But they did not. Under the rules and customs of Mesoamerican warfare, the Caxtilteca should have retreated and sued for a peace in which they paid tribute to Tlaxcallan. But lacking that option, the Spaniards perpetuated a war of attrition whose cost was proving too high for the local leadership. A hint of that cost is given by Cortés’s own chilling descriptions of nocturnal attacks on Tlaxcalteca villages, where, he later crowed to the king, “I killed many people.” On one dawn raid, he reached “another large town, which, according to an inspection I had made, contained more than twenty thousand houses. And because I took them by surprise, they rushed out unarmed, the women and children running naked through the streets, and I began to do them some harm.”22
There is no doubt that the Tlaxcalteca decision not to destroy the invasion force was the right one. In the long run, such a massacre would only have led to brutal Spanish reprisals from the much larger force that Velázquez was already assembling in Cuba—although Xicotencatl and the other Tlaxcalteca rulers could not possibly have known that. Still, in the short run, many Tlaxcalteca lives were saved. And if the Caxtilteca-Tlaxcalteca war was beneficial to the Aztecs—their doing, at least in part—then the subsequent peace was far less so. During the days of negotiations between the Spanish captains and the Tlaxcalteca, Aztec envoys urged the captains not to trust the enemy (again, it seems clear that there were Aztecs with the company every day of the journey). But a new supply of gifts and reassurances from Montezuma could not match the promise of immediate relief in nearby Tlaxcallan. On September 23, the invaders limped into the city and the Tlaxcalteca leadership took control.
The badly bruised company spent seventeen days in Tlaxcallan (roughly a day of recovery for each grim day of warfare). Almost every Spaniard had suffered wounds of some kind, and while most recovered, some died, reducing total Spanish numbers to fewer than 250 (half the force that had left Cuba). The survivors must have been traumatized and terrified. Their relief at being able to experience the hospitality, rather than the hostility, of the Tlaxcalteca must have been tempered by the knowledge that the invaders were at the mercy of their hosts, dependent upon them for food and supplies, for information about the Aztecs, and for allied warriors to protect them from whatever came next.
Viewed from the perspective of the traditional narrative, it is a mystery why the Spaniards did not stay longer in Tlaxcallan. Viewed from the same perspective, it is also difficult to explain the shocking incident that followed: the brutal slaughter of thousands of residents of a neighboring Nahua city. As with so many moments in the traditional narrative, the mystery and inexplicability are rooted in the great narrative of the conquistadors and chroniclers, and its mythistory of Cortesian control. The massacre in Cholollan (today’s Cholula) is less mysterious if we step back from that traditional narrative, take into account the reduced circumstances and state of mind of the conquistadors, and accept that it was the Tlaxcalteca leadership, not Cortés and his captains, who were in control.
THE BARE FACTS of the Cholollan massacre are as follows. On October 10, the surviving Spaniards and some six thousand Tlaxcalteca warriors made the daylong march to Cholollan. They camped for the night outside the town, where Chololtec nobles delivered welcome speeches and food. The next day, the Spaniards entered the town (with Cempohualtec and Tlaxcalteca porters; the allied warriors were asked to remain outside). There they were housed and fed for two days, but for the three days after that they were brought only firewood and water (according to Spanish reports). Cortés also claimed (echoed by other Spanish accounts) that there were barricades in the city, pits with stakes sharpened to kill falling horses, piles of stones on the rooftops (ready to be thrown), and rumors of a massive Aztec army hidden nearby. Decades later, a final detail of supposed evidence of a planned Chololtec ambush was added to Spanish accounts: a local woman revealed the ambush plot to the interpreter Malintzin, who informed Cortés.
Around the 16th or 17th, a large number of Chololtec porters assembled in the central plaza of the city, either at Cortés’s behest or in preparation for the departure of the Spaniards; there seem also to have been hundreds of other locals there too, including women and small children, possibly to watch the Caxtilteca marching off. Suddenly, the conquistadors began to wade into the crowd with their swords, butchering the townspeople. Armed Spaniards blocked all four exits from the plaza, killing those who tried to flee. Meanwhile, the Tlaxcalteca army that was camped outside stormed into the city. For the next several days (one conquistador said it lasted four), the Spaniards and Tlaxcalteca slaughtered, plundered, and burned. Thousands of Chololteca were killed. Not a single Spaniard died.
Cortés later claimed that he had marched to Cholollan for supplies. But Cholollan was neither on the way to Tenochtitlan, nor any closer to it than Tlaxcallan itself (it was a detour to the south). The fact is, neither Cortés nor his fellow captains were in control: the Tlaxcalteca led the Spaniards to Cholollan for their own political purposes, telling the Spanish captains that it was on the way and rich in supplies. The alleged Chololtec ambush was probably a Tlaxcalteca ruse devised to manipulate the captains—or, as Alva Ixtlilxochitl later wrote, “an invention of the Tlaxcalteca and some of the Spaniards.” The Spaniards did not know that another city, closer to Tlaxcallan, was also well supplied: Huexotzinco. And therein lies the rub.
Part of the mythistory of Tlaxcallan as the city of “good Indians,” the antidote to the Aztec “bad Indians,” was the supposed difference in their governmental system—a virtual republic run by senators. In fact, Tlaxcallan was organized socially and politically just like any Nahua altepetl (town or city-state), with local variations similar to those of the Aztecs. Tlaxcallan itself was a complex altepetl, made up of four constituent altepeme (plural of altepetl), each with its own tlahtoani (one of whom, Xicotencatl, was most senior); Tenochtitlan was also a complex altepetl, comprising Tenochtitlan itself (with its own four subordinate neighborhoods) and the sibling altepetl of Tlatelolco at the north end of the island (whose tlahtoani had been demoted to the level of a governor by the huey tlahtoani of Tenochtitlan).
There was another similarity between Tlaxcallan and the Aztecs, one central to the events of 1519. The Aztec Empire was a Triple Alliance of unequal partners, with Tenochtitlan dominant over Tetzcoco, both of whom were more powerful than Tlacopan (as we shall see in the next chapter, this uneasy partnership played a crucial role in the war’s outcome). Tlaxcallan was also the dominant partner in its own regional triple alliance (let us call it the Tlaxcallan Triple Alliance); its junior partners were Huexotzinco and Cholollan. Huexotzinco’s warriors had fought the Spaniards alongside their Tlaxcaltec allies in September’s eighteen-day war, and in October they too marched to Cholollan; they would go on to fight the Aztecs, and later insist in eloquent petitions to the king of Spain that from the very beginning they had embraced the Spaniards and the Christian religion. And what of Cholollan? A year or two earlier, it had abandoned the Tlaxcallan Triple Alliance and become a loyal tributary of the Aztec Empire.23
The march to Cholollan and the sacking of the city thus constituted a well-executed Tlaxcalteca plan to test the new alliance with the Caxtilteca invaders, to punish the Chololteca for switching sides, and to restore in Cholollan a leadership loyal to the Tlaxcallan Triple Alliance. The political tide had turned not only in favor of Tlaxcallan as a regional power—better equipped than ever to resist Aztec encroachment—but also in favor of Xicotencatl. One of his fellow kings, a tlahtoani named Maxixcatl, had been jostling to replace the elderly Xicotencatl as senior ruler, but he was related to the Chololteca ruler who had switched to the Aztec side and been killed in October’s massacre.
After two weeks in Cholollan, the company moved on to a subject town of Huexotzinco’s, and from there began the march between the volcanoes and into the Valley of Mexico. The surviving Spaniards made up roughly 5 percent of the expedition: in addition to the surviving Taíno slaves, African slaves and servants, and remnant Totonac warriors and
porters, the vast majority of the force were warriors and other support personnel from the Tlaxcallan Triple Alliance. There were women too—Spanish, Taíno, Totonac, and Tlaxcalteca (to whom we shall return in a later chapter). All in all, something close to ten thousand people descended into the Aztec heartland.
For a moment, let us put aside Tlaxcaltec confidence in their newfound situation, as justified as it may have been, and let us reject the traditional narrative’s mythistory of Cortesian control (the captains were being pushed by the Tlaxcalteca and pulled by the Aztecs, with any semblance of control on their part mere delusion); forget the sibling myth of Montezuma the Fearful (some of his noblemen may have been apprehensive, but the emperor was keen to see the Caxtilteca for himself). Instead, let us accept that all the protagonists in this unfolding drama were familiar with war, and all must have felt the visceral, anticipatory fear—or thrill—of the violence that they knew was coming.24
* * *
But the violence did not come; not yet, at least. It would remain contained for months, like the wild beasts in Montezuma’s zoo, threatening periodically to break out, their roars sounding to the conquistadors “like hell itself.” Perhaps the Spaniards sensed—assumed—that, when the killing did eventually come, it would indeed be as if all hell had broken loose.25
Meanwhile, the months of marching and fighting, the memories of slaughter and reminders of one’s own mortality, gave way to a surreal ease and tranquility. Montezuma welcomed Cortés and the other Caxtilteca captains, extending to the invaders a level of hospitality that was incredible, inexplicable. The Meeting initiated a long interlude in the Spanish-Aztec War of some 235 days (more or less, if we end it on the uncertain date of Montezuma’s death). Certainly there was violence during this time, even within Tenochtitlan itself. But relatively speaking the interlude was a period of “phoney war” or drôle de guerre (“strange war”)—phrases coined to describe the period of roughly the same number of days at the start of World War II, when no major military operations were launched in Western Europe. Similarly, only toward the end of the 235 days of our story’s phoney war did Spaniards or Aztecs engage in major attempts to destroy or subdue the other.26
During these months, Montezuma and Cortés seem to have spent considerable time in each other’s company, most of it in the relative seclusion of the royal palaces in the center of Tenochtitlan. One is reminded of the months that Julius Caesar and Cleopatra spent together in Alexandria, thereby influencing the course of Egyptian and Roman history. That interlude produced a notorious romance; did the phoney war in Tenochtitlan nurture a political romance?
All this makes the 235-day interlude sound paradoxically both mysterious and uneventful, and indeed Conquest accounts have tended to focus on the year before the Meeting and the year after Montezuma’s death, skipping over or shrinking the time in between (typical of the temporal distortions of the traditional narrative). An extreme example is by Vásquez de Tapia, who was in Tenochtitlan for most of this period, summing it up thus: “The next day, we entered Mexico and we were there for eight months, more or less.” But such a summary was deceptively simple, as reflected in Vásquez de Tapia’s next sentence: “During that time important things [grandes cosas] happened that, in order not to be longwinded, I shall leave out.”27
Important things, indeed; for the Meeting had planted a seed. Or rather, the lie of the Meeting had planted a seed that, just as one lie begets another, germinated into a sprawling tree of inventions and embellishments. The captains had reached Tenochtitlan hoping to do what conquistadors had done before and would continue to do in the Americas: seize the ruler; and by threats, selective acts of violence, and the performance of possession, make a conquest claim. (In his Second Letter, Cortés claimed he had told the king about Montezuma in a prior report, “and I assured Your Highness that I would take him, either captive or dead or subject to Your Majesty’s Royal Crown.”)28
Such an outcome was not, in reality, possible. It was the Spaniards, not the Aztec ruler, who had been detained; Montezuma had collected the Caxtilteca, not surrendered to them. But the audience for the legalistic performance of possession was not indigenous; it was Spanish, ranging from the rank-and-file conquistadors camped out in the city to the royal officials in Spain who would eventually read reports of these events. And so—surely soon after the Meeting—the captains began to nurture the seed that would produce that tree of lies, of which we can identify three main branches.
The first such branch was that of the arrest or capture of the emperor (an act introduced at the very start of this book). Conquistador sources are vague and contradictory as to when exactly the arrest took place, how Montezuma responded, and where he subsequently was detained. This is because the very notion, like the Surrender at the Meeting, is pure nonsense—implausible in the extreme, unsupported by any of the evidence of life in Tenochtitlan during these months. If Montezuma was ever physically detained, whether in irons or under guard, it was after war broke out in the city center in May; in other words, it happened within weeks, if not days, of his death. But Cortés and others later moved the “arrest” forward in time; they admitted that Montezuma still ran his empire, but by inventing his capture, they could claim that Cortés controlled Montezuma and thus controlled the empire. The story only hangs together if one accepts cartoonish stereotypes of Montezuma as naïve and acquiescent, and Cortés as brilliantly and boldly Machiavellian (as illustrated literally in a recent “graphic biography” of Cortés; see the Gallery). This period, then, was less of a phoney war, closer to a political romance, and more of a phoney surrender and captivity (let us call these 235 days the Phoney Captivity).29
The second branch of the metaphorical Phoney Captivity tree was the claim in Cortés’s Second Letter that Montezuma’s speech of surrender at the Meeting was restated by him several times—that, in effect, he kept on surrendering, month after month. Montezuma’s second great Surrender speech became a famous scene, because Cortés made of it an irresistibly theatrical one, in which a tearful emperor not only swore allegiance to the king of Spain, but persuaded the Aztec nobility to likewise “promise to do and comply with all that was demanded of them in the name of Your Majesty” (Cortés told the king) and to henceforth pay to the Spanish monarch “all the tributes and services which formerly they made and owed to Mutezuma.” As if laying to rest any doubts regarding the veracity of so spectacularly implausible an event, Cortés added that “all of this took place before a public notary, who set it down in an appropriate document.”30
The scene was repeated, painted, and engraved (our Gallery includes an example), and embellished scores of times, included in almost every account for the last five centuries. As usual, Gómara set the unquestioning tone. In a 1578 English edition, for example, the emperor ordered all “his Noble men” to submit to “the king of Castile,” because he is “the king whiche wee have looked for so many yeares.” As for the conquistadors, added Montezuma, “wee are their kinsmen,” and he then broke down “with the sobbes, sighes, and teares, that fell from hys eyes. All his subiectes there present fell into a crie, weeping and mourning.” Elizabethan readers of Gómara might have taken Aztec tears to be a mark of submission, but just as likely they read the scene as one of emotional expression appropriate to the import of the moment—as Spaniards did. For in the European (and possibly Aztec) culture of these centuries, weeping was associated with prayer and petition, with both the request and receipt of favors, from both divine and earthly lords.31
In Cortés’s account, this scene took place in early December; then again, some unspecified number of weeks later, he supposedly had another discussion with the emperor and Aztec notables on matters of religion. While admitting that he could not impose a destruction of religious “idols” or the conversion of the Aztec rulership, he nonetheless claimed that the emperor conceded that “I would know better than them the things they should hold to and believe, and I should explain to them and make them understand, and they would d
o what I told them was best.” (Francis Brooks, the Australian friar-historian who years ago brilliantly dissected the Phoney Captivity, called this “perhaps the most extraordinary sentence in the whole letter.”)32
A few pages (perhaps a month) later, Cortés reported again on the many conversations he had had with Montezuma, emphasizing how much he had learned about the “mines” and “the secrets of Mutezuma’s lands.” This knowledge was shared “with such free will and contentment on the part of Mutezuma and all the natives of these lands that it seemed as if ab initio they had known Your Sacred Majesty to be their king and natural lord.” In addition to such statements, Cortés’s Second Letter is peppered with implications of Montezuma’s amiable subordination and Aztec subservience. These were repeated and expanded by subsequent writers, with imaginative new scenes invented from the onset. Cervantes de Salazar, for example, turned the Phoney Captivity into a lengthy political romance, culminating in a poignant final conversation between Cortés and a dying Montezuma, in which they both shed tears and declared their mutual affection. The emperor (now ex-emperor and vassal of King Carlos) yet again articulated his subordination and acknowledgment of Spanish sovereignty, making one last “formal expression of Spanish imperial theory” (Brooks again).33
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 25