Conquistador

1519 AN AMBITIOUS AND CALCULATING CONQUISTADOR named Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba and arrived on the shores of Mexico with empire expansion in his veins. He intended to appropriate the new-found

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Aztec civilization.*1 What Cortés encountered when he arrived at Tenochtitlán, the famed “City of Dreams,” were not the barbarians that his conquistador predecessors had envisioned but a powerful and highly evolved civilization at its zenith. The Aztecs possessed elaborate and accurate calendars, efficient irrigation systems for their myriad year-round crops, zoos and botanical gardens unrivaled in Europe, immaculate city streets with waste-management methods, astounding arts and jewelry, state-run education, sport in the form of a life-or-death ballgame, a devoted and organized military apparatus, and a vast trade and tribute network stretching the entirety of their immense empire, as far south as Guatemala.

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discover that the Aztecs also possessed a highly evolved and ritualized religion much more complex than their own, a religion that its people followed with equal, if not greater, faith and conviction. Instead of one god, they zealously worshipped a pantheon of deities in elaborate and sophisticated ceremonies.

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actually parallel in a number of striking ways. Both were barbaric in their unique traditions. The Spaniards, fired and forged by the Crusades, would pillage and rape and kill in the name of God and country, subsuming in digenous cultures with little respect for their centuries of existence; the Aztecs used military force and violence to subjugate independent neighboring tribes and performed rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Neither could comprehend the other, and neither was willing to acquiesce. Both were uncompromisingly devoted to expanding their already considerable empires, and each was under the guidance and tutelage of a great leader.

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They set their bearings for the small island called Isla Mujeres, which Francisco de Córdoba had discovered and named on his unsuccessful voyage two years earlier, in 1517. Almost immediately distress shouts came from Juan de Escalante’s brigantine; the vessel hove to and then ignited its cannon, signaling that it was imperiled. It was leaking badly, and the pilot feared it would not make the crossing. Escalante’s ship carried the bulk of the expedition’s important stores of cassava bread, which had been packed in Cuba, so Cortés decided to turn around and sail back to Cozumel, where they might repair the ship in friendly environs.

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stones, which he later learned was used for religious “gladiator” battles, the victor winning his own life. Cortés dispatched scouts to inspect the main temple, where they found a scene that shocked them: freshly sacrificed young boys, blood still pooling from their viscera. The walls of the altar were bespattered with blood, and the victims’ hearts were set out on plates. The scouts saw large, square sacrificial stones and sharp obsidian blades glistening with blood. They saw dismembered torsos, the arms and legs severed from them cleanly. All this they reported to Cortés, who immediately demanded to see the leader of these people.26

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sent Malinche to see what she could discover about these visitors. She arrived to find the Aztec tribute collectors finished with their meal (which had included turkeys and chocolate) and vehemently berating the Totonac chiefs for peacefully receiving the Spaniards and then hosting them, without the Aztecs’ (and by extension Montezuma’s) permission. As punishment for such impudence, they demanded immediately twenty young men and women for ritual sacrifice. And this human fee was levied in addition to the other tributes they had come for.

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sent them rumbling down the steep steps and shattering into pieces. Horrified, the chiefs and priests threw their hands before their eyes and turned away, and the general wailing intensified. The assembled prayed to their gods to forgive this brazen act of the Spaniards, for it was not their fault. The Totonacs apologized to their gods for their inability to protect these symbols from harm.

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On August 16, 1519, Cortés assembled his troops in rank and file and spoke to them above the huff and snort of the horses and snarling hounds. They were a “holy company” of men about to engage in their own crusade, he said. They must “conquer the land or die,” but belief in their savior would carry them to victory, as there was no option to turn back. “This assurance must be our stay,” he hollered, “for every other refuge is now cut off, but that afforded by the Providence of God, and your own stout hearts!”4 The men cheered, buoyed by the rousing speech, and the train of warriors and bearers and beasts lurched forward into the unknown.

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altars and sacrificed by five priests who placed each victim on his back on a special stone that depicted the sun. One priest held down the right arm, another the left, and two more priests splayed and pressed down the legs. A final priest clamped a large collar around the prisoner’s neck while the village chief hoisted an obsidian blade high, then plunged it into the victim’s chest. Opening the cavity, he would then remove the still-beating heart with his hands and lift it in a highly stylized and ceremonial offering. The steam from the heart was believed to carry a special message to the sun. The skull racks, made from thousands of sacrifice victims, served as constant reminders of their religion’s immense power. Human ritual sacrifice also served to bring rain and ensure harvest, as well as fertility, enacted in the Feasts of the Flaying of Men, the Festival of Toxcatl, and the New Fire Ceremony.9 Cortés brought Malinche

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Roaming the city, some of Cortés’s men came upon the disturbing sight of prisoners bound and pinioned inside wooden latticework cages. The prisoners were fed daily rations of a special diet designed to quickly fatten them for sacrifice and consumption. Seeing these unfortunates and their condition, Cortés railed against such practices, hoping to impress upon the Tlaxcalans the teachings and truth of Christianity, about which he lectured long and often through Malinche and Aguilar. He even suggested to the elders and nobles the benefits of destroying their own idols and replacing them with his, showing them illustrations and pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. They should convert immediately, submitting to baptism to avoid burning in a fiery hell in the afterlife. The elders, including Xicotenga, balked. They had no intention of forsaking their own gods. As in Cempoala, Cortés favored a forced conversion, but once more the judicious Father Olmedo argued for prudence, pointing out that real and lasting conversion took time and religious understanding, and at any rate the Spaniards certainly had no need to create conflict and tensions with their brand-new allies. And once more Cortés had the good sense to take the advice of his trusted religious counselor. For their part, in a remarkable show of religious concession and tolerance, the Tlaxcalans provided one temple where the Spaniards could erect a cross and worship their idols. Here Cortés had his priests hold daily public mass; the ceremonies were attended not only by his men but by scores of the city’s inhabitants and those of neighboring villages.4

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If Malinche wished to escape imprisonment and probable death by sacrifice, she should seek refuge with her.15 But Malinche, now completely loyal to Cortés, convinced the noblewoman that she needed to get some things first, and she hurried to report her discovery to him.*19

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The lords at first denied duplicity, but when pressed, they blamed the scheme on Montezuma, saying that as his subservient tributaries they had had no choice. By now the courtyard of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl had filled with Cholulans, including most of the city’s dignitaries, as well as the many bearers Cortés had requested. Cortés waved for a harquebus to be fired, his signal for the massacre to commence. Spanish soldiers rode in and sealed off all the courtyard exits. The infantry—both Spanish and the few Tlaxcalans who had been allowed into the town—rushed the crowded courtyard, wielding their swords and spears, crossbowmen and harquebusiers in support. They fell upon the mostly unarmed populace in wholesale slaughter. Arrows whirred in horrific volleys, scything down scores in minutes as musket balls plowed others. Women and children ran screaming, many trampled by horses or by their own fleeing people. Some priests managed to escape to the top of the high Temple of Quetzalcoatl, from which spot they feebly hurled stones to defend themselves or, despondent, took their own lives. Witnesses later reported, “They hurled themselves from the temple pyramid…and they also hurled the idol Quetzalcoatl headfirst from the pyramid, for this form of suicide had always been a custom among them, and it was their custom…to die headlong. In the end, the greater part of them died in despair, by killing themselves.”16 Cortés ordered the temple set ablaze, and it burned for two days straight.

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Within two hours nearly everyone who assembled in the courtyard had been slain. Uncharacteristically, Cortés then allowed many of his allied Tlaxcalans inside the city to vent their rage on their long-standing rivals. For hours the Tlaxcalans pillaged and burned houses, looted and slaughtered everyone they could find, until Cortés determined to put a stop to them lest they go on indefinitely, so inflamed was their bloodlust. By the time Cortés halted the butchery, nearly five thousand people lay dead on the stone streets of Cholula.

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WHEN the messengers arrived in Tenochtitlán with explicit and detailed descriptions of the bloodbath in Cholula, Montezuma was stricken and perplexed. This style of slaying defied all protocols of traditional Aztec warfare. Even more confounding, Cholula was the spiritual house of Quetzalcoatl—how could his own shrine have been desecrated? How could Quetzalcoatl have allowed it to occur? It was inconceivable. The massacre cast doubt that this Spaniard, this Cortés, was really Quetzalcoatl. But that left an ominous question: who, then, was he?

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THE stage was set for a moment unprecedented in human history: a meeting between two civilizations, two completely autonomous worlds with no prior encounters or understanding of each other. The native Americans whom Cortés saw for the first time were a race of people who had evolved, isolated from the rest of the outside world, for more than fifty thousand years, and the complex, advanced civilization he was encountering had until only recently been thought not to exist. Yet here it was before him.18

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previously encountered. He presented the emperor with a necklace made of pearls and cut glass and scented with musk. Through Malinche, he inquired with a directness that must have surprised the emperor: “Are you Montezuma?” With measured calm came the reply, “Yes, I am he.” Flanked by dignitaries, the two men strolled a short distance up the street, and then Montezuma waved for an attendant to bring him a bundle of cloth, which he handed to Cortés. Wrapped inside were two necklaces, which the Spaniard graciously accepted. They were “made from red snails’ shells, which they hold in great esteem; and from each necklace hung eight shrimps of refined gold almost a span in length.”21 Montezuma had given him the highly revered “wind necklace,” a design said to have been worn by Quetzalcoatl himself.22 He also presented his visitor with garlands of aromatic

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Our lord, thou hast suffered fatigue, thou hast endured weariness. Thou hast come to arrive on earth. Thou hast come to govern the great city of Mexico. Thou hast come to descend upon thy mat, upon thy seat, which for a moment I have guarded for thee. For thy governors are departed—the rulers Itzcóatl, Montezuma the Elder…who yet a very short time ago had come to govern the city of Mexico. O, that one of them might witness, might marvel at what to me now hath befallen, at what I see now. I do not merely dream that I see thee, that I look into thy face. I have been afflicted for some time. I have gazed upon the unknown place whence though hast come—from among the clouds, from among the mists. And so this. The rulers departed, maintaining that thou wouldst come to visit the city, that thou wouldst come to descend upon thy mat, upon thy seat. And now it has been fulfilled; thou hast come…Rest thyself. Visit thy palace.*25 26

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OVER the next week the remarkable City of Dreams unveiled itself to the Spaniards as they traveled about the thriving megalopolis accompanied by Aztec nobles. They toured the remainder of Montezuma’s grand palace, which Cortés noticed was heavily guarded by as many as three thousand armed warriors. Here were housed a few thousand women (150 of whom, presumably, Montezuma slept with); the emperor was attended to daily by more than one thousand servants. His personal rooms on the upper floors offered vistas of his sprawling realm. His meals were elaborate, for he ate only on the finest Cholulan ceramic ware, and he touched each plate or platter or bowl, it was said, only once. He selected daily from more than three hundred possible specially prepared dishes—“cooked fowl, turkeys, pheasants, quail, tame and wild duck, hares and rabbits”—then removed to a low table, where he dined alone in silence but for the occasional low whispers of his closest priests and chosen relatives. He finished his meal with a cup of cocoa frothed with chocolate and long drafts from his tobacco pipe, entertained by foot-jugglers, singers, poets, and even misshapen hunchbacks and dwarfs and albinos.

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He faced Montezuma and spoke to him as Malinche translated, “I cannot imagine how a prince as great and wise as your majesty can have failed to realize that these idols of yours are not gods but evil things…devils.” Montezuma heard these words with a steely-eyed stare but for the moment said nothing. Cortés, deciding the time was right, with brazen audacity suggested that a cross be erected here, as a symbol of the one true God. “Let us divide off a part of this sanctuary…as a place where we can put Our Lady, and then you will see, by the fear that your idols have of her, how grievously they have deceived

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Ritual human sacrifice was the supreme offering in the Aztec belief system. And here stood Cortés, this mysterious interloper, denigrating that which was most sacred. It was too much. It was inconceivable. Deeply affronted, Montezuma held up his hand in defiance. “If I had known that you were going to utter these insults, I should not have shown you my gods,” he said angrily. “We hold them to be very good…they give us health and rain and crops and weather, fertility, and all the victories we desire. So we are bound to worship them and sacrifice to them…Say nothing more against them.”

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Hernán Cortés’s brazen, bloodless coup was perhaps the most audacious and astonishing takeover in the annals of military history. Deviously and deceitfully, Cortés had played on Montezuma’s trust, generosity, and hospitality, then struck with viperlike venom from within. Cortés was likely ecstatic, and perhaps surprised, that his plan had worked so seamlessly; but little did he know that the real fight for the Aztec empire had only just begun.

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Cortés sentenced Qualpopoca, his son, and the fifteen chiefs to burn at the stake, after which they would suffer eternal damnation for killing the Spaniards. The penalty was harsh, though hardly novel or original, having precedents in the Spanish Inquisition. By meting the punishment out so publicly, in a nearly ritual spectacle, Cortés certainly intended to send a message to the Aztec nobility as well as to the populace: killing a Spaniard would be met with the highest penalty. Having admitted their guilt, the Aztecs were tethered to poles and led to the square directly in front of the Great Temple. As they stood in confused horror, Cortés’s men arrived from Montezuma’s personal storage arsenals with javelins, swords, bows, and arrows, which they used to make great pyres. In the meantime Cortés visited Montezuma. After verbally lambasting him for his part in the deaths of his men, he ordered the emperor to be chained in ankle irons, an utterly humiliating and unprecedented indignity. Cortés then took Montezuma to watch as his own countrymen were burned alive at the stake; their horrific screams were finally subsumed by the snapping and cracking of the flaming wooden weapons. A large crowd gathered at the square to witness the atrocity, stunned into utter silence and confused as to how their emperor could have ordered it, or if he had not, how he could have allowed it.11

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HERNÁN CORTÉS WOULD REMAIN ENSCONCED in Tenochtitlán for the next five months, during which he and his captive ruler Montezuma would develop one of the most peculiar relationships in recorded history. Driven partly by political arrangement and partly by military necessity, the two men coexisted for nearly half a year in a bizarre captor-captive, ruler-puppet scenario of colliding religious beliefs and a regional power struggle.

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The priests charged with the idols’ protection stood in unarmed defiance as Cortés explained what he was about to do—destroy their evil idols and replace them with statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The priests simply laughed, incredulous. These gods ruled the empire, and the populace of Tenochtitlán would most certainly die for them, as some did daily through sacrifice. Desecration of these idols would cause chaos and bloodshed, the likes of which the Spaniards could not imagine. The priests pointed to some alarmed citizens below who, having heard the commotion at the Great Temple, were beginning to organize a defense.

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Sandoval and his men, expertly wielding their pikes, swords, and the long, specially made copper-tipped Chinantla spears, surged forward, swinging viciously, and through the darkness they heard the bloodcurdling cry “Holy Mary protect me, they have killed me and destroyed my eye!”24 The sharp tip of a pike had impaled Narváez’s face, sinking deep into an eye socket. Blood spewed from the cavity, pouring down his face and over his bearded chin as he fell to his knees, gasping in agony.25 Narváez must surrender, Sandoval barked, or the shrine would be set ablaze, consuming him and all his men. Narváez, thinking that he was dying, could only writhe in pitiful despair. When no order to surrender came, Martín López, the shipbuilder, set fire to the shrine’s thatched roof, and flames enveloped the place. Shortly thereafter Narváez crawled from the burning wreckage, his bare feet scorched and blistered.26 Ignoring his cries for help, Sandoval dragged him away and had him clapped in leg irons.

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conch flute in pieces as he climbed. At the top priests would meet him. He would turn and look down to acknowledge the power of the great lake, then acquiesce under the numbing euphoria of sacred mushrooms. Priests would hold down his arms and legs, as the obsidian blade impaled his thorax. His heart would be torn from him and offered, still pulsing, to the sun. Then he would be beheaded, his skull displayed on the skull rack for all to see. His sacrificial death signaled the birth of the next year’s ixiptla, who was publicly named, and the cycle was renewed. The festival, its origins, and its enactment were integral to Aztec life.2

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Toxcatl was considered the most splendid and important of all religious festivals, and the sacrifice of the ixiptla was its symbolic grand finale. So even had the priests and Montezuma told Alvarado that there would be no human sacrifices, they could hardly have upheld their promise. The very notion was absurd, akin to asking Cortés and his Christian followers to stop taking communion.

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drums, some upright, played by hand, others laid level and beaten with round, rubber-headed hammers. The dancers coursed and chanted, undulating in a roiling, rhythmical wave, to hollow horn sounds blown through bone fifes, shell conches, and flutes. On and on the dancers pulsated, consumed by spirits, enveloped and alive, the line of writhing Aztec nobles becoming the physical embodiment of a serpent. The music and drumming and chanting rose over the patio walls and poured into the streets of the city. Commoners stopped to listen in awe, aware of the sacredness of the spectacle. Alvarado and his men observed the dancing in confused wonder, impressed by the elaborate ritual and the skill of the participants but unable to comprehend the euphoria or trance that infused the dancers, who seemed utterly consumed by the enactment. The Serpent Dance brought the participants into a unity of the senses, a whole-human awakening or synesthesia, combining the aural, visual, and tactile experiences of dance with the ritual spiritual experience of seeing their gods—both as icons and as human impersonators—all at once, so that the mood became frenzied.9

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But they were penned in. Trying to escape, they stampeded one another; some attempted to scale the courtyard walls, but few were successful, and the gates had been further blockaded by some one thousand armed Tlaxcalans.11 Alvarado’s swordsmen and pikemen hacked and slashed with impunity, cutting the hands from drummers who continued drumming, thrusting pikes and spears into the bodies of participants and spectators until runnels of their blood stained the patio stones. Aztec reports from a few nobles who managed to escape that day recalled the ruthless horror of the massacre: “They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. No matter how they tried to save themselves, they could find no escape.”12

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Fighting for their lives, they killed a handful of the butchering Spaniards and wounded many, but in the end wood and flesh were no match for steel. Aztecs who survived later recalled the horror they had experienced: “The blood of the warriors flowed like water and gathered into pools. The pools widened, and the stench of blood and entrails filled the air. The Spaniards ran into the communal houses to kill those who were hiding. They ran everywhere and searched everywhere; they invaded every room, hunting and killing.”13

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In the grisly massacre, the music, drumming, and flute playing were supplanted by ghoulish screams and moans of the dying. In their frenetic bloodlust, the Spaniards killed until there was no one left to kill; then they knelt in the pooling blood to pilfer gold ornaments and stone jewelry from the slain and dying Aztecs.14 By the time Alvarado ordered his men to return to the Palace of Axayacatl, many thousands of the finest Aztec soldiers and the highest nobility lay heaped in grotesque attitudes on the sacred patio floor.

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Cortés, through Malinche, agreed, saying that Montezuma should choose whomever he thought best for the job. Montezuma selected his brother, Cuitláhuac, who was unchained from his shackles and set free. Cortés did not know it at the time, but he had released a demon.

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longer possessed the capacity to rule the Aztecs. It was a conclusion they had already come to themselves.15 In a very short time, in a move unprecedented in the history of the Aztec peoples, the council annulled Montezuma’s powers and bestowed the title of tlatoani on Cuitláhuac: he was now emperor of the Aztecs.16

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wounded and crying out that all the Indians in the city were preparing for war and had raised all the bridges.”17 Within twenty-four hours, under the leadership of the new warlord Cuitláhuac, the Aztecs renewed their attacks, and the worst military fears of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his company were stark realities. With the bridges up and the causeways blockaded, they were ensnared inside the City of Dreams.

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employed Father Olmedo, who had come to know the emperor well, to try to persuade him, but Montezuma shook his head, saying, “It is of no use. They will neither believe me, nor the false words and promises of [Cortés].”27 He added, in words certainly intended to be translated verbatim to Cortés, “I believe I shall not obtain any results toward ending this war, for they have already raised up another Lord (Cuitláhuac) and have made up their minds not to let you leave this place alive; therefore I believe that all of you will have to die.”

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Montezuma lived through the night but perished within a few days, on June 30, 1520, most likely from wounds caused by his own people. He had ruled the Aztec empire for seventeen years, leading it to the pinnacle of its magnificence. Its trade and tribute network stretched far beyond the horizons that he could see as he prayed atop the Great Temple, spanning to the oceans east and west and the lands as far south as Guatemala. It was a tragic end to an enigmatically tragic life.*37 30

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And certainly cultural and communicative differences plagued Montezuma, for the gifts he bestowed upon Cortés from the moment of his arrival—gifts that in the Aztec world were indications of wealth and power and meant to show dominance—only further fueled Cortés’s greed and desire. Montezuma had allowed Cortés and the Spaniards into his wondrous city so that they might be awed by his immense wealth and power, realize it, succumb to it, and go away, but instead that wealth had only fortified Cortés’s unyielding resolve.

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Fray Diego Duran would say of Montezuma that he was “a king so powerful, so feared and served, so obeyed by the whole of this new world, who came nevertheless to an end calamitous and shabby so that even in his last rites there were

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Any Spaniards who managed to survive the night were now dragged to the temple tops and held down screaming, their hearts cut still pulsing from their chests and brandished aloft in victory, spoils of war and bloodfood for the god Huitzilopochtli.26 Later their bodies would be ingloriously dismembered, their heads skewered onto their own pikes and spears and swords and exhibited for all to see, thrust into the ground like monstrous fence-posts, alternating between blood-drenched, butchered horse heads.

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Still seething from his bitter defeat in Tenochtitlán, and his narrow escape, he decided to take aggressive symbolic measures now. The measures he chose were public enslavement and terror. He would teach a lesson that burned across the region. He ordered his men to round up all prisoners of war from the two recent battles and conduct raids on all nearby towns where Spaniards were known to have been killed. They then herded these prisoners, including the women and children of the slain and captive, into the central square of Tepeaca to await their fate. Cortés had one of his blacksmiths fashion a brand shaped in the letter g for the term guerra or “war.” The brand was fired on hot coals and seared deeply into the faces of all the slaves taken, the skin of their cheeks blistering and bubbling as they were held down, bellowing out in anguish.28 For the next three weeks, fueled perhaps by a desire for vengeance for La Noche Triste, and certainly wishing to make a show of unyielding power, Cortés terrorized the region, ravaging villages and cities with brutal impunity. He turned his ferocious armored war-hounds loose on any Aztecs or their allies who refused to submit; the snarling, blood-crazed animals tore them to shreds.29 Hacking and burning a wide and deadly course, Cortés took prisoner-slaves and exacted fealty from leaders until, as the thick smoke of sacked towns choked the horizon, he had subjugated the entire province of Tepeaca. Cortés would say of this bloody carnage, “Although…this province is very large, within twenty days we had subdued and pacified many towns and villages, and the lords and chieftains…offered themselves as your majesty’s vassals.”30 Cortés would later justify his brutality and the taking of slaves by arguing that it was in response to widespread regional cannibalism, which both he and the crown despised, but this claim rang false, sounding like an excuse.31

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The campaign reached, even for Cortés, shocking levels of atrocity and barbarity. In one city he is said to have lined up and killed two thousand civilian men, while four thousand women and children watched—and the latter were then branded and enslaved.32 It was terribly effective, however, and on September 4, 1520, Cortés ensconced himself inextricably on the promontory of Tepeaca, where he founded a new town called Segura de la Frontera (Security of the Frontier). He appointed, as in Villa Rica, a city council, complete with magistrates, alcaldes, and all necessary officials of a functioning and “legal” Spanish city. Looking down from the hilltop fortress (on which he erected civic buildings and installed a garrison), Cortés could survey his new domain with satisfaction, even optimism. He now controlled nearly half of Mexico, and, more important, he had won a strategic position that guaranteed secure and open passage from the high plains clear to the eastern shore, allowing unimpeded transfer of men, equipment, and goods. And by extension he had severed the Aztecs from this same crucial lifeline.

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Cortés in his pursuit of conquest. While he was training his new recruits, stacking and storing powder kegs and ammunition, and cleaning freshly arrived armaments, all across Mexico the native population began to suffer from an inexplicable illness. King and peasant alike were racked with fitful coughs and burning, blistering sores. Then after months of horrific suffering, those stricken would die. The pestilence was smallpox, a virulent killer that was foreign to and unprecedented in the New World.

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The disease first reached Hispaniola in the last months of 1518, laying waste to more than one-third of the indigenous population; then it hopped from island to island, infecting both Cuba and Puerto Rico and, quickly, the Greater Antilles.10 Then came perhaps the greatest and most destructive irony in the history of the Spanish conquest; certainly Hernán Cortés would not understand until much later how crucial it had been to his cause. On one of the Narváez ships (sent to either capture or kill Cortés) was an African porter named Francisco de Eguia, who was infected with smallpox and brought the first case to New Spain.11 Unwittingly Eguia “infected the household in Cempoala where he was quartered; and it spread from one Indian to another, and they, being so numerous and eating and sleeping together, quickly infected the whole country.”12 By late October the pestilence had scoured its way to Tenochtitlán, so that just as the Aztecs were busy cleaning their temples and ridding the pyramids of all memory of the Spaniards’ presence among them, the people began to fall sick with mysterious and frightening symptoms.

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prevalent on the victims’ faces as to render them blind. The inexplicable epidemic caused panic and paralysis across the lacustrine district. The Aztecs long afterward remembered the pestilence and its symptoms: “Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their…

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Tezcatlipoca. But they had no experience with an epidemic of this magnitude, which partly explains why the Aztec soldiers were unable to pursue and finish off Cortés. People died in such numbers that even cremation was halted. Bodies were heaped into canals or taken by canoe to the middle of the lake and dumped without ritual or ceremony.14 Women grew too sick to grind maize, so that a serious food shortage developed, and for seventy days—the period coinciding precisely with Cortés’s crucial convalescence in…

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jalap, and even crushed beetles, but none could remedy the scourge of the smallpox, against which the indigenous peoples of Mexico had no immunity.15 Most of these attempted remedies merely failed, but one actually further spread the disease: communal bathing. Ritual and curative bathing was a widespread, established practice in everyday life, used for general cleanliness but also to purge maladies. Unfortunately, one of the…

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were an invalid, to massage him; and after the massage the bather would lie upon a mat to let the bath have its effect.”16 The touching of open sores, the sharing of infected water, and the breathing of the close communal air helped transmit the disease, and soon “the Great Rash” ravaged the mighty metropolis of Tenochtitlán and the rest of the Aztec empire.

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wondering yet again why their gods had forsaken them, why they were being punished. As the Aztec accounts sadly reported, “a great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, so they starved to death in their beds.”*40 18 Chronicler Francisco de Aguilar, who was there, noted the cosmic irony of the timing, observing that just “when the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.”

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While the pox decimated the Aztecs physically, it also worked against them psychologically. The Spaniards were immune to the plague’s effects, most having been exposed as children. Their immunity made them appear ever more powerful, even superhuman; it most certainly rekindled the notion (which had been at least contemplated by the late Montezuma) that these men were not men at all but gods.20

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city, where they were stacked and ordered for further refining, trimming, and dressing. This was merely the beginning of the most ambitious undertaking of the entire campaign, and it is still among the largest landlocked naval operation ever conducted in the history of warfare. Cortés had decided,

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deliberations used to contemplate and select his successor. “Who now shall order matters for the good of the people and the realm?” chanted the priests. “Who shall appoint the judges to minister justice to the people? Who shall bid the drum and the flute to sound, and gather together the veteran soldiers and the men mighty in battle?”1 Those questions would haunt the empire for two months, during which time the Aztecs lived without a ruler. The answer

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Cortés spoke to his men (translated to the Tlaxcalans through Malinche and a few pages who had learned Nahuatl) reminding them of (and cleverly providing legal precedent for) the task ahead. They embarked on a “just” cause, he said, simultaneously appealing to honor, faith, and greed. “The principal reason for us coming to these parts,” he bellowed across the plaza, “is to glorify and preach the Faith of Jesus Christ, even though at the same time it brings us honor and profit, which infrequently come in the same package.”

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This last realization, according to Cortés, weighed heavily on his soul, for he certainly preferred, if possible, to take the city without destroying it entirely. But that appeared unlikely. As a last-ditch effort, thinking he would hurt the Aztec leadership to their very core, he sent amphibious raiding parties via brigantine to infiltrate the city and destroy and torch the “towers of their idols and their houses,” including the Palace of Axayacatl as well as one of the former emperor Montezuma’s most prized buildings, his gorgeous and magnificent House of Birds.18 And though the tactic caused the Aztecs extreme grief, it only spurred them to fight that much harder out of anger and hatred.

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When they got to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huitzilopochtli, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs…and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals…and the flesh they ate in chilmole… and the bodies, that is their entrails and feet, they threw to the tigers and lions which they kept in the house of the carnivores.*54 39

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hands and a few flayed horse heads. As word of these trophies went around the lake, support for Cortés began to shift, and within only a couple of days nearly all of Cortés’s Indian allies disappeared. Fickle, having seen that Cortés could be defeated, and superstitious of prophecies presaging their doom, they broke camp and vanished beyond the lakeshores. With the situation now firmly in his favor, Cuauhtémoc issued a bold and definitive proclamation, one he ordered spread far and wide: he had consulted his gods, and they had spoken. Within eight days not a single Spaniard would be left alive.

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their lives before the charging Spanish horses, began discarding heavy bundles, spoils and plunder from an Otomi town they had recently sacked. Sandoval and his men stopped to inspect the bundles of booty, which included bales of maize and stacks of fine clothing. Among the garments were also the remnants of roasted babies, the sight of which spurred the Spaniards to pursue the fleeing warriors for over five miles to an elevated and walled fortress, where the survivors (some two thousand were slain) sought refuge.5 They wailed, beat drums, and blew horns into the night, then slunk away under cover of darkness. By sunrise there was no sign of them, and Sandoval was able to return to Tenochtitlán with more than seventy thousand new Otomi allies, having secured the region and shored up his political alliances.6

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He would reduce Tenochtitlán to rubble. “My plan,” he reported, “was to raze to the ground all the houses on both sides of the streets along which we advanced, so that we should move not a step without leaving everything behind us in ruins.”12 He called on his allied leaders to enlist from the surrounding hills and towns all the farm laborers they could muster, and those should come with their coas (digging tools like shovels) and prepare to utterly destroy the famed city. Using the laborers and field workers to flatten buildings and permanently fill in all the causeways, canals, and ditches, Cortés had also availed himself of a great many allied warriors, for they were no longer required in the destruction work.13

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The captain-general ascended the steps of the high pyramid to gain a view over the whole city and discovered there the decapitated heads of many of his Spanish brethren impaled and displayed on skull racks, as well as the heads of numerous Tlaxcalans, the Aztecs’ arch-enemies. Cortés stood at the edge so that the entire city could see him, perhaps hoping the sight of him rather than their own priests, or Cuauhtémoc, would convince the Aztecs at last to give up. Nearly ninety percent of the city was now in his possession.17 But still the proud and tenacious Cuauhtémoc refused to submit. Despite the appearance of utter dominance for Cortés, pockets of elite Aztec fighting corps remained, brave eagle and jaguar warriors, men who would much sooner die than surrender.

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During the four days of the construction of the catapult, the Aztec populace had continued to suffer horrendous hardship of famine and dehydration, perishing in such great numbers that a stench rose in the air as the bodies of the unfortunate were piled in houses or thrown into the lake. Emaciated women and children huddled along the streets, gaunt and exhausted, unable to offer resistance.21 And neither were the Aztec warriors any match for the better-fed and -watered Spaniards and their allies.

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During two days’ fighting—which by now could really only be accurately described as slaughter—Cortés claimed to have killed and imprisoned more than fifty thousand people, warriors and women and children. The Tlaxcalans annihilated with an ancient vengeance, a kind of hatred and vitriol that shocked even Cortés, who said of his allied killing machine, “No race, however savage, has ever practiced such fierce and unnatural cruelty as the natives of these parts.”*56 22 But despite this claim of compassion (which rings as a bit disingenuous coming from the Butcher of Cholula), Cortés unquestionably benefited from the services of these allies he called “savages.”

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These Aztec generals gorged themselves on the Spaniards’ food offerings, then left with food for their leader, which was presumably meant as a powerful enticement to a man ruling over a starving people. But still Cuauhtémoc refused to come, sending the generals back with only a pile of meager cotton garments. Despite their bitter famine, to the end the Aztecs refused to consume the flesh of their own people (the practice was reserved only for religious rituals); Bernal Díaz noted that “the Mexicans did not eat the flesh of their own people, only that of our men and our Tlascalan allies whom they had captured.”24

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It must have pained him beyond words to see his once-proud people penned into the small quarter the survivors now occupied, the houses nearby smoldering rubble, others filled with the dead and the nearly dead. The air grew thick with obsidian-colored smoke, while the streets were riddled with crying children and wailing women beating their empty hands against what few walls remained.25

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In a last-ditch effort to combat what appeared inevitable, Cuauhtémoc sent forth one of his greatest individual warriors, bedecking him in the feather garb of the Quetzal Owl, the armor and regalia of former Aztec ruler Ahuitzotl. He flew forth wielding obsidian-tipped spears and arrows, flanked by four attendants. His brilliant green quetzal feathers spanned out, making him seem larger than life. His plumage gleamed and shimmered as he leaped into battle. The Quetzal Owl warrior fought bravely, driving scores of enemies back through intimidation and power. He ascended a rooftop, fired arrows upon the invaders, then leaped from the roof and was gone.

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The end of the Aztec empire was upon them. The wheeling blood-colored whirlwind came to be referred to as “the Final Omen.” In shock and terror the Aztecs realized that their civilization was—both literally and figuratively—being consumed by their enemy and by the lake itself. Their gods, it seemed, had forsaken them.

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Though he had personally wrought this carnage with his sustained and skillful siege, Cortés could hardly believe what he witnessed. “The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it.”30 As the Spaniards approached, women and children poured forth from the mostly destroyed houses, fleeing in panic and despair. In the frantic press of humanity many were trampled while others attempted to escape into the lake, where many floundered and drowned. In the streets Cortés and his men and horses came across such numbers of dead that they had no choice but to walk over and upon them.

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was long but cheerful, and when his eyes dwelt on you they seemed more grave than gentle, and did not waver.” He was anything but cheerful as he stood before his captor, gesturing toward the dagger at his waist. “Ah, captain,” Cuauhtémoc is said to have implored, “I have already done everything in my power to defend my kingdom and free it from your hands. And since my fortune has not been favorable, take my life, which would be very just. And this will put an end to the Méxican Kingdom, since you have destroyed my city and killed my vassals.”33

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the plaintive wailing of a defeated people as they began to come out of hiding, emaciated and dressed only in rags. According to Bernal Díaz, “For three whole days and nights they never ceased streaming out, and all three causeways were crowded with men, women, and children so thin, sallow, dirty, and stinking that it was pitiful to see them.”36

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Looking through the blood-orange haze that lay low across the lake waters, seeing the smoke from the funeral pyres curling like vaporous black serpents over the burning and demolished city, Cortés must have wondered if there existed enough forgiveness to accommodate what they had done.

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

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enemies could not pilfer it.2 The severe torture left the king of Tacuba dead, and though Cortés himself eventually stopped the torture of Cuauhtémoc, the emperor’s feet were so badly mangled that he limped for the remainder of his life. Cortés had him hanged from a pochote tree a few years later for allegedly orchestrating a rebellion and assassination attempt of Cortés during the late 1523 Honduras expedition. With him were also executed the lords Cohuanacoah of Texcoco and Tetlepanquetzal of Tacuba, finalizing the demise of the Triple Alliance, the formal triumvirate buttressing the Aztec empire.*57 3

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

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After the king and Cortés were paid, and a few under-the-table payments were made to special captains—men close to Cortés—there remained so little to distribute among the soldiers that the amount suggested came to an insulting 160 pesos per man, at a time when the cost of a crossbow alone, or a serviceable battle sword, was fifty or sixty pesos.

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

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

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

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The Aztecs recalled the end of their city, the demise of their civilization, reflectively and poetically, their memories tinged with loss and futility: Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, And the walls are spattered with gore. The water has turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine. We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead. The shields of our warriors were its defense, but they could not save it.13

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Hernán Cortés became immensely wealthy, though he never lost his adventurous spirit. He would go on to discover the peninsula of Baja California in 1536 and to survey the Gulf of California (later named the Sea of Cortés) that separates it from Mexico. Subsequent attempts at conquest in Honduras and Guatemala were failures, as was his last disastrous expedition in Algiers in 1541. Still, he was given a hero’s welcome in Spain and was considered and referred to as the Gran Conquistador, the conqueror against whom all others would ultimately be measured. He was bestowed with many honors, even offered knighthood, which he declined although he had earned it. Cortés’s expedition to and conquest of Mexico garnered the largest addition of land and treasure to the Spanish empire ever secured by a single individual. Knowing this, Cortés is said (according to Voltaire) to have once brashly remarked to the king, who did not recognize him, “I am the one who gave you more kingdoms than you had towns before.”32

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Hernán Cortés left behind a considerable legacy, from off-spring to legends to lore, an entire mythology. He remains—like his arch-enemy Montezuma—enigmatic and misunderstood, sometimes revered, sometimes reviled, always controversial. People suggest that had Cortés not conquered Mexico, someone else surely would have. Given the devastating effects of smallpox on the indigenous population, that is probably true. But the argument misses the point. Hernán Cortés did conquer Mexico. Others tried and failed; most barely made it out of their ships; many did not escape alive.

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