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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The chief problem for the Europeans in many infantry battles with the Tlaxcalans and the Aztecs was one of exhaustion. The mailed Spaniards, nearly invulnerable from sword and missile attacks, soon tired after constant slashing and stabbing with heavy blades and lances, and at last were often forced to retreat behind the curtain of cannon and small-arms fire:

  They surrounded them [the Spanish] on all sides, the Spanish started to strike at them, killing them like flies. No sooner were some slain than they were replaced with fresh ones. The Spaniards were like an islet in the sea, beaten by waves on all sides. This terrible conflict lasted over four hours. During this many Mexicans died, and nearly all the Spaniards’ allies and some of the Spaniards themselves. When it came noon, with the intolerable exertion of battle, the Spaniards began to lag. (B. Sahagún, The Conquest of Mexico, 96)

  Each Castilian butchered dozens of the enemy, and in some cases hundreds, to ensure his own survival, an enormous effort of muscular strength and endurance for such relatively small men encased in mail. Their chief worry was either stumbling or being tripped and dragged off. Our sources report that over the course of the two-year fighting, hundreds of Castilians were wounded, but nearly all such cuts and contusions were to the limbs and rarely fatal. The way to kill a man is to penetrate his chest or face with thrusting metal blades, and that was nearly impossible for Aztec warriors pitted against mailed foot soldiers.

  Scholars who dismiss the importance of Spanish steel must explain why, after the Noche Triste and the ambush at Tlatelolco, the Aztecs quickly employed the precious few Castilian swords and lances they captured. Why did the Tlaxcalans welcome the Spanish infantry as a cutting edge in all infantry engagements against the Aztecs, on the premise that only Castilians could hack their way through Aztec lines? During the humid season many conquistadors felt that lighter and more comfortable local quilted cotton fabrics offered enough protection from native stone-edged missiles and blades. On occasion they jettisoned their mail—dramatic proof that they feared little from Aztec weapons, despite being wielded by some of the most ferocious fighters in the history of warfare.

  Superior metal arms were only part of the Spanish advantage. Harquebuses and crossbows were more accurate and had greater range and far more penetrating power than any native sling or arrow. The Spanish crossbow could send a bolt in an arc over two hundred yards and was deadly accurate in direct fire at nearly a hundred. Little skill was required in its use, and bolts and replacement parts were easily fabricated from indigenous materials. The chief drawback was the weight of the machine (fifteen pounds) and the relatively slow rate of fire (one bolt per minute). Although Aztec archers could shoot five or six arrows in a minute, they could rarely reach targets at two hundred yards, and at even close ranges their flint-tipped arrows could not penetrate the vital organs of the armored Spanish. Native arrows were also far less accurate than crossbow bolts. Moreover, archery took years of training to master, while a Castilian could reemploy the bow of a fallen or wounded crossbowman in minutes.

  Harquebuses (early muskets with a matchlock firing device) had much the same advantages and drawbacks as the crossbow—enormous penetrating power, little required training, good accuracy, and great range, versus slow rates of fire and clumsiness—but were even deadlier in stopping numerous unarmored warriors with single shots. They were also easier to fabricate and repair. The real advantage of firearms lay not in their ease of use—they were awkward and hard to load—but in their greater accuracy and deadliness. A good shooter could kill with some assurance at 150 yards. His enormous projectiles—some lead balls might weigh up to six ounces—at closer ranges could often go right through the flesh of a number of unarmored Aztecs. Cortés had nearly eighty harquebusiers and crossbowmen when he returned to Tenochtitlán in spring 1521. In serried ranks with bowmen shooting over the heads of the gunners, his men were capable of putting down a sequential carpet of about ten or fifteen projectiles every ten seconds. For short periods of ten or fifteen minutes, against dense masses of Mexicas where misses were few, the Castilians were capable of killing hundreds, especially when placed behind pikemen, on boats, or atop fortifications.

  In contemporary European warfare there was an ongoing renaissance in tactics and armament, as harquebusiers were blasting apart even the most disciplined ranks of well-armed Swiss and Spanish pikemen at Marignano (1519), La Bicocca (1522), and Pavia (1525). If the new muskets, fired in careful volleys, could tear apart columns of fast-moving and well-disciplined European pikemen, there was little doubt of their effectiveness against larger but less well organized and poorly protected swarms of Aztec warriors. Even if the Aztecs had captured and mastered the use of harquebuses, such technology, without a supporting framework of scientific research, would have soon stagnated: harquebuses were a mere phase in the continual evolution of European firearms that would soon see flints, better-cast barrels, rifling, and improved powder.

  On the plains the Spanish had nearly a century of battle experience in integrating pikemen with harquebusiers—the latter walked out, shot, retreated behind a wall of spears to reload, then again came forward to shoot—to stave off the charges of European aristocratic cavalry. Against the near naked Mexica foot soldiers, these tried-and-tested Castilian squares were nearly invulnerable. Skeptics of European gunpowder superiority must remember that the swarming tactics of indigenous armies— the Zulus are an excellent example—made Western guns especially lethal well before the age of repeating rifles.

  Spanish discipline was legendary. Cannon, musket, and crossbow were shot on orders, achieving a murderous symphony against charging masses. Rarely would a harquebusier or swordsman flee should his immediate superior go down. In contrast, regional contingents of the Aztecs were prone to disintegrate once the revered cuachpantli—the gaudy standards mounted on bamboo frames and worn on the backs of illustrious warriors—fell or were seized. Personal bravery and prowess in arms are not always synonymous with military discipline, which in the West is largely defined as staying in formation and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder.

  What terrified the Aztecs most, however, were the Spanish cannon, some wheeled or fitted on carts, with at least a few of the more rapidfiring breech-loading models. Sources disagree about the actual number and types employed by Cortés’s men over the two-year campaign (many were lost during the Noche Triste), but the Spaniards brought along ten to fifteen, ranging from small falconets to larger lombards. When properly used against the Aztec mobs, they were absolutely deadly weapons, firing both grapeshot—canisters of smaller iron projectiles—and large cannonballs and stones up to ten pounds. The smaller breech-loading falconets could fire almost a round each minute and a half, point-blank at five hundred yards or with arced shots reaching nearly a half mile. When aimed at the charging Mexicas, each volley tore off limbs, heads, and torsos, as shots went through dozens of warriors.

  Spanish chronicles make much of Cortés’s horses—forty were present at the final siege of Tenochtitlán—and the complete terror they brought to the Aztecs. The Mexicas at first considered them strange half-human centaurs or divine creatures who could talk with their riders, and only later realized they were large grazing beasts like some sort of gigantic deer. Besides the obvious advantages that horses brought to the fighting—terror, reconnaissance, transport, and mobility—they were unstoppable when ridden by mailed lancers, prompting Bernal Díaz del Castillo to label them the Spaniards’ “one hope of survival.”

  Historically, the only way to defeat cavalry was to fight en masse, as the Franks had done at Poitiers, or with extended pikes in the manner of Swiss phalanxes, or, like the French, to put down a carpet of musket fire into the approach of a mounted charge. The Aztecs could do none of these, lacking a tradition of landed infantry, shock warfare, and firearms of any sort. If they tried to mass in great numbers to clog the lanes of charging horsemen, they soon became vulnerable to cannon volleys. Thus, in concert with artillery, the Spanish horsemen proved deadly in either riding
down and spearing individual Aztecs or causing the enemy to seek protection in bunches and thus offering better targets for Cortés’s cannon.

  Unlike the horses of antiquity, Cortés’s mounts were no ponies, but Andalusian Barb-Arabs, bred from larger Arabian horses brought to Spain by the Moors. English observers later exclaimed that the horses of the West Indies were the finest they had ever seen. Their great size and the expertise of their riders—Spanish aristocrats like Sandoval and Alvarado had ridden since childhood and were masters of the mounted lance thrust—made a terrifying spectacle:

  It is extraordinary what havoc a baker’s dozen of horsemen could inflict on a vast horde of Indians: and indeed it seems as if the horsemen did not do the damage directly, but that the sudden appearance of these “centaurs” (to use Díaz del Castillo’s word) caused so much demoralization that the Indians faltered and enabled the Spanish infantrymen to dash at them with renewed force. . . . The Indians had no idea how to deal with this supernatural beast, half animal and half man, and simply stood paralysed while the pounding hoofs and flashing swords cut them down. (J. White, Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire, 169)

  Not all the weapons that would prove so deadly were objects brought from Spain. Some of the most lethal were in the minds of the conquistadors themselves, latent mental blueprints of killing machines that sprang from their heads to became real only under the exigencies of the fighting. The Spanish quickly recognized that among the vast wealth of Mexico were untold—and untapped—raw materials for European-style weapons, ranging from fine lumber for ships and siege machines to metal ores for blades and ingredients for gunpowder.

  It is popular to suggest that natural resources alone determine cultural or military dynamism. If true, we should remember that the Aztecs were sitting atop a war merchant’s bonanza—an entire subcontinent replete with the ingredients of gunpowder, iron, bronze, and steel. In truth, it was the absence of a systematic approach to abstract learning and science, not the dearth of ores or minerals, that doomed the Aztecs. They lacked wagon wheels perhaps because of the absence of horses; but they were also entirely without other wheel-based instruments of war and commerce—wheelbarrows, rickshaws, water wheels, mill wheels, pulleys and gears—because there was neither a rational tradition of science nor a climate of disinterested research.

  Nowhere was the rational Spanish approach more apparent than in their ad hoc construction of battle machinery, which followed siege and ship designs dating back to classical antiquity. During the bitter fighting on the eve of the Noche Triste the Spanish within a few hours constructed three manteletes, portable wooden towers that protected harquebusiers and crossbowmen who fired over the heads of the infantrymen. When Cortés next discovered that the causeways were breached, he ordered movable bridges built—a European specialty that dated back to Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Germany. After the flight from Tenochtitlán, gunpowder was fabricated, sulfur being drawn from the nearby “smoky mountain” (Mount Popocatépetl, 17,888 feet above sea level). Native metalsmiths were given Spanish designs and instructions to assist in the making of more than 100,000 copper arrowheads for their own bows, and another 50,000 metal bolts for the Spanish crossbows. In an effort to save powder, during the final siege a gigantic catapult was even fabricated—the mechanics of its winch, armature, and springs apparently being misdesigned by amateurs, since it proved ineffective.

  The most impressive project was Martín López’s brilliant launching of thirteen prefabricated brigantines. These were enormous galleylike boats more than forty feet long and nine feet at the beam, powered with sails and paddles, and yet with flat bottoms that drew only two feet of water and were thus especially designed for the shallow and swampy waters of Lake Texcoco. Each held twenty-five men and could carry a number of horses, as well as a large cannon. To craft such ships, the Spaniards drafted thousands of Tlaxcalans to haul lumber and the iron hardware salvaged from their beached ships at Vera Cruz. Then López had his carefully organized native work gangs entirely dismantle the brigantines and transport them over the mountains in a large column of some 50,000 porters and warriors to Lake Texcoco. When they arrived in the dry season at Tenochtitlán, López engineered a canal twelve feet wide and about the same depth, through which to navigate the ships from the marshes into deeper waters of the lake: 40,000 Tlaxcalans were involved in the latter project for seven weeks.

  The brigantines proved the deciding factor in the entire war, as they were manned by a third of the Spanish manpower and were allotted nearly 75 percent of the cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. The ships kept the causeways free, ensured that the Spanish camps were secure in the evening, landed infantry at weak points in the enemy lines, enforced a crippling blockade of the city, systematically blew apart hundreds of Aztec canoes, and transported critical food and supplies to the various isolated Spanish contingents. They turned Lake Texcoco from the Spaniards’ chief vulnerability to their greatest asset. Their high decks prevented boarding and gave ample cover for the harquebusiers and crossbowmen to fire and reload—characteristic of traditional Western skill in combined infantry and naval tactics:

  However, in the final analysis, Tenochtitlán had an importance that cannot be assigned to Salamis: Tenochtitlán was synonymous with final victory, the conclusion of a war; Salamis was not. At Salamis a civilization was challenged; at Tenochtitlán a civilization was crushed. Possibly in all history there is no similar victorious naval engagement that concluded a war and ended a civilization. (C. Gardiner, Naval Power in the Conquest of Mexico, 188)

  The brigantines, despite being fabricated more than a hundred miles from Lake Texcoco, proved to be far more ingeniously engineered for fighting on the Aztecs’ native waters than any boat constructed in Mexico during the entire history of its civilization—a feat possible only through a systematic approach to science and reason that had been ubiquitous in the West for two millennia.

  Almost all elements of the Western military tradition played their respective roles in assuring a Spanish victory, trumping problems of numerical inferiority, logistics, and unknown geography. The hundreds of thousands of pages of postbellum Spanish lawsuits, formal inquiries, and judicial writs among the conquistadors attest to the strong sense of freedom and entitlement each warrior possessed: a sense of civic militarism of individuals with rights and privileges that neither Cortés nor the Spanish crown could infringe upon without constitutional support. While on the road to meet Narváez, some of Cortés’s men caught Alonzo de Mata, an emissary with legal papers and summons for their leader’s recall. What ensued next was a legalistic debate about the official status of de Mata, ending when the latter could not produce documentation to prove that he was a genuine king’s notary and therefore had no authority to vouch for the authenticity of his own decrees.

  In fact, throughout the sixteenth century there was a strong sense of political freedom in Spain, perhaps best epitomized in Juan de Costa’s (1549–95) treatise Govierno del ciudadano, on the proper rights and behavior of the citizen in a constitutional commonwealth. About the same time, Jerónimo de Blancas, a biographer of Cortés, wrote Aragonesium re-rumcomentarii (1588), on the contractual nature of the Aragonese monarchy and its relationship with legislative and judicial branches of government.

  The Castilians’ drive for decisive horrific engagements—in the streets of Tenochtitlán, on the causeways, in the Plain of Otumba, on Lake Texcoco—was not shared by the Mexicas, who preferred daylight spectacle, in which status, ritual, and captive-taking were sometimes integral to battle. Throughout the fighting, eager traders and entrepreneurs from the New World and Spain docked at Vera Cruz to supply Cortés with shot, food, weapons, and horses. Near extinction, Cortés nevertheless confiscated gold from enemy and friend alike to pay for his supplies, assured in a society of free markets that if there was profit to be made in Vera Cruz, there would eventually be European rascals replete with fresh powder, arms, and men in Tenochtitlán.

  The conquistadors, whethe
r led at times by Sandoval, Ordaz, Olid, or Alvarado, owed their lives to an abstract system of command and obedience, not just to a magnetic leader like Cortés. Throughout the conquest individual initiative gave Cortés innumerable advantages. Even the constant complaints of his outspoken men and the threat of formal audit and inquiry from Spanish authorities forced Cortés to consult on strategy with his top lieutenants and to craft tactics with every expectation that there were scores of critics who would appear should he fail. All these components of the Western military tradition gave the Spanish an enormous edge. But in the last analysis a tradition of rationalism, some two millennia old, guaranteed that Hernán Cortés’s tools of battle could kill thousands more than those of his enemies.

  REASON AND WAR

  People from the Stone Age onward have always engaged in some form of scientific activity designed to enhance organized warfare. But beginning with the Greeks, Western culture has shown a singular propensity to think abstractly, to debate knowledge freely apart from religion and politics, and to devise ways of adapting theoretical breakthroughs for practical use, through the marriage of freedom and capitalism. The result has been a constant increase in the technical ability of Western armies to kill their adversaries. Is it not odd that Greek hoplites, Roman legionaries, medieval knights, Byzantine fleets, Renaissance foot soldiers, Mediterranean galleys, and Western harquebusiers were usually equipped with greater destructive power than their adversaries? Even the capture or purchase of Western arms is no guarantee of technological parity—as the Ottomans, Indians, and Chinese learned—inasmuch as European weaponry is an evolving phenomenon, ensuring obsolescence almost simultaneously with the creation of new arms. Creativity has never been a European monopoly, much less intellectual brilliance. Rather, the West’s willingness to craft superior weapons is just as often predicated on its unmatched ability to borrow, adopt, and steal ideas without regard to the social, religious, or political changes that new technology often brings—as the incorporation of and improvement on the trireme, Roman gladius, astrolabe, and gunpowder attest.