by Buddy Levy
He had struck a major offensive blow in the earliest moments of the siege. Olid now continued five miles south as directed, where he found Coyoacán deserted and undefended; he was able to take up his position without a fight. Cortés took the cue to release Sandoval and his forces from Texcoco and deploy them at Iztapalapa, near the entrance to the main and longest causeway. On May 31 Sandoval marched the twenty-five miles without incident, but they were attacked once they finally arrived at the abandoned city. Sandoval’s sheer numbers easily thwarted the small Aztec squadron. As Sandoval and his men appropriated the best houses there, smoke signals began to puff and rise from shrines around the lake, which the Spaniards assumed was a battle cry among the Aztec forces.
So far the Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc had yet to act, choosing not to defend the positions the Spaniards were taking up with any real zeal, content for the moment to observe their movements. Clearly he was concerned about spreading his forces too thinly at various positions around the lake and was nervous about what that flotilla of water-houses would mean once they were brought into the action. He seemed to tacitly understand that he would need most of his canoe power to defend against these floating war machines, and he was right. As tradition and religion dictated, Cuauhtémoc appealed to his priests and his war god Huitzilopochtli for guidance in the forthcoming battles, and he made many sacrifices of special prisoners held in cages, including the two young Spanish pages captured from Cortés.18
Photo Insert
Portrait of the Gran Conquistador, Hernán Cortés, in armor. Ambitious, calculating, politically brilliant and unwavering in his beliefs, Cortés arrived on the shores of Mexico in 1519 and soon told the indigenous Mexicans: “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.”
Portrait of the Emperor Montezuma, with feather cloak and feather shield, as he would have appeared when Cortés met him. Deeply spiritual, superstitious, and enigmatic, Montezuma was so revered and feared that ordinary Aztec citizens dared not gaze directly upon him, under punishment of death.
Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, god of the wind, learning and the priesthood, master of life, creator and civilizer, patron of every art and inventor of metallurgy.
To quell potential mutiny and prevent his men from turning back, Cortés ordered his ships scuttled in the bay of Villa Rica.
Priests perform a ritual human sacrifice, which they believed insured the daily rising of the sun.
During the important Festival of Toxcatl, Pedro de Alvarado ordered the entrapment and slaughter of thousands of the Aztec’s finest warriors and priests.
Under Spanish custody, Montezuma was ordered to a rooftop and forced to plead with his people not to attack the Spaniards. His appeals were met with a rain of spears and stones.The great emperor no longer held power over his own people.
The interpreter Malinche was instrumental in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Not long after receiving her as a gift, Cortés discovered her skills with language and from that moment on she rarely left his side.
Spanish Captain Pedro de Alvarado’s actions while in command at Tenochtitlán left the Spanish forces besieged inside the city and very nearly cost them the conquest and all of their lives.
The siege and conquest of Tenochtitlán, summer of 1521. The Spaniards fought along the causeways and on the water, using an armada of specially-built cannon-mounted “brigantines,” which ruled the waters of the lake district for nearly three months and proved too powerful and maneuverable for the Aztec canoes.
After the Spaniards barely escaped with their lives during La Noche Triste, they fought the important Battle of Otumba. The battle was perhaps the Aztecs’ last best chance to annihilate the intruding Spaniards, but the Spanish cavalry and horses proved too formidable on the open plain. Note the standard- bearer borne on the litter.
An early map of the Aztec capital, which was published with Cortés’s second letter to Charles V.
After courageously defending Tenochtitlán for nearly three months of constant siege, Cuauhtémoc was finally captured on August 13, 1521, forcing an official Aztec surrender.
Portrait of an elderly Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico.
Then on June 1, as smoke signals plumed the lake district, Cortés climbed aboard the flagship La Capitana, with Malinche at his side and Martín López as fleet pilot, and ordered the hoisting of the sails. The warships moved out of Texcoco using both sail and paddle, the winds too light to be of much assistance. They sailed south toward Iztapalapa, aimed at supporting Sandoval there. The brigantines lurched slowly along, and to the fascinated Aztecs watching from Tenochtitlán, they must have appeared cumbersome and plodding. Cuauhtémoc had organized thousands of his best and strongest canoe warriors, who filled the canals, waiting to be launched.
Cortés and his fleet kept on, reaching an inlet on the southern shore of the lake lying beneath the long shadowy outline of a lone peak, then called Tepepulco. He would have well remembered the inlet: it was here that he had gone with Montezuma, then disembarked to hunt on the emperor’s royal island game preserve. Cortés later renamed it El Peñón del Marqués. Now the outcrop was covered with Aztec warriors who appeared to have expected the Spaniards and the brigantines to pass this way, so many were there. Cortés recalled the encounter: “When they saw the fleet approaching, they began to shout and make smoke signals, so that the other cities by the lakes should know and be prepared.”19 Although Cortés had planned to head for the portion of Iztapalapa built over the water and support Sandoval there, he decided to anchor first at Tepepulco and go ashore with 150 soldiers, hoping to extinguish the elevated communications post that was being used for smoke signaling.
Cortés led a squad of men up the steep and rocky terrain, encountering difficult hand-to-hand fighting along the way, and after a tough battle at the promontory, he managed to destroy the defense fortifications erected there and extinguish the signal fires. Though twenty-five Spaniards were wounded in the skirmish, Cortés relished it as “a most beautiful victory.”20 But the view from the knoll afforded him an image less appealing: a few thousand Aztec canoes were coursing across the lake from Tenochtitlán, headed straight toward them. Cortés and his men hurried back down the escarpment, embarked once more aboard the brigantines, and rowed out onto the open water to face the enemy.
Cortés and his naval captains watched the approaching Aztec canoe fleets with concern, even trepidation. He had his ships remain still, so that the canoe warriors would assume they had the upper hand and that the Spaniards were paralyzed by fear. The ruse worked—the bulwarked, reinforced canoes approached with great haste, pausing when they came within a distance of “two crossbowshots”21 of the brigantines. For a moment of tense impasse the two sides faced each other, each waiting for a sign, or for the other to make a move.
Just then the flags on the brigantine masts began to flutter, and the sails billowed and filled as a strong breeze stirred on the lake. Cortés strode to the bow and tested the air, hoping for gusts, which soon arrived. Mountain winds whipped down the valley, winds that he deemed “very favorable to attacking [the Aztecs],”22 so he ordered all oars in and sails full. The brigantines launched headlong into the lines of canoes, prow cannons blazing. Reaching their considerable speed, they rammed headlong into the canoe lines, shattering and splintering the smaller craft. They tacked and turned and slammed through again and again, sinking countless canoes and drowning droves of floundering warriors. Cannon fire from the bronze guns upended plenty more, and the harquebuses and crossbows fired and reloaded and fired again, until the water was strewn with wreckage and blood and the floating bodies of the dead and dismembered. A descendant of the warrior Ixtlilxochitl, who was there fighting with Cortés, reported that “so many were killed that all of the great lake was so stained with blood that it did not look like water.”23
The canoe warriors eventually realized the futility of firing slingstones and spears and arrows at the hulls, which only pattered ag
ainst the sides of the big boats and fell away into the water. Before long they were in retreat, paddling furiously for the safety of the canals, where the brigantines could not sail. Cortés and his warships chased the tattered canoe fleets for six miles, due north all the way to the capital. The initial deployment of his armada had brought a resounding and impressive victory, one that would clearly send waves of shock and dismay across the lake waters. Cortés had predicted that his brigantine launches would be “the key to the war,” and their maiden voyage had made the Caudillo appear prophetic.
In Iztapalapa and Coyoacán, the Spaniards had observed the fight on the water and they were spurred on by what they saw. They later intimated to Cortés that they were overwhelmed and elated “to see all thirteen sails over the water with a fair wind, and us scattering the enemy canoes.”24 Inspired by the rout, the Spaniards under Olid pressed forward along the short causeway toward Xoloc. Olid took most of his cavalry and infantry and pushed the Aztec foot divisions back, finally managing to gain ground when Cortés and the brigantines arrived, having sailed through and crossed a number of channels where bridges had been removed in the causeway. Near evening Cortés positioned for a landing and amphibious assault at Xoloc, which was the confluence point of the causeways coming from Coyoacán and Iztapalapa and the site of an important Aztec fortress. Disembarking there with thirty men, Cortés would certainly have recalled the towers at Xoloc, the historic place of his first meeting with Montezuma. Now, assisted by Olid’s forces, Cortés took possession of the two temple towers. Still, the causeway beyond swarmed with Aztec soldiers, and the water on all sides teemed with returning canoes.
Cortés ordered three heavy cannons landed from his flagship, and they were hoisted and conveyed to the captain-general. The largest of the three guns was loaded, aimed, and fired at the assembled Aztec foot soldiers, and the ordnance exploded into the enemy, causing a great deal of damage and panic. Then, ironically, a Spanish mistake actually aided their cause. The artilleryman in charge of the heavy cannon aimed another round into the Aztec lines and fired. But in his enthusiasm he carelessly ignited all the powder that had been landed and piled for the assault, and the powder kegs erupted in a massive explosion so powerful and concussive that it not only sent the enemy fleeing but knocked a number of nearby Spaniards into the water.25 Cortés encamped that night at Xoloc, keeping the brigantines anchored just near the towers and close enough for immediate boarding. He sent one of the brigantines to Sandoval, indicating that he needed more gunpowder as soon as possible.
Night fell, and Cortés remained watchful and attentive. For the next few hours he could hear the sloshing of canoe paddles in the water all around, and the voices of Aztec soldiers echoing across the lake surface in the eerie darkness. The Aztecs issued forth from the city deep into the night, a fact that concerned Cortés gravely. “At midnight,” he remembered clearly, “a great multitude of people arrived in canoes and poured along the causeway to attack our camp; this caused us great fear and consternation, especially as it was night, and never have they been known or seen to fight at such an hour unless they were certain of easy victory.”26 The Aztecs attacked with fury, charging forward from all quarters with battle cries piercing the night, screams and whoops calling out behind mournful conch whistles and the thumping of war drums. The surprised Spaniards had not expected such a concerted night attack.
The brigantines came into position flanking the causeway, firing repeatedly from their fieldpieces, the harquebuses and crossbows chiming in behind with sustained volleys. The brigantines thus repelled the first evening Aztec attack, and at dawn Cortés and his boats had won the day. But it was only the first day of their deployment. He had no way of knowing, as he watched the sunrise shimmer the color of roses over the chinampas, that he would need these boats every day for the next two and a half months. He would discover very soon that Cuauhtémoc and the proud people of Tenochtitlán had only just begun to fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Clash of Empires
CORTÉS, ALWAYS FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTABLE to his current situation, felt that his position at Xoloc was the best for his headquarters. It may have been merely circumstantial that the site he chose was the place of his historic first meeting with Montezuma, or it may have been intentional, for symbolic reasons. Less than two miles south of the capital, he could monitor the lake for incoming canoe activity and had access to ground support along the causeway from both Sandoval and Olid. Alvarado was to force his way inward from Tacuba, and thus Cortés planned to maintain his pressure around the throat of the city. But Cortés knew that the best-laid plans did not always come off smoothly, and though the first day’s victory on the lake gave him cause for optimism, taking the causeways proved to be another matter entirely.
For the first weeks of early June, Cortés and his divisions engaged in a strange ebb and flow, a surge and withdrawal, that left the captain-general wondering whether he was really making any progress at all. By day the Spanish divisions fought toward the interior of the city, struggling mightily along the narrow causeways, contending with constant harassment from canoes on all sides, and slowed by stake-lined pits, strong wooden breastworks erected to block their progress, and Aztec soldiers wielding Toledo-bladed spears and swords, adapted from lost and abandoned Spanish weaponry. Not wanting to risk being thinly scattered and vulnerable along the causeways, Cortés and his captains drove inward all day, filling causeways and hacking a path toward the capital, but by evening they returned to their three camps to rest, where they could post sentries and maintain brigantine support. The problem was, the Aztecs used the cover of night (again, an adaptive departure from their traditional practices) to rebreach the causeways, erect new barricades, dig more pits and line them with sharp wooden stakes, and unfill the causeway gaps of the rubble that the Spaniards’ Indian allies had worked so hard to fill. It was a painstaking process for both besieger and besieged, and it exhausted all the combatants, but probably the Aztecs suffered more, compelled to continue shifts both day and night, with virtually no fresh water.
Cortés was quick to contrive innovations of his own. When a group of Sandoval’s men could not cross a large gap in the Iztapalapa causeway, Cortés called for two of the smaller brigantines to sail into the gap and then anchor end to end, effectively creating a bridge over which Spanish soldiers and allies and even horses were able to cross, then continue their forward movement.1 This was one of many in-field innovations. Cortés also used hundreds of Indian workers to intentionally breach the causeway, allowing four of his brigantines to sail through so that they could assist Olid and his men, leaving the other eight warships on the eastern side of the causeway.2 The brigantines had to negotiate plenty of stakes in shallow waters, but they managed to either evade or destroy many of these traps, and the boat captains discovered a few deeper canals along which they could sail or paddle right up into the suburbs and outskirts of Tenochtitlán, where they set many of the houses on fire before retreating back out into the open water.
The early stages of the fighting were as hard and vicious as any the Spaniards had encountered. Cuauhtémoc continued to send canoes from the capital in waves, which pestered the causeways continually, the Aztec warriors, according to Cortés, “shouting and screaming so that it seemed the world was coming to an end.”3 They were initially chased off by the cannon-firing brigantines, but the Aztecs adapted, learning that the cannons fired only in straight lines, and that if the canoe warriors bobbed and weaved as they paddled, they could successfully dodge the balls fired from the bronze guns. Cortés, noting this new evasive tactic, called for a fleet of several thousand canoes from Texcoco, which arrived eagerly to assist in driving the Aztec canoes from the proximity of the causeways.
During the first week of fighting, Cortés learned from Alvarado that the Aztecs were using the Tepeyac causeway—a short one at the north end of the city linking Tlatelolco to Tepeyac—aggressively as their primary access to the world outside the city, and that a c
onstant stream of canoes was bringing in food and perhaps even water from the outside. Much of this activity was being conducted at night, under veil of darkness. Now Cortés had something of a dilemma. He had intentionally allowed that northernmost causeway to remain open as an enticement for Aztecs to flee the city, where they could easily be ridden down and slaughtered in the open by Spanish cavalry. Cuauhtémoc had not taken this bait, however, and the plan seemed to have backfired. Cortés could not allow the continued Aztec use of this thoroughfare, as it undermined his siege.