty-four hours, under the leadership of the new warlord Cuitláhuac, the Aztecs renewed their attacks, and the worst military fears of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his company were stark realities. With the bridges up and the causeways blockaded, they were ensnared inside the City of Dreams.

  Even as Cortés rushed his men to arms, the Spaniards could hear the cacophonic tremor of leather-thonged warriors marching and running toward the religious precinct. Peering out from the garrison watchtowers and cannon placements, the Spaniards saw a dark human tide pouring forth; the causeways, the streets, and even the flat rooftop terraces teemed with the violent surge of Aztec warriors. War canoes brimming with men churned from all shores of the lacustrine cities, racing toward the center, oars and paddles slashing through the saline wash.

  Cortés’s men were always armed for battle, ready and well organized, so they soon assumed their battle positions. But none could have liked their odds as the streets below and all around the precinct, even the plazas and courtyards, were filled to capacity with stomping, chanting, spear-wielding men. From the mass—numbering perhaps in the tens of thousands—rose a piercing, shrill war whistle that eclipsed even the beating of war drums and the alarum of the conchs. Cortés later remembered well the dreadful sights and sounds: “There came upon us from all sides such a multitude that neither the streets nor the roofs of the houses could be seen for them. They came with the most fearful cries imaginable, and so many were the stones there were hurled at us from their slings into the fortress that it seemed they were raining from the sky.”18

  Cortés sent Diego de Ordaz at the head of a few hundred men, hoping that the force of his weaponry and firepower might diffuse the onslaught, but the tactic proved ineffectual and costly. Despite their blazing guns and thrumming crossbows, a hailstorm of ancient ordnance from the terraces above—stones, javelins, and darts—battered their shields, helmets, and armor. A half dozen of Ordaz’s men died in the initial barrage, and Ordaz was wounded badly, struck in three places.19 Almost instantly Ordaz was on the defensive. Repelled by the sheer volume of warriors and the constant sleet of stone and wood from above, he ordered a retreat back to the palace. Once there the streets in front were so thick with Aztecs that the Spaniards were forced into close hand-to-hand combat, barely battling their way back inside to the temporary safety of the palace compound. There, slumped and bleeding, they found that Cortés had been injured—a war club had crushed his left hand—and so had as many as eighty other Spaniards.20

  After regrouping, Cortés ordered a full-scale barrage of firepower from the rooftop. In unison, Spanish soldiers fired cannons, harquebuses, and falconets as fast as they could shoot and load; the crossbowmen sent searing volleys into the dense crowds. Hundreds of Aztecs slumped to the ground with each pelting, the metal balls ripping through dozens at a time, but for every man slain ten came behind in support. Conquistador Bernal Díaz and other soldiers were amazed by the Aztecs’ courage and resolve: “Neither cannons nor muskets nor crossbows availed, nor hand-to-hand fighting, nor killing thirty or forty of them every time we charged, for they still fought on in as close ranks and with more energy than in the beginning.”21 The Aztecs surged forward with a torrent of their own, shooting flaming arrows into the wooden fixtures of the palace and igniting the Tlaxcalans’ makeshift timber lodgings. Flames engulfed the compound. Cortés hurried to dismantle parts of walls,
removing flammable sections and flinging mud and dirt until the fires were controlled.22

  The fighting raged for nearly a week. At night some of Cortés’s men nursed wounds and rested, while others worked to repair the great rifts in the walls protecting them. The Spaniards listened to chants and taunts hour after hour, the Aztecs calling them rogues and cowards and promising to sacrifice them and eat them, to consume their hearts and throw their viscera to the carnivorous zoo beasts. This taunting had a chilling effect on the morale of the soldiers. During the night the Aztecs sent sorcerers and wizards to vex the Spaniards, chanting and conjuring in full view at the palace entrance. In their delirium some of the Spaniards claimed to have had visitations, witnessing “heads without bodies bobbing up and down, cadavers rolling around as if they had somehow come back to life, and severed limbs walking about of their own accord.”23 The men—especially the newly arrived Narváez conscripts—trembled in sleep-deprived fits, uncertain whether these demonic apparitions were real or imagined.

  By day Cortés launched courageous if ineffective sorties and assaults, all inevitably repelled. Constantly innovating and adapting his battle tactics as the situation dictated, he conceived an idea that he hoped would allow him to fight his way out of the palace with minimal damage to his men. Carpenters were to begin constructing wooden machines (Cortés called them “engines”) called mantas, towerlike covered structures on rollers, to be carried or pulled with ropes by exposed Tlaxcalan bearers. The mantas would protect as many as two dozen soldiers, encased by the thick timber walls and ceiling. From inside, musketeers and crossbowmen could fire through narrow slats or loopholes, then duck to safety to reload. Cortés’s invention, though similar to the medieval mantelets, was much more complicated and elaborate, having dual chambers, one above the other. The plan was for the men to use the mantas to shoot their way out, advancing through the mob and demolishing houses as they went. They could then use the debris and wreckage to rebuild the causeways and as fill so that the cavalry could more easily cross. The carpenters hurried, building three of the war machines in a matter of days.24

  At this point Cortés was ready to try just about anything, for it was only a matter of time before they would be starved and thirsted out and overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of Aztecs. So once they were completed and workable, he rolled out the first mantas, filling them with fine soldiers and enlisting strong and brave Tlaxcalans in waves to pull or push them into the enemy swarm. The initial shock worked well—the animate mechanisms lurched forward, spitting flame and smoke and lightning—and the Aztecs recoiled in fear and dismay, running from the monstrous contraptions. Soon, however, the Tlaxcalans had difficulty maneuvering the mantas over the uneven ground and through the thickening crowds. Canals also impeded their progress. Emboldened Aztec reinforcements heaved boulders from terraces that shattered the war towers into splinters. The shaken soldiers could only crawl out onto the ground and resume close combat, and though they tried to set a few houses on fire, they were forced to flee back to the palace, dragging the wreckage of the mantas with them.25 Innumerable Tlaxcalans, exposed as they were, died during this attack.

  From a purely military standpoint, Cortés was entirely on the defensive, his options—and his able-bodied soldiers—depleting with every passing hour. Even his vaunted cavalry, so devastatingly effective on the open field, proved inconsequential, held immobile in the tightly packed streets and struggling for footing on the slick cobble and flagstone. And the Aztecs were adapting and innovating as well, unseating charging horsemen with long lances, and erecting walls to slow or reroute the galloping animals. Cortés opted to make one last-ditch effort at diplomacy. Reason overriding his pride, he called upon Malinche and Aguilar and appealed to Montezuma to ascend the rooftop and speak to any below who might recognize him—some of his relatives had been spotted, even Cuitláhuac—warriors in regal battle garments, gleaming with gold.

  Montezuma had no interest in trying to help Cortés and waved Malinche away. Despondent and humiliated, he said, “I wish only to die. Fate has brought me to such a pass because of him that I do not wish to live or hear his voice again.”26 The once-great ruler appeared slight and inconsequential in his robes, his voice tinged with melancholy and desolation. Cortés employed Father Olmedo, who had come to know the emperor well, to try to persuade him, but Montezuma shook his head, saying, “It is of no use. They will neither believe me, nor the false words and promises of [Cortés].”27 He added, in words certainly intended to be translated verbatim to Cortés, “I believe I shall not obtain any results toward ending this war, for they have already raised up another Lord (Cuitláhuac) and have made up their minds not to let you leave this place alive; therefore I believe that all of you will have to die.”28

  Unable to convince the emperor to go voluntarily, Cortés ordered some men to strong-arm him to the roof. The Spaniards held him close as they led him to the edge, covering him with shields to protect him from the continuing barrage. At the edge, on a slight promontory, the soldiers removed their shields to display Montezuma prominently for all to see. They told him to start talking, to mollify the people below. If Montezuma spoke, his voice or words were unlikely to have been heard above the clamorous roar of battle. Seconds later stones drummed the rooftop and the terrace walls, arrows sizzled past, and spears fell in a clatter all around. Said Fray Aguilar, “It seemed as if the sky was raining stones, arrows, darts and sticks.”29 The emperor crumpled beneath the sting of stones, struck with at least three direct blows to the chest and head. Too late, the soldiers covered him with their shields and ran for cover.

  Montezuma lived through the night but perished within a few days, on June 30, 1520, most likely from wounds caused by his own people. He had ruled the Aztec empire for seventeen years, leading it to the pinnacle of its magnificence. Its trade and tribute network stretched far beyond the horizons that he could see as he prayed atop the Great Temple, spanning to the oceans east and west and the lands as far south as Guatemala. It was a tragic end to an enigmatically tragic life.*37 30

  In many ways, he had been played by Cortés, duped or charmed into believing that his empire might actually be saved from ruin, if only he went along with the wishes of this strange and confusing visitor from another world. Perhaps Montezuma had allowed his deep religious conviction to cloud his political sense, for many of his family, his high counselors, and even his priests had cautioned him that the Spaniards were evil and not to be trusted. And certainly cultural and communicative differences plagued Montezuma, for the gifts he bestowed upon Cortés from the moment of his arrival—gifts that in the Aztec world were indications of wealth and power and meant to show dominance—only further fueled Cortés’s greed and desire. Montezuma had allowed Cortés and the Spaniards into his wondrous city so that they might be awed by his immense wealth and power, realize it, succumb to it, and go away, but instead that wealth had only fortified Cortés’s unyielding resolve.

  Fray Diego Duran would say of Montezuma that he was “a king so powerful, so feared and served, so obeyed by the whole of this new world, who came nevertheless to an end calamitous and shabby so that even in his last rites there were none who spoke or bewailed him.”31

  Hernán Cortés certainly had no time to mourn. Back in Montezuma’s chambers, after confirming that the emperor was dead, he ordered that all the remaining lords who were in custody, including Itzquauhtzin and as many as thirty others, be killed on the spot. This order released a great number of his soldiers from having to guard them, men he desperately needed. Below the balcony and out in the streets, flaming arrows sparked through the air, leaving trails in the sky like shooting stars or comets, and the hivelike Aztec imperial army continued assembling its immense force.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  La Noche Triste

  CORTÉS’S EFFORT AT DIPLOMACY had yielded only the death of Montezuma and an even more determined army, headed by the rabid warlord Cuitláhuac. Cortés must have berated himself for freeing him. Ha
d it been Montezuma’s plan all along? Perhaps Montezuma had agreed to let Cuitláhuac lead, then sacrificed himself so that Cuitláhuac might liberate his people. It made sense, really, a quiet and unceremonial parting gift from a once-proud king, the last effective military move of a ruler whose hands were literally tied. But if Cortés sought to understand the enigmatic lord Montezuma, he said nothing of it.

  Weakened by hunger and thirst, the carpenters nonetheless toiled night and day to repair the battered mantas, and Cortés employed the war machines once more. Meanwhile the nearby temple of Yopico (where the Spaniards had previously erected a cross and a figure of the Virgin Mary inside the shrine of Xipe Totec, “the Skinned God”) had been converted into a strategic Aztec command post.1 From this aerie Cuitláhuac and his military advisers could monitor Cortés’s movements (few and insignificant as they were) and direct the Aztec forces, sending squadron after squadron to replace those taking the heaviest artillery fire.

  Cortés determined that, if he were to have any chance at all, he must eliminate the enemy’s advantage of this elevated command post. He tethered a shield firmly to his left forearm, the injured hand palsied and useless, and directed a small detachment of perhaps forty soldiers. Using the ingenious mantas, they barrelled forward toward the base of the pyramid, the shored-up machines spewing balls and arrows from within. The mantas pitched and yawed toward the temple beneath a sustained onslaught from above, once more taking boulders rolled from rooftops and from the pyramid itself. By the time Cortés’s engines reached the foot of the temple and men poured from inside, the mantas were for a second time splintered, but they had served their purpose.