When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  In 2010, the Medellín statue was defaced with red paint. “Anonymous citizens” left a note denouncing it as “fascist” and “a cruel and arrogant glorification of genocide and an insult to the Mexican people.” The vandals objected to Cortés standing on a decapitated Aztec head; in a statement of response, the mayor of Medellín corrected them, lamented their “lack of historical understanding,” and defended the statue as a simple “homage to a son of this town.” The protestors also noted that the red paint was significant because that very night the Spanish and Mexican national soccer teams played in Mexico City (the Spanish team plays in red and is nicknamed “La Roja”).3

  Meanwhile, in 1982, the Mexican government erected a statue in Coyoacan whose purpose was not to memorialize Cortés but to celebrate mestizaje—the mixing of the Spanish and Mesoamerican peoples—with a depiction of the conqueror with Malintzin and their son, Martín, as a naked boy (labeled “Where is Martín?” in our Gallery). A century earlier, Cortés’s image had appeared in bronze in a very public part of Mexico City, the great Paseo de la Reforma, but in a decidedly negative context; the statue itself portrays Cuauhtemoc, with Cortés appearing only in bronze reliefs on its plinth, as the Aztec emperor’s captor and torturer. By contrast, in the 1982 sculpture, Cortés is not the antihero but the founding father. It provoked uproar. There were denunciations, demonstrations, and defacings, and the statue of little Martín was stolen. The remaining installation was moved to an obscure corner of another park, where, like the plaque marking where Cortés’s urn is hidden, it attracts little attention today. Martín has never been found.4

  * * *

  “There is so much to say about the prowess and invincible courage of Cortés that on this point alone a large book could be written.” These words, penned by Motolinía, one of the first Franciscans in Mexico, were more farsighted than the friar could have imagined.5

  When Motolinía penned that prophecy, Cortés was still alive and Gómara was busy laying the foundation (using Cortés’s published Letters to the King as crucial building material) for a literary tradition that combined a narrative of the Spanish-Aztec War styled as a glorious, predestined Conquest of Mexico with a life of the conqueror as a hagiography—a hero-worshipping, legend-forming biography. Blooms of intense popularity have periodically sprung up, but the topic’s popularity has remained deeply rooted for five centuries. Serious attempts to uproot the legend are few and far between; almost every book has sought to lionize or demonize, to celebrate the hero or denounce the antihero. Like his bones, the real Cortés has been either obscured by the trimmings of a celebratory mausoleum or hidden behind a beam. Like his vandalized statues, he is seen increasingly through presentist eyes, less and less understood as a historical figure. As one of his modern biographers noted, Cortés long ago ceased to be a man, surviving only as “a myth.”6

  For us to uproot the legend, we need to understand its nature, to see how Cortés became Caesar, Moses, and Hero, and also to see how “Cortez the Killer,” the antihero, has served as the fourth side of the same frame containing the Cortés legend, completing the myth rather than shattering it.

  THE MOTTO CHOSEN by Cortés for his coat of arms was Judicium Domini apprehendit eos, et fortitudo ejus corroboravit bracchium meum (“The judgment of the Lord overtook them, and his might strengthened my arm”). Taken from an account of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus Flavius Josephus, the line implied that Cortés had besieged and captured a second Jerusalem. The reference reflected Cortés’s own embrace of the exalted notion that his actions in Mexico were divinely guided, that his role was that of a universal crusader. It also reflected the Spanish tendency, commonplace in the early modern centuries, to compare Spain’s imperial achievements to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans.7

  By the 1540s several specific comparisons had become commonplace in Spanish accounts of the war in Mexico, including that of Jerusalem and Tenochtitlan, and that of Cortés and Julius Caesar. Cortés himself made no such claim; the purpose of his Letters was, after all, to display his undying loyalty to a king who, as Holy Roman Emperor, was the Caesar of the day. But the clerics and intellectuals who formed the pro-Cortés, anti–Las Casas faction in Spain during the conquistador’s final years pointed out three similarities: both men were remarkable generals; both were unique literary figures for recording detailed accounts of their greatest campaign (Cortés’s Letters; Caesar’s Gallic Wars); and both had administrative vision, guiding the Mexican and Roman worlds, respectively, into new eras.8

  Gómara made much hay with the comparison to ancient Rome. In addition to printing his coat of arms, Gómara insisted that “never has such a display of wealth been discovered in the Indies, nor acquired so quickly” as that found by Cortés. Enthused his secretary-hagiographer:

  not only were his many great feats in the wars the greatest—without prejudice against a single Spaniard in the Indies—among the many achieved in the regions of the New World, but he wrote them down in imitation of Polybius, and of Salust when he brought together the Roman histories of Marius and Scipio.9

  Gómara used his giddy comparisons of Cortés to the great generals of ancient Greece and Rome—and to their historians—as buildings blocks for his construction of the exemplary conquistador. By contrast, the other famous conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, was portrayed as illiterate and ignoble, and his assault on the Inca Empire as little more than a plundering expedition by avaricious bandits. This allowed Gómara to better promote Cortés as the noble, pious model of a literate man-at-arms, and his invasion of Mexico as “a good and just war.” Gómara went a little too far—his criticism of the Conquest of Peru prompted his History to be quickly banned in Spain. But by century’s end there were ten Italian editions, nine in French too, and two in English, making it “so widely read that it served, almost by default, as the official history of the Spanish New World.”10

  Comparisons were not restricted to Julius Caesar—in his ode to Cortés of 1546, for example, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar also compared Cortés to Alexander the Great and to St. Paul—but the Cortés-Caesar leitmotif tended to predominate, and it lasted for centuries. In his 1610 account of the Spanish Conquest campaigns in New Mexico, composed as an epic poem, Gaspar de Villagrá repeatedly invoked Cortés as the paradigmatic conquistador. When, in Villagrá’s telling, Cortés’s efforts to campaign in northwest Mexico were opposed by Viceroy Mendoza (who had by now assumed rule of New Spain), the conflict had classical echoes: “Greed for power, like love, will permit no rival. Even as Caesar and Pompey clashed over their rival ambitions for world power, so now Cortés met with opposition.” Similarly, the splendors and religious devotion of Mexico City were

  all due to the noble efforts of that famous son who set forth to discover this New World, whose illustrious and glorious deeds, after the years have passed, will surely be seen as no less great and admirable than those of the great Caesar, Pompey, Arthur, Charlemagne, and other valiant men, whom time has raised up.11

  The theme was prominent too in the histories by Díaz (who also compared himself to Julius Caesar) and by Solís—the latter prefaced with the assertion that “whoever will consider the Difficulties he overcame, and the Battles he fought and won against an incredible Superiority of Numbers, must own him little inferior to the most celebrated Heroes of Antiquity.” Solís’s book was a bestseller in multiple languages for well over a century. Meanwhile, Cortés was promoted inside and outside the Spanish world as a kind of model, modern Caesar. For example, in his History of the Conquest of Mexico, By the Celebrated Hernan Cortes (first published in 1759 but seeing dozens of editions through to the twentieth century), W. H. Dilworth sought to improve and entertain “the BRITISH YOUTH of both Sexes.” The book claimed to contain “A faithful and entertaining Detail of all [Cortés’s] Amazing Victories,” with a story “abounding with strokes of GENERALSHIP, and the most refined Maxims of CIVIL POLICY.”12

  From Dilworth to Prescott to modern authors (entire books have be
en devoted to comparing Cortés to Caesar or to Alexander), the Spaniard has generally come off well in relation to ancient generals, whether the focus is on military logistics, governmental vision, or moral justification. For a 1938 Mexican biographer of the conqueror, Julius Caesar was more self-interested than Cortés; the Spaniard was not only glorified, but also sanctified, an “epic boxer” and “mystical crusader” who embodied his age more than his own personal ambitions.13

  Other Latin American intellectuals suggested that Cortés “was a Caesar, but more like Caesar Borgia than Julius Caesar”—meaning Cesare Borgia, the duke made famous by Machiavelli in The Prince—and that Cortés’s “political vision” was so similar to Machiavelli’s that one imagines the conquistador reading The Prince. That scenario is impossible, as the now-classic political treatise was not published until 1532, as literary scholars acknowledge. But some have argued that Machiavelli’s ideas were circulating before the book saw print, allowing Cortés to be “the practical Spaniard” to Machiavelli’s “theoretical Italian.”14

  FOLLOWING THE LOGIC OF the Cortés legend, political disunity among Mesoamericans has traditionally been read as the conqueror’s achievement, with the question being who most influenced his divide-and-rule strategy: Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli, or the Bible. The Christian element (Solana’s “mystical crusader”) inevitably gave Cortés the moral edge over any of his possible influences (the Bible aside). Thus, beginning with the earliest writings on the Conquest by Franciscans and other ecclesiastics, Cortés was promoted as a pious version of a classical general, better than the ancients because he carried the true faith with him.15

  “I do not wish to deride the noble achievements of the Romans,” wrote Diego Valadés in 1579, for they subdued and organized an impressive number of provinces. “Yet one must exalt with the highest praise and with new and illuminating phrases the unprecedented fortitude of Hernando Cortés, and the friars who came to these new worlds.” Comparing the possessions of the Roman Empire with “the parts of the Indies that have come into our hands, ours are infinitely greater.” But for Valadés, it was not just a question of scale. The Cortesian achievement was a religious one, and thus “the sign of how Cortés exercised his power for the good” was how he and the earliest friars destroyed temples, expelled priests, and prohibited “diabolic sacrifices.” It was thus the nature, as well as the magnitude and speed, of the enterprise that made it “the most heroic.”16

  Valadés, the son of a Spanish conquistador and a Tlaxcalteca mother, was the first mestizo (mixed-race man) to enter the Order of Saint Francis. His perspective was thus as much colonial Tlaxcalteca as it was Franciscan. Valadés was one of the earliest to articulate the invented but long-lasting tradition that the Tlaxcalteca were the very first—at Cortés’s urging—to receive baptism as new Christians in Mexico.17

  Another mestizo son of a Spanish conquistador and Tlaxcalteca mother, Diego Muñoz Camargo, also contributed to this core element of the Cortés-as-Moses legend. His History of Tlaxcala, completed in 1592, recounted a meeting that supposedly took place between Cortés and the four rulers of Tlaxcallan in the middle of the Spanish-Aztec War (as anti-Aztec forces regrouped). At the meeting, Cortés delivered a virtual sermon, confessing that his true mission in Mexico was to bring the true faith. “We call ourselves Christians,” he declared, being sons “of the only true God that there is.” Explaining Christianity and its rituals, he urged the lords to destroy their “idols,” receive baptism, and join him in a vengeful campaign of war against Tenochtitlan. The rulers then persuaded their subjects, who all gathered for a public mass baptism, at which Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado acted as godfathers.18

  The incident was almost certainly fiction. It may have echoed real conversations between conquistador captains and city rulers in 1520, but the scene depicted by Muñoz was a mythistorical mix of his imagination and Tlaxcalteca folk history. Yet—like the mythistory of the Meeting in Tenochtitlan—it took root. For it placed both Tlaxcallan and Cortés in a positive light, promoting one as the voluntary starting point for Christian baptism, and the other as an effective agent for conversion. These Tlaxcalteca were the good Nahuas; they listened to religious reason and to their wise lords, in stark contrast to the Aztecs and their failed ruler. This Cortés was a peacemaker, a spiritual conquistador who deployed the word, not the sword, inspiring conversion without coercion.

  The Franciscan promotion of Cortés as a New World Moses, both during and long after his lifetime, had three roots. First, the twelve founding fathers of Catholicism in Mexico were Franciscans, arriving in 1524 with Cortés’s support. Second, many of the Twelve (as they came to be known), including their leader, fray Martín de Valencía, and the influential Motolinía (fray Toribio de Benavente), shared a millenarian vision of their mission; their goal was to convert indigenous Mexicans in order that Christ could return, a holy task made possible by Cortés. Third, the Cortés-Franciscan alliance became cemented by the political schism that divided Spanish Mexico in the 1530s. The Franciscans were forced to compete in Mexico with secular clergy and rival orders, especially the Dominicans, who aligned themselves with the first royal officials sent to govern New Spain. The Dominicans were critical of Cortés; the Franciscans penned narratives that praised him.19

  One such Franciscan was fray Gerónimo de Mendieta. He spent roughly the last quarter of the sixteenth century composing his Historia Eclesiástica Indiana in the Franciscan convent in Tlatelolco, once part of the Aztec capital and in Mendieta’s day a Nahua neighborhood of Mexico City. Although Mendieta’s history of the evangelization in Mexico was denied publication permission (for its overly millenarian tone), it reflected the opinion of the day and influenced subsequent chronicles and accounts of the Spiritual Conquest. As we read earlier, Mendieta believed that Martin Luther and Hernando Cortés were born the same year, and that this was part of God’s plan for the Spaniard. This providential numerology was reinforced by the bloody orgy of human sacrifice that Mendieta thought occurred in Tenochtitlan that same year. The remedy to “the clamor of so many souls” and “the spilling of so much human blood” was Cortés, dispatched to Mexico “like a new Moses to Egypt.”20

  “Without any doubt,” wrote the friar, “God chose specifically to be his instrument this valiant captain, don Fernando Cortés, through whose agency the door was opened and a road made for the preachers of the Gospel in this new world.” Mendieta’s nineteenth-century editor printed in the margin: “Cortés chosen as a new Moses to free the Indian people.” Proof of Cortés’s role, divinely appointed since birth, was another meaningful synchronicity with Luther: in the same year that the German heretic “began to corrupt the Gospel,” the Spanish captain began “to make it known faithfully and sincerely to people who had never before heard of it.” No less a “confirmation of the divine election of Cortés to a task so noble in spirit” was the “marvelous determination that God put in his heart.”21

  Down through the centuries, authors writing in multiple languages wove these threads of Cortés’s religious devotion and the evidence of God’s intervention in the Conquest’s glorious story. It was the stuff of epic poetry: for Mexican-born Spanish poet Antonio de Saavedra, Cortés was a brilliant and godly agent; for Italian poet Girolamo Vecchietti, he was il pietoso Cortese. He guided indigenous people to the light so effectively that “the reverence and prostration on their knees that is now shown to priests by the Indians of New Spain was taught to them by don Fernando Cortés, Marqués del Valle, of happy memory” (as García put it in 1607).22

  In the hands of Protestant authors in later centuries, the Moses leitmotif shifted into something slightly different—“religious fanaticism,” one American historian called it in 1856—but the core legendary element persisted. Upon assuming command of the expedition to Mexico, Cortés took up his “heavenly mission” with the zeal of “a frank, fearless, deluded enthusiast.” His destiny was “to march the apostle of Christianity to overthrow the idols in the ha
lls of Moctezuma, and there to rear the cross of Christ.” In the less judgmental words of another turn-of-the-century historian, Cortés’s “religious sincerity” was “above impeachment.” Indeed, he was virtually a saint, “a man of unfeigned piety, of the stuff that martyrs are made of, nor did his conviction that he was leading a holy crusade to win lost souls to salvation ever waver.” Later scholars were decreasingly adulatory, arguing that Cortés and his colleagues were, “so far as religion was concerned, simply products of their times.” But many remained convinced that Cortés’s character and goals were, above all else, religious, and that no other explorer or conquistador of the Americas could match Cortés “in the constancy or the depth of his zeal for the Holy Catholic Faith.”23

  MAXIME HEROICUM—“MOST HEROIC”—was how Valadés had summed up Cortés’s enterprise of military and spiritual conquest. Hero was increasingly popular as a descriptor of Cortés from the late sixteenth century onward, typically tied to a set of adjectives that defined his heroic qualities: great, invincible, valiant. Although sometimes tied to religion (as Moses-Hero), the purpose of such praise was usually political and patriotic, to promote Cortés as an inspirational national hero. The Hero leitmotif ran thick through the familiar canon of conquest sources—from Gómara to Madariaga—as well as in a wide variety of other sources. Villagrá, for example, exclaimed to the king that Cortés was the hero who “conquered an entire world,” inspiring the insight that “there is nothing in the world to compare with the presumptuousness of man”; Cortés, as the exemplary homo heroicus, was the man.

  He attempts things which it seems are reserved for God alone. You will note, worthy king, that the great Cortés, Marquis of the Valley, who, after braving the dangers of the mighty deep, burned his fleet, determined either to conquer or to perish; this very one in whom the spirit of adventure still burned with an unconquerable desire to discover not one more world but one hundred if possible . . .24