When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  Tapia also described stone statues of deities with necklaces and decorations of serpents, golden human hearts, and skulls; as these would seem to be descriptions of two statues uncovered beneath Mexico City in 1790 and 1933 (Coatlicue and another deity, Yolotlicue), it has been suggested that Tapia muddled up his “idols” in his later recollections. This was not the only possible muddling up of Aztec statues, mixed with conquistador imagination; the temple tour described by Cortés (and Bernal Díaz) was not actually that of the Great Temple at the heart of Tenochtitlan, but took place in the neighborhood of Tlatelolco.40

  Tapia’s account was not published, but it was read by Gómara, who merged all these ingredients to create an imaginative description of Huitzilopochtli as a grim, fearsome, bejewelled stone idol in the Great Temple. Gómara’s semifictional, hybrid Huitzilopochtli was copied over and over by chroniclers and churchmen (Franciscans like Mendieta and Torquemada in particular relished the detail of sacrificed children’s blood). Even Las Casas, with his deep skepticism of the conquistadors, swallowed it wholesale. Bernal Díaz, despite insisting his account was to rectify Gómara’s errors, himself copied the Gómara version.41

  Meanwhile, a slightly different Spanish description of the “idol” developed in Mexico. Probably originating among the indigenous elite in the late sixteenth century, in oral tradition or a long-lost codex, the earliest surviving record of this description is in fray Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain. From there it was copied by a Jesuit, Juan de Tovar; Durán and Tovar included drawings of the god in their books (and Tovar’s is included in our Gallery). Both books also remained unpublished for centuries, but another Jesuit, José de Acosta, copied Tovar’s description into his Moral and Natural History of the Indies. First published in 1590, Acosta’s book soon became an international hit, quickly published in six other European languages.42

  Acosta’s description of Huitzilopochtli was for centuries worked into various bestselling histories of the Americas, from Theodore de Bry’s Americae series to Solís’s Historia. Some combined the Acosta version with the Gómara version, with emphasis usually placed on the more satanic elements. For example, Ogilby’s influential book, along with its Dutch twin, regaled readers with lurid images of Aztec sacrifices, flesh-eating, and idols—including a vast goat-monster of a Huitzilopochtli, complete with a ghoulish face on his torso. Thus whatever authentic, indigenous elements may have worked their way into the Durán-Tovar descriptions, or even the first conquistador accounts, they were distorted or lost amid the Europeanized ones. “In the centuries following the Conquest,” art historian Elizabeth Boone concluded in a landmark study, Huitzilopochtli “comes to be a new pagan god or a diabolical idol.”43

  All of which raises the question: What did Huitzilopochtli really look like? No stone statues of the god have survived (so much for Tapia’s description), but there are descriptions and drawings in early colonial codices. Their imagery is similar to that found on stone sculptures made before the Spanish invasion; examples are in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (in our Gallery) and on the backrest to a stone throne called the Teocalli. In these and comparable examples, the artist has not simply drawn or carved the “idols” that Europeans imagined Aztecs worshipped. Such images are neither the god himself, nor a priest dressed up to represent the god, but to some extent both of those things. The decorative elements—heron and quetzal feathers, a hummingbird-head helmet, paint stripes on face and body, a smoking shield, and so on—evoke the characteristics of the deity; they call up his sacrality, his divine and sacred power.44

  Only one of these sacred elements is unique to Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird (huitzilin in Nahuatl); all the others can be found as sacred elements of other Aztec deities. Furthermore, some of the descriptions and drawings of Huitzilopochtli that have survived from the sixteenth century do not actually refer to the god himself, but rather to priests or rulers representing the deity. For example, the Aztec king Chimalpopoca (who ruled 1417–27) is portrayed in the Codex Xolotl as dressed in the accoutrements of the god—from striped face and headdress of heron and quetzal feathers to hummingbird device. This wasn’t so much an impersonation of the god as it was a borrowing of his sacred power, a projection of authority through association with the deity—one whose mythology closely associated him with the genesis of the Aztec state (Huitzilopochtli was said to have guided the ancestors of the Aztecs from their mythical home of Aztlan to the island where they built Tenochtitlan). A similar association is achieved in the Teocalli carving, in which Montezuma mirrors and is paired with the deity, while both “talk” war; the symbols for fire and water, representing warfare, stream from their mouths.45

  One final aspect of Aztec representations of Huitzilopochtli is worth explanation: the dough mentioned earlier, which Spaniards imagined was made with the blood of sacrificed children. In fact, the tzoalli dough was formed of ground amaranth seeds and cactus syrup. It was used to make an image of Huitzilopochtli for the festival of Panquetzaliztli, held in the month of that name. The image was adorned with the symbols of the deity (the feathers, the hummingbird device, the stripes, and so on), carried through the streets of the city, set up at the Great Temple, and at the climax of the festival it was broken up and eaten.46

  The tzoalli image is depicted and described in colonial sources such as Sahagún’s Historia (Florentine Codex), more or less in ways that seem to reflect accurately how it was used. But at the same time, the transformation of the Aztec deity into the demon-god of European imagination can be seen emerging in Franciscan and other Spanish sources. Indeed, the transition can even be seen occurring within Sahagún’s Historia: the drawing of the dough statue of Huitzilopochtli in Book I is similar to the sideways rendering in various codices; but in Book XII, composed years later, the traditional accoutrements and side view were replaced by a frontal view of a leg-splayed pagan god, a stark precursor to the devil-idol to be found on the pages of European books for centuries to come. The iconography and meaning of Aztec images of Huitzilopochtli have been explored and debated at great length by scholars, and it would be easy to devote many more pages to them. But the point should already be clear: Huitzilopochtli, as represented by the Aztecs themselves, was a far cry from the pagan devil-monster of post-invasion renderings.47

  ALTHOUGH THE SACRIFICIAL PRACTICES associated with Huitzilopochtli are still the primary popular images of Aztec culture, the deity himself became eclipsed in the last century or so by another: Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent (or Plumed Serpent), “for most people the quintessential Aztec god.” The story of how the modern manifestation of Quetzalcoatl evolved is very different, and more complex, than the parallel post-invasion history of Huitzilopochtli. But the end result is the same: so much was invented by Europeans, mostly for specific political, religious, and cultural purposes, that the surviving aspects and meanings of the original Aztec deity are diluted, eclipsed, difficult to discern.48

  What does seem clear is that there was memory or folk history in ancient Mexico of a legendary ruler of Tula (the city-state that dominated central Mexico before the Aztecs but after the decline of Teotihuacan), named Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. Topiltzin is really a title (in Nahuatl, to means “our,” pilli means “nobleman,” and tzin is a part of speech that conveys reverence; making “Our Noble Lord,” or, very colloquially, “Sir”). The title was probably held by a series of rulers, so Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was various historical men who became merged into a single legendary figure, with various folktales attached to him. For our purposes, one such group of tales is important: Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was forced to leave Tula, due to political conflict or religious differences, and in some variants he did not die but disappeared, perhaps across the Caribbean Sea. That final detail was probably added after the Spanish invasion, as was a further twist in the tale: the legendary man, or man-god, was destined one day to return.49

  One of Quetzalcoatl’s many manifestations was that of a man-god, because at some point he merged or
was muddled up with a deity named Quetzalcoatl—himself a complex nexus of gods, including a deity of rain and fertility, and a wind god named Ehecatl. A god named Quetzalcoatl was thus part of the pantheon of the Aztecs, associated in particular with the town of Cholollan (Cholula, a pilgrimage site for more than a millennium, with the world’s largest pyramid; it was devoted to Quetzalcoatl). Meanwhile, during the first decades after the Spanish invasion, two unrelated concepts began to circulate in Mexico and Europe: one was the idea, put into Montezuma’s mouth by Cortés when he wrote his account of the Meeting, that the Aztecs believed the descendants of ancient lords of the land would one day return to claim their kingdom; the other was the idea, first written down by Durán, that St. Thomas reached Mexico and preached there in ancient times.50

  By the late sixteenth century, the first of these had merged with the tale of Quetzalcoatl’s return. It is significant that the linking of the two stories had not been made by the conquistadors; Cortés never once mentions Quetzalcoatl in his writings of the 1520s and ’30s, and Gómara’s mention of Quetzalcoatl follows Tapia, who only refers to him as a man-god founder of Cholollan who wore a white robe covered in red crosses and who banned human sacrifice. Despite this incipient Christianization of the god by the 1540s, it was not until Sahagún compiled his Historia a few decades later that the legends of the returning lords and of Quetzalcoatl’s return were merged into one (“They say he lives, and will return and reign . . . and when don Fernando Cortés came, they thought he was him”).51

  The idea that Montezuma thought Cortés was Huitzilopochtli had circulated earlier—Viceroy Mendoza recounted that rumor in a letter to his brother in Spain in 1540—but by the second half of the century the Franciscans and their Christianized indigenous collaborators on the Historia project had settled on Quetzalcoatl as a far better candidate. The appeal to the early colonial-period indigenous elite of a man-god Quetzalcoatl destined to return was obvious: such a figure made Christianity more local, tying it to native Mexican culture past and present, and helped recast “the Conquest” as predestined and providential, rather than an inexplicable tragedy.52

  Then, in the seventeenth century, the notion that St. Thomas had visited Mexico also became attached to the evolving legends and understandings of whom Quetzalcoatl had been. The first full development of the idea was an essay by Sigüenza y Góngora, unpublished but widely circulated into the next century, when the St. Thomas–Quetzalcoatl myth reached fruition in the hands of writers and churchmen like Lorenzo Boturini, Francisco Javier Clavigero, and the controversial Teresa de Mier. This saintly Quetzalcoatl was a benign ruler who abolished human sacrifice and cannibalism, preached monotheism, prophesied the Spanish conquest, and promised to return. The patriotic significance of the reinvented Quetzalcoatl was profound, and was the basis for his resurgence in twentieth-century Mexico; in the era of indigenismo (a postrevolutionary political and cultural movement that sought to rehabilitate the nation’s indigenous heritage), Quetzalcoatl was the subject of a “literary renaissance,” manifested in poetry, theater, and painting.53

  A side effect of the long life of this modern Quetzalcoatl was the perpetuation of the Sahaguntine connection between the legendary Quetzalcoatl, the alleged Aztec myth of the returning lords, and Montezuma’s supposed speech of surrender. The more Christianized that Quetzalcoatl became, the more benign and blessed he became in the Mexican cultural pantheon, the deeper the roots of that invented connection grew. The effect, in the end, was not to rehabilitate the Aztecs (who remained barbaric and bloodthirsty), but on the contrary, to emphasize their salvation through the surrender to Cortés and Christianity, thereby perpetuating the mythistory of the Meeting.

  The combined effect of Spanish, European, and modern Mexican reinventions of Quetzalcoatl as Jesus-like and Huitzilopochtli as satanic was to reinvent Aztec religion and culture as anticipating and justifying the Spanish invasion. One showed how Satan’s grip on the Aztecs had placed human sacrifice and cannibalism at the heart of their culture, requiring their rescue from barbarism and damnation; the other showed how God had predestined the Aztecs to be saved, laying the foundation through St. Thomas–Quetzalcoatl, bringing it to fruition through Cortés. The final key piece to this elaborate, imaginary puzzle was Montezuma’s identification of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl, inspiring his otherwise incomprehensible surrender, thereby opening Tenochtitlan’s gates to providence, turning an otherwise indefensible invasion into a morally justifiable fulfillment of divine will.

  * * *

  Montezuma was a general in the armies of the Inca emperor of Peru.

  Never mind that the Aztec and Inca empires were thousands of miles apart and never knew of each other’s existence. Such details did not trouble London’s theatergoers a century and a half after Montezuma’s death. For it was as a general, serving the Inca emperor, that Montezuma appeared in The Indian-Queen, a play written by John Dryden and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard, first performed in London in 1664. The brief, five-scene tragedy was later turned into a semi-opera, with music by Henry Purcell. In that form it has been performed from 1695 until today (Purcell’s satisfyingly Baroque melodies offsetting the absurdities of the poets’ plot).54

  The play’s central, heroic character is an entertainingly imaginary Montezuma. As a young Peruvian general, he defeats the Mexicans in battle; but then, when the Mexicans turn the tide and triumph over Inca Peru, Montezuma switches sides. His primary goal, it turns out, is to marry Orazia, the Inca’s daughter—in the face of her father’s opposition, of competition from rival suitor Acacis (son of the Mexican queen), and of that same queen’s desire to have Montezuma for herself.

  The play is thus a royal love story about legitimacy, with romance as a metaphor for kingship: Who has the right to rule and who has the right to love or marry whom? Such a universal theme might have been given a European setting. But by placing the drama in the generically exotic otherness of the ancient Americas, Howard and Dryden were also able to deploy crowd-pleasing themes of incest and human sacrifice—long established in European minds as attributes of “Indian” life. The essentializing of Native American cultures, place, and historical characters—Peruvians and Mexicans mixed up and their kingdoms made adjacent; Mexico’s “Usurping Indian Queen” is named Zempoalla; her general (and secret lover) is Traxcalla—was made possible by the 150-year-long European reduction of historical figures like Montezuma to stereotypes and symbols.

  Dryden soon returned to these themes, this time without his brother-in-law, to write The Indian Emperour. In defiance of today’s wisdom regarding sequels, this longer play was better and more successful; first performed on London’s Drury Lane in 1665, it was a popular hit at the time, and has gone down in literary history as a seminal work of rhymed heroic tragedy.55

  Dryden attempted to fix the second play more securely in historical reality than The Indian-Queen had been. The Incas are absent, for example, and Montezuma rules Mexico, which is invaded by Spaniards led by Cortés (“Cortez”). The sequel takes place twenty years later, with Montezuma the sole character to have survived (although children of the Indian queen, Zempoalla, play roles). In an explanation of the link between the two plays, handed out to audiences, Dryden stated that the sequel was about the conquest of Montezuma’s “flourishing Empire,” and that he had “neither wholly followed the story nor varied from it.”56

  Dryden’s poet’s liberty included making Pizarro one of Cortez’s “commanders” in Mexico, as well as giving all his Aztec characters decidedly non–Native American names, such as Odmar and Alibech. His theme is, once again, the legitimacy of rulership and love (one cannot, it seems, have both: Montezuma chooses love, and dies; Cortez chooses rule, and wins Mexico). Yet while the plot and characters varied from “the Truth of the History” more than Dryden would have had his audiences believe, the play captured important aspects of the early modern (and even modern) perception of “the Spanish Conquest” and its protagonists—most notably that of Montezu
ma.

  In The Indian Emperour the title character is the conflicted, and contradictory, ruler that we know today, the character that he has been for most of the past five centuries. He is the doomed yet “great and glorious Prince” that Dryden declares him from the very start, often firm in his resolve to protect his empire, and steadfast under torture. His captain-goes-down-with-ship sense of pride and honor would have resonated well with an early modern audience: when Cortez, magnanimous to a fault, proffers a compromise to the defeated emperor (“Despair not, Sir, who knows but Conquering Spain / May part of what you lost restore again?”), Montezuma responds:

  “No, Spaniard, know, he who to Empire born,

  Lives to be less, deserves the Victors scorn:

  Kings and their Crowns have but one Destiny:

  Power is their life, when that expires they dye.”

  Taking up his sword, the proud Aztec continues:

  “————Name Life no more;

  ’Tis now a Torture worse than all I bore:

  I’le not be brib’d to suffer Life, but dye

  In spight of your mistaken Clemency.

  I was your Slave, and I was us’d like one;

  The Shame continues when the Pain is gone:

  But I’m a King while this is in my Hand,——[His sword].

  He wants no Subjects who can Death Command:

  You should have ty’d him up, t’have Conquer’d me,

  But he’s still mine, and thus he sets me free [Stabs himself].”57

  Thus does Montezuma become a martyr. He insists that his martyrdom is to his throne, and thus to the empire itself (the notion of royal martyrdom was no doubt an echo, for Dryden and his audiences, of the execution of England’s King Charles I in 1649). Yet he opts not to work with Cortés to govern his people, nor to lead those of his subjects who go into a happy exile (where they will enjoy “Love and Freedom”), because he chooses a principle over his surviving subjects.