by Buddy Levy
38. Quoted in Díaz, Discovery, 561–62.
39. Ibid., 569; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 387. The Florentine Codex also records this spectacle; Lockhart, We People Here, 210–18. Also interesting is León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 104–9.
40. Cortés, Letters, 241; Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden and Horcasitas, 314; Carrasco, City of Sacrifice, 50–51, 87.
Chapter 22
1. Marks, Cortés, 243–44; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 104, 107.
2. López-Portillo, They Are Coming, 330–31; Marks, Cortés, 244; Cortés, Letters, 246; Gómara, Cortés, 282–83.
3. Cortés, Letters, 242; Gómara, Cortés, 283; Prescott, History, 780.
4. Gardiner, Constant Captain, 93; Cortés, Letters, 242; Gómara, Cortés, 283.
5. The reference to the “roasted babies” is found in Cortés, Letters, 245; Gómara, Cortés, 284; Marks, Cortés, 247.
6. Ixtlilxochitl, Ally, 42–44; Gardiner, Constant Captain, 93–95; Hassig, Mexico, 166–68.
7. Cortés, Letters, 247, 490n; Prescott, History, 781; Thomas, Conquest, 516 and 752n.
8. Prescott, History, 379; Cortés, Letters, 279, 325; Thomas, Conquest, 516.
9. Gómara, Cortés, 287; Prescott, History, 783; Thomas, Conquest, 516. Women disguised as warriors are described in Duran, Indies, 555.
10. Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, We People Here, 218; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 107–9; Thomas, Conquest, 516; Kelly, Alvarado, 114–15.
11. Cortés, Letters, 248.
12. Ibid.
13. Ixtlilxochitl, Ally, 43–44; Hassig, Mexico, 169.
14. As we have seen, the estimates vary considerably. The figure 150,000 is actually conservative.
15. Gardiner, Constant Captain, 95–96; Cortés, Letters, 251–52; Kelly, Alvarado, 114–15; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 398–99.
16. Thomas, Conquest, 518; Prescott, History, 790–91; Díaz, Discovery, 578.
17. Cortés, Letters, 256.
18. Lockhart, We People Here, 242–43. The tent is also referred to as “red” and “varicolored.”
19. Prescott, History, 794–95; Cortés, Letters, 256–57, 490–91n; Thomas, Conquest, 520; Díaz, Discovery, 587–88.
20. Cortés, Letters, 257.
21. Sahagún, War of Conquest, 79; Marks, Cortés, 246; Kelly, Alvarado, 115.
22. Cortés, Letters, 262–63.
23. Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 400.
24. Ibid., 407.
25. From Aztec accounts, including “Epic Description of the Beseiged City” in León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 137–38; and “The Fall of Tenochtitlán,” of Cantares Mexicanas, in Schwartz, Victors, 212–13. Finally, see Bancroft, History of Mexico, 192.
26. León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 112–13; Lockhart, We People Here, 241; Clendinnen, Aztecs, 271–72.
27. Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, We People Here, 242–43. Also in León-Portilla, The Broken Spears, 116.
28. López-Portillo, They Are Coming, 349; Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden and Hornacitas, 316; Clendinnen, Aztecs, 272.
29. Cortés, Letters, 263.
30. Ibid., 263.
31. Ibid., 264; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 402; Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 149; Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden, 556.
32. Prescott, History, 807, 807n; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 402–4; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 123–24; Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden, 556.
33. Ixtlilxochitl, Ally, 52; Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden, 556, 556n. Very similar versions of this speech are found in León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 123; Cortés, Letters, 264–65; Gómara, Cortés, 292.
34. Prescott, History, 809; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 406; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 120.
35. Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, We People Here, 252.
36. Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 406.
37. León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 118–20; Thomas, Conquest, 528; Prescott, History, 810–12.
38. Gómara, Cortés, 293; León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 120.
39. Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 407; López-Portillo, They Are Coming, 356–57.
Epilogue
1. Cortés, Letters, 265.
2. Gómara, Cortés, 295–96; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 408–10; Thomas, Conquest, 546, 758–59n; López-Portillo, They Are Coming, 358–60. There is general agreement among the sources that the tortures occurred directly after the fall of the city, which makes sense, as Cortés and his men were still searching for the lost treasure of Montezuma.
3. Cortés, Letters, 492–93n. Versions of Cuauhtémoc’s death are in 518n; Clendinnen, Aztecs, 273; Gillespie, Aztec Kings, 228.
4. Marks, Cortés, 268.
5. Prescott, History, 830.
6. Gómara, Cortés, 296–97.
7. Quoted in Wood, Conquistadors, 15–16; Thomas, Conquest, 536, 755n.
8. Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 410.
9. For detailed discussions of the encomienda system, see Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: Forced Native Labor in the Spanish Colonies, 1492–1550 (Berkeley, Calif., 1950); Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 58–97; and Ida Altman, “Spanish Society in Mexico City After the Conquest,” Hispanic American Historical Review 71:3 (1991), 413–45; Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555 (Austin, Tex., 1991).
10. Pratt, “‘Yo soy,’” 859. On population, see also John E. Kicza, The Peoples and Civilizations of the Americas Before Contact (Washington, D.C., 1998), 22.
11. Cortés, Letters, 261–63, 491n. This large figure of over 200,000 includes death by smallpox. Burland, Montezuma, cites the dead at “nearly a quarter of a million” (249–50). Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 150, and Mann, 1491, 129, both cite a more conservative estimate of 100,000 dead during the siege.
12. Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 413.
13. Quoted in Clendinnen, Aztecs, 272; Léon-Portilla, Broken Spears, 137–38.
14. Cortés, Letters, 267; Gómara, Cortés, 298; Innes, Conquistadors, 194.
15. Innes, Conquistadors, 194; White, Cortés, 266–68. Also see Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492–1763 (London and New York, 2002), xiv–xv.
16. Gardiner, Constant Captain, 104–5; Marvin E. Butterfield, Jerónimo de Aguilar, Conquistador (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1955), 48.
17. Gardiner, Constant Captain, 105; Gómara, Cortés, 303–4; Prescott, History, 836.
18. Gardiner, Constant Captain, 105–8; Thomas, Conquest, 550–53; Marks, Cortés, 270–72; Cortés, Letters, 496–97n.
19. Quoted in Wood, Conquistadors, 53.
20. Cortés, Letters, 321, 495–96n.
21. As usual, the numbers vary considerably. Ixtlilxochitl reports that as many as 400,000 indigenous people from the Valley of Mexico and beyond assisted in the rebuilding during the first years after the conquest. See also Thomas, Conquest, 562; Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 155; Prescott, History, 833, 839, 843. Rebuilding is also discussed in Gómara, Cortés, 323–25.
22. Burland, Montezuma, 251–54; Gómara, Cortés, 323–25; Thomas, Conquest, 562–63; Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 155. Also see Felipe Solis, The Aztec Empire (New York, 2004), 347.
23. Duran, Indies, trans. Heyden, 560–61, 568. A useful and comprehensive overview of this system of conversion is offered in Gibson, Under Spanish Rule, 98–135. Also see Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 (New York, 1992), 143–60. Finally see David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992), 216–21.
24. Hassig, Mexico, 184–85. Also see the fascinating and comprehensive (nearly five hundred pages) study by James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 202–10, 442–46.
25. Gómara, Cortés, 297.
26. Pohl and
Robinson, Aztecs, 139, 155; Thomas, Conquest, 568–69; Cortés, Letters, 509–10n; Marks, Cortés, 277.
27. Anna Lanyon, The New World of Martín Cortés (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), ix, 4; Prescott, History, 214, 868, 906.
28. Lanyon, Martín Cortés, ix, 4; Marks, Cortés, 274–75.
29. Prescott, History, 891n; Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 159; Wood, Conquistadors, 100–1; Thomas, Conquest, 579–82, 635; Marks, Cortés, 274–75; Madariaga, Cortés, 415–17.
30. Cortés, Letters, 302.
31. Pohl and Robinson, Aztecs, 159; Wood, Conquistadors, 101.
32. Quoted in Prescott, History, 900n; Marks, Cortés, 332.
33. Lanyon, Malinche’s Conquest, 144–53; Cortés, Letters, 464–65n; Díaz, New Spain, trans. Cohen, 85–87; Prescott, History, 867. Also very useful is Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), 1–23, 305–7. Finally see Frances Karttunen, “Rethinking Malinche,” in Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, Indian Women of Early Mexico (Norman, Okla., 1997), 291–312.
34. Lanyon, Martín Cortés, xi. Lanyon points out that the term mestizo is not to be used pejoratively or derogatorily but rather connotes a blending or fusing of peoples and cultures.
Appendix D
1. This list of principal Aztec deities is adapted from a number of sources, including H. B. Nicholson, “Religion in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico,” in Archeology of Northern Mesoamerica, part 1, edited by Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal, 395–446; and Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 10 (Austin, 1971). Also in Smith, Aztecs, 200–1, and Van Tuerenhout, Aztecs, 180.
Appendix E
1. For more detailed information on the Aztec kings and the imperial Aztec lineage, see Gillespie, Aztec Kings, 3–24; Van Tuerenhout, Aztecs, 38–46; Smith, Aztecs, 43–55.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND THE SOURCES
Conquistador is concerned primarily (although certainly not exclusively) with the events directly leading up to and directly following the expedition to Mexico led by Hernán Cortés, 1519–21. For those interested in further reading and inquiry, especially regarding the remainder of Cortés’s life and the aftermath of the conquest, numerous works are listed below and in the extensive bibliography that follows, works which have either been cited, quoted directly, or used as reference.
Winston Churchill’s famous witticism “History is written by the victors” is all too apt when it comes to the firsthand accounts chronicling the conquest of Mexico. In the aftermath of the conquest, adding dreadful insult to what was already devastating injury, the Spanish conquistadors destroyed nearly all of the native books. As a result, native firsthand accounts—though incredibly rich, lyrical, and informative—are few. Additionally, nearly all the native chronicles are in fact postconquest reconstructions that rely on, or are based upon, those lost original preconquest documents.
Still, a number of extremely important native sources were vital to Conquistador. The Aztec codices (a number of which appear early in the bibliography that follows) are particularly important. They are books written (or in many cases, drawn) by pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial–era Aztecs, and they provide some of the best existing primary source material pertaining to Aztec life and culture. Foremost among them is the so-called Florentine Codex (also referred to as the Codice Florentino), prepared by Dominican friar Fray Bernardino de Sahagún under the title The General History of the Things of New Spain. Written over a time span of nearly forty years (approximately 1540–77), Sahagún’s work was monumental in scope, translated from Nahua Indians who were present before, during, and after the conquest. The thirteen-volume work records all aspects of Aztec life and culture in one of the most remarkable and ambitious ethnological studies ever attempted. The English-language gold standard of this text is Bernardino de Sahagún, The General History of the Things of New Spain, 13 vols., translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson (Salt Lake City, 1950–82), and Book 12, Conquest of New Spain 1585 Revision, translated by Howard F. Cline (Salt Lake City, 1989). A comprehensive study of the life of Sahagún is the rich and readable Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist (Norman, Oklahoma, 2002).
Another friar to embark on work similar to that of Sahagún was Fray Diego Duran, who came to Mexico as a small child and grew up speaking both his native Spanish and Nahuatl. In 1581 he completed his work, which is available now as The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated by Doris Heyden (Norman, Okla., and London, 1994). Duran based much of his work on the lost so-called Crónica X, a document of unknown authorship said to have influenced many subsequent codices.
As important as any of the native sources (and the earliest, written directly after the fall of Tenochtitlán, 1524–28) is the Anales de Tlatelolco. The first-ever ethnographic work transcribing the Nahuatl language into Latin characters, the Anales de Tlatelolco is housed in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. A delightfully readable (and heartbreaking) version of the work is available in English in the form of The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, edited by Miguel León-Portilla (Boston, 1990). The text is also referred to in Spanish as it was first published in 1959: Visión de los Vencidos (Vision of the Vanquished).
A last crucial early Aztec source is the Crónica Mexicana (Mexico City, 1944) or, alternatively, Crónica Mexicoyotl (Mexico City, 1949), written by Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, the grandson of Montezuma II. Tezozómoc interviewed his own parents as well as individuals who had been alive before the conquest in compiling his work, which he wrote in 1598.
A number of Spanish conquistadors recorded their accounts of the events before, during, and after the conquest. Hernán Cortés penned five letters to Charles V during, and directly following, his expeditions. By far the best, most comprehensive, and most meticulously annotated collection is Letters from Mexico, edited and translated by Anthony Pagden (New Haven, Conn., 2001). Cortés recorded a tremendous amount of detail during his historic conquest of Mexico (1519–21), including daily life in the Aztec capital, the palaces and buildings of Montezuma, and the living conditions, religious practices, and cultural mores of the people from the Yucatán coast all the way to the Valley of Mexico. It is important, however, to read Cortés’s letters with a healthy dose of critical circumspection, bearing in mind that they are highly political, in effect long justifications for actions that might even be construed as treasonous. Still, his observations and recordings of life in Mexico during the period are among the finest, most detailed, and most fascinating in existence. The 2001 Yale Nota Bene edition, edited by Anthony Pagden, is the version relied upon in Conquistador, and Pagden’s nearly one hundred pages of extensive notes provide a comprehensive and rich resource for further research and study of all the events related to the conquest and its central figures.
A close relative of Cortés’s letters is the “biography” written by Cortés’s chaplain and secretary, Francisco López de Gómara. Written in 1552 and based very closely on Cortés’s letters, personal recollections, and conversations, the work appears now as Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, edited and translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley, Calif., 1964). Gómara’s work employs a number of revisions to Cortés’s letters.
The best and most readable of all the Spanish accounts is certainly the memoir of participant conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a man who was present at all three expeditions to Mexico and claims to have participated in 119 battles. In 1568, at over seventy years old, he undertook to write his memoirs, his True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In part written to take Gómara to task on a number of details where Cortés seemed to be garnering undue credit, Díaz’s work lay neglected and unpublished until 1632, when it was discovered in a private library and published in Madrid. Though written some fifty years after the stirring events it describes, the work of Bernal Díaz del Castillo remains among the most important extant firsthand accounts of the conquistadors, and
it is so reliable as to have been borrowed from liberally by famed historian William H. Prescott in his groundbreaking The History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 2001). Nearly every other scholar and writer since Prescott has leaned heavily on Bernal Díaz, in part because his writing is so detailed, descriptive, and dramatic, but also because—at least compared with other chroniclers like Cortés and Gómara—Díaz is the least politically motivated. Díaz, writing near the end of his life, had virtually nothing to gain by fabrication, and although he comes across as a proud Spaniard imbued with a sense of mission and duty, he appears to be trying to provide an accurate account of the events, and not to justify them. In a vigorous writing style Díaz conveys the wonder and awe felt by the conquistadors as they encountered the people of Mexico for the first time. A number of versions exist (including useful and modernized abridged versions). Quoted and relied on in Conquistador are two versions: The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, translated by Alfred Percival Maudslay (New York, 1928); and The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J.M. Cohen, abridged ed. (New York, 1963).
A handful of other accounts by conquistadors were written during and after the conquest, and these are compiled together in an excellent book by Patricia de Fuentes called The Conquistadors: First-person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Norman, Okla., 1993). The collection includes the work of Pedro de Alvarado, Andrés de Tapia, Juan Díaz, and the notorious Anonymous Conquistador, among others.
