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

by Buddy Levy

  Buttressed by these recent reinforcements, his Spanish soldiers rested and somewhat recovered, Cortés and his captains noticed something curious and intriguing. With each passing night, the Aztecs appeared to be less and less successful at digging up and unearthing the gaps, until by mid-July they had ceased these efforts altogether, and all the breaches now remained filled in permanently. At first Cortés believed this might be yet another Aztec ruse, but the arrival of two starving and delirious Aztecs told him that Cuauhtémoc’s and the Aztec people’s situation was most dire. These men said that the Aztecs were dying from starvation and thirst; that the dead bodies of their countrymen were being piled inside houses to conceal the extent of their losses; and that they were now too few and too weak to work through the night. Cuauhtémoc had even resorted to disguising women in men’s garb to make them appear as able warriors.9

  Compounding the Aztecs’ already grave situation, Alvarado’s forces had recently reached and destroyed the only remaining water source left to the city’s inhabitants, a saline spring that was hardly sufficient and its salinity too high. After that spring was destroyed, the Aztec people were reduced to drinking the highly brackish lake water. Aztec accounts attest to the severity of their predicament, stating

  There was no fresh water to drink, only stagnant water and the brine of the lake, and many people died of dysentery. The only food was lizards, swallows, corncobs and the salt grasses of the lake. The people ate water lilies and chewed on deerhides and pieces of leather. They roasted and seared whatever they could find and then ate it. They ate the bitterest weeds; they even ate dirt.10

  Cortés decided to see whether the Aztecs, if they were indeed desperate and vulnerable, would agree to a settlement: if Cuauhtémoc would simply surrender, then Cortés would not destroy the city and slaughter whatever inhabitants remained. A few exchanges took place at this time, and Cortés released three captured Aztecs warriors to try to negotiate a peace. Cuauhtémoc stalled and postured (and even consulted his captains and priests), but in the end he was too proud and too committed to surrender. He would make no deals with this Spaniard Cortés. The Aztecs would fight to the death.

  Cortés had mixed emotions and uncertainty about his next move. “I did not know,” he said, “by what means we might relieve ourselves of all these dangers and hardships, yet avoid destroying them and their city which was indeed the most beautiful thing in the world.”11 Tired of the protracted siege and concerned with the condition of his own men, Cortés now made the fateful decision that he had hoped somehow to avoid. He would reduce Tenochtitlán to rubble. “My plan,” he reported, “was to raze to the ground all the houses on both sides of the streets along which we advanced, so that we should move not a step without leaving everything behind us in ruins.”12 He called on his allied leaders to enlist from the surrounding hills and towns all the farm laborers they could muster, and those should come with their coas (digging tools like shovels) and prepare to utterly destroy the famed city. Using the laborers and field workers to flatten buildings and permanently fill in all the causeways, canals, and ditches, Cortés had also availed himself of a great many allied warriors, for they were no longer required in the destruction work.13

  In conjunction with the demolition, Cortés stepped up his offensive and orchestrated a series of concerted raids that lasted through the final days of July 1521. The razing of buildings provided wider and more level avenues for the horses to run, and Cortés employed the cavalry now to great advantage, though near the market the Aztecs had placed giant boulders and walled off some streets to prevent the horses from entering. Despite these defensive tactics, the Spaniards ratcheted up the pressure, and Cortés now had nearly 150,000 allied warriors fighting alongside his own highly skilled and experienced divisions.14 The brigantines continued to pound Aztec positions around the north end of the city with constant cannon and artillery fire, and to make amphibious landings of stealthy Spanish troops. After a few days of such surges, the remaining Aztec force had cordoned itself off at the Tlatelolco marketplace, the last stronghold of their empire.

  Cortés called once more upon his trusted captain Sandoval to bring fifteen horses from Alvarado’s camp, and adding them to his own cavalry Cortés mounted a force of forty horsemen for a planned ambush, hoping to draw out as many of the elite Aztec warriors as he could. He sent ten riders ahead to capture the attention of the enemy; then, while Aztecs on rooftops and behind large barricades were engaging them, the remaining thirty followed after, hiding behind houses and walls near the square. The ten horsemen at the front did their job, attracting attention and battling for a time before galloping away in a feigned retreat. The ruse worked. A very large Aztec contingent pursued the retreating horses, which led back to the open square. There Cortés gave the order to attack, and the thirty hidden cavalrymen rode from their hiding positions and ambushed the Aztecs savagely, killing a great number and dispersing the rest.15

  At precisely the same time, Alvarado and his troops were assaulting the marketplace from their position and encountering surprisingly fierce fighting considering the wretched physical and psychological condition of the Aztecs. The vengeful Tlaxcalans fought and pillaged with increasing vigor, razing and burning Cuauhtémoc’s palace. In the last days of July, Cortés looked up to see smoke rising in thick plumes from the pyramid temple in Tlatelolco. It was Alvarado’s signal that the great marketplace had been taken. Thereafter Cortés and Alvarado were able to join forces and make coordinated forays against the stubborn holdouts. Francisco de Montano, who had recently returned from the summit of Popocatépetl, and a soldier named Gutierre de Badajoz, placed Cortés’s flag at the top of the temple to signal victory there.16

  For several days the Spaniards and their allies made similar raids, during which the Tlaxcalans were particularly ruthless, killing women and children indiscriminately, despite protestations by Cortés. The captain-general ascended the steps of the high pyramid to gain a view over the whole city and discovered there the decapitated heads of many of his Spanish brethren impaled and displayed on skull racks, as well as the heads of numerous Tlaxcalans, the Aztecs’ arch-enemies. Cortés stood at the edge so that the entire city could see him, perhaps hoping the sight of him rather than their own priests, or Cuauhtémoc, would convince the Aztecs at last to give up. Nearly ninety percent of the city was now in his possession.17 But still the proud and tenacious Cuauhtémoc refused to submit. Despite the appearance of utter dominance for Cortés, pockets of elite Aztec fighting corps remained, brave eagle and jaguar warriors, men who would much sooner die than surrender.

  To further illustrate his positional advantage (both tactically and symbolically), Cortés moved his military headquarters to the Amaxac district, setting up a crimson-canopied tent on a prominent rooftop where he could survey the battlefield and orchestrate maneuvers.18 He noted that large number of the enemy had taken refuge on adjacent rooftops, atop stilt houses near the lakeshore, making them impossible targets for the cavalry and difficult ones for his infantry. They were, however, somewhat exposed to brigantine fire from the water—and in fact this area had a lagoon where most of the remaining Aztec war canoes were moored.

  In the first days of August, worried about now-dwindling gunpowder stores and wondering how to conclude a siege that had now gone on for nearly three months, Cortés was approached by a man named Soltelo, a soldier who had served in Italy under Gonzalo de Córdova. Soltelo claimed to be knowledgeable in the fabrication of war machines and suggested that Cortés manufacture a catapult with which they might bombard the final Aztec redoubt, thereby saving gunpowder and potentially subduing the enemy. At this point Cortés was willing to try anything, so he ordered Diego Hernández, a clever builder who had made wheeled carts back in Cempoala and then assisted Martín López with the brigantines, to construct the elaborate catapult.19 He hoped that the machine could terrorize the Aztecs into submission.

  After just a few days of construction, the catapult was ready and was brought to
a specially manufactured launching platform on top of a pyramid, where they positioned it for dramatic firing. The war machine was a complete failure. The great stones they loaded into its sling fell out before they were launched, dropping inconsequentially to the ground below. Try as they might, the carpenters and shipbuilders could not make it work, and in the end Cortés ordered it dismantled and hidden. During construction Cortés and his captains had threatened the Aztecs, saying that this godlike machine (which the Aztecs themselves called “the Wooden Sling”) would annihilate them all. He was embarrassed—even a bit sheepish—by the failure. “We were obliged,” he admitted, “to conceal the failure of the catapult by saying that we had been moved by compassion to spare them.”20

  During the four days of the construction of the catapult, the Aztec populace had continued to suffer horrendous hardship of famine and dehydration, perishing in such great numbers that a stench rose in the air as the bodies of the unfortunate were piled in houses or thrown into the lake. Emaciated women and children huddled along the streets, gaunt and exhausted, unable to offer resistance.21 And neither were the Aztec warriors any match for the better-fed and -watered Spaniards and their allies. During two days’ fighting—which by now could really only be accurately described as slaughter—Cortés claimed to have killed and imprisoned more than fifty thousand people, warriors and women and children. The Tlaxcalans annihilated with an ancient vengeance, a kind of hatred and vitriol that shocked even Cortés, who said of his allied killing machine, “No race, however savage, has ever practiced such fierce and unnatural cruelty as the natives of these parts.”*56 22 But despite this claim of compassion (which rings as a bit disingenuous coming from the Butcher of Cholula), Cortés unquestionably benefited from the services of these allies he called “savages.”

  Cortés made a few final attempts to meet with the Aztec emperor, who could clearly see that his empire was in its final days. But these parlays never materialized. Once Cortés was told that Cuauhtémoc wished to speak with him from across a canal, but at the appointed time Cortés was informed that the leader was too sick to come. Another rendezvous was planned to take place at the marketplace, but Cortés waited many hours and the emperor never showed up.23 The captain-general, weary of the siege and of these failed correspondences, had one final exchange with some emissaries of Cuauhtémoc. These Aztec generals gorged themselves on the Spaniards’ food offerings, then left with food for their leader, which was presumably meant as a powerful enticement to a man ruling over a starving people. But still Cuauhtémoc refused to come, sending the generals back with only a pile of meager cotton garments. Despite their bitter famine, to the end the Aztecs refused to consume the flesh of their own people (the practice was reserved only for religious rituals); Bernal Díaz noted that “the Mexicans did not eat the flesh of their own people, only that of our men and our Tlascalan allies whom they had captured.”24

  The Spaniards had nothing left to do but continue the wholesale ransacking and guerrilla-style street fighting, and for these duties Cortés relied in great part on the enthusiastic Tlaxcalans. Cuauhtémoc could certainly see that the end was near; it was only a matter of how it would unfold. It must have pained him beyond words to see his once-proud people penned into the small quarter the survivors now occupied, the houses nearby smoldering rubble, others filled with the dead and the nearly dead. The air grew thick with obsidian-colored smoke, while the streets were riddled with crying children and wailing women beating their empty hands against what few walls remained.25

  In a last-ditch effort to combat what appeared inevitable, Cuauhtémoc sent forth one of his greatest individual warriors, bedecking him in the feather garb of the Quetzal Owl, the armor and regalia of former Aztec ruler Ahuitzotl. He flew forth wielding obsidian-tipped spears and arrows, flanked by four attendants. His brilliant green quetzal feathers spanned out, making him seem larger than life. His plumage gleamed and shimmered as he leaped into battle. The Quetzal Owl warrior fought bravely, driving scores of enemies back through intimidation and power. He ascended a rooftop, fired arrows upon the invaders, then leaped from the roof and was gone.26

  On the evening of August 12, 1521, according to Aztec sources, one last omen appeared. Perhaps it was finally the sign that the emperor Montezuma had been waiting for, come too late:

  At nightfall it began to rain…Suddenly the omen appeared, blazing like a great bonfire in the sky. It wheeled in enormous spirals like a whirlwind and gave off a shower of sparks and red-hot coals…It also made loud noises, rumbling and hissing like a metal tube placed over a fire. It hovered for awhile above Coyonacazco. From there it moved out into the middle of the lake where it suddenly disappeared. No one cried out when this omen came into view: the people knew what it meant and they watched in silence.27

  The end of the Aztec empire was upon them. The wheeling blood-colored whirlwind came to be referred to as “the Final Omen.” In shock and terror the Aztecs realized that their civilization was—both literally and figuratively—being consumed by their enemy and by the lake itself. Their gods, it seemed, had forsaken them.

  Cuauhtémoc had no intention of being taken alive, and after consulting with his priests, the next morning he agreed to flee the city by water rather than face certain annihilation.28 Perhaps he believed he still had a chance to rally some kind of defense if allies could be summoned from across the water. Perhaps he even still clung to a kernel of faith in the oracle of Huitzilopochtli, which had predicted that the Aztecs would find salvation on the eightieth day of the siege, now in its seventy-fifth day. Cuauhtémoc was loaded into a war canoe along with Tetlepanquetzal, the king of Tacuba, another soldier, and a boatman. As quietly as they could, they paddled away from the smoking and flattened island capital.

  From his rooftop tent, Cortés had planned what he hoped would be a combined final attack featuring multiple operations: cavalry, infantry, and a sustained naval bombardment. Cortés would direct land divisions under Alvarado and Olid, essentially herding any resistant Aztec forces backward through crumbling Tlatelolco to the very edge of the lake, where most civilians were already huddled. Sandoval would captain a brigantine launch and attack at the same place from the water, firing on any exposed or fleeing canoes in the lagoon and at the people onshore. Cortés instructed his captains and soldiers to find Cuauhtémoc and take him alive if at all possible, “for once that had been done the war would cease.”29 So on August 13, 1521—the day of St. Hippolytus, the patron saint of horses—the Spaniards marched and sailed and rode against the last vestiges of Aztec resistance, which was now little more than knots of emaciated warriors.

  Though he had personally wrought this carnage with his sustained and skillful siege, Cortés could hardly believe what he witnessed. “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.”30 As the Spaniards approached, women and children poured forth from the mostly destroyed houses, fleeing in panic and despair. In the frantic press of humanity many were trampled while others attempted to escape into the lake, where many floundered and drowned. In the streets Cortés and his men and horses came across such numbers of dead that they had no choice but to walk over and upon them.

  The brigantines encircled the reedy lagoon and engaged a small fleet of war canoes, but these showed no spirit for fighting, and as there were fewer than fifty of them and no match for the large Spanish boats, they gave up. One canoe was spotted escaping, its small crew paddling furiously, and a brigantine captain named Garci Holguín pursued it under sail and oar, ordering his crossbowmen to level on it and fire when in range. Seeing that they were aimed upon, the occupants of the canoe raised their hands and called out for the Spaniards not to shoot, for aboard the canoe was Cuauhtémoc, lord of the Aztecs.31

  Garci Holguín was thrilled to have made the capture, but immediately Sandoval came alongside in a br
igantine and, as he outranked Holguín, ordered that the prisoner be handed over for him to bring in. A vigorous argument ensued between the two, and Cortés demanded that Cuauhtémoc be brought before him immediately, without further discussion; he added that the emperor must be treated with respect and dignity and that no harm should come to him. Despite the two captains’ entreaties, it was ultimately Cortés who took credit for the capture of Cuauhtémoc, adding the Aztec emperor to his escutcheon.32 He prepared the rooftop canopy for the official meeting between conqueror and conquered, carpeting the terrace floor with crimson cloth and laying out opulent foodstuffs on tables, offerings befitting an emperor.

  Cortés made sure that Malinche was at his side to translate. The emperor was brought before the captain-general, the Aztec king appearing wan and haggard. Bernal Díaz remembered that “Cuauhtémoc was very delicate, both in body and in features. His face was long but cheerful, and when his eyes dwelt on you they seemed more grave than gentle, and did not waver.” He was anything but cheerful as he stood before his captor, gesturing toward the dagger at his waist. “Ah, captain,” Cuauhtémoc is said to have implored, “I have already done everything in my power to defend my kingdom and free it from your hands. And since my fortune has not been favorable, take my life, which would be very just. And this will put an end to the Méxican Kingdom, since you have destroyed my city and killed my vassals.”33