Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The odds were now dramatically against the vastly outnumbered Castilians, who foolishly had brought their entire tiny force inside the island city of Tenochtitlán. During this awful week the Spaniards gave up their grandiose ideas that had taken root over their prior eight-month occupation of Mexico City. The thought of ruling the city as European lords now seemed utter folly. Soon the notion of either a truce or an Aztec surrender became equally ludicrous. Finally, Cortés’s men began to have doubts that they could even come out of the infernal city with their lives, much less with their trove of looted gold. 1

  Only repeated fire from their harquebusiers and crossbowmen, and occasional volleys from the cannon—thirty or so Mexica attackers often fell with each shot—allowed the stalwart Diego de Ordaz to return to the Castilians’ bunker and report to his caudillo that he had failed in his breakout attempt: the streets were all blocked and full of their enraged hosts. Still, Ordaz’s men hacked away entire limbs of the unarmored Mexicas with their Toledo swords. The iron lances of the mounted mailed knights killed even more with single thrusts. Grapeshot from the cannon shredded wave after wave of Mexicas. A few horses trampled dozens of unprotected Aztecs. The ugly Spanish mastiffs tore at the legs and arms of the shrieking attackers. Volleys of crossbow bolts and lead balls from the harquebuses mowed natives at distances of one hundred yards and more.

  The density of metropolitan warfare and the sheer number of enraged and courageous native warriors were new experiences for the undefeated conquistadors. Their commanders, veterans of Spain’s wars against the Italians and Ottomans, had never seen such audacity or bravery in all the fighting in the Mediterranean. Ordaz was soon to learn that his excellence in technology and tactics might not any longer be able to nullify the numerically superior enemy if the Spanish were continually forced to fight in the back alleys and narrow corridors of Tenochtitlán, where they could be thronged and pelted from the rooftops by men often as brave as themselves. The more desperate Aztecs were beginning to kill a few of his soldiers, not merely wrestling them to the ground to bind them as captives for their hungry gods.

  The rout of this trial sally of Ordaz’s four hundred conquistadors— including almost all the Spanish crossbowmen and harquebusiers that Cortés had left—was proof enough that there was no way out of the fortress city. Or so it seemed. The neighboring allies in Tlacopán (modern-day Tacuba) on the shore had wisely warned Cortés the day before not to reenter the dreaded Tenochtitlán, but to remain with them on the coast of Lake Texcoco. “Lord,” they pleaded with Cortés, “stay here in Tacuba, or in Coyoacán, or in Texcoco . . . because here on the mainland, in these meadows, if the Mexica rise against you, you would defend yourself better than in the city” (H. Thomas, Conquest, 395).

  Excellent advice, but back in the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán were the carefully guarded captured Aztec treasure, the hostage emperor, Montezuma, and the beleaguered Pedro de Alvarado with fewer than one hundred of the expedition’s best conquistadors. These had stayed behind while Cortés marched back to the coast to put down a rival Spanish challenge to his campaign. Besides, with this new contingent of Pánfilo de Narváez’s Cuban army, who had “joined” Cortés in Vera Cruz in the aftermath of their commander’s failed attempt to subvert the conquest of Tenochtitlán, Cortés had more than a thousand soldiers. The city had been all but his anyway for almost the last eight months. After his brief excursion to Vera Cruz, he had far more arms and supplies than when his men had first dismantled their ships and marched inland in July 1519, reaching Montezuma’s capital on November 8 of that year. Why should he worry now?

  What tribe in all of Mexico had shown they could stop such a force? In the prior twelve months the Mayas, Totonacs, Tlaxcalans, Otomis, and Cholulas had all learned the futility of opposing mounted lancers, gunpowder weapons, crossbows, fierce war dogs, and Spanish steel—not to mention the classical battle tactics of massed infantry and the generalship of Cortés himself, who sought to annihilate, not capture, his enemies through disciplined squares, carefully timed mounted attacks, and mass volleys of gunfire. Surely if Cortés had initially marched into Tenochtitlán in November 1519 with 500 conquistadors, could he not just as easily now march out in June 1520 with more than 1,200?

  He proudly announced to the anxious residents of Tlacopán that, in fact, his Castilians would go back across the causeways into the capital city of his New-Spain-to-be—Cortés’s gift to the adolescent king, Charles V. They would make a show of force, throw down some more idols, threaten a few Aztec lords, reenter the imperial palace, collect their booty, rescue Alvarado, and then order Montezuma to cease the futile resistance of his subjects.

  But after Cortés rode into Tenochtitlán and rejoined Alvarado’s men, the entire reunited contingent was soon cut off in the Palace of Axayácatl and the temple of Tezcatlipoca. The once-friendly Mexicas were blocking all three causeways leading out of their great island capital. More than 1,000 Spaniards, with a small contingent of their gallant Tlaxcalan allies— some 2,000 indigenous enemies of the Aztecs—were completely surrounded in a tiny compound by well over 200,000 enraged Mexicas and a growing number of their tributary allies from the surrounding lakeside communities. Once it was clear that the captive Montezuma no longer had control of his subjects, and that Ordaz had failed to find a way out, the Castilians packed their gold, hunkered down, and began planning their escape before they were utterly annihilated.

  Had not the diabolical Narváez—now half-blind and in shackles in Cortés’s jail—interrupted his plans, Cortés and his fanatics would have thrown down all the Aztec stone idols, fumigated the pyramids in the Valley of Mexico from the stench of their human offal, tossed the Mexica priests with their odious capes of human skin down from the heights, eradicated the horrific sacrifices, banned cannibalism and sodomy, introduced the love of the Savior, and then usurped Montezuma as lord and master of an empire of a million Christian subjects and ensconced Cortés himself in the former’s palace as doge of this Venice of New Spain! And what works such an enormous force of laborers might accomplish for their European overseers under Cortés’s megalomaniac tutelage! What subterranean gold treasures such a throng of miners might uncover! Upon entry to Tenochtitlán the awed Mexicas for a while thought Cortés’s soldiers of fortune were white-skinned gods, their horses supernatural centaurs who talked to men, their cannon murderous thunder weapons from the heavens. And their enormous sharp-fanged mastiffs? Surely a far cry from the local tiny lapdogs that were castrated and eaten; more like some devilish fanged creatures of myth. Such were the Castilian fantasies dashed by the thousands of enraged Aztecs now outside the Spanish compound.

  Despite Cortés’s defeat of Narváez’s army, the incorporation into his own force of the latter’s troops, and his successful return across the causeways back into the island city, everything had suddenly gone terribly wrong in the capital. In his absence, the maniacal Pedro de Alvarado had massacred thousands of the Mexica nobles and instigated hostilities against their unarmed women and children. The crazy Castilian had murdered festivalgoers on the pretext that they were plotting insurrection. Or was it their purported resurrection of the now forbidden human sacrifice, or Alvarado’s own paranoia, his greed at the sight of so much gold and jewels on the ceremonial dress of the Aztec nobles, or finally perhaps the sheer sadistic delight of the mounted aristocrat in hacking to pieces hundreds of the defenseless but hated Mexicas? How Alvarado and his tiny coterie of fewer than a hundred conquistadors had managed to slaughter more than 8,000 of them, albeit initially surprised and unarmed in a confined place, was still not altogether clear. Evil could only serve a man like Alvarado so far.

  In any case, Cortés was not gone for more than two months before his jittery lieutenants had sparked a murderous revolt of his once-pacified hosts. “You have done badly,” Cortés lectured the hothead on his return. “You have been false to your trust. Your conduct has been that of a mad-man” (W. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 407–8). Or perhaps
a psychopath—Aztec witnesses a few years after the slaughter reported the effect of steel swords and iron lances upon unprotected flesh:

  They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 76)

  Now a little more than a month later, the Spaniards themselves could find no escape. For a week they sortied out of their headquarters, probing the Aztec resistance in vain attempts to find an exit to the elevated causeways across Lake Texcoco. At night, Cortés’s men saw through the windows of their headquarters the heads of their slain comrades bobbing on sticks; groaning and making wild gestures as if the rotting corpses were some sort of talking dead, the Aztecs used them as puppets of sorts to terrorize the beleaguered Spaniards. Despite the mounting casualties in these battles to the death around the Spanish compound, it was still likely that any Castilian who stumbled in the fighting might be bound and taken captive, to mark resumption of the sacrifices atop the Great Pyramid. The Spaniards’ supplies of fresh water and food were cut off, as they were blockaded and then continuously bombarded with missiles from the surrounding roofs.

  After a week of this mayhem, Cortés was desperate, and in the immediate crisis would survive only through his reliance on his impromptu machines and his own military acumen. All the while, the cannon fired grapeshot that slaughtered the Aztec swarms, killing hundreds and breaking up their efforts to storm his temple redoubt. His men dug a well to find brackish water. They somehow constructed from roof timber and beams in the Aztec temples vast manteletes, or mobile wooden tanks, that could protect up to twenty-five men, as they shot and stabbed in safety from the engines’ apertures. His engineers thereby hoped to clear the area around the Palace of Axayácatl and halt the nightly missile attacks.

  Cortés at last dragged the discredited Montezuma himself onto the roof of the temple to order his subjects below to desist. Instead, the firedup Mexicas jeered the shackled emperor and pelted their once-divine ruler with stones. Soon the Spaniards pulled the dazed emperor back inside, only to find Montezuma mortally wounded—their last chance of parley extinguished. Later rival accounts suggested that the Castilians murdered the emperor in their anger—and on rumors that Montezuma had earlier sent heralds to the Spanish usurper Narváez on the coast to join forces with him against Cortés.

  Cortés next stormed the nearby temple of Yopico. The newly constructed siege engines shielded himself and forty men who climbed the pyramid, cast down idols, threw the priests off their sanctuary, destroyed the stores of ceremonial flayed skins, and generally cleared the rival tower of archers and slingers who had rained death down on the Spaniards. The desperate killing was driven by religion and tactics: sorties against the immediate military challenge of enemy missiles, coupled with the continual Christian crusade to obliterate all traces of the Mexicas’ machinery of sacrifice. Whereas at first the religious war was seen by some conquistadors as an impediment, the Spaniards were learning that the destruction of Aztec idols and priests brought benefits to the battlefield as well—in steadily sapping enemy morale and cohesion, as the Aztecs despaired of seeing their gods, whom they fought to feed, unable to prevent their own destruction.

  In the struggle for Yopico, Cortés reinjured his wounded hand and was almost cast off the pyramid in the terrible melee. The contemporary encomiast Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote of the Spaniards’ mad climb up Yopico: “Oh! What a fight and what a fierce battle it was that took place; it was a memorable thing to see us all streaming with blood and covered with wounds and others slain” (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 306). At least another twenty conquistadors were killed in this desperate second sortie; despite the cannon, horses, and siege engines, there were too many Aztecs in such a confined place to make any headway. Now powder was growing short and shot scarce (should the gold and silver be melted into cannonballs? Cortés wondered). His wounded were hungry and without medical treatment. The mud-brick walls themselves of the temple fortress were eroding from the impact of thousands of missiles and stones. As one Aztec herald pointed out to them, the Mexicas and their allies could lose 250 for every one Spaniard and still annihilate the trapped guests.

  At the end of this last week of June 1520, Cortés was at a crossroads. The choice, as his lieutenants put it to him, was apparently clear-cut: either flee empty-handed or stay and die with the gold in his supposed new tributary city. Characteristically, the caudillo chose neither option. He would instead attempt a night escape across the causeway despite the rain and fog, and carry out under the noses of the Aztecs the cumbersome bars of looted gold and bags of precious jewels. The Castilians would muffle the horses’ hooves. Cortés would order them to bring along a newly constructed movable bridge to span the breaks in the causeways. They would load the golden bars on horses and let the soldiers take out the rest—each man deciding how much gold he would carry under his tunic or breast-plate, the choice being to march wealthy and cumbersome for the fighting to come or to be nimble and poor—and perhaps stay alive. As Francisco López de Gómara, the contemporary chronicler put it, “Among our men, those who were most encumbered with clothing, gold, and jewels were the first to die, and those who were saved carried the least and forged fearlessly ahead. So those who died, died rich, and their gold killed them” ( Cortés, 222).

  For the next two decades the survivors of that awful night of sorrows would engage in mutual recriminations, lawsuits, and slander to determine exactly how much gold was carried out and how much saved. Most was clearly lost, and yet the accusations went on. Cortés would confiscate anyway what precious metal the lucky had brought out on their persons. But all that was years and hundreds of dead in the future. For the moment Cortés’s 1,300 conquistadors had to find a way out of this island maze that had so suddenly been transformed from their paradise to their execution yard.

  Noche Triste—June 30–July 1, 1520

  It was pitch-black and raining. Still, the Castilians had nearly made it, miraculously crossing three canals—the Tecpantzinco, Tacuba, and Atenchicalco—that bisected the causeway of escape leading to the shore town of Tlacopán. They were mostly out of Tenochtitlán proper and strung in a long column on the levee above Lake Texcoco. Their wondrous portable bridge was successful so far in spanning the gaps in their path of escape. But as they began to make their way over the fourth canal, the Mixocoatechialtitlan, a woman who was fetching water spotted the clumsy band and sounded the alarm: “Mexica, come quickly, our enemies are leaving.” The priest of Huitzilopochtli heard her screams and ran wildly to muster the warriors: “Mexican chiefs, your enemies are escaping! Run to your canoes of war” (H. Thomas, Conquest, 410).

  Within minutes hundreds of canoes dotted Lake Texcoco, embarking their crews at various places along the narrow causeway to ambush the column. Others docked beside the army and smothered the Castilians with missiles. The portable bridge quickly gave way under the weight of the frantic fugitives. From now on, the only way out was to trample over the baggage horses and the bodies of those in the vanguard who fell into the canal—and had the macabre effect of providing enough flotsam and jetsam to offer footing for their terrified comrades. Hordes from Tenochtitlán left the city and attacked the retreating conquistadors from the rear, while a new Aztec muster blocked the advance. The Spaniards’ four sloops—control of Lake Texcoco was critical for any successful fighting on the causeways—had long since burned. Help by water was impossible.

  What followed in the next six hours was the greatest European defeat in the New World since its discovery by Columbus, as the
heavily armed Spaniards, far too many laden with gold tucked up in their armor, struggled to bring up their cannon, to keep the horses calm, to organize their harquebusiers and crossbowmen, and somehow while under constant aerial attack to fill in with rubble the chasm that blocked their escape. Contemporary Mexica witnesses later recounted the confused scene as the Spaniards realized their highway of escape was breached, the bridge down, and an open canal blocking their advance:

  When the Spaniards reached the Canal of the Toltecs, the Tlatecayohuacan, they hurled themselves headlong into the water, as if they were jumping from a cliff. The Tlaxcaltecas, the allies from Tliliuhquitepec, the Spanish foot soldiers and horsemen, the few women who accompanied the army— all came to the brink and plunged over it. The canal was soon choked with the bodies of men and horses; they filled the gap in the causeway with their own drowned bodies. Those who followed crossed to the other side by walking on the corpses. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 85–86)

  Those luckily at the fore of the column made it to shore, followed closely by Cortés himself and the second division—but no others. Rounding up five of his best horsemen who had reached safety—Ávila, Gonzalo, Morla, Olid, and the redoubtable Sandoval—Cortés plunged back among thousands to carve out a pocket through which the few still alive of his army might yet be saved. Too late.

  At least half his Castilians were swarmed by Mexicas, while dozens of others were knocked off the causeway and into the water, some being clobbered to death with obsidian blades by warriors in canoes, others captured, bound, and dragged off by those in Lake Texcoco. Many Mexica warriors were excellent swimmers and far more mobile in the water than the heavily laden and often mailed conquistadors. Cortés himself was hit, stunned, and nearly cuffed before being pulled back to safety by his companions Olea and Quiñones. It would not be the last time that the Aztec obsession for capturing Malinche for their gods, rather than killing him outright, saved Cortés from being hacked to pieces.