When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  —Jane Austen, 1799, on “history”1

  HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE SPANIARDS invaded the Aztec Empire? The most widely read account of “one of the greatest Subjects in all History” is the gripping narrative of the invasion by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz has been frequently praised as a foot soldier with extraordinary literary talent. A member of the 1519 expedition into Mexico, this “captain conquistador” was trumpeted in the preface to his book as the original “eye witness” to the events he recalled. Díaz billed his book as the True History of the Conquest; Carlos Fuentes, the famous Mexican novelist, canonized it as the true foundation of Latin American fiction.2

  The title page to the first edition of the True History, published in 1632, featured a full portrait of the conquistador who had led that invasion, Hernando Cortés. In the engraving, Cortés presents to the reader a dramatic scene, simply rendered, on a shield. In effect, the legendary conqueror opens a window onto the story, with a single moment selected to symbolize the narrative—an icon, if you like, that gives access to the narrative.

  In that moment, we see a conquistador—clearly Cortés—approaching a king sitting on a throne. Although bearded, with features similar to those of Cortés, and wearing a simple European-style crown, the king is dressed in a feathered skirt. Just as the crown was an iconic and universal representation of kingship to Europeans of the day, so did a feathered skirt represent “the Indian” of the Americas. The king was thus clearly Montezuma, the emperor of the Aztecs, whose island-capital was depicted in another circular shield, or cartouche, at the bottom of the title page.

  As Cortés approaches Montezuma, he reaches out with both hands: with his left, he appears to be grabbing the emperor’s crown; with his right, he has a set of manacles, which he is slipping onto Montezuma’s wrist. The seated emperor appears passive, offering no resistance. Yet this is hardly a peaceful meeting. Cortés’s aggressive pose, the trio of armed soldiers crowded in behind him, and his symbolic seizure of crown and emperor suggest an encounter with violent intent, diplomacy gone wrong, an unnegotiated seizure of king and kingship.3

  Does this small engraving, therefore, offer us a visual shortcut to the crux of the story? Can the epic history of the Conquest of Mexico—indeed, the larger world-changing phenomenon of the European discovery, invasion, and settlement of the Americas—be distilled to an emblematic, bold capture of an indigenous king? Perhaps it can; perhaps the history of the world, from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, can be reduced to an engraving of imperial man, invading and taking.

  But perhaps such an image is only the very start of the story. Perhaps it is merely a hint, in fact, on the title page of an 863-page book; and a misleading hint, to boot. For as we enter that book, read Díaz’s lines closely, read between them, and compare them to other written and visual sources on this “greatest Subject,” that simple image of seizure pixelates and crumbles. The late historian Hugh Thomas’s comment that “on occasion Bernal Díaz’s memory is at fault” turns out to be classic British understatement. Mexican historian Juan Miralles’s catalog of the many inconsistencies and outright errors that pepper the True History turned into a book-length study, Y Bernal Mintió [And Bernal Lied]. For Díaz was neither a captain nor an eyewitness to much that he described, often relying instead on the earlier accounts (Cortés’s included) that he claimed to be correcting. Pondering the “flashbacks, digressions, repetitions, ellipses, and incendiary passages” of the True History, Christian Duverger became convinced that Díaz witnessed little of what he claimed to see, and wrote not a word of it; the French scholar went so far as to argue that the book was actually written by none other than Cortés, during his retirement in the Spanish city of Valladolid in the 1540s.4

  In the New York Times and Chicago Sunday Tribune, reviewers of a modern edition of Díaz’s True History called his words “the most reliable narrative that exists” and “the most complete and trustworthy of the chronicles of the Conquest.” But what if it is the opposite of that—utterly unreliable, incomplete, and untrustworthy? Where does that leave us? If we must take literally Fuentes’s verdict on Díaz’s book as foundational to the Latin American novel, and see it as a work of historical fiction, then how do we find the “Historical truth” to which Dryden alluded—let alone some “probability” regarding the great events of the sixteenth century? As an historian recently wryly remarked, “Historians explain why things turned out the way they did. Since we already know the outcome, this might seem a simple matter of looking back and connecting the dots. But there is a problem: too many dots.”5

  I suggest that we begin again, that we go back and trace the dots once more. “Every good mystery takes place on three planes,” a celebrated mystery novelist has said, “what really happened; what appears to have happened; and how the sleuth figures out which is which.” Five centuries after Spaniards launched themselves against the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and then wrote thousands of pages describing what they saw and did, we live in an intellectual world in which the phrase testigo ocular (eye witness) is viewed with skepticism and suspicion, as indeed it should be. But that does not mean that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss sources such as Díaz as lies, as fiction, as invention. We can return again to Díaz, to the writings of Cortés himself, to the dozens of accounts and chronicles written by Spaniards in the sixteenth century and beyond, to accounts written by Aztecs and other Mesoamericans and their mixed-race descendants, to engravings and paintings and codices, and to the thousands of pages of legal documentation still held in the archives of Seville and Mexico City. We can sort through the probabilities and possible historical truths, sift through the lies, fictions, and inventions, until new understandings and perspectives start to come into focus.6

  In seeking to begin again, to approach from new angles the oft-told story of Mexico’s Conquest, I take my cue from Juan de Courbes (1592–1641), the French engraver who worked in Madrid in the 1620s and ’30s and created the cartouche that is our initial window onto Mexico in 1519 (facing this Prologue’s title page). The essence of the miniature scene engraved by Courbes is an encounter between two famous men. The accuracy of the scene, either as a literal depiction or a symbolic one, is not important for now (but we shall certainly return to it later). What matters is that Cortés, through Courbes’s invention, offers us his encounter with Montezuma as a starting point.

  That encounter was not just a meeting, but also one of the greatest meetings of human history—the moment when two empires, two great civilizations, were brought irreversibly together. “If that mythical moment—the birth of modern history—can be said to exist, it occurred on November 8th, 1519.” So suggested one historian; another has proposed that the morning when Cortés first met Montezuma at the entrance to the imperial capital city of Tenochtitlan was “the real discovery of America.” In this book, I call it the Meeting, with a capital M.7

  The Meeting is the outermost layer of the story. We shall begin, in the first chapter, with Cortés’s own version of the Meeting. Intriguingly, he never claims to have taken Montezuma’s crown or manacled him on November 8; the alleged arrest came later. Instead, he depicted the Meeting as an unambiguous surrender by the Aztec emperor. That depiction has remained the dominant narrative, underpinning the way in which Cortés, Montezuma, and the entire story of the Conquest of Mexico have been seen for five centuries. As Cortés’s account of the Meeting is peeled back, the layers beneath are revealed: how that encounter was remembered, interpreted, and invented; and beneath that, the entire exposed artifice of the legendary Cortés, the enigmatic Montezuma, and the messy, chaotic, brutal war of invasion that ever since has been seen through distorting lenses as “the Conquest of Mexico.” And as the names we use for things matter a great deal, with the “Conquest of Mexico” a highly partisan label coined to evoke a triumphalist narrative (which it has done well for five centuries), we shall from this point on refer only to the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21)
and to the larger conflict of which it was a crucial part, the Spanish-Mesoamerican War (1517–50). (Those dates, as well as the terms Aztec and Mesoamerican, shall become clearer as we proceed; also see the Appendix, “Language and Label, Cast and Dynasty.”)

  I wish I could claim a Road-to-Damascus moment when I realized why and how I had to write a book on the most-studied subject in the history of Latin America, a foolhardy task that surely demands an explanation up front. But the truth is that I have experienced a series of such moments stretched between two quincentennials—that of Columbus’s 1492 landing in the Americas and that of the first Spanish contacts with native Mesoamericans in 1517. Some of those moments took place in the archives (for example, reading documents written or dictated by the conquistadors themselves, preserved for centuries in Spain’s extraordinary imperial archives in Seville); or in libraries (like the British Library in London, or the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, with its unparalleled collection of rare books and manuscripts); or in conversation with the brilliant scholars of the Conquest period in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere (either in person, or through reading and rereading the studies that made this book possible, and which are scattered through its endnotes); or in the classroom (where students in Pennsylvania, London, Bogotá, and many points in between have kept me on my toes and forced me to second-guess every assumption and conclusion); or in Mexico City (walking where the streets and canals of Tenochtitlan once ran, realizing that Montezuma had often strolled through his zoo, for example, right beneath my feet); or simply at home (where I benefit from the extraordinary mind of a generous spouse).

  As a result, I researched and wrote, lectured and wrote more; and yet the questions kept coming, often the same questions, and with the explosion of the Internet came increasing numbers of questions by email—from a high school student in New Zealand, from a retired naval officer in Argentina, from a postman in Barcelona, from a doctoral candidate in Canada, from a convict in a California prison, and so on. Gradually, it dawned on me that the wrong questions were being asked, or they were being asked in the wrong way—not by students or email correspondents, but by scholars and writers, by me.8

  The challenge must be, therefore, to resist asking—let alone answering—why “Montezuma and the Mexican people were so quickly conquered by the Spanish?” (as a recent book phrased it). Instead, let us first entertain the notion that they were not “quickly conquered.” Then let us ask why that question has been phrased in that way. Let us not ask, “How could a small army of hundreds of Spanish soldiers crush millions of Mexica and their powerful military theocracy?”—because it leads inevitably to the next sentence in that quotation: “This has been one of history’s great mysteries.” Instead, let us revisit and challenge common answers; for example, that the Aztecs were “weakened psychologically” because they believed Cortés or the Spanish king had “a prior claim to the Mexican throne,” or “their ritualized style of combat unfitted them to confront Europeans who fought to win rather than to take sacrificial captives; but, in a contest of hundred against thousands, it was their horses that gave the invaders the decisive advantage.”9

  The quotations above come from four authors, deliberately unnamed in the paragraph because my purpose is not to criticize them personally (they have all written books I admire greatly), but to show how such phrases reflect the larger perspective made up of thousands of books and articles, plays and films, going back hundreds of years. That perspective has always centered on a profoundly leading question, or—as I hope to persuade you—a profoundly misleading question. We will encounter it many times in the coming chapters. But for now, consider one more example, chosen because these are the beautifully phrased opening lines of an award-winning article by a superb scholar:

  The Conquest of Mexico matters to us because it poses a painful question: How was it that a motley bunch of Spanish adventurers, never numbering more than four hundred or so, was able to defeat an Amerindian power on its home ground in the space of two years? What was it about Spaniards, or about Indians, that made so awesomely implausible a victory possible?10

  The outcome of the war—not just Tenochtitlan in smoldering ruins by August 1521, but Spanish colonial rule for three centuries and its deep, complex legacy in modern Mexico—must and will be explained. But we can reach that place of new understandings by fully questioning the above assumptions, and many more. For example, is there evidence that Montezuma ever surrendered, or that any Mesoamerican saw the Spanish invasion as legitimate? Has the emphasis on the Aztecs as devotees of so-called human sacrifice distorted our view of their civilization? Is a twenty-eight-month invasion really a “quick” war? Why are conquistadors typically numbered in the hundreds when in reality thousands of Spaniards fought the Aztecs? Is there really an advantage to being on “home ground” or having a dozen horses in battles of thousands of men? Do we prejudice our discussion and privilege traditional answers by styling the invaders as “adventurers,” the invaded as “Indians,” and their war as the “Conquest of Mexico”? Does viewing the Conquest as a compelling conundrum—as one of history’s great mysteries—tend to lead us unavoidably back to the “mythistory” of the traditional narrative (as I label it)?

  I think it does. And I have thus resisted the temptation to structure the chapters that follow as a simple narrative. That narrative is a trap, drawing writer and reader alike into the familiar old Cortesian chronology, turning the war into “the Conquest of Mexico,” with its predictable denouement. It is also monolithic, pushing counternarratives to the margin as sidebars. Never fear, the story will be told, but it will be told multiple times, with narrative pieces removed from the story, examined in detail, and then reinserted.

  But note that this book is not a synthesis of previous accounts, another telling of the tale albeit from a different angle. Rather, it is a reevaluation of previous accounts stretching from the 1520s to the present; an examination not just of the events of the Conquest story but of their half-millennium afterlife; an argument for seeing the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico” as one of human history’s great lies, whose exposure requires us to better grasp both what really happened at the time and why the traditional narrative has prospered.

  The book unfolds with eight thematically paired chapters. The first pair (Part I) anatomizes the Meeting and the story of the Spanish-Aztec War, exploring how and why their history evolved into a traditional narrative that dramatically distorts the events of the early sixteenth century. The next pair of chapters (Part II) describes how Aztec civilization and Montezuma have been seen over the centuries. The West’s long-standing view of the Aztecs is contrasted with suggestions as to how we might understand differently their culture, their response to the invaders, their emperor, and his perspective on the Meeting.

  The Cortés legend is probed in the third and fourth pairs of chapters, punctured not in order to demonize him, but to shrink the inflated conquistador and make way for other protagonists. Those other actors, both Spanish and Nahua, afford us revealing, alternative perspectives on the invasion through to Montezuma’s death (Part III) and then through the 1520s and beyond (Part IV). These chapters suggest how we might select different dots and connect them in new ways, seeing the Spanish-Aztec War through the experiences of people marginalized in the traditional narrative—Taíno slaves from Cuba, for example, or women of all ethnicities. We can also place at the center of the story the violence and mass enslavement that characterized the conflict, which were sufficiently horrific to suggest that even “invasion” and “war” (let alone “conquest”) are inadequate descriptors of a watershed moment in world history, for too long glorified as “the greatest adventure story of modern times.”11

  Thus new portraits of Cortés and Montezuma emerge, turning upside down the legends and stereotypes of the traditional narrative; beneath the layer of the famous men of imagination lie the layers revealing whom those men really were. But, even more important, there t
oo at the heart of the story we see the perspectives and roles of all the other men and women who lived and died in Mexico during these tumultuous years. The Meeting of November 8, 1519, is thus the outside layer of a story driven by a great cast of characters—with the most famous members of that cast playing very different roles to those traditionally assigned to them. As the layers are peeled back and the book unfolds, we see in a new light the Meeting; Cortés and Montezuma; the “Conquest of Mexico”; the Spaniards and Aztecs of the era; the posthumous persistence of the mythistorical traditional narrative; the history of great encounters; and ultimately the very nature of history itself—and its invention.

  Part I

  Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

  —Francis Bacon’s essay on “Vain-Glory,” 1612

  Myth is birthed by ideology, and only by attacking ideology can myth be dispelled.

  —Octavio Paz1

  IMAGINING TENOCHTITLAN. The caption reads, in German: “Great Venice has five gates / at each of the gates there is a bridge / which reaches the land / and on these same five bridges / there are many drawbridges with towers on them / so that the city is impregnable.” This woodcut (on both the fifth and seventh pages of the Newe Zeitung, printed in Augsburg in 1521 or 1522) is the earliest surviving European illustration of Tenochtitlan. Depicting the Aztec capital as a medieval city, it is almost completely inaccurate.

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 1

  Mysterious Kindness

  Do not believe more than what you see with your eyes.

  —Montezuma to Cortés, according to Cortés, 1519

  The empire [of the Aztecs] received him with mysterious kindness.