Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

by Buddy Levy

  Cortés, through Malinche and Aguilar, offered some soft assurances, adding that he wished that Cuauhtémoc had surrendered earlier, for he could have avoided much bloodshed and destruction. Cortés suggested that the emperor should eat and rest, and later they could discuss the terms of the surrender of the city. At Cuauhtémoc’s’ request, Cortés had his wife—Montezuma’s youngest daughter—brought to him, and they were quartered together and guarded. After the capture Cortés and most of his captains retired to their camps away from Tlatelolco, needing a respite from the stench of the dead, which rose from the streets in a foul, miasmatic vapor, causing them nausea and headaches.34 The day of the city’s capture would be documented as August 13, 1521. The war was officially over.

  At the meeting the next day Cortés wasted little time before inquiring about the gold. The event had an initial air of formality to it: Cuauhtémoc was allowed to dress in ornate (if soiled) quetzal feathers, his remaining nobles beside him in flowery cloaks. But after very brief initial courtesies, Cortés got down to business, demanding the gold lost during La Noche Triste and the rest of the empire’s treasure. Cuauhtémoc, apparently prepared for this question, had some of his nobles and priests bring forth various hidden stores with which they had attempted to escape in their canoes—there were golden banners and armbands and helmets and disks—but the amount hardly impressed Cortés. “Is this all the gold that was kept in Mexico?” Cortés demanded. “Get it all out, for it is all needed.”35 Cuauhtémoc and his men discussed things among themselves, suggesting that perhaps the rest was taken by common people, or hidden under the skirts of women, or thrown into the lake. Whatever the case, Cortés was halfheartedly ensured that any remaining gold would be sought after and, if found, brought before him.

  Humbled, humiliated, and not even granted his wish to die, Cuauhtémoc now only asked that, as the conditions in his former city were so riddled with disease and famine, the people be allowed to leave, to depart the city for the healthier towns along the lake, where they might take refuge and begin to heal. Cortés consented to the request, figuring a general exodus would aid in commencing the much-needed purification of the city. Fires were lit to begin the burning of the dead, and the timbers and flames could be heard spitting and crackling, for there was no longer the sound of drums, or conch shells, or flutes. Now there was only the plaintive wailing of a defeated people as they began to come out of hiding, emaciated and dressed only in rags. According to Bernal Díaz, “For three whole days and nights they never ceased streaming out, and all three causeways were crowded with men, women, and children so thin, sallow, dirty, and stinking that it was pitiful to see them.”36

  Though they had been instructed not to harass or hinder the unfortunate Aztecs in their departure from the city, many Spanish soldiers, greedy for the lost gold, waylaid the destitute stragglers, violently body-searching them. They looked everywhere, including inside their noses, even within their genital cavities, hoping to find gold nuggets but often finding only jadestones or other gems.37 In the end the Spanish captains and soldiers found very little, and they watched with pity as the ragged train of Aztec survivors staggered from their home of Tenochtitlán, sickly and expiring children carried on their fathers’ backs, lank warriors bleeding and covered with wounds and weals, the famished women limping and forlorn. The healthiest and best-looking of the women and the younger men were culled out and branded on the face “with the King’s iron”38 and taken as slaves.

  Cortés left Juan Rodríguez de Villafuerte in command of a force of some three hundred Spaniards to oversee the initial cleanup of the city, and then departed with the rest of his men for Coyoacán, where he planned to convene with all his forces from Tacuba and Tepeyac to celebrate with a victory banquet. Great stores of wine were sent for in Villa Rica, where another Spanish ship had recently arrived, and a bunch of pigs were herded from the eastern coast as well. On the evening of the party, so many people arrived that there was not enough room to seat everyone, so that only the captains and favored soldiers were seated at the tables. Some Spanish women had come recently from Cuba as well, and they, along with native slave and servant women, helped to prepare the feast. After seventy-five days of constant fighting, the Spaniards took their reveling seriously, and they drank flagons of wine as fast as it could be brought to them. Soon the makeshift banquet room was awash in screaming and disorder, with men dancing on the tables, fighting, and dragging women away to copulate in the wide open. According to a chronicler who was present, “So many discreditable things occurred, indeed, that it would have been better if the banquet had never been held.”39

  At sunrise the next morning, Cortés awoke with a throbbing hangover and apologized to Father Olmedo, promising to gather the debauched Spaniards for a proper mass, at which he and all of his men would kneel and pray and ask their God for forgiveness. Looking through the blood-orange haze that lay low across the lake waters, seeing the smoke from the funeral pyres curling like vaporous black serpents over the burning and demolished city, Cortés must have wondered if there existed enough forgiveness to accommodate what they had done.

  EPILOGUE

  The Shadows of Smoke

  A rain of darts falls on the earth

  Flowers of many hues wilt under the dark cloud

  And the heavens in anguish bellow.

  AZTEC POEM, CANTARES MEXICANOS

  TENOCHTITLÁN, THE ONCE-GREAT CRADLE of the Aztec nation, smoldered for months. Cortés went about his business and administration, contemplating the implications of having finally taken the city for the crown, for his men, and perhaps above all for himself. He must have felt a great deal of personal pride at having stayed a course laid out a few years earlier, a course from which he had not turned back since the day he ordered the ships scuttled on the coast at Vera Cruz. It must have all seemed like some vaguely remembered dream. But if he may have mused romantically in his own mind, in his correspondence on his military and political achievement he was matter-of-fact, saying only, “On the day that Cuauhtémoc was captured and the city taken, we gathered up all the spoils we could find and returned to our camp, giving thanks to Our Lord for such a favor and the much desired victory which He had granted us.”1

  As it turned out, “the spoils” to which Cortés referred, the great hoard of Montezuma’s treasure that he had hoped to uncover and on which he had staked his own life and those of his men, amounted to much less than they had dreamed of. While preparing for the expedition back in Cuba in early 1519, Cortés had lured many of his original fighting men with the promise of bounty, and he had sustained their spirits along the way—through defeat, near-death, and the death of their comrades in arms—with offers of great riches. Now, seeing his disgruntled and wounded men and under pressure from the king’s treasurer Alderete, Cortés had Cuauhtémoc brought forth and demanded for the last time that more gold be produced.

  The stoic emperor, bereft of all dignity, would say nothing, so officers ordered him to be tortured. (Cortés’s personal involvement in the actual order is unclear.) Spaniards lashed the last emperor of the Aztecs to a pole, poured oil over his feet, and then lit them on fire. The flesh crackled and bubbled, yet still Cuauhtémoc would admit nothing of consequence—though he is said to have attempted to hang himself to avoid further torture and indignity. When the king of Tacuba was brought alongside and tortured in similar fashion, Cuauhtémoc eventually revealed that his deities had warned him of the impending fall of the city and that all remaining treasure should be thrown deep into the lake where the enemies could not pilfer it.2 The severe torture left the king of Tacuba dead, and though Cortés himself eventually stopped the torture of Cuauhtémoc, the emperor’s feet were so badly mangled that he limped for the remainder of his life. Cortés had him hanged from a pochote tree a few years later for allegedly orchestrating a rebellion and assassination attempt of Cortés during the late 1523 Honduras expedition. With him were also executed the lords Cohuanacoah of Texcoco and Tetlepanquetzal of Tacuba, fina
lizing the demise of the Triple Alliance, the formal triumvirate buttressing the Aztec empire.*57 3

  Cortés sent a team of divers to scour the lake bottom, but very little was recovered. Allied Tlaxcalans were allowed to search and pillage the city for treasure, and many found small quantities of gold, precious stones, and iridescent tail-feather mantels of the quetzal bird. They seemed satisfied with the plunder and returned to their villages with stories of vanquishing their ancient enemies. Some even carried the dismembered limbs of slain Aztecs with them.4

  But the Spanish soldiers were less than pleased with their paltry shares of the spoils. Searches around the palace ruins and ponds brought forth a few significant finds, including a great golden disk similar to the gift from Montezuma that Cortés had sent to Spain in the first “treasure ship,” as well as a handsome jade head, but it was hardly enough to raise the value of their collective shares.5 A general discord surfaced among common soldiers and officers alike, all of whom waited impatiently for the gold to be melted down, weighed, and distributed according to Spanish law. Unconfirmed rumors went around that Cortés had hidden an immense cache of personal plunder—a literal room filled with gold—which the captain-general would claim later.

  There was in fact a remarkable (and except for the contents of the original treasure ship, unprecedented) array of jewels and finery, of a magnitude and quality never witnessed by Europeans before. According to Cortés’s secretary López de Gomara, the king’s fifth included

  shields of wickerwork covered with tiger skins and lined with feathers, with bosses and rims of gold; many pearls, some as large as hazelnuts…a fine emerald as large as the palm of one’s hand, square, pointed like a pyramid…many coronets, earrings, finger rings, lip rings, and other jewels for men and women, and several idols and blowguns of gold and silver.6

  Also included for the king’s pleasure and fascination were giant bones discovered in Coyoacán, as well as three live jaguars, one of which broke loose from its cage while en route aboard the ship, scratching a half dozen men before leaping to its death overboard. A second jaguar escaped and had to be killed to avoid an identical fiasco. So in addition to the gold currency allotted in his royal fifth, the king was to receive plenty of curiosities and antiquities of the very kind that had tantalized him initially, enough that he had taken the first load in August 1520 on an exhibition tour in Brussels. These created quite a stir among the nobility, the aristocracy, and even among famed artists like the German Albrecht Dürer, who saw the display at the Brussels residence of the Holy Roman emperor and was absolutely awestruck. Dürer later recalled:

  I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun of all gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms of the armor of the people there, with all manner of wondrous weapons, harness, spears, wonderful shields, extraordinary clothing, beds and all manner of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies…All the days of my life I have seen nothing that touches my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express my feelings about what I saw there.7

  In choosing these current treasures as part of the royal fifth, Cortés certainly hoped to further impress the king, from whom he still, at the time of the conquest, had no official sanction. But the immediate problem was how to appease his men, who clamored and grumbled for their shares.

  Despite the opulent and majestic appearance of the treasure, the reality was grim, as the remaining tally had to be split many ways, starting with Cortés’s own fifth. After the king and Cortés were paid, and a few under-the-table payments were made to special captains—men close to Cortés—there remained so little to distribute among the soldiers that the amount suggested came to an insulting 160 pesos per man, at a time when the cost of a crossbow alone, or a serviceable battle sword, was fifty or sixty pesos.

  A few captains—Alvarado and Olid among them—suggested that since the shares were so minuscule, they ought to be reserved for those who were “maimed and lame and blind, or had lost an eye or their hearing, and others who were crippled…or had been burnt by gunpowder.”8 An uproar began among the men, shouting and fighting, and mutiny appeared imminent. In the end, Cortés used the same powers of persuasion, diplomacy, and promises that had convinced these men to follow him so many times before. Pointing out the ruins of the capital, he reminded the men that they now possessed this land from which all the gold they sought had come, and they now controlled all the gold and silver mines as well. If they would only remain patient, true to Cortés and to their king, then each and every one of them would be granted their fair share—a plot of land and the laborers to work it. Eventually, as he had told them, they would all profit—it was only a matter of time.

  To keep some men appeased—especially the captains—Cortés immediately planned expeditions of further conquest and settlement, the fruits of which (if successful) would ostensibly go straight into the captains’ personal coffers. That was the promise, anyway. Pedro de Alvarado was sent west to the Pacific coast, while Cristóbal de Olid, sent to subdue intractable Tarascans, was stationed in the new vassal Michoacán. Gonzalo de Sandoval, Cortés’s constant captain, was dispatched to the Gulf Coast, to found a town near Tuxtepec southeast of Vera Cruz. (Many loyal and trusted comrades-in-arms did in fact eventually receive generous payments from Cortés—in the form of encomiendas, which offered land, status, and material wealth—for Cortés had personally appropriated vast mineral holdings and armies of Indians to work the mines.)*58 9

  The potential mutiny quelled, Cortés turned his attention to other pressing matters, including rebuilding a new México City where the great Tenochtitlán had stood for nearly two hundred years. Cortés’s dream, such as it was, had been realized. He had taken Mexico—at the time the most populated city in the world—for Spain.10 But the costs—still visible in the rubble of buildings and the exodus of a vanquished people—had been staggering. The most accurate accounts, estimated by native chroniclers in the years directly following the conquest, suggest that more than 200,000 Aztecs fell during the siege of Tenochtitlán, as well as 30,000 Tlaxcalans. Even by the most conservative estimates, the battle for the Aztec empire ranks, in terms of human life, as the costliest single battle in history.11

  Bernal Díaz remembered the devastation that the Spaniards left in their wake, noting that word spread quickly to the distant provinces. People from afar made pilgrimages to see for themselves, to witness whether Tenochtitlán could really have been utterly razed to the ground. Some brought presents of tribute to Cortés, he recalled, while others simply held their children aloft in their arms, letting them behold the destroyed city, “pointing it out to them in much the same way that we would say: ‘Here stood Troy.’”12

  The Aztecs recalled the end of their city, the demise of their civilization, reflectively and poetically, their memories tinged with loss and futility:

  Broken spears lie in the roads;

  we have torn our hair in grief.

  The houses are roofless now, and their walls

  are red with blood.

  Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,

  And the walls are spattered with gore.

  The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,

  and when we drink it,

  it has the taste of brine.

  We have pounded our hands in despair

  against the adobe walls,

  for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.

  The shields of our warriors were its defense,

  but they could not save it.13

  In addition to curious pilgrims, leaders and delegates from far-flung provinces, including the powerful province Michoacán directly to the west, came to pay tribute and confer their vassalage to Spain. This development pleased Cortés greatly, for he could now send a few scouts across these lands toward the so-c
alled “Southern Sea” (actually, the Pacific Ocean), the presumed gateway to the Far East, to the Orient, and the route that he believed would lead to “islands rich in gold, pearls, precious stones and spices, and many wonderful and unknown things.”14

  Hernán Cortés, in fact if not legally, now ruled nearly all of Central America, a massive swath of land extending from Vera Cruz on the east coast all the way west, through the jungles and rain forests of the tierra caliente, across the volcanic scablands to the Pacific Ocean, and far south, effectively to the boundary of what is now Guatemala.15 He controlled New Spain, much larger diplomatic and geographical holdings than the island governors of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola combined. But his self-proclaimed governorship would have to endure one more political threat before he would at last be legally vindicated.

  That threat sailed into Villa Rica harbor in December 1521, in the form of two Spanish ships from Hispaniola, one of them bearing an inspector by the name of Cristóbal de Tapia. He came on behalf of Juan de Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos, and bore papers prepared in Spain authorizing him as governor of New Spain. Tapia presented his letters and papers to those in charge at Vera Cruz, but captains there instructed him to present his case (and himself) before Hernán Cortés, who was presently over the mountains in the high country at Coyoacán. Tapia immediately drafted a letter to Cortés, telling him that he came as governor of New Spain, in the king’s name, and requested a meeting, either at Vera Cruz or in Coyoacán, whichever would be more convenient for Cortés.

  Messengers had informed Cortés of Tapia’s arrival long before the letter arrived, and Cortés had already launched into evasive and proactive political action. He knew Cristóbal de Tapia well from his years in Hispaniola and realized he must act decisively and immediately. He instantly dispatched Gonzalo de Sandoval to a small Totonac town on the Vera Cruz coast, instructing him to formally found a city there, complete with judges and representatives, and to name it Medellín (a nice touch, as this was the name of Cortés’s hometown in Spain, as well as Sandoval’s).16 Cortés himself formed and officially founded the new municipality of Mexico City, of which he made Pedro de Alvarado alcalde and legal spokesperson. Cortés now had handpicked representatives of four complete municipalities, including the previously founded Villa Rica and Segura de la Frontera. Responding calmly and politely to Tapia’s request for a meeting, Cortés then sent his henchmen to deal with the political threat in a meeting at Cempoala. His representatives were Cristóbal Corral, battle standard-bearer and now councilman of Segura de la Frontera; Pedro de Alvarado, new magistrate of Mexico City–Tenochtitlán; and Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia, councilman of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz.17