Zorita’s task, then, was a Sisyphean one, and he knew it. Perhaps this book is one too. For it has been as much about the invented history of the “Conquest of Mexico” as it has been about the reality (or a truth, as I have presented it) of the Spanish-Aztec War. Why? In part because I have had to describe the myth in detail, to expose history as mythistory, in order to bust it. But I am equally interested in the traditional narrative for its own sake, for what its half-millennium shelf life—from its Cortesian birth to its evolution through poetry and opera to its popular persistence today—tells us about how we retain and use the past.
The Meeting did not only take place on November 8, 1519. Both for the people who were there (the Castilians and Basques, Nahuas and Totonacs, Taínos and Africans) and for us today, the Meeting merely began on that day. It was—is—an encounter that has lived for five hundred years, fed by those who have appropriated it, given it meaning, rewritten or redrawn it for someone else to remake it as their own. That is true of the entire story of the Spanish invasions, remade and studied for centuries until its history has become a mountain of contradictory and competing claims. No wonder the traditional narrative has survived; it offers a tidy solution to all that clutter. But that also means that it is impossible to study the Spanish-Aztec War without studying its traditional “Conquest of Mexico” narrative. The events themselves and their traditional narrative long ago became inextricably intertwined.
Or perhaps the two are not completely inextricable. For example, consider these sentences, taken deliberately from a relatively obscure but middle-of-the-pack representation of the traditional narrative (a history of the Conquest, structured as a Cortés biography, by a Spaniard published in Edinburgh in 1829). Cortés’s
whole life is gilded by deeds so singular and splendid, as to invest the narration of them with the interesting character of chivalrous romance. The destruction of his fleet at Vera Cruz to compel his followers to conquer or die—his fearless entry into Mexico—the still bolder seizure of Montezuma, in the midst of the capital—his defeat of Narvaez—his exploit at the battle of Otompan—and his magnanimity in the siege of Mexico, present a series of events as striking as they are unparalleled.4
Here the threading of a heroic, omnipresent, omnipotent Cortés into the story is so visible as to make it possible to pull that thread out. As we pull on that thread, the traditional narrative unravels, allowing us to see that Cortés’s life is indeed a “chivalrous romance”—as it has been imagined and invented, not as supported by the historical evidence. The reason why his “Conquest of Mexico has more of the atmosphere of romance than of sober history” (as a modern historian enthused) is not the content of “the Conquest” but how historians have packaged it. Without Cortés in control of events, those events no longer become his, or cease to have happened completely: he alone neither destroyed his fleet, seized Montezuma, nor defeated Narváez; ships were scuttled for practical reasons, the entry into Mexico was fearful and blind, there was no magnanimity displayed before, during, or after the siege of Tenochtitlan.5
Pulling the thread may be easier said than done. If the gorilla in History’s room is Invention, then Cortés is the gorilla of the “Conquest of Mexico” (his name appears on most of the preceding pages—of a book arguing against Cortés-centrism). Yet done it must be. For the European invasion wars in the Americas rank not only among the great watersheds in global history, but “also among the most frequently misrepresented.” More than just a pivotal moment in our past, the importance of the Meeting is magnified by being falsely depicted and grossly misunderstood for half a millennium—and, I have suggested here—because of the links between the justification of the Spanish Conquest and the glorification of the Rise of the West.6
With that last sentence (or even paragraph) we might have lost the good Spanish judge. So let us pick up Zorita’s challenge, and in the spirit of his efforts to influence the Spanish king—but with the benefits of hindsight, access to multiple archives, and the efforts of hundreds of historians—write a brief, Cortés-free account of what happened “when the Spaniards came to this land.”
* * *
The Meeting took place twenty-seven years and twenty-seven days after Columbus first set foot on American soil. During that time period, Spanish settlers sailed the Caribbean Sea and its edges in Florida, Central America, and the northern coasts of South America. They explored and founded small colonies. They introduced cattle, found gold, and built churches. But above all they massively disrupted indigenous life—killing, displacing, and enslaving hundreds of thousands of local peoples. Such was both the experience and expectation of the Spaniards who joined expeditions to the Yucatec coast and Mexican mainland in the late 1510s, when epidemic disease and over-enslaving had created a labor crisis in the Spanish Caribbean. Those expeditions were organized in Cuba by Diego Velázquez, who had been in the Indies (as the Spaniards called the Americas) since 1493.7
Expeditions mandated to explore, trade, and—if the appropriate procedures were followed—enslave, but not to conquer and settle, sailed from Cuba in 1517, 1518, and 1519. These were companies of armed settlers, not formal armies, divided into men on foot of various professions and “captains” who had invested in the company in various ways (paying for ships or supplies, bringing horses or men dependent upon them). The 1519 company comprised about 450 Spanish men and more than a thousand Taíno slaves and servants (mostly Cuban), as well as small numbers of African slaves and servants, some non-Taíno women, a dozen horses, and some mastiffs. That 450 would constitute less than 15 percent of the total number of conquistadors who would come to fight in the 1519–21 war. Most would die in the war. Upon reaching the region of the Gulf coast that was under the control of the Aztec Empire (around today’s Veracruz), the leading captains of the company began a four-month quarrel over whether to return to Cuba or to betray Velázquez and reconstitute themselves as a new company answerable only to the Spanish king (soon to become Carlos V).
They chose the latter option, setting off in August 1519 on an inland march that would take the survivors into the valley and island-capital at the heart of the Aztec Empire—and would begin the two-year Spanish-Aztec War. The Spanish perspective on that war, what I have been calling its traditional narrative, has been presented in many ways in the preceding chapters. So let us summarize it one last time, using Bernal Díaz (as the book’s dubious alpha and omega). Near the end of his manuscript, Díaz included a 213th chapter that was omitted from the 1632 edition, not published until the nineteenth century, and omitted too from almost all modern editions. He titled it “Why so many Indian men and women were branded as slaves in New Spain, and my statement about this.”8
Díaz began the chapter by stating that “certain friars” had often asked him that question, and that he always explained that the king authorized slave-taking in New Spain—and that it was the fault of Velázquez for sending Narváez “to take the country” for him. These two somewhat contradictory explanations reveal both the war for what it was, and the defensive choreography of justification that conquistadors felt obliged to perform.
As Díaz went on to explain, Montezuma had surrendered his empire to the Spaniards and willingly become their prisoner. Thus at the moment when Narváez’s company landed on the coast, roughly a year after the original company from Cuba had arrived there, the land was already under legal Spanish control. Therefore when hostilities with the Aztecs broke out, their aggression constituted “a rebellion”—and rebels could, under Spanish law, be enslaved. The fault lay with Narváez because the arrival of his company obliged the Spaniards in Tenochtitlan to split their small company in two, one to meet the newcomers, the other to remain in the capital; the latter group, numbering only eighty under Alvarado, panicked during an Aztec festival, attacked the celebrants, and provoked the ire of the local population. The “rebellion” rolled on, resulting in the Aztecs “killing, sacrificing, and eating over 862 Spaniards.” The survivors prevailed only because “Go
d favored us,” the Tlaxcalteca “received us like good and loyal friends,” and reinforcements came steadily from Cuba, Jamaica, and the other islands.
It was at this time that the Crown and royal officials “granted us permission” to “enslave and brand on the face with this G the Mexican Indians and those natives of the towns that had risen up and killed Spaniards.” That license was given because of the revolt, and because evidence was provided of indigenous markets in which slaves were “bound with collars and ropes much worse than those the Portuguese use on the blacks from Guinea.” Such slaves were “redeemed,” meaning they were branded on the face with an R and sold to Spaniards.
Armed with reinforcements, local allies, and the righteous justification of royal law, the Spaniards regained the city and empire that had been taken from them by Aztec rebels. In the process, many “Indians” were branded. But Spaniards—incompetent, corrupt, traitorous ones—had prompted that rebellion, and thus inevitably the recovery of the lost empire brought some abuses. As Díaz admitted,
certainly great frauds were committed over the branding of Indians, because as men, not all of us are very good—rather, there are some of evil disposition [de mala conçiençia]; and because at that time there came from Castile and from the islands many Spaniards who were poor and so greatly covetous and avaricious and ravenous to acquire wealth and slaves that they took measures necessary to brand the free.
Díaz was not, of course, Las Casas. So he followed this seemingly Lascasian admission by first blaming the Spanish officials who took over the incipient government in Mexico while many conquistadors (Díaz included) were on the Honduras expedition of the mid-1520s (they “branded many free Indians who were not slaves,” just for profit); then he blamed bad “caciques” or local indigenous rulers for selling their own people; and finally he told an unlikely tale of how he and a priest named Benito López “broke the branding iron” in Coatzacoalcos to stop slave laws being abused.
Crowed Díaz, “We took pride in having done so good a deed!” In such boasts was the entire enterprise of enslavement, slaughter, and colonization wrapped up in the artifice of righteousness and legality. The Spanish-Aztec War and its aftermath, as a “good deed,” became “the Conquest of Mexico.”9
What, meanwhile, of the other side of the story? There is, as has become clear in the preceding chapters, no single vision of the vanquished. But just as the Spanish perspective on the invasion can be more clearly seen when we view it as a chaotic but collective enterprise, we can likewise access indigenous experiences by granting agency to altepeme, that is, seeing how the leadership of the altepetl of Tlaxcallan, and that of Tetzcoco and other city-states and towns, exploited the disruption of the Caxtilteca invasion to expand their own regional power at the expense of their enemies and their rival partners.
The point is not simply the well-worn one that the Tlaxcalteca role—downplayed by Spaniards, trumpeted by writers from colonial Tlaxcala, highlighted by modern historians—was crucial. Nor is it the equally tired point that early alliances revealed Aztec weakness and spelled inevitable defeat. In the war’s earlier stages, resistance to the invaders was widespread, even among indigenous groups who later switched sides. Numerous ethnic groups participated as warriors or support personnel in the invasion, including oft-ignored Taínos brought from the Caribbean. Above all, when the Aztec Empire’s Triple Alliance collapsed in the war’s second half, the role played by Tetzcoco proved to be more significant than that of Tlaxcallan. Meanwhile, the violence of the invasion destabilized Mexico and then all of Mesoamerica, largely because of the combined impact of two factors: epidemic disease, and a rapid slide into a kind of total warfare that was arguably genocidal in effect (albeit not in intent), genocidal as a result of the combined impact of battle mortality, massacres of civilians, enslaving of survivors, destruction of family units, and sexual predation.
The experience of atrocities by both Spanish conquistadors and indigenous warriors fueled further violence, generating a culture of conquest that resulted in the perpetuation of such patterns of warfare across Mesoamerica through the 1540s. Unprecedented levels of violence and mortality prompted competition for regional dominance; waves of violence across the empire and beyond spread that competition, into which the Spaniards—reinforced from the Caribbean and Spain in a steady stream during and after the war—were able to insert a new hegemony. But that hegemony was established in collaboration with the surviving indigenous nobility, whose role as “allies” was thus crucial not only during the war but in its aftermath. Local Mesoamerican rulers should neither be judged for choosing to act as “allies” nor criticized for misreading the long-term impact of the Spanish presence. More than 90 percent of combatants in the war were indigenous; they fought to defend their homes and to use the war’s upheaval to carve out political space and regional autonomy. Men like Xicotencatl and Ixtlilxochitl made sound decisions based on the information at hand and the apparent best interests of their own positions and the security of their subjects.
Montezuma did likewise. He knew of the foreigners for years before their arrival. He had the company tracked along the coast in 1519, and when they landed in his territory in April, a large embassy immediately met the Spaniards with an elaborate and generous welcome. In the months that followed, he both tested them (he surely had a hand in them being guided into a Tlaxcalteca ambush) and lured them into his capital city. Once the Spanish-Tlaxcalteca force entered the Valley of Mexico, they were met by Cacama (Montezuma’s nephew and the king or tlahtoani of Tetzcoco, the second-ranked city-state in the empire’s Triple Alliance) and led into Tenochtitlan, although not by the causeway traditionally used by Aztec emperors upon their return from victorious campaigns; that was the route from Chapultepec to the east. Instead, the foreigners were guided in from the south to be welcomed by Montezuma and the full entourage of Aztec royalty and nobility.10
Montezuma’s bait-and-switch strategy, designed to weaken the invaders while luring them into the center, worked brilliantly. The Spaniards were so confused that their frustration and bewilderment is clearly seen in their letters and testimonies, despite the self-promotional intent and tone of such accounts. They even seem to have convinced themselves that Montezuma was deeply shaken by their presence—while they slowly traveled, losing men, suffering battlewounds and other hardships, toward the emperor’s net. They did not realize that Montezuma was not afraid of them; he was hunting them.
The conquistadors could not have known, of course, that the emperor was a collector. Even after they were successfully hunted, lured, trapped, and placed in a suitable structure in the center of the city, adjacent to the many other buildings and enclosures of the royal zoo, they could not have understood what had happened. Montezuma would hardly have attempted to explain to the Spaniards that their role was to be observed and studied, celebrated as a novel reflection of Aztec imperial power; then, if they proved too wild, they were to be transferred to the collections that existed beneath the sacred precinct—ritually executed, perhaps at the ceremony of the Flayed Man, and interred along with other foreign objects and the bones of exotic creatures.
That Montezuma’s latest acquisitions proved to be his last, creatures so savage that they turned on their zookeeper, does not undermine the logic and efficacy—from the Aztec perspective—of his strategy. It worked: the conquistadors were collected, at first as additions to the zoo; later, most were indeed transferred to the sacred collection. That events subsequently turned against Montezuma, and then his empire and his people, was due to factors beyond his control: the sweep of Old World epidemic diseases; the lack of a common Mesoamerican or “Indian” sense of identity, combined with the inevitable shift of “alliances” within and between imperial states that had been built and wrecked and rebuilt on such arrangements for thousands of years; and the steady influx of Spaniards from the Caribbean and then from Spain itself.
Let us return, then, to the core moment in the Meeting: Montezuma’s speech. Within th
e context of the emperor’s strategy of collection, that speech takes on a different meaning. Clearly, he did deliver a speech. Just as clearly, it was not one of surrender; yet there is evidence that Montezuma’s words contained historical and cultural references that in some way gave status to the guests, possibly at the expense of the hosts. In the sixteenth-century Nahua play The Three Kings, when Herod receives the Magi, he welcomes them in language appropriate to his status as tlahtoani of Jerusalem: “Ascend to your home, your altepetl. Enter. You are to eat, since it is at your home that you have arrived.” These were exactly the kinds of phrases Montezuma used at the Meeting.11
To better grasp the purpose of such phrases, we must jump two decades forward, to 1541. In that year, a Spanish official named Jerónimo López wrote from Mexico City to the king, “every day there are more Indians who speak Latin as elegant as Cicero’s.” Noting that one could pass Nahua noblemen conversing in Latin on the streets of the city, he enthused “it is admirable to see what letters and colloquies they write in Latin, and what they say.” Spaniards naturally credited Franciscans for their skill at turning “Indians” into literate Christians. Certainly friars played the central role in the conversion campaign that followed the war, and the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the first school opened in the Americas, produced a generation or two of Latinized Nahua nobles (we met some, like don Pablo Nazareo, earlier). The first academic library in all the Americas, founded in 1536, survives in part today in San Francisco, California, where the breathless scholar can turn pages of books once turned by Aztec noblemen. But the college in Tlatelolco was a rapid success not just because of the efforts of a small group of dedicated friars, but because those Franciscans were able to build upon the existence and persistence of an indigenous intellectual tradition of higher learning, pictographic and phonetic writing, elegant and formal speech, and courtly address.12
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 39