When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  González asserted four reasons to prove “the just title of Your Majesty to this new world” and “to shut up the backbiters [murmuradores].” One was that the conquistadors had come under license from king and pope; another was that “these people” (indigenous Mexicans) were “idolatrous” cannibals and “filthy sodomites” (a common accusation and justification for conquest to which we shall return later). The remaining two proofs were roundabout ways of using the Surrender as justification. Montezuma “was not a legitimate lord,” because he had usurped the throne from his elder brother, “unmade the contract [compañia] of his ancestors” (the Triple Alliance with Tetzcoco and Tlacopan), and tyrannized and enslaved his subjects. Thus, as a result, “the lords of the land were on our side,” willingly joining Cortés and the Spaniards, who “made them free of all captivity and servitude.” González thus dismissed Montezuma as illegitimate, thereby dismissing his surrender; instead, the Surrender was applied to “all those natives, admitted into the service of Your Majesty of their own free will; they asked for it and we ratified it.”51

  One can imagine González and his fellow veterans sitting round the dinner table cursing Las Casas and other “backbiters,” discussing the Surrender and its importance in these terms. Similar conversations are reflected in a 1589 book written by Juan Suárez de Peralta. Born in Mexico City in 1537, Peralta was a nephew of Cortés’s first wife (murdered, Peralta’s aunt later alleged, by Cortés). Peralta insisted that the speech of surrender recorded in Cortés’s Second Letter, and repeated in Gómara’s biography, was true:

  [Montezuma] said those words, as recounted by old Indians, from whom I heard them, as did certain conquistadors, especially my brother-in-law Alonso de Villanueva Tordesillas, who was secretary to the government of the Marqués del Valle [Cortés], and to whom one can give much credit, seeing as he was so prominent and honored and very noble, a native of Villanueva de la Serena.52

  One gets the strong impression that Peralta heard the story only from his brother-in-law—whose truthfulness, in accordance with the early modern Spanish legal system, was based on his socio-racial status more than plausibility or corroborating evidence. As for the brother-in-law’s source—“old Indians”—Peralta told us nothing of them or those from whom they may have heard the story. The surrender speech Peralta reproduced was a somewhat fantastical version of the Cortés-Gómara account, complete with ancient prophecies and the Aztecs believing the conquistadors to be gods.

  Las Casas was the one man willing to question the Surrender story in public—because he was willing to question the legitimacy of the invasion, the very rationale behind the story. The friar told several stories of conversations he had with Cortés in Mexico City. In one, Las Casas said he reproached the conquistador for attacking Montezuma without cause and taking him prisoner—and then taking his kingdom. Cortés replied, “Qui non intrat per ostium fur est et latro. [He who does not enter by the front door is a thief and a brigand.]” This seems to have been Cortés’s style—to joke about the war, and to do it at the friar’s expense by vaguely comparing himself to Christ (the Latin phrase is from John, Chapter 10).53

  Las Casas’s indignance over the conquistador’s immorality and arrogance was similarly characteristic. Thief, brigand, and liar were precisely the accusations levied at Cortés by Las Casas, who had no qualms confronting him in person or denouncing his deeds and deceptions in print. And, in 1547, while Cortés’s bones were still settling into their coffin, Las Casas prepared to confront in Spain the apologist forces for the Conquest. A series of debates were held, over several years, in the university town of Salamanca and in Valladolid, where they culminated in the convening of a special council or junta of 1550–51 (when Las Casas took five days to read out loud in Latin his 550-page Argumentum apologiae). Conquistador veterans were there, like Bernal Díaz (or so he claimed), and other minor figures like Gómara (hard at work on his hagiography of Cortés, soon to be published as La Conquista de México); both men could scarcely have imagined the influence their books would have on perpetuating the mythistory of the Conquest for centuries to come. Also at the debates were Historians Royal like former conquistador-administrator Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (whom Las Casas once called “the greatest enemy that the Indians ever had”), and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the “intellectual figurehead of the conquistador cause.”54

  The result of the years of argumentation was a moral victory for Las Casas, as reflected in laws curbing conquistador practices and a book that has yet to go out of print (1552’s The Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). The achievement of Las Casas was the permanent establishment of the principle that conquests—both in general and in each specific act of invasion and territorial claim—required justification. But in practice that did not mean that Spain’s colonies ended up being run by bishops and friars, as Las Casas wanted; it meant that conquistadors had to justify their actions by following certain legal procedures to avoid losing out to rivals or to Crown officials, or being denied the lucrative and prestigious right to rule the provinces they had won. The many New World readings of the Requirement—along with related ritual performances of Spanish authority, like Montezuma’s invented surrender speech—had, despite their apparent absurdity, done their job. Conquistadors continued to be granted licenses to “pacify” and “populate” (thereby enjoying the title of adelantado, literally “the advance man,” the licensed invader). But if they survived the wars they started, and the internecine violence among conquistadors and Crown officials of the early sixteenth-century Americas, they increasingly ran the risk of being bedeviled by decades of lawsuits and legal wrangling back in Spain, while another governed what the adelantado had fought so hard to conquer.

  Consequently, the concept of justification was the battleground upon which all sides of the debate on conquest and colonization fought. In this sense, Sepúlveda had won the argument. For the debate was no longer about the humanity of indigenous peoples, but about how to define “just war” against them—how to remove “doubt” regarding the king’s “lordship” over “this new world” (in Ruy González’s words). As one conquest led to another, like stepping-stones of violence taking the invaders and all their deadly baggage across the hemisphere, the controversial cases piled up. From the 1520s into the ’40s, accusations against Cortés of the use of excessive violence continued to circulate; but in the face of new cases of conquistador atrocities—in Michoacán, in Guatemala, in southeast Yucatan, in Peru—the Mexican stories seemed less and less shocking. Above all, tales of the treatment meted out to indigenous kings and rulers comprised a litany of torture and murder. Yes, Cuauhtemoc had suffered the same fate, tortured in 1521, hanged in 1525, and Montezuma himself was probably murdered (as we shall see). But no other conquistadors could come close to claiming a surrender story like that of the Meeting. Preserving and perpetuating the Meeting as Surrender thus became increasingly important not just to the Mexican case, but to the entire enterprise of Spanish conquest and colonization in the Americas. It was the paramount parable of justification.55

  THUS WAS THE TRADITIONAL narrative propagated in the Spanish world. By the time of the Salamanca debates, a set of key versions of specific conquest events—above all, the Meeting as Surrender—was already in print, most notably in accounts by Cortés and by Oviedo. Gómara’s was soon to follow, consolidated in the next century by Herrera, Díaz, Solís, and on into the eighteenth century. But a further answer (the fourth of our eight) is needed to explain why the same narrative is repeated in accounts in English, French, Dutch, and eventually a dozen other languages, perpetuated in paintings, poems, plays, and operas, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That answer is, to borrow a term from modern psychology, confirmation bias.

  An eighteenth-century Frenchman, the Abbé Prévost, seemed to hit the nail on the head when he noted that Spanish accounts of Montezuma’s speech, full of “skill and ingenuity,” were based on sources that “were mostly highly suspect.”
Yet, mused the historian-abbot, “they seem otherwise, because they draw on a sort of authenticity through their resemblance to accounts by all historians, all of whom must have drawn from a common source.” Prévost was right; the similarity of all the sources available to him in the 1750s was due to the fact that they stemmed ultimately from a single root—the surrender speech invented by Cortés. However, rather than go on to question the veracity of the speech, the abbot—of brilliant mind but ultimately a man of his times—concluded the opposite. He then simply repeated the version created by Solís, whose account was in Prévost’s day the best-known descendant of Cortés’s version.56

  In other words, the story of Montezuma’s surrender was repeated so often that it acquired the timbre of truth, the way that statements uttered over and over or made in print again and again tend to do. Century after century, chroniclers and historians simply repeated the same story, each new account a new branch stemming from the same tree trunk. Gómara and Díaz in the sixteenth century, Solís in the seventeenth, Robertson and Prescott in the eighteenth and nineteenth—none were able or willing to act like modern historians and strive to create an objective, balanced (some might say, cynical) reconstruction of the past. Nor should we expect that of them. Instead, they leaned on their own briefs and biases—Gómara in Cortés’s employ, Solís in the king’s, Robertson influenced by the anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish Black Legend—to forge minor variations on the theme of the Meeting as a Surrender.

  Even more recent generations of historians, subjecting the Meeting and the Conquest to scholarly scrutiny and international debate, as the pile of books rose higher and higher, have not escaped the shadow of that tree—with its hundreds of branches all stemming from Cortés’s letter. Some have certainly rejected Cortés’s account as an outright invention, with Montezuma’s surrender speeches as “fabrications.” But the overwhelming majority of modern accounts—in print, online, on film—are mere variations on the same endlessly repeated theme of the Meeting as Surrender.57

  As the Elizabethan essayist Francis Bacon famously noted, opinion “brings on substance”; once formed, “it draws all things else to support and agree with it.” The weight of “received opinion” is as great as that which simply seems “agreeable.” Or, to draw on a more recent commentator (and an historian of colonial Mexico), James Lockhart once remarked that scholars were subject to what he sardonically called “the law of the preservation of the energy of historians.” Consequently, historians tend to turn first to “the easiest (most synthetic) sources.” In this case, those sources are the canon of conquistador and chronicler accounts that underpin the traditional narrative, further rendered “fact” by confirmation bias.58

  Related to confirmation bias is another subliminal factor (and another answer to the question posed a few pages back). This factor is the structure of the traditional “Conquest of Mexico” narrative, a subliminal factor because we are drawn to it as something familiar and predictable (and thus something that just makes sense), without being consciously aware of the deep roots of the attraction. To be more specific: not only is the Conquest story a ripping-good yarn, but its core elements have allowed it to harness the power and logic of the Classical narrative. It is typically called such because it is traceable back to Aristotle. But today’s literary theorists have also reduced it to a five-stage model, labeled A/B/-A/-B/A.59

  Applied to our story: A is the initial state of equilibrium (a New World granted to the Spanish Crown by the pope, with Cortés as one of the agents of God and crown, tasked simply with claiming it); B is the disruption of that equilibrium (the Spaniards meet with resistance); -A is the acknowledgment of that disruption (the Spaniards realize that they have invaded a powerful, centralized state to which they assign blame for all disruptions); -B is the attempt to repair that disruption (they attempt to forge alliances in order to reach Montezuma and Tenochtitlan); the final A is the restoration of equilibrium (Montezuma’s surrender). The rest of the story is a repeat of the B/-A/-B/A stages, with the Spaniards facing a setback, building alliances, and restoring equilibrium through the defeat of the Aztecs and the recovery of Tenochtitlan.

  This is arguably the only way Cortés could have structured the narrative, and the only way (or certainly the most likely way) that subsequent narrators and chroniclers could have seen it. For this is the traditional narrative structure in the West, deeply embedded in the medieval European mind, perpetuated through the early modern centuries, and given renewed strength in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the explosion of different media for telling stories—from the novel to the full-length motion picture. The traditional Conquest of Mexico narrative is tailor-made for modern storytelling, complete with hero, villain, and tragic hero, as well as an ambiguous romantic theme that can be twisted to suit contemporary purposes (the Cortés-Malintzin relationship that has blossomed in the last two centuries). Whether we view it as a three-act drama or a five-stage narrative, its win-loss-recovery structure is echoed in a myriad range of dramas stretching from Shakespearean tragedy to Hollywood’s romantic comedies.

  MEANWHILE (returning to the sixteenth century for the sixth answer), a similar narrative was becoming rooted, traditional, and repeatedly confirmed among the indigenous nobility in Mexico—but for different reasons than those underpinning its Spanish and European equivalent. The colonial system brought to Mexico from Spain a new political culture of reward and privilege. Claims to a deeply rooted and unswerving loyalty to church and crown, God and king, were essential to how indigenous rulers, dynasties, and towns petitioned for rewards (such as exemption from paying tribute, rights to traditional titles, and control over landed estates). As a result, a surrender mythistory spread across Mesoamerica. For centuries, all across the former Aztec Empire and south into the Maya regions of Yucatan and Guatemala, ruling families and former city-states and towns claimed that they had immediately and peacefully embraced Christianity and the sovereignty of the Spanish Crown. Some genuinely had, but many downplayed or omitted their past resistance to invasion.60

  That larger surrender mythistory gave structural support and cultural affirmation to the more specific mythistory of Montezuma’s Surrender to Cortés. Who was most motivated to embrace and perpetuate the Surrender? Montezuma’s own relatives and descendants. Despite suffering heavy losses in the war, the Aztec royal family survived as a ruling dynasty (albeit at the local level), successfully maneuvering and negotiating their status for generations (there is copious legal documentation on family members’ efforts to sustain property and position from the early sixteenth into the twentieth centuries). There are numerous examples of the consistent claim by Aztec dynasty members that Montezuma voluntarily conceded sovereignty. Perhaps the best-known such examples are by his daughter, Tecuichpochtzin (doña Isabel Moctezuma Tecuichpo), and her sixth (and final) husband, the conquistador Juan Cano, who promoted the notion of Montezuma as a Christian martyr—welcoming Cortés from the very start, eager to convert, dying “in Your Majesty’s Service.” The argument was clear. In Cano’s words: “it befits your royal conscience to show favor to [the Aztec imperial] lineage, especially to doña Isabel, because she is the successor to Moctezuma, who gave obedience and vassalage to Your Majesty.” We shall return to doña Isabel in a later chapter, so let us turn here to an example written by another Aztec noble, don Pablo Nazareo, a nephew by marriage of Montezuma’s.61

  Nazareo was a boy during the Spanish-Aztec War, educated after it by Franciscan friars in the college in Tlatelolco (part of the island-capital slowly turning into Mexico City). Trilingual in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin (of which he became a teacher), Nazareo wrote a series of letters in Latin to the Spanish king, petitioning for privileges on behalf of himself, his wife, and the father-in-law whom he cared for in his old age. That old man was don Juan Axayacatl (or Axayaca), Montezuma’s brother; Nazareo’s wife was a niece of Montezuma’s, baptized doña María Axayaca Oceloxochitzin. Nazareo repeated in various ways in his letters to the kin
g that Montezuma and his brother had not only surrendered to Cortés, but that don Juan’s loyalty throughout the war made the Spanish Conquest possible. For example:

  Our forebears, the lord Moteucçoma and our father the lord Juan Axayaca, Moteucçoma’s brother, were easily the first of anyone who rose up in favor of the Spaniards who were the first to travel in these parts of the Indies, and with humble souls yielded to Your Royal Crown with the greatest reverence, giving, via the Captain [Cortés], to Your Sacred Catholic Caesarean Majesty infinite goods, a great quantity of gifts, and infinite kinds of weaponry made of pure gold, as a sign, or rather as proof, that they recognized the true rule of the vicar of God, almighty and living, one shepherd and one flock.62

  It would hardly be an understatement to say that, for don Pablo Nazareo, his uncle’s Surrender had cosmic significance. This simple pair of facts—Montezuma’s Surrender was a fiction, but his relatives and descendants bent over backward for generations to insist it was an essential truth—tells us a great deal about the role that mythistorical moment played in Mexican history, as it unfolded after 1519. One can hardly blame Nahuas like Nazareo and doña Isabel Moctezuma for deploying the myth of Montezuma’s surrender as a legal and political strategy. After all, they were Christians and surely preferred to believe that the emperor had died one too. For them, the Surrender was no lie; it was the sacred moment that made sense of their new world.