Floating gardens, zoos of exotic tropical animals, and an enormous privileged religious and political elite, bedecked in gold, jewels, and exotic feathers, intrigued Cortés’s men enough to swear in contemporary accounts that no city in Europe could rival Tenochtitlán in wealth, power, beauty, and size. Yet within two years a tiny Castilian force—without sure supply lines, unfamiliar with local territory and custom, initially attacked by every native group they encountered, suffering from tropical diseases and an unfamiliar diet, opposed by their own superiors in Cuba, and later confronted by another Castilian force sent to arrest Cortés—defeated the Aztec empire, inaugurating a series of events that would wipe out most of its population and ruin the majestic capital of Tenochtitlán.
The Spanish themselves incorrectly attributed their amazing success to innate virtue, superior intelligence, and the Christian religion. For nearly five hundred years both Mexican and European critics have offered a variety of contradictory explanations for this seemingly impossible feat, explanations that range from the role of the Tlaxcalan allies and disease to the genius of Cortés himself and cultural impediments in time-reckoning and systematic communication. Few have sought answers in the wider context of a long lethal Western military tradition.
Native Allies?
Did Cortés play off native against native, in a cynical alliance that saw a civil war in Mexico destroy its own culture, with Cortés the sole and ultimate beneficiary? To understand the conquest of Mexico as essentially due to internal disputes between Mexica nations, three propositions would have to be true. First, Mesoamerican tribes could have accomplished the obliteration of Tenochtitlán sometime earlier on their own without Spanish aid. Yet contemporary accounts prove that all the neighboring tribes had failed to overthrow the Mexicas prior to the Spanish arrival, and afterward were ineffective in fighting the Aztecs without European support. Second, after the destruction of Mexico City, the natives of Mexico could have turned on the Spanish, renewed their assaults on the Europeans as they had during the arrival of Cortés, and then annihilated the Castilian presence altogether, ensuring their own perpetual autonomy from both Aztec and European oppressors. The opposite took place: the destruction of Tenochtitlán marked the end of all Mexica autonomy. Neither could an indigenous tribe before the Spanish arrival defeat the Aztecs, nor after the conquest could any natives overthrow the Spanish. Third, squabbling and fractious Mesoamerican peoples were co-opted by a united and cohesive European force, suggesting that native infighting, not Spanish military superiority, prevented an eventual Indian victory. The Europeans, however, had nearly as much dissension in their ranks as the natives of Mexico. Cortés himself barely escaped arrest in Cuba and became the target of several assassination plots. He was officially branded a renegade by authorities in Hispaniola and was forced to steal and expropriate supplies at gunpoint. In the midst of delicate negotiations with Montezuma, he was obliged to abandon Tenochtitlán. Leaving only a small force under Alvarado, his men marched the difficult and dangerous 250-mile route back to Vera Cruz and then faced and defeated a Castilian armada under Narváez larger than their own—the entire time under attack by various Mesoamerican peoples who sought to capitalize on just such signs of weakness.
In short, an embattled Cortés, without official sanction and suffering from near outlaw status among his Caribbean superiors, turned a preexisting native world of tension and constant battle into an entirely new war of utter annihilation against the most powerful people in the history of Mexico—something impossible without superior technology, horses, and tactics. Upon conclusion of that campaign, within a few years he pacified all of Mexico under Spanish authority, a condition that, aside from occasional revolts, would characterize Mexican history from the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 to the nineteenth-century Mexican war of independence.
In all discussions of the Mexican conquest numbers tell us little. The discipline, tactics, and technology of the invaders, not the unwieldy size of the Aztec army or the corresponding huge musters of their native enemies, explain why the Aztec empire vanished in less than two years after the arrival of Cortés. Routine native conflicts were turned into a final war of annihilation by the Spanish, who then ended the autonomy of every tribe in Mexico. After the disastrous Noche Triste of July 1, 1520, Cortés lost most of his Tlaxcalan allies and was surrounded by thousands of warriors from hostile tribes. Tlaxcala itself was miles distant and deliberating whether to continue its alliance. Yet the Spaniards, aided for the most part by just a few surviving Tlaxcalans, fought their way out from Lake Texcoco, slaughtered thousands of natives on their march, and coerced others back into their federation. Additionally, in early July 1521—almost a year to the day after the Noche Triste—after being ambushed in Tlatelolco, most of Cortés’s allies suddenly and without warning vanished as dozens of Castilian captives in a gruesome public festival were herded up the Great Pyramid to their slaughter. Native accounts of the spectacle that followed explain why Cortés’s coalition suddenly evaporated:
One by one they were forced to climb to the temple platform, where they were sacrificed by the priests. The Spaniards went first, then their allies, all were put to death. As soon as the sacrifices were finished, the Aztecs ranged the Spaniards’ heads in rows on pikes. They also lined up their horses’ heads. They placed the horses’ heads at the bottom and the heads of the Spaniards above, and arranged them all so that the faces were toward the sun. (M. León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 107)
Contemporary sources emphasize that from the once-vast native army that Cortés had mustered from the villages on the lake, fewer than a hundred Mesoamerican natives at this point remained. The more distant peoples of Malinalco and Tula revolted outright, causing Cortés to send punitive expeditions against them to secure the confidence of the wavering lords of Cuernavaca and Otomí.
In all such engagements, the numerical disparities are staggering, as the Castilians were outnumbered on the battlefield by well over one hundred to one—a far greater disparity even than the British experienced during most of the engagements of the Zulu wars in 1879. In the midst of such revolts and the dissolution of his army, Cortés nevertheless maintained the siege of Tenochtitlán, conquered the rebellious allies, and restored the skeptical Mesoamericans to his army. Apparently, the besieged Aztecs could not conquer the isolated Castilians; nor did the other peoples of Mexico feel confident on their own to destroy Tenochtitlán without Spanish assistance—and yet themselves did not march on the causeways to kill the weakened Cortés.
Perhaps it is hard for modern deskbound scholars to understand the utter dread that existed in the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs, and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts—not to mention those thousands who were summarily executed without warning by Cortés and Alvarado in Cholula and at the temple of Tlacochcalco. Throughout contemporary oral Nahuatl and written Spanish accounts, there are dozens of grisly scenes of the dismemberment and disemboweling of Mesoamericans by Spanish steel and shot, accompanied by descriptions of the sheer terror that such mayhem invoked in indigenous populations. We of the twentieth century who have witnessed millions of Jews gassed by just hundreds of Nazi guards, or hundreds of thousands of Cambodians murdered by a few thousand deranged and cowardly Khmer Rouge, should not be surprised that the horror and the fright incurred by sophisticated tools of death so often and so easily trump sheer numbers.
The distinguished Aztec scholar Ross Hassig has rightly pointed out that most narratives of the conquest underplay the Mesoamerican contribution to the Spanish victory. So let us be clear: Cortés could not have conquered Tenochtitlán within a mere two years without vast support of native allies (initially the Totonacs and later the Tlaxcalans); nor could the surrounding Indians, who had fought the Aztecs in vain for decades prior to the European arrival, have destroyed the Aztec capital without the support of
Cortés. The answer in assessing the critical role of the native involvement is one of degree, and involves the question of time and cost.
The tens of thousands of Indians who, as warriors, porters, and construction workers, aided, fought alongside, and fed Cortés were indispensable to the Castilians’ effort. Without their assistance Cortés would have required thousands of Spanish reinforcements and lost hundreds more men in an effort that might have taken a decade or more. Nevertheless, he would have accomplished his conquest even had he battled a united Mexico without native assistance. The Spanish conquest of Mexico— against populations without horses, the wheel, steel or iron weapons, oceangoing ships, gunpowder weapons, and a long tradition of scientific siegecraft—is emblematic of a systematic pattern of brutal conquest of the New World that elsewhere did not necessarily demand native complicity.
The Mesoamericans fought the Aztecs not because they were enamored of the Spanish—indeed for much of 1519 and early 1520 they tried to exterminate Cortés—but because they met an unexpected and powerful enemy who could be unleashed on their even greater adversary, Tenochtitlán, which had systematically butchered their own women and children in a most gruesome and hideous fashion. The near constant wars of the past century with the Aztecs had left most Mesoamerican peoples between the interior and the coast—the Tlaxcalans especially—under either an oppressive subjugation that stripped their fields and often their population for material and human tribute, or a state of siege for as much as six months out of the year to ward off Aztec depredations.
The appearance of the Spanish convinced most of the subjects of the Aztec empire that here was a people whom they could not defeat, yet who could annihilate their archenemies, the Mexicas, and possessed such technological and material advantages—as the prescient Aztec defenders reminded the Tlaxcalans during the last bitter days of the siege—as to be able to establish a lasting hegemony over all the natives of Mexico. We should see the indigenous contribution as the fuel that fed the fire that consumed the Aztecs, but concede the spark and flame to be all Spanish. Without the Spaniard presence even the brave Tlaxcalans would not have freed—and heretofore had never freed—themselves from Aztec oppression. Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.
The key to dismantling the Aztec empire, which centralized its communications, bureaucracy, and military in an island fortress, was the destruction of Tenochtitlán—a task that no Mesoamerican tribe could carry out, much less even envision. It is true that native peoples sought to use Cortés as a tactical asset in their ongoing war against the Mexicas. But they failed utterly to understand the Spaniards’ larger strategic goals of destroying the Aztec empire as prerequisite to annexing Mexico as a tributary of the Spanish empire—and therefore unwittingly became pawns in the age-old European tradition of strategic thinking that was mostly alien to their own idea of what war was for.
Neither the Tlaxcalans nor the Mexicas had any abstract notion that war is the ultimate and final arbiter of politics, a uniquely Western idea that goes back to Aristotle’s amoral observation in the first book of his Politics that the purpose of war is always “acquisition” and thus a logical phenomenon that takes place when one state is far stronger than the other and therefore “naturally” seeks the political subjugation of its inferior rival through any means possible. Such views are later thematic in Polybius’s Histories, omnipresent in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and once again amplified and discussed in abstract terms by Western thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Clausewitz. Plato in his Laws assumed that every state would, when its resources were strained, seek to annex or incorporate land that was not its own, as a logical result of its own ambition and self-interest.
Disease?
No precise figures exist on the final tally of Aztecs who died of sickness during 1519–21. It is a highly charged subject that involves not merely numbers but questions of deliberate intent and European culpability. For most of the sixteenth century Mexico was beset by a succession of European diseases—smallpox, flu, plague, mumps, whooping cough, and measles—that reduced its indigenous population by some 75 to 95 percent of its pre-invasion total. In one of the great tragedies of the entire European subjugation of the Americas, a Mexican subcontinent that may have supported nearly 25 million people before the Spanish conquest was within a century inhabited by only a million or two.
For our strictly military purposes, however, we are concerned here with the more narrow and largely amoral issue of sheer military efficacy. To what degree did the smallpox outbreak of 1520 per se account for the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán in August 1521? Native observers, who described the pox in excruciating detail to the later Spanish believed that the epidemic wiped out almost one out of fifteen inside Tenochtitlán itself. Modern scholars have estimated that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all the population of central Mexico—Aztecs and their enemies alike—perished from this first wave of the outbreak. Perhaps as many as 20,000 or 30,000 Aztecs died from the disease during the two years in which Cortés was engaged in the conquest of Mexico, a staggering number of fatalities that surely helped to weaken the power of the Mexicas.
As horrible as those figures are, it is not clear that smallpox had a great deal to do with the final destruction of Tenochtitlán, although the subsequent creation of the province of New Spain was brought about by the millions who died in the century following Cortés’s victory, especially during the typhus epidemics of 1545–48 and 1576–81. According to the Florentine Codex, the first outbreak of the disease had a definite and limited course, spreading among the population from early September to late November 1520. Then it was largely gone by the time of the final siege (April to August 1521). By the time Cortés approached Tenochtitlán for his second campaign in April 1521, the city had been largely free of the disease for nearly six months. Smallpox also killed thousands of Cortés’s allies in even greater numbers than the Aztecs, since the Totonacs, Chalcans, and Tlaxcalans were in closer contact with the succession of European arrivals at Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. Furthermore, the disease seems to have been most virulent on the coast, near the base of Spanish operations and in the midst of those tribes allied to Cortés. To a limited degree the island isolation of Tenochtitlán, its elevation, and the no-man’s-land of the battlefield provided an initial barrier, feeble as it would ultimately prove, to ready sources of the infection.
The disease argument cuts both ways: there was a variety of tropical illnesses with which the Europeans had almost no experience or immunity against. Most contemporary accounts mention constant bronchial ailments and fevers that severely weakened and sometimes killed Cortés’s soldiers. New World malarias and dysenteries were far more virulent than similar outbreaks in Spain. Some also suffered from syphilis-like cankers, an especially unpleasant experience for armored men in the tropics. Moreover, not all of Cortés’s men had been exposed to smallpox and gained immunity against a disease that still wiped out thousands in the major urban areas of Europe. Given the small numbers in his army, even a few dozen Spaniards with the disease could have had as great an effect on the relative military efficacy of the conquistadors as did the thousands of infected natives in an Aztec empire of more than a million. In Cortés’s own letters and the annals of contemporary Spanish observers, smallpox, though mentioned, is never characterized as a predominant factor on either side of the struggle. This was because the Castilians, themselves beset by a host of diseases and unable to detect any sudden weakness in the resistance of Tenochtitlán, never fully appreciated the degree to which the outbreak had become pandemic among their enemies.
What prevented the Europeans from being wiped out by these new fevers and old illnesses is explai
ned as much by demographics and culture as by biological causes. As a largely heterogeneous group of younger male warriors with varying backgrounds and travel experience, the Castilians were rarely cooped up in small urban quarters in constant contact with women, children, and the aged. They also had almost no responsibility or need to care for the civilian infected. Besides some biological immunity to smallpox, there was among the Spanish arrivals a long empirical tradition of combating disease outbreaks—Seville would lose half its population to plague in 1600, yet recover without being destroyed by either the disease or opportunistic foreign invasion.
Throughout the fighting, the conquistadors applied wool and cotton bandages to wounds, and found, in a gruesome manner, that the fat from freshly slain Indians worked as an excellent salve and healing cream. While scientific knowledge of viruses and bacilli was, of course, absent in sixteenth-century Europe, and indeed the entire mechanism of infectious agents unknown, the Spaniards did draw on a long empirical tradition that went back to classical medical writers like Hippocrates and Galen, who drew on firsthand observations of epidemics in Greek and Italian cities and had thus helped establish Western traditions emphasizing the importance of proper quarantine, medicinal diets, sleep, and the careful burning of the dead.
As a consequence of that long legacy, the Spaniards realized that close contact with the ill spread infection, that the dead had to be immediately disposed of, that the course of diseases was predictable by acute observation of symptoms, and that the process of empirical observation, diagnosis, and prognosis was superior to mere incantation and sacrifice. Catholic priests may have argued that one became ill as God’s punishment for prior sins and offered prayer as healing, but most Spaniards realized that once the infection set in, there was a predictable course of illness to follow, one that to some degree could be ameliorated by medicines, careful nursing, diet, and isolation.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 28