By early morning even the murderous Alvarado was at last overwhelmed and lost control of the rear guard. Unhorsed and wounded, he staggered to the shore alone, after leaping his way over the breach. His co-commander, Juan Velázquez de Léon, was never heard from again, presumably either slain, drowned, or dragged off alive to be sacrificed and eaten. Although the Spaniards had marched out in the rainy and foggy night as an ordered army of four divisions, the escape march had quickly become every man for himself, as the confused Europeans were surrounded and mostly pushed into the lake along the mile and a quarter of causeway over Lake Texcoco.
Seeing the human detritus ahead, some of Alvarado’s men at the rear turned around and fled back to the compound inside Tenochtitlán. They apparently preferred a glorious last stand on dry land to being clubbed to death at night in the muck of the causeway. Once there, this doomed band of stragglers purportedly met a few other terrified Castilians who had been left behind in confusion—presumably barricaded in the nearby temple of Tezcatlipoca—or who had not been willing to risk the sortie across Lake Texcoco. As many as two hundred Castilians never made it back out of Tenochtitlán. Later Aztec accounts related that after a few days of stout resistance they were killed or captured and sacrificed.
Fewer than half the Castilians and Tlaxcalans finally stumbled onto shore. What saved them from seeming annihilation was the near maniac determination of Cortés himself. Far from panicking, Cortés quickly organized in Tlacopán what was left of his little army and then set out the next day on the long way back to the Tlaxcalan capital, nearly 150 miles away, much of it through hostile and rugged terrain. For all the Aztec slaughter, the best of his men had survived. Alvarado—under dubious circumstances—had made it across the causeways, though he lost nearly all the men he was entrusted to lead. The other great knights—Ávila, Grado, Olid, Ordaz, Rangel, Sandoval, and Tapia—were yet alive. So was the irrepressible and deadly María de Estrada, who had once so terrified the Mexicas as some sort of supernatural Christian she-god.
The survival of these skilled killers ensured that the Spaniards would retain a core of mounted warriors. These trusty few had had long experience in coolly charging through Indian swarms, lancing and hacking away with near impunity—in sharp contrast with the caliber of the later recruits from Narváez’s failed expedition. For the most part, the newcomers took far too much gold, were far more terrified of the Mexicas, and felt little affinity with Cortés and his original, battle-hardened cohort that had landed in fall 1519.
Cortés also noted that the loyal and invaluable translator Doña Marina, La Malinche herself, was safe. Even more important, his brilliant shipwright, Martín López, had sliced his way through along the levee. Though badly wounded, he, too, survived. The caudillo remarked to his shattered and demoralized troops, “Well, let’s go, we lack nothing.” At the moment of his greatest defeat, Cortés realized he still had the services of the one man who could craft new ships, which would allow him victory in his inevitable and deadly return to come. The contrast with the Mexicas was startling: after expelling the Spaniards, thousands of the courageous victors rejoiced and for critical hours ceased pursuit of a few hundred fugitives—who themselves on the brink of obliteration were already determined somehow to return to wipe out their tormentors.
Flight—July 2–9, 1520
When light broke after the Noche Triste, nearly eight hundred Europeans were dead or missing. More than half the Castilians who had entered Tenochtitlán during the prior month were gone, either rotting in the lake or about to have their chests ritually cut open. Nine months of the Spaniards’ constant campaigning and careful alliance-building among dozens of Indian cities were for naught. The half year of conniving inside Tenochtitlán itself to gain the city peaceably, characterized by alternate threats to and reconciliation with Montezuma, was likewise apparently wasted. In some six hours of slaughter on the dikes Cortés had literally lost the army that had taken nearly a year to create. Stalwarts like Alonso de Escobar and Velázquez de Léon were missing—and logically presumed to have been dragged atop the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli to have their hearts ripped out during the Mexica victory parade. The Mexica priests were already preparing trophies of Castilian heads to send around to the surrounding villages on the lakeshore and beyond as proof of the mortality of the newcomers—with accompanying threats not to aid the desperate fugitives, who bled and fled like men, not gods.
Contemporary Aztec accounts record the immediate aftermath at Tenochtitlán of the Castilians’ “Melancholy Night”:
But they laid out the corpses of the Spaniards apart from the others; they lined them up in rows in a separate place. Their bodies were as white as the new buds of the canestalk, as white as the buds of the maguey. They removed the dead “stags” [horses] that had carried the “gods” on their shoulders. Then they gathered up everything the Spaniards had abandoned in their terror. When a man saw something he wanted, he took it, it became his property; he hefted it onto his shoulders and carried it home. They also collected all the weapons that had been left behind or had fallen into the canal—the cannons, arquebuses, swords, spears, bows and arrows—along with all the steel helmets, coats of mail and breastplates, and the shields of metal, wood, and hide. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 89)
Nearly all the Spanish survivors were wounded or sick. Given weeks of marching and inhaling summer dust, poor food and wounds incurred in the compound in Tenochtitlán, the sudden rain and cold water of the lake, and the constant need to wear their heavy metal breastplates, many developed bronchial ailments—most likely pneumonia—and dozens expired along the route of escape. Despite the wretched condition of his men, Cortés nevertheless had to leave Tlacopán and the lake’s shore as quickly as possible while the Mexicas for a time celebrated and regrouped. Most of the stolen gold was gone. The cannon were at the bottom of Lake Texcoco. The harquebuses and crossbows were almost all lost. The few weapons remaining were without powder and bolts. In theory, the Mexicas, with the captured arms that they had stripped from the dead on the causeway and the doomed Spaniards back in the compound, had at their disposal better missile weapons than the Castilians.
No exact record exists of the number of Tlaxcalans killed or captured—no doubt their dead were more than a thousand. Further allied Indian reinforcements were miles away. The tiny Spanish garrison at Vera Cruz was incommunicado. All in all, Cortés figured that he had lost 70 percent of his horses and 65 percent of his men. Worse still, he was more than 150 miles from the first friendly town of Tlaxcala. Had he any allies at all left? For the moment he was at the shore of the seemingly still neutral city of Tlacopán. But in hours thousands of Mexicas would be at his heels, with bribes and incentives for any confederates who could bind and deliver the pitiful starving Castilians. The trick was getting out of the valley alive, since the entire plain was full of former allies increasingly hostile, and eager to ride the wave of Aztec victory.
Whether or not Cortés knew it at the time, his fortunes were about to change dramatically. First, he was not quite surrounded, at least not yet. Apparently, the Aztecs were not completely familiar with this new type of European battle, which, unlike their accustomed “flower wars,” campaigns aimed at submission, had nothing to do with rules or rituals, much less captives, but hinged on the science of killing the enemy outright, pursuing the defeated, ending his will to resist, and thus gaining through slaughter what negotiations and politics had failed to deliver. Under the tenets of European wars of annihilation, letting a man like Cortés—or an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Napoleon, or Lord Chelmsford—escape with his army after defeat was no victory, but only an assurance that the next round would be bloodier still, when an angrier, more experienced, and wiser force would return to settle the issue once and for all.
Cortés, for his part, had inflicted great damage on the Mexicas. Alvarado’s foolish and cowardly but deadly massacre a few weeks earlier at the festival of Toxcatl
had robbed the unsuspecting Mexicas of the best of their military leadership—one almost wonders if Alvarado’s diabolical massacre had the implicit approval of the absent Cortés, since it did irreparable harm to the Aztec cause. Thousands more of the warrior nobles were dead or severely wounded from the week of fighting in late June. The Mexicas’ most powerful emperor was shamefully killed when (or immediately after) addressing his subjects. Vital tribute was permanently interrupted. Hundreds of houses inside Tenochtitlán had been burned, and dozens of shrines looted and desecrated.
In the battle’s aftermath the shell-shocked Mexicas were busy back in Tenochtitlán, as if the danger was at last past, cleaning up the mess in their streets, glad to be rid of these murderous interlopers and their terrible propensity to destroy almost everything they touched. More important than the considerable Mexica losses was a series of seven separate squadrons of Spanish ships on the seas headed for Vera Cruz, in transit with more powder, crossbows, horses, and cannon from Cuba and Spain, filled with desperate men sniffing profit and ready to join in on the rumored goldfest.
Cortés knew that the slaughter of so many Spanish kinsmen, and the subsequent rumors of human sacrifice and the eating of flesh, would enrage the proud Castilians and call forth each man’s sense of honor to return and bring fire and ruin to these cannibalistic infidels. Cortés had sized up the Aztec way of war: their emphasis was on capturing rather than on killing; their weapons could stun but rarely kill without repeated blows. Aztec warriors preferred individual sword- and clubplay, rather than mass tactics of shock assault in disciplined ranks and files. Their brigades centered around gaudy, feather-clad, banner-carrying lieutenants whose death might send their regional musters fleeing in terror. The commander in chief was remote and mostly apart from his men in battle. The Aztec army was even more hated by other natives than were the Castilians.
Cortés was now on dry land, away from the infernal causeways and the canoes, with room for his horses and phalanxes of swordsmen. In his fear and depression after the Noche Triste he did not yet realize amid the slaughter of his Castilians and Tlaxcalans that there were still thousands of Indians—Tepanecs, Totonacs, Chalcans, and fresh Tlaxcalans—who were not yet ready to join the Aztecs, but wavering still. Many were secretly eager for the Castilians to return to Tenochtitlán.
To Cortés the Noche Triste had been a great defeat. But for the most stalwart of the Aztecs’ native enemies, who provided food for the tables of the Aztec elite and their own bodies for the infernal Aztec gods, the thought that the caudillo’s army had pranced its way into the fortress city, kidnapped the hated emperor, and slaughtered thousands of Aztecs on their retreat was cause for wonder, not contempt. The tales that flew across the Valley of Mexico were not all of Aztec triumph over the Castilians; they also emphasized that the audacious and lethal white men had slashed their way out to safety along the frightful causeways. The reports stressed the butchery of the thousands of Aztecs, not merely the hundreds of Castilians killed. The new Aztec emperor, Cuitláhuac, might claim that his display cases of flayed skins and skulls were those of Cortés, Sandoval, and Alvarado, but the truth soon emerged that all three legendary killers were alive and determined to return. Even the Aztec ambassadors’ confident tales that some forty-five Castilians left behind in Tlaxcala had been waylaid and slaughtered en route to the coast made little impression. As the wavering tribes of Mexico weighed the odds and nursed their grievances over the yearly human tribute demanded by the Aztecs, a great many would prefer Castilian to Aztec brutality—and perhaps the strange Jesus Christ of the white killers they did not know to the bloodthirsty Huitzilopochtli they were only too familiar with.
Finally, it was rumored that a recent European arrival on the coast— purportedly an African slave from Narváez’s contingent—was ailing from smallpox. The Castilians, on the verge of extinction in summer 1520, had thus gained a new and unforeseen ally: a lethal bacillus amid a population without much immunity. New germs among people who slept in group huts, who were largely urban rather than rural dwellers, who communally ate and washed together, and who had neither biological nor cultural experience with European epidemics would soon wipe out hundreds of thousands—friendly, neutral, and hostile alike—killing far more Aztec warriors than the Toledo blades of the Castilians. On the morning of July 2, wet, wounded, and facing annihilation, little did Cortés and his pathetic band at Tlacopán know that in a few months his men would not only regain their reputation as the dreaded strangers with steel blades and thundering weapons but once again take on the appearance of supermen whom alone this terrible new curse of angry gods did not infect.
So Cortés on this July 2, 1520, gathered his men together and for the next few days lumbered out under constant harassment. Finally, about halfway back to the safety of the Tlaxcalans, at the small village of Otumba, the new Mexica emperor, Cuitláhuac, and his vast army caught up with the Castilians. The Spanish annals later claimed that 40,000 were assembled, a plausible number given the change of heart among the surrounding villages in the immediate vicinity of Tenochtitlán. The Mexicas quickly surrounded Cortés’s men and for the next six hours gradually beat them down, inasmuch as there were fewer than twenty horses left, all were wounded, and they were without cannon or harquebuses. Even skeptics concede that Cortés’s Spaniards may have been outnumbered on the Plain of Otumba by as much as a hundred to one.
As the Spaniards were nearing obliteration, Cortés spotted the commander of the Aztec line, the cihuacoatl, and his subordinates decked out in bright colors and gaudy feathers, the leader himself carrying the Aztec plumed standard on his back. Díaz del Castillo notes that Cortés was unimpressed by the terrible insignia, but instead selected Sandoval, Olid, Ávila, Alvarado, and Juan de Salamanca—the most deadly lancers of the age—and rode with them into the throng. “When Cortés saw him with many other Mexican chieftains all wearing great plumes, he said to our Captains: ‘Now, Señores, let us break through them and leave none of them unwounded’ ” (B. Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 320). Despite vast numerical superiority and the recent victory on the causeways, the Aztecs were defenseless against mounted attacks on the plains and dense ranks of swordsmen—and the Plain of Otumba was tailor-made for Spanish horsemen. None of the Mexicas had ever encountered a mounted enemy that charged directly at their cihuacoatl. With their leader torn apart by the lancers, and the Aztec war banner in Spanish hands, thousands fled back to Tenochtitlán.
The battle at Otumba, coming as it did just eight days after the Noche Triste, was in many ways Cortés’s greatest victory. In a famous passage William Prescott noted the role of discipline, military science, and the personal leadership of Hernán Cortés in the sudden reversal of Aztec fortune (Cuitláhuac, as Montezuma before, kept out of the fighting):
The Indians were in all their strength, while the Christians were wasted by disease, famine, and long protracted sufferings; without cannon or firearms, and deficient in the military apparatus which had so often struck terror into their barbarian foe,—deficient even in the terrors of a victorious name. But they had discipline on their side, desperate resolve, and implicit confidence in their commander. (History of the Conquest of Mexico, 465)
When at last Cortés fought his way to safety at Tlaxcala, many of his men, especially the few surviving late-comers who had joined him after defecting from his archenemy Narváez, were spent and tired of Mexico. Most were ready to march to Vera Cruz to find passage back to Cuba. Others were furious that Juan Páez, left behind in Tlaxcala when Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, had stayed put—although he had a force of thousands of Tlaxcalans who were eager to march to the relief of the beleaguered conquistadors when they learned that they and their kinsmen were trapped in the Aztec capital. In addition, news reached the exhausted army of the ambush and slaughter of an auxiliary of forty-five Spaniards who had attempted to reach Vera Cruz.
Then Cortés only made things worse: he announced that he would confiscate all the
gold carried out of the city to pay for provisions. He also forbade any of the survivors to march to the coast to find a ship home. Francisco López de Gómara wrote of their grumbling:
What does Cortés think he is doing? Why does he want to keep us here to die the evil death? What has he got against us that he won’t let us go? Our heads are broken, our bodies are rotting and covered with wounds and sores, bloodless, weak, and naked. We are in a strange land, poor, sick, surrounded by enemies, and without hope of rising from the spot where we fall. We would be fools and idiots if we should let ourselves in for another risk like the past one. Unlike him, we do not wish to die a fool’s death, for he, in his insatiable thirst for glory and authority, thinks nothing of dying himself, and still less of our death. He does not consider the fact that he is without men, guns, arms, and horses (which bear the brunt of war), and has no provisions, which is the worst lack of all. (Cortés, 228)
No one could envision that in a mere thirteen months Hernán Cortés would return to Tenochtitlán, kill thousands, and then end the Aztec nation forever.
The Destruction of Tenochtitlán—April 28–August 13, 1521
Once the Castilians reached safety at the Tlaxcalan town of Hueyotlipan on July 9, 1520, their plight improved incrementally during the rest of the year. In July the Tlaxcalans agreed to a perpetual alliance—they had the wherewithal to muster nearly 50,000 warriors from their allied domains—in exchange for a share of the booty from Tenochtitlán, perpetual relief from tribute, and a fortified presence inside the city once the Aztec capital was conquered. During August Cortés re-formed his army and at the head of thousands of Tlaxcalans stormed the fortress of Tepeaca and began systematically to overrun its surrounding villages. In September the brilliant Martín López was given the best craftsmen in the army, thousands of Tlaxcalan workers, and the salvaged hardware from the destroyed ships in Vera Cruz, and told to build fourteen brigantines that could be dismantled, carried over the mountains to Tenochtitlán, reassembled, and then launched on Lake Texcoco.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 24
