When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  At the same time, the impact of so-called indigenous allies is also thereby magnified. Herein lies an argument made many times (it was even made, in muted form, by Prescott), but it needs to be restated, with a crucial additional emphasis. Conquistadors massively downplayed the extent to which “the Conquest” was not theirs, but rather a war fought by indigenous warriors allied with them against the Aztecs and—eventually—just the Mexica. They did this for the obvious reason that their letters of report and testimonies were intended as evidence of their success and their sacrifice. But Spaniards also considered it ignoble for a Spaniard to use indigenous warriors to fight another Spaniard, and so accounts tended to ignore the presence of indigenous warriors during internecine conflicts. For example, the Cortés-Narváez standoff, depicted in the traditional narrative as yet another moment of Cortesian triumph against the odds, in fact pitted Narváez’s thousand Spaniards against ten thousand indigenous warriors brought by Sandoval. Even more shocking was the claim that “Pedro de Alvarado captained fifty thousand Indians, when he went against Francisco de Garay, and he killed three hundred Christians in one night.”64

  Those numbers are probably exaggerated, but the point remains: there were indigenous warriors and porters involved in the war far more extensively than Spanish sources and modern histories tend to recognize. The recognition that Tlaxcalteca forces played crucial roles has never gone far enough; the deep roots of that perspective in Tlaxcala’s successful self-promotion since the sixteenth century has only served to downplay or deny the roles played by other city-states. Above all, the failure to acknowledge the role played by the Tetzcoca in forging an agreement with the Tlaxcalteca Triple Alliance has meant a distortion of the war and a downplaying of total alliance numbers. Ironically, Gómara’s figure of two hundred thousand men besieging Tenochtitlan may in fact have been close to the truth. I suspect there were at least that many. Thus in 1521 warriors from dozens of cities and regions outnumbered 200:1 the Spaniards with whom they were loosely allied; they outnumbered Mexica defenders four or five to one. No wonder the Tlaxcalteca/Tetzcoca-led alliance—not the Spaniards—defeated the Mexica.

  The combination of these developments helps to explain why the Spanish-Aztec War became so violent. Prior to the arrival of the conquistadors, two factors acted to restrain warfare, to prevent or minimize any kind of total warfare being waged in central Mexico. One was the balance of power, operating on two levels: Tenochtitlan was dominant within the Triple Alliance, but the inclusion of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan served to offset that domination and discourage its abuse (with dynastic intermarriage helping too); the Aztec Triple Alliance was then itself kept somewhat in check by the Tlaxcalteca Triple Alliance. The events of 1519–20 shifted that larger balance in favor of the Tlaxcalteca—for the first time in their history. The events of 1521 destroyed the balance within the Aztec Empire, giving Tetzcoco dominance over its two former partners. At the same time, the Tlaxcalteca-Tetzcoca rapprochement magnified the effect of those two shifts.

  The addition of Spaniards, their weapons, and the diseases brought by them and their Taíno and African dependents made the shift explosive and chaotic. Furthermore, the Spanish tendency to engage in a kind of total war (ideologically justified, aimed at unconditional surrender, with civilians as legitimate targets) destroyed the second factor of pre-Columbian restraint. Contrary to the Aztecs’ reputation for bloodthirstiness, they shared with other Mesoamericans a culture of warfare that was bound by a war season, by rules of conduct, and by an emphasis on individual combat and ritualized killing. (The Aztecs and the Tlaxcalteca Triple Alliance even seem to have engaged in so-called Flower Wars, in which the unpredictable chaos of open battle was replaced by hand-to-hand combat and negotiated casualties.) Unlike the Iberian Peninsula, the Mexican countryside was not studded with castles and fortified towns; by and large, both urban and rural populations did not need to live in fear of sudden attack, slaughter, and enslavement—not until 1519, that is. Places like Cholollan and Tepeaca were thus highly vulnerable to the kinds of massacres inflicted upon them by the conquistadors. But—and this is important to emphasize—indigenous warriors also participated in those massacres, as they did in the violence of the siege of Tenochtitlan. In other words, the lesson of conquistador practices was that the rules no longer applied; the Spaniards let the genie of total warfare out of the bottle.65

  * * *

  Ruy González participated in the attack on Tepeaca. He missed the slaughter at Cholollan and the Toxcatl massacre—having crossed from Cuba with Narváez in 1520—but he survived the Noche Triste (allegedly saving the lives of many compatriots) and the Battle of Otompan (Otumba) in order to wield his sword at Tepeaca. There “he faced many dangers and hardships, fighting many times with the Indians” (in the words of the commendation that accompanied his coat of arms). He went on to survive his wounds from the siege of Tenochtitlan, and to settle in the city as a prominent veteran conquistador. He fought again in Conquest campaigns into Michoacán and New Galicia. In 1525 he was given a house plot in Tenochtitlan, and he spent the next three decades acquiring and losing property, entering into business deals, profiting from indigenous tribute payments through encomienda grants, and negotiating the shifting sands of Spanish politics in early Mexico. He died a moderately wealthy city councilman in 1559, by all accounts as close as a conquistador came to being an “ordinary man.”66

  In his old age, did memories of massacres like Tepeaca trouble Ruy González? We cannot really know the answer to that question. But we do know that he was so incensed by Las Casas’s Very Brief Account of 1552 that mere months after its publication he wrote a letter to the king, attacking the friar and defending Spain’s wars of conquest (quoted in Chapter 2). One passage touches so closely on our concern here—the mentality of the ordinary men who fought in the war—that it is worth quoting at length:

  The war and conquest of these kingdoms does not appear so twisted and senseless as certain unlettered people affirm and maintain. For these [indigenous] people were barbarous, idolatrous sacrificers, killers of innocent people, eaters of human flesh, most repulsive and nefarious sodomites. And if someone wished to tell me that such-and-such sins deserve war and loss of a kingdom—and furthermore that in war there are outrages, great mistakes, and notable excesses and sins—that I do believe. But let those who committed them pay for them, not everyone; punish them, and let us not lose that which we have earned so well and with such hard work in the service of God and of Your Majesty. And the truth is that once war begins, even though it may be very just and among very Christian people, I don’t believe that there can be any fewer excesses, as occurs in the wars in France and Rome and elsewhere.67

  It may be tempting to view this simply as a conventional conquistador usage of racism (or its sixteenth-century manifestation) to justify and excuse war crimes (by others); Vargas Machuca wrote two books at the turn of the seventeenth century making just that argument. Or we could zoom back our lens and see it as an example of the universal claim by soldiers that collateral damage is unavoidable. And it is, of course, both of those things. But if we leave it at that, we come close to settling for an explanation that smacks of the Black Legend, as if it is enough just to pass judgment on the conquistadors—to condemn them as perpetrators, leaving indigenous people to be victims. As Tzvetan Todorov put it, “what if we do not want to have to choose between a civilization of sacrifice and a civilization of massacre?”68

  Instead, we might see in Ruy González’s defensive phrases a kind of confession, a sliver of an opening into the mindset that made the Spanish-Aztec War such a bloodbath. In two ways, he goes further than he needs to. First, in describing the people among whom he has lived most of his life—“these people [esta gente]”—he hammers away at their savagery with one negative stereotype after another, stripping away their humanity until they seem worse than animals, as if sparing their lives would itself be a sin. Second, the mild term for “excesses” used in the last line, desordenes, m
ight have sufficed as a dismissive confession; many a conquistador referred to the slaughter of “Indians” with a single word, slipping it past king, royal councilor, modern historian, student. But, again, González lays it on thick, effectively admitting that he participated in a war that was characterized by atrocities. The term atrocidad was not in his sixteenth-century vocabulary, but his string of descriptors amount to a damning revelation of atrocity: eçesivo, grandes ynadvertençias, notables desordenes, pecados. In short, he is telling us this: we invaded the homelands of these people and committed atrocities against them; we were able to do it, justifying it to ourselves and others, by dehumanizing them, classifying them as evil subhuman creatures; but on some level, we knew this was wrong.

  González challenges us to see the good and bad within each conquistador; he may make it difficult, but it is crucially important if we are to better understand why the “Conquest” was a war so lethal and brutal. There are easier alternative explanations, easily found in the literature. But they fail to satisfy. Condemning all conquistadors as bad is as facile as claiming all indigenous people are good; turning one entire ethnoracial group into perpetrators and another into victims is itself a kind of racism that no amount of moral indignation can redeem. More tempting is the sorting of conquistadors into two categories. After all, one wants to believe that in the very crucible of cruelty, there were men who chose not to torture, rape, or kill; that conquistadors who took holy orders did so in order to live lives of compassion, not corruption; that a butcher like Pedro de Alvarado was a bad apple.

  This latter explanation, which effectively scapegoats Alvarado as an apologia for the rest or majority of the conquest company, is the one most commonly found in traditional narrative accounts. Even Las Casas, with his litany of “tyrants” and their atrocities in his Destruction of the Indies, seems to condemn all conquistadors by not naming the accused. But in fact he does the opposite; by failing to denounce the larger enterprise of conquest and colonization, he implies that the “tyrant” captains are the bad apples ruining what would otherwise be a fine orchard. A variant explanation for conquistador cruelty—a rather Lascasian one, smacking too of the Black Legend—is the view that most conquistadors were bad apples, thereby highlighting the nobility of the exception. Sandoval, that “constant captain,” has tended to be favored for such a role, as have Aguilar and Ordaz. In the 1826 anonymous Conquest novel, Xicoténcatl, the “sincere and selfless” Ordaz serves to underscore how all his colleagues are immoral brutes; the Nahuas, or “Americans,” are the mirror opposite, all decent and honorable, with a duplicitous Tlaxcalteca traitor in the role of the one bad apple.69

  A third variant on the question of how to explain conquistador behavior comes closer to our goal. This one sees the moral balance shifting within the conquistadors as a result of the war experience. As the great Mexican intellectual and historian José Luis Martínez once said of Cortés: “after the Noche Triste he was infuriated by [Aztec] Mexico; little by little he became tougher and he ended up being cruel—a very tough and cruel man.” There is surely some truth to this, and it surely applies to hundreds of indianos—Spaniards who fought and settled in the Indies. But the danger in the argument lies in slipping toward the old Franciscan position—more justification than explanation—best articulated by Mendieta.70

  “Some, in their writings,” wrote the old friar, had judged Cortés to be a “tyrant” (a reference to the famous Dominican). Rather than deny the captain’s “excesses,” the Franciscan excused them on two related grounds. First, he had no other option, as he was surrounded by “such a multitude of enemies, some visible and others hidden,” with “so few compañeros” (and those “so greedy for gold”). Second, he had the greater good to consider. Thus:

  Although he himself pronounced the death sentence in cases that did not seem to justify it—saying, “hang this Indian, burn that one, torture so-and-so!”—in two words they provided him with the information regarding who was going to kill Spaniards, who conspired, who mutinied, who plotted, and other such things; and although many times he felt they [such measures] were not quite justified, he had to pander to the [conquistador] company and [indigenous] allies, so that they did not become enemies and abandon him.71

  This rationale—the twisted logic of the civilizing mission requires cold calculations of violence—is chillingly compelling. But it contains a flaw, one ubiquitous in the traditional narrative: it assumes total Cortesian control, maintained at times by lesser-of-two-evils choices. I suggest that the truth was the opposite: Neither Cortés nor any other Spanish captain or indigenous leader controlled the company, campaign, or the overall arena of the war. As a result, many men made cold calculations of violence all the time, for multiple reasons. At the same time, some moments of violence were so extreme and explosive as to seem incalculable, inexplicable. Take Robertson’s description of the massacre in Cholollan, written in the 1770s with only the obvious Spanish sources at hand, but perhaps informed a tad by his grasp of how such moments in human history unfold:

  The streets were filled with bloodshed and death. The temples, which afforded a retreat to the priests and some of the leading men, were set on fire, and they perished in the flames. This scene of horror continued for two days; during which, the wretched Indians suffered all that the destructive rage of the Spaniards, or the implacable revenge of their Indian allies, could inflict.72

  As much as Protestant writers like Robertson, Prescott, and MacNutt relished the quick slip into barbarism of armed Catholics, one cannot help but read their use of terms like carnage, merciless slaughter, and unchecked ferocity as echoes of other massacres—the human record of which has piled up exponentially in the centuries since Cholollan. In the century before Robertson’s, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius had written books imploring European rulers to respect international laws of war, having observed “throughout the Christian world” the speed with which men resorted to war “for no reasons at all, and when arms were taken up no reverence left for human or divine law, exactly as if a single edict had released a madness driving men to all kinds of crime.” If writers from Robertson to MacNutt saw in the “Conquest of Mexico” a premonition of the kinds of butchery that Grotius witnessed in the Thirty Years’ War, what would they have made of the human record of atrocity in the twentieth century?73

  For example, on March 16, 1968, a company of about a hundred U.S. soldiers shot 404 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in My Lai. The bodies of the My Lai victims were thrown in a ditch in the village. They included 182 women and 173 children, of which 56 were infants. A mile away, in the village of My Khe, the soldiers of another company from the same battalion executed 97 Vietnamese villagers. The story hit the press in the United States a year and a half later, galvanizing the antiwar movement. The company’s lieutenant was court-martialed and convicted of mass murder, and charges were filed against officers for covering up the massacre. But nobody else was convicted and nobody served prison time, including the lieutenant, who was freed from house arrest by President Richard Nixon and at the time of writing was living in Georgia.

  The massacres at Cholollan and My Lai happened centuries apart and under circumstances so different that a deep comparison is unlikely to be revealing. But some superficial similarities are suggestive. In both cases, the lack of closure or accountability, the lack of a satisfying explanation, has allowed community scar tissue to permanently form. Despite the passing of centuries, “the aftermath of the massacre remains on most Cholultecas’ minds.” An elderly Tlaxcalteca who married into a Cholulteca family as a young woman recently bemoaned that “Cortés manipulated” the people of Tlaxcallan to come to Cholollan “and kill our brothers”; “I’m from there and everyone calls us traitors.” “We forgive, but we do not forget” is a common comment by survivors; the phrase was said recently to a reporter by Pham Thanh Cong, a My Lai villager who was eleven at the time of the massacre and hid under the corpses of his mother and three sisters. The soldiers entered My Lai beli
eving that it harbored enemy Vietcong soldiers; the conquistadors entered Cholollan believing an enemy army was hiding nearby and was plotting with the townspeople. But did it not become clear that such information was faulty, as unarmed families huddled apprehensively in the village center and the town plaza, and as American soldiers fired their guns and Spanish conquistadors swung their steel swords? We are left with the uncomfortable suspicion that, in the heat of the moment, that is all there was: the heat of the moment. As a Vietnamese veteran remarked of the massacre, noting that there were others, committed by Americans and by Vietnamese soldiers on both sides: “In war such things happen.”74

  As unsatisfying as those explanations may be—and interviews with soldiers who were at My Lai offered similarly predictable and routine reflections on the fog of war: we were afraid, we were avenging our fallen comrades, we were just following orders—they nonetheless help us to better understand what happened in Cholollan and throughout the Spanish-Aztec War. For whereas the Vietnam War has become infamous as a senseless, bloody conflict, the Spanish-Aztec War retains in the popular imagination a shimmer of glorious adventure. But it was no such thing. By thinking of the massacres at Cholollan and Tepeaca as manifestations of a certain kind of war, we can better see the whole story as a war that is replete with such moments—traumatized combatants, numb to the horror they are experiencing and perpetrating, civilian populations brutalized beyond all imagining, one sickening outbreak of violence leading to another.