When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The conquistadors liked to claim both that Montezuma willingly gave them his empire and also that they had destroyed it with remarkable rapidity—early in the 1520s Cortés wrote regularly of how he had already “conquered and settled” all of New Spain. But the destruction of the Aztecs and their emperor was actually a slow process, not just in terms of Spanish colonization (which, contra Cortés, took decades, even centuries), but in terms of the steady, widespread construction of negative and stereotypical perceptions and depictions of Aztec civilization and the personality of the ruler who welcomed the invaders that November day in 1519. Most important, the understanding of the Meeting as the Surrender by Montezuma both underpinned and was reinforced by those perceptions.76

  The organizers of a 2009 British Museum exhibition, Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler, noted that “today Moctezuma is an ambivalent and little-celebrated figure,” although “his name still carries a ring of familiarity.” Their reference was to Mexico, but the statement surely applies more broadly too. The British sailor song suggests that the emperor needed assistance in avenging the wrong done to him by his enemies, and it is perhaps the ultimate sign of how bruised his reputation is that most people today associate Montezuma’s name with a phrase that did not even originate in Mexico or Spain, but with the intestinal distress of British administrators in India and other regions of their empire. As “Montezuma’s Revenge” is also the name of a video game and a roller coaster, even the original meaning of that phrase is presumably lost to many. In the interests of permitting the emperor that vengeance, therefore—and also by way of bringing us closer to a new understanding of the Meeting—we now turn to look at Montezuma with fresh eyes.77

  DOWNTOWN. The map of Tenochtitlan printed with the 1524 Latin edition of Cortés’s Second Letter, published in Nuremberg. The labels were in Italian in the 1525 Venice edition. A few hand-colored versions also survived. The map is hybrid in style and content, a Europeanized version of a lost Aztec original. The smaller circular space on the left is the Gulf of Mexico, likewise a European rendering of a cloth original acquired from Montezuma. The larger detail has been rotated to place north at the top. The closer detail is in its original orientation, and depicts Montezuma’s zoo.

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 4

  The Empire in His Hands

  They unanimously gave him their votes, saying he was mature, virtuous, very generous, of invincible spirit, and adorned with all the virtues that could be found in a good ruler; his advice and decisions were always right, especially in matters of war, in which he had ordered and undertaken things that showed his invincible spirit.

  —fray Diego Durán’s account of Montezuma’s election to emperor in 1502, in his History of the Indies of New Spain, 1581

  Moteczuma found himself on the greatest throne that he or his ancestors had ever held. The whole empire was in his hands. And so, considering the great power he had, he did not believe that he could be conquered by any ruler, even the greatest in the world.

  —don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Thirteenth Relation, 1614

  His story is, perhaps the greatest, which was ever represented in a Poem of this nature.

  —John Dryden, referring to Montezuma, in the dedication to The Indian Emperour, 16651

  IT IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAPS IN THE HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY. It is also one of the most significant and enigmatic—the sole surviving cartographic depiction of a unique and spectacular city on the eve of its destruction. And yet nobody knows who created the map.

  Sometimes wrongly (and ludicrously) attributed to Cortés, the earliest version of the map seems to have been a long-lost print of 1522, made in Seville to accompany the first edition of the conquistador’s Second Letter to the king (as we learned in Chapter 1). A Spanish engraver probably created it by combining a sketch sent from Mexico with details found in the Letter. The original Mexican cartographer would thus have been indigenous, most likely an Aztec who knew Tenochtitlan well. But the engraver in Seville had never seen the Aztec capital, or any buildings in Mexico, and his embellishments thus created a strange hybrid metropolis—as can be seen in the earliest surviving versions.2

  The map seized the imagination of printers, writers, and readers, and it has not let go for five centuries. Known today as the Nuremberg Map, it was copied and adapted over the years, taking on a life of its own. It accompanied accounts of explorations and conquests published in French and Dutch and Italian, printed in Germany, England, Spain, and Mexico. Details were dropped and added, islands in the lakes were moved, the scale and orientation were shifted. In some versions, there was only one, circular lake. In others, the causeways were bridges and the dikes were strings of fortified towers. In one branch of variants, there were as many as eight islands on the lake, all with city buildings on them, all connected by causeways. Over time, buildings tended to look more and more European, with the center of Tenochtitlan gradually losing the detail of the original version.3

  Yet despite this complex and fascinating story of cartographic evolution, certain key details survived in the rendering of the city. One detail in particular is, I suggest, of crucial importance to understanding Montezuma. In fact, I believe it is the key to his worldview, to grasping who he was, and why he responded the way he did to the arrival of the Spaniards. That detail was a part of the city destroyed in 1521, but remembered for centuries: Montezuma’s zoo.

  On the Nuremberg Map, located within the central plaza of “Temixtitan” are the usual architectural elements that appealed to the European imagination: the pyramid and “Temple where they sacrifice” (Templum ubi sacrificant); skull racks, with silhouetted heads still sporting hair, both labeled “Sacrificial heads” (Capita sacrificatorum); and a headless, vaguely androgynous statue, called a “Stone Idol” (Idol Lapideum). But on the edge of the stylized city in the Nuremberg Map appears another label: “Montezuma’s Garden,” and next to it, “Montezuma’s Pleasure Palace.” Adjacent to the central plaza is “Montezuma’s Palace,” and nearby a structure labeled “House of the Animals” (Domus animalium; in the Italian version, Casa de li animali). The map thus gives the impression of a city and its ruler that were not solely concerned with violence and death, but with pleasure and life. Is it possible that—amid the imaginative fantasy of a map evolved far from geographical and architectural reality—this depiction of the city captured something revealingly essential about the world that Montezuma controlled?4

  * * *

  The answer is a resounding yes. I believe that Montezuma’s complex of palaces, gardens, and zoos is the key that unlocks a new way of looking at the emperor, his empire, and his response to the arrival of conquistadors. The key has been in front of us all along—in the Nuremberg Map, for example—but we simply have not seen its significance or appreciated how it makes sense of the Meeting. For this reason, the zoo is worth dwelling on for a moment.

  The Aztec emperor’s palaces, gardens, and zoos were so extensive, well ordered, intensely maintained, aesthetically impressive, and—to foreign eyes—exotic and strange, that they drew immediate interest in Europe. The very earliest letters and pamphlets that spread word of the Aztecs in European cities in the 1520s emphasized such wonders. For example, a newsletter that seems to have been written in November 1522, and printed in German in Augsburg, probably by year’s end, contextualized the zoo of “Mantetunia” (Montezuma) thus:

  This Mantetunia has many large and beautiful palaces, the doors of which are as much as seventy or ninety feet wide, with such a maze of corridors that those who loiter there cannot easily find their way out and sometimes get lost. The land has an abundance of gold, pearls, and precious stones, and the palace contains an enormous treasure. There are many beautiful gardens and parks such as have never been seen before, and many strange trees and fruits unknown to us, and a very beautiful and rare zoological garden in which there are many strange fowl and animals of this country such as tigers, lions, leopar
ds, bears, wild boars, and lizards, as well as wild and wondrously shaped human beings from among their own people, which they watch, and they are of both sexes. All these are kept separated.5

  The newsletter would have drawn upon letters arriving with every ship that came from the New World, such as one written in Cuba by the royal judge Alonso de Zuazo in November 1521. Zuazo had not yet seen Mexico for himself, but he saw the booty that Cortés sent back to Spain in 1520 and he clearly spoke with some of the conquistadors who were in Tenochtitlan before its fall—among them Diego de Ordaz and Alonso de Ávila. His summary of the zoo thus reflected the details that were circulating in these earliest days:

  Monteuzuma [sic] had for show a house in which he had a great diversity of serpents and wild animals, which included tigers, bears, lions, wild boar, vipers, rattlesnakes, toads, frogs and many other various snakes and birds, right down to worms; and each one of these things was in its place and in cages as needed, with people assigned to give them food and all that was necessary to take care of them. He also had other people that were monstrous, such as dwarves and hunchbacks, some with one arm and others that were missing a leg, and other monstrous races [naciones] that are born as such.6

  Zuazo also included the usual stereotypes about the Aztecs (they were all godless, cannibal sodomites who sacrificed live victims daily) and some tall tales (one province was inhabited by giants, proof of which was a massive bone that Ordaz had taken back to Spain, and another region was ruled by the “Lady of Silver”). But the details regarding the zoo more or less match those in other early reports, from the earliest (Cortés’s Second Letter and Andrés de Tapia’s account) to the late-sixteenth-century accounts that blended the threads of prior accounts with indigenous community memory and with Franciscan and Dominican versions. So, did Montezuma’s zoo really exist or was it a myth (to use the terms of a long-standing debate in Mexico)?7

  Conquest history is certainly full of tall tales and long-lasting legends. This book, after all, is built upon my argument that a linchpin of that history—Montezuma’s surrender—is the tallest tale of all. But the repeated reports and mentions of the imperial Aztec zoo do not smack of such invention, nor do they smell of political or religious spin. Both colonial and modern accounts certainly contain exaggeration, invention, and plenty of imagination—especially, as we shall see shortly, on the link between the zoo and the ubiquitous theme of human sacrifice. But I see no reason to question the zoo’s existence. Indeed, in addition to early colonial accounts of it, there are two other relevant sources of evidence: the lists of war booty and loot, gifts, and tribute items that Cortés and other conquistadors sent back to Spain between 1519 and 1524; and the thousands of objects discovered by archaeologists buried underneath the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan.8

  The sum of all that evidence opens up a window onto Aztec life and Montezuma’s court that is illuminating and compelling, offering an important series of steps toward a new understanding of the Meeting. I suggest we look through that window in a trio of distinct ways. The first way is to emphasize organization and categorization: how the zoos were laid out as part of the larger royal collections of flora, fauna, and other objects—what we might call the zoo-collection complex. Another perspective is to analyze acquisition, maintenance, and observation: how the zoo-collection complex was built, and the relationships between the collections and Montezuma himself, his courtiers, and those who worked in the zoos. The third way of looking at the zoo-collection complex is to think about representation and meaning: how did all the animals, birds, plants, people, and objects reflect the Aztec cosmology or view of their empire and the universe. As far as that may seem to take us from the day that Cortés first met Montezuma, it actually sharpens our vision of that event in surprising ways.

  VARIATIONS IN COLONIAL ACCOUNTS of the zoo make it hard to tell what kinds of categories the Aztecs themselves used. The Nuremberg Map suggests that the zoo-collection complex had two levels of organization: discrete palaces or compounds (simply called “houses” on the map and in Spanish accounts), within which were separate cages, rooms, or walled zones for different kinds of creatures (as mentioned by Zuazo and shown in the map). Colonial writers often made an attempt to describe the zoo-collection complex categorically, but then either allowed their imagination to get the better of them or ended the topic by lumping categories together. (Gómara, for example, divided live birds into two chapters, one of birds kept for their feathers, the other of hunting birds—but threw into the latter chapter wild cats, other animals, and deformed humans.) Ogilby, drawing upon a century and a half of such descriptions, labeled the zoo-collection complex Montezuma’s “Strange Garden-houses” and identified three categories:

  The King hath in Tenustitan three great Structures, whose Magnificence, for Cost and rare Architecture, can hardly be parallell’d. The first is the Residence for all deform’d People: The second, an Aviary for all manner of Birds and Fowl, being a spacious open place, Roof’d with Nets, and surrounded with Marble Galleries. The third, being a Den for Wild Beasts, was divided into several Rooms, wherein were kept Lions, Tygers, Wolves, Foxes, and all manner of Four-footed Animals.9

  In my own research journey through these “Strange Garden-houses” I identified seven categories of living things, and seven of nonliving objects. That classification is loosely reflected in the pages to follow, but the zoos and collections were varied and complex enough to support any number of categorizations and emphases.

  We might begin with plants, organized by the Aztecs into various subcategories located in multiple gardens and palaces. As Nahuas later told Sahagún, moxuchimiltia (“flower gardens were laid out”), and many flowers were tended for their “delightful Variety and Fragrancy” (according to Solís). But more important, Solís and others claimed, were the herbal and medicinal gardens, whose properties were studied by Montezuma’s physicians and applied freely to the sick—a sort of Aztec national health-care system, which satisfied the emperor’s vain sense of obligation to take “such Care of the Health of his Vassals.”10

  Then there were reptiles. Without the glass that is customary in modern reptile houses, the Aztecs apparently used “large pots” and “jugs” or “great pitchers.” There were “poisonous snakes that had in the tails something that sounded like bells,” and—Díaz claimed—when “the serpents hissed, with the lions and tigers roaring, and the wolves and foxes howling, it was awful to hear and seemed like hell itself.” Solís concluded that the reptile house was an “improbable” invention “of the Indians,” made up “to represent the savage Disposition of a Tyrant”—although he nonetheless included details on the kinds of snakes it contained, “even Crocodiles.”11

  Birds comprised a pair of categories. The Aztecs were dedicated ornithologists; they called aviaries totocalli (“birdhouse” in Nahuatl). Ogilby imagined a single aviary, roofed and netted with “Marble Galleries.” Gómara, as we saw, stated that the Aztecs kept colorfully feathered and hunting birds separate. Solís decided some birds were kept “for their Feathers, or Singing,” with “Sea-Fowl” maintained in separate saltwater or freshwater “Pools.” And the Nuremberg Map shows five or six separate bird areas. So it is likely that the aviary of feathered birds was itself divided up into a series of cages and ponds, with a wide variety of birds kept for their song and for observation, but above all for their feathers—carefully harvested, considered “of great Value,” and used “in their Cloaths, in Pictures, and in all their Ornaments.” In addition to geese, brown herons, and white pelicans, there were “cranes and crows, many parrots and macaws, and a different sort of large bird they say are wild pheasants.” Cortés later admitted that during the siege of Tenochtitlan, he deliberately destroyed these aviaries. Having set fire to the palaces where Montezuma had hosted the invaders some eighteen months earlier, he then turned to

  others next to them which, though somewhat smaller, were very much prettier and more refined; Mutezuma had kept in them every species [linajes] o
f bird found in these parts. And although it greatly grieved me, I decided to burn them, for it grieved the enemy very much more; and they showed much grief, as did the others, their allies from the lakeside cities.12

  Birds of prey were kept apart from other feathered creatures for obvious reasons. They included “lanners, sparrow hawks, kites, vultures, goshawks, nine or ten kinds of falcons, and many assorted eagles, among which there were fifty larger than our own golden eagles” (the artists of the Florentine Codex conveyed a similar list, sampled in our Gallery). According to fray Toribio de Benavente (who took the Nahua name Motolinía), writing not long after the zoo was destroyed, Montezuma’s eagles could “really be called royal because they are extremely large”; kept in vast cages, they ate entire turkeys and were treated respectfully as if they were “lions or some other wild beast.” Solís remarked that one of his sources claimed “one of these Eagles would devour a Sheep at a Meal”—which he thought an exaggeration. Sheep did not exist in Aztec Mexico, which is perhaps why the illustrator of an Italian edition of Solís’s book changed the sheep to a dismayed, feathered Aztec carried off in an eagle’s talons (perhaps, one might imagine, a careless zookeeper).13

  Another category was that of those animals described above by Zuazo; in Solís’s words, “Lions, Tygers, Bears, and all others of the savage Kind which New-Spain produc’d.” According to Díaz, there were “tigers and two kinds of lions, one of which was a kind of wolf which here they call a jackal, and foxes and other small carnivorous animals.” “In short,” wrote Gómara, “there was no kind of four-footed beast that was not represented.”14