Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs
Page 43
Return to text.
*21Diego de Ordaz was himself so impressed with the volcano Popocatépetl that in 1525 he requested of his king, and was granted, the right to install the image of a smoking volcano on his family’s coat of arms.
Return to text.
*22A dedicated Dominican friar, Sahagún spent nearly forty years preparing his General History of the Things of New Spain (the Florentine Codex), a thirteen-volume work translated from Nahuatl Indians who were present before, during, and after the conquest. The work records every conceivable aspect of Aztec life and culture. (See “A Note on the Text and the Sources” at the end of the book.)
Return to text.
*23Chinampas—fields constructed in the lakes of the Valley of Mexico—were a brilliant Aztec agricultural innovation beginning around 1450. It involved staking the lakebeds and dumping lake-bottom soil into these “enclosures,” which created islands of extremely fertile soil (augmented with fertilizer that included human feces, a form of waste management) that did not require irrigation since crop roots could tap the water table below. The design also left crops impervious to frost. The creation of chinampas dramatically helped Tenochtitlán supply its own food and reduce the need for outside sources and is in large part responsible for the great size of the city, which, at 200,000 inhabitants, far outnumbered any other Mesoamerican metropolis. At their height the chinampas fields of the southern lakes Chalco and Xochimilco comprised approximately 2.3 million acres.
Return to text.
*24The population of Tenochtitlán at the time is estimated to have been between 200,000 and 300,000; the entire Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlán’s metropolitan area, contained between 1 million and 2.6 million people. By contrast, Europe’s largest city then was Paris, with 100,000 to 150,000. London had between 50,000 and 60,000. Many scholars agree that at the time Tenochtitlán was the largest city in the world.
Return to text.
*25Montezuma’s speech to Cortés will remain among the most perplexing, intriguing, and problematic in history, the subject of endless interpretation and discussion. How his speech is interpreted underlies and informs the essence of this unprecedented meeting. Cortés’s version appears in a letter he wrote to the king of Spain ten months later, and it is suspect because of its highly politicized nature. The Nahuatl version (quoted above), gleaned from oral histories and here translated into English, is deeply poignant, revealing Montezuma as aristocratic and dignified but also burdened by confusion, self-doubt, and an unwavering belief in destiny.
Return to text.
*26Cortés, of course, was exaggerating this part, since his king had not yet sanctioned his endeavors.
Return to text.
*27A dark and spicy recado or seasoning combination.
Return to text.
*28The hypocrisy of Cortés’s response to Aztec ritual practices cannot be overlooked or overstated, especially given Spain’s recent history of barbarity and cruelty during the Inquisition and its treatment of the Moors and the Jews. Cortés had just weeks before sanctioned the throat-slitting of six thousand innocent civilians in Cholula. His reaction simply reinforces the historical truth that one people’s passion is another’s perversity.
Return to text.
*29Aztec chroniclers also recorded the Spaniards’ discovery of the treasure: “They went to Montezuma’s storehouse where his personal treasures were kept. The Spaniards grinned like little beasts and patted each other with delight. When they entered the hall of treasures, it was as if they had arrived in paradise. They searched everywhere and coveted everything: they were slaves to their own greed.”2
Return to text.
**30Sometime later Cortés actually told Montezuma that he had discovered the treasure, and Montezuma asked only that the Spaniards not disturb or take any of the gorgeous and revered featherwork, which rightfully belonged not to him but to his gods. The gold, he said, they could keep.
Return to text.
*31Cortés had actually learned of this skirmish while mopping up the massacre in Cholula, but he had chosen to withhold the news from his men so as not to alarm them or cause discord among them. He also wanted further confirmation of the events, which he now had.
Return to text.
*32According to William Prescott, some of the soldiers decided to take their shares of gold, which they had melted and then, with the aid of Tenochtitlán’s best jewelers, fashioned into gaudy chains that they wore around their necks as displays of wealth. See Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, (New York, 2001), 487–88.
Return to text.
*33Montezuma’s acquiescence to Cortés while in captivity has long been puzzled over and debated, some calling Montezuma weak, cowardly, pathetic, and at the very least enigmatic. But it would certainly make sense to apply some modern psychology to him, and the Stockholm syndrome, in which a captive becomes sympathetic to and ultimately identifies with his captor (initially out of fear), certainly applies here.
Return to text.
*34One of these shipwrecked in rough weather en route, claiming all aboard, including the ship’s captain, Cristóbal de Morante, a good friend of Velázquez. So the usual number referred to is eighteen.
Return to text.
*35Narváez’s star-crossed nightmare would not end there. In 1528, partly fueled by the stinging memory of his loss to Cortés, the one-eyed conquistador would lead an expedition to Florida, only to have all but four of his original crew perish during the journey. Narváez died at sea, without food or water and riddled with leprosy.
Return to text.
*36Cortés’s reaction to the massacre, and his calling it madness, ring a bit ironic, given the proceedings he orchestrated at the Massacre of Cholula. He may even have prearranged it in secret with Alvarado.
Return to text.
*37There are two distinct and opposing versions of Montezuma’s death. The Spanish version claims that after being stoned, he lived for three days but had lost the will to survive and refused food, water, or any medical attempts to revive him. Aztec accounts are nearly unanimous that Montezuma recovered from his wounds but was stabbed to death by the Spanish or, some argue, “garroted” (an execution style using an iron collar to strangle or break the neck of a victim), then thrown from the palace roof to the ground and his people below. Scant evidence supports the garroting theory, since it was typically employed during formal, even public, executions, and virtually no other garroting incidents are recorded in the chronicles of the conquest. Alas, the exact nature of Montezuma’s death must remain a mystery.
Return to text.
*38Juan de Salamanca attempted to give the plumed headdress to Cortés, saying that it was his by right for the initial gallant charge, but Cortés declined. Many years later, in 1535, Salamanca used the decorative plume as the model for his family’s coat of arms, which was granted him by the king.
Return to text.
*39Cortés had to be careful here, as he knew that the Spanish crown frowned on “slavery” in the strict sense of the word. In the West Indies (and subsequently, on the Mexican mainland) conquistadors had evaded this policy with the clever use of encomienda, which made captured or subsumed native inhabitants the propertied workforce of a land owner but not technically “slaves.”
Return to text.
*40The exact number of deaths as a result of smallpox alone is impossible to determine, but the impact the disease had on the native population was catastrophic. In México some estimates suggest that more than half the population died from the disease, and according to recent projections, between its onset in 1518 and the early 1600s, as many as 100 million Indians perished from European-borne diseases, which was then the equivalent of one in five people on earth. See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York, 2005), 94.
Return to text.
*41Cuauhtémoc would not be formally inaugurated as the eleventh (and last) Aztec king until February 1521.
&nbs
p; Return to text.
*42By calling the Aztecs “vassals in rebellion,” Cortés was directly referring to his initial (now famous) discussion with Montezuma, in which Cortés interpreted (rather too conveniently) Montezuma’s speech as a concession, and donation, of his empire to Spain via Hernán Cortés. It was a devilishly shrewd bit of diplomacy on the part of Cortés; the “justifications” for war later were referred to in the Siete Partidas, the Spanish legal code.
Return to text.
*43The flaying and wearing of sacrifice victim skin was relatively common and part of particular ceremonies, including the Feast of the Flaying of Men. Immediately following ritual sacrifice, the face (and sometimes the arms and legs as well) would be flayed, removed, and donned by priests while the skins remained slick with blood and membrane. See David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice (Boston, 1999), 140–63; and Diego Duran, History of the Indies of New Spain (Norman, Okla., 1994), 169–74.
Return to text.
*44The exact route of the transport of the brigantines is not known, though two primary possibilities seem most likely. The most level route, with the least amount of vertical gain, would have been the one north of the Telapon mountain. Another possibility is the Pass of Ápam, which Cortés took in his retreat during La Noche Triste and knew to be secure. See C. Harvey Gardiner, Naval Power in the Conquest of Mexico (Austin, Tex., 1956), 117–18 and 117n, for discussion. Also see Manuel Orozco y Berra, Historia Antigua, (Mexico City, 1880), 4:523–24.
Return to text.
*45Cortés said they left Texcoco with 30,000 Indian allies, while Bernal Díaz halves that number to 15,000. In any event, the great numbers of warriors and bearers made the Spanish assaults on the lake cities possible.
Return to text.
*46Puertocarrero and Montejo, sailing with pilot Alaminos, reached Spain at the end of October 1519. They were not received as heroic conquerors of the New World, as it turns out. Their ship, Cortés’s flagship the Santa María de la Concepción, was impounded, and much of the treasure they carried was embargoed and some of it seized (including five Totonac Indians sent as evidence of their amazing discoveries). It would take procuradores Montejo and Puertocarrero many months to finally receive an audience with the crown, finally gaining it (and then only with the assistance of Cortés’s father, Martín Cortés) in late April 1520.
Return to text.
**47The bones, thought to be from giant humans, were actually those of the mammoth (Bison antiquus) and other prehistoric elephants. Based on the size of the femur bones, Spanish scientists hypothesized that the giant men would have been over twenty-five feet tall.
Return to text.
*48Montezuma I reigned from 1440 to 1469.
Return to text.
**49Originally called Cuauhnahuac by the Mexicans, but Cortés and the Spaniards mispronounced the term enough so that they eventually renamed it Cuernavaca, the name it still bears. It is considered to be among the most beautiful and dramatic places in all of Mexico, with a lovely temperate year-round climate, situated at five thousand feet above sea level. Cortés would eventually establish a large sugar plantation there and maintain a stronghold palace fortress (now called the Palacio de Cortés) atop conquered Aztec buildings. Diego Rivera painted murals on the top floor of the palace between 1927 and 1930. Cuernavaca is today the capital of the state of Morelos.
Return to text.
*50None of the chroniclers, of course, had accurate means of counting the large allied forces. As a result, the numbers attributed to Cortés’s allied reconquest force vary considerably, with 200,000 on the conservative but reasonable side, given modern military scholarship. Some writers place the number closer to half a million. Whatever the actual number, Cortés clearly employed large numbers of allied forces in various crucial capacities, including combat, the destruction and construction of bridges on the causeways, the demolition and incineration of houses, and the all-important transporting and preparing of food.
Return to text.
*51Father Pedro de Melgarejo had arrived back in February carrying an impressive supply of “indulgences,” in the form of papal bulls (bulas de cruzada), officially stamped sheets that, if purchased and signed by a priest, guaranteed absolution from any sins committed during their expeditions in México. Needless to say, Melgarejo turned a solid trade among the mercenary soldiers, and Cortés seemed to favor him from the moment of his arrival.
Return to text.
*52The aqueduct was improved upon and maintained by Itzcóatl’s successor, his nephew Montezuma I.
Return to text.
*53Cortés is of course referring to the riches he took from Montezuma but lost when fleeing the city during La Noche Triste.
Return to text.
*54These sacrifices are recorded, if with less dramatization, by Nahuatl accounts, including the Florentine Codex (book 12, ch. 34), which states: “Then they pursued the Spaniards; they went knocking them down and taking them. And when they had gotten [the Spaniards] to where they were to die…they stripped them. They took away from them all their war gear and their cotton upper armor, and they made them drop everything that was on them to the ground. Then they performed their office and killed them; their companions watched from out on the water.”
Return to text.
*55Juan Ponce de León’s first attempt to find the Fountain of Youth was made in 1512, during which voyage he failed to make landing. The wounds he suffered during this second attempt (including being struck by a poisoned arrow) were so extensive that he died not long after his return to Cuba, in late July 1521.
Return to text.
*56The Spanish chroniclers are consistent in saying that twelve thousand people were killed or captured on one day, and a staggering forty thousand on another. Most of these people were unarmed or reduced to throwing stones.
Return to text.
*57Cuauhtémoc, the last (eleventh) emperor of the Aztecs, is revered in modern Mexico much more highly than is Montezuma. Cuauhtémoc remains a national hero, a symbol of resistance, of pride and honor, a leader who fought until the very end. Montezuma’s legacy is much more complex, controversial, and enigmatic.
Return to text.
*58Cortés was initially against the encomienda system, which was essentially a euphemism for slavery in which a number of the conquered population (sometimes in the hundreds) were distributed as laborers to work the newly appropriated land of a designated landholder (conquistadors, primarily, and in the case of México, some high-ranking indigenous chiefs and officials who had converted to Christianity). In lieu of making cash payments to his officers, men who had fought gallantly beside him, Cortés could see no alternative but to offer encomiendas as payment for their years of services rendered. The first of these encomiendas were parceled out as early as April 1522.
Return to text.
*59Despite the quick and categorical extinction of religion, however, one important and marvelous irony resulted from the arrival and tenure of the friars—they essentially saved the Nahuatl language. Two highly educated and highly trained Franciscan friars—Andrés de Olmos and Alonso de Molina—spent decades working with remaining Nahuatl speakers of Mexico, first learning their language and then compiling magnificent (and massive) volumes of grammar, pronunciation, idiomatic expression, and vocabulary. Following them, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and numerous Nahuatl speakers spent nearly forty years compiling a monumental volume—an encyclopedia—of every conceivable aspect of preconquest Nahua life. This archival text has come to be known as the Florentine Codex. See 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), 5–6. Also see Ignacio Bernal, in Fray Diego Duran, The History of the Indies of New Spain (Norman, Okla., 1994), 565–77.
Return to text.
e Aztecs