History
Consider whether Townsend would agree or disagree to post below.
For example: if a classmate chooses Martinez to discuss cite evidence from Townsend to argue whether she would agree or disagree with the assessment.
post by classmate #1
- While Martinez constructed her book to showcase the political and cultural systems that the Spanish put in place when they were creating “New Spain”, further evaluation into the changes she mentions actually give way to a certain degree of continuity that the indigenous people were able to maintain through this period. Continuity in their structures even through colonization was bound to happen as the Spanish did not exactly take this land as their own empire, but instead made it a tribute state. Martinez mentions the New Laws of of 1542 and the “two-republic model” early on to emphasize how the indigenous people did not lose all of their autonomy, they were actually granted the right to “freedom” and having a separate republic allowed them to wield some of the influence they still had (Martinez 2008, 95). Through the “two- republic model”, in the pueblos they were forced into, the creation of their own indigenous government structures allowed them to take European conventions and use them for protection by combining the new beliefs with their own traditional ones. Also, later on some of the traditional elite rulers were allowed to maintain power over their lands because they had shown loyalty by converting (Martinez 2008, 107). Continuity of traditional native practices and culture was maintained through the indigenous communities manipulation of the restraints they were under in order to sneak in some of their influence, and when allowed they tried to keep traditional rule prominent.
Would Townsend Agree or disagree and why?
post by classmate #2
- In terms of continuity after Spanish colonization, Martínez discusses that a degree of freedom was attributed to indigenous populations because of their acceptance of religious conversion and the fact that the Spanish were residing on indigenous lands (Martínez, 2008, 97). One illustration of an independence granted can be demonstrated through the cacicazgo political-economic system. This institution provided some continuation of indigenous practices by maintaining the status, leadership, and wealth of the descendants of leaders of pre-Hispanic indigenous dynasties (Martínez, 2008, 108). To add, the Spanish offered flexibility in maintaining indigenous social norms by allowing women to inherit these cacicazgos in certain circumstances (Martínez, 2008, 109). However, there was not always continuity in how women were treated after colonization. After inheritance of these cacicazgos, the status of many women declined resulting from the Spaniard’s favor of primogeniture (Martínez, 2008, 109). Further, in legal settings, Mexica women were granted less autonomy, as they were not perceived as legally responsible for themselves under colonial law (Martínez, 2008, 113). Provided these examples, in some instances, there did exist a degree of continuity of indigenous leadership and social practices.
Would Townsend Agree or disagree and why?
NO WORD COUNT REQUIRED
see Attached links to respond to discussions
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Townsend, Camilla, 1965– author.
Title: Fifth sun : a new history of the Aztecs / Camilla Townsend.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019003623 (print) | LCCN 2019004887 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190673079 (updf) |
ISBN 9780190673086 (epub) | ISBN 9780190673062 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Aztecs—History. | Aztecs—First contact with Europeans. | Aztecs—Historiography.
| Mexico—History—Conquest, 1519–15
40.
Classification: LCC F1219.73 (ebook) | LCC F1219.73 .T67 2019 (print) | DDC 972—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003623
Title Page Art: Mexica government officials in full battle gear. The Bodleian Libraries, the University
of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 67r.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. United States of America
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003623
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
The Trail from the Seven Caves (Before 1299)
People of the Valley (1350s–1450s)
The City on the Lake (1470–1518)
Strangers to Us People Here (1519)
A War to End All Wars (1520–1521)
Early Days (1520s–1550s)
Crisis: The Indians Talk Back (1560s)
The Grandchildren (1570s–1620s)
4
Strangers to Us People Here
1519
A girl learns to weave. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS.
Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 60r.
The frightened girl and her companions followed the winding path from the Maya town of
Potonchan, on the shore of the Gulf, down to the beach where the strangers were
encamped. They moved through the shadows, surrounded by gnarled and twisted trees—
ceiba, mahogany, rubber—the exposed dirt path glinting silvery-gray wherever the sunlight
managed to strike it. Warriors armed with spears walked with them, in case anyone should
suddenly try to run. The young women were to be peace offerings to the fearsome
newcomers; they could not outrun their fate. As the group came out into the bright sunlight,
they saw the giant boats they had heard so much about, with their cloths hung to catch the
wind. The bearded ones turned from their smoking camp fires—they were desperately
trying to keep the mosquitoes away—to stare brazenly at the offered women.1
***
W��� ��� ��� young, the girl would have been called something like
Daughter Child. Some girls in her world earned funny, affectionate names
—like She’s-Not-a-Fish or Little Old Woman—or poetic ones—like Deer
Flower—but most were simply called “Elder Daughter,” “Middle Child,” or
“Youngest,” at least until their personalities became better known.2 Living
at the fringes of empire, this Daughter Child had no illusions about the
agonies of war; she harbored no belief that it was for a greater good. It was
simply the way things were. If she allowed herself to have any feelings
about the Mexica at all, her sentiment was hatred.
When she was born to a Nahua nobleman of Coatzacoalcos, farther west
along the coast—close to today’s Veracruz—her mother had undoubtedly
buried her umbilical cord near the hearth, as almost all Nahuatl-speaking
mothers did. She would have uttered a prayer something like this: “You will
be the heart of the home. You will go nowhere. You will not become a
wanderer anywhere. You become the banked fire, the hearthstones.”3 It was
what anyone would have wanted for a beloved daughter. The mother’s
prayers, however, had been in vain. Although the child’s father was a highly
ranked nobleman, her mother was no one important, probably a slave. It
was such women’s children who were most vulnerable in moments of crisis.
And the crisis came. The Coatzacoalcos region was the next target in the
Mexicas’ perennial expansion. When the Mexica and their allies
approached other altepetls to demand their allegiance, it was the children of
less powerful mothers who generally found themselves in harm’s way.
Unless the aggressors happened to be in need of child sacrifices for the
annual festival of Tlaloc, no one thought of killing the young. They were far
too valuable. They could be raised as loyal household dependents, or sold
as slaves. That is what had happened to Daughter Child. Whether her
father’s people had managed to prevent war with the Mexica by offering a
sort of preemptive tribute, or whether they had actually lost a battle and
been forced to sue for peace by offering a gift, is unknown. Regardless, the
child was ripped from her kin and placed in a canoe with other captives. As
the boat pulled away from the shore and sliced rapidly through the water,
bearing her in the direction of the rising sun, she had no reason to believe
she would ever see her home again.4
Daughter Child would have guessed that she was being taken to one of
the neutral trading ports that rendered long-distant trade possible in war-
ridden Mesoamerica. At the coastal town of Xicallanco, lying not far to the
east, where many Nahuatl merchants lived, she was sold to some Maya,
either for a certain weight of cacao beans or for bolts of cotton cloth. These
were the two kinds of currency in the busy, polyglot town that nestled in a
giant blue lagoon. Here, there were no pyramids or stone monuments, just
buildings made of mud and sticks of wood. No one had time to construct
anything more, for they were there to trade, not to pray. People came from
far and wide, and no one attacked the place, for it was too important to all
of them. Every kingdom’s merchants depended on the existence of such
towns.5
From Xicallanco the girl was brought back westward to the town of
Potonchan, near the mouth of the Tabasco River. It was a leading settlement
of the Chontal Maya, the “Phoenicians of Mesoamerica,” as they have since
been dubbed. These were a powerful people, for their nobles, nearly all of
whom were merchants, were extremely wealthy. They used their riches to
buy food and favors from the surrounding farmers and to purchase slaves
from the long-distance Nahua traders. Those slaves made it possible for
them to produce large quantities of beautiful cotton cloth that others were
willing to pay a great deal for.6
It was the honored wives and daughters of Chontal men who did most of
the weaving, not the enslaved women. The creation of cloth, of tapestry,
was a holy task, beloved by the gods. But while the honored wives devoted
their time to weaving, other women were needed to grind corn, make
tortillas, fetch water, and care for young children. A host of other textile-
related activities could be assigned to slaves as well. Someone had to sow
and harvest the cotton plants. Then the fibers needed to be beaten and
carded for many hours to rid them of the dirt and flecks. The fibers then had
to be spun into yarn; dyes had to be made out of plants or shellfish and then
the yarns repeatedly boiled in them until they reached the desired color.
Finally the looms needed to be warped in preparation for the actual
weaving. Then at last the great lady of the house could begin the sacred task
of weaving. As a Nahua girl child, the newly purchased child would have
adapted to her assigned chores relatively easily: back home, she would have
begun by the age of five to learn to use a little spindle to make yarn, and she
would have been taught to cook and clean as well.7
Years passed, and Daughter Child had a new name, a slave’s name. In
her new life, no one claimed her as kin. She was no one’s Elder Sister, or
Youngest Child. We do not know what the Maya who had purchased her
called her. Whether she was coerced into having sexual relations, we will
also never know, although that would have been a typical part of an
enslaved woman’s experience. As the girl grew to early womanhood, not
much differentiated one year from another. Then in 1517, the townsfolk
heard that some strangers with remarkably hairy faces had landed a very
large boat at Champoton, another Chontal town lying to the east. After a
skirmish, the outsiders were driven off, with many of their men badly
wounded, but they left many Chontal warriors wounded and dying. The
strangers were clearly dangerous to the political order—a political order
that required the Chontal to appear invulnerable to the surrounding peoples.
The strangers returned the next year. This time, they bypassed the feisty
town of Champoton. Messengers on speeding canoes came to say that they
had stopped near Xicallanco, but didn’t find it, hidden as it was in its
lagoon. They kidnapped four young boys who had boarded the boat to trade
and then proceeded west. All of Potonchan waited. Within days, the
strangers found the mouth of the Rio Tabasco. From where they floated,
they could see the town clearly. Hundreds of Chontal warriors gathered
along the shore; they made their way out toward the larger boat in dozens of
canoes, arrows notched, ready to fly. A huge dog aboard the strangers’ boat
spotted land, jumped overboard, and began to swim toward the shore. The
young Chontal men gave a great shout and showered the creature with
arrows. Within moments, something aboard the massive boat seemed to
explode, and bits of metal flew everywhere, wounding many. Some
slumped over, apparently dead. The Chontal retreated.8
All the households buzzed with gossip. The next day, the town’s leaders
sent a few canoes of men out to try to parley, and the strangers brought
forward a young prisoner who spoke their language. He told the Chontal he
had been kidnapped years ago near Cozumel. Yes, the warriors said, they
had heard rumors that strangers were occasionally appearing along the
eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula, and some even asserted that they
governed a huge island six days’ sail to the east of Cozumel, but the
previous year was the first time they had heard a full and coherent story,
from Champoton. The interpreter told them the strangers were indeed
dangerous and that they sought gold and food in regular supplies. To the
indigenous, this signified that they were demanding tribute; it was not good
news. The Chontal asked the interpreter to explain that the Mexica, far to
the west, were really the people to seek if they wanted gold and other
precious goods, but that they would barter what they had, if only the
strangers would return the four boys they had kidnapped near Xicallanco.
Some goods were brought out and traded, but the boys were not returned.
Later that day the winds were right, and the strangers rapidly put up a sail
and departed.9
No one could tell if they were gone for good. The Chontal leaders built a
few stockades and arranged for neighboring peoples to fight at their side if
it came to that. The people harvested their corn and cacao and wove their
cloth. Many undoubtedly forgot about the incident or put it out of their
minds. But if the women had ceased to gossip and speculate about the
strangers, the subject nevertheless resurfaced dramatically less than a year
later. In 1519 a messenger arrived, saying that no fewer than ten of the big
boats were sailing westward from Cozumel.10
The ships came straight to Potonchan. In the talks that unfolded between
Spaniard and Indian on the very first day—undoubtedly while the women
and children were being led out of the city—the Chontal leaders said
bluntly that they would kill anyone who entered their land. They offered
food and advised the strangers to leave before anything unpleasant
happened. The foreigners’ leader, a man in his early thirties who called
himself “Hernando Cortés,” refused to listen. Instead, he made plans to
come ashore. He divided his men into two groups. One landed at the mouth
of the river on the coast and then moved overland toward the town, and the
other sailed upriver, then drew near the settlement in smaller boats and
began to wade ashore in a tight formation. Their glinting swords were
bared, creating a circle of space around them, and their outer clothing was
likewise made of metal, so they could move with relative impunity, as the
Indians’ stone arrowheads and spear tips shattered against it. Still, it was
tough going for them. One of the strangers later described the scene:
With great bravery the [locals] surrounded us in their canoes,
pouring such a shower of arrows on us that they kept us in the water
up to our waists. There was so much mud and swamp that we had
difficulty getting clear of it; and so many Indians attacked us, hurling
their lances and shooting arrows, that it took us a long time to
struggle ashore. While Cortés was fighting, he lost a sandal in the
mud and could not recover it. So he landed with one bare foot.11
As soon as they were ashore, the invaders began to use their crossbows and
lances against the indigenous, who were armored only in padded cotton,
forcing them to retreat. With their metal weapons, the strangers broke
through the wooden stockades that had been constructed, and then the other
group of outsiders, who had been making their way overland, arrived. The
Indians rapidly withdrew, and the newcomers were left in command of the
abandoned center of Potonchan, a square surrounded by empty temples and
halls. There they slept, with sentries standing guard. Armed and armored
and in a large group, they were relatively invulnerable. But they soon grew
hungry. When they sent out foraging parties, the Chontal attacked them
guerrilla-style and killed several men.12
Two days later, the strangers, determined to make something happen,
moved out in a body onto an open plain. Wave after wave of warriors
attacked the group of metal-clad foreigners, perishing before the lethal steel
weapons, but wearing them down nevertheless. The battle continued for
more than an hour. The Chontal lords thought the strangers would surely
tire soon, and then their own greater numbers would carry the day. Then,
from behind, there suddenly came thundering over the plain more enemies
mounted on huge quadrupeds, twenty times as strong as deer. Under cover
of night, the Spaniards had unloaded ten horses from the ships that were
still in the mouth of the river. It was a time-consuming and difficult task,
requiring pulleys and canvas slings, but the men were protected by darkness
and their armor, and whichever Chontal were watching could not possibly
have known how significant these actions would turn out to be. The
horsemen, who had been struggling through the coastal swamps all
morning, came charging over the flat grasslands, cutting down Chontal foot
soldiers with wild exhilaration. The warriors had no alternative but to
withdraw.
The leaders of Potonchan counted their missing men, whose bodies lay
strewn over the field of battle. They had lost over 220 warriors in only a
few hours. Nothing comparable had ever occurred in all the histories
recorded in stone or legend. They simply could not afford to keep up a fight
like that. Even if in the end they could drive these men away, the battle
would do them no good, for everyone in their world would learn of it. They
would be left weak and defenseless, vulnerable to their enemies, having lost
many hundreds of their own.13 Moreover, it seemed likely that more of
these strangers would arrive the following year. So it was that the Chontal
sued for peace. One of the enemy, strangely enough, spoke some Yucatec
Mayan, a language well known to the Chontal. He had been a prisoner on
the peninsula for years. He said that his leader, Cortés, would forgive them
if they made amends.
Among many other gifts, the Chontal leaders sent twenty slave girls
down to the shore. The young woman from Coatzacoalcos was among
them.14 She watched as a man who was evidently a religious figure
approached them in a costume different from that of all the others. He made
gestures and murmured prayers of some kind, finally sprinkling water on
each new arrival. Daughter Child’s new name, she learned, was Marina. Her
captors did not ask what her former name had been, nor did she tell them.15
Almost immediately, she was presented to a confident, even arrogant man
whom the others deferred to. She could not yet pronounce his name, but she
heard that it was “Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero.”16 Later she would
learn what gave the man his authority among these people: he was first
cousin to a nobleman, the Count of Medellín, across the ocean in the place
called Spain. Cortés had been so excited to have someone of his stature
along that he had given him a sorrel mare as a gift and would now present
him with the most beautiful girl in the group. Marina’s spiritual baptism, it
turned out, had simply been a preliminary to rape.17
Marina learned a great deal in the next few days. This wasn’t only
because she was an astute observer who could hold her feelings in check.
She found she could speak easily to the foreigner named Jerónimo de
Aguilar, who had been relaying messages to the Chontal.18 Over eight years
earlier, when he was about twenty years old, he had been aboard a ship that
capsized near Cancun. A good swimmer, he made it to shore. But then he
was taken prisoner by the Yucatec Maya and had labored as a slave among
them ever since, learning enough of their language to function. When
Cortés arrived in the area where he was living and learned of his existence,
he ransomed him so that he might serve as an interpreter, one who would be
more loyal than any the strangers had ever had. Aguilar did not speak
Chontal, but Marina and some of the other women spoke enough Yucatec
Mayan that they could communicate with him easily. Fortunately, Marina
had a razor-sharp mind, and she soon realized that there was a staggering
amount of information that she needed to absorb and process rapidly if any
of it was going to be of use to her.
It seemed that the sea that surrounded their world was not boundless
after all. It was larger than she could imagine, but within about ten weeks’
sailing toward the rising sun, there lay a land full of people who worshipped
a powerful god of their own. They called themselves cristianos, among
many other names. In any case, explained Jerónimo de Aguilar, his people
were one group among many who worshipped this same god. He himself
was, he said, a Spaniard, and it was the Spaniards who had first discovered
this part of the earth, this New World, and conquered and settled the great
islands that lay a few days to the east in the Caribbean Sea. At first the
Spaniards thought that they had reached the islands off the coast of a place
called Asia, such as the famed Cipangu (Japan), or perhaps India. The
explorer called Columbus was so convinced of this that he had named the
people he met “Indians,” and the name stuck. After more than ten years, the
newcomers had acknowledged that what they had found was not Asia, but a
landmass hitherto unimagined by anyone. They sent out many exploratory
expeditions from the Caribbean and kidnapped a number of interpreters.
They thought they had learned that on this mainland there was a rich nation
somewhere to the west. It was important that they find it, Aguilar added, for
there were now about five thousand Spaniards living in the Caribbean, and
there simply was not enough wealth for all of them. Over four hundred men
and another hundred or so servants and retainers had come away with
Cortés on his expedition, convinced as they were that better things awaited
them over the western horizon. They would be grievously disappointed and
therefore dangerous, at least to their own leaders, if they did not find what
they sought. But Hernando Cortés had no intention of letting them taste
such bitterness.19
In the days after peace was made with the Chontal, the two sides did a
brisk business together, the Spaniards presenting goods they had brought
for the purpose in exchange for food. The priest they had with them said
mass. Jerónimo de Aguilar may have tried to explain some of what he was
talking about, but it would have been difficult. Later, a linguistically
talented missionary would try to translate Hail Mary into an indigenous
language. He heard the murmured words in his head: Hail Mary, full of
grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is
the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Virgin, mother of God, pray for
us sinners. Amen. He tried to convey these words in an utterly foreign
tongue to people who were completely unfamiliar with any of the ideas. He
struggled. “May you be joyful, oh sainted Mary, you who are full of
gracia.” He left just that one word in Spanish; it was too difficult to
translate. He went on, “God the king is with you. You are the most
praiseworthy of all women. And very praiseworthy is your womb of
precious fruit, is Jesus. Oh Saint Mary, oh perfect maiden, you are the
mother of God. May you speak for us wrong-doers. May it so be done.”20
The much less articulate Jerónimo de Aguilar could not even have gotten
this far. As they listened, the Chontal looked non-committal, but politely
kept their impatience to themselves. When they were given a chance to
speak, they said nothing about God or his mother. Instead, they worked to
convince the Spaniards that the type of tribute they sought could best be
delivered by the Mexica, to the west.
On the day that the Spaniards called Palm Sunday, they took to their
ships with the twenty enslaved women and headed west. About three days
later, they passed near the land of Marina’s birth, drawing into the entrance
to the Coatzacoalcos River at the foot of the Tuxtla mountains. This place,
however, seemed to be of no interest to her new masters. They sailed on,
and she watched the coast of her homeland recede once again in the
distance. A day later, they anchored at a point that had been charted by the
previous year’s expedition, on the site of today’s Veracruz.
Within half an hour, two canoes approached the flagship of the fleet,
which bore Cortés and Puertocarrero and their Indian servants. Moctezuma,
they would later learn, had ordered that this spot be watched since the
strangers had visited it the year before.21 Cortés called for Jerónimo de
Aguilar and asked him to translate. The man tried. In his desperation, he
may even have considered feigning comprehension, but that could only go
so far. Aguilar spoke Yucatec Mayan well enough, but unbeknownst to him,
the expedition had now left Maya territory. He was hearing Nahuatl and
could make nothing of it. Cortés grew angry. He had gone to a great deal of
trouble and expense to ransom the castaway, and the man had assured him
he could speak to Indians. Now it seemed he couldn’t, after all.
The young woman now named Marina did have alternatives. She could
have remained silent. No one expected a young slave girl to step forward in
that moment and become an international conduit. But she chose to explain
what the Nahuatl speakers were saying. By the end of that hour, she had
made her full value felt. Afterward, Cortés claimed that he took her aside
along with Aguilar, and promised her “more than her liberty” if she would
help him find and speak to this Moctezuma of whom he now had heard so
much. He meant that he would make her rich; it was what he promised
everyone who agreed to help him.22 But it is doubtful that Marina acted out
of any interest in the riches promised by an interloper whom she had no real
reason to trust. Her motivations would have been quite different. As it was,
she was the concubine of Puertocarrero—a man with so few morals that he
had once even abandoned a Spanish girl whom he had persuaded to run
away with him. When he tired of his Indian slave girl, or when he was
killed, Marina would be passed on and might even become the common
property of all the men. Alternatively, she could speak aloud, earning the
respect and gratitude of every Spaniard there, especially their leader. If she
did that, the group might survive longer, and she along with them, for if she
rendered it possible for them to communicate with the local people, she
could help stave off battles, gain important information, and aid them in
trading more efficiently for food. She does not seem to have hesitated.
Within days, the Spaniards were calling her “doña” Marina, a title reserved
for highborn ladies in Europe. Over the months to come, she proved herself
to be both courageous and charming; she even managed to laugh at times.
Mexicans today generally consider Marina to have been a traitor to
Native American people. But at the time, if anyone had asked her if she
should perhaps show more loyalty to her fellow Indians, she would have
been genuinely confused. In her language, there was no word that was the
equivalent of “Indians.” Mesoamerica was the entire known world; the only
term for “people native to the Americas” would have been “human beings.”
And in her experience, human beings most definitely were not all on the
same side. The Mexica were her people’s enemies. It was they who had
seen to it that she was torn from her family, and their merchants who had
sold her in Xicallanco. Now this relatively small group of newcomers
wanted to make war on the Mexica. No one in her world could have
imagined that she owed loyalty to the Moctezuma’s people. While she
lived, and for many years afterwards, no one expressed surprise at the
course she chose. Only modern people who lacked knowledge of her
situation would later say that she was some sort of traitor.
Gradually, Marina and others of her generation did begin to understand
that the people on the American side of the ocean were profoundly different
in some regards from the people on the other side of the sea, and that the
former were eventually going to lose to the latter. None of them, however,
could see that at first contact. The indigenous people struggled with
categories and eventually began to refer to themselves as nican titlaca
(NEE-kan tee-TLA-kah, “we people here”), whenever they needed to
distinguish themselves as a whole from the outsiders who were arriving.
Moctezuma’s messengers, for example, told him that the interpreter the
strangers had with them was not one of the ones from across the sea, but
rather “one of us people here.” They explained that she was from the
eastern lands; they never meant that she was “one of us” in the sense of
being one of the Mexicas’ own. It would not have occurred to them to
expect any loyalty from her, any more than they would have from anyone
else whom they had made war against.23
In the first few days after Cortés discovered that he had such a
marvelous translation chain at his disposal, he worked hard to convince
Moctezuma’s messengers that he needed to be taken to meet their lord in
person. Meanwhile, the emissaries worked hard gathering information and
preparing their report. Sometimes they questioned Cortés though Marina
and Aguilar; sometimes they spied on the Spanish encampment, watching
them race their horses up and down the hard-packed sand of low tide. Soon
they decided they had as much information as they could glean easily, and
they departed.24
The Spaniards covered themselves with stinking grease to try to ward off
the mosquitoes that swarmed them, driving them nearly mad. And then they
waited.
***
M��� ����� �����, it would become an accepted fact that the
indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortés to be a god,
arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was
understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and
quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom
over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily
acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated so many times, in so many
reputable sources, that the whole world came to believe it. Moctezuma was
not known for his cheerful disposition. Even he, however, had he known
what people would one day say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with
some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.25
What really happened when the messengers returned with their report
was that he sent scouts out to every important town between Tenochtitlan
and the coast, and then set up a veritable war room. This is exactly what one
would expect him to have done, given his history as a ferociously
successful tlatoani who believed whole-heartedly in order, discipline, and
information. Years later, a man who had been young at the time
remembered: “A report of everything that was happening was given and
relayed to Moctezuma. Some of the messengers would be arriving as others
were leaving. There was no time when they weren’t listening, when reports
weren’t being given.”26 The scouts even repeated a summary of the
religious instruction that was being regularly offered by the Spanish priest
and translated by Aguilar and Marina. When the Spaniards later got to
Tenochtitlan and tried to deliver a sermon to Moctezuma, he cut them off,
explaining that he was already familiar with their little speech, his
messengers having presented it to him in full.27
Only one European recorded the events in writing as they were
unfolding—or at least, only one account from that time has survived.
Hernando Cortés himself penned a series of letters that he sent back to the
king of Spain between 1519 and 1525. These are our only existing direct
source, all other commentaries having been written years later when their
authors were older men and the events deep in the past. And in his letters,
written on the spot, Cortés never claimed that he was perceived as a god.
The idea first appeared, albeit in somewhat incoherent form, in some
writings by Europeans in the 1540s. Fray Toribio de Benavente wrote of the
indigenous observers’ purported understanding: “Their god was coming,
and because of the white sails, they said he was bringing by sea his own
temples.” Then, remembering that he had earlier claimed that all the
Spaniards were supposed to have been gods, the priest quickly added,
“When they disembarked, they said that it was not their god, but rather
many gods.”28 It was a deeply satisfying concept to this European author
and his readers. In such a scenario, the white men had nothing to feel
remorse about, no matter how much the Indians had suffered since their
arrival. The Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been
worshipped. Indeed, could there be a European man living who didn’t like
the idea, who didn’t feel flattered and pleased by the notion? In years to
come, other invaders would try out comparable assertions. John Smith, for
example, would claim that in Virginia, the local chief’s daughter had been
wildly in love with him and had been willing to sacrifice her very life for
his. He didn’t mention that when he had known her, she had been only ten
years old. And interestingly, he only told the story of her adulation when
she and her English husband had both been dead for years and couldn’t
possibly refute what he said; in the report he sent back to London during the
period in question, he said nothing remotely similar. There are, in fact,
numerous such tales in the annals of colonialism.29
In retrospect, the story of Cortés being mistaken for a god seems so
obviously self-serving and even predictable that one has to wonder why it
was believed for so long. In a fascinating turn of events, by the 1560s
and’70s, some of the Indians themselves were beginning to offer up the
story as fact. The first ones to do so were the students of the very
Franciscan friars who had originally touted the idea. The young indigenous
writers were from elite families, the same ones who, forty or fifty years
earlier had lost everything with the arrival of the Spaniards. And they were
longing for an explanation. How had their once all-powerful fathers and
grandfathers sunk so low? They were intimately acquainted with both sets
of people—their Mexica families and their European teachers. They knew
them both too well to believe that their own people were simply inferior,
necessarily weaker or less intelligent than Europeans. Their own personal
experience taught them that this was definitely not the case.
Here, however, was an explanation. God had been on the side of the
Christians, of course; their own immediate ancestors had been trapped by
their own loyalty to a blinding faith, tragically imprisoned in their own
religiosity. The students of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún,
author of the Florentine Codex, beginning in the 1560s and’70s, wrote
down what no indigenous person had ever said before—namely, that their
forefathers had been paralyzed even before 1519 by the appearance of a
variety of terrifying omens. Interestingly, the stories they told bore a distinct
resemblance to the narrations in certain Greek and Latin texts that were in
the Franciscan school library.30 They waxed eloquent in their tales of pillars
of fire and a trembling king. A few pages later, the students turned to a new
phase of the project and began to write down what certain old men who had
actually participated in the events had to say, and then both the substance
and the tone of their writings changed dramatically. They became much
more specific and the indigenous people they described much more
pragmatic. “At the first shot the wall did not give way, but the second time
it began to crumble,” someone remembered, for instance. Gone were the
pillars of fire.31
The students weren’t done with the subject of influential prophecies,
however. They liked an idea that one of their teachers had offered, which
was that the great schism that had occurred in ancient Tula, present in so
many of their early histories, had really been a battle between a brutal
leader who believed in human sacrifice and a peaceful one who did not—
one who was in effect an early Christian, unbeknownst even to himself. The
group that had wandered away to the east had been following the peaceful
leader. If they decided the man’s name was not Huemac, as a leading
culture hero of numerous ancient stories was called, but rather Quetzalcoatl,
as the former teacher fray Toribio was the first one to suggest, the story
would work perfectly, as one of the many year signs associated with the god
Quetzalcoatl corresponded to 1519. The mortal man could have become a
god and been expected to return then. Unfortunately, the students got the
matter a bit confused. From their people’s own records, they knew of the
arrivals along the coast in the two preceding years, and they said it was the
second captain who was thought to be Quetzalcoatl returning from the
east.32 That one was actually Juan de Grijalva, sailing in 1518, not Cortés
arriving in 1519. But no matter. The gist of the story was there, and it could
be taken up in generations to come and embellished as much as future
authors saw fit to do.
None of the original Nahua histories written down by the earliest
generation of students in the privacy of their own homes had said anything
like this. In fact, none of the elements ring true, given what we know about
Mexica culture. The Mexica did not believe in people becoming gods, or in
gods coming to earth only in one particular year, or in anybody having a
preordained right to conquer them. They didn’t consider Quetzalcoatl to be
their major deity (like the Cholulans did) or originally associate him with an
abhorrence of human sacrifice. When we add the fact that we can actually
watch the story’s birth and evolution in European-authored and European-
influenced works, the case for its being a later fabrication seems closed.33
However, even if the notion that the Mexica mistook Cortés for the god
Quetzalcoatl is discounted, the fact remains that they did refer to the
Spaniards for a number of years as teules. Beginning a generation later,
Spanish writers delighted in this, as it was a bastardization of the Nahuatl
word teotl, meaning “god.” But the word carried other connotations as well.
In religious ceremonies, a teotl was a representative of the god, destined for
sacrifice. In certain other contexts, the word implied strange and unearthly
power, such as some sorcerers or priests might wield. At the time, the
Europeans seemed to understand this: in an early letter back to Cortés, the
Spanish king instructed him to take special care to convert the Indians’
political leaders (their “señores,” he said) as well as their priests (their
“teules,” he called them).34 Later generations, however, forgot what the
Spaniards had initially understood about the word’s use, probably because
they hadn’t seen the chaos and confusion of the earliest interactions. In
general, the Nahuas struggled to come up with terms that would apply to
the Spaniards. In their world, everybody was named for the place from
which they came (the Tenochca from Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalteca from
Tlaxcala, the Culhuaque from Culhuacan, etc.). If a person’s geographical
origins were unknown, then it wasn’t clear what to call him. The
newcomers presented a problem in this regard. The only element that
rapidly became clear was that the strangers considered themselves to be
representatives of their god. That made sense to the Nahuas. Until they
were certain what the name of the newcomers’ god was—and the strangers
used a confusing array of terms—it apparently seemed most logical to refer
to them by a word that conveyed they were the representatives of a revered
divinity.35
Their choice of labels apparently left even some of their own
grandchildren believing that the white men really had been considered gods.
The fact remained that those grandchildren desperately needed to come to
terms with the conquest. That their ancestors had been benighted savages,
as the Spaniards sometimes said, they knew to be false. But their ancestors
could perhaps have made a mistake of this nature, and if they had, it might
explain a great deal.36
Indigenous youths of the late 1500s had no way of knowing the deep
history of either the Old World or the New. They had no way of knowing
that in the Old World, people had been full time farmers for ten thousand
years. Europeans had by no means been the first farmers, but they were
nevertheless the cultural heirs of many millennia of sedentary living. They
therefore had the resultant substantially greater population and a panoply of
technologies—not just metal arms and armor, but also ships, navigation
equipment, flour mills, barrel-making establishments, wheeled carts,
printing presses, and many other inventions that rendered them more
powerful than those who did not have such things. In the New World,
people had been full-time farmers for perhaps three thousand years. It was
almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient
Sumerians. The Mesopotamians were stunningly impressive—but they
could not have defeated Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire
working in combination with the Pope. Had the young indigenous writers of
the late sixteenth century known all of this, it would have been a relief to
their minds. But that relief was denied them. And so they participated in
constructing a version of events that Moctezuma would have derided—but
that he had no power to change from the land of the dead.
***
I� ��� ����� ������ �� 1519, neither the Spaniards nor the Mexica
knew what stories would someday be told about them. At the time, both sets
of people had pressing realities to contend with. Neither could spare time or
energy for philosophical musings about the future, historical memory, or the
nature of truth.
First of all, the Spaniards were hungry. Marina bargained as effectively
as she could. From the people living nearby, she bought cages full of
turkeys, and some of the other women plucked and stewed them. She
bought tortillas and salt, fruits and vegetables. The people grew used to
dealing with her and sought her out. They did not have an “r” in their
language, so they heard her name as “Malina.” They added the honorific “-
tzin” to the end, and it became “Malintzin,” which sometimes came out as
“Malintze.” As the Spanish speakers did not have the “tz” sound in their
language, they heard the “Malinchi” or sometimes “Malinche.” Thus when
they did not call her “doña Marina,” they called her “Malinche,” and so she
has remained to historians ever since. What the Spaniards found
disorienting was that to the various groups they dealt with, this woman
seemed to be the most important member of their party. They did not even
seem to see Jerónimo de Aguilar, and they called Hernando Cortés himself
“Malinche,” as if her name must be his name, too, though the Spaniards felt
it should have been the other way around.37
Cortés knew he was dependent on Malintzin, and he did not like it. In
his letters home to the king, he referred to her as little as possible. He might
not have referred to her at all, but then his whole story would have been
suspect, as there were moments where an interpreter simply had to have
been present in order for events to have transpired as they did. What Cortés
did not want others to realize was that if Malintzin hadn’t been there, they
could not have succeeded. Of course, it was possible that if she had not
appeared when she did, someone else might have filled this role later. After
all, women who had been ripped from their homes and had no love for the
Mexica were now scattered all across Mesoamerica. But Cortés had been
especially lucky, and on some level he knew this. Not all women who hated
the Mexica spoke both Nahuatl and Yucatec Mayan. And of those who did,
not all of them were the daughters of noblemen and spoke with such
finesse, with the ability to understand and use the high register of the
nobility, which even had its own grammar. Nor did all of them have such a
subtle understanding of complex situations. It soon became clear that
Malintzin actually had a special gift for languages. She began to learn
Spanish from Jerónimo de Aguilar, without a blackboard or a grammar
book. Within a few months, she no longer needed her teacher at all.38
In the meantime, she helped Cortés to lay his plans. Messengers came
back from Moctezuma twice, each time bearing gifts and promising more in
the future, but also categorically refusing to escort Cortés and his party to
Tenochtitlan. There was a drought, said Moctezuma’s emissaries, and the
king could not entertain them in the style to which they were undoubtedly
accustomed. Cortés, however, was absolutely determined to get there. He
had decided that he would either conquer this city, or if that was impossible,
then he would trade for marvelous goods and bring back specific
intelligence of the place to Spain; in either case, he would be hailed as a
great discoverer. Undaunted, he considered what he had learned from some
nearby Totonac villagers and from Malintzin herself—namely, that
Moctezuma had many enemies who would help him in his travels. He could
proceed by making his way first to a rebellious Totonac town, and then go
on to Tlaxcala, where the people hated the Mexica. There, his forces would
have access to food and water and other support.
There was a serious obstacle, however—namely, that he had left the
Caribbean without the governor’s permission, so he was, technically
speaking, an outlaw.39 The governor had at first assigned him to go on an
exploratory expedition, which was the reason that more than four hundred
landless men had flocked to join him. At the last moment, however, the
governor began to fear that Cortés planned to exceed his authority and
attempt to establish some sort of fiefdom on the mainland, one that would
cut the governor out of all the profits. He sent a messenger to convey that
he was revoking his permission. What could Cortés do but leave
immediately and pretend he had never received the word? (The messenger
himself he dealt with by bribing him to come along to find the rumored land
of riches.) Yet even if his venture into the heart of the mainland succeeded,
he was still liable to be arrested when he returned. Even the permit he
pretended to believe was still in effect only gave him the right to explore,
nothing more.
Cortés knew Spanish law well—some historians even believe he had
attended law school for a while—and he clearly had been trained by a
notary. He knew that the Spanish legal apparatus was based on the idea that
an organic unity of purpose bound together a leader and his subjects. Any
leader, even a king, could be set aside by “all good men of the land” if he
was behaving outrageously. In that case, the good men of the land were not
traitors when they refused to obey, but were acting instead for the common
good. Cortés therefore needed a citizenry to demand that he lead them in
settling the land. He arranged for all the Spaniards present to band together
and sign a document insisting that they found a Spanish town (it was to be
called the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, or the “Rich City of the True Cross”),
and that he lead them where they wanted to go—which was to Tenochtitlan.
There was more to do, however, before they set out. Cortés asked
Puertocarrero, the most influential man on the expedition because of his
high social status, to return to Spain and speak directly to the king, in order
to ensure that the Caribbean governor not prejudice him against their case
too much. This was not just a maneuver on Cortés’s part to get rid of the
man who kept him from having Malintzin all to himself. Crucially,
Puertocarrero’s high status meant that he could take responsibility for
sending more men, supplies, horses, and arms. Five hundred Europeans
could not bring down the Mexica, but Renaissance Europe could, so Cortés
needed to make sure that more of mainland Europe was on its way to
support him. At this point Puertocarrero and his party left. Finally, Cortés
ordered that the remaining ships be beached. They weren’t permanently
destroyed, but leaving would now be a major undertaking requiring many
weeks of repair work. It was a way of preventing discontented men from
easily going home.40
With this done, Cortés led the ascent from the hot coastal lands up into
the mountains. Two Totonacs guided them toward Tlaxcala. They entered a
pine wood, where it was unexpectedly cold at night. Many of the men
weren’t dressed for it, and a few of the enslaved Indians the Spaniards had
brought from the Caribbean died after a drenching rain with hail. At length
the path began to lead downhill, into a valley. There they came upon a nine-
foot-high wall built of stone, stretching to the right and left as far as they
could see. It was shaped like an extended pyramid: at its base, it was twenty
feet across, and at the top it culminated in a flat walkway only a foot and a
half wide. This, it seemed, was the Tlaxcalan border. Despite the forbidding
boundary, the Totonacs continued to insist that all would be well. The
Tlaxcalans, they explained, truly hated the Mexica, for although they had
remained independent, they had done this by participating in the dreaded
Flower Wars against them for years.41
The travelers soon found an opening in the wall, and Cortés along with
half a dozen men rode forward to explore. They soon caught sight of about
fifteen warriors up ahead and called out to them. Cortés sent one of the
riders galloping back in case reinforcements were needed, and then he and
the others approached the Indians. Suddenly, hundreds of warriors seemed
to rise out of nowhere and surrounded them completely. Cortés actually
claimed it was thousands in his letter home, but he always exaggerated
numbers for dramatic effect whenever anything went wrong; it wouldn’t
have been possible for the Tlaxcalans to have placed a guard of thousands
at the entrance, given their total population. In any event, two of the horses
were killed and their riders gravely injured before more of the Spanish
cavalry approached and the Tlaxcalans retreated. Cortés had learned a
crucial lesson: a handful of armored men was not enough to withstand an
onslaught, not even if they were mounted on horseback. His men simply
had to move in larger groups in order to remain relatively invulnerable.
Late in the day, some Tlaxcalan messengers arrived. They apologized
for the incident and blamed it on foolish and rambunctious Otomí who lived
in their territory. They claimed to desire friendship and asked to tour the
impressive camp. Malintzin had misgivings; she wasn’t sure what to expect.
A huge Tlaxcalan force attacked at daybreak. The Spaniards were ready
for them, and with their armor on, they could inflict more casualties than
they received, but they were weakened from their travels and distraught at
this reception. They had to fight without food or respite all day long,
surrounded by a sea of enemies who only withdrew when darkness made it
impossible for them to tell friend from foe. That night, Cortés took the
thirteen remaining horsemen galloping over the plain to the nearby hills,
where lighted fires signaled the presence of villages. “I burnt five or six
small places of about a hundred inhabitants,” he later wrote to the king.42
The next morning, the Tlaxcalan warriors attacked once more, in such
numbers that they were able to enter the camp and engage in hand-to-hand
combat. It took four hours for Spanish armor and weaponry to drive them
back. This time, the Spanish even used their guns, which were really tiny
cannons that couldn’t be aimed well but could scatter grapeshot with deadly
effect. “The enemy was so massed and numerous,” commented one of the
Spaniards later, “that every shot wrought havoc among them.”43 Many
dozens of Tlaxcalan men died that day, each one swept up into the arms of
his comrades and carried from the battlefield. Yet only one Spaniard died.
Before dawn the next day, Cortés once again led the horsemen rapidly
out of the camp, this time in the opposite direction. “I burnt more than ten
villages,” he reported. For the next two days, the Tlaxcalan chiefs
sporadically sent emissaries suing for peace, but they somehow sounded
unconvincing, perhaps because no gifts were forthcoming. Cortés tortured
one of them, demanding the truth through the interpreter, Malintzin—who
was quickly ascertaining that the Christian god was not truly one of peace.
The emissaries learned nothing, and Cortés cut the fingers from the hands
of a number of them, so that “they would see who we were,” as he said, and
then sent them home.44
The Indians attacked again, and again were driven back. After a few
days of silence, Cortés took his now-rested horsemen out again during the
hours of darkness. “As I took them by surprise, the people rushed out
unarmed, and the women and children ran naked through the streets, and I
began to do them some harm.”45 He had Malintzin on horseback with him
and had her shout aloud that the strangers offered peace and friendship, if
they chose to accept it. Something she said convinced them, for the war
ended that night. Peace talks began in earnest in the morning.
Tlaxcala was in effect four countries in one. The altepetl consisted of
four well-populated sub-altepetls. Each had its own king, but they were so
tightly bound by intermarriage and tradition that they remained an
unbreakable unit in their relations with outsiders. So it was that they alone
had been able to resist Mexica aggression. For many years, they had been
allies with nearby Cholula and Huexotzinco, but recently these two, facing
the possibility of destruction by Moctezuma, had gone over to his side and
fought against the Tlaxcalans. The Tlaxcalans remembered proudly that
they had gotten word of the defection while they were playing a ball game
and then had roundly defeated the Huexotzincan traitors. “We pursued them
right to their own homes,” they bragged in their annals.46 Their courage
notwithstanding, they were still surrounded by enemies, their trade routes
cut off. The Mexica could not bring them down without losing more men
than they could spare, but they did not really need to, because they could
use the traditional enmity to fuel the ritual Flower Wars that often ended in
death.
Over the years, the Tlaxcalans’ survival had depended on their ability to
prove that their warriors were the match of anybody’s. Although they would
have been aware of the approach of an expedition of over four hundred
strangers, they would not have had a ring of spies and messengers bringing
them detailed reports or anyone to explain to them ahead of time the
newcomers’ hope that they would help bring down the Mexica. It fell to
Malintzin to convey the situation to them. Fortunately, until the recent wars
had cut them off, Malintzin’s people in Coatzacoalcos had been among
Tlaxcala’s trade partners. She apparently presented herself as a gracious and
authoritative noblewoman, for they decided that they could trust her.
The Tlaxcalans brought the Spaniards to the imposing palace of the
tlatoani Xicotencatl (Shee-ko-TEN-kat) of Tizatlan, one of the two largest
sub-altepetls. There, they offered the newcomers women, ranging from
princesses whom it was intended the lords should marry, to slave girls
meant as a form of tribute. Cortés gave the most important princess—a
daughter of Xicotencatl himself—to Pedro de Alvarado, a charismatic man
with a bright blond beard who was one of his lieutenants. One of the minor
lords’ daughters was given to Jerónimo de Aguilar, and the rest were
distributed to other men in the company who were proving their worth in
the eyes of Cortés. Not many years later, Tlaxcalan artists painted a record
of the politically important event on Tizatlan’s palace walls and made
another copy on bark paper. They wished the early alliance to be recalled in
perpetuity. Strings of young women being given to the Spaniards, together
with the names of the most important ones, looked out from the painting;
they personified the treaty of alliance that the Tlaxcalans believed had been
made.47
Meanwhile, Cortés was bargaining for more through the women. He
wanted several thousand warriors to go with him to Tenochtitlan. The
Tlaxcalans agreed. It was the kind of alliance they had had in mind when
they offered Xicotencatl’s daughter as a bride to one of the strangers’
leaders. When the company set out, it was at least three times larger than it
had been before. It gave the appearance of an army of victory.48
***
A� ���� �����, Moctezuma decided he could not delay any longer what
he had so dreaded having to do. He sent messengers offering annual tribute
—including gold, silver, slaves, and textiles—to be delivered as the
strangers desired. The only provision was that they not enter his lands, as he
could not host so large a company. Moctezuma and his council assumed
that this arrangement was what the foreigners’ sought. It was certainly what
the tlatoani himself would have sought in like circumstances. He had
hesitated to make the offer before because it would constitute such a drain
on his resources, and he had hoped there might be another way of turning
the newcomers aside. What he absolutely could not afford, politically
speaking, was a confrontation with such a force anywhere close to home.
He knew from his sources that the strangers won their battles. Even if he
collected a mighty army and did manage to bring them and their allies
down, his kingdom would still be lost, for the casualties would be immense,
beyond anything calculable from past experience. And if he could not
deliver an easy victory at the heart of his kingdom, his allies would not
continue to stand with him. Under no circumstances could the Mexica be
made to appear weak in the central basin; it would be political death to
them. Moctezuma could not afford a battle; he did not even want the
strangers to come close enough for comparisons to be drawn. In later years,
scholars would delight in arguing that Moctezuma did nothing at this point
because he was paralyzed by some aspect of his culture which the scholars
could perceive and specify (he was relying on man–god communication
rather than man–man, or perhaps unable to fathom warfare to the death) but
there is no genuine evidence that overwhelming fatalism had anything to do
with it. Moctezuma had, as he had always had throughout his adult life, a
pragmatic agenda.49
However, his plan failed. The strangers and their newfound friends, the
Tlaxcalans, turned down his offer of tribute and continued to approach.
They stopped in Cholula, now a subject town of Moctezuma’s. He gave
orders to the Cholulans that they not feed the strangers well. It seems that
he also commanded them to attack the party as they left the city, when they
would be forced to pass through certain narrow ravines as they entered the
ring of mountains surrounding the central valley. At least, Cortés claimed
that Malintzin gathered this news from an old woman who lived in the city.
It is eminently logical that Moctezuma would have done this: Cholula was
the last stop outside of the central valley, and the town was a new ally. He
had little regard for the lives of the people who lived there, and if their
attack failed, he could easily dissociate himself from it, both in his own
people’s eyes and those of the Spaniards. But perhaps he was too cautious
to order a confrontation even this close to home; we cannot be sure.
Whether he wanted a battle or not, the Tlaxcalans were spoiling for a fight.
They had not forgiven the recent turncoats in Cholula. If they could bring
down the present chiefly line and install one more sympathetic to Tlaxcala,
the result would be of lasting benefit to them. It may, indeed, have been the
Tlaxcalans who planted the story of the planned attack, and the Spaniards
were merely their dupes. However it came about, the Spaniards and the
Tlaxcalans combined forces in a terrible rampage. The temple to
Quetzalcoatl was burned—Quetzalcoatl was the primary protector god of
the Cholulans—as were most of the houses. “The destruction took two
days,” commented one Spaniard laconically.50
That business done, the combined Spanish and indigenous force moved
on. They safely traversed the mountain pass between the volcano
Popocatepetl (Smoking Mountain) and the snow-capped Iztaccihuatl (White
Woman) and entered the valley. As they approached the lakeside towns at
the center, the Spaniards—as well as many of the accompanying Indians—
began to feel a sensation of awe. A Spaniard named Bernal Díaz wrote of
his impressions many years later: “These great towns and cues [pyramids]
and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an
enchanted vision from the tale of Amadís.” (Amadís was a legendary
knight, and a book about him had recently become a best seller in Spain.)
“Indeed,” the Spaniard remembered, “Some of our soldiers asked if it were
not all a dream.” When the men stopped to rest at the town of Iztapalapan,
they were literally stunned. The lord’s palace there rivaled buildings in
Spain. Behind it a flower garden cascaded down to a lovely pond: “Large
canoes could come into the garden [pond] from the lake, through a channel
they had cut…. Everything was shining with lime and decorated with
different kinds of stonework and paintings which were a marvel to gaze
on…. I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be
discovered in the whole world.”51
Bernal Díaz was writing these words as an old man. He had reason to
feel a bit maudlin as he thought of his lost youth, and then also recalled all
that had happened since. At the end of the paragraph, he almost visibly
flinched with shame. “Today all that I then saw is overthrown and
destroyed; nothing is left standing.”
***
O� ��� ������� of November 8, 1519, the Spaniards and the
Tlaxcalans crossed the wide, clean-swept causeway that led straight to the
city. Cortés rode on horseback towards the front of the cavalcade;
Malintzin, her small shoulders squared, walked at his side. Moctezuma had
wisely decided to handle the situation by putting on a grand show of two
brother monarchs meeting. At the gate at the edge of the island, hundreds of
dignitaries had gathered, including multiple representatives of each of the
central altepetls. Each person in turn stepped forward and made the gesture
of touching the ground and then kissing the earth upon it. The joint
performance was a classic Nahua method of expressing the strength of a
united body politic. The chiefs were nothing if not patient as they carried it
through. But Cortés was different. “I stood there waiting for nearly an hour
until everyone had performed his ceremony,” he said huffily.52
Then Cortés and his company were led across a bridge and found
themselves looking at a broad, straight avenue leading to the heart of the
metropolis. It put the tiny, mazelike streets of European cities to shame, and
the small downtown area of Tlaxcala also paled in comparison. For the
newcomers, there was a moment of doubt as they tried to make sense of the
scene, and then the various elements resolved themselves before their eyes.
Not far down that wide sun-lit road, there stood a royal company, which
now moved toward them. Every man there was dressed in bejeweled cloaks,
and at the center came Moctezuma, the tlatoani, speaker for his people.
Anyone could see that he was the high king. Over him his retainers held a
magnificent canopy, a great arc pointing toward the sky, its bits of gold and
precious stones glinting in the light.53 It was as if he carried with him a
reflection of the sun itself.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Chapter 4
This paragraph captures a moment in the life of the woman we now know as Malinche, or doña
Marina, a slave who was given to Cortés and became his translator and mistress. Because she
left no letters or diaries of her own, it is difficult to piece together her biography, but it has been
done, triangulating between her actions, the records of the Spaniards, and the comments made
by other Nahuas. For the full story, as well as discussion of the limited sources available to us,
see Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
For a range of names found in mundane sources recording ordinary aspects of life in the early
years after conquest, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 118–22. “Little Old Woman” for instance was the name of a
five-year-old child in one document. The girl from Coatzacoalcos could also have been given a
calendrical name related to her birth, but this was uncommon in that area. See France V. Scholes
and Ralph L. Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians of Acalan-Tixchel: A Contribution to the History
and Ethnography of the Yucatan Peninsula (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1968 [1948]),
61–63.
Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, ed.
Arthur J. O Anderson and Charles Dibble (Salt Lake City: School of American Research and
University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 6:172. This is from a Mexica source, but the attitude was
typical of Nahuas in general. On the commonality of basic shared aspects of gender constructs
in central Mexico, see Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar and Other Narratives
of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2017). On the importance of women’s metaphorical association with the home, see Louise
Burkhart, “Mexica Women on the Home Front: Housework and Religion in Aztec Mexico,” in
Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
On women’s experience of enslavement through warfare or processes of appeasement, see
Camilla Townsend, “‘What Have You Done to Me, My Lover?’: Sex, Servitude and Politics
among the Pre-conquest Nahuas,” Americas 62 (2006): 349–89. On the annual purchase of
children to be sacrificed to Tlaloc, see Florentine Codex 2:42. Archaeology teaches us that these
children were probably either captive slaves themselves or the children of abused slaves, for
their remains demonstrate that they suffered from malnutrition. See Ximena Chávez Balderas,
“Sacrifice at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan and Its Role in Regard to Warfare,” in
Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places: War in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed.
Andrew Scherer and John Verano (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014).
Scholes and Roys, Maya Chontal Indians, 27–35; and Anne Chapman, “Port of Trade Enclaves
in Aztec and Maya Civilizations,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, ed. Karl Polyani,
Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 129–
42.
The Florentine Codex alludes to the trade in women and children being sent eastward from the
war zones where they were captured. See Florentine Codex 9:17–18. Scholars who have studied
this trade include Scholes and Roys, Maya Chontal Indians, 28–30, 56–59; Chapman, “Port of
Trade Enclaves,” 125–26; and Frances Berdan, “Economic Alternatives under Imperial Rule:
The Eastern Aztec Empire,” in Economies and Polities of the Aztec Realm, ed. Mary G. Hodge
and Michael E. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Archaeologists have
revealed that high concentrations of spindle whorls moved east as Mexica power grew and the
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
labor-intensive activities of spinning and weaving were pushed outward. See Elizabeth
Brumfiel, “Weaving and Cooking: Women’s Production in Aztec Mexico,” in Engendering
Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, ed. J. M Gero and M. W. Conkey (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 232–
33.
There is a substantial literature on Mesoamerican women and weaving. See Gabrielle Vail and
Andrea Stone, “Representations of Women in Postclassic and Colonial Maya Literature and
Art,” and Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett and Sharissse McCafferty, “Spindle Whorls: Household
Specialization at Ceren,” both in Ancient Maya Women, ed. Traci Ardren (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
See the account of the ship’s friar, Juan Díaz, in The Conquistadors: First Person Accounts of
the Conquest of Mexico, ed. Patricia de Fuentes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993)
and of Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain (London: Penguin, 1963). Fray Juan wrote a
report immediately after the expedition’s return, whereas Bernal Díaz wrote as an old man in his
eighties and included far less detail. (Indeed, some scholars believe he wasn’t really on that
expedition and wrote his report based on stories heard from others.) The Spanish chroniclers are
rarely in full agreement, each having their own specific agenda and their own lapses of memory
and interpretation. However, reading them together certainly gives a sense of what happened. I
would not presume to continue to tell the story in such detail, because there is too high a chance
of transforming the narrative into fiction. But for a brief period, I mention some of the details
the chroniclers included, to give the reader a sense of their experience as well as insight into
what the indigenous specifically observed.
We cannot really know exactly what the indigenous were thinking. The exchange I paint here I
deduce must have occurred from comments made by the Spaniards about the Indians’ apparent
concerns and questions (as articulated by the captive interpreter), and the Indians’ own actions,
both then and later.
It is the Spaniards who repeatedly tell us that in their expeditions along the coast, the Indians
always knew they were coming. Their statements to this effect fit perfectly with what we know
of Chontal culture—namely, that is was based on rapid canoe travel.
Díaz, The Conquest, 70.
Hernando Cortés tells largely the same story as Díaz about this battle—albeit less colorfully—in
his First Letter. See Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. Anthony Pagden (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1986), 19–
23.
This is not merely my own deduction. Cortés’s secretary later said they told him that their
position depended on their being perceived as stronger than all others in the region. Francisco
López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, ed. Lesley Byrd
Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 50. Cortés initially mentioned (in the
First Letter) that the number of indigenous bodies they could see out on the field was about 2
20.
Later, his secretary raised this number, and Díaz did so even more (mentioning 800). I think we
should go with the initial estimate, which is high enough from an indigenous perspective.
All sources, indigenous and Spanish, agree that this was the moment when the future translator
was transferred to Spanish power. A few sources say she was presented with a very small group
of other girls, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests that there were twenty of them, as
the Chontal were trying to make a definitive statement about submission, and twenty was a
culturally significant number for them, as well as for the Nahuas.
Some modern authors have liked to think that the Spaniards might have been inspired to give
her the name “Marina” because her indigenous name was “Malinalli,” but there is no evidence
for this. The Spaniards never asked captives what their “real” names were before they selected a
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
Christian name for them, nor did the Nahuas give the name “Malinalli,” because it boded bad
luck.
For more on the relationship between Cortés and Puertocarrero, see Ricardo Herren, Doña
Marina, la Malinche (Mexico City: Planeta, 1992), 26–27, as well as any of the major
biographies of Cortés.
Frances Kartunnen comments on the jarring effect on our modern sensibilities when we read of
the women’s baptisms immediately prior to their being distributed as concubines. See her
“Rethinking Malinche” in Indian Women in Early Mexico.
There is a great deal of misinformation available about this important figure. On Jerónimo de
Aguilar and on research materials that illuminate his life, see Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, 37
and 2
39.
We have no actual record of what Aguilar conveyed to Malintzin, but her later choices and
actions render it absolutely clear that she had been informed of the larger political context
relatively early on.
Louise Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature
(Albany, NY: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 2001), 3, 17. Burkhart is here translating a
segment of Pedro de Gante’s Nahuatl text, Doctrina cristiana en lengua Mexicana (1553).
Díaz and Cortés both mention the extraordinary rapidity with which the emissaries made their
appearance, and the Florentine Codex, book 12, tells us that Moctezuma had had certain spots
on the coast watched for a year; thus Spanish and indigenous sources confirm each other. For a
fascinating study of the way sources of a “nonliterate” people and sources left by European
colonizers can sometimes illuminate each other, see Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Cortés in his initial letters to the king barely mentions Marina, not wishing to give her much of
the credit for the enterprise. By the time his secretary wrote his biography of his employer, the
issue had to be dealt with as the public wanted to know how they had come by their by-then
famous translator. It is he who tells the story (though he assumes Marina acted as she did in
order to become rich); Gómara, Life, 56.
James Lockhart explores the use of the phrase in the introduction to We People Here: Nahuatl
Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Again, the Spanish chroniclers and the Florentine Codex confirm each other.
For a full scholarly study of this subject, see Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New
Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 659–87.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 94.
Díaz, Conquest, 222.
Fray Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolonia, Historia de los Indios de la Nueva
España (Madrid: Alianza, 1988), 107–8.
For a detailed study, see Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New
York: Hill & Wang, 2004).
Felipe Fernández Armesto, “Aztec Auguries and Memories of the Conquest of Mexico,
“Renaissance Studies 6 (1992). See also Stephen Colston, “‘No Longer Will There Be a
Mexico’: Omens, Prophecies and the Conquest of the Aztec Empire,” American Indian
Quarterly 5 (1985).
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 188.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 59.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
This is one of the major aspects of the work of Susan Gillespie, Aztec Kings: The Construction
of Rulership in Mexica History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989). I have studied the
evolution of the treatment of the subject in the works of certain European-influenced indigenous
historians; see, for instance, Camilla Townsend, “The Evolution of Alva Ixtlilxochiltl’s
Scholarly Life,” Colonial Latin American Review 23 (2014): 1–17.
This document is available in print: José Luis Martínez, ed., Documentos cortesianos (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 1:265–71. Part of the original survives in the
Archivo General de Indias in Seville.
For more on this, see Lockhart, introduction to We People Here, and Townsend, “Burying the
White Gods.”
Pedro de San Buenaventura, a former student of fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s at the school at
Tlatelolco, either wrote or heavily influenced the writing of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan in the
1570s, and there he partially embraced the story, albeit with qualifiers. Later, Chimalpahin also
partially embraced the story in the early 1600s, though he seems to have done so after reading
the work of Ixtlilxochitl, who was himself influenced by the Franciscan fray Juan de
Torquemada (see n. 33). See Camilla Townsend, Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of
Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chaps. 3
and 4.
It is Bernal Díaz who tells us that the Indians began to refer to Cortés as Malinchi or Malinche.
Nahuatl speakers interested in the unusual form of the vocative should consult Horacio Carochi,
Grammar of the Mexican Language, ed. James Lockhart (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2001 [1645]), 44–45. The usage (“Malintze”) is repeatedly attested in the Annals of
Tlatelolco.
Later court cases about other matters indirectly reveal these facts. For their enumeration and
analysis, see Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, 243 (n. 11).
The most penetrating analysis of Cortés’s background and of his choices in this moment remains
J. H. Elliott’s introduction to Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. Anthony Pagden (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
Traditionally, it was asserted that Cortés actually “burned his ships” to prevent returns. Serious
historians knew this to be false, but we did believe that he was purposely leaving them scuttled
at the shore. Matthew Restall has recently proven that in fact the ships were already in need of
repair and were simply brought onto the beach where they could be repaired later. See Matthew
Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).
This part of the story, in which the Tlaxcalans fought against the Spaniards with extraordinary
determination, is not often recounted in narratives of the conquest, which tend to focus on the
alliance the Tlaxcalans later proffered. But it is important to understand that the Mexica’s
enemies did not immediately rally around the Europeans. They did so only when it became clear
that it was their best option in a military sense. The details in all the available Spanish chronicles
corroborate this. For Flower Wars, see also chap. 2, n. 57.
Cortés, “Second Letter” in Letters from Mexico, 60. (This segment of Cortés’s report is
extremely detailed and continues for many pages.)
Díaz, Conquest, 1
49.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 61. Cortés says that he “cut off their hands.” Matthew Restall in When
Montezuma Met Cortés explains that the Europeans meant that they cut off the fingers;
otherwise, the victims would have died immediately.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 62. It is Díaz who tells us that the translator was brought into the midst
of the battles with them.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
Tlaxcalan annals as found in don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, Historia cronológica
de la Noble Ciudad de Tlaxcala, ed. Luis Reyes García and Andrea Martínez Baracs (Tlaxcala:
Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, 1995), 94–95. The best study of preconquest Tlaxcala
remains Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1967 [1952]), chap. 1.
For my own analysis of the Tlaxcalan conquest pictorials, see Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices,
63–76. For a full study, see Travis Kranz, “The Tlaxcalan Conquest Pictorials,” PhD diss.,
UCLA, Department of Art History, 2001.
For a study of the extraordinary difference the existence of indigenous allies made, see Michel
Oudijk and Matthew Restall, “Mesoamerican Conquistadors in the Sixteenth Century,” in Indian
Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, ed. Laura Matthew and
Michel Oudijk (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
For more on this, see Townsend, “Burying the White Gods” as well as Matthew Restall, Seven
Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Inga Clendinnen
promoted the idea that the Aztecs did not like to fight to the death in her article “‘Fierce and
Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations 33 (1991): 65–100.
Tzvetan Todorov contributed the notion that the indigenous participated primarily in man–god
communication in his The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper,
1984).
These were the words of Andrés de Tapia, printed in Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 36. For the
best treatment of the battle in Cholula, see Ross Hassig, “The Maid of the Myth: La Malinche
and the History of Mexico,” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 12 (1998): 101–33.
Díaz, Conquest, 214–15.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 84–85.
Cortés says little about what the monarch and his retainers wore; Díaz tells us more, in
describing the canopy, for instance, referring to gold, silver, pearls, and jade suspended from a
fan of green feathers. “It was a marvelous sight,” he rhapsodized (Conquest, 217). I do not
assume he is necessarily accurate in all the details he presents, merely that the monarch did
indeed walk beneath a highly symbolic construction. See Justyna Olko, Insignia of Rank in the
Nahua World: From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth century (Boulder: University Press of
Colorado, 2014). It is possible that Díaz either could not see well from a distance or
misremembered the event, and that what he saw was actually a headdress worn on a back frame
and thus suspended above Moctezuma, as such an arrangement was very typical.
- Halftitle page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- 1. The Trail from the Seven Caves (Before 1299)
- 2. People of the Valley (1350s–1450s)
- 3. The City on the Lake (1470–1518)
- 4. Strangers to Us People Here (1519)
- 5. A War to End All Wars (1520–1521)
- 6. Early Days (1520s–1550s)
- 7. Crisis: The Indians Talk Back (1560s)
- 8. The Grandchildren (1570s–1620s)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Glossary
A Note on Terminology, Translation, and Pronunciation
Introduction
Epilogue
Appendix: How Scholars Study the Aztecs
Annotated Bibliography of the Nahuatl Annals
Anónimo mexicano
Codex Aubin
Bancroft Dialogues
Cantares Mexicanos
Cristóbal de Castillo
Don Domingo de San Antonio Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin
Codex Chimalpopoca
Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca
Annals of Cuauhtinchan
Annals of Cuauhtitlan
Florentine Codex
Libro de los Guardianes
Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl
Annals of Juan Bautista
Legend of the Suns
Codex Mendoza
Annals of Puebla
José Fernando Ramírez
Annals of Tecamachalco
Codex Telleriano-Remensis
Texcoca Accounts of Conquest
Don Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc
Annals of Tlatelolco
Annals of Tlaxcala
Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca
Annals of Tula
Codex Xolotl
Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza
Notes
Prelims
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Townsend, Camilla, 1965– author.
Title: Fifth sun : a new history of the Aztecs / Camilla Townsend.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019003623 (print) | LCCN 2019004887 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190673079 (updf) |
ISBN 9780190673086 (epub) | ISBN 9780190673062 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Aztecs—History. | Aztecs—First contact with Europeans. | Aztecs—Historiography.
| Mexico—History—Conquest, 1519–1540.
Classification: LCC F1219.73 (ebook) | LCC F1219.73 .T67 2019 (print) | DDC 972—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003623
Title Page Art: Mexica government officials in full battle gear. The Bodleian Libraries, the University
of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 67r.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. United States of America
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003623
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
The Trail from the Seven Caves (Before 1299)
People of the Valley (1350s–1450s)
The City on the Lake (1470–1518)
Strangers to Us People Here (1519)
A War to End All Wars (1520–1521)
Early Days (1520s–1550s)
Crisis: The Indians Talk Back (1560s)
The Grandchildren (1570s–1620s)
5
A War to End All Wars
1520–1521
Temples burn in war. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch.
Selden. A.1, folio 6r.
The smell of the burning bodies was rank in the air. But worse was the smell of the
miccatzintli, the poor dead woman who had not been moved for days. She lay where she
was, because there was no one left in the palace strong enough to cope with the problem.
The sickness, like nothing ever seen before, had struck not long after the unwelcome
strangers had been forced to leave Tenochtitlan. Now Moctezuma’s young daughter looked
at her sisters lying with her on the soiled sleeping mats. They were still alive. When they
looked back at her, their dark eyes reflected her own terror. Their faces, their arms, all their
parts were covered with the vile sores. But they were beginning to heal; they did not seem
to be at the point of death. Not like before, in the fevered haze, when she thought she knew
they were all perishing, all disappearing—it was the same word.1
***
N��� �� ��� royal children had ever known a day’s hunger until now.
Even through this scourge, they had had good care as long as there were
any servants left to tend to them: their good fortune had helped them
survive. It helped that they were grown girls, too. Later, Moctezuma’s
daughter would find that her younger siblings—children recently born to
the newest wives—had died.2 Nor were they the only ones gone. Others had
been “erased”—as she would have described it—weeks before the pox
struck. Two of her brothers had been accidentally killed when she herself
was rescued from the strangers,3 the night the Spaniards were ejected.
People said that her father, the Lord Moctezuma himself, had been found
strangled by the Spaniards like a common criminal.4 It was probably true.
However it had happened, he was gone, as were the others. Like the heroes
in the songs, they would never come back. Time on earth was fleeting, the
singers always said. “Are we born twice on this earth?” the singers called
out when people died. And the chorus knew the tragic, angry, tear-laden
response, “No!” The child understood what they meant now.
Tecuichpotzin (Tek-weech-PO-tzin, Lordly Daughter) was about eleven
years old.5 She had experienced so much horror in the past year that her
mind had almost certainly chosen to forget some of it, as she needed to use
the wits she had left to make it from day to day. It had been a joyous
moment when the Spaniards left, when they were pushed out of the
seething, resentful city and forced to flee for their lives. If she had known
then that the ordeal was far from over, that the worst was yet to come, she
might not have found the fortitude to forge ahead and join her people in
putting their world back together. But she was eleven, with a child’s zest for
living, and she had her beloved sisters at her side. And of course she had
not known that the sickness stalked them. So when the Spaniards left, she—
like all the other women—reached for a broom and began the holy act of
sweeping.6 She swept the cobwebs, both literal and figurative, out the door.
***
H�� ������ ����� Tecuichpotzin, she undoubtedly would have said
that the problems had started even before the strangers and their Tlaxcalan
allies had crossed the causeway into her world. Her father’s temper had
been frayed for months before that moment, as he had struggled to
determine the best course of action. He could not afford the casualties of a
battle with the newcomers so close to home, in front of all their allies. His
offers of tribute, no matter how great or dedicated to what god, had proven
ineffective in turning the marching army from its course. Eventually he
determined that there was nothing to be done but to welcome them, even act
as though he expected them—and gather as much information as he could.
There had been tensions from the earliest moments of their arrival when
Hernando Cortés dismounted from his horse, took a few steps forward, and
made as if to embrace Moctezuma. The tlatoani’s shocked retainers had
stepped forward quickly to prevent such marked disrespect. They waited
nervously as gifts were exchanged. Cortés presented a necklace of pearls
and cut glass. Moctezuma signaled that a servant bring forth a necklace of
red snail shells, hung with beautifully crafted shrimp made of gold. Then he
gave orders that the newcomers follow him, as he would speak with the
leaders indoors.7
To this day we do not know exactly what the great men said to each
other. Tecuichpotzin did not hear what passed between them; few did. A
year later, Cortés made the remarkable claim that Moctezuma had
immediately and contentedly surrendered his kingdom to the newcomers,
on the grounds that an ancestor of his had gone away generations before,
and that he and his people had long expected that his descendants would
return and claim the kingdom. Cortés added that a few days later (because
he doubted that he really had full control) he had placed Moctezuma under
house arrest and never let him walk free again. Cortés’s statements would
be utterly mystifying—except that they were absolutely necessary for him
to make at the time. When he wrote of these events a year later, the Mexica
people had ousted him and all his forces from the city. At that point, he was
desperately trying to orchestrate a conquest from near the coast, in
conjunction with indigenous allies and newly arrived Spaniards. He did not
want to look like a loser, but instead like a loyal servant to the Spanish
monarch who had already accomplished great things and would soon do
more. According to Spanish law, he was only in the right in launching this
war in the name of the king … if in fact he was attempting to retake a part
of the kingdom that was in rebellion. He had no authority to stir up trouble
by making war against a foreign state that had just ejected him. Thus it was
essential that the Mexica people were understood to have accepted Spanish
rule in the first place, so that their present choices could be interpreted as
acts of rebellion.8
When Cortés’s men wrote about these events in later years, they often
forgot what they were supposed to say. Cortés, for example, claimed that
his control had been complete from the beginning, and he asserted that he
had ended human sacrifice. “While I stayed … I did not see a living
creature killed or sacrificed.” But Bernal Díaz admitted, “The great
Moctezuma continued to show his accustomed good will towards us, but
never ceased his daily sacrifices of human beings. Cortés tried to dissuade
him but met with no success.”9 Another man seemed to remember mid-
paragraph that Moctezuma was supposed to have been their prisoner. “[His
people] brought him river and sea fish of all kinds, besides all kinds of fruit
from the sea coast as well as the highlands. The kinds of bread they brought
were greatly varied…. He was not served on gold or silver because he was
in captivity, but it is likely that he had a great table service of gold and
silver.”10
It is more than likely that Cortés had heard about the Mexica history of
schisms and migrations through Malintzin or perhaps others. Moctezuma
knew well that his own ancestors were invaders and that there had been
other waves of invaders, some of whom had moved on or turned back. It
would make sense for him to believe—or at least seem to believe, in front
of his people—that the strangers were other descendants of his own
fearsome ancestors, in short, that these visitors were long-lost relatives,
whose existence did not surprise him at all. Such a scenario makes perfect
sense. But we can’t know with any certainty what really passed in that first
conference between the Mexica tlatoani and the men from Europe. All that
the children of the indigenous elites ever mentioned was that Moctezuma
recounted his own ancestral lineage in great detail, before calling himself
the newcomers’ “poor vassal.” If he really said that, then he was only
underscoring his great power in the speech of reversal that constituted the
epitome of politeness in the Nahua world. It certainly would not have been
an indication that he actually intended to relinquish his throne without
further ado.11
What is clear is that Moctezuma continued to govern in the weeks and
months that followed, and that he treated the strangers, even the Tlaxcalan
leaders, like honored guests, despite the drain on his resources that feeding
so large a company entailed. He persistently questioned them through
Malintzin. The Spaniards toured the city, rudely demanding gifts
everywhere they went. Their hosts remembered them chortling and slapping
each other on the back when they saw Moctezuma’s personal storehouse
and were told they could take what they liked. The Spaniards took beautiful
gold jewelry and melted it down to make bricks; the Tlaxcalan warlords
preferred polished jade. Moctezuma showed the strangers maps and tribute
lists in an effort to get them to name their price and go away. He clearly
hoped to convince them to leave and to have established the most favorable
possible relationship with them by the time they did.12
Tellingly, Moctezuma sent for Tecuichpotzin and two of her sisters to be
turned over to the newcomers as potential brides. It was a test. If the
strangers treated them only as concubines and not as brides, it would be bad
news, but he would at least know where he stood. The royal sisters,
presented in all their finery, kept their eyes down and maintained a
respectful silence as their elders made the requisite rhetorical speeches and
Malintzin listened.13 The translator learned that Moctezuma had a number
of older daughters who were already married into the royal houses of
Chalco, Culhuacan, Tlacopan, and other important altepetls. These three
daughters were the girls presently of marriageable age. The mother of two
of them was the daughter of the Cihuacoatl, the leading military
commander.14 The mother of Tecuichpotzin, or Lordly Daughter, was a
daughter of the former king Ahuitzotl, so this child’s marriage was of great
political significance, as her heritage brought together both the rival
branches of the royal family, the one descended from Huitzilihuitl and the
one descended from Itzcoatl.15 Moctezuma kept the existence of a younger
sister of hers a secret from the Spaniards, so that they did not even know of
her until years later. Perhaps he thought she might be useful as a political
pawn some day in the future, or her Tepanec mother had insisted on hiding
the girl, or both. Another young boy, the child of a woman from
Teotihuacan, was also purposely hidden from the Spaniards.16
Malintzin managed to convey to the strangers—utterly ignorant of the
complex politics of marriage in this part of the world—that Tecuichpotzin
was the daughter of a high-ranking mother and thus a princess of
significance. This they understood. When they baptized her, they named her
Isabel, in honor of Queen Isabella, who had launched the first ships to the
New World. They called the other girls “María” and “Mariana.”17 Then
they were taken away to live with the Spaniards in their quarters in
Axayacatl’s former palace. What happened to them there is undocumented,
but some of the Spaniards later said that Cortés violated multiple princesses
during those early years; and other, less public figures than Cortés would
never have been brought to account for anything they might have done.18
The weeks of tension dragged on. Then in April of 1520, the situation
changed dramatically. Moctezuma received news from his network of
messengers that at least eight hundred more Spaniards in thirteen ships had
arrived on the coast.19 The Spaniards did not yet know. The tlatoani
eventually decided to tell them, in order to gauge their reaction. He gave the
news to Malintzin, who turned to tell Jerónimo de Aguilar, who said the
words aloud in Spanish. Cortés could not hide the panic he experienced in
that moment.
***
W��� ������ �� ������������� had sailed from Veracruz, the
plan had been to make straight for Spain. But one of the Spaniards on board
had lands and loved ones on the north coast of Cuba. Stopping briefly at his
plantation had proven irresistible. They left within just a few days, but word
soon spread. The angry governor, Diego de Velázquez, made a futile effort
to overtake the scofflaws on the high seas, and he brought in for questioning
all those who had learned anything during the ship’s brief stopover.
Velázquez, who had once led the brutal conquest of the island of Cuba, now
decided that he was extremely concerned about the violence Cortés had
inflicted on the Indians along the Maya coast. He wrote of his concerns to
the king, and assured him he would immediately send Captain Pánfilo de
Narváez in pursuit of the renegade. Narváez had been his second-in-
command in the taking of Cuba and now held a legal permit to explore the
mainland. Unlike Cortés, he said, he would establish a suitable relationship
with the people there.
Puertocarrero docked in Spain on November 5th, and the letter from the
enraged Cuban governor arrived shortly after. Puertocarrero and other
speakers on behalf of Cortés’s expedition—such as his father, Martín Cortés
—did their best to defend the operation in the king’s eyes. They delivered
all the gold and other exotic treasures the expedition had been able to
collect along the coast. Some of the material was sent on tour for exhibition
throughout the realms of the Holy Roman Emperor. In July, in the town hall
in Brussels, the artist Albrecht Dürer saw some of the tiny, lifelike animals
the indigenous people had made out of gold. “All the days of my life,” he
wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,
for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I have marveled at
the subtle intellects of men in foreign parts.” The stories, of course, traveled
even faster than the exhibit—many of them full of wild exaggeration.
Unbeknown to him, Cortés became a famous man in Europe. His father
immediately began to outfit a shipload of supplies. Ships and printing
presses ensured that the news passed from port to port in weeks rather than
years, a speed that was to make a huge difference. Within months, there
were people in every part of western Europe considering the possibility of
investing in the newly discovered lands or even going there themselves.20
***
I� ��� ��������, across the sea, both Cortés and Moctezuma were
busy assessing future possibilities. Cortés knew that his messengers had not
been gone long enough to have sent the many well-outfitted ships so
rapidly. The recently arrived fleet had to have come from his would-be
nemesis, governor Velázquez. Somehow, either through Malintzin or some
other Nahua who was learning Spanish—perhaps even Tecuichpotzin—
Moctezuma learned of Cortés’s tension and the reason for it. He detected an
opportunity to divide the Spaniards and, hopefully, defeat them. For the first
time, he ordered his people to begin preparations for war—though he could
not have been entirely certain which group of the outsiders he would
initially side with.21
In desperation, Cortés risked all by doing what he only claimed he had
done before: he took Moctezuma hostage—literally put him irons, where he
would remain for about eighty days.22 Only with a knife at Moctezuma’s
throat could Cortés assure the newly arriving Spaniards that he was in
control of the kingdom and thus hopefully win their allegiance. And only in
doing that could he stave off a violent rejection on the part of the Indians:
this was a tried-and-true practice of medieval Spanish warfare.23 The
Spaniards took Moctezuma by surprise, dragged him back to their quarters,
and guarded him around the clock, threatening to kill him if he ordered his
people to resist. Then Cortés took Malintzin and a substantial portion of his
men and traveled with haste down to the coast.24
Once there, they sent messages and bribes to key men in Narváez’s
camp, assuring them that they were welcome to join them in dividing up the
riches of Mexico if they chose. At the end of May, they attacked the camp
suddenly in the middle of the night. The fighting was brief—only about ten
men died—for once the obstreperous Narváez was captured, few others
seemed to have the heart to go on with the battle. They reached an accord
almost immediately. Cortés now had approximately eight hundred more
men armed with steel, eighty additional horses, and several ships full of
supplies at his disposal. Now he could truly bring down Moctezuma, he
thought. They even had wine from home with which to celebrate.
On the twelfth day, however, as Cortés was in the midst of making plans
and arrangements, some Tlaxcalans brought Malintzin a devastating piece
of news. The people of Tenochtitlan were in open rebellion. The Spanish
forces had turned Axayacatl’s palace into a fortress, but they could not hold
out much longer. They had every reason to believe it was the beginning of
the end. The next day, two more Tlaxcalans arrived, this time carrying a
smuggled-out letter from the Spaniards. Cortés remembered reading it. “I
must,” they begged, “for the love of God come to their aid as swiftly as
possible.”25
They set out at once. The trek up into the mountains was more than a
little disconcerting. “Not once in my journey did any of Moctezuma’s
people come to welcome me as they had before,” Cortés wrote. “All the
land was in revolt and almost uninhabited, which aroused in me a terrible
suspicion that the Spaniards in the city were dead and that all the natives
had gathered waiting to surprise me in some pass or other place where they
might have the advantage of me.”26 Later he would learn that a much
smaller group that had traveled separately, whom he had dispatched before
receiving the bad news, had in fact been attacked in a mountain pass,
imprisoned, and eventually killed down to the last person—and animal.
This group had included Spanish women and children, enslaved Africans,
and other servants carrying burdens and leading livestock. Despite what
Cortés had learned about the need for numbers and cavalry, they had been
sent ahead because they would travel more slowly and would need more
time to cover the same ground. As it turned out, they paid for their
commander’s arrogant decision with their lives.27 Cortés’s own force was
large enough to be relatively invulnerable while on the move. No one tried
to stop them, not even when they reached the city. They passed easily
through the silent streets to Axayacatl’s palace, where they were greeted by
their compatriots with great joy. It was to be the last laughter the Spaniards
shared for quite some time, for the next morning, the Mexica attacked.
The signs of trouble had begun three weeks earlier. The resentment of
the city’s people had become evident when they stopped delivering food to
the strangers. A young woman who had been paid to do their laundry was
found dead near their quarters, a clear sign to others not to do business with
them. The Spaniards sent clusters of armed men to the market to obtain
food, and they stored what they brought back. Meanwhile, the city people
were preparing for an important holy day, the celebration of Toxcatl, at
which the altepetl’s warriors danced before a huge figure of the god
Huitzilopochtli. Pedro de Alvarado, who had been left in charge, said that
he began to fear they planned to use the dance to launch a war. This seems
highly unlikely; there were far more efficient ways for the Mexica to
overcome the Spaniards, as events would later prove. But Alvarado was not
known for his acumen. Perhaps he simply believed that a struggle was
coming and that whoever attacked first would secure victory. In that case,
he sought only an excuse, and the days of warlike dancing provided one.28
What followed was etched in the altepetl’s memory for many years to
come. Thirty years later, a survivor told a young listener what had
happened:
The festivity was being observed and there was dancing and singing,
with voices raised in song. The singing was like the noise of waves
breaking against the rocks. When … the moment had come for the
Spaniards to do their killing, they came out equipped for battle. They
came and closed off each of the places where people went in and out
[of the courtyard]…. And when they had closed these exits, they
stationed themselves in each, and no one could come out anymore.
When this had been done, they went into the temple courtyard to
kill the people. Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just
went on foot, each with his metal sword and leather shield…. Then
they surrounded those who were dancing, going among the
cylindrical drums. They struck a drummer’s arms; both of his hands
were severed. Then they struck his neck; his head landed far away.
Then they stabbed everyone with iron lances and struck them with
iron swords. They struck some in the belly, and then their entrails
came spilling out…. Those who tried to escape could go nowhere.
When anyone tried to go out, at the entryways they struck and
stabbed him.29
Yet a few did escape, for it was they who told posterity what had happened.
They hid where they could. “Some climbed up the wall and were able to
escape. Some went into the various [surrounding] calpolli temples and took
refuge there. Some took refuge among those who had really died, feigning
death…. The blood of the warriors ran like water.”
That evening, Mexica warriors raised their cry promising vengeance.
The Spaniards and those Tlaxcalans who were still in the city walled
themselves into their “fortress” and waited. The Mexica attacked en masse,
but they couldn’t penetrate the wall of crossbows and steel lances. Then
suddenly, they ceased their attack. For more than twenty days, they left the
Spanish alone in silence and uncertainty. Thirty years later, an old man
recalled what they had been doing. “The canals were excavated, widened,
deepened, the sides made steeper. Everywhere the canals were made more
difficult to pass. And on the roads, walls were built, and the passageways
between houses made more difficult.”30 They were preparing, in short, for a
cataclysmic urban battle. During that period, Cortés and his army reentered
the city and made their way back to their quarters.
When the warriors were ready and felt the strangers had grown hungry
enough, they attacked. For seven days, Tecuichpotzin and her sisters
listened to the sounds of battle—to the rising murmurs and then shouts of
their own warriors, and then the noise of the harquebuses (a heavy
matchlock weapon) firing grapeshot among them, and the hissing
crossbows slinging forth iron bolts or whatever came to hand. The fighting
began anew every day at dawn as soon as it was light enough to see. The
Spaniards could not escape, but the Mexica could not penetrate their
defenses, either. At length Moctezuma tried to speak to the people from a
rooftop, conveying his words through the booming voice of a younger man
who served as his mouthpiece. His message went something like this:
Let the Mexica hear! We are not their match. May the people be
dissuaded [from further fighting]. May the arrows and shields of war
be laid down. The poor old men and women, the common people,
the infants who toddle and crawl, who lie in the cradle or on the
cradle board and know nothing yet, all are suffering. This is why
your ruler says, “We are not their match. Let everyone be
dissuaded.”31
In later years, these words were taken out of context and used to try to
prove that Moctezuma was a coward, interested only in saving himself. But
all the old histories and prayers make it clear that the Nahuas understood a
ruler to have one paramount duty—and that was to save the lives of his
people, down to the youngest babies, so that the altepetl could continue into
the future. A ruler who lost his head, or who was arrogant and stubborn and
committed his people to unwinnable wars, was the lowest of the low. He did
not have a chief’s wisdom, the perspective of a true leader.32 Moctezuma
had eighteen years of experience as a ruler of tens of thousands of his
people and was well aware of how many of the people around them hated
the Mexica. Furthermore, he had spent the last half year conversing in depth
with Malintzin and the Spaniards, and he knew that many more of the
strangers were coming. He understood that in this case, no victory would be
permanent. He was simply telling his people the truth as he saw it.
The young warriors, however, did not see the situation this way. It was
not their duty to be circumspect but rather to fight to the death, if necessary,
to defend their honor. A younger half brother of Moctezuma, the militant
Cuitlahuac of Iztapalapan, emerged as the de facto leader of the city’s
enraged young men. The long-term consequences of their actions were not
uppermost in their mind. What they knew was that they could endure no
more. Speaking through Malintzin, Cuitlahuac’s messengers informed
Cortés in no uncertain terms of how things stood:
They were all determined to perish or have done with us, and … I
should look and see how full of people were all those streets and
squares and rooftops. Furthermore, they had calculated that [even] if
25,000 of them died for every one of us, they would finish with us
first, for they were many and we were but few. They told me that all
the causeways into the city were dismantled—which in fact was true,
for all had been dismantled save one—and that we had no way of
escape except over the water. They well knew that we had few
provisions and little fresh water, and, therefore, could not last long
because we would die of hunger if they did not kill us first.33
Cortés understood that escape from the island city offered the Spaniards
their only hope of survival. There was one causeway left still connecting the
isle and the mainland, but the segments connecting its separate segments
had been destroyed, so that it was impassable. They would not let this stop
them: some of the men worked all through one night constructing a portable
bridge out of whatever wood they had available. Others packed the most
important tools and valuables, including the gold they had collected for
King Charles. Cortés organized a guard of thirty men who would surround
and escort Malintzin and the Tlaxcalan princess “Luisa” (the nobleman
Xicotencatl’s daughter, now the common-law wife of Pedro de Alvarado),
the two women being at this point the Spaniards’ most valuable assets. He
also ordered that “Isabel” and her siblings, Moctezuma’s children, were to
be taken along as hostages. According to the Indians, this was the moment
when he commanded that Moctezuma be killed, lest the tlatoani serve as a
rallying point for his people, though Cortés himself never admitted he had
done so. He insisted that the angry young warriors had killed their own
king.
Before midnight on the seventh day, the Spaniards suddenly broke
through the gates of the palace in what was at first an organized body; they
then traveled as quietly as possible down the avenue that became the
causeway over the lake. The portable bridge served them well at the first
place they found themselves facing open water, but they were unable to
pick the bridge up and move it to the next location where it was needed.
They went forward with only some wooden beams they had taken from the
palace to help them with the next crossings. Some later said it was a woman
who first saw them and shouted aloud, sounding the alarm. Warriors in
canoes descended on their fleeing enemies from all sides: they were intent
on destroying the makeshift bridges and stabbing upward at the armored
horses on the causeway, as they were vulnerable from below. They killed
fifty-six of the eighty or so horses that night. At the second place where the
causeway was broken—and where there was no bridge, just a few boards—
the escaping forces drowned in droves. The Mexica later recalled what the
Spanish never spoke of: “It was as though they had fallen off a precipice;
they all fell and dropped in, the Tlaxcalans … and the Spaniards, along with
the horses and some women [they had with them]. The canal was
completely full of them, full to the very top. And those who came last just
passed and crossed over on people …”—they hesitated over the words
—“… on top of the bodies.”34
Approximately two-thirds of the Spaniards died that night, and probably
an even greater proportion of the many Tlaxcalans still in the city, about six
hundred Europeans and many more Indians. Cortés estimated the dead at
two thousand, including the indigenous.35 Almost all of the men who had
come with Narváez were killed, for most of them were in the rear. The only
ones who stood a good chance of surviving the ordeal were those who
departed first. They had surprise on their side, and the makeshift bridges
were still in good condition. Those who came later faced a disaster zone.
Bernal Díaz, who had a horse at that time, had been ordered to act as a rear
guard. When he was old, he still struggled with his conscience whenever he
thought of the “Noche Triste,” as it was called, for he had certainly not
remained behind until the bitter end. “I declare that if the horsemen had
waited for the soldiers at each bridge, it would have been the end of us all:
not one of us would have survived. The lake was full of canoes…. What
more could we have attempted than we did, which was to charge and deal
sword thrusts at those who tried to seize us [from below], and push ahead
till we were off the causeway?”36 They had lost everything—the gold, their
guns, most of the horses. But the few hundred who were left still wore their
armor, still had their swords—and could not be easily attacked if they
stayed together. And they still had Malintzin and the Tlaxcalan princess. It
was toward Tlaxcala that they now turned.
Cortés was told that all the Mexica hostages, including Isabel and her
siblings, had been killed in the mêlée, but that was not the truth. The girls
had been recognized, and their people surged forward to help them. Isabel’s
brothers had, in fact, accidentally been killed. Later, as the people collected
the masses of bodies, “they came upon Moctezuma’s son Chimalpopoca
lying hit by a barbed dart.”37 But Isabel was pulled into the arms of her
people, along with her sisters, and taken to Cuitlahuac.
Then, in a matter of weeks, the smallpox struck.
***
L� ������� ��� ���� ������ one of Narváez’s ships as an invisible
passenger, perhaps in a scab in a blanket. Or perhaps it was carried by a
man who did not know he was sick until they landed, since the ten-day
incubation period was longer than the voyage from the Caribbean. In
essence, the microbe was part of the panoply of military advantages that
had accrued to the Old World. The people had always lived with their farm
animals, exposing themselves to myriad viruses, but then the highly
developed trade and transportation routes had spread the germs with deadly
efficiency. The only silver lining was that those who did not die of a
particular pest were immune from it for the rest of their lives. And in this
regard, their vulnerability suddenly became a source of strength when they
met the people of the New World. Most of the Europeans had been exposed
to the smallpox before, and they were, in effect, inoculated. But the
indigenous were a previously unexposed population, utterly without
defenses.38
When the pox reached a new altepetl, the wave of death rose for about
sixty days, in some places taking as many as a third of the people. Then the
epidemic receded, for by that time there was no unexposed person left to
contract the disease. It had been carried to surrounding towns, and so the
wave arose somewhere else. It had already reached Tlaxcala by the time the
Spaniards and their surviving allies had dragged themselves back there.
Maxixcatzin (Ma-sheesh-KAH-tzeen), one of the four kings, was dying of
it, along with many thousands of his people. Those leaders who were able
came together for a series of great council meetings; there they debated for
twenty days. Many saw the Spaniards as a plague of hungry grasshoppers
who had come in a time of sickness; they pointed out that the strangers’
war-mongering had already cost the lives of hundreds of young Tlaxcalan
warriors. These leaders were for killing the Spaniards, finishing the job that
the Mexica had started. But others reminded the more militant that they
knew from their own experience that twenty-odd horses and a few hundred
Spaniards could inflict extraordinary damage. And the woman who the
strangers called doña Luisa—the Tlaxcalan princess who was in a
relationship with Pedro de Alvarado—informed the men in council that the
Spaniards who were here were but the forerunners; thousands more were
coming. Malintzin likewise agreed that it would be wisest to stay the
course, cement the alliance, and use the victory they would ultimately attain
to gain the upper hand over Tenochtitlan. Eventually, this side carried the
day.39
The Spaniards were in bad shape. The Mexica had harried them at
several points, so that they had to travel in a tight cluster, with the horsemen
surrounding those on foot. Whenever they stopped to rest, they established
lookouts in every direction. They had found that most of the villagers fled
before them, afraid not only of Spaniards but also of what the Mexica
would do to them if they were thought to have helped them. The
beleaguered travelers ate the supplies they found in the abandoned altepetls;
they even ate a wounded horse when he died. By the time they found succor
in Tlaxcala, many of their wounds had festered, and more men died. Cortés
himself needed to have two fingers on his left hand amputated.
While they rested, Cortés and his closest companions discussed their
options. Some were for making for the coast and either leaving or
regathering their strength there. But Cortés was convinced that they should
do the opposite, that they should stay where they were and make a show of
strength. The Mexica had many enemies, but they had some friends, too;
perhaps more importantly, they had the entire the countryside living in fear
of them. If the Spaniards were going to gain and keep enough indigenous
allies to secure a permanent victory, they had to be perceived as the
strongest force in Mexico, the one group most feared on a long-term basis,
not a group who would soon leave. They could not be just another playing
piece on the chessboard of local politics; they had to be by far the most
frightening figures in the game.
Through Malintzin, Cortés gathered intelligence from the Tlaxcalans.
Whenever a nearby altepetl was found to have entertained emissaries from
Tenochtitlan, he gathered his horsemen and made another one of his famous
early morning raids. The Mexica let it be known that they were offering a
year’s tribute relief to all who refrained from going over to the strangers—
implicitly reminding everyone that they were the leaders who were there to
stay and that they wouldn’t forget who their friends and enemies were after
these interlopers were forced to withdraw. But that was a distant reward
compared to the immediate threat of having mounted lancers ride through
town, burning and killing with impunity. Meanwhile, the Spaniards also
offered to reward those who came over to them. “They see,” wrote Cortés
in the midst of these events, “how those who do so are well received and
favored by me, whereas those who do not are destroyed daily.”40 Malintzin,
who had always counseled that responsible leadership entailed caution,
circumspection, and peaceful overtures toward the powerful strangers,
would have reminded all those to whom she spoke that if they swore loyalty
to Cortés’s king, the Mexica would be destroyed, and the endless wars
between the altepetls would cease forever. The Mexica had been strong
enough to guarantee peace among their subjects in the central basin, but
these newcomers were far stronger. It was a foregone conclusion that the
Spaniards would ultimately be victorious, went the argument for laying
down arms, for they had the edge, and they weren’t leaving. Their victory
would prevent future chaos and retaliatory wars throughout a much larger
swath of land than just the central valley.
More of the indigenous were gradually learning what Malintzin and
Moctezuma had understood months before—that far more Spaniards were
coming, and would bring more of their arsenal with them. While resting in
Tlaxcala, Cortés had forced every man to turn over whatever gold he
possessed so it could be collected and used to buy horses and weapons in
the Caribbean. He then sent a number of mounted men to the coast, charged
with repairing one of the boats and setting forth to make the purchases.
They found to their delight that seven more ships had already arrived. One
came from Cortés’s father, who had been working to collect goods for his
son since his message first arrived with Puertocarrero. Early the next year,
three more fully stocked ships appeared. Cortés grew increasingly jubilant.
“When on the 28th of April [1521], I called all my men out on parade and
reckoned eight-six horsemen, 118 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, some
700 foot soldiers with swords and bucklers, three large iron guns, fifteen
small bronze field guns and ten hundred weight of powder, … [we] knew
well … that God had helped us more than we had hoped.”41
Word spread quickly among the local communities about the present
strength of the Spanish forces. We know that they were always assessing
whether or not to believe Malintzin’s argument from various incidents. At
one point after the war had actually started, the Spaniards lost a battle:
several dozen men were cut off from their company and then captured and
killed. Some of the indigenous allies withdrew at once, but they soon
returned. Spaniards later said that they returned because their priests had
augured a great Mexica victory within the next eight days, which did not
occur, and thus the people lost faith in their priests. That may have been
part of the reason for their return to the Spaniards’ side. After all, in one of
their own histories—indeed, one of the earliest written, probably in the
1540s—the indigenous writer recalls the people’s profound disappointment
on another occasion when some priests promised them a victory on the
eightieth day, which never occurred, and in fact the promise only cost them
more lives. But in this case, something else had occurred: messengers had
come from the coast carrying word of the arrival of yet another ship, and
they brought powder and crossbows as proof, which would have been
visible to any indigenous who were spying on them. Almost immediately, in
the words of Cortés, “all the lands round about” made the decision to return
to their erstwhile allies.42
Many altepetls—or rather, certain lineages within altepetls—needed
little convincing to throw in their lot with the strangers. Due to old internal
tensions, these family lines and their followers were ready and willing to
fight with the powerful newcomes. In Texcoco, for instance, Moctezuma
had only recently worked to dispose of undesirable heirs to the throne to
make way for his nephew, Cacama, and Huexotzincatzin had been executed
for singing with the Lady of Tula. Some of Huexotzincatzin’s full brothers
had accepted bribes in the form of land. Yet since the death only a few years
before of the old king, Nezahualpilli, the altepetl had literally been split in
two, as the youngest brothers of Huexotzincatzin, the executed poet-heir,
had emerged as a potent force and had been given—or had taken—the
northern half of the realm. One of these younger brothers, Ixtlilxochitl
(Eesh-tlil-SHO-cheet), an extremely successful warrior, decided to seize the
day and ally with the strangers in order to oust Moctezuma’s favorite,
Cacama, and unite Texcoco under his own and his full brothers’ control.
Cortés was delighted with him, calling him “a very valiant youth of twenty-
three or twenty-four years” who worked hard to bring along “many chiefs
and brothers of his.” He admitted that the brothers were not at first “so firm
in their friendship as they afterwards became.” But thanks to the efforts of
Ixtlilxochitl, thousands of Texcocans were soon fighting on the side of the
Spaniards.43
In the meantime, as the Spanish forces waited for reinforcements and
worked on creating alliances with the local people. Martín López, a
shipbuilder in their company, taught the Tlaxcalans how to build brigantines
to sail on the great lake. Canoe makers, carpenters, ropemakers, weavers …
all were needed. They built twelve different boats in pieces, and then, when
the time was right, carried them to the shores of the great lake and
assembled them there. The Tlaxcalans quickly learned to work the sails and
maneuver the large, fast-moving boats. In later years, when they told their
children about the conquest, this was what some of them mentioned first
and recorded in their earliest annals.44 It was an empowering, even thrilling
experience, and it became an important long-term memory. In the short
term, though, it meant that Cortés and his forces would never be dependent
on the causeways again.
***
I� ������������, ������������� lived each day in fear. Her joy at
being rescued from the strangers and seeing them in flight had been short-
lived, for the terrible disease had come soon after her rescue, and her relief
at seeing the epidemic abate had been even briefer. Cuitlahuac, her father’s
younger brother and the new tlatoani, had died of the smallpox after only
some eighty days of rule.45 With every family in the city devastated, they
could not even mourn their ruler properly, as their religion demanded. The
people did their best to regather their strength and rebuild, managing just
day-to-day efforts. In the meantime, the man who emerged from the council
as the new tlatoani was Cuauhtemoc (Kwow-TAY-moc). He was from the
other branch of the family—the one descended of Itzcoatl—a son of the
former king Ahuitzotl. He had a Tlatelolcan mother,46 so he had
Tlatelolco’s support. And as the Tlatelolcans were the possessors of the big
market on the north side of the island to which many local people were still
bringing their produce, they had significant strength in these tumultuous
times. Cuauhtemoc’s election would have seemed appropriate to
Tecuichpotzin at first, but within weeks, the full force of a new horror
struck her.
Cuauhtemoc and his advisers understood all too well what was
happening in the Mexican countryside—that despite their resounding
victory in July, people far and wide were still considering allying with the
strangers. The Mexica had not been too afraid that they would be attacked
while they were laid low with the pestilence, for all the people in the
country were affected by it at about the same time, including all the
Spaniards’ allies and potential allies. But the Mexica became afraid as the
survivors recuperated and regained their full strength, for the season of
warfare would start again soon. If they could not prevent the defection of
the majority of the surrounding altepetls, then they would almost certainly
be destroyed. Cuauhtemoc believed the only response was to make a show
of brutal force.
Moctezuma’s living sons were a threat to Cuauhtemoc and his policies.
Two had died in the fighting on the night of the Spanish retreat, but a
number were still alive. Cuauhtemoc had the support of most Tlatelolcans,
but the sons of Moctezuma had the support of many, possibly most, of the
Tenochca. Perhaps more importantly, these sons would have been taught by
their father, Moctezuma, that overt warfare against these strangers was
futile and counterproductive. They thus represented an opposing school of
thought; they offered an alternative to the war that the city was undertaking.
Fortunately for Cuauhtemoc, they were also vulnerable: these sons of
Moctezuma could be presented as weak, as emblematic of the mistakes that
had been made. That is how Cuauhtemoc went about describing them.
Then, in short order, he had six of them killed; some said he even killed one
with his bare hands. The Tlatelolcan noblemen—who held Cuauhtemoc
entirely blameless—explained, “The reason these nobles were killed is that
they were favoring the common people [in desiring peace] and trying to see
to it that shelled white maize, turkey hens, and eggs should be collected so
that they could have them submit to the Spaniards.” Among those who were
killed was Tecuichpotzin’s only full brother, named Axayacatzin, after the
past king. Now, Tecuichpotzin was left with only two living half brothers,
little boys who had managed to survive the pox and were too young to be
considered a threat.47
In the midst of the carnage, Cuauhtemoc came for Lordly Daughter
Tecuichpotzin herself. He did not want to kill her, though. Instead, he
wanted to marry her and make her bear his children. Doing this rendered his
rule legitimate in many more people’s eyes, for his heirs would thus be tied
to both branches of the royal family. The union was in keeping with the
custom of having a new tlatoani from a different branch of the family marry
a daughter or another close relative of the man he had replaced. In this case,
it was even more important that Cuauhtemoc have the girl by his side. Ever
since she had been gifted to the strangers, her name was sometimes paired
with that of their enemy, Cortés, by the people in the countryside, whenever
they weren’t pairing him with Malintzin (with whom they sometimes
confused Tecuichpotzin, probably to the royal family’s shame). It had to be
shown that this symbolically important girl who carried both royal lines
within her belonged to him, and to no one else. This he told her, in deeds if
not in words.48
In the wider world, however, Cuauhtemoc’s power remained far from
absolute. Despite his ferocity—and he did bring many allies to the city,
among them some of the loyal Texcocans, even some of the brothers of
Ixtlilxochitl—he was unable to keep enough of the altepetls on his side.
Gradually, as the Europeans’ technological advantages won over the
surrounding peoples, the city folk found themselves increasingly cut off
from food supplies. Their isolation was not yet complete, but it was
growing. They were grateful for their chinampas, for the birds and the fish
and the algae in the lake, and for those who still flocked to their banners.
Around the fire at night, they sang songs in celebration of loyalty.49 And as
weeks turned into months, they prayed.
Then one day, the enemy came. Though the Mexica had anticipated this,
it was still somehow a shock. The strangers had been moving around in the
local area for a number of months and had been seen assembling their boats
across the water in Texcoco, on the eastern side of the lake. Still, everybody
had assumed that their approach to the island would be a gradual affair. The
people had not realized how fast the ships could move when in full sail with
the wind behind them or how many people they could carry. One morning,
the brigs made straight for the neighborhood of Zoquipan (or “Mudflats”)
on the island’s shore. The residents ran about frantically, calling to their
children. They tossed the little ones into canoes and paddled for their lives.
The lake grew full of their craft, and the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans entered
an uninhabited quarter. They looted it, then returned to their ships.50
Over the ensuing weeks, a pattern emerged. The foreigners used their
cannon to knock down the walls that the Mexica had built as obstructions
and even demolished whole buildings. Then they sent in their indigenous
allies to fill in the canals with rubble or sand, while the long-range
crossbows and guns guarded them. Once the Spaniards had access to a flat,
open space, they could easily maintain control of it with their horses and
lances. Every day, the Spaniards killed dozens of the Mexica at a minimum;
once they killed several hundred in a single day. One of the warriors, when
he was an old man, remembered: “Bit by bit they came pressing us back
against the wall [at Tlatelolco], herding us together.”51
The old one remembered other elements as well, especially how hard he
and his companions had made the Spaniards’ task. They contested every
single foot of ground; at night, they sometimes managed to re-excavate
canals that had been filled in. Famous warriors performed death-defying
deeds and occasionally managed to topple a horse and bring down the rider.
Twice they were able to isolate and bring down large groups of the
Spaniards (once fifteen of them, once perhaps fifty-three). They sacrificed
the prisoners atop the tallest pyramid in full view of their ashen
compatriots, then strung their heads in a grisly necklace and left it hanging
in the air. The courage of individual warriors sometimes stunned the
younger boys who watched. On one occasion the Spaniards reached a
neighborhood no one had thought they would reach until the next day. They
began to seize the women and children who had not yet evacuated. A
warrior named Axoquentzin (Ah-sho-KEN-tzeen) came running. His rage
seemed to lend him superhuman strength. He ran out into the open and
picked up a Spaniard and whirled him around until he dropped a girl whom
he had seized. Then Axoquentzin picked up another man and flung him
about. But this sort of action couldn’t go on forever, and the Spaniards
brought him down: “They shot an iron bolt into his heart. He died as if he
were stretching out when going to sleep.” Thirty years later, such stories
lived on in the people’s collective memory and in the songs they sang. The
fearlessness of their greatest warriors made them deeply proud.52
At no point do the warriors seem to have been awestruck or paralyzed
with fear by the strangers’ weapons. Instead they analyzed them in a
straightforward way:
The crossbowman aimed the bolt well. He pointed it right at the
person he was going to shoot, and when it went off, it went whining,
hissing, and humming. And their arrows missed nothing. They all hit
someone, went all the way through someone. The guns were pointed
and aimed right at people…. The shot came upon people unawares,
giving them no warning when it killed them. Whoever was fired at
died if some dangerous part was hit: the forehead, the nape of the
neck, the heart, the chest, the stomach or the abdomen.53
Unfortunately, when the Mexica secured some of the powerful weapons and
tried to use them themselves, they were unable to do so. At one point, they
forced captured crossbowmen to try to teach them to shoot metal bows, but
the lessons were ineffective, and the arrows went astray. The guns, they
soon learned, would not work without the powder the Spanish had. Once,
when they captured a cannon, they concluded that they had neither the
experience nor the ammunition needed to make it useful. The best they
could do was to prevent it from falling back into enemy hands, so they sank
it in the lake. They learned not only to make extra-long spears to rival
Spanish lances but also to zigzag their canoes so quickly in unexpected
patterns that the Spaniards could not easily take aim from their brigantines.
Yet such tactics could not bring them victory; they could only hinder their
enemies. The old men remembering their people’s efforts found it too
painful to say this directly, but one came close. “In this way, the war took
somewhat longer.”54
On one occasion the Spaniards decided to build a catapult, thinking that
it would petrify the Indians. Cortés wrote: “Even if it were to have had no
other effect, which indeed it had not, the terror it caused would be so great
that we thought the enemy might surrender. But neither of our hopes was
fulfilled, for the carpenters failed to operate their machine, and the enemy,
though much afraid, made no move to surrender, and we were obliged to
conceal the failure of the catapult by saying that we had been moved by
compassion to spare them.”55 Here, Cortés was merely assuaging his
feelings. The Mexica by no means believed his claim that only compassion
stayed his hand, and in fact, for them, the incident bordered on the
humorous:
And then those Spaniards installed a wooden sling on top of an altar
platform with which to hurl stones at the people…. They wound it
up, then the arm of the wooden sling rose up. But the stone did not
land on the people, but fell [almost straight down] behind the
marketplace at Xomolco. Because of that the Spaniards argued
among themselves. They looked as if they were jabbing their fingers
in one another’s faces, chattering a great deal. And [meanwhile] the
catapult kept bobbing back and forth, going one way and then the
other.56
But the moments the warriors could joke about were few and far between.
The Mexica knew that they were losing. They had no way to explain the
discrepancy between their power and that of their enemies; they had no way
of knowing that the Europeans were heirs to a ten-thousand-year-old
tradition of sedentary living, and they themselves the heirs of barely three
thousand. Remarkably, through it all, they seem to have maintained a
practical sense of the situation: they knew what needed to be explained.
They did not assume greater merit or superior intelligence on the part of
their enemies. Rather, in the descriptions they left, they focused on two
elements: the Spaniards’ use of metal, and their extraordinary
communication apparatus. The old men talking about their experiences used
the word tepoztli (metal, iron) more than any other in reference to the
Spaniards: “Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies in iron.
They put iron on their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron,
and their shields and lances were iron.” They grew ever more specific:
“Their iron lances and halberds seemed to sparkle, and their iron swords
were curved like a stream of water. Their cuirasses and iron helmets seemed
to make a clattering sound.”57 When the elderly speakers paused in wonder
at the events, it was to ask how the word had gone out so efficiently to so
many people across the sea about their marvelous kingdom.58 The warriors
had seen the ships—but not the compasses, the navigation equipment, the
technical maps, and the printing presses that made the conquest possible.
What is striking is how quickly they realized that these issues were at the
heart of the matter.
***
T�� � ������� ������ for three months, far longer than the Spaniards
would have thought possible, given the effects of the smallpox and the
starvation to which the Mexica were ultimately reduced. Once, after more
than four weeks of war, the warriors shouted to the Tlaxcalans that they
wished to speak to the woman, she who was one of the people from here.
When Malintzin came, they offered full and immediate peace—on
condition that the Spaniards would return to their home across the sea.
“While we stood there arguing through the interpreter,” Cortés remembered,
“with nothing more than a fallen bridge between us and the enemy, an old
man, in full view of everyone, very slowly extracted from his knapsack
certain provisions and ate them, so as to make us believe that they were in
no need of supplies.” The Mexica went on to outline terms—undoubtedly
giving the specifics of the tribute they would offer—for they stood in
conversation for some time without having Malintzin pause to translate. It
was agreed that she would summarize afterwards. “We fought no more that
day, for the lords had told the interpreter to convey their proposals to me,”
said Cortés. He rejected those proposals in the morning.59
The Mexicas’ efforts to demonstrate that they were not short of
courageous warriors or of food supplies could not mask the truth for long.
By August 13, their remaining corner of the city had come almost to a
standstill. “On the roads lay shattered bones and scattered hair. The houses
were unroofed, red [with blood]. Worms crawled on the roads, and the walls
of the houses were slippery with brains.”60 The survivors had eaten
everything they had, down to deer hides and tiny insects and lizards, and
even softened adobe bricks. Dysentery was now widespread among them.
Cuauhtemoc went to the Spaniards in a canoe and gave himself up, together
with some close advisers and his wife, Tecuichpotzin.61 He asked only that
his people be allowed to go to the countryside to seek food. The fighting
stopped, and word spread among the populace that they could walk out, go
to family in other altepetls if they had any, or bring precious possessions to
trade for food, or simply beg. Those who were children at the time
remembered the feeling of release, the surge of hope and joy as they sped
along the broken causeways or waded and swam across the lake with
surviving adults. The young ones heard cries of lamentation in the distance,
as some of the adults gave vent to their grief, and some saw young women
being seized by individual Spaniards despite the agreement.62 But the
children couldn’t help feeling happy at this change in their fortunes. They
did not understand as yet that their world as they knew it was ending. A
hollow-eyed Tecuichpotzin watched them go.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Chapter 5
Florentine Codex, book 12 (best translation in We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the
Conquest of Mexico, ed. and trans. James Lockhart [Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1993], 181–82)
describes the smallpox epidemic that struck not long after the Spaniards were forced to leave the
city. The narrators mention the experience of lying immobilized on the soiled sleeping mats and
emphasize that so many deaths occurred because there were not enough healthy people to care
for the ill. “Starvation reigned, and no one took care of others any longer.” The word
miccatzintli for the corpse of someone known and loved appears in other annals. We have
relatively little testimony about the experience of illness on the part of the Mexica. However,
historians have been able to explore other smallpox epidemics in an experiential sense. See, e.g.,
Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americans: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill &
Wang, 2001). Both indigenous and Spanish sources (see nn. 2 and 3 this chapter) agree that
there were three daughters of Moctezuma in Spanish custody who were given Spanish baptismal
names; they remained in Tenochtitlan when the Spaniards retreated, and they survived the
ensuing epidemic. Two were married to Spaniards after the conquest, and one died shortly after
the war. (Cortés ceased referring to the one called María between 1522 and 1526, and the
indigenous source says that María died “as an unmarried girl.”) The Nahuatl verb polihui is to
perish or to disappear.
A highly specific genealogical list of Moctezuma’s children, which includes mentions of their
deaths, does not specifically record any deaths by smallpox in the first great epidemic, so the
royal line apparently fared relatively well in that regard. On the other hand, the list stops with
children who were of marriageable age at the time of the conquest, as though Moctezuma had
no younger children at the time, which makes no sense in a polygynous context until we
consider that child mortality would have been higher than adult mortality in the epidemic. See
don Domingo Chimalpahin, Codex Chimalpahin, ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan
Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 1:158–65.
Mexica records assert that two sons were killed at the Tolteca canal because they were held
hostage and were forced to flee with the withdrawing Spaniards (Codex Chimalpahin, 158–59;
and Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 156). Cortés in his initial report
asserted that one son was killed. (He assumed at the time of writing that the daughters were
killed as well, but in fact they had been successfully rescued by their people, as he later learned.)
He apparently was purposely undercounting, so as not to upset his king; besides referring to
only one son, Cortés mentioned two daughters, when he would have known that he had had
three in his custody. (See “Second Letter” in Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. Anthony
Pagden [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986], 138–39.) Later legal documents reveal
more about his dealings with three daughters, which is in keeping with the indigenous record.
See Donald Chipman, Moctezuma’s Children (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 75–76.
Indigenous annals are consistent here; the Spaniards are also consistent in reporting that his own
people hit him with a rock when he demurred from fighting back against the foreigners. The
former is far more likely to have been true; in either case it is certainly what Tecuichpotzin
would have been told.
Her age comes to us from Spanish documents (see Chipman, Moctezuma’s Children); what the
documents assert is highly believable; if she were much older, she would have been married
before the Spaniards arrived, and if much younger, she would not have been considered of
marriageable age.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
On sweeping, see Louise Burkhart, “Mexica Women on the Home Front: Housework and
Religion in Aztec Mexico,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie
Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1997). The Florentine Codex,
book 12, describes the great cleansing and repairing that took place, beginning the day the
Spaniards left.
The meeting on the causeway is described in Cortés’s letter and in the Florentine Codex (as well
as in many other derivative accounts). For an analysis, see Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the
Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95–99.
See J. H. Elliott’s introduction to Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. Pagden.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 107; Díaz, Conquest, 276.
Fray Francisco de Aguilar in Patricia Fuentes, ed., The Conquistadors: First Person Accounts of
the Conquest of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 148. Statements by
other chroniclers sound equally odd, as if they were trying to keep their story straight.
Restall, Seven Myths, 97–98. The attributed speech is in the Florentine Codex, book 12, in
Lockhart, We People Here, 116. Restall also discusses the wide-ranging myths surrounding this
famous meeting in When Montezuma Met Cortés (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).
Francis Brooks wrote an essential article on this topic. See his “Motecuzoma Xocoyotl, Hernán
Cortés, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo: The Construction of an Arrest,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 75 (1995). The Annals of Tlatelolco, the earliest set of annals to cover this
period, written before the story of Quetzalcoatl and the Indians’ wide-mouthed awe had been
taken up, makes it clear that the indigenous peoples provided food for those who were their
guests, just as we would expect.
A comparable scene had unfolded in Tlaxcala when the Spaniards were there, and the
indigenous memorialized it in a pictorial text now called “the Texas Fragment,” in the Nettie
Lee Benson Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. For an analysis, see Camilla
Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 68–74.
Codex Chimalpahin, 1:142–43, 162–63; 2:108–9.
There has been confusion among historians as to who Isabel’s mother was: Spanish documents
first said she was named Teotlalco (which would not be a person’s name in Nahuatl) and came
“from Tecalco,” and only later mentioned that she was a daughter of Ahuitzotl (see Chipman,
Moctezuma’s Children). There is no need for confusion on this point, however, as the use of
teccalco might simply mean that she was from a settlement surrounding any royal household,
“the place where the royals live.” The Nahuatl genealogies all agree that she was Ahuitzotl’s
daughter by a Tepanec wife, which would certainly explain her status. (See Codex Chimalpahin
1:52–53, 154–55, 163–63; 2:86–87.)
This was doña Francisca of Ecatepec (see chap. 8). I have deduced the probable reasons for the
silence around her, but there exists direct commentary on the reasons for keeping the existence
of a younger half brother of hers a secret from the Spaniards at that time. See Anastasia Kalyuta,
“El arte de acomodarse a dos mundos: la vida de don Pedro de Moctezuma Tlacahuepantli
según los documentos del Archivo General de la Nación (México, D.F.) y al Archivo General de
Indias (Sevilla),” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 41, no. 2 (2010): 471–500.
The latter actually went by “Leonor” by the late 1520s. She first married Juan Paz, then
Cristóbal de Valderrama.
Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortes, 286–87.
Cortés, Díaz, and Andrés de Tapia all mention this. Indeed, there would have been no other way
for Cortés to learn the news (but in his letter, Cortés claimed that he also heard of it through his
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
own Spanish messengers, implying that his men roamed freely and knowledgeably through the
countryside though we know this was not the case).
These matters have been extensively treated in biographies of Hernando Cortés. Dürer’s diary is
quoted in Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1971), 69. On the remarkable speed with which news about indigenous
peoples of the New World traveled via European print texts, see John Pollack, “Native
American Words, Early American Texts,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Department of
English, 2014.
Almost all Spanish accounts agree on this. Only Cortés in his letter differs, recounting an
intimate conversation in which he took a sympathetic Moctezuma into his confidence, but by the
time Gómara wrote his biography, he, too, acknowledged that orders coming from Moctezuma’s
household clearly became more hostile to the strangers at this point. Francisco López de
Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1965). Contrast Cortés, “Second Letter,” 119, with
Gómara, Life, 188–89.
See Brooks, “The Construction of an Arrest,” 181. We cannot be exactly certain when
Moctezuma was placed under house arrest, given the contradictory statements.
The tactics of the conquest are put into perspective in James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz,
Early Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 80–83.
All the chroniclers agree that they took him in a sudden strike and bound him. They claimed to
have done this early on, when in fact, as Brooks demonstrates (see n. 22), they actually did so
when other Spaniards arrived and they had to take action.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 128. Historians have written at length on this period of the campaign,
sometimes taking the chroniclers’ writings too literally, rather than looking for commonalities in
their statements and considering what makes most sense in context. For a summary of my
sifting of the evidence, see Malintzin’s Choices, 99–101.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 128–29.
At the time, the place where these people were captured was called Zoltepec (“Old Hill”); the
site was home to an ancient temple dedicated to Ehecatl, the wind god. Thereafter, it became
known as Tecoaque (“People Were Eaten”), and has retained that name ever since. An
archaeological excavation under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia has revealed that the prisoners were sacrificed a few at a time, including the children.
The site, between Mexico City and Tlaxcala, is an important one, as it is the only known
archaeological record of direct interactions between Europeans, Africans, and indigenous in the
years of the war of conquest. It was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.
We can gain insight into this period from the records of a 1529 investigation of the conduct of
Pedro de Alvarado. These are available in print: Ignacio López Rayón, ed., Proceso de
residencia instruida contra Pedro de Alvarado y Nuño de Guzman (Mexico City: Valdes y
Redondas, 1847). Book 12 of the Florentine Codex (in Lockhart, We People Here, 140–42)
reveals that people who did business with the Spaniards, or who were even suspected of doing
so, were killed. This unfortunately included many of the palace servants.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 132–
34.
Lockhart, We People Here, 142.
Lockhart, We People Here, 138–39. The Annals of Tlatelolco also remembers Moctezuma as
working to calm the situation. Cortés makes the same claim.
See Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, 104–5. See also chap. 4.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 134–35.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
First the speaker said çan tlacapan (“right on top of people”) and then he grew more specific,
saying çan nacapan (“right on top of flesh, of bodies”); see book 12 of the Florentine Codex in
Lockhart, We People Here, 156. Cristobal Castillo shares a similar memory, focusing on the
bodies of highborn indigenous women who were drowned.
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 139. Cortés also made the spurious claim that only 150 Spaniards had
died, but historians have been able to use other Spanish documents to ascertain the true number.
We cannot do the same for the Indians. If we assume that he used the same multiplier, then
about 8,000 Tlaxcalans died. However, that number seems implausible to me. The Tlaxcalans
could not have spared such a large proportion of their population for so long; nor could
Tenochtitlan have fed so many guests for six months.
Díaz, Conquest, 299.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 156. For more on this, see n. 3.
The literature on disease in the conquest of the New World is immense. A fine book, which
reviews the literature, takes the disease factor extremely seriously and yet does not attempt to
ascribe all that happened to that factor alone is Suzanne Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World
Epidemics in a Global Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).
See Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1952).
Cortés, “Second Letter,” 154–58.
Cortés, “Third Letter,” 207.
Cortés, “Third Letter,” 207, 221, 247. Annals of Tlatelolco, in Lockhart, We People Here, 268–
69.
Cortés, “Third Letter,” 220–21. To understand why Ixtlilxochitl would do this, see chapter 2’s
discussion of polygyny-induced factionalism. Bradley Benton has a chapter on the events of the
1510s in The Lords of Tetzcoco: The Transformation of Indigenous Rule in Postconquest
Central Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
See Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, Historia chronológica de la Noble y Leal
Ciudad de Tlaxcala, ed. Luis Reyes García and Andrea Martínez Baracs (Tlaxcala: Universidad
Autónoma de Tlaxcala, 1995).
Several extant king lists mention his short reign. Codex Chimalpahin (1:165) and Codex Aubin
say explicitly that he died “of the blisters,” meaning smallpox.
The Annals of Tlatelolco mention this relationship, but that alone would not constitute proof, as
the authors might have been guilty of wishful thinking. However, the most specific Mexica
genealogical source verifies this statement (Codex Chimalpahin 2:79, 99). Later events, in
which Tlatelolcans give Cuauhtemoc undivided loyalty, offer further proof.
All the indigenous annals agree that these events did occur. Only the Tlatelolcans seemed to see
Cuauhtemoc as blameless. See Codex Chimalpahin 1:159, 167 (on the names of the assassinated
brothers); Codex Aubin in Lockhart, We People Here, 277 (on the story of Cuauhtemoc having
killed his own half brother), Annals of Tlatelolco in Lockhart, We People Here, 261 (for the
quotation on the need for the actions). See also Kalyuta, “Don Pedro.”
On the symbolic importance of the female consort as a legitimator, see Susan Gillespie, Aztec
King: The Construction of Rulership in Mexica History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1989), and specifically of Malintzin and Isabel being understood to be such a consort by
Cortés’s side, see Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, 77–78. A full exploration of the theme of
legitimacy passing through the female line in Western myth is found in Alejandro Carrillo
Castro, The Dragon and the Unicorn (Mexico City, 2014 [1996]).
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
There is a subgenre of such songs in the Cantares Mexicanos, some of them specifically about
the war with the Spaniards.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 186. The Annals of Tlatelolco tell a
similar story.
Lockhart, We People Here, 218.
Lockhart, We People Here, 222. Such moments also figure in the Cantares Mexicanos.
Lockhart, We People Here, 146.
Lockhart, We People Here, 224.
Cortés, “Third Letter,” 257.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 230.
Lockhart, We People Here, 80, 90, 96, 110, and elsewhere.
Lockhart, We People Here, 74, 86, 98, 116, and elsewhere.
Cortés, “Third Letter,” 246–47.
Annals of Tlatelolco in Lockhart, We People Here, 267 and 313. A clear explanation of the way
in which this passage was partly mistranslated by Angel Garibay, then by Miguel Leon Portilla,
and eventually altered yet again in the translation from Spanish to English, yielding the famous
book title, “The Broken Spears,” which exists nowhere in the original passage, can be found in
John Schwaller, “Broken Spears or Broken Bones? The Evolution of the Most Famous Line in
Nahuatl,” Americas 16, 2 (2009): 241–52.
Cortés said he took him unawares, but the indigenous annals all say he went to give himself up.
Indeed, it would be hard to imagine the Spaniards taking the tlatoani of the Mexica off guard in
his own city.
Florentine Codex, book 12, in Lockhart, We People Here, 246–48.
- Halftitle page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- 1. The Trail from the Seven Caves (Before 1299)
- 2. People of the Valley (1350s–1450s)
- 3. The City on the Lake (1470–1518)
- 4. Strangers to Us People Here (1519)
- 5. A War to End All Wars (1520–1521)
- 6. Early Days (1520s–1550s)
- 7. Crisis: The Indians Talk Back (1560s)
- 8. The Grandchildren (1570s–1620s)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Glossary
A Note on Terminology, Translation, and Pronunciation
Introduction
Epilogue
Appendix: How Scholars Study the Aztecs
Annotated Bibliography of the Nahuatl Annals
Anónimo mexicano
Codex Aubin
Bancroft Dialogues
Cantares Mexicanos
Cristóbal de Castillo
Don Domingo de San Antonio Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin
Codex Chimalpopoca
Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca
Annals of Cuauhtinchan
Annals of Cuauhtitlan
Florentine Codex
Libro de los Guardianes
Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl
Annals of Juan Bautista
Legend of the Suns
Codex Mendoza
Annals of Puebla
José Fernando Ramírez
Annals of Tecamachalco
Codex Telleriano-Remensis
Texcoca Accounts of Conquest
Don Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc
Annals of Tlatelolco
Annals of Tlaxcala
Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca
Annals of Tula
Codex Xolotl
Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza
Notes
Prelims
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index