When Montezuma Met Cortes

by Matthew Restall

  29.From the late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, Cortés’s Letters saw no new edition, but Lorenzana’s volume inspired new editions in French, German, and Dutch within a few years (Cortés 1770; 1778; 1779; 1780). Some credit may also lie with the earlier inclusion of Cortés’s four Letters in the sources compiled by González Barcía (1749). After the flurry of editions in the 1770s, there were regular reprints or new editions in European languages through the twentieth century (see the discussions in Cortés 1843: iii–iv and Pagden in Cortés 1971: xxxixlx). Escoiquiz (1798): see the illustration facing this chapter’s title page: the “Fat Cortés” portrait is best known (and perhaps originated with) Paul Methuen’s engraving for the 1724 English edition of Solís; it appeared variously during the eighteenth century, including in this cropped form in Escoiquiz’s book and in an edition of Solís likewise (and presumably not coincidentally) published in Madrid in 1798. Cortés as a soft-hatted, portly gentleman is a far cry from the robust warrior of most portraits of the conquistador; arguably, it better represents how he lived for most of his life.

  30.Ruiz de León (1755). The poem’s subtitle was Triumphos de la Fe, y Gloria de las Armas Españolas. Poema Heroyco. Conquista de Mexico, Cabeza del Imperio Septentrional de la Nueva-España. Proezas de Hernan-Cortes, Catholicos Blasones Militares, y Grandezas del Nuevo Mundo.

  31.Nicolás Fernández de Moratín and Joseph María Vaca de Guzmán, in 1765 and 1778, respectively (Las Naves de Cortés Destruidas); Vaca de Guzmán (1778: 1, 9, 8) (El Héroe grande; Del nuevo Cid, del Español Aquíles; Ese el teatro, donde el mar de Atlante / Al Castellano veneró triunfante); Escoiquiz (1798).

  32.“Black Legend” was coined in 1914 by Julián Juderías y Loyot; for the mid-twentieth century debate among U.S. historians Charles Gibson, Lewis Hanke, Benjamin Keen, and William Maltby, see Keen (1969; 1971a); for more recent studies that summarize, cite, and update earlier ones, see Cárcel (1992), Hillgarth (2000), and Villaverde Rico and Castilla Urbano (2016).

  33.Thomas Nicholas in Gómara (1578 [1552], Nicholas trans.: i-ii); italics in original.

  34.Nicholas briefly recounts falling in with a seventy-year-old conquistador on the road leaving Toledo. Named Zárate, this veteran of the conquests and “the civil warres of Pirru,” rather than resting on his laurels and the wealth of his “good lands and possessions” in Peru, was on his way to petition the king for a license “to discover and conquere a certayne parte of India, whyche adioyneth Brazile and is part of the Empire of Pirru.” “You are not wel in your wit,” responds Nicholas bluntly; “for what would you have? Wil not reason suffice you? Or else would you now in your old days be an Emperour?” The old indiano responds with a noble speech showing that he is neither crazy nor power-hungry, but an altruistic gentleman, devoted to “God and my Prince.” A true Christian is born to help others, says Zárate, “not for his owne private wealth and pleasure.” He intends to spend the rest of his days enlarging “the royall estate of my Prince” and showing “valiante yong Gentlemen” the virtues of hard work and service. Nicholas in Gómara (1578 [1552], Nicholas trans.: ii–v); italics in original. Nicholas’s Zárate, if apocryphal, may have been inspired by Agustín de Zaráte, who served briefly as a royal official in Peru in the 1540s and is known primarily for his account of the conquest of Peru, first published in 1555.

  35.Solís (1724: unnumbered first page of Dedication).

  36.Vasconcelos (1941: 172).

  37.Spontini and Maurin are both discussed in Chapter 2. On Spontini: BnF, département Musique, X-309 (score and libretto of the 1817 version); Spontini (1809); Lajarte (1883: 153–83); Subirá in EC: 117–18G. Spontini’s opera was performed repeatedly in Paris, where Maurin lived, through the decades of both men’s adult lives (they died within months of each other in 1850–51) (also see the anonymous curator’s commentary to the copies of Maurin’s lithographs in the Museo de América, Madrid, accessible at mecd.gob.es/museodeamerica). I first accessed prints of two of the Maurin lithographs in the California State Library, Sacramento (CSL-Sac, Rare Prints #2001–0019) (Se place fièrement sur le trône; ton empire est détruit, je suis seul maître ici, et tu vas subir le sort qui t’est réservé; il en coute la vie pour résister à Cortès; ton coeur est noble, Cortés, il sera généreux aussi, et ce moment va décider si c’est un héros magnanime où un soldat barbare à qui j’ai donné mon amour).

  38.The quoted sources are, in sequence: MacNutt (1909: xii, v) (earned by his “preeminent qualities both as a statesman and general”); Descola (1957 [1954]: 227); Madariaga (1969 [1942]: 108 et al.); Schurz (1964: 112); Elizondo Alcaraz (1996: 11) (luces y sombras; en verdad extraordinaria; un personaje apasionante); Berry and Best (1968: 134).

  39.The Darryl F. Zanuck/Twentieth Century Fox movie, directed by Henry King and starring Tyrone Power, was based on the first half of the 1945 novel by Samuel Shellabarger (Zanuck and King 1947) (note that after making the film, Power bought one of Cortés’s old estates; Bauer 2009: 99). Carlos: Cortés is depicted as strangling his first wife, Catalina Suárez, in episode 7 of the series, directed by Oriol Ferrer and produced by Diagonal TV for RTVE, Spain (Ferrer 2015); the scene is revisited at the start of Chapter 8. It is a curiosity of modern creative representations and usages of the “Conquest of Mexico” that it has inspired numerous operas (see relevant discussions and notes in Chapter 6 and the Epilogue), plays, and novels (e.g., Dryden 1668, Planché 1823, Bird 1835, Thomas 1857, García Iglesias 1946, Thomas 1998, Spinrad 2005, Aguirre 2008), but very few feature films. I suspect (based anecdotally on half a dozen conversations with filmmakers in Los Angeles and Mexico spread over the last thirty years, as well as recent conversations and communications with Stuart Schwartz) that many movies on the topic have been planned but never made due to the costs and logistical challenges of re-creating and then destroying the Tenochtitlan of 1519–21; but I like to think that another deterrent has been the realization that historical accuracy cannot easily be reconciled with the racist romanticism of the traditional narrative.

  40.RC (AGI Justicia 220–225), with scores of additional documents in Justicia (e.g., in 1004, in 1005, and in 1018), Patronato, and México; relevant documents also in all four volumes of DC. Cortés was involved in more than fifty lawsuits just in the 1530s alone.

  41.Manuscripts: LCDT; LCHI. “False”: Krauze (2010: 59). Also see Fernández (2014: 103–72).

  42.“Bandit”: Romerovargas Iturbide (1964: quotes in sequence on 186, 184).

  43.Muralists: Rivera’s version is in one of the scenes in the Palacio Nacional (completed in 1945); Orozco’s 1926 fresco painting is in the Colegio de San Idelfonso, both in Mexico City. As Krauze notes (2010: 72), the oldest public monument in Mexico City that shows Cortés is the 1887 glorieta mentioned earlier. Paz: Paz (1987); Paz interpreted the Orozco fresco of Cortés and “la Malinche” not as a peaceful genesis but as evoking the sexual violence of the Conquest; see also Hernández (2006: 87). Guzmán: on her battle in the 1940s and 1950s to publish an edition of Cortés’s Letters (CCR; Guzmán 1958) that included a damning critique of Cortesian claims—certainly “ahead of its time” and in many ways in the spirit of this book—and the impact of the controversy surrounding Cuauhtemoc’s faked tomb, revealed in 1949 and endorsed by Guzmán, see Gillingham (2011: 51–69, above quotation on 52). “Controversial”: Felipe Solís interviewed in the History Channel’s “Cortés” documentary (Bourn 2005); Benjamin Keen in Zorita (1994 [1566]: 19). “Gentleman-adventurer”: Keen in Zorita (1994 [1566]: 19).

  44.Young (1975); also see the liner notes to Decade (Warner Bros. 1977), on which “Cortez the Killer” was included; Manrique (2012).

  45.Candelaria (2011: 6).

  46.“Rebellion”: Fray Francisco Cárdenas y Valencia on Maya resistance to invasion in northeast Yucatan (in his Relación historial: BL, Egerton MS 1791: f. 14v). My explanation of the “myth of completion” is Chapter 4 of Restall (2003).

  47.Prescott (1994 [1843]); Gómara (1552; 1964); Carrasco in Díaz (2
008 [1632]: xiv, xxvinn3–4). Díaz (1632) has 214 chapters, with Tenochtitlan’s capture in Chapter 156, which is where the widely read Penguin edition ends (1963 [1632]); Maudslay’s original five-volume edition included the whole text (1908–16 [1632]), but the abridged edition (printed many times by various publishers; e.g., 1942 [1632]), likewise ends in 1521.

  48.The 1550 end date is a soft one, as wars came to an end variously in different regions to the west, north, and south in the 1540s (an argument can be made for 1547 as an end date, allowing us to dub this another Thirty Years’ War, or the Mesoamerican Thirty Years’ War, although the year unfortunately happens to be that of Cortés’s death). On the New Galicia wars, which Ida Altman dates 1524–50, see Altman (2010); on ex-Aztecs fighting after 1521, see Matthew and Oudijk (2007) and Oudijk and Restall (2014); on the Maya wars, see Restall (1998; 2014); Restall and Asselbergs (2007); Graham (2011).

  49.Ix13; CA: ff. 42r–45v; the two different Tlatelolco accounts called the Annals (in Lockhart 1993: 256–73) and the List of Rulers (see Terraciano 2010: 15–18); FC, XII (note that the exception to the pattern is the attention given here to pre-1520 events, a third of the whole account, a section that Lockhart 1993: 16–17 argues “is quite anomalous”).

  50.Unread reports: these are the probanzas de mérito, mentioned above, that have survived by the hundreds, mostly in the AGI; point suggested to me by Richard Conway (personal communication, December 7, 2016).

  51.“Brilliant”: Palomera (1988: 34; brillante victoria). Narváez expedition: AGI Patronato 180, ramo 2. Usagres: DCM: #s1067–68; Díaz CXVII, CXXII, CLXIV (1910, II: 181, 206; 1912, IV: 272).

  52.This paragraph is drawn from reading between the lines of Díaz CXXXVII–CLVII (1912, IV: 1–203); Ix13: 27–59; Townsend (2006: 109–25); and Hassig (2006: 131–75); also see the admittedly partisan Gardiner (1961); AGI sources on the brigantines include Escribanía 178A, no. 4. Plaza-Toro: a line of Fernández-Armesto’s in Restall and Fernández-Armesto (2012: 82). “Cowards”: Ix13: 22. (This was hardly the first time Cortés had been called a coward in print: Velázquez accused him of it as early as November 1519; DC, I: 99). I found a possible variation on this theme in an unlikely place: the sonnet dedicated to the portrait of Cortés in Lasso de la Vega’s 1594 epic poem, Mexicana (quoted in the notes to this chapter), suggesting that Cortés chose to be the feminized courtier rather than the valiant warrior of legend.

  53.“Veritable”: Benton (2017: 4); my discussion of Tetzcoco draws heavily upon the work of Bradley Benton, who generously allowed me to access his book while still in manuscript form; also useful were Ix13; Ixtlilxochitl (1985 [1620s–30s]); Offner (1983); and Lee and Brokaw (2014).

  54.Benton (2017: 25–28); Hassig (2016: 107–9, 132–33); Ixtlilxochitl (1985 [1620s–30s]: 220–23); as the latter noted, Tetzcoco’s divided rule did not prevent it from participating in successful Aztec conquest campaigns in the late 1510s.

  55.Sources vary as to whether this brother (named Nezahualquentli) was beaten by a Spanish captain, then hanged by Cortés, or hanged by Cacama. Ix13: 21–24; Ixtlilxochitl (1985 [1620s-30s]: 248–56). Also see Díaz C–CVI (1910, II: 115–46; 2005, I: 264–82); Benton (2017: 29–33).

  56.CDII, XXVII: 243–47, 385, 519; Díaz CXXXVII (1912, IV: 6–7).

  57.Ix13: 28.

  58.On Tlaxcala, see Martínez Baracs (2008: 37–69) and Cuadriello (2011). On Ixtlilxochitl’s accounts, see 1985 [1620s–30s]; Ix13; the fine new work being done by Bradley Benton (e.g., 2014; 2017) and Amber Brian (e.g., 2010; 2014, especially 206–7 on the link to Wallace’s novel, The Fair God [Wallace 1873]); as well as García Loaeza (2014) and Kauffmann (2014).

  59.On the hanging of the three deposed tlatoque of the old Triple Alliance, see Ix13: 89–94; Restall (2003: 147–57); Terraciano (2010); all of which lead to numerous primary and secondary sources on the incident.

  60.Ix13: 31–32.

  61.For a smart summary of these months of warfare, dependent upon the traditional narrative but not uncritical of it, see Hassig (2006: 131–175; also 2001b). For a summary in which Ixtlilxochitl leads the entire campaign and siege, with warriors from an expanding Tetzcoca territory at times outnumbering Spanish allies 1,000:1, and Ixtlilxochitl helping a hapless Cortés at every turn (even personally saving his life in combat), see Ix13: 31–59.

  62.Radical suspension: paraphrases Benton (2017: 20; also see 36–39). Cohorts: Hassig (2016: 48–59).

  63.Benton (2014; 2017: 48–105). Don Antonio Pimentel Tlahuitoltzin was the eighth son of Nezahualpilli to rule as tlahtoani, or the tenth if we count Tecolol and another brother that some Spanish sources claim ruled very briefly between Tecolol and Ixtlilxochitl (see the Dynastic Vine). There was only one other succession dispute of note: Yet another of the sons of Nezahualpilli, don Carlos Ometochtzin (aka Chichimecatecuhtli), agitated in the 1530s to succeed his brother don Pedro. When don Pedro died, don Carlos tried to take his sister-in-law as a second wife, in accordance with Aztec custom; she and don Carlos’s wife, both Christians, denounced him to the Inquisition, whose investigation made him vulnerable to various other accusations by his enemies. Bishop Zumárraga jumped on one accusation—that of “idolatry”—and just two months after don Pedro’s death, don Carlos was burned alive at the stake in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. While the theme of the spiritual conquest is obviously important (see Don 2010: 146–76), as is that of political subversion (see Ruiz 2014), Benton (2014; 2017: 39–45) argues persuasively that this was the old succession dispute among Nezahualpilli’s sons rearing its head for the last time (also see AGN Inquisición, tomo 2, exp. 10; thanks again to Robert Schwaller for sharing copies of the original documents with me). For an argument on how the imposition of monogamy helped undo the Aztec Empire, in whose rise polygyny had “played a crucial role,” see Hassig (2016: 123–47, quote on 142).

  64.Las Casas (1697: unnumbered prefatory p. v) (un grand Empire, dont Montezume fut le dernier Roi. Fernand Cortez y entra l’an 1519, prit ce Prince, & conquit tout son Païs). Solís in Townsend translation (1724, V: 151–52). Solís’s book is 567 oversize pages in the 1724 English edition.

  65.Vargas Machuca (2010 [1612]: 96) (I have slightly altered Johnson’s translation).

  66.Solís in Townsend translation (1724, V: 152); Abnett (2007: 21); an earlier page of the same book (2007: 6–7), included in our Gallery, similarly captures elements of the traditional narrative: a clever Cortés controlling a passive Montezuma, happily complicit in his own manipulation; and a hotheaded Pedro de Alvarado destined to wreck the peace.

  67.Swords: Johnson (1975: 160). Warriors: Matthew and Oudijk (2007); Oudijk and Restall (2014). Pair of ships: van Deusen (2015b: 285). For an early account from Tlatelolco of two of the royal passengers headed for Spain, both informed by Malintzin that they will die in Castile, prompting one to jump overboard, see the translated summary in Terraciano (2010: 15–18).

  68.Myth: Mundy (2015: 72; quotes Motolinía on 73); in referring to the city’s “life” and “death” I am also alluding to the title of Mundy’s book. Stumbled: Díaz CLVI (1912, IV: 187; 2005, I: 510) (algunos pobres mexicanos que no podian salir; tan flacos y amarillos y suzios y hidiondos que era lastima de los ver); FC, XII: 248–49; Annals of Tlatelolco in Lockhart (1993: 268–69).

  69.This and my discussion of Tenochtitlan in the 1520s–30s rely heavily on Mundy (2014; 2015: 72–113); also see López (2014).

  70.Aubin: Gallery image titled “Once and for All”: The entry, bottom left, beside the pictographic representation of Two Flint Knife (1520), translates from Nahuatl as “The tenth king, Cuitlahuatzin, was installed in [the month of] Ochpaniztli. He ruled for only eighty days, dying at the end of Quecholli of pustules [smallpox], when the Castilians had gone to Tlaxcallan.” The next entry, top right, following a pictogram of Three House (1521), translates as “The eleventh king, Cuauhtemoc, was installed during Nemontemi and Quahuitl-ehua. And this was the moment when Mexico Tenochtitlan as an entity collapsed. This was when the Spaniards came
in once and for all.” Halfway down the page the 1523 entry depicts “Cihuacoatl Tlacotzin, here seated as ruler” (CA: ff. 44v–45r; I have worked from this original in BM, but am indebted greatly to Lockhart 1993: 278–79).

  71.CA: f. 76; Chimalpahin (1997: 166–73); Mundy (2015: 77–84). Much has been made of the administrative paperwork generated by Cortés during his term as governor and captain-general. Indeed, viewed in isolation, the many edicts and orders that flew off his desk in the 1520s would seem to support the interpretation that he had some sort of governmental vision—seen by his biographers as pious or putatively patriotic or even “mestizo” (Vasconcelos 1941; Duverger 2005). In fact, much of it was smoke and mirrors, designed to impress the court in Spain of his administrative acumen and accomplishments—as much a performance of due process as was the Requirement. His objection to Aztec “idols” was entirely expected and his support for the Franciscans politically expedient; his requests to the king in 1524 that “personas religiosas” be sent to Mexico did not show exceptional piety, but normal understandings of the need to create an alliance with the church and show to the king the appropriate forms of commitment to settlement (CDII, V: 556–59; letter written in Tenochtitlan, October 15, 1524). Ogilby (1670: 92) summarized the Spanish and Cortesian 1520s with wry brevity: “the Spanish Officers has these Civil Broyls one against another” until royal officials arrived, and “at last, after all these Services, Cortez disagreeing with the Vice-Roy Don Antonio Mendoza, being about that time sent over, went male-contented [sic] into Spain.”