Cortés is found in archival documents of the early modern centuries as a heroic reference, but these tend to be repetitive, passing mentions, knee-jerk nods to his iconic status as patriotic hero. A more natural and vivid medium for Cortesian adulation and legend promotion was epic poetry. One of the best examples—both for its quality of verse and its wide circulation for centuries—is Gabriel Lasso de la Vega’s Valiant Cortés (Cortés valeroso) of 1588, comprising more than nine thousand lines of epic verse praising “the great Cortés.” A second edition of six years later was more than twice as long. Five years later, Saavedra rose to the challenge (he and Lasso were friends) and published a similar chronicle. The Indiano Pilgrim (El Peregrino Indiano) used more than sixteen thousand lines of epic poetry promoting the Cortés legend, likewise built around a version of the traditional “Conquest of Mexico” narrative.25
That put the ball back in Lasso de la Vega’s court, and within two years he had published his Elegies in Praise of Three Famous Men (Elogios en Loor de los Tres Famosos Varones)—one of whom was Cortés, compared favorably to another, Jayme the Conquistador, King of Aragon.26 Lasso’s devotion to lionizing the legendary conquistador of Mexico was as much necessity as it was ideologically motivated; he was supported and sponsored by the Cortés family. One of them, don Gerónimo Cortés, was an amateur poet who contributed prefatory verses both to Lasso’s Valiant Cortés and to Saavedra’s Pilgrim. This example, included in the former of the two books, captures the tone both of don Gerónimo’s efforts and the more elegant lines of the poets his family kept solvent:
Once again there pours forth
the sweet sound of the greatness,
the labors, dangers, and bravery, with which
my invincible grandfather won eternal fame.27
“Invincible” was a favored adjective, used both by Saavedra and don Gerónimo, and in the caption to the portrait of Cortés printed in all three of Lasso de la Vega’s hagiographies (and included in our Gallery). “Valiant” was also popular—“valorous, great gentleman and Christian”; “illustrious and valiant gentleman”—as was “fame”; Cortés was often “the most famous and most adventurous Captain.” Above all, Cortés was the “great hero.”28
While Cortés never disappeared as a popular, patriotic topic, Cortesiana came in waves: that of the decades surrounding 1600; another in the reign of Carlos II (1661–1700), who commissioned and collected books and paintings on the “Conquest of Mexico” (Solís was his royal chronicler); and another in the late eighteenth century (culminating in the reburial of Cortés’s bones and in Juan de Escoiquiz’s Heroic Poem—introduced at the top of this chapter). This latter wave can be explained generally in terms of Bourbon Spain’s more profitable, more robust empire, and specifically as a result of new Spanish publications of Cortés’s Letters to the King (most notably by Mexican archbishop Lorenzana in 1770).29
A larger cultural context was also the increased popularity of the epic poem, with Cortés as a traditional, fashionable subject. For example, in Hernandia, Francisco Ruiz de León wove themes from ancient Greek and Roman literature into the traditional narrative of Mexico’s Conquest. The title may have been pithy, but the poem was a dense 383 pages of ottava rima, an Italian verse form associated primarily with heroic poetry. Although the poem’s title suggested its topic was Cortés, in effect the conquistador was deployed as a figure from classical mythology, with the primary target being to praise Spain, the true faith, and heroism itself. By embodying that triad, Cortés was virtually deified, recognizable as a legendary icon, not as a credible, historical human being.30
In subsequent decades, more Spanish poets turned to the same theme and genre of verse. Two of them even used the same motif and title, The Ships of Cortés Destroyed. One of these poems, a sixty-stanza ode to “the great Hero,” won the Royal Academy’s annual poetry prize. This giddily patriotic celebration of Spanish glory, as embodied in “the new Cid, the Spanish Achilles,” took Cortés’s alleged destruction of his ships on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico as a symbolic moment that turned the Atlantic into a “theatre” and “fountain” of Spanish triumph. “The great Cortés” thus brought to Spain national glory and global respect. Escoiquiz’s stirring verse in praise of “the valiant Hernando” ran to more than a thousand pages; Mexico Conquered: Heroic Poem included a prologue that proclaimed Spain’s glowing record of moral rectitude, legitimacy, and generosity toward “Indians.”31
That prologue noted how favorable Spain’s colonial record was in contrast to the dire reputations of other European empires, and in refutation of the lies spread by Las Casas and his foreign disciples. Anti–Las Casas apologias for Spanish conquest and colonialism formed a tradition stretching from Sepúlveda and Vargas Machuca, through the Bourbon era of epic poetry, into the early twentieth century (when a Spanish historian coined the phrase “Black Legend”). Yet despite this defensive tradition, and the abiding popularity of Las Casas’s Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, depictions of Cortés as Hero persisted in the Protestant world.32
For example, for Thomas Nicholas, the Elizabethan translator of Gómara’s Conquista, the “delectable and worthy” exploits of Cortés were a model and precedent to be emulated. Any Englishman contemplating the ambition of discovery and conquest could learn from the Cortés case,
how Glorie, Renowne, and perfite Felicitie, is not gotten but with greate paines, travaile, perill and danger of life: here shall they see the wisdome, curtesie, valour and pollicie of worthy Captaynes, yea and the faithfull hartes whiche they ought to beare unto their Princes service.33
Nicholas presented Cortés as an exemplar but not an exception among his people. Indeed, there is nothing in his introduction to his Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India, now called new Spayne that anticipates later Black Legend stereotypes about Spaniards in the Americas (the first English edition of Las Casas’s Destruction of the Indies was still five years away; the Spanish Armada of 1588 a decade in the future). Not only does he echo the praise for Cortés that he has found in Gómara’s text, but Nicholas also suggests that something can be learned from the steely spirit of Spaniards as a whole. His portrait of the Spaniards is the opposite of later stereotypes; they are people so committed to king and country, so full of the “zeal of travayle,” that they have built a “greate” and “marvellous” empire. Englishmen, Nicholas implies, should envy and seek to emulate such men.34
A century and a half later, another English translator of a bestselling Spanish book—Solís’s Conquest of Mexico—articulated a similar admiration for Spain’s achievements, arguing that the English should even be grateful to their rivals; for that “the Discovery and Conquest of that new World have enrich’d England with no small Share of the wealth of it; which makes it a Point of Gratitude in Behalf of my Country to publish the Actions of this Hero . . . so illustrious a Conqueror.”35
The persistent perception of Cortés as a heroic figure in the Protestant West can in part be explained by the simple fact that a great story needs a great hero. By the late eighteenth century, the “Conquest of Mexico” came prepackaged as a narrative with Cortés as that hero (sometimes flawed, but always triumphant), Montezuma as the doomed and tragic half-hero, and Velázquez as the antihero. It is hardly surprising that the story was appealing to Spanish poets hoping a patriotic theme would bring them success. But it was equally attractive to the painters, poets, composers, and writers of the Romantic era. In particular, the Romantics—who emphasized individual emotional responses over the rationalism of the Enlightenment—found Malintzin a compelling character, ripe for reinvention. She became central to the story by being transformed into a sort of female version of Montezuma—a representative of the indigenous Mexican world who surrenders not through weakness or superstition, but because of the overwhelming emotions of romantic and sexual attraction. The effect was to transform Cortés, in turn, into a rugged leading man, sexually irresistible to women, a symbol of machismo, a mod
ern hero, “the Romantic Caesar” (as Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos dubbed him).36
Cortés the Romantic Hero would have been recognizable to Parisians, for example, who saw Spontini’s opera Fernand Cortez, and likewise to Europeans who saw copies of Nicolas-Eustache Maurin’s lithographs depicting scenes from the “Conquest of Mexico.” In “Clémence de Fernand-Cortès” (included in the Gallery), the Spanish captain is the archetypal Romantic Hero—martial yet magnanimous, triumphant both on the battlefield and in love. Stated the caption: “placing himself proudly on the throne” of the defeated and manacled Moctezuma, Cortés informs his captive that “your empire is destroyed, I am the sole master here, and you shall suffer the fate that is reserved for you; resisting Cortés will cost you your life.” But there is hope for Montezuma, in the form of Alaïda—a fictional, generic, pale-skinned Indian princess, far removed from the historical Malintzin but fitting her stereotype of the period. “Your heart is noble, Cortés,” declares Alaïda, putting herself between the fallen emperor and his Spanish executioner: “It will also be generous, and this moment will determine if it is a magnanimous hero or a barbarous soldier to whom I have given my love.”37
The question is left hanging, as it should be. For Cortés is both the magnanimous, macho, barbarous, soldier-hero who seduces an empire and founds a nation. From Gómara’s day to Maurin’s, and through the twentieth century, Cortés has retained “an uncontested place amongst the heroes of the nations.” Hyperbolic evaluations of this heroism have grown, rather than faded, across these centuries. For some, Cortés was simply the ultimate “hero”; for others his “inner greatness” burned too bright to be contained. The “Conquest was a thing of superlatives and the men who took part in it were supermen,” with Cortés the superman. Even when modern historians and writers attempted to evaluate Cortés in a balanced way, to see him as both hero and villain, in both “bright light and shadow” (as one Mexican biographer put it), he has remained a larger-than-life figure, a “truly extraordinary” and “riveting character.” Apologetic hero worship has served only to give modern legs to the legend: “It may be impossible for us, nowadays, to approve of men like Cortes [sic] and the conquistadores, but we may at least admire their courage, resourcefulness, and strength.”38 Statues and monuments to Cortés have had a mixed history. But in text and image he has remained inextricably tied to the monumental events for which he is routinely given credit. Thus did Cortés himself become monumental.
* * *
Cortés: smooth enough to seduce an entire empire into submission. The dashing, handsome, beautifully dressed—yet ruthless—ladies’ man of Maurin’s lithographs survived in the popular imagination long enough to be played by Cesar Romero in the 1947 Hollywood movie Captain from Castile. Romantic consummation is reserved for a subplot that does not include Romero’s Cortés, as if his seductive appetite is far too vast for a mere love interest; in the final scene, it is a kingdom he rides off to woo and take. But by the time of the 2015 Spanish television drama Carlos, Rey Emperador, Cortés had become more of a promiscuous predator, a macho megalomaniac, a wife-killing brute.39
Those two images of Cortés are arguably two sides to the same coin, for the Antihero legend is often little more than the revision of his Romantic Caesar-Hero characteristics to emphasize brutality over boldness, cruelty over cunning, seizure over seduction. In specific, historical terms, three roots of negative perception created the Antiheroic Cortés: the Cortés-Velázquez feud, the Black Legend, and Mexican nationalism.
As explored in an earlier chapter, Cortés’s complex and ultimately bitterly contentious relationship with Diego Velázquez underpinned and influenced most of his adult life. For his last two and a half decades, Cortés was ensnared in a massive legal and political battle, both directly with Velázquez and with his allies after the governor’s death. Dozens of private lawsuits were filed against Cortés in the 1520s to ’40s, while the sprawling residencia investigation into his conduct dragged on inconclusively. Portions of the residencia were terminated shortly before Cortés died, but they lacked clear verdicts (the murder inquiry never went as far as an arrest or trial, judgments of his governorship of New Spain became irrelevant as the years passed since his removal from the office, and in the meantime the Crown had repeatedly exacted funds from him as fines and loans). The Velázquez feud was thus at the center of a vast legal-political web whose numerous insinuations, accusations, and absence of ringing exonerations echoed down the centuries, where they could once more be alleged (making a wife-murder scene in a television show not only possible, but plausible to audiences).40
The second root to the modern Antiheroic Cortés is a similar set of sixteenth-century accusations revived centuries later. Las Casas was one of the most vocal critics of Cortés during the conquistador’s lifetime and for years after it (they first met in the Caribbean shortly after Cortés arrived in 1504; for four decades they crossed paths in Cuba, Mexico, and Spain, and on occasion, the friar confronted the conquistador in person). But his scathing written denunciations were largely restricted to Spanish and Latin manuscripts not published until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern apologists for Spain’s empire wrongly imagined past centuries of Protestant writers using Las Casas to demonize Cortés; ironically, only after such apologists invented the Black Legend did the Dominican’s criticisms become part of a modern Cortesian Black Legend. The Antihero may be “sterile, anachronistic, and ultimately false,” but for a century it has been fueled by modern interpretations of past texts and events far beyond the discovery of works by Las Casas—fueled by a powerful movement that is Mexican nationalism.41
For Ignacio Romerovargas, the midcentury Mexican champion of “Moctezuma the Magnificent,” Cortés was no more than a “bandit,” and his “invasion . . . an act of barbarism contrary to just law and a violation of the laws of human civilization.” In an era in which Las Casas is hailed as anticipating the modern human rights movement, and Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc are periodically subject to attempts at rehabilitating them as national heroes, some see Cortés as something of a precursor to today’s monsters and megalomaniacs.42
Over the last two centuries, Mexicans have sought to come to terms with the Conquest and Spanish colonialism as part of the process of forging a national identity. This process has been a complex political and cultural one, and is still very much ongoing, articulated in sophisticated terms by generations of intellectual figures from Lucas Alamán to José Vasconcelos, from Eulalia Guzmán to Octavio Paz. Along the way, Cortés has been tossed back and forth, denounced and defended in numerous ways, but in the end persisting as a highly ambiguous figure. Even the great muralists of the Mexican Revolution gave him varying treatment, from Diego Rivera’s deformed and syphilitic Cortés to the naked Cortés elevated by José Clemente Orozco into the Adam of a Mexican genesis. On the five hundredth anniversary of Cortés’s birth, Paz commented on the paradox of Mexican feelings toward the conquistador as both violator and founder: “hatred of Cortés is not even hatred of Spain. It’s hatred of ourselves.” As another Mexican scholar noted, Cortés is “a very controversial character” because “to Mexicans he represents that ambivalence, the presence of the destructive European; but he’s also the great European warrior, the conqueror.” Likewise, even scholars in the English-speaking world whose sympathies lie with the Aztecs more than the conquistadors have let slip their grudging admiration for the “devious, masterful gentleman-adventurer.”43
In other words, Cortés has evolved in modern times into a reluctantly but relentlessly admired Antihero. Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost or J. R. Ewing in the 1980s television drama Dallas, he is an Antihero so compelling, so central to the story, so necessary to the formation of the other characters, that he draws our primary attention; in the end, we love to hate him.
Cortés the Antihero, the modern monster, is of course no closer to being a credible historical figure than Cortés as Caesar, Moses, or national Hero. In Neil
Young’s song “Cortez the Killer,” Cortés is simply the medium by which the idyllic society of the Aztecs is destroyed, as if he were a weapon, not a man (“What a killer”). By the song’s time, Cortés had become associated with destruction for so long as to be a well-recognized symbol of loss; indeed the final verse reveals the Mexican subject matter to be merely metaphorical, with the paradise lost of Montezuma’s world standing for the romantic paradise that Young lost with the end of a relationship.44
Young later claimed that the song was banned in Franco’s Spain; when, after the generalissimo’s death in 1975, the album upon which the song appeared was released in that country, the song’s title was softened to “Cortez, Cortez.” The Cortés legend had come far enough for a song about a different kind of conquest and loss to be a battleground between images of Cortés as the Romantic Caesar, the National Hero, and the lethal Antihero. In this, as in the vandalism of the Cortés statue in his hometown, the tragedy of the original war is hidden behind presentist squabbles tinged with unintentional comedy.
The comedy in Xochiquetzal Candelaria’s 2011 poem “Cortés and Cannon” is darker, and its use of old threads of the Cortés legend more subtle. Here is the Black Legend Cortés who mutilates and murders, who seems deranged with attachment to his largest weapon of destruction, the cannon. But his pantomime of affection for “his field piece,” the stroking and dancing and ordering “his men to lie on the ground in homage to the iron,” amuses and endears him to the local Totonacs, who “laugh” and believe him “wild with love for the enormous, hollow thing he has hauled from the hull of his ship” (also see the epigraphs to Chapter 8). Candelaria comes close to an old stereotype of innocent, gullible indigenous people doomed to die at the hands of the blood-crazed conquistadors. But in the end the poem’s hint of homoerotic humor, its evocation of the war’s violence as completely lacking in glory or justification, and Candelaria’s willingness to imagine a real Cortés, suggest with deft brevity a new way to look at this old Antihero.45
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 29