Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
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By the end of that month the virulent smallpox epidemic had made its way from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán. Thousands of Mexicas began dying from what they at first thought was a mysterious skin ailment. Years later Mexica survivors related to Bernardino de Sahagún the terrible symptoms; he in turn recorded their accounts in near Thucydidean fashion:
Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great many died from this plague and many others of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. Some people came down with a milder form of the disease; they suffered less than the others and made a good recovery. But they could not escape entirely. Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a sore broke out, it gouged an ugly pockmark in the skin. And a few of the survivors were left completely blind. (M. León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 85–86)
Montezuma’s successor, Cuitláhuac, who had attacked Cortés at Otumba, fell to the disease and was replaced by the younger and more audacious Cuauhtémoc. The latter would eventually surrender a destroyed Tenochtitlán—the third Aztec emperor in less than a year to deal with Hernán Cortés.
This strange sequence of events that gradually turned Cortés’s ruined army into a terrible force of vengeance against the Aztecs continued unabated. In the late fall of 1520 seven squadrons of ships docked in Vera Cruz, adding another two hundred men to Cortés’s remnant of four hundred to five hundred conquistadors. For the first time in six months, there were fresh horses and plenty of powder, cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. Cortés, in addition, sent ships to Hispaniola and Jamaica for even more horses and arms. Meanwhile, for much of December 1520 while he was putting down the Tepeacans, the ever-dependable Sandoval had conquered all the tribes between Tlaxcala and the coast, and thus ensured safe transit of supplies from Vera Cruz to the conquistadors’ headquarters in Tlaxcala. If the huge city of Tenochtitlán was amply supplied by water transport, the Spanish had the entire Atlantic to draw in supplies in safety at Vera Cruz. But whereas Cortés could build a fleet to cut off the canoes of Tenochtitlán, no Aztec warrior had a clue how to prevent the “floating mountains” from docking at Vera Cruz with even more of the infernal whiteskins and their thunderous weapons.
By new year 1521, Cortés had pacified most of the hostile tribes between Vera Cruz and Tenochtitlán and had gained plentiful supplies and additional soldiers. He was in the midst of an enormous shipbuilding program to ensure naval protection when his infantry and cavalry returned to the causeways on the lake. Cortés may have started his march back to Tenochtitlán with some 550 Spanish infantrymen—still only half as many Castilians who had fled the city the prior June—including 80 harquebusiers and crossbowmen, along with at least forty fresh horses and nine new cannon. In addition, he selected 10,000 of the best Tlaxcalan warriors, as preparations were made for the march on the satellite cities that surrounded Tenochtitlán. By early April 1521 the new army was on the outskirts of the Mexica capital, the ships were readied for launching, and roving parties had systematically begun to cut off food and water supplies to the city. This second offensive had none of the pretense of conciliation and alliance of the first “visit.” After the Noche Triste Cortés was intent on either obtaining the unconditional surrender of the new emperor, Cuauhtémoc, and his people or defeating the Aztec army in battle. Should the Aztecs not capitulate, the Castilians would destroy Tenochtitlán block by block and turn it over to the Tlaxcalans to loot— reminiscent of the manner in which Alexander had leveled Thebes and then allowed the surrounding Boeotians to rob, enslave, and kill the survivors with impunity.
In late April, after six months of constant campaigning in the surrounding countryside to amputate the Aztec tributary empire, Cortés’s reconstituted army was back on the causeways and blockading Tenochtitlán. Most of the cities on the lakeshore and in the Valley of Mexico were subdued or had joined Cortés. A year earlier it may have been unwise for the Spanish to enter an island fortress city, but now Cortés was eager to prove it was even more foolish for the Mexicas to stay in it, as the Castilians’ former besiegers would become the besieged. By April 28, 1521, Martín López’s flat-bottomed brigantines—masted, oared, decked with cannon, and bristling with crossbowmen and harquebusiers—were over the mountains, reassembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco, ensuring that the Aztec canoes could no longer attack the Castilians on the causeways. In a world without horses or oxen—or even the wheel—an enormous city of a quarter million like Tenochtitlán could only be supplied by water. Indeed, its daily survival depended on tons of maize, fish, fruits, and vegetables shipped over the lake by thousands of canoes. The destruction of that fleet would not only cripple Aztec military power but starve the city into submission.
With shouts of “Castilla, Castilla, Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala!” Cortés led his Spanish-Indian army toward Tenochtitlán itself. While contemporary observers put the coalition’s size at nearly half a million, the invading army more likely numbered around 50,000 to 75,000. With last-minute reinforcements from Vera Cruz, it was spearheaded by some 700 to 800 Castilian foot soldiers, 90 horsemen, 120 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, and three large cannon, as well as smaller falconets and the firepower of the fourteen brigantines. Many Castilians also had new steel helmets, swords, occasional breastplates, and shields, in addition to spare parts for their firearms.
Cortés’s plan was simple. His three veteran knights—Alvardo, Olid, and Sandoval—would each lead a quarter of the army along the three main levees into the city. The causeway to Tlacopán would for a while be left open but guarded, to allow fugitives to flee the siege. Cortés himself would take the fourth component and embark on the brigantines, with some three hundred Castilians, about twenty-five men to a ship. In addition, thousands of Texcocans and Tlaxcalans would follow in boats— Ixtlilxochitl, the leader of the Texcocans, would later claim his people manned 16,000 canoes in Cortés’s armada. The combined fleet would aid the three land assaults, enforce the blockade, and destroy the enemy vessels.
By June 1, 1521, Cortés had cut entirely the city’s supply of fresh water and stormed the island fortress of Tepepolco, which the Mexicas used to coordinate their attacks on the multipronged Castilian invasions. The Spaniards deemed that the siege had officially begun on May 30, when they had blockaded the city’s sources of supply—later memorializing the destruction of Tenochtitlán as “the seventy-five days” between May 30 and August 13, 1521. But progress remained difficult for the rest of the summer as the Aztecs still vastly outnumbered the invaders. They placed sharp sticks in the mud of the lake to tear up the brigantines and swarmed all over the flagship, the Capitana. Had it not been for the courageous Martín López—in some ways the most impressive of Cortés’s men—and a small group of swordsmen, who rallied to expel the Aztec boarders and slaughter those who would bind and drag off the caudillo, both the Capitana and its captain would have been captured.
The Castilians were also learning that they not only had to defeat the Aztec army but had to storm the city and raze it to the ground if they were to crush all resistance. The four-pronged Spanish attack would slowly advance along the causeways, enter the suburbs, and then retreat back to safety during the evening. Success was determined by the degree to which Cortés could fill in breaches in the dikes and keep the causeways intact. That way, the Spaniards could move freely, as they began to dismantle the city blocks of Tenochtitlán, tearing down temples, walls, and houses. Gradually, the horsemen, crossbowmen, and harquebusiers gained room to operate and found clear lines of fire, while eliminating the source of ambushes in corners and narrow streets. Cortés drew on 2,000 years of European
siegecraft—the ancient Hellenic science of poliorcetics (“fencing in the polis”)—that addressed the target city’s supply of water, food, and sanitation, as artillery, sorties, and missile attack were concentrated on weak places in the Aztec defenses to augment nature’s assault of hunger and plague.
If the Spanish proceeded too far inside Tenochtitlán proper—where they could be ambushed and swarmed, while their levees of retreat were breached—they faced annihilation. But if the brigantines kept the causeways passable, then each day the attackers could cross into the city, destroy another block or two, kill hundreds more Aztecs, and then retreat during the night to their fortified compounds. Usually, foot soldiers advanced, supported by the fire of cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows, slashing away at the unarmored Aztecs with their Toledo blades. At key moments, dozens of mounted mailed lancers would charge concentrations of the enemy or ambush the Mexicas when at dusk they rashly pursued the retreating foot soldiers. By late June the emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had seen the futility of Aztec tactics and radically revised his defenses by removing most of the surviving population of Tenochtitlán proper—warriors, civilians, and even the idols and effigies of the gods from the Great Temple— to the adjoining northern island suburb of Tlatelolco. This was a wise move: the change of defense drew in the Spaniards, who wrongly believed the Aztecs were defeated and fleeing. In addition, the Castilians were unaware that Tlatelolco was a far more crowded precinct, far more suitable for urban warfare than the broad avenues of the mostly destroyed Tenochtitlán.
The key to the entire struggle was to deny the Spaniards room for their horses to charge, space for their infantry to form into ranks, and clear lines of vision for their artillery and firearms. Now as the battle shifted to Tlatelolco, the Tlatelolcons joined the Aztecs in swarming the Castilians in the winding and narrow streets and cutting the causeways to the mainland. Cortés himself was unhorsed and for the third time nearly dragged off; Cristóbal de Olea and an unnamed Tlaxcalan hacked away at the enraged Mexicas, severing their hands and thus saving their caudillo. In the initial ambush at Tlatelolco, more than fifty Spaniards were bound and dragged off and twenty more killed, as thousands of Tlaxcalans paid for the Castilians’ impetuosity by being killed or captured. One brigantine was sunk and another precious cannon lost.
The Mexicas immediately beheaded some of their captives, waving them in front of the retreating Spaniards, claiming them to be Cortés and his officers: “So we shall kill you, as we have killed Malinche and Sandoval.” Once the Spaniards reached safety, the sound of drums was heard. Bernal Díaz del Castillo recalls what followed:
When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole. (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 436)
The Spanish feared a repeat of the Noche Triste. The Mexicas yelled at the Tlaxcalans, throwing them roasted legs of their captured brethren and pieces of the Castilians. “Eat of the flesh of these Teules [Castilians] and of your brothers, for we are already glutted with it, and you can stuff yourselves with this” (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 437). When news spread throughout Cortés’s Indian alliance that the Aztecs were eating Spanish flesh, and dozens of bound conquistadors were feathered and marched up the steps of the pyramid to their deaths, nearly the entire Indian alliance suddenly collapsed. Most indigenous leaders feared the return of the Aztec terror, realizing that the Europeans themselves were as vulnerable before the hungry Aztec gods as they themselves had been before the Spanish arrival. Meanwhile, Cortés and his men nursed their wounds and regrouped as Cuauhtémoc rallied his allies, sought new support, and sent the body parts of captured Castilians and their horses among the villages around Lake Texcoco as proof of the Spaniards’ failure. But then an odd thing happened—or perhaps a predictable occurrence, given the earlier Mexica failure to follow up immediately on the morning after the Noche Triste. The Aztecs for most of July did not storm the beleaguered Spanish compounds. Hunger, disease, the great destruction of their city, and thousands of battle casualties had decimated their army. Once again, it was almost as if the Aztecs were dispirited after their dramatic victory. Killing and sacrificing Castilians did not stop the invaders, even as Cortés grew more confident after a setback.
By the latter part of July the wearied Aztecs could no longer cut the dikes, thereby ensuring the Castilians free access in and out of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. Supplies from Vera Cruz reached Cortés uninterrupted. His men fabricated additional gunpowder by lowering themselves into Mount Popocatépetl to fetch the critical ingredient of sulfur. Aztec deserters confirmed that Tenochtitlán was starving and the eighteen-year-old emperor increasingly unable to marshal an effective resistance. Cortés in his famous third letter to Charles V described the desperate plight of the Aztecs:
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. Countless numbers of men, women, and children came toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned amid the multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench. So that we should not discover the plight in which they were in, they dared neither throw these bodies into the water where the brigantines might find them nor throw them beyond their boundaries where the soldiers might see them, and so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them. (Letters from Mexico, 263–64)
Castilian horsemen roamed the dikes at will and slaughtered hundreds who emerged from their hovels in Tlatelolco searching for food. The Tlaxcalans became increasingly hard to rein in; they roamed the city butchering—and occasionally eating—any of the Mexicas they found. On August 13 Sandoval and García Holguín caught Cuauhtémoc fleeing in a canoe. Both fought over honors for the prize of his capture, prompting Cortés to intervene, in the manner, he mused, that Marius and Sulla had fought over the shackled Numidian king Jugurtha. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the allied prince of Texcoco, Ixtlilxochitl, who wrote a history from the allied Indian side decades after the conquest, related Cuauhtémoc’s surrender speech.
Ah Captain, 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 with this you will put an end to the Mexican Kingdom, since you have destroyed my kingdom and vassals. (Ally of Cortés, 52)
Cortés would spare the young emperor, then drag him along during his disastrous expedition to Honduras—only shamelessly to hang him in transit in 1523 on trumped-up charges that he was inciting revolt among the Indian allies.
Since the city had been cut off in late May, more than 100,000 Aztecs had fallen in the fighting, along with at least a hundred Castilians and 20,000 Indian allies. But that was a small percentage of the actual losses in the two-year struggle for Mexico City. Disease, hunger, and constant fighting had essentially wiped out the population of Tenochtitlán. The final tally of the dead would eventually reach more than 1 million of the peoples surrounding Lake Texcoco. In the entire two-year campaign since Cortés had marched in from Vera Cruz, Sp
anish losses were no more than 1,000 out of some 1,600 who had at various times fought for Tenochtitlán.
The eventual carnage was to be even more appalling. In the ensuing decades smallpox was followed by measles, bubonic plague, then flu, whooping cough, and mumps, reducing the population of central Mexico from more than 8 million when Cortés landed to well below a million a half century later. In less than two years Cortés and his tiny army had inaugurated a chain of events that changed the face of an entire subcontinent and destroyed a civilization.
AZTEC WAR
Misconceptions and stereotypes abound concerning the Aztecs at war. Too often Mesoamericans are seen as little more than bizarre savages who fought in hordes solely to facilitate human sacrifice on a vast scale, captive-takers whose queer rules of engagement preempted real killing on the battlefield. More recently, apologists have reinvented them as New World Greeks whose impressive architecture symbolized an enlightened and progressive civilization that did not really sacrifice or eat fellow humans, and saw no reason to craft military technology they did not need. In fact, the Aztecs were neither Greeks nor savages, but shrewd theocratic imperialists who had ruthlessly created a loosely knit political empire based on the perception of terror, backed up by a deadly army, and fueled by a vast system of tribute.