When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  This brings us to a more specific reason why the Meeting is such a milestone: the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico,” as well as the traditional portraits of Cortés and Montezuma, effectively stems from that account of the Meeting. If we rethink the Meeting, we can rethink its protagonists and the invasion war. Indeed, we might thereby rethink the entire history of conquest and early colonization in the Americas. And while the dominoes of traditional narratives are falling, we can go even further.

  Consider this: the Spanish conquests are not only viewed as if “inscribed in the genes of the conquistadors,” but that “retrospective illusion” is usually extended to include the genes “of modern Europe.” Put another way, Spain’s conquests funded its creation of “the first modern global configuration,” and as primacy passed from nation to nation, the superior destiny of the West was confirmed. There has been a deep-rooted assumption, for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, that the sixteenth-century rise of Spain and the modern triumph of the West are not just linked by a causal chain, but that each confirms the other, each echoes the other, each tells the same primal tale. The traditional “Conquest of Mexico” narrative resonates because it is a universal one, in which civilization, faith, reason, reality, and a progressive future are victorious over barbarism, idolatry, superstition, irrationality, and a retrogressive past.28

  That narrative may be more broadly familiar than any in human history. For it underpins the multimedia fables that have been embraced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide in the decades straddling the turn of this century—the books, movies, and games of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars are just three examples. At the heart of those fictional universes are conflicts between civilization and barbarism, good and evil, configured in highly racialized terms (even if the racial Others are imaginary anthropomorphic species) and complete with reassuring triumphal endings. No wonder the “Conquest of Mexico,” in traditional narrative form, seems surprisingly familiar to modern audiences.29

  Thus while Cortés and Montezuma continue to crop up again and again in the chapters that follow, this is not just a book about them. It is about something much larger—the pernicious prevalence and insidious ubiquity of traditional narratives that justify invasion, conquest, and inequality. And it is also about something “smaller”—the many men and women whose lives and stories from the age of the conquest wars were left on the margins, forgotten, or never told. They are included not for inclusion’s sake, but because they are the tools that permit us to dismantle the traditional narrative and see the “Conquest of Mexico”—and, perhaps, hopefully, much more—from numerous new angles.

  SURRENDER IN MEXICO. Scenes 3 (“Cortes and Montezuma at Mexican Temple”) and (“American Army Entering the City of Mexico”) in the Frieze of American History, in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, designed by Constantino Brumidi in 1859. The composition of these two events as moments of manifest destiny, as meetings of peaceful triumph and surrender, reflects the nineteenth-century U.S. appropriation of the traditional narrative of the Meeting. Each surrender—Montezuma’s in 1519 and Santa Anna’s in 1847—is used to legitimize the other, setting both incontrovertibly into the edifice of “American” history.

  Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.

  Chapter 2

  No Small Amazement

  [Then] appear’d Montezuma himself, who put a Chain of Gold, imboss’d with Pearls, about Cortez his Neck, and immediately conducted him to the City, where having entred, and being come to the Palace, Montezuma plac’d Cortez on a Golden Throne, and surrendred up his Right to his Catholick Majesty of Spain, in the presence of all his Peers, to their no small amazement.

  —Ogilby’s America, 1670

  Cortés entered triumphant, and to the Empire Of Spain was added that hemisphere

  —Final lines of Juan de Escoiquiz’s epic México Conquistada: Poema Heroyca, 17981

  WITH A TILT OF THE HEAD, AND A GESTURE OF THE HAND, Montezuma capitulates to Cortés on Capitol Hill.

  It is a milestone moment, but you might miss the Aztec emperor’s surrender—even if you are able to visit the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., stand in its spectacular Rotunda, and admire the Frieze of American History at the base of the dome. For the frieze is fifty-eight feet from the floor, and the meeting of Cortés and Montezuma is but one of nineteen scenes.

  The surrender is a subtle one: Montezuma’s pose is one of proud welcome, not abject defeat. Yet the context and ramifications of the encounter seem clear. The forward motion of the scene is with the advancing, armed conquistadors; the Aztecs are adorned with feathers, not weapons, and one of three Aztec princesses is on her knees. Furthermore, the scene is a link in a chain of events that mark “American” history, from Columbus’s first landing in the hemisphere through to the discovery of gold in California (the artist, an Italian named Constantino Brumidi, drew the original designs in 1859). This, the third of Brumidi’s scenes, is echoed in the fifteenth scene, a depiction of U.S. troops taking possession of Mexico City in 1847. The parallel is inescapable: General Scott is Cortés, and General Santa Anna is Montezuma; the two acts of surrender in Mexico City echo, illuminate, and legitimize each other, representing resonant moments in the march of progress that is “American” history.

  The Frieze of American History in the Capitol Rotunda illustrates the simple fact that three and a half centuries after the Meeting took place, it was still being remembered, represented, and reinscribed as a surrender. The clash of civilizations, the conquest wars, the protracted process of colonization are all eclipsed and elided into a single symbolic moment. For Cortés (and the West), that moment is providentially triumphal; for Montezuma (and Native America), it is one of voluntary capitulation, an acceptance of fate. Brumidi left space (accidentally) for later artists to update America’s history, so that today the final scene depicts the Wright brothers and the “Birth of Aviation.” Because the frieze is circular, Wilbur Wright is adjacent to Columbus, separated only by an allegorical female “America” (the Wright-Columbus comparison was frequently made in the twentieth century, typically updated since 1969 to pair the Genoese navigator with Neil Armstrong). The twenty-first century’s millions of visitors to the Capitol can gaze up to see Columbus and the Wrights virtually side by side, just as they can see the mirrored pairs, across the Rotunda from each other, of Cortés and Scott, Montezuma and Santa Anna. The impression of the monumental weight of great events, of a predestined sequence of past moments, of facts carved in stone, is irresistible.2

  Yet the frieze is not carved in stone. It is a mural, painted in grisaille, a fresco of whites and browns designed to look like stone. Likewise, the frieze depicts a series of encounters that actually took place, but those encounters are styled and juxtaposed to eliminate their ambiguities and complexities, all in the service of a greater message. Thus the frieze’s use of content, like its technique of composition, is an artful trick. We can let ourselves be fooled, and accept Montezuma’s surrender to Cortés as a fact carved in stone. Or we can open our eyes to the spectacular trickery of a lie that has lived for five hundred years, surviving like a virus as it moves from page to page, image to image.

  Brumidi did not include Montezuma’s surrender to Cortés in his frieze simply because it happened (it did not) or because he believed it happened (he surely did, as did his peers). It was included because Montezuma’s surrender was seen as a momentous example of barbarism accepting the progressive march of civilization, a strong link in that chain of “American” history, reflecting how the United States sought to build itself and promote its legitimate place in the world.

  This may seem like a wild leap—from sixteenth-century Tenochtitlan to nineteenth-century (and twenty-first-century) Washington, D.C.—but Brumidi was not alone in making such a leap. During his lifetime, the Spanish Conquest of Mexico was very much on the minds of U.S. Americans and Mexicans, as the two carved out identities as independent nations, going to w
ar with each other in the process; U.S. soldiers carried copies of William Prescott’s new bestseller, The Conquest of Mexico, on their march from Veracruz to Mexico City, writing home that they were walking in the footsteps of the great Cortés.3

  The perspective from the Mexican-American War is only the tip of an iceberg of preoccupation with the “Conquest of Mexico” that has not ceased, on both sides of the Atlantic, for five centuries. Our challenge is to grasp how and why a small lie became so massive, how a grossly distorted interpretation of a major event in world history has persisted as its traditional narrative—its mythistory—for half a millennium, staring at us still—from history books, from television screens, from the walls of the Capitol Rotunda.

  * * *

  Sir Hugh Cholmley was an English officer and gentleman who spent much of his adult working life in Tangier. The English acquired the Moroccan port city from the Portuguese in 1661, and the following year Sir Hugh took up a post in the colony, where he served for two decades. At some point he acquired a set of paintings, which he sent to be hung in his ancestral home in Yorkshire. There they remained for three centuries, noticed on occasion by guests, such as the Victorian visitor who described “a most curious and valuable series of eight ancient Spanish pictures, supposed to have come into possession of Sir Hugh Cholmley, of Tangier, from a captured Dutch vessel.”4

  We will probably never know for sure who created these paintings, where, and why, but art historians have reasonably argued that they were made in Mexico during the three decades after 1660, commissioned by a viceroy or even by King Carlos II himself. For the eight paintings told one of the young king’s favorite stories, that of the glorious “Conquest of Mexico.” Either way, destined for Spain, they never arrived. If the Cholmley family lore of “a captured Dutch vessel” is true, it is likely that the Dutch took the paintings from a Spanish ship carrying them across the Atlantic, and the Dutch ship in turn fell into English hands; during Sir Hugh’s Tangier years there were two Anglo-Dutch wars.5

  Meanwhile, Carlos II had commissioned his court historian, Antonio de Solís, to write a new telling of Spain’s “Conquest of Mexico.” The resulting book was published in Madrid in 1684. It was an immediate hit. Cholmley’s eight looted paintings reflect Solís’s telling of the Conquest story so closely that some scholars (myself included) have suggested the paintings were composed between 1684 and Cholmley’s death in 1689 to illustrate Solís’s Historia. I now suspect that the paintings were already hanging in Sir Hugh’s house in Yorkshire when the Historia went to the printers, and that the parallels between the two stem from the fact that they both rely heavily on the traditional narrative of the Conquest established decades earlier (especially the 1632 first edition of the account by Díaz, who is depicted and named in two of the paintings).6

  We shall turn momentarily to Cholmley’s paintings, as they offer an engaging way to illustrate the traditional narrative. But first, it is worth clarifying the core elements and events of that narrative. Although Solís’s version is a good example, his Historia is merely a link in the chain stretching from Cortés’s own accounts through to the present, made manifest in recent times in every imaginable medium from serious history books to television shows.7

  Imagine the traditional narrative as a drama in three acts. For across the centuries, it has been told as a tripartite tale of discovery, loss, and recovery—following a structure that is fundamental to human storytelling (not coincidentally, as we shall see shortly). The first act sets the scene and introduces the cast—most notably the hero (Cortés), the villain (Velázquez), and the tragic hero (Montezuma). This is primarily a Spanish story, beginning with the arrival of its Spanish hero. It is also a tale of underdog triumph, of the extraordinary bravery of a small conquistador company, but the heroism of the group always stems from Cortés’s lead. The narrative follows the hero and his companions into Mexico, culminating in the cliffhanger moment of the Meeting. Following Cortés’s lead, established in his Second Letter, this first act is full of signs that it will climax not only in discovery, but in the winning of a prize—confirmed, in the act’s closing scene, with Montezuma’s surrender to Cortés.8

  The second act begins by consolidating that win, but the logic of the drama requires immediate challenges to it, and sure enough it soon falls apart. Despite heroic efforts to hold on to what Cortés has won for his king, the barbarism of the Aztecs and the treachery of Velázquez bring catastrophe to the conquistadors. Hundreds of Spaniards die in the battles fending off Aztec warriors as the conquistadors fight their way out of Tenochtitlan. But hope remains: the villain is neutralized, as the army Velázquez had sent to arrest Cortés had instead joined him; and the stoic survivors find refuge with their allies, the Tlaxcalteca. The second act closes with Cortés’s promise to his king to reconquer what has been temporarily lost.

  The third act comprises the events covered by Cortés’s Third Letter, in which the final year of the war against the Aztecs is presented as a predestined yet masterful act of recovery by Cortés—in His Majesty’s name. A year of turning towns subject to the Aztec Empire into allies allows the Spaniards to lay siege to Tenochtitlan, culminating in its destruction and the capture of Montezuma’s successor, Cuauhtemoc. The empire is declared conquered—and redeemed as New Spain.9

  LET US NOW FILL in some of the details of this traditional narrative by looking closely at some of Cholmley’s paintings. (All eight can be seen in the flesh—in oil and canvas—by visitors to the Library of Congress, where the paintings hang as part of the Kislak Collection; acquired by the Kislak Foundation in 1999, they are now usually called the Kislak Paintings; four are included in this book’s Gallery.)10

  The Kislak canvases are continuous narratives; most of them image multiple events within a single frame, as if the story were divided into eight chapters. The paintings reflect well several of the traditional narrative’s key elements. For example, Cortés is the hero of the story. Aside from his name in the title of half the paintings in the series, he is also tagged in the key with a “1” in the six paintings where he appears. Three other captains are also introduced to let us know that this is a tale of glorious battles fought by a small company of brave conquistadors. Gonzalo de Sandoval, Cristóbal de Olid, and Pedro de Alvarado appear five or six times in the painting series (as often as Cortés), identified with numbers on their helmets. In the first painting, for example (not reproduced here), the three appear—in the tradition of battle paintings of the Baroque period—on horseback, wielding swords. The captains, along with the anonymous throng of conquistadors presented in the paintings, are in full armor and carrying banners of the seventeenth century. The traditional narrative is full of anachronisms of this kind, turning the conquistadors from armed colonists into an army of soldiers.11

  Let us turn specifically to Kislak Painting #2, which graphically evokes further aspects of the traditional narrative of the war. In late April 1519, Cortés’s fleet anchored in the same natural harbor found by a previous expedition (that of Juan de Grijalva), on what is now the central Veracruz coast. The next three months featured a series of events that are weaved into the traditional narrative, all essential to the cloth of Cortés’s legend as a general of genius. Those events (as traditionally told) were as follows: The coast was part of the kingdom of the Totonacs, who were tribute-paying subjects of the Aztecs. Cortés was able to turn Totonac suspicion of the foreigners into an alliance against the Aztecs, setting a precedent that would allow him systematically to dismantle the empire by a combination of diplomacy and warfare over the next two years. At the same time he initiated diplomatic relations with the Aztecs themselves, through a series of meetings and gift exchanges with ambassadors from Tenochtitlan, artfully fomenting discord and alarm in the empire—from its margins to its center.

  Meanwhile, seeing how wealthy the empire was, Cortés determined not to return to Cuba to report to Velázquez, but to press on and conquer the Aztecs in the Spanish king’s name. With a trio of
brilliant moves he dispatched a ship to Spain laden with Aztec treasures (Montezuma’s gifts) and letters to the king; he then sank the rest of his fleet so none of the men could betray him to Velázquez; and he manipulated his company of some 450 men into founding a town on the coast, named Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. They elected a town council; the council or cabildo officers, acting according to Cortés’s secret plan, used their new authority as Crown officials to declare the Velázquez expedition fulfilled and terminated, and to appoint Cortés as their captain-general to lead them to conquer and settle for the king.

  This impression of Cortés’s masterful ability to maintain control of the situation in the face of all obstacles is powerfully reflected in the dominant scenario of this Kislak Painting #2—at Cortés’s command, the conquistadors have put on a theatrical display of military shock and awe. The canvas is bristling with lances, cannon, galloping horse legs, and ship masts. The eight ships are mostly heavy galleons (in reality, not yet invented at the time of the war), their gun ports open. Onshore, six cannon are being fired simultaneously, while six horsemen gallop in formation with lances raised. To the far right, half-naked indigenous warriors fall to the ground in fear and wonder; the heavy dress and weaponry of the conquistadors contrasts in all the paintings with the light feathered costumes of the indigenous warriors, whose faces mostly show alarm or amazement.

  To the far left, a large Aztec embassy presents lavish gifts to Cortés, who is seated at a white-clothed table (a reframing has cut off all but Cortés’s hands and a knee). In the traditional narrative, these gifts were bribes from Montezuma, who was already hoping to persuade Cortés to go home; cleverly, the conquistador converts them into bribes with a different purpose. He is seated with other Spanish captains and with Malintzin. This was his Nahua interpreter (whose name is explained in the Preface, and whose life is further discussed in Chapter 8). Mayas had earlier “given” her to Cortés, as the expedition worked its way from Yucatan along the Gulf coast toward Vera Cruz; she thus spoke Nahuatl (the tongue of the Aztecs) and Yucatec Maya. Before that, the Spaniards had rescued Gerónimo de Aguilar on Cozumel. Because he had been shipwrecked on the Yucatec coast seven years earlier, he too had learned Maya. Together, Aguilar and Malintzin formed an invaluable translation chain, credited in the traditional narrative to a combination of good fortune (or God’s intervention) and Cortés’s astuteness.12