When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  THE THIRD AND FINAL moment of mythical Cortesian control, according to the traditional narrative, occurred in the days between Puertocarrero and Montejo sailing for Spain and the departure of the Cortés-led company inland toward Tenochtitlan. According to Cortés himself, “I came up with a way to pretend that the ships were not seaworthy, and ran them aground, so that everyone lost hope of leaving.” He feared that some of the men would “rise up against me,” being unnerved by how well populated the land was and “how few we Spaniards were,” and because so many were “dependents and friends of Diego Velázquez.” The idea that Cortés could simultaneously fool hundreds of Spaniards while having a fleet of ten ships grounded defies credulity. For perfectly good reasons explained in a moment, a group of captains surely decided to ground and dismantle the vessels, and Cortés simply took credit for it, as he did so much else.53

  Yet it might have remained a harmless fib, had not the biographers and chroniclers blown up the moment so dramatically that by the 1840s Prescott could exclaim: “The destruction of his fleet by Cortés is, perhaps, the most remarkable passage in the life of this remarkable man.” Dozens of parallels to heroic feats of ancient Greeks or Romans have been made, with Cortés’s boldness growing greater as the centuries passed. Gómara’s mention of a speech by Cortés taunting those “unwilling to wage war in that rich country,” restyled by Díaz as Cortés comparing the moment to “the heroic deeds of the Romans,” evolved over the centuries into a stirring speech to match the Rubicon-crossing milestone. “Julius Caesar on the Rubicon cast his die. Tiny streamlet was the Roman’s glory. You vanquished an ocean,” sings a “heroic, irresistible” Cortés to his soldiers in the opera Montezuma. In the fulsome prose of the great Galician intellectual José Filgueira Valverde, “the captain’s words lit up a fire of triumph and greed on the ashes of the broken timbers”; the assembled conquistadors “all felt themselves to be the clay of history, shaped by the supremely strong hands of a Hero.” As one historian remarked: “No other episode in the total career of Hernando Cortés has received so much attention or has been the object of so much rhapsodic writing.”54

  The fact that there is an entire body of literature on this molehill-turned-mountain of a topic, from epic poems to scholarly articles, should surely inspire us to question the entire traditional narrative and its literature. Indeed, the only reason to give it our attention now is the chasm between what most likely really happened and what has been generated by Cortesian mythistory. Bridging that chasm allows us to fit this artificially enlarged piece of the puzzle into our emerging new picture of the 1519 invasion.

  Let us first be clear on what Cortés did not do. He did not set fire to his fleet. That detail was added in the late sixteenth century, as many before me have observed. But it survives because it echoes the torching of boats on the Tigris by the Roman emperor Julian, because “boat burning” alliterates nicely (throw in “bold” and “brave” too), and because it evokes an irresistible visual (used to effect in Captain from Castile, in which the ships light up the night as they float flaming in the bay). Nor did he scuttle or sink his ships, then justify the action with a stirring speech to rally angry sailors, despite the repetition of such a story by centuries of chroniclers; there was no reason to go to that much trouble, and scuttling would have made it harder to remove items of value from the ships.55

  In fact, this was not a decision brilliantly made by Cortés alone to destroy his entire fleet, in order that the surviving four hundred men of the company had no choice but to follow him to victory. Instead, as with the other decisions made at Vera Cruz, he acted with some of the other captains, who realized that, as the remaining ships had been at sea for six months (without access to a full array of supplies for maintenance and repair), their wooden hulls were beginning to rot. Left at anchor, they would slowly sink and the valuable hardware on board be lost. By grounding or beaching the ships—a far simpler task than scuttling or burning them in the bay—the sails, rigging, cables and cordage, tackle, nails, and other metal fittings could be removed and saved. This was done, and the equipment left in Vera Cruz with the sixty to one hundred fifty men who remained there under Juan de Escalante as captain. Saving such valuable equipment was not visionary; it was simple common sense. Puertocarrero and Montejo, questioned the following spring in La Coruña (Spain), testified that it was ship captains and pilots who determined that their ships were rotting—and they proposed the beaching. Even Tapia, who otherwise follows Gómara’s contrived tale of Cortésian cleverness, admitted that several captains reported that “their ships were unseaworthy”; Díaz, despite wrongly claiming that boats only were saved, with all ships destroyed, insisted that it was done “with our full knowledge, and not [in secret] as is said by the historian Gómara.”56

  Were there complaints about the ship grounding? Naturally. The men of the company argued about everything. The developing Cortés-Velázquez feud exacerbated the squabbling. Many of the captains and men were absent when the decision was made and executed. And those captains who owned the ships feared they would not be fully compensated (three of them later sued Cortés, claiming he owed them the value of the equipment removed from the ships). But the men left in Vera Cruz were in no way stranded; the ship in best condition remained at anchor. Furthermore, as we have already seen, there was a steady traffic of ships from Cuba and Hispaniola to the Veracruz coast and back, as well as traffic with Spain, through the entire period of the invasion and war. Nor could any of the captains, Cortés included, have possibly known that much of the ship’s salvaged hardware would end up being used in the small ships or brigantines that would be built for the lakeside siege of Tenochtitlan.

  The Rubicon-crossing, no-turning-back, to-Tenochtitlan-or-bust turning point—complete with a rousing speech by a crafty, seductive, Caesarian Cortés—is dramatic and resonant. But it is pure fiction, as much an invention as the burning of boats.

  Returning to Cortés’s original statement on the boats, we can now see how it contains that combination of truth, half-truth, and lie that is the essence of all his Letters to the King (and, by extension, the entire traditional narrative of the war): he did “run the ships aground,” but the decision was not his alone; the decision was not artfully “contrived,” although it was controversial; and the ships being “unfit for sea service” was not a “pretense” but an evaluation of their imminent state.

  Such was the Cortés-Gómara spin on the entire mess of the four months on the Veracruz coast: a mix of memory, accurate reporting, half-truths, and outright fiction. To credit Cortés with a masterful manipulation of all the Spanish and indigenous protagonists over these four months turns him into a superhuman puppet-master, reducing all others to gullible, craven, passive fools. A recent example is the narration to the “Cortés” episode of the History Channel’s Conquerors series, in which “one of the most daring acts in the history of conquest” (not just the “Conquest of Mexico,” but conquest in world history) is Cortés’s ship-burning: “Now, the only option for his soldiers is victory or death, and victory depends on the leadership, diplomacy, audacity, and cunning of one man: conquistador Hernán Cortés.”57

  The traditional narrative thus makes Cortés so Machiavellian, it has even been suggested that he literally followed Machiavelli’s (as yet unpublished) playbook. Over and over, a circular argument has been repeated by the peddlers of the traditional narrative: Cortés triumphed at Vera Cruz because he was so gifted, heroic, even godlike, and proof that he was those things was the fact of his triumph on the coast—and then inland. Like the fiction of Montezuma’s surrender, it would be “a splendidly implausible notion, save that so many have believed it.”58

  A LAMENTABLE END. The Victorian newspaper editor William Dalton wrote adventure novels and history books on the side, entertaining generations of children with tales of derring-do. This illustration of the Death of Montezuma is from Cortes and Pizarro: The Stories of the Conquests of Mexico and Peru, with a Sketch of the Early Adv
entures of the Spaniards in the New World. Re-Told for Youth, first published in 1862. Reflecting the dominant narrative of the emperor’s death, as established by the conquistadors and repeated for centuries, the Spanish invaders do not cause the tragedy, but lament it; having tried to protect Montezuma from his own people, they are concerned, even devastated, by his fatal wounding.

  Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Chapter 6

  Principal Plunderers

  Motzume also surrendred himself, and left all his people to Cortez his kindness, but after he had thus submitted, Ferdinand hearing there was a secret Rebellion in the Countrey, put him in chains, which so inraged these Barbarians, that they furiously ran to the place where Motzume was imprisoned (whether it was to deliver him from the indignity he suffer’d, or else were vexed at his compliance with Cortez) and threw great stones at their King, wherewith (notwithstanding all the Spaniards endeavours to drive them away) they miserably killed him and dash’d out his brains.

  —1676 English version of Thevet’s The Life of Ferdinand Cortez, A Spaniard

  Did King Montezuma really learn our language so quickly that he could understand the stipulations of this principal plunderer [primer salteador], the ones in which he was asked to surrender his kingdom or cede his entire royal estate? Is it not true that such contracts are only valid where the contractual parties understand each other?

  —Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1561

  A mysterious convergence united them from the outset: they wanted to understand each other, to decipher each other.

  —Enrique Krauze, 2010, on Cortés and Montezuma1

  WHO MURDERED MONTEZUMA? AS WORD OF HIS DEATH spread across Tenochtitlan, the question must have been on the lips of Spaniards and Aztecs alike—and then, in the succeeding weeks and years, the lips of other Mesoamericans and Europeans. Indeed, to this day, the smoke and mirrors that surround the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico” have kept the question alive and its answer unsure. The Aztec emperor suffered a violent death in June 1520; that much is clear. But how did he die and by whose hand?

  There has been no shortage of theories and dramatizations, with the emperor’s demise inspiring many a scene, and even entire works, of theater, opera, and film. Writers and composers, drawn for centuries to the dramatic thrust of the traditional narrative, have always been particularly taken by its inconsistencies—and a popular one has been the emperor’s death, with its mysteries (whodunit?) and ambiguities (was it noble or ignominious?).2

  To explore the moment, we must jump into the exact midpoint of the twenty-eight-month war of invasion. Full-scale, open Spanish-Aztec warfare had finally broken out a few weeks earlier—after fourteen months of cold war coexistence—and the slaughter would not now cease for another fourteen months. By the last week of June (1520), the Spaniards were besieged within Axayacatl’s palace complex (which Cortés then called “the fortress”), along one side of Tenochtitlan’s great plaza. The conquistadors—some fifteen hundred of them—were more numerous than at any point in the war so far, and they had with them thousands of Tlaxcalteca warriors (how many is uncertain), as well as an unknown number of African and Taíno slaves and servants. But Aztec warriors and the city’s population had surrounded them and were seemingly hell-bent on their destruction—a goal that the Aztecs would, to a significant extent, achieve within a matter of days.

  To see what happened next, through the fog of competing claims and verdicts, I have grouped accounts of Montezuma’s death into five versions of the story. The first is the one most commonly given in the traditional narrative, found, not surprisingly, in Cortés’s Second Letter. Considering that he described the June battle in detail—giving a day-by-day, almost blow-by-blow, account—Cortés’s summary of the emperor’s end was perfunctory:

  Mutezuma, who was still a prisoner, together with one of his sons and many other lords who had been captured from the beginning, asked to be taken out onto the rooftops of the fortress so that he might speak to the captains of those people and have them end the war. I had him taken out, and when he reached a parapet which went out beyond the fortress, wishing to speak to the people who were fighting out there, his own people gave him a stone’s blow to the head, so great that he died three days later.3

  There is no accusation of murder in these lines. The cause of death is clearly Aztec projectiles, but the implication is that it was accidental, with the verdict thus manslaughter (you may remember Kislak Painting #4, in the Gallery). This ambivalent version, in which nobody is really to blame (save, perhaps, the unruly Aztec mob and even Montezuma himself), was copied by Gómara and Oviedo, and then repeated for centuries. One example suffices: in a seventeenth-century English account, the emperor attempts to order “his Subjects to retreat” from a window of his palace, but “thinking to be more easily heard or seen, [he] went to a higher Window, where looking out, he was unfortunately hit with a Stone, of which he died three days after.”4

  Version two took the same elements, but assigned intent and blame more clearly: Aztec “Rebels” were the deliberate killers. This explanation first appears in the second half of the sixteenth century, stemming from the same quasi-indigenous sources (like the long-lost so-called Crónica X) that turned Montezuma into a scapegoat for Aztec (and specifically Mexica) defeat. In this version, predominant by the seventeenth century, the Mexica insulted the cowardly, captive emperor as they tried to kill him. In Solís’s telling, for example, Cortés and Montezuma agreed that the emperor would persuade the “Rebels” to lay down their arms and the Spaniards would then leave the city. But the rebels threw stones and insults, calling Montezuma “the opprobrious Names of pusillanimous, effeminate Coward, an abject, a vile Prisoner, and Slave to his Enemies.” Despite efforts by two conquistadors to shield him, he was fatally hit by two arrows and a stone to the head.5

  The more the Aztecs were guilty, the more the Spaniards were not only blameless but also distraught. In Escoiquiz’s epic poem, for example, the Spaniards tried to stop the “lamentable stone,” then to salve the emperor’s wound and save his life, and, finally, to save his soul with conversion. Their noble efforts were in vain. Montezuma’s soul “fell hopelessly into the abyss,” through the fault not of the conquistadors but of the rebellious Aztec mob and the emperor himself, stubbornly superstitious to the end.6

  Robertson likewise was typical in making it clear who was to blame. In his 1777 telling, the Aztecs, accustomed to revering Montezuma “as a god,” listened to his speech, “their heads all bowed.” But disapproving of his words, they soon let the arrows fly “so violently” that before the Spaniards could protect the emperor, “two arrows wounded the unhappy monarch, and the blow of a stone on his temple struck him to the ground.” The Spaniards carried him “to his apartments; and Cortes hastened thither to console him under his misfortune. But the unhappy monarch now perceived how low he was sunk,” angrily “scorned to survive this last humiliation, and to protract an ignominious life,” tearing off his bandages, refusing “any nourishment” so that “he soon ended his wretched days, rejecting with disdain all the solicitations of the Spaniards to embrace the Christian faith.”7

  The suggestion that Montezuma contributed to his own death in some way, either through his foolhardy attempts to address a hostile, armed populace, or by refusing food and medical attention, is fully developed in the third variant of the story: death by suicide. We have already seen a metaphorical dramatization of that variant in Dryden’s The Indian Emperour, in which Montezuma stabs himself to death, preferring martyrdom to reigning as Cortés’s puppet. But it certainly goes back into the sixteenth century. Cervantes de Salazar, for example, wrote that the emperor willed himself to die, “wishing neither to eat nor be cured” of his wound. In this imaginative rendering of the death scene, Montezuma exclaimed to Cortés that the stones thrown at him “broke my heart into pieces,” to which Cortés responded that indeed “you do not have a mortal wou
nd; you are dying from despair and discontent.” This was the variant picked up by Herrera and by Díaz—the latter’s similarly imaginative account helping give this third variant life up to the present.8

  The fourth variant also retains Aztec-hurled stones as the proximate cause of death, but adds a new assassin: Cuauhtemoc. This accusation has its own thread in text and image going back centuries. For example, in one seventeenth-century depiction of the emperor’s “stoning by his own people” (Kislak Painting #4), Cuauhtemoc is not identified by name, but he could be the Aztec who seems to be leading the attack—yelling back at Montezuma, sporting a prominent head feather, the sole Aztec holding a steel sword. Montezuma, arms out, brought into focus by the white-robed friar, Olmedo, is Christlike, betrayed by his own, a martyr in the making. Indeed, the similarities between this moment and the Ecce Homo scene in the Passion of Christ—when Pilate displays the captive and condemned Christ to a hostile mob, an increasingly popular scene in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—gives pause to wonder how much of the story of Montezuma’s stoning was a later invention.9

  The depiction of Montezuma as a Christian martyr may be a subtle and minor thread in his posthumous fabric, but it has been persistent. A vivid example comes in Montezuma, a 1960s operatic telling of the story. When the Aztec mob insult Montezuma and Malintzin as traitors, egged on by Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma uses the prophecy myth to justify his surrender. But Cuauhtemoc sings mockingly, “He pleads for the pale-face ladrone, his master,” and the Aztec chorus chant, “Kill him!” Although Montezuma does not actually convert in this operatic version, Cuauhtemoc rallies the mob to hurl the fatal stones and shoot arrows by singing, “He’s a Christian! Kill him!” With Montezuma dead on the spot, the opera draws to a close with the Aztecs singing, “Long live Cuauhtemoc the King!”10