When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  How, then, did conquistadors who were “ordinary men” end up participating in—even creating—such moments? It is tempting to turn to the five Alvarado brothers as case studies, but their reputation for savoring violence and cruelty—especially Gonzalo and Pedro—leads us back to a “bad apple” argument. So let us take two lesser-known examples.75

  JUAN BONO DE QUEXO was a Basque with a long career as a conquistador in the Indies. Arriving as a pilot on Columbus’s final transatlantic voyage in 1502, he went on to participate in expeditions to Florida, Puerto Rico, and Cuba; he had encomiendas of indigenous people on both those two islands, and on Puerto Rico owned mines and large numbers of Taíno slaves. A consummate plotter and backstabber, he joined the anti-Velázquez rebellion at Vera Cruz in 1519, but then stole back to Cuba only to return to Mexico with the pro-Velázquez company under Narváez. He survived the Noche Triste to participate in massacres such as that at Tepeaca (after which he accused the Tlaxcalteca warriors of mass cannibalism). He continued to plot against Cortés in the 1520s, eventually settling back in Cuba. One gets the distinct impression that he was a singularly unpleasant man, but within the spectrum—like Ruy González—of conquistador ordinariness.76

  The same might be said of Jacinto “Cindo” del Portillo. He reached the Indies in 1514 and likely participated in both the Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva expeditions. He survived the Spanish-Aztec War, going on to join various campaigns in the 1520s, by which he acquired as many as five hundred indigenous slaves. He seems to have used them in gold-mining or panning operations, and to have abused them so harshly that they rose up against him. Badly wounded in the resulting conflict, he swore to give up his worldly possessions if God saved him; when he recovered, he joined the Franciscans, freed his indigenous slaves, and signed his encomiendas over to the Crown. For decades, fray Cindo was one of the doorkeepers of the Franciscan convent in Mexico City. But he still participated in expeditions of conquest and forced conversion—into Zacatecas around 1560, for example—and advocated not for the abolition of encomiendas, but for their income to be used to build churches (as he told the king in a 1561 letter). One wonders whether souls were saved—Portillo’s included—by his transformation from veteran conquistador to friar (and whether such thoughts crossed his own mind while he died slowly from a poisonous spider bite in Nombre de Dios).77

  Men like González, Bono, and Portillo crossed to the mainland alongside—or to join—groups of men to whom they were connected by kinship, hometowns, and other ties, in the hope of being in the percentage (it turned out to be only one-third) who survived the war to reap rewards of plunder and settlement. Allegiances among men were deep-rooted, complex, and personal; they killed for each other. (Contra the traditional narrative: larger allegiances, to captains like Cortés, were fleeting, strategic, and almost incidental.)

  For the first two years of the war, men came to fight and survive. During the siege, they came to be part of the victory. Veterans of violence against indigenous peoples in the islands joined survivors of the first half of the war against the Aztecs; almost all had experienced the slaughter of “Indians” in their own homes. In Mexico, they witnessed the death—slowly by infection, or quickly in ritual executions—of most of their comrades. They had become hardened to mass killing, and the steady trickle of supplies from the islands gave them the means to do immense harm to the “Indians.” Their small numbers and the limitations of their weaponry, especially cannon and harquebuses, meant that battles against large numbers of indigenous warriors were frustrating and exhausting. But against unarmed captives and civilians, such limitations evaporated; in the plaza of Cholollan or the fields outside Tepeaca, swords and knives could be deployed as riskless and efficient tools of mass butchery.

  Each massacre was an act of revenge for Spaniards already killed. It did not matter that retaliation for Mayas killing the first Spaniards of the company was inflicted upon Totonacs or Nahuas. Or that revenge for the killing of scores of Spaniards by Tlaxcalteca was carried out against Chololteca, with Tlaxcalteca warriors as comrades. Or that the Tepeaca massacres were revenge for the Noche Triste, a defeat inflicted far away by the Mexica, who had themselves conquered the people of Tepeaca in warfare. It did not matter because in the frenzy of battle, revenge was revenge, and—after all—to the Spaniards, they were all “Indians.”

  In that simple fact—the Spanish reduction of all indigenous peoples to a single category—lies a crucial piece of the puzzle of violence in this war. A scholar of the Holocaust has written that “war, and especially race war, leads to brutalization, which leads to atrocity.” The Spanish conquests in the Americas have tended not to be seen as “race wars,” because modern concepts of race did not yet exist; Spaniards were ethnocentric, not racist, seeing themselves as Christians and Castilians or Basques, and others by similar terms and in categories of ethnicity, region, religion, or types of barbarism. And yet the Spaniards under our microscope were men like González, Bono, and Portillo; men whose experience in the Indies had led them to view “Indians” in a category that looks a lot like not only a racial one, but a racist one. They anticipated warfare against indigenous towns and villages, in which local men would be killed near or in their homes, and their women and children enslaved. All this could and would be done because “Indians” were in a separate human, or subhuman, category.78

  Here, then, were the puzzle pieces. First, conquistador culture was a violent one, and Spaniards were quick to treat each other with brutality. But they tortured and murdered each other according to certain rules, giving their violence a judicial veneer (examples from the Mexico of the 1520s are the torturing to death of Rodrigo de Paz, and the torture and mutilation of García de Llerena). Second, those rules did not, however, apply to “Indians.” By virtue of the same loopholes that permitted “Indians” to be invaded, conquered, enslaved, and otherwise subjugated—their “idolatry,” cannibalism, propensity for “human sacrifice,” and frequent rebelliousness—they also fell outside the protection of the rules of violent conduct. If men like Paz and Llerena could be judicially tortured, indigenous people could be indiscriminately slaughtered and enslaved. Third, the incipient racism that had developed toward “Indians” by Spanish indianos permitted revenge for conquistador deaths to take the form of massacres—even if the frenzy of such atrocities went against the logic of the fourth factor, which was the need to finance the war through the acquisition and sale of slaves.79

  In wartime atrocities—from the Thirty Years’ War to World War II to the Vietnam War—violence was committed by men who became “numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties, and frustrated by the tenacity of an insidious and seemingly inhuman enemy.” As different as the contexts are to those more recent conflicts, those factors undoubtedly apply to the conquistadors and their mounting record of brutality in the Spanish-Aztec War—and in Mesoamerica from 1519 through to the 1540s.80

  THERE IS A FINAL STEP TO TAKE. What we must contemplate are battles comprising hours of casual slaughter, massacres of civilian populations, each side driven by what they have witnessed to commit their own atrocities, internecine violence, mass mutilations of prisoners, entire towns butchered or enslaved, families torn apart, women raped or forced into long-term sexual slavery, an apocalypse of violence striking the center and then devastating one region after another in waves lasting decades. The sum of all this so resoundingly makes the case that the “Conquest of Mexico” should be seen as a war—not a conquest war, not a short war, and certainly not a surprisingly short war, but fully and categorically a war—that it in fact does more than that. It suggests that we might do better to understand it as a genocidal war.

  Genocide is, of course, a loaded and controversial term. There has been resistance to the application of the term to the extermination of indigenous peoples in North America—despite exhaustive recent studies that make powerful arguments for its relevance. As a term coined and officially defined by the United Nations
in the 1940s, it is also anachronistic to the sixteenth century. A genocide requires, by definition, state policy of the kind not found in the Spanish world of five centuries ago (where the state was a far cry from modern). And even though twentieth-century atrocities “were too often tolerated, condoned, or tacitly (sometimes even explicitly) encouraged by elements of the command structure, they did not represent official government policy.” Indeed, in the case of the Indies in the sixteenth century, individuals or conquest companies acting with extreme violence sought subjugation rather than total elimination; their “policy” was to gain slaves and encomienda tributaries, even if the violence used to attain those goals was consequently irrational and patently counterproductive.81

  What I am suggesting, therefore, in rhetorical rather than categorical terms, is that the Spanish wars of invasion were genocidal not in intent, but in effect. Within what was in effect the genocidal Spanish-Aztec War, there occurred micro-genocidal moments. In town after town—Cholollan, Tepeaca, Quecholac, Cuauhnahuac, and even Tenochtitlan itself—the slaughter of combatants was followed or accompanied by the massacre of civilians and the enslavement and often deportation of survivors, most notably young women and children. The impact of such attacks on these communities was catastrophic and permanent (genocidal in effect) and tinged with a hint of deliberate destruction (genocidal in intent). For rightly perceiving that there were millions of indigenous Mesoamericans, Spanish captains were willing to obliterate certain communities knowing that there were hundreds of others. The survival of those communities—the cultural and demographic persistence of Nahuas and other indigenous peoples through these wars and up to the present—has helped to mask the fact of those micro-genocidal moments.

  Even if we accept that Spanish institutional or governmental policy was not genocidal in intent, and indeed often comprised laws designed to protect and encourage the proliferation of indigenous communities, the fact remains that an invasion war could only be genocidal in effect with official acquiescence. Underlying the sixteenth-century Spanish debate regarding the nature of New World “Indians” lay an assumption that they had no rights until the Crown determined that they did, and that the limits to those rights and the loopholes in the laws permitted Spaniards to behave accordingly. A Spaniard who killed another Spaniard faced judicial retribution (or at least personal retribution that was state-sanctioned); but a Spaniard could kill or enslave an “Indian” with impunity if that victim met two simple criteria—being “Indian” and offering resistance.

  The significance of the genocidal element in the Mexico of the 1520s is twofold. First, it marked the moment of genesis for the region’s transition to New Spain and, in time, the Mexican republic, with profound implications for Mexican national identity (as Mexicans are well aware). But, second, Mexico is not unique in this respect; on the contrary, violence and warfare that was genocidal in effect (and, in some cases, in intent) marked the genesis of colonies that led to nation-states throughout the Western Hemisphere.

  Scholars of the U.S. Wars of Independence, or the American Revolution, have pointed out that Americans have sought to portray the war as more of a revolutionary movement than a war, one based on high ideals rather than dangerous and wrongheaded ideas, a transition less violent than other revolutions. Americans made this comparative spin during the French Revolution of the 1790s, and during the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century. It remains deeply ingrained in the popular understanding of 1776 and its aftermath. The Spanish-Aztec War has enjoyed a similar whitewashing—not labeled a war, but instead called an entrada, a pacificación, the “Conquest of Mexico.”

  Both cases, of course, were myths, lies, designed to render noble and just wars that featured atrocities, massacres, murders, rapes, enslavements, and all manner of brutalities inflicted upon civilian populations—in short, wars.

  CONQUEST AS CRUCIBLE. Humberto Limón, Crisol de razas (1975). Oil on cloth, 90x70cm. The painting (titled “Crucible of Races”) echoes the tradition of Mexican calendar art, originating in the nineteenth century, specifically the romance between the personifications of the two great volcanoes that overlook the valley (seen here on the horizon); it also draws upon a parallel mythical tradition, with roots going back to the seventeenth century, in which the “Conquest of Mexico” is seen through the metaphor of a romance, either specifically between Cortés and Malinche, or more generically between an heroic conquistador and a passionate “Indian princess.” The fixing of this scene in November 1519 is suggested by Limón’s depiction of a procession along the causeway leaving Tenochtitlan, presumably Montezuma coming out to meet Cortés. Thus that Meeting, with its thwarted embrace and its doomed political romance, is substituted for a metaphorical meeting that is seeped in sexual possession—with the conquistador the active protagonist, the indigenous one made female, passive, her unconscious pose ambiguously representing rescue or kidnap. The image reflects well the layered centuries of perceptions and interpretations that shroud the Spanish-Aztec War, making its many meetings a complex and unresolved phenomenon.

  Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Soumaya.

  Epilogue

  Halls of the Montezumas

  Alvarado.

  So, let’s improve the time; then pledge me all—

  May we, thus met to-night, thus meet again,

  All joyously, “to revel in the halls

  of the Montezumas!”

  Sandoval.

  Fill bumpers, all!

  All.

  Halls of the Montezumas!

  —Cortez, the Conqueror, 1857

  We should not believe the historian who writes based on what others have told him. To see the reason for this, take a hundred people who have been to a sermon and you will see that each one will recount it to you in a different way. And take a thousand who have been to a battle and you will not find four in agreement about what happened.

  —Pedro de Navarra, 1567

  In many cases a real historic event is transformed into a myth, and the myth itself is reenacted through ritual.

  —Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 1987

  These men, seen in their distant perspective, seem to us to move in an aura of romance, and even the most cut-and-dried chronicle of their deeds reads more like a troubadour’s tale than the sober pages of history.

  —MacNutt, Fernando Cortes, 1909

  There’s always a story that comes after the end of a story. How could there not be? Life doesn’t come in tidy packages, all neatly wrapped up with a pretty bow on top.

  —Sue Grafton, 20111

  THE KING HAD HEARD THE STORY MANY TIMES BEFORE. ONE OF his childhood playmates was Martín Cortés, Malintzin’s son, who was sent to court as a page at the age of six, and remained in Prince Philip’s entourage until going to war, at nineteen, in the disastrous Algiers campaign of 1541 (where he saw his father again). So Philip knew Martín for the first fourteen years of his life. He must have been told many times who the older boy was and of what glorious conquest he was the progeny. He also heard from his tutor and his governor (the latter related, by chance, to Cortés’s second wife) the details of Spain’s progression of conquests in the Indies—as a break from learning Latin and Greek and memorizing The Song of El Cid. In the early 1540s, the teenage Philip became regent of Spain, where he met Cortés and Las Casas—who gave him a manuscript copy of the Destruction of the Indies—and many others with strong opinions on Indies affairs. So he knew the story of the “Conquest of Mexico” well.2

  Yet, in 1562, Alonso de Zorita felt the need to explain it again. As the royal judge (oidor) wrote to Philip (now king) from Mexico:

  When the captain don Hernando Cortés and the Spaniards came to this land, once Montezuma knew of them, he sent people to visit the port and to bring them food and other things as a sign of peace and friendship, and they did this at his orders along the whole road until the Spaniards arrived at this city, where he came out to receive them with all his people in peace. And as a sign of this h
e gave the captain a thick chain of gold and put it round his neck and received him and the Spaniards as brothers, and he put them up in his palace and he treated them amicably until they seized him, in order to take his gold, jewels, and precious stones and all his valuables, which were many, without he or his people giving them any occasion or reason to do so. And if later the Spaniards were thrown out, it was because they had imprisoned Montezuma and because of the killing and destruction, by don Pedro de Alvarado and the Spaniards who were with him, of the sons of the lords and principal men of those kingdoms and other people who were on the patio of the house where Monte zuma was held captive, trying to comfort him in his prison.3

  Zorita had presented the king with an interpretation of History as Encounter. Not only, suggested the judge, did New Spain originate in the encounter between Cortés and Montezuma, but its subsequent problems stemmed from how that encounter had gone wrong—with “peace and friendship” transformed into “killing and destruction” for no “occasion or reason.” Furthermore, Zorita also understood how the encounters that compose the historical past are remembered and retold in ways that reflect multiple agendas and misunderstandings—as well as the distortions and agendas of subsequent encounters. The result is the blurring of lines between fact and fiction, truth and invention. Those blurred lines are not just an issue that historians must tackle; they are History.