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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In contrast, the native people of Mexico, like the ancient Egyptians and many Catholic priests, believed that internal diseases were a result of gods or evil adversaries, who wished to punish or take possession of the afflicted—and could thus be thwarted by charms and incantations. Aztec fortune-tellers consulted the pattern of beans thrown on cotton fabrics to determine the etiology of the disease. Various sacrifices, human and animal, would surely appease the angry Macuilxochitl or Tezcatlipoca—or was it Xipa? The idea that communal sleeping and bathing, group sweat-houses, eating on the floor, wearing of human skin, cannibalism, or the lack of immediate burial and disposal of the dead had anything to do with the spread of diseases was poorly known even among the Mesoamerican herbalists.

  The real advantage of the smallpox epidemic to Cortés was not the reductions in Aztec numbers per se but its cultural and political consequences. Because the Spaniards did not die at the same rate as the Indians, there spread the notion—mostly forgotten for a time after the Noche Triste—that the Europeans were more than mortal. As smallpox swept through the Mesoamerican population and wiped out its leadership, the Castilians were careful to support and assist only those new leaders who were favorable to their cause. Smallpox enhanced the Spanish reputation for superhuman strength and solidified their support among native allies, despite the fact that the disease killed as many supporters as enemies— and thus had no real effect on the numerical parity between attackers and besieged.

  Cultural Confusion?

  A recent popular explanation of the Spanish miracle is the notion of cultural confusion. Either a semiotic exegesis is adduced that the Aztecs conceived and expressed reality in radically different ways than the Spanish, and were thus bewildered to the point of impotence by the European arrival, or the more logical argument that their culture did not practice a type of warfare that could thwart such a radically different foe. It is true that the Aztecs at first were unaware of the danger that the Spaniards and their superior military technology and tactics posed. They may have believed that the conquistadors were some sort of divine beings—the long-prophesied return of the light-skinned god Quetzalcoatl and his retinue from across the sea. Many Mexicas believed that Spanish firearms were thunder weapons, their oceangoing ships floating mountains, horses some sort of divine centaurlike beasts, rider and beast being the same creature. Many scholars argue that the absence of a syllabic script, the highly ritualized nature of Aztec formal speech, and the foreign ideas of the Spanish made the Aztecs confused by European directness and vulnerable to their cause-and-effect method of state politics and warfare.

  Montezuma, well before the arrival of the Spaniards at Vera Cruz, seems to have associated rumors of their presence in the Caribbean with the fated return of Quetzalcoatl and the overthrow of the Aztec empire. The combination of religious authority and absolute political power in the hands of a single ruler, coupled with Montezuma’s mythic worldview, in part explains the fatal decision of the Aztec hierarchy to admit Cortés into Tenochtitlán in November 1519. Soon they sized up the Spaniards as no gods at all, but their initial hesitancy and fear had given Cortés a critical edge in the campaign. Others have emphasized the ubiquity of religious ritual in Aztec life, especially the degree to which Aztec warfare was scripted and conventional, with its overriding emphasis on taking captives as sacrificial victims for their gods, rather than killing the enemy outright. In this view, hundreds of times Spanish conquistadors (Cortés among them) could have been easily killed, but escaped due to the failed efforts of the Aztecs to capture them alive.

  As in the case of the smallpox outbreak, the argument is one of degree. The Mexicas may have believed that Cortés and his men were divinities and either let down their guard or feared to attack such “gods” when they were surrounded and vulnerable inside Tenochtitlán in late 1519. The Aztecs did not immediately attempt to kill the Spaniards in battle and thus lost countless opportunities to exterminate their vastly outnumbered enemy. But by the time of the Noche Triste the Spaniards had been in Tenochtitlán for nearly eight months. The Aztecs had the opportunity to examine the Spaniards firsthand—their propensity to eat, sleep, defecate, seek out sex with native women, and exhibit greed for gold. From reports that had long ago reached Montezuma they knew that in the prior Spanish wars with the Otomis and Tlaxcalans (April to November 1519), the Spaniards had bled like men. In fact, a few of them had been killed in battle, making it abundantly clear that their physical bodies were similar to any in Mexico. Before they entered Tenochtitlán, horses had also been brought down, sliced to pieces, and sacrificed: on arrival it was clear to all in the Valley of Mexico that these beasts were large deerlike creatures without any divine propensities.

  At the first real military engagement on the causeways on July 1, 1520, the Aztecs surrounded Cortés with the clear idea of exterminating men, not gods. Under the conditions of these nocturnal mass attacks on the narrow dikes, it was nearly impossible to capture the Castilians, and it is no accident that the vast majority of the six hundred to eight hundred or so Spaniards lost that night were deliberately killed outright or left to drown.

  In the subsequent fighting during the Spanish flight to Tlaxcala, and again at the final siege of Tenochtitlán, the Mexicas employed captured Toledo blades. They may even have attempted to coerce captured conquistadors to show them the intricacies of crossbows. The Mexicas often changed their tactics, learning to avoid swarming attacks in the plains, and during the great siege showed ingenuity in confining their fighting to narrow corridors of the city, where ambushes and missile attack might nullify the Spaniards’ horses and cannon. The Aztecs eventually guessed that the Spanish were intent on their slaughter, and so logically distrusted all affirmations of Spanish mediation. They taunted their Tlaxcalan enemies with prescient boasts that after their own demise, they, too, would end up as slaves to the Spanish.

  If the Aztecs fought with any disadvantage, it was one of training and custom that had taught them to capture and bind rather than slice apart an adversary—habits that would prove hard to shake even against killers like the Spanish, who gave no quarter. Still, we must remember that the notion that soldiers should seek to capture rather than kill their enemy is a most un-Western one, and only reaffirms our general thesis that the entire menu of Western warfare—its tactics of annihilation, mass assault, disciplined files and ranks, and superior technology—was largely responsible for the conquest of Mexico.

  Besides the overriding problem of inferior weaponry and tactics, the greatest cultural disadvantage of the Aztecs has often gone unnoticed: that of the age-old problem of systems collapse that threatens all palatial dynasties in which political power is concentrated among a tiny elite— another non-European phenomenon that has given Western armies enormous advantages in cross-cultural collisions. The abrupt destruction of the Mycenaean palaces (ca. 1200 B.C.), the sudden disintegration of the Persian Empire with Darius III’s flight at Gaugamela, the end of the Incas, and the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union all attest that the way of palatial dynasties is one of extreme precariousness to outside stimuli. Anytime a narrow elite seeks to control all economic and political activity from a fortified citadel, island redoubt, grand palace, or walled Kremlin, the unraveling of empire shortly follows the demise, flight, or discrediting of such imperial grandees—again in contrast to more decentralized, less stratified, and locally controlled Western political and economic entities. Cortés himself sensed that vulnerability and thus kidnapped Montezuma within a week of arrival. With the final flight of the successor emperor Cuauhtémoc in August 1521 the final resistance of the Aztecs came abruptly to an end.

  Malinche

  The great narratives of William Prescott and Hugh Thomas suggest that the abrupt collapse of the Mexicas at little Spanish cost would have been impossible without the singular genius and criminal audacity of Hernán Cortés—whom the natives dubbed “Malinche,” a derivative from the Nahuatl name, Mainulli or Malinali, of his constant companion and Mayan in
terpreter, the brilliant and irrepressible Doña Marina. The implication is prevalent in almost all modern European accounts of the conquest that other conquistadors—even intrepid men such as Governor Velázquez of Cuba, Narváez, who was sent to arrest Cortés, or Cortés’s own capable henchmen, the brave Sandoval and the reckless Alvarado— could not have replicated Cortés’s achievement.

  One does not have to be a believer in the “great man” theory of history to realize that on a number of key occasions—the initial dismantling of the ships and march inland, the war against and then brilliant alliance with Tlaxcala, the kidnapping of Montezuma, the defeat of Narváez and miraculous appropriation of his troops at almost no cost in lives, the heroic trek after the Noche Triste, the return march and launching of the brigantines, and the recovery after the final setback at Tlatelolco—the bravery, oratory, and political savvy of Cortés alone saved the expedition. A mere seven years after the conquest of 1521, Pánfilo Narváez, who had failed to stop Cortés and lost an eye for the trouble, led an expedition into Florida, comparable in size to Cortés’s initial force in Mexico, replete with five hundred men and one hundred horses. Apparently, only four conquistadors survived. They took years to be rescued—illustrating the abject catastrophe that might befall even well-supplied Spanish forces in the New World when led by men without ability and courage.

  Manuel Orozco y Berra paints a near Machiavellian figure of Cortés beyond good and evil, but clearly one unlike any of his generation:

  Consider his ingratitude to Diego Velázquez, his double and deceitful dealings with the tribes, his treachery toward Montezuma. Put to his account the useless massacre of Cholula, the murder of the Aztec monarch, his insatiable desire for gold and for pleasures. Do not forget that he killed his first wife, Catalina Juárez, that in torturing Cuauhtémoc he committed a base deed, that he ruined his rival, Garay, that by retaining command he made himself suspected of the death of Luis Ponce and Marcos de Aguilar. Even accuse him of everything else which history records as proven. But then allow him the plea he was a sagacious politician and a valiant and able captain; that he concluded successfully one of the most astounding feats of modern times. (Ixtlilxochitl, Ally of Cortés, xxvi)

  Cortés was indeed a warrior, ruthless intriguer, and politician of superhuman energy and talent unmatched even among his gifted rivals of the sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of the New World. He was deathly ill from tropical viruses numerous times and had contracted a serious case of malaria even before he set sail from Spain. In the battles for Mexico City he suffered a near concussion and wounds to the hand, foot, and leg. On three occasions he was nearly captured and dragged off to be sacrificed on the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlán. He put down numerous attempts on his own life by native and Castilian cabals and neutralized rivals in the far-distant court of Charles V. Cortés fathered several children by various women and was accused of murdering his first wife, Catalina. Almost wiped out during the Noche Triste, suffering from wounds himself, his army surrounded by enemies, Cortés—because of religious fanaticism, Castilian honor, Spanish patriotism, sheer greed, or personal repute, or a mixture of all that and more—refused to retreat to the safety of Vera Cruz:

  I remembered that Fortune always favors the bold, and furthermore that we were Christians who trusted in the great goodness of God, who would not let us perish utterly nor allow us to lose so great and noble a land which had been, or was to be, subject to Your Majesty; nor could I abandon so great a service as continuing the war whereby we would once more subdue the land as it had been before. I determined, therefore, that on no account would I go across the mountains to the coast. On the contrary, disregarding all the dangers and toil that might befall us, I told them that I would not abandon this land, for, apart from being shameful to myself and dangerous for all, it would be great treason to Your Majesty; rather I resolved to fall on our enemies wherever I could and oppose them in every possible way. (H. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 145)

  Cortés saw well over half his men—some 1,000 out of 1,600—killed or captured in a two-year period. On three occasions his sick and wounded survivors were ready to revolt. He kidnapped Montezuma, waged war against the Aztec emperor’s brother and nephew, at various times fought and repulsed his allied Tlaxcalans, and defeated and then won over a Spanish relief force sent to bring him back in chains. He sailed to Spain to plead his cause, took an enormous force to Guatemala, and claimed he still could lead a voyage to China if given ships and men. All this from a small man of five feet four inches and about 150 pounds, who arrived in Hispaniola penniless at the age of twenty in 1504.

  All that being said, without horses, firearms, steel weapons, armor, ships, dogs, and crossbows, not to mention the military acumen of his lieutenants who between them possessed expertise ranging from shipbuilding to gunpowder fabrication to the use of integrated cavalry and infantry tactics, even Cortés would have failed. The disparity—far more marked than in the Roman-Carthaginian or Macedonian-Persian encounters—was too great for either a brilliant Aztec leader or an inept Spanish conquistador to alter the eventual outcome. Had an Alvarado or Sandoval led the Castilians into Mexico City in November 1520, and had they met a fiery Cuauhtémoc rather than a cautious and confused Montezuma, the entire expedition might have floundered. But just as seven successive fleets reached Mexican shores during Cortés’s rebound in 1521, there would have been larger expeditions to replace the losses of an initial setback, some of them led by better generals, with even more men—30,000 Spaniards were in the immediate Caribbean settlements. Cortés himself after the disaster of the Noche Triste claimed that his life was worth little, since there were now thousands of Castilians in the New World who would take his place and subdue the Aztecs.

  The conquest of Mexico was one of the few times in history in which technology—Europe in the midst of a military renaissance pitted against foes that had neither horses nor the wheel, much less metals and gunpowder—in itself trumped the variables of individual human genius and achievement. The subjugation of western North America was accomplished in four decades of concerted warfare without a European conqueror as skilled as Cortés or a centralized and vulnerable nerve center like the island city of Tenochtitlán. The battle for the American frontier was marked by a number of incompetent English-speaking generals who lost their command and lives in idiotic assaults against brave and ingenious Indian tribes armed with Western weaponry and horses in a vast landscape—all without much effect on the continual encroachment on Indian lands and the systematic defeat of native war parties. We also should keep in mind that the Norse explorers of the northwestern coast of North America—the first European aggressors in the New World—during the tenth and eleventh centuries had little permanent success against native tribes because of their lack of firearms, horses, and sophisticated tactics and their inability to arrive in sufficient numbers on successive flotillas of large oceangoing ships. Neither Norse brilliance in navigation and seamanship nor legendary prowess in arms was enough to ensure conquest or colonization without an easy and continual supply of manpower and matériel.

  Spanish Weapons and Tactics

  Modern scholars who attribute the Castilians’ astounding success to cultural confusion, disease, native allies, and a host of other subsidiary causes are reluctant to admit to the critical role of Western technological and military superiority. Perhaps they fear that such conclusions might imply Eurocentrism, or suggest Western mental or moral preeminence. But the enormous gulf between the equipment and tactics of the Mexica and Spanish armies is a question not of virtue or genes, but of culture and history.

  In all categories of arms and armor the Spanish were vastly superior to every native tribe they met. Their steel swords were sharper and lighter than the Mexicas’ obsidian-tipped clubs and held an edge far longer. When used by skilled swordsmen as both a thrusting and a cleaving blade, such weapons—as written sources and Mexica artwork attest—could lop off entire limbs and dispatch an unarmored opponent i
n a single blow. The conquistador sword was a direct descendant of the shorter Roman gladius, it, too, originally a Spanish blade that gave the Roman legionary the greatest degree of penetrating power of any weapon in the ancient Mediterranean. All 1,600 Castilians who fought at various times in Mexico were equipped with such lethal swords, which in large part accounts for Spanish victories even when their shot and bolts were depleted.

  Many soldiers bore long pikes of ashwood. Most were twelve to fifteen feet in length, tipped with heavy sharp metal heads. Like the Macedonian sarissai, which inspired these weapons, Spanish pikes when wielded by dense bodies of men—the Castilian tercio became for a time the deadliest infantry force in sixteenth-century Spain—created an impenetrable wall. In Spanish parlance it was an “iron cornfield” that could not be entered. When the pike was used as a lance by an armored horseman riding down stragglers, a single blow could take a man’s head right off. Finally, there were also hundreds of lighter, steel-tipped javelins, the jabalinas, which like the Roman pila were deadly when thrown by swordsmen closing in for the kill.

  Nearly all the Spaniards wore steel helmets that also protected parts of the face and could not be penetrated by either arrow or stone. A great many donned steel breastplates and carried steel-reinforced shields, which explains why few were killed by Aztec club or sword blows. Instead, those killed were swarmed and pulled down, as dozens of Mexica warriors tried to trip or knock down the heavily laden Castilians. Nor had any tribe in the New World ever experienced the European idea of shock infantry collision—a tradition originating with the phalanx of the seventh century B.C. on the killing fields of ancient Greece, and rarely found outside of Europe.