ON NOVEMBER 3, the expedition made the slow descent to Amaquemecan (Amecameca), an Aztec city of several thousand inhabitants. Here they were again generously lodged and fed “in some very good houses,” so much so that they stayed two nights. According to Cortés, there were again bribes (“some forty female slaves and three thousand castellanos [and] all the food we needed”), and obsequious promises of loyalty by high-ranking lords telling the captain that Montezuma had ordered them “to provide me with all the necessary things.”15
Cortés’s fear of ambush also remained constant. On November 5, the expedition reached Lake Chalco, which connected to the waters surrounding Tenochtitlan, although their view of the capital was obscured by the spur of land upon which the town of Ixtlapalapan stood. They seem to have spent one night in Chalco (although Cortés omits that night in his account), and then one night in Ayotzinco (Ayotzingo), about five miles along the lakeshore. The region was heavily populated—the city of Chalco alone probably had some ten thousand inhabitants—and so there were Nahuas everywhere, no doubt hoping to catch a glimpse of the strange foreigners. But Cortés saw only spies and warriors with ill intent; he was convinced that “there they wished to test their forces against ours, only it seemed they wished to do it very safely by catching us at night unawares.” Thus all during the night of November 6, Cortés had guards assault any locals who came close enough to catch, by foot or in canoes, so that “by the breaking of dawn some fifteen or twenty of them had been taken and killed by us.”16
On the morning of the 7th, Cacama (more properly, Cacamatzin), Montezuma’s nephew and tlahtoani, or king, of Tetzcoco—Cortés only identifies him as “a great young lord of about twenty-five”—arrived on a litter with a large entourage. In Cortés’s telling, Cacama’s message was as contradictory as that of the lords with whom he had spoken over the preceding days. On the one hand, Cacama offered to guide Cortés to meet Montezuma in Tenochtitlan, assuring the Spaniard that “we would see and learn from him the willingness he had to serve Your Highness”—that is, Montezuma’s willingness to serve the Spanish king. On the other hand, Cacama and the Aztec lords with him “greatly insisted and persisted” in warning Cortés not to continue in his journey, for in doing so the Spaniards “would endure much effort and need.” As always, Cortés implied that the Aztecs were simply untrustworthy—that they recognized the Spaniards as a legitimate presence, yet continued to threaten them. Cortés’s narrative thus seems nonsensical, an illogical jumble of justifications. In fact, it was logical only as a precursor to his telling of the fantastic encounter with Montezuma, now only a day away.17
During the course of November 7, the expedition moved along the lakeshore past the town of Mixquic and onto the causeway that crossed the lake—marking where Lake Chalco flowed under the causeway’s bridges into Lake Xochimilco. In the middle of the causeway was a small island, covered by the town of Cuitlahuac. This city, wrote Cortés, “although small, was the most beautiful we had seen up to then, both in regard to the well-built houses and towers and in the good nature of the foundation, for it is entirely assembled on the water.” After being “fed very well,” the Spaniards continued on the causeway, reaching the spur or peninsula of land that led to the capital city. Near the peninsula’s tip was Ixtlapalapan, a large city of some fifteen thousand people, which sprawled from the shore into Lake Tetzcoco. Cortés once again details the largesse with which the local lords “made me very welcome,” including “some three or four thousand castellanos and some female slaves and clothing.” He is also as effusive about Ixtlapalapan as he is later about the capital itself, insisting that the houses of the city’s rulers “are as good as the best in Spain,” praising the “workmanship both in their masonry and woodwork,” and detailing the elaborately landscaped gardens.18
Ixtlapalapan faced Tenochtitlan, and thus, at last, offered the invaders a close view of the great city. Cortés again saved his descriptions of the capital for later, but this is the moment when other conquistadors—most notably Bernal Díaz—commented on the view in their accounts. In an often-quoted passage, Díaz marveled at the entire panorama, from Tenochtitlan to Ixtlapalapan, noting that the curiosity and amazement went in both directions; for the Spaniards were “seeing things that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about,” while the Aztecs came in massive crowds to see the invaders, “which was not to be wondered at, for they had never before seen horses or men like us.”19
CURIOUS AZTECS WERE OUT en masse on November 8, as Cortés and his Spanish-Tlaxcalteca force made their way out of Ixtlapalapan and onto the causeway that led to Tenochtitlan. The road was wide enough, wrote Cortés, “that eight horsemen could ride right down it side by side.” The causeway passed through three towns, each with thousands of inhabitants and featuring “very good buildings, both houses and towers” (referring to pyramids), all “built on the shore, with many of their houses on the water.” The invaders stopped at a fortified gate, built where the causeway met another one running from the western lakeshore. Here began the extended ritual of welcome that was the Meeting.20
The ritualized encounter started with the arrival of “about a thousand men, leading citizens of that city,” each of whom “placed his hand on the ground and kissed it.” That ceremony took “almost an hour.” Beyond the gate was a bridge, and “past this bridge, that lord Muteeçuma came out to receive us with some two hundred lords, all barefoot and dressed in a different livery” but very richly so. “Muteeçuma came down the middle of the street with two lords, one on his right hand and the other on his left.” Both of these Cortés had already met over the previous twenty-four hours: one was Cacama, Tetzcoco’s ruler and Montezuma’s nephew; the other was the emperor’s brother, Cuitlahua (more properly, Cuitlahuatzin, and not to be confused with the town of Cuitlahuac), the ruler of Ixtlapalapan. They held Montezuma’s arms, and “were all three dressed identically.”
Cortés then succinctly described the awkward first moment of thwarted personal contact: “When we met I dismounted and went to embrace him alone, but those two lords who were with him stopped me with their hands so that I should not touch him.” The three Aztec kings then “performed the ceremony of kissing the ground.” After that, they each greeted Cortés, as did every one of the two hundred lords. When it was Montezuma’s turn, Cortés took the opportunity to give the emperor “a necklace of pearls and glass diamonds”; Cortés “placed it around his neck.” Montezuma quickly reciprocated: after they “had walked up the street ahead, a servant of his” brought two necklaces featuring gold shrimp, which Montezuma placed over Cortés’s neck. Continuing up the street, they reached “a very large and beautiful house.” The emperor took his guest “by the hand” and led him to “a very rich throne” in a large room facing a courtyard. Montezuma left but soon returned with gifts—“jewels of gold and silver and featherwork and up to five or six thousand pieces of cotton clothing”—and sat on another throne beside Cortés.
The emperor then delivered an astonishing address, written down a year later by Cortés as if it were reported speech. The verb that Cortés used to introduce the speech is significant. He avoids decir or hablar; that is, Montezuma does not simply talk, speak, or address his visitor. Instead, Cortés styles the speech as a formal, reasoned, legally valid discourse. The introductory phrase is rendered as ppuso eñsta manera in the 1522 and 1523 editions, and as prepuso en esta manera in the 1528 manuscript; in modern Spanish, propuso en esta manera. Thus Montezuma “suggested” or “proposed” or “reasoned in this manner,” or “he made the following proposition.” The speech is cast as an offer, one supported by a rationale.21
As a voluntary capitulation, supported by a kind of legal logic, Montezuma’s speech correlated perfectly with the Crown’s requirement that invasion companies attempt to secure surrender from indigenous rulers prior to waging war on them. There was even an official text, called the Requirement (requerimiento), which was routinely recited or read to indigenous defenders befo
re battle. Bartolomé de Las Casas (the Dominican friar to whom we shall return frequently) famously remarked that he did not know “whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity” of this ritual. The Requirement offered two options: peaceful submission to king and church; or slaughter and servitude, “death and damages” that would thereby legally be “your fault” (indigenous rulers were told). In this fantasy of imperial ritual, indigenous lords would fully grasp their choices, and willingly surrender in terms that were as legally logical and binding to the Spanish mind as was the Requirement.22
That never happened. But Spaniards came to imagine that it did, in Tenochtitlan in 1519. For the Requirement was only absurd if taken literally as a speech aimed at indigenous audiences (the pretense that incensed Las Casas); likewise, Montezuma’s voluntary articulation of the legal tenets of the Requirement is equally absurd if taken literally. But (as anthropologist Paja Faudree recently argued), the Requirement’s audience was not indigenous, it was “other European powers, critics within Spain, and, crucially, the Crown itself.” Thus Montezuma’s speech, like the Requirement, was a Spanish legal ritual performed for a Spanish (primarily royal) audience, designed to officially transform the political Spanish-Aztec relationship—in Spanish eyes.23
Montezuma’s speech, as composed by Cortés (and his fellow surviving captains), is worth reading in its entirety:
“For a long time we have known from our scriptures that we have from our ancestors that I, and all those who dwell in this land, are not natives of it, but foreigners who came to it from very foreign parts; and likewise we hold that our ancestors brought to these parts a lord, whose vassals they all were, and who returned to his homeland. And then he came again after a long time, so long that all those who had remained were married to local, native women and had many offspring and built villages where they lived. And when he wished to take them with him, they did not want to go nor even receive him as lord; and so he departed. And we have always held that those who descended from him would come and subjugate this land and us as their vassals; and thus because of the place from which you say you come, which is where the sun rises, and the things you say of that great lord or king who sent you here, we believe and hold as certain that he is our natural lord, especially as you tell us that he has known of us for a long time. Therefore you may be certain that we shall obey you and hold you as our lord in place of that great lord of whom you speak; and in this there shall be no mistake or deceit whatsoever. And you may well command as you will in all the land—that is, all that I possess in my domain—for you shall in fact be obeyed; and all that we own is for you to dispose of as you wish. And thus you are in your own homeland and your own house; take your ease and rest from the labors of the journey and the wars you have had. For I know full well of all that has happened to you from Puntunchan to here, and I know well that those of Cempoal and Tascaltecal have told you much evil of me. Do not believe more than what you see with your eyes, especially from those who are my enemies; and some of those were my vassals and have rebelled against me upon your arrival and said those things to gain favor with you; and I also know that they have told you that I have houses with walls of gold, and that the floor mats in my rooms and other things in my household are likewise of gold, and that I was, and made myself, God; and many other things. The houses that you see are of stone and lime and clay.” Then he lifted his clothes and showed me his body, saying to me: “See me, that I am of flesh and bone like you and like everyone, that I am mortal and tangible”—gripping his arms and body with his hands—“see how they have lied to you! It is true that I have some things of gold left to me by my grandparents; all that I might have, you shall have, every time that you want it. I am going to other houses where I live; here you shall be provided with all the things that you and your people need, and you shall receive no hurt, for you are in your own house and homeland.”24
Cortés then stated that he replied to the part of the speech “that seemed to me most agreeable, especially in making him believe that Your Majesty was he whom they were expecting.” And with that, Montezuma left and the Meeting was over. Its coda, in Cortés’s telling, is oddly anticlimactic (at least, until the reader turns the page). Provided with plenty of “chickens and bread and fruit and other necessary things,” Cortés and his compatriots “spent six days very well provided with all that was needed.” The question of who was the host and who the guest remained hanging (and will remain so for us, for now).
* * *
If only the story ended there, with the Spanish invaders enjoying a week of Aztec hospitality—before returning to the coast with fantastic tales to tell their compatriots in Cuba and Spain. But, of course, it did not, and therein lies the significance of the Meeting: the moment when Cortés met Montezuma would prove to be one of our past’s great milestone encounters, one that forever altered human history.
Why was the Meeting such a milestone? The answer lies in part with the universal relationship between history and meetings. There is an enormous literature on historical theory that could profitably be discussed here; for the past century and more, historians have relished debating history and discussing historians. But let us step around such debates and consider this: History is encounter. The past comprises all the encounters—both simple and complex, peaceful and conflictual—that have brought people together. History, as a discipline, is thus the sum of all the narratives of those encounters. But that sum of narratives is untidy—replete with omissions, fabrications, and contradictions. Human memory is wildly unreliable, “wired to be warped.” As a result, a traditional narrative (as I call it throughout this book) tends to be privileged over others, an appealing tale to mask the unappetizing mess that is reality. The English historian E. H. Carr asserted a half-century ago that history cannot exist without interpreters; for Carr, history was “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts,” so that “without their historian the facts are dead and meaningless.” What I am suggesting here is that history—being all the encounters of the past—only exists for us through that “continuous process of interaction” between alleged and apparent facts and all their historians.25
But by historians, I do not mean just the professors and writers of modern times; I mean all the witnesses and writers whose narrations and interpretations have allowed past encounters to survive. With respect to the Meeting and the events surrounding it, accounts by “historians” therefore include every narrative ranging from Cortés’s own version to this very book, any comments made in legal documents, all interpretations embedded in plays and poems, and all visual representations from the earliest colonial codices to the statues of Cortés, Malintzin, and their son that provoked controversy in Mexico City near the end of the twentieth century (more on that in a later chapter).
It may seem obvious that “the more you shift your point of view, the more is revealed” (in the words of Felipe Fernández-Armesto), and indeed that observation has been made for as long as histories have been written. And yet Fernández-Armesto, one of our era’s most original historians of the Americas, is right to repeat it. Traditional narratives achieve biblical tenacity; Cortés’s triumph and Montezuma’s surrender persist as Conquest gospel. As Carr warned a half-century ago, it is “very hard to eradicate” not just the “fetish” that history is facts and nothing but them, but also the idea that a particular history is a particular set of well-established facts, amounting to a “true history” (to poke at Díaz again). The traditional narrative of the Spanish conquests in the Americas has been particularly tenacious because “persuasion is at the heart” of its canon of chronicles—from Cortés into modern times—a literature that its leading scholar, Rolena Adorno, has called a “polemics of possession.” Historians of those conquests have thus had to work hard in recent decades to develop new viewpoints—revisiting well-worn texts, digging deeper in well-scoured archives, and analyzing sources written in Mesoamerican languages, all in an attempt to create what we like to call a New Con
quest History.26
Yet the traditional narrative is like the Aztec defense of Tenochtitlan during the siege of 1521: by day, the attackers would take a section of the city, fighting house by house, block by block; at night, the Aztecs would take most of it back. Likewise, despite recent assaults by historians on numerous aspects of the traditional narrative, it holds its ground, even gaining some, as readers, listeners, and viewers remain as drawn as they have been for centuries to the narcotic effect of its simplified coherence and inevitable climax.27
The tragic mess that was the destruction of old Tenochtitlan resulted not from the tidy sequence of triumphal moments that marks the traditional narrative, but from the complexity that was the Spanish-Aztec War and the combined mess of its many histories and images. The messiness of narrative and interpretation that lies between us and any given past encounter has profound implications for our understanding of the story unfolding here, for it suggests that the traditional narrative of the Cortés-Montezuma Meeting is an unfaithful, distorted, or even dramatically fictitious rendering of the event. The real encounter that day must have been seen, understood, interpreted, remembered, and recorded in diverse ways, creating a picture far less simple than the one painted by Cortés. The promotion of Spanish mastery and control, of legitimacy and superiority, of a monopoly on truth and on knowing what really happened, must necessarily have marginalized or silenced alternative memories, perceptions, and realities. In short, the depiction of the Meeting as Montezuma’s surrender is likely to have been a lie.
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 4