Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, was a rich one that, in its golden age, lent itself not only to sonorous sermons but to moving poetry that in translation resembles the French verse of the fifteenth century or its Spanish imitators, such as Jorge Manrique—being full of regrets that beauty dies, that youth passes, that warriors become weak. For example:

  I am to pass away like a faded flower,

  My fame will be nothing,

  My fame on earth will vanish.

  Or:

  Ponder this, eagle and jaguar knights,

  Though you are carved in jade, you will break;

  Though you are made of gold, you will crack;

  Even though you are a quetzal feather, you will wither.

  We are not forever on this earth,

  Only for a time are we here.

  Compare this to Jorge Manrique’s:

  Gifts unmeasured, the royal buildings,

  Full of gold, dishes so burnished,

  The golden coins of the treasury,

  The caparisons of the horses and the finery:

  Where shall we find them now?

  What were they but the dew of the meadows?13

  Such similarities have naturally suggested to some critics that those learned men who have tried to record the poetry of the Mexica must have been influenced by European examples. It may be so, but the Mexica plainly had sentiments comparable to those of their contemporaries on the other side of the Atlantic. Many of the political or economic arrangements of the Mexica seemed vaguely similar to practices that the conquistadors either knew of or could imagine. The Mexican Empire, for instance, had been maintained by armies whose predecessors had conquered the subject cities; and it was by the threat of force that those tributaries were persuaded to deliver biannual consignments of objects that their masters coveted. This was resented by those who paid (as the conquistadors would discover to their benefit). But, until the Spaniards came, the Mexica were regularly presented with an immense collection of goods. The best analysis of this system of tribute can be seen in the Codex Mendoza, completed about 1540 for the first Spanish viceroy of Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, a son of that enlightened Count of Tendilla who was the first governor of Granada after its capture.

  This “Codex” lists most things on which Mexico-Tenochtitlan came to rely: cloth, for dress and clothes generally, the fibers for which could not be grown in the valley of Mexico, though it was woven there (primarily by women) in a sophisticated way; feathers, for ceremonial decoration; tropical food; and, to a great extent, maize, the staple food that, though there were some fields of it near the capital, was not nearly abundant enough to meet the demand. Other Mexican goods dispatched to the capital included chocolate, soon to be a delightful revelation to the Europeans; cochineal (a red dye also extensively used in Europe); tomatoes, such a wonderful contribution to the diets of the Old World; and turkeys, so called by the English because the bird seemed exotic, even though it came from the West, not the East.14 The Europeans were not used to this kind of tribute in the Middle Ages, but it was comparable to what was practiced in Oriental despotisms, such as those of the Mongols or the Tartars, and some conquistadors from Spain would have been familiar with it.

  The emperors in Mexico were selected from a small group of noblemen, all of the same family. That was similar to the Scottish succession before Macbeth, the so-called law of tanistry. Some have creatively compared the way that one emperor succeeded another with the succession of modern presidents in Mexico within the “revolutionary family” of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The emperor—like, indeed, the modern president of Mexico—though we should not dwell too long on such an agreeable anachronism—was a despot. He was limited, however, by an elaborate series of laws or rules that bound everyone else, and he was also the temporal expression of a civilization in which religion played the dominant part.

  The Mexica had a social system that was easily recognizable by the conquistadors. There was a class of noblemen related to the Emperor, who seemed to have enjoyed, in the last few generations before 1500, lives of unexampled luxury—thanks to the system of tribute; a class of craftsmen, workers in stone or paint, apparently hereditary, as they had been in ancient Egypt; farmers, who were called on every year to an increasing extent to perform some kind of public service within the city, as well as producing maize on their plots; workers, who seem to have been the equivalent of serfs; and, finally, outright slaves, either captives in war or men or women who had been made slaves in consequence of some crime. Priests and generals were also a class apart. But the Mexica, who were neither slaves nor serfs, were obliged to fight in their country’s wars when the emperor deemed it necessary.

  The Mexica did not constitute the only authority in Mesoamerica. Close to them to the east lay the small, unconquered territory of Tlaxcala, which the Mexica had surrounded by the early sixteenth century but which remained independent. Its society was a modest version of what prevailed in its powerful neighbor, and its freedom to act was severely constrained by their close proximity. To the north there was the monarchy of the Tarascans, to give them the name used by the Spaniards, based on what is now Michoacan, before whose copper-tipped weapons the Mexica had fled in the 1470s. To the far southeast there were the Maya, that once superior society that, in the sixteenth century, was, as indicated earlier, a shadow of past glory. The Mexica traded with them and do not seem to have made any effort at conquest. It will be remembered that in his fourth voyage Columbus met some traders who seemed to be Maya, and he and his companions were impressed by them.15

  Many things strike modern observers about ancient Mexico, but above all they are moved by the remarkable artistic achievement. In sculpture, for example, the Mexica prized and made relief and regular three-dimensional heads and ornaments, as well as monumental work. They designed delicate jewelry in gold, or gold combined with stones, of which there are still fine examples to be seen in Mexico (some of it found in the 1930s in the famous Tomb 7 in Oaxaca). There was remarkable featherwork, made by interweaving birds’ feathers in mosaics, of which a few examples also survive (it is best represented in Vienna’s museums).16 A case can be made that this featherwork was, as poetry has been to England, the supreme achievement of the Mexica.

  There were also mosaics made out of precious or semiprecious stones, of which turquoise was the most prized.17 The Mexica were, too, skilled woodworkers, as one can see from their drums and spears. They used paint both to embellish stone sculpture and directly on stone, without sculptural additions. Ancient Mexico also used paint in its remarkable books, or codices, which, by means of glyphs and designs, not an alphabet, depicted genealogies and listed both conquests and quantities of tribute. The Mexica made music from instruments that the Spaniards would call flutes but that were more like recorders; from conch shells; and from at least two different kinds of drums. They danced often and extravagantly. Indeed, as elsewhere in the New World, there seems never to have been an occasion in Old Mexico where music and dancing did not accompany each other. The Mexica had games in which they used rubber balls that were much more elaborate than those used in the walled ball courts of the Caribbean islands.18

  Ancient Mexico was a disciplined civilization: the streets were regularly cleaned and swept. That was a symbolic indication of a society that most remarkably—perhaps uniquely—provided some kind of education for all except slaves and serfs, and where everyone had a meticulously ordered place in society, much as they had had in ancient Egypt.

  The complexity of Mexican religion does not lend itself to a swift summary.19 As far as the common man was concerned, religion signified a large number of festivals: at least one a month in honor of a special deity, and marked by processions, dancing, and music. They were also attended by offerings and sacrifices, sometimes of birds such as quail and, increasingly, of slaves and other captives. As in earlier regimes, the human sacrifices were carried out on the summits of pyramids before shrines to the different deities. Priests, mon
archs, and noblemen were called on to offer blood in other ways, from the ear, the wrist, or even the penis. Human sacrifice shocked the Spaniards, but it was an integral part of a series of ceremonies common to the region.

  In addition to the worship of the regular gods, there were some, especially among the nobility of Texcoco, to the east across the lake, who seem to have been groping toward the idea of an impersonal deity whose goodness could not be expressed in pictures:20

  Everywhere is your house,

  Giver of Life.

  The carpet of flowers is woven with flowers by me.

  On it the princes worship you.

  The life of the Mexica was obviously hard for the majority. But the upper class, as in most places, comforted themselves with alcohol such as pulque, a drink made from the sap of the maguey cactus; and there were hallucinogenitory mushrooms, flowers, and cactuses. These may have played a part in soothing victims before the sacrifice, and, like alcohol in Europe, they gave courage before battles.

  The history of Mexico before the coming of the Spaniards prompts many interesting reflections—not least, on the similarities with the Old World. In Mexico as in the Old World, history told of the rise and fall of cities, of the preying by energetic nomads on sedentary states, of habits of adornment, and of festivals and ceremonies. But the differences were also great: the lack of domestic animals, either for war or for agriculture; the consequent employment of men and women as beasts of burden; the absence of wheels and of the use of metal except for decoration; and the pictographs that could begin to tell a story but were much less effective than the alphabets of Europe.

  The relative similarity of the development of the Indians in Mexico (and also Peru) to what occurred in Asia has prompted many to argue that there must have been an earlier contact. The Chinese are said to have introduced the art of weaving, the Japanese the art of pottery. Even the lost tribes of Israel are supposed to have given the Mexica a liking for law. St. Thomas is thought to have brought the cross as a symbol in religion. All these ideas are baseless. The Chinese, in the age of the Ch’in emperor, could have reached the Americas in their big ships in the third century B.C., but they did not choose to. Everything suggests that the American Indian peoples developed their remarkable civilizations in isolation.

  The Mexica believed, as their Emperor Moctezuma declared, that they were the “masters of the world.”21 But they did not spend much time thinking of what lay beyond the wild tribes whom they called the Chichimeca in the north, and the Maya in the south, although their merchants knew that beyond the Chichimeca, turquoise could be obtained; south of the Maya lived peoples who traded in jade and, farther on, in emeralds and gold, which some of the Mexica’s tributaries learned to work with incomparable skill. From both the north and the south, slaves also were obtained by the rulers of Tenochtitlan.

  Nor did the Mexica have much interest in what happened beyond the Eastern Sea—which we now think of as the Gulf of Mexico—though legend insists that the intellectual and reforming god Quetzalcoatl had years before disappeared there on a raft of serpents. The lack of curiosity was a mark of Old Mexico distinguishing it from Europe.

  But from about 1500, curious rumors began to reach Mexico from the east. In 1502, some indigenous merchants, perhaps Jicaques or Payas, both of them subdivisions of the Maya, as we have recalled, met Columbus, then on his fourth voyage, off the Bay Islands in the Gulf of Honduras. Presumably descriptions of well-dressed, bearded Europeans were carried back by the Maya authorities to the Emperor of the Mexica in Tenochtitlan, just as Columbus and his companions eventually carried back to Spain tales of the merchants whom they had met off Honduras.22

  Then, in 1508, as we have seen, two master sailors from Seville, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who had been captain of the caravel Pinta on Columbus’s first voyage, and Juan Díaz de Solís, who would later discover the River Plate, made landfall in Yucatan. They were looking for the strait that they believed would lead them to the Pacific, hence to the Spice Islands and China. Perhaps they sailed along the Mexican coast as far as Vera Cruz or even Tampico. Possibly their journey led to the depiction by a Mexican merchant about that time of what looked like three temples floating in the sea on large canoes. The sketch was sent up to Tenochtitlan, where Moctezuma consulted both advisers and priests about it.23

  Then a canoe of Tainos, the indigenous people of Jamaica, was wrecked off the coast of Cozumel, itself off Yucatan, in about 1512. The survivors may have told, presumably by signs, something of what they had observed the Europeans to be already doing in the Caribbean.24 A little later, a trunk washed up on the Gulf of Mexico somewhere close to Xicallanco, a Mexica trading outpost near what is now Campeche. Inside were several suits of European clothes, some jewels, and a sword. No one had ever seen such things before. What were they? Whose possessions were these? Moctezuma is said to have divided the trunk’s contents with his cousins, the kings of Texcoco and Tacuba. But the mystery remained.

  As we have seen, a Spanish settlement was established in 1510 at Darien, in Panama, directed to begin with by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific, afterwards by Pedrarias Dávila. The brutalities of the Spanish conquistadors under the leadership of the latter make it likely that some rumor of what was happening would have penetrated to the Mexica. Darien was eighteen hundred miles from Tenochtitlan as the crow flies, but merchants traveled far.

  In 1511, Diego de Nicuesa, a merchant-explorer sailing from Darien to Santo Domingo, was wrecked off Yucatan. Several Spanish sailors survived, and two of these, Gonzalo Guerrero and Jerónimo de Aguilar, were for some years prisoners of the Maya, the former siding with his captors. So it was scarcely surprising that a magician in Tenochtitlan, later known to the Spaniards as Martín Ocelotl, predicted “men with beards coming to this land.”25

  Another Spanish landing seems to have occurred in 1513 in Yucatan when Juan Ponce de León stopped there on his return from his unsuccessful journey to Florida to find the Fountain of Eternal Youth. In 1515, there was yet another curious contact between Spain and the Mesoamerican world: a Spanish judge named Corrales in Darien reported that he had met a “refugee from the interior provinces of the West.” This man had observed the judge reading a document and put the marvelous question, “You, too, have books? You also understand the signs by which you talk to the absent?”26 Although Mexican painted books were inferior to their European counterparts, they had the same purpose.

  The last years of old Mexico are full of legends of comets, predictions, and tales of strange visions. But more important were the signs of the Spanish presence growing ever closer.

  In 1518, a laborer apparently came to the court of Moctezuma. He was said to have had no thumbs, no ears, and no toes: all had been cut off as punishment for some unrecorded crime.27 He reported that he had seen a “range of mountains, or some big hills, floating in the sea.” Moctezuma imprisoned the man presumably to stop him spreading such alarming tales but sent some trusted advisers to the coast to find out what was happening. They returned to tell their master:

  It is true that there have come to the shore I do not know what kind of people; there were mountains on the waves, and a number of men came in from them toward the coast. Some of them were fishing with rods, others with a net. They were fishing from a small boat. Then they got into a canoe and went back to the thing on the sea with its two towers and went into it. There must have been about fifteen of them.… Some had green handkerchiefs on their heads and others scarlet hats, some of which were very big and round, in the style of frying pans, against the sun. The skins of these people are very white, much more so than our skins are. All of them have long beards and hair down to their ears.28

  These new people had come in 1518 from the Spanish island of Cuba, in a flotilla of four ships under the leadership of the Governor’s nephew, Juan de Grijalva, a “charming young man, beautiful to look at and very well mannered,” Las Casas thought, as well as being “a person inclined to virtue, obedie
nce, and … very obedient to his superiors.”29

  An English poet once wrote some lines about these voyages of discovery and conquest that began:

  Doom-laden caravels slant to the shore

  And all her seamen land.

  The most sensational event in the history of the Americas was about to begin.

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  “This land is the richest in the world”

  And we believe this land is the richest in the world, in stones of great value, of which we carried back many pieces.

  Father Juan Diaz in his account of the journey of Grijalva to Mexico, 1519

  The first Spanish expedition to the territory now known as Mexico was in 1517. It consisted of three ships (two caravels and a brigantine), and was led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, who, with little more than a hundred men, looked for Indians to kidnap and take back to Cuba as slaves. (This voyage has been touched on earlier.) Hernández de Córdoba was a member of an immense family from Córdoba from which derived the famous Gran Capitán. He was “a close friend” of Las Casas and had arrived in Cuba with Velázquez in 1511 from Santo Domingo.1 Hernández de Córdoba, who may have been forty-two in 1517,2 persuaded two other captains to go with him and help with his costs. These were Cristóbal de Morante, from Medina del Campo, who had gone to Santo Domingo in 1514, and Lope Ochoa de Caicedo, another Cordobés, who had left Spain in 1512. One who accompanied them (Ginés Martín) said that they had been setting out for the Bahamas but found the weather so bad that they went to Yucatan instead.3 The responsibility for this deviation may have been that of Antonio de Alaminos, of Palos, Ponce de León’s prize pilot, who had known the coast of Central America since he was there with Columbus in 1502. According to Alaminos, he was invited by Hernández de Córdoba and his friends “in order to seek new lands.”4 So there were several motives behind this apparently simple journey.