When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  The phenomenon has been grossly downplayed in the Cortesian legend: he “extended toleration rather than approval to the institution of slavery,” later having “grave doubts of the equity or wisdom of enslaving the Indians”; he had enslaved “natives in the past but [then] appeared to find it abhorrent.” A hideous truth was thus hidden. As Andrés Reséndez, a leading historian of “Indian enslavement,” recently observed, “not only was Cortés the richest man in Mexico, he was also the largest owner of Indian slaves. And wherever Cortés led, others followed.”31

  Reséndez is right, but let us tweak the point to emphasize our concern here: Cortés was the biggest enslaver of “Indians” because he was the richest settler in Mexico. And others were not taking their cue from him; all conquistadors were taking slaves. Not just in Quecholac and Tepeaca, but in town after town across the Americas, for generations before and after Cortés’s years in the Indies, adult “Indians” and their elderly were slaughtered, their women and children enslaved. Why?

  Imagine the explanation as a matryoshka or Russian nesting doll. The outermost doll is that of the larger history of slavery in the early modern world—a subject in which there is little space for a moral high ground. Cortés’s thousands of indigenous slaves (Vázquez de Tapia claimed it was over twenty thousand) may have been an exceptionally large number for one Spaniard, but they were a tiny percentage of the more than half a million enslaved across the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, Central America, and beyond, just in the early sixteenth century alone. And an even smaller percentage of those enslaved elsewhere in the Atlantic orbit. Holocaustic levels of slaughter and enslavement of non-European peoples marked the early modern genesis of our modern world. Cortés’s era was just the beginning. Over the successive centuries, between 10 and 20 million Africans and indigenous Americans would be forced into slavery. Tens of millions more would be displaced and forced into servitude, would die from epidemic diseases, would suffer the tearing apart of families and the brutal exploitation of colonialism and imperial expansion. Such experiences were the political, economic, and moral platforms upon which our world was constructed.32

  Nor was slavery limited to Europeans and Africans; there were indigenous slaves in the Americas before 1492. Arguably, conquistadors simply practiced a more devastating version of the slavery that had been practiced for centuries in the hemisphere. “More devastating” is the key phrase, however; sixteenth-century Spaniards magnified and transformed indigenous traditions of slavery, imposing a scale of dislocation that was unprecedented. At the same time, they used the prior existence of slaves in indigenous communities as an excuse, a justification for their own slaving (Europeans of all nations used a similar justification to enslave Africans). More than a simple justification, this was a legal loophole that was abused on a massive scale: Spaniards branded so-called esclavos de rescate (“ransomed slaves”) with an R on the face, their status thereafter no longer requiring explanation, regardless of how spurious its origin.

  This leads us to the second matryoshka doll, or reason why Mesoamericans were enslaved. Because Spaniards were accustomed to enslaving North and West Africans, as well as Muslims taken in the war against Granada of 1480–92, they did not hesitate to enslave indigenous peoples in the Caribbean—beginning with Columbus’s first voyage, sponsored by the Castilian crown, in 1492–93. And because it was far cheaper and easier to “harvest” islands for slave labor than it was to buy and ship Africans across the Atlantic, the Caribbean was virtually depopulated by Spanish expeditions of exploration, conquest, and enslavement—motivating companies to search farther afield, including (as mentioned earlier) the Mesoamerican mainland. Although the more critical accounts of Spanish conquests in the Americas have tended to assign to Spaniards gold-lust as their darkest motivation, the evidence is extensive that the conquistadors came from the Caribbean to Mexico fully intending, above all, to carry on raiding for slaves—and they did exactly that on numerous occasions during and after the Spanish-Aztec War. As Díaz admitted, defensively:

  If the Mexican Indians and natives of the villages rose up against and killed Spaniards, and after being summoned three times to come in peace still did not wish to come in, but made war, we were given license to make them slaves, and to burn a brand on their faces, in a G like this.33

  So why does our vision of the Americas in the early sixteenth century tend not to feature enslaved indigenous peoples in the foreground? Why, more specifically, in the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico” are there few mentions of indigenous slaves? This is partly because of the eventual decline in indigenous slavery and its eclipse by African slavery throughout the hemisphere. (Black African slaves were brought to the Americas beginning with the earliest voyages of Columbus; a small but unknown number of black slaves and freedmen fought in the Spanish-Aztec War, the best known of whom was Juan Garrido.)34

  But it is also because the prudence and legality of enslaving “Indians” was debated from the very start, regulated for much of the time, and periodically banned outright. Thus Spaniards tended not to mention it, or to do so in passing, because it was done with such routine regularity as to barely be worth mentioning, while—paradoxically—it was also understood to be illicit and illegal if not justified on vague moral grounds (idolatry, cannibalism, sodomy, and the old sawhorse of human sacrifice) or legal ones (rebellion). So while Crown policy more or less outlawed the enslaving of “Indians” throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, it always permitted loopholes. Rather than admitting small numbers of special cases, those loopholes actually fostered and encouraged the perpetuation of mass slaving practices, especially in zones of conflict or European expansion. That included pretty much every corner of the Americas at some time or another (and sometimes for generations), meaning no region escaped from being a “borderland of bondage.” In the 1520s, it was Mexico’s turn, and Mesoamerica’s for decades to follow.35

  In theory—and, again, in terms of Crown policy—it was preferable to leave indigenous men and women to be converted to Christianity and to labor in their homelands to produce food and tribute goods. Moving them was counterproductive, because it was “contrary to their nature, and because they are of feeble complexion,” stated a royal edict banning the shipping of “Indians” to Spain. When they died in Europe—as did the majority of the hundreds transported on dozens of ships, from Columbus in the 1490s to Cortés in 1540—the blame was placed on “the change of climate, country, and food.” But that edict was not issued until 1543.36

  Furthermore, such edicts did not mean enslaved “Indians” across the Spanish world could suddenly take control of their lives; it meant that they had a right to file suit in the law courts, which a minority were able to do, and a minority of those achieved freedom. Legal cases of indigenous men and women, almost all enslaved as children during the war, fighting for freedom in Spain and New Spain (and elsewhere) in the 1540s and ’50s (and beyond) are a gold mine for historians. From amid the faceless, nameless thousands, such cases bring to life individuals like Francisco Manuel (his full name). He was a small boy in 1527 when his hometown on the Pacific coast (near today’s Manzanillo) was attacked by Alvaro de Saavedra Céron (as part of Cortés’s plan to secure the region for a port). As was the pattern in the Spanish-Aztec War, and for many years following, the town was sacked, adult men killed, women and children enslaved—including Francisco Manuel, who a year later was on a ship to Spain, destined to spend his youth working as a servant/slave in Seville (not until 1552 did he escape to Madrid and file suit to be legally declared free).37

  Yet such cases, as fascinating as they are, can be misleading; most Francisco Manuels never made that journey to Madrid, and thus never made it into the historical record. Meanwhile, in 1551 in Mexico City, the viceroy appointed a lawyer, Bartolomé Melgarejo, to free the kingdom’s “Indian” slaves and return them to their hometowns. Melgarejo’s plaintive, pathetic letters to the king are a sobering read. He proudly added up the number of slaves freed, a
s the years passed, yet after a decade the total barely topped three thousand—out of some one hundred thousand in central Mexico, and hundreds of thousands more across the viceroyalty. He also freely admitted that officials in Mexico forced him to respect the old loopholes, with face brands (G or R) trumping the legal process, and the tens of thousands enslaved in the wars to the north and west deemed “just” because the invaded peoples were classified as rebels. Finally, Melgarejo claimed that year after year the local treasurer refused to pay his salary; because “I cannot work as a lawyer for those who own slaves” and nobody employs “me due to the great communal enmity in which they hold me,” “my odious job” has thus left “me in a worse condition than the Indian slaves I’ve freed.”38

  Meanwhile, new conquest campaigns meant new opportunities for harvesting indigenous communities for slaves, and the human spoils of those campaigns tended to stimulate the slave markets throughout the Spanish colonies. Thus the link between indigenous enslavement in the Caribbean and in Mexico was twofold: the history of enslavement in the Caribbean provided conquistadors with models and motives, while indigenous slaves were transported between the islands and the mainland—in both directions.

  During the course of the war, Spaniards brought hundreds—possibly thousands—of Taíno slaves and servants into Mexico from the Caribbean (mostly from Cuba, although many were surely born and enslaved elsewhere before being taken to Cuba). There were numerous complaints from the Spaniards left in Cuba. Manuel de Rojas, for example, claimed that due to “the great quantity of Indians that Spaniards took on the fleets that went [to Mexico], this island was very depopulated and greatly damaged.” Things went from bad to worse: “excessive allotments [repartimientos]” of “Indians” were then made to Spaniards on the island, “many of whom went to New Spain, taking with them many of the servants [naborías] and Indians who were given to them in encomiendas and others whom they then sold and bartered away.”39

  There is no evidence that these Taíno slaves and servants fought or were even used as arrow fodder. Instead, the men were porters, they built defensive works, and they put up and broke down camps; the women were sex slaves, and they carried and cooked. Many died from maltreatment. As Rojas alleged, they were also sold. Diego de Ávila claimed that Cortés approved “the Spaniards bartering Carib Indians—the Indians they brought with them on the campaign—for chickens and other things,” and “I saw the Spaniards who were with Cortés publicly bartering many of those Indians.” The statement was made in 1521, in Cuba, in a transparently Velazquista legal brief, but I suspect Ávila simply laid at Cortés’s door a practice that was sanctioned by all captains and reflected the way that Taíno slaves were generally treated.40

  This draining of indigenous Cubans did not stop Velázquez and other Spanish settlers on the island from continuing to exploit the surviving population. Despite a royal ban on any Spaniard other than Velázquez himself claiming more than one hundred “Indians” as “servants” [personas de servicio], a 1522 survey showed that the twenty most prominent settlers divided up three thousand Taínos among them that year, averaging 166 each; given that this included Mexican conquistadors such as Narváez, Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa, and the notorious slaver Juan Bono de Quexo, some of these “servants” were surely shipped to households or slave markets in Mexico.41

  As Mesoamerica became part of the Spanish Indies in the 1520s through 1540s—the viceroyalty of New Spain would eventually encompass Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean—it also became a core part of the regional Spanish network of slave markets. Slaves taken in Mesoamerica were mostly moved to mining, plantation, or household enterprises elsewhere in Mesoamerica, but some were taken to the islands. Spaniards made little effort to hide the fact that they were enslaving “Indians” in one province to be sold in another; indeed, that was the nature of the business. Andrés de Tapia got rich doing this after the Spanish-Aztec War; he was so successful that decades later, when he was an old man, he was able to persuade Viceroy Mendoza to ask Prince Philip to appoint his son to a lucrative church position because “tribute” from the family encomiendas was insufficient—because “in the past they took so many of the natives of the province to the islands and to other regions.”42

  The third matryoshka doll is more specific to Mexico, and to the Spanish-Aztec War. The point can be summarized in one intriguing phrase: Montezuma’s missing treasure. In their earliest reports back to Spain, Cortés and his allies planted a seed that would turn into a virulent weed. They exaggerated the extent of the gold, silver, and “treasure” that they had acquired—both during the months of plotting on the Gulf coast in 1519, and when persuading the Narváez company to join them in 1520. The consequences of their hyperbole were legion. Most of the decades-long residencia inquiry, along with scores of other lawsuits and investigations, was devoted to finding Montezuma’s missing treasure. Cuauhtemoc and other Mexica were tortured to reveal the secret (the feet of the captive huey tlahtoani were doused in hot oil, which was then ignited). Spaniards tortured and murdered other Spaniards (a notorious example being the slow death of Rodrigo de Paz, one of Cortés’s cousins). And—most germane here—the thousand or so Spaniards who joined the siege and survived the war acquired inflated expectations that fueled disappointment and anger. The solution was to turn on the local population. With shares upon victory in 1521 at fifty pesos or less for a conquistador of modest status, the potential profit from enslaving unarmed indigenous villagers was too tempting to turn down.43

  The fourth matryoshka doll of explanation is the smallest, but it takes us back to the heart of the matter. Indigenous enslavement during and after the Spanish-Aztec War was endemic because it was mostly women and children who were being seized and branded. There were several reasons for this, in turn—explanations that apply to indigenous enslavement in the Indies as a whole (not just in Mexico). There was a market in Europe for indigenous American women and children as domestic or household slaves (women fetched the highest prices, then girls, then boys, with men the lowest); as Spanish settlements spread and grew in the Americas, so did that same market. In addition, women and children were more easily overpowered, restrained, and branded on the face than full-grown men. Children were also easier to trick into going with slavers—who then passed them off as paid servants, not forced slaves; or they worked as servants, ostensibly free, only to find themselves later sold as pieces of property. Such was the experience of hundreds of Nahua children and teenagers taken to Spain alone between the 1520s and 1540; thousands of Mesoamerican children became enslaved adults in lands far from home through this layered system of deception.44

  But, above all, there was also a particular market in the Spanish Indies of the early sixteenth century for indigenous women and girls to play the roles of wives, concubines, and sex slaves. Such slaves were elemental to the trifecta of conquistador expectations and practices. Spaniards assumed that the “pacification” of “Indians” was likely to entail violence; that subdued indigenous populations would be exploited through slavery and the encomienda system (which provided unpaid goods and labor); and that indigenous women would meet the needs—sexual, reproductive, domestic—of conquistadors and settlers. As one historian rather bluntly put it, “sex was a driving force in the exploration of the Americas.”45

  The Spanish world in the Americas was for decades overwhelmingly male; in theory, growing numbers of Spanish women would replace indigenous women in such roles, but in practice they tended to displace them in terms of rank, not roles and services. The patterns were set in the islands; Cortés was typical in having a Taíno family in Cuba before having sexual relationships with Nahua women in Mexico. Diego González, for example, survived the entire Spanish-Aztec War, but his Cuban Taíno wife was less fortunate; she died from complications giving birth to their son. González remarried in Mexico, perhaps to a Nahua woman. Another example was Martín Vásquez, a horseman in the Mexican war; he had previously fought in Panama, under Pe
drarias de Ávila, and in the conquest of Cuba—where he married a Taíno woman. They had four children, and by 1525 his wife was in his Mexico City household with him. (He held various encomiendas and owned numerous indigenous slaves, whom he used for gold panning; at one point he sold a crew of fifty indigenous slaves to his business partner.)

  Lorenzo Suárez, a member of the cohort of viejos, left behind a Taíno woman and their child in Cuba when he joined the expedition to Mexico; the child meant something to him, for in 1527 he sent Alonso Botel to go look for him in Cuba and bring him to him in Mexico. Suárez had meanwhile married a Spanish woman, but he killed her with a stone used for grinding maize (he was one of several conquistador wife-killers, according to Díaz); the act earned him the nickname of “Grinding Stone,” and as punishment he lost his encomiendas, although they were given to the son whose mother he murdered. In penance, he seems eventually to have taken orders as a friar, and as such denounced some Nahuas to the Inquisition for “idolatry.”46

  There are many other examples of conquistadors whose interactions with indigenous women in Mexico moved along, or existed simultaneously, at different points on the spectrum between rape and marriage. Sancho de Sopuerta fought in the conquest campaigns on Hispaniola and Cuba, then with Grijalva, coming to Mexico with Cortés. He settled in Tenochtitlan in 1524, marrying and having at least three children with Ana Gutiérrez, who seems to have been indigenous. Francisco de Granada was a veteran of the conquest wars in Mexico and Guatemala, famous for having taken an Aztec arrow in the face on the Noche Triste (Santos Hernández achieved similar renown for removing it in the heat of battle). Granada participated in the Tepeaca massacre and other such events, and owned many indigenous slaves. There is no record of a spouse, but Granada fathered an unknown number of children by one or more Nahua women. Juan Sedeño fought in the Mexican wars, after which he settled in Vera Cruz with an indigenous wife, renamed Isabel Sedeño; he had been given the nearby town of Xilopetec in encomienda, but its population complained so vigorously of his abusive treatment that it was appropriated by the Crown in 1531.47