When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  During his seventeen years as huey tlahtoani, Montezuma faced his share of natural disasters and man-made threats to his empire. There were famines three years, earthquakes in three others, and one brutal snow-filled winter. Roughly a third of his military campaigns were against towns or provinces rebelling against Aztec tribute demands. Yet the fact remains that not only did he survive in office, but the empire persisted and continued to expand. Early colonial documents like the Codex Mendoza and the related Matrícula de Tributos list impressive numbers of city-states defeated and brought into the empire. Tlaxcallan remained autonomous, but Montezuma shrank its territory, cutting its access to the coast, surrounding it with Aztec client states, “tightening the noose.” Meanwhile, the dominance of Tenochtitlan within the Triple Alliance increased, as Tetzcoco became more markedly a junior partner, a distinct second, with Tlacopan a distant third (with implications for the course of the war in 1520–21, as we shall see).50

  Montezuma thus proved himself worthy of the association with his warlike namesake great-grandfather. His record of imperial expansion substantiated his image on public monuments and in public rituals. The elaborate claim to a supreme and mystified rulership, promoted by his name glyph, was not a hollow one. His devotion to acquiring living things, objects, and knowledge did not hinder his ability to acquire territory and tribute, but in fact helped it. He was not a bookish zookeeper, timid and retiring, but a fearless master collector, a bold zoological imperialist. In other words, this emperor was clothed.51

  * * *

  We know little of what Montezuma was thinking and doing in Tenochtitlan in the six months leading up to the Meeting. But his state of mind and his intentions were understandably the subject of intense speculation among the conquistadors as they marched closer to the emperor’s capital city. After the war, such speculations became tainted by the triumph of the Meeting-as-Surrender narrative and by the scapegoating of Montezuma. His inscrutable behavior during the course of 1519 thus became interpreted (and even invented) much later as further evidence of his mental collapse. By the late sixteenth century, the Montezuma of these months had become firmly established as vacillating, paralyzed, panic-stricken, and fatally weakened by his superstitious belief that a series of omens foretold the end of his empire—and that Cortés-as-Quetzalcoatl was the agent of that doom.52

  Yet despite that later reinterpretation of Montezuma’s behavior to fit the story of the Surrender, one can still see in conquistador accounts some echoes of Spanish confusion regarding his strategy. For example, Aguilar took the standard line that because the Spaniards had fought the Tlaxcalteca until they agreed to an alliance, Montezuma “grew fearful and dismayed to think that the captain [Cortés] was on the way to his great city.” The series of gift-bearing embassies that Montezuma sent to meet the advancing conquistador company was thus interpreted as attempts to bribe the Spaniards into turning around (illustrated in the Gallery’s “Picturing the War”). This nonsensical interpretation of Montezuma’s gifts by Aguilar, Cortés, and others has been repeated into the present day, even though the opposite conclusion—that the emperor sought peacefully to lure the foreigners into his city—is far more logical. Aguilar himself seemed to realize that such an interpretation did not quite add up, noting too—without being able to explain it—that “Montezuma appeared to have stationed a great army along the way, although we only heard report of it and never saw it.”53

  Tapia likewise claimed that such an army was shadowing them, adding that it surely could have “quickly crushed” the invaders and “put an end to the war.” Tapia added, seeming to refer both to the pre-invasion Tlaxcalteca and to the Spanish-Tlaxcalteca invasion:

  I asked Montezuma and some of his captains why, having these enemies surrounded, they did not finish them off in a day; and they answered: “Well, we could easily do so. But then we would have nowhere to train our young men, except far from here; and we also always wish to have people at hand to sacrifice to our gods.”54

  Even if we take this conversation between Tapia and Montezuma with a grain of salt, it suggests that at the time of the war, the Spaniards were aware that the emperor was not seized by fear and inaction, but in fact was in control and had a strategy. The conversation also suggests that Montezuma’s strategy was not clear to the Spaniards as they approached the city, provoking concern and speculation; and that it nonetheless seemed likely that the company was able to march into Tenochtitlan solely because Montezuma had permitted it.

  Indeed, Montezuma’s mastery of the situation becomes much clearer once we stop trying to cram the vast square peg of evidence on his strategy into the tiny round hole of the Meeting-as-Surrender. Ross Hassig has persuasively argued that Montezuma chose not to attack the Spaniards in 1519 because he wished to learn more about them before committing to outright war, and because he needed to be sure of his control over subject city-states in the eastern region of the empire, which had been destabilized by the invasion. Furthermore, the labor demands of harvest restricted the war season to December through April; thus the force of warriors shadowing the invaders in the autumn of 1519, if it existed at all, was most likely a modest one, not yet the “great army” of Aguilar’s comment.55

  I agree with Hassig’s analysis, which I think makes even more sense when viewed in the context of Montezuma’s collection mentality. Like a cat toying with a mouse, for months the emperor was watching the conquistadors, testing them, playing with them, studying them. Even before he could examine them in person, he was gathering accounts and images of them. He was fascinated by these Caxtillan tlaca, these Caxtilteca (“people from Castile”). His goal was neither to destroy nor drive the newcomers away, but to confuse, weaken, and draw them in—so they could be collected. Montezuma was not afraid of the Spaniards; he was hunting them.56

  In the short run, the strategy worked. The emperor peacefully acquired these strange new people, and housed them in buildings that were adjacent to the royal zoo-collection complex, effectively incorporating them into his collections. But the Caxtilteca could not be contained for long as novelties, as new subjects of study, in the zoo-collection complex; they were too numerous, too dangerous, too savage (let alone accompanied by a contingent of Tlaxcalteca warriors). So what was Montezuma’s long-term plan?

  We shall never know for sure, although the various accounts of the ensuing months in Tenochtitlan—the 235 days from the Meeting to Montezuma’s death—suggest several possibilities. We shall come to those in a subsequent chapter, but for now let us consider just one possibility, and propose a tantalizing theory rooted in the seasonal cycles of the life, death, and celebration in the city.

  Aztec life—like daily life for sixteenth-century Spaniards and indeed for us today—was marked by a sequence of months, each with its particular activities and holidays, repeated annually. There were eighteen months, each of twenty days, in the Aztec calendar. This 360-day cycle was called the xihuitl (“year” in Nahuatl), leaving five days, called the nemontemi, to round out the solar year. Each month had its own public festival. For example, the festival and month of Ochpaniztli (“Sweeping of the road” or “Sweeping the way”) was dedicated to a goddess of sexuality and fertility; celebrants wore outfits and wielded implements associated with the goddess, most notably a broom, a symbol of cleaning and cleansing.

  The Meeting and the initial Spanish entry into Tenochtitlan took place near the end of Quecholli (“Macaw” or “Precious Feather,” the hunting god’s month). The month that followed, the first full month the conquistadors witnessed in the life of the city, was Panquetzaliztli (“Raising of flags” or banners). Its festival was a major event each year, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli. It was also the last of the year’s four tribute months, when the subject towns and provinces of the empire delivered food, luxury goods, and other tribute items to the capital city. The other tribute months were Ochpaniztli (in the autumn) and Etzalqualiztli (in early summer), but the first tribute month of each year was Tlacaxipehualiztli (“Flaying
of men”), whose festival is, I propose, of great significance to our story.57

  It is tempting to imagine that Montezuma and his court were conscious of the fact that, as the Caxtilteca settled into their quarters in the city, the month dedicated to hunting was drawing to a close. The festival of Quecholli featured various ritual deer hunts, bringing venison into the city and including the execution of a warrior dressed like a deer. Yet here were men who had been drawn into the city through an elaborate kind of hunt, and who brought with them huge deer that could be ridden (the Aztecs and other Nahuas called horses “people-bearing deer,” in mamaça in temamani). Likewise, it was surely not lost on the city’s rulers and warriors that, when the warfare season began that December, they already had foreign warriors in their city—armed guests who quickly began to wear out their welcome. Indeed, as the months passed and Tlacaxipehualiztli approached (it fell around March in our calendar), it must have occurred to the Aztecs that their Spanish guests might have a special role to play in the festival, one that may well have been in the minds of Montezuma and his more hawkish courtiers since the previous Quecholli. For Tlacaxipehualiztli marked the high point of war season, celebrating Aztec martial prowess by turning Tenochtitlan into a ritual, theatrical battlefield—complete with real enemy warriors and a guaranteed Aztec victory.58

  Each year, for forty days spanning Tlacaxipehualiztli and the month before it, warriors captured in imperial campaigns were brought into the city. There they gave a series of ritual, public performances—including dancing with the Aztec warriors who had captured them—and eventually, with their hair shorn, bodies painted in red stripes, and given new names, they were executed. This was not the indiscriminate slaughter of war prisoners that sometimes happened on European battlefields (Agincourt comes to mind), but a ritualized reenactment of victory intended to show respect for the defeated—and to spiritually transform them into divine offerings.

  At one point (at the month’s end, in some accounts), a captive and his captor drank pulque together in the plaza (pulque, made by fermenting agave sap, is still drunk in Mexico today), before giving a gladiatorial performance. The captive won his freedom if he defeated his captor and then three other warriors in succession, but he alone was tied by his ankle or waist to a stone platform, given a club decorated with feathers to fend off clubs embedded with razor-sharp obsidian blades. In the battles of Tlacaxipehualiztli, the Aztecs always won.

  Executions took the form of the swift removal of the heart, after which the bodies were taken to local temples around the city and skinned (the “flaying” or xipehua of Tlacaxipehualiztli). Those who had captured the executed warriors then wore their skins, going door-to-door to show off their achievement, engaging in mock battles with other warriors (with turkeys as prizes), dancing in the central plaza, receiving gifts and public praise from Montezuma in front of his palace.

  The skin-wearing ritual turned captor and captive into one, both dubbed xipe (“flayed one”; the festival’s god was Xipe Totec, “Our Flayed Lord”). The captor acquired his captive’s life essence or energy in this celebration of individual warrior courage and prowess. When the flayed skin rotted and was then removed at the festival’s end, timed with the appearance of spring flowers, the captor ritually bathed, emerging—like a fresh ear of corn from its dried-out husk—as a renewed and celebrated warrior of status.59

  THERE IS NO DIRECT EVIDENCE that Montezuma or other ruling Aztec nobles planned or hoped to turn their Spanish guests into involuntary participants in the “flaying of men” festival. But it seems inconceivable that it did not occur to them as a possible—even serendipitous, appropriate, and divinely arranged—solution to the Spanish problem. If there had been such hopes, the deterioration of diplomatic relations near the end of the 235 days following the Meeting would have dashed them, but only in terms of the timing of the attack, capture, and execution. For in the end, it was in June, during Etzalqualiztli, when Aztec warriors killed hundreds of Spaniards in the city, some half of the invading force, executing scores of them at the top of the Great Temple pyramid.

  By then Montezuma—speaker, emperor, collector—was dead. He did not live to see the rest of his collections plundered, his zoos burned to the ground, his city buried like a vast sacred offering. Like his jaguars, wolves, and ocelots, Montezuma’s Spaniards could not be tamed. They had imprisoned their zookeeper, humiliated and discarded him, leaving posterity to do him the greatest violence of all—the assassination of his character, transforming the great collector into a cowardly captive.

  Part III

  What? Are they really planning

  To keep the people away

  From plundering the Indies?

  —Satan, referring to Saints Francis and Dominic, in Carvajal’s Complaint of the Indians in the Court of Death, 1557

  Great Hercules of old, did mighty things

  And overcame at last his sufferings.

  But Ferdinando second unto none,

  By nobler Acts has Hercules out-done.

  Cortez a greater Traveller then He

  Though not so strong, has compass’d Land and Sea.

  Made the Antipodes obey his Nod;

  And what is more, acknowledg one true God.

  —English edition of Thevet’s “Life of Ferdinand Cortez,” 1676

  He came dancing across the water

  Cortez, Cortez

  What a killer

  —Neil Young, “Cortez the Killer,” 19751

  HOW CONQUISTADORS DISCOVER. The frontispiece to a 1697 French edition of Las Casas’s Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, retitled La Découverte des Indes Occidentales par Les Espagnols (“The Discovery of the West Indies by the Spaniards”). The “discovery” is symbolized by Spaniards carrying off the wealth of the land, using forced indigenous labor: in the distant background, women are grabbed and men beaten on the ground; in the foreground, a proprietorial Cortés meets a passive Montezuma—an example of how, even in a context critical of conquistador practices, the Meeting was presented as surrender and submission.

  Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Chapter 5

  The Greatest Enterprises

  Oh ingenious man, excelling all others in spirit, and born only for the greatest enterprises!

  —A character admiring Cortés’s palace in Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s Dialogues, 1554

  He was soon disgusted with an academic life, which did not suit his ardent and restless genius.

  —William Robertson, 1777

  As an Italian poet said, with good reason, in a sonnet of his: Qui esparge il seme et qui recogle il fructo. Which means, some sow the seeds and others collect the fruit.

  —Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, 1535, referring to Velázquez and Cortés1

  AT THE MOMENT OF HIS BIRTH, HERNANDO CORTÉS WAS CHOSEN by God for greatness. That, at least, was the conclusion drawn by Gerónimo de Mendieta.

  As the Franciscan friar sat in a convent in Mexico City in the 1590s, composing his history of the spiritual conquest of the Aztecs, he was struck by the apparent coincidence in 1485 of three events. For surely they were not, he realized, coincidental at all. In that year, a German woman in Saxony gave birth to Martin Luther, destined “to place beneath the banner of the Devil so many of the faithful.” At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, at the dedication ceremony for the new main temple in Tenochtitlan, 80,400 people were sacrificed by Aztec priests. But God had a remedy to “the clamor of so many souls and the spilling of so much human blood, to the injury of their Creator.” The divine response was the birth of Cortés, who would bring into the fold of the Church “an infinite multitude of people who for countless years had lived under Satan’s power.”2

  In fact, neither Luther nor Cortés was born in 1485. The German entered the world in 1483, and Cortés was probably born in 1484. Nor was the new temple to the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, dedicated in 1485; that ceremony seems to have
taken place in 1487. Furthermore, the figure of 80,400 human sacrifices comes from Franciscans such as Mendieta himself and (as we saw earlier) is now generally believed to be a wild exaggeration. But the point here is not to correct Mendieta; on the contrary, the dubious factual basis for his claim only serves to bring into focus the mythological smoke and mirrors that surround the entire first half of Cortés’s life.

  Mendieta was not the first—nor the last—to imagine the providential noncoincidence of Cortés’s birth and early life. The idea was probably already circulating in the Spanish world when the poet Gabriel Lasso de la Vega put it in print. Sponsored by the Cortés family, Lasso had published in 1588 in Madrid a great epic poem titled Valiant Cortés; an expanded second edition of 1594 included the lines that native Mexicans had forever been blind,

  Without being given any news of Christ the King,

  until this man came to the world,

  which was in the same year as Luther,

  horrible and ferocious monster against the Church.

  Whether Lasso invented it or not, by the end of the century the notion of Cortés as God’s antidote to Luther had become part of the fabric of the conquistador’s legend. In his own epic poem in praise of Cortesian conquests, Antonio de Saavedra fine-tuned the imaginary providential coincidence, noting, “When Luther was born in Germany / Cortés was born the same day in Spain.” Not long after, Torquemada solved the dating problem by moving Cortés’s birth year to 1483. Similar contrivances, including the claim that both men were born not only the same year but on the very same day, continued to appear in chronicles and poems through to the eighteenth century.3