SIX
Tenochtitlán, June 24, 1520–August 13, 1521
A cunning fellow is man. His tools make him master of beasts of the field and those that move in the mountains . . .
He has a way against everything, and he faces nothing that is to come without contrivance . . .
With some sort of cunning, inventive
Beyond all expectation
He reaches sometimes evil,
And, sometimes good.
—SOPHOCLES, Antigone (347–67)
THE BATTLES FOR MEXICO CITY
Besieged—June 24–30, 1520
CLOUDS OF JAVELINS, stones from slings, and arrows wounded forty-six conquistadors. Twelve were killed outright. In the narrow passageways around Cortés’s headquarters, the Spanish were hemmed in on all sides. “But I declare,” wrote the eyewitness Bernal Díaz del Castillo of the Spaniards’ suddenly desperate plight in Tenochtitlán, “that I do not know how to describe it, for neither cannon nor muskets nor crossbows availed, nor hand-to-hand fighting, nor killing thirty or forty of them every time we charged, for they still fought on in as close ranks and with more energy than in the beginning” (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 302).
The odds were now dramatically against the vastly outnumbered Castilians, who foolishly had brought their entire tiny force inside the island city of Tenochtitlán. During this awful week the Spaniards gave up their grandiose ideas that had taken root over their prior eight-month occupation of Mexico City. The thought of ruling the city as European lords now seemed utter folly. Soon the notion of either a truce or an Aztec surrender became equally ludicrous. Finally, Cortés’s men began to have doubts that they could even come out of the infernal city with their lives, much less with their trove of looted gold. 1
Only repeated fire from their harquebusiers and crossbowmen, and occasional volleys from the cannon—thirty or so Mexica attackers often fell with each shot—allowed the stalwart Diego de Ordaz to return to the Castilians’ bunker and report to his caudillo that he had failed in his breakout attempt: the streets were all blocked and full of their enraged hosts. Still, Ordaz’s men hacked away entire limbs of the unarmored Mexicas with their Toledo swords. The iron lances of the mounted mailed knights killed even more with single thrusts. Grapeshot from the cannon shredded wave after wave of Mexicas. A few horses trampled dozens of unprotected Aztecs. The ugly Spanish mastiffs tore at the legs and arms of the shrieking attackers. Volleys of crossbow bolts and lead balls from the harquebuses mowed natives at distances of one hundred yards and more.
The density of metropolitan warfare and the sheer number of enraged and courageous native warriors were new experiences for the undefeated conquistadors. Their commanders, veterans of Spain’s wars against the Italians and Ottomans, had never seen such audacity or bravery in all the fighting in the Mediterranean. Ordaz was soon to learn that his excellence in technology and tactics might not any longer be able to nullify the numerically superior enemy if the Spanish were continually forced to fight in the back alleys and narrow corridors of Tenochtitlán, where they could be thronged and pelted from the rooftops by men often as brave as themselves. The more desperate Aztecs were beginning to kill a few of his soldiers, not merely wrestling them to the ground to bind them as captives for their hungry gods.
The rout of this trial sally of Ordaz’s four hundred conquistadors— including almost all the Spanish crossbowmen and harquebusiers that Cortés had left—was proof enough that there was no way out of the fortress city. Or so it seemed. The neighboring allies in Tlacopán (modern-day Tacuba) on the shore had wisely warned Cortés the day before not to reenter the dreaded Tenochtitlán, but to remain with them on the coast of Lake Texcoco. “Lord,” they pleaded with Cortés, “stay here in Tacuba, or in Coyoacán, or in Texcoco . . . because here on the mainland, in these meadows, if the Mexica rise against you, you would defend yourself better than in the city” (H. Thomas, Conquest, 395).
Excellent advice, but back in the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán were the carefully guarded captured Aztec treasure, the hostage emperor, Montezuma, and the beleaguered Pedro de Alvarado with fewer than one hundred of the expedition’s best conquistadors. These had stayed behind while Cortés marched back to the coast to put down a rival Spanish challenge to his campaign. Besides, with this new contingent of Pánfilo de Narváez’s Cuban army, who had “joined” Cortés in Vera Cruz in the aftermath of their commander’s failed attempt to subvert the conquest of Tenochtitlán, Cortés had more than a thousand soldiers. The city had been all but his anyway for almost the last eight months. After his brief excursion to Vera Cruz, he had far more arms and supplies than when his men had first dismantled their ships and marched inland in July 1519, reaching Montezuma’s capital on November 8 of that year. Why should he worry now?
What tribe in all of Mexico had shown they could stop such a force? In the prior twelve months the Mayas, Totonacs, Tlaxcalans, Otomis, and Cholulas had all learned the futility of opposing mounted lancers, gunpowder weapons, crossbows, fierce war dogs, and Spanish steel—not to mention the classical battle tactics of massed infantry and the generalship of Cortés himself, who sought to annihilate, not capture, his enemies through disciplined squares, carefully timed mounted attacks, and mass volleys of gunfire. Surely if Cortés had initially marched into Tenochtitlán in November 1519 with 500 conquistadors, could he not just as easily now march out in June 1520 with more than 1,200?
He proudly announced to the anxious residents of Tlacopán that, in fact, his Castilians would go back across the causeways into the capital city of his New-Spain-to-be—Cortés’s gift to the adolescent king, Charles V. They would make a show of force, throw down some more idols, threaten a few Aztec lords, reenter the imperial palace, collect their booty, rescue Alvarado, and then order Montezuma to cease the futile resistance of his subjects.
But after Cortés rode into Tenochtitlán and rejoined Alvarado’s men, the entire reunited contingent was soon cut off in the Palace of Axayácatl and the temple of Tezcatlipoca. The once-friendly Mexicas were blocking all three causeways leading out of their great island capital. More than 1,000 Spaniards, with a small contingent of their gallant Tlaxcalan allies— some 2,000 indigenous enemies of the Aztecs—were completely surrounded in a tiny compound by well over 200,000 enraged Mexicas and a growing number of their tributary allies from the surrounding lakeside communities. Once it was clear that the captive Montezuma no longer had control of his subjects, and that Ordaz had failed to find a way out, the Castilians packed their gold, hunkered down, and began planning their escape before they were utterly annihilated.
Had not the diabolical Narváez—now half-blind and in shackles in Cortés’s jail—interrupted his plans, Cortés and his fanatics would have thrown down all the Aztec stone idols, fumigated the pyramids in the Valley of Mexico from the stench of their human offal, tossed the Mexica priests with their odious capes of human skin down from the heights, eradicated the horrific sacrifices, banned cannibalism and sodomy, introduced the love of the Savior, and then usurped Montezuma as lord and master of an empire of a million Christian subjects and ensconced Cortés himself in the former’s palace as doge of this Venice of New Spain! And what works such an enormous force of laborers might accomplish for their European overseers under Cortés’s megalomaniac tutelage! What subterranean gold treasures such a throng of miners might uncover! Upon entry to Tenochtitlán the awed Mexicas for a while thought Cortés’s soldiers of fortune were white-skinned gods, their horses supernatural centaurs who talked to men, their cannon murderous thunder weapons from the heavens. And their enormous sharp-fanged mastiffs? Surely a far cry from the local tiny lapdogs that were castrated and eaten; more like some devilish fanged creatures of myth. Such were the Castilian fantasies dashed by the thousands of enraged Aztecs now outside the Spanish compound.
Despite Cortés’s defeat of Narváez’s army, the incorporation into his own force of the latter’s troops, and his successful return across the causeways back into the island city, everything had suddenly gone terribly wrong in the capital. In his absence, the maniacal Pedro de Alvarado had massacred thousands of the Mexica nobles and instigated hostilities against their unarmed women and children. The crazy Castilian had murdered festivalgoers on the pretext that they were plotting insurrection. Or was it their purported resurrection of the now forbidden human sacrifice, or Alvarado’s own paranoia, his greed at the sight of so much gold and jewels on the ceremonial dress of the Aztec nobles, or finally perhaps the sheer sadistic delight of the mounted aristocrat in hacking to pieces hundreds of the defenseless but hated Mexicas? How Alvarado and his tiny coterie of fewer than a hundred conquistadors had managed to slaughter more than 8,000 of them, albeit initially surprised and unarmed in a confined place, was still not altogether clear. Evil could only serve a man like Alvarado so far.
In any case, Cortés was not gone for more than two months before his jittery lieutenants had sparked a murderous revolt of his once-pacified hosts. “You have done badly,” Cortés lectured the hothead on his return. “You have been false to your trust. Your conduct has been that of a mad-man” (W. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 407–8). Or perhaps a psychopath—Aztec witnesses a few years after the slaughter reported the effect of steel swords and iron lances upon unprotected flesh:
They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. 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. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 76)
Now a little more than a month later, the Spaniards themselves could find no escape. For a week they sortied out of their headquarters, probing the Aztec resistance in vain attempts to find an exit to the elevated causeways across Lake Texcoco. At night, Cortés’s men saw through the windows of their headquarters the heads of their slain comrades bobbing on sticks; groaning and making wild gestures as if the rotting corpses were some sort of talking dead, the Aztecs used them as puppets of sorts to terrorize the beleaguered Spaniards. Despite the mounting casualties in these battles to the death around the Spanish compound, it was still likely that any Castilian who stumbled in the fighting might be bound and taken captive, to mark resumption of the sacrifices atop the Great Pyramid. The Spaniards’ supplies of fresh water and food were cut off, as they were blockaded and then continuously bombarded with missiles from the surrounding roofs.
After a week of this mayhem, Cortés was desperate, and in the immediate crisis would survive only through his reliance on his impromptu machines and his own military acumen. All the while, the cannon fired grapeshot that slaughtered the Aztec swarms, killing hundreds and breaking up their efforts to storm his temple redoubt. His men dug a well to find brackish water. They somehow constructed from roof timber and beams in the Aztec temples vast manteletes, or mobile wooden tanks, that could protect up to twenty-five men, as they shot and stabbed in safety from the engines’ apertures. His engineers thereby hoped to clear the area around the Palace of Axayácatl and halt the nightly missile attacks.
Cortés at last dragged the discredited Montezuma himself onto the roof of the temple to order his subjects below to desist. Instead, the firedup Mexicas jeered the shackled emperor and pelted their once-divine ruler with stones. Soon the Spaniards pulled the dazed emperor back inside, only to find Montezuma mortally wounded—their last chance of parley extinguished. Later rival accounts suggested that the Castilians murdered the emperor in their anger—and on rumors that Montezuma had earlier sent heralds to the Spanish usurper Narváez on the coast to join forces with him against Cortés.
Cortés next stormed the nearby temple of Yopico. The newly constructed siege engines shielded himself and forty men who climbed the pyramid, cast down idols, threw the priests off their sanctuary, destroyed the stores of ceremonial flayed skins, and generally cleared the rival tower of archers and slingers who had rained death down on the Spaniards. The desperate killing was driven by religion and tactics: sorties against the immediate military challenge of enemy missiles, coupled with the continual Christian crusade to obliterate all traces of the Mexicas’ machinery of sacrifice. Whereas at first the religious war was seen by some conquistadors as an impediment, the Spaniards were learning that the destruction of Aztec idols and priests brought benefits to the battlefield as well—in steadily sapping enemy morale and cohesion, as the Aztecs despaired of seeing their gods, whom they fought to feed, unable to prevent their own destruction.
In the struggle for Yopico, Cortés reinjured his wounded hand and was almost cast off the pyramid in the terrible melee. The contemporary encomiast Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote of the Spaniards’ mad climb up Yopico: “Oh! What a fight and what a fierce battle it was that took place; it was a memorable thing to see us all streaming with blood and covered with wounds and others slain” (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 306). At least another twenty conquistadors were killed in this desperate second sortie; despite the cannon, horses, and siege engines, there were too many Aztecs in such a confined place to make any headway. Now powder was growing short and shot scarce (should the gold and silver be melted into cannonballs? Cortés wondered). His wounded were hungry and without medical treatment. The mud-brick walls themselves of the temple fortress were eroding from the impact of thousands of missiles and stones. As one Aztec herald pointed out to them, the Mexicas and their allies could lose 250 for every one Spaniard and still annihilate the trapped guests.
At the end of this last week of June 1520, Cortés was at a crossroads. The choice, as his lieutenants put it to him, was apparently clear-cut: either flee empty-handed or stay and die with the gold in his supposed new tributary city. Characteristically, the caudillo chose neither option. He would instead attempt a night escape across the causeway despite the rain and fog, and carry out under the noses of the Aztecs the cumbersome bars of looted gold and bags of precious jewels. The Castilians would muffle the horses’ hooves. Cortés would order them to bring along a newly constructed movable bridge to span the breaks in the causeways. They would load the golden bars on horses and let the soldiers take out the rest—each man deciding how much gold he would carry under his tunic or breast-plate, the choice being to march wealthy and cumbersome for the fighting to come or to be nimble and poor—and perhaps stay alive. As Francisco López de Gómara, the contemporary chronicler put it, “Among our men, those who were most encumbered with clothing, gold, and jewels were the first to die, and those who were saved carried the least and forged fearlessly ahead. So those who died, died rich, and their gold killed them” ( Cortés, 222).
For the next two decades the survivors of that awful night of sorrows would engage in mutual recriminations, lawsuits, and slander to determine exactly how much gold was carried out and how much saved. Most was clearly lost, and yet the accusations went on. Cortés would confiscate anyway what precious metal the lucky had brought out on their persons. But all that was years and hundreds of dead in the future. For the moment Cortés’s 1,300 conquistadors had to find a way out of this island maze that had so suddenly been transformed from their paradise to their execution yard.
Noche Triste—June 30–July 1, 1520
It was pitch-black and raining. Still, the Castilians had nearly made it, miraculously crossing three canals—the Tecpantzinco, Tacuba, and Atenchicalco—that bisected the causeway of escape leading to the shore town of Tlacopán. They were mostly out of Tenochtitlán proper and strung in a long column on the levee above Lake Texcoco. Their wondrous portable bridge was successful so far in spanning the gaps in their path of escape. But as they began to make their way over the fourth canal, the Mixocoatechialtitlan, a woman who was fetching water spotted the clumsy band and sounded the alarm: “Mexica, come quickly, our enemies are leaving.” The priest of Huitzilopochtli heard her screams and ran wildly to muster the warriors: “Mexican chiefs, your enemies are escaping! Run to your canoes of war” (H. Thomas, Conquest, 410).
Within minutes hundreds of canoes dotted Lake Texcoco, embarking their crews at various places along the narrow causeway to ambush the column. Others docked beside the army and smothered the Castilians with missiles. The portable bridge quickly gave way under the weight of the frantic fugitives. From now on, the only way out was to trample over the baggage horses and the bodies of those in the vanguard who fell into the canal—and had the macabre effect of providing enough flotsam and jetsam to offer footing for their terrified comrades. Hordes from Tenochtitlán left the city and attacked the retreating conquistadors from the rear, while a new Aztec muster blocked the advance. The Spaniards’ four sloops—control of Lake Texcoco was critical for any successful fighting on the causeways—had long since burned. Help by water was impossible.
What followed in the next six hours was the greatest European defeat in the New World since its discovery by Columbus, as the heavily armed Spaniards, far too many laden with gold tucked up in their armor, struggled to bring up their cannon, to keep the horses calm, to organize their harquebusiers and crossbowmen, and somehow while under constant aerial attack to fill in with rubble the chasm that blocked their escape. Contemporary Mexica witnesses later recounted the confused scene as the Spaniards realized their highway of escape was breached, the bridge down, and an open canal blocking their advance:
When the Spaniards reached the Canal of the Toltecs, the Tlatecayohuacan, they hurled themselves headlong into the water, as if they were jumping from a cliff. The Tlaxcaltecas, the allies from Tliliuhquitepec, the Spanish foot soldiers and horsemen, the few women who accompanied the army— all came to the brink and plunged over it. The canal was soon choked with the bodies of men and horses; they filled the gap in the causeway with their own drowned bodies. Those who followed crossed to the other side by walking on the corpses. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 85–86)
Those luckily at the fore of the column made it to shore, followed closely by Cortés himself and the second division—but no others. Rounding up five of his best horsemen who had reached safety—Ávila, Gonzalo, Morla, Olid, and the redoubtable Sandoval—Cortés plunged back among thousands to carve out a pocket through which the few still alive of his army might yet be saved. Too late.
At least half his Castilians were swarmed by Mexicas, while dozens of others were knocked off the causeway and into the water, some being clobbered to death with obsidian blades by warriors in canoes, others captured, bound, and dragged off by those in Lake Texcoco. Many Mexica warriors were excellent swimmers and far more mobile in the water than the heavily laden and often mailed conquistadors. Cortés himself was hit, stunned, and nearly cuffed before being pulled back to safety by his companions Olea and Quiñones. It would not be the last time that the Aztec obsession for capturing Malinche for their gods, rather than killing him outright, saved Cortés from being hacked to pieces.
By early morning even the murderous Alvarado was at last overwhelmed and lost control of the rear guard. Unhorsed and wounded, he staggered to the shore alone, after leaping his way over the breach. His co-commander, Juan Velázquez de Léon, was never heard from again, presumably either slain, drowned, or dragged off alive to be sacrificed and eaten. Although the Spaniards had marched out in the rainy and foggy night as an ordered army of four divisions, the escape march had quickly become every man for himself, as the confused Europeans were surrounded and mostly pushed into the lake along the mile and a quarter of causeway over Lake Texcoco.
Seeing the human detritus ahead, some of Alvarado’s men at the rear turned around and fled back to the compound inside Tenochtitlán. They apparently preferred a glorious last stand on dry land to being clubbed to death at night in the muck of the causeway. Once there, this doomed band of stragglers purportedly met a few other terrified Castilians who had been left behind in confusion—presumably barricaded in the nearby temple of Tezcatlipoca—or who had not been willing to risk the sortie across Lake Texcoco. As many as two hundred Castilians never made it back out of Tenochtitlán. Later Aztec accounts related that after a few days of stout resistance they were killed or captured and sacrificed.
Fewer than half the Castilians and Tlaxcalans finally stumbled onto shore. What saved them from seeming annihilation was the near maniac determination of Cortés himself. Far from panicking, Cortés quickly organized in Tlacopán what was left of his little army and then set out the next day on the long way back to the Tlaxcalan capital, nearly 150 miles away, much of it through hostile and rugged terrain. For all the Aztec slaughter, the best of his men had survived. Alvarado—under dubious circumstances—had made it across the causeways, though he lost nearly all the men he was entrusted to lead. The other great knights—Ávila, Grado, Olid, Ordaz, Rangel, Sandoval, and Tapia—were yet alive. So was the irrepressible and deadly María de Estrada, who had once so terrified the Mexicas as some sort of supernatural Christian she-god.
The survival of these skilled killers ensured that the Spaniards would retain a core of mounted warriors. These trusty few had had long experience in coolly charging through Indian swarms, lancing and hacking away with near impunity—in sharp contrast with the caliber of the later recruits from Narváez’s failed expedition. For the most part, the newcomers took far too much gold, were far more terrified of the Mexicas, and felt little affinity with Cortés and his original, battle-hardened cohort that had landed in fall 1519.
Cortés also noted that the loyal and invaluable translator Doña Marina, La Malinche herself, was safe. Even more important, his brilliant shipwright, Martín López, had sliced his way through along the levee. Though badly wounded, he, too, survived. The caudillo remarked to his shattered and demoralized troops, “Well, let’s go, we lack nothing.” At the moment of his greatest defeat, Cortés realized he still had the services of the one man who could craft new ships, which would allow him victory in his inevitable and deadly return to come. The contrast with the Mexicas was startling: after expelling the Spaniards, thousands of the courageous victors rejoiced and for critical hours ceased pursuit of a few hundred fugitives—who themselves on the brink of obliteration were already determined somehow to return to wipe out their tormentors.
Flight—July 2–9, 1520
When light broke after the Noche Triste, nearly eight hundred Europeans were dead or missing. More than half the Castilians who had entered Tenochtitlán during the prior month were gone, either rotting in the lake or about to have their chests ritually cut open. Nine months of the Spaniards’ constant campaigning and careful alliance-building among dozens of Indian cities were for naught. The half year of conniving inside Tenochtitlán itself to gain the city peaceably, characterized by alternate threats to and reconciliation with Montezuma, was likewise apparently wasted. In some six hours of slaughter on the dikes Cortés had literally lost the army that had taken nearly a year to create. Stalwarts like Alonso de Escobar and Velázquez de Léon were missing—and logically presumed to have been dragged atop the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli to have their hearts ripped out during the Mexica victory parade. The Mexica priests were already preparing trophies of Castilian heads to send around to the surrounding villages on the lakeshore and beyond as proof of the mortality of the newcomers—with accompanying threats not to aid the desperate fugitives, who bled and fled like men, not gods.
Contemporary Aztec accounts record the immediate aftermath at Tenochtitlán of the Castilians’ “Melancholy Night”:
But they laid out the corpses of the Spaniards apart from the others; they lined them up in rows in a separate place. Their bodies were as white as the new buds of the canestalk, as white as the buds of the maguey. They removed the dead “stags” [horses] that had carried the “gods” on their shoulders. Then they gathered up everything the Spaniards had abandoned in their terror. When a man saw something he wanted, he took it, it became his property; he hefted it onto his shoulders and carried it home. They also collected all the weapons that had been left behind or had fallen into the canal—the cannons, arquebuses, swords, spears, bows and arrows—along with all the steel helmets, coats of mail and breastplates, and the shields of metal, wood, and hide. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 89)
Nearly all the Spanish survivors were wounded or sick. Given weeks of marching and inhaling summer dust, poor food and wounds incurred in the compound in Tenochtitlán, the sudden rain and cold water of the lake, and the constant need to wear their heavy metal breastplates, many developed bronchial ailments—most likely pneumonia—and dozens expired along the route of escape. Despite the wretched condition of his men, Cortés nevertheless had to leave Tlacopán and the lake’s shore as quickly as possible while the Mexicas for a time celebrated and regrouped. Most of the stolen gold was gone. The cannon were at the bottom of Lake Texcoco. The harquebuses and crossbows were almost all lost. The few weapons remaining were without powder and bolts. In theory, the Mexicas, with the captured arms that they had stripped from the dead on the causeway and the doomed Spaniards back in the compound, had at their disposal better missile weapons than the Castilians.
No exact record exists of the number of Tlaxcalans killed or captured—no doubt their dead were more than a thousand. Further allied Indian reinforcements were miles away. The tiny Spanish garrison at Vera Cruz was incommunicado. All in all, Cortés figured that he had lost 70 percent of his horses and 65 percent of his men. Worse still, he was more than 150 miles from the first friendly town of Tlaxcala. Had he any allies at all left? For the moment he was at the shore of the seemingly still neutral city of Tlacopán. But in hours thousands of Mexicas would be at his heels, with bribes and incentives for any confederates who could bind and deliver the pitiful starving Castilians. The trick was getting out of the valley alive, since the entire plain was full of former allies increasingly hostile, and eager to ride the wave of Aztec victory.
Whether or not Cortés knew it at the time, his fortunes were about to change dramatically. First, he was not quite surrounded, at least not yet. Apparently, the Aztecs were not completely familiar with this new type of European battle, which, unlike their accustomed “flower wars,” campaigns aimed at submission, had nothing to do with rules or rituals, much less captives, but hinged on the science of killing the enemy outright, pursuing the defeated, ending his will to resist, and thus gaining through slaughter what negotiations and politics had failed to deliver. Under the tenets of European wars of annihilation, letting a man like Cortés—or an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Napoleon, or Lord Chelmsford—escape with his army after defeat was no victory, but only an assurance that the next round would be bloodier still, when an angrier, more experienced, and wiser force would return to settle the issue once and for all.
Cortés, for his part, had inflicted great damage on the Mexicas. Alvarado’s foolish and cowardly but deadly massacre a few weeks earlier at the festival of Toxcatl had robbed the unsuspecting Mexicas of the best of their military leadership—one almost wonders if Alvarado’s diabolical massacre had the implicit approval of the absent Cortés, since it did irreparable harm to the Aztec cause. Thousands more of the warrior nobles were dead or severely wounded from the week of fighting in late June. The Mexicas’ most powerful emperor was shamefully killed when (or immediately after) addressing his subjects. Vital tribute was permanently interrupted. Hundreds of houses inside Tenochtitlán had been burned, and dozens of shrines looted and desecrated.
In the battle’s aftermath the shell-shocked Mexicas were busy back in Tenochtitlán, as if the danger was at last past, cleaning up the mess in their streets, glad to be rid of these murderous interlopers and their terrible propensity to destroy almost everything they touched. More important than the considerable Mexica losses was a series of seven separate squadrons of Spanish ships on the seas headed for Vera Cruz, in transit with more powder, crossbows, horses, and cannon from Cuba and Spain, filled with desperate men sniffing profit and ready to join in on the rumored goldfest.
Cortés knew that the slaughter of so many Spanish kinsmen, and the subsequent rumors of human sacrifice and the eating of flesh, would enrage the proud Castilians and call forth each man’s sense of honor to return and bring fire and ruin to these cannibalistic infidels. Cortés had sized up the Aztec way of war: their emphasis was on capturing rather than on killing; their weapons could stun but rarely kill without repeated blows. Aztec warriors preferred individual sword- and clubplay, rather than mass tactics of shock assault in disciplined ranks and files. Their brigades centered around gaudy, feather-clad, banner-carrying lieutenants whose death might send their regional musters fleeing in terror. The commander in chief was remote and mostly apart from his men in battle. The Aztec army was even more hated by other natives than were the Castilians.
Cortés was now on dry land, away from the infernal causeways and the canoes, with room for his horses and phalanxes of swordsmen. In his fear and depression after the Noche Triste he did not yet realize amid the slaughter of his Castilians and Tlaxcalans that there were still thousands of Indians—Tepanecs, Totonacs, Chalcans, and fresh Tlaxcalans—who were not yet ready to join the Aztecs, but wavering still. Many were secretly eager for the Castilians to return to Tenochtitlán.
To Cortés the Noche Triste had been a great defeat. But for the most stalwart of the Aztecs’ native enemies, who provided food for the tables of the Aztec elite and their own bodies for the infernal Aztec gods, the thought that the caudillo’s army had pranced its way into the fortress city, kidnapped the hated emperor, and slaughtered thousands of Aztecs on their retreat was cause for wonder, not contempt. The tales that flew across the Valley of Mexico were not all of Aztec triumph over the Castilians; they also emphasized that the audacious and lethal white men had slashed their way out to safety along the frightful causeways. The reports stressed the butchery of the thousands of Aztecs, not merely the hundreds of Castilians killed. The new Aztec emperor, Cuitláhuac, might claim that his display cases of flayed skins and skulls were those of Cortés, Sandoval, and Alvarado, but the truth soon emerged that all three legendary killers were alive and determined to return. Even the Aztec ambassadors’ confident tales that some forty-five Castilians left behind in Tlaxcala had been waylaid and slaughtered en route to the coast made little impression. As the wavering tribes of Mexico weighed the odds and nursed their grievances over the yearly human tribute demanded by the Aztecs, a great many would prefer Castilian to Aztec brutality—and perhaps the strange Jesus Christ of the white killers they did not know to the bloodthirsty Huitzilopochtli they were only too familiar with.
Finally, it was rumored that a recent European arrival on the coast— purportedly an African slave from Narváez’s contingent—was ailing from smallpox. The Castilians, on the verge of extinction in summer 1520, had thus gained a new and unforeseen ally: a lethal bacillus amid a population without much immunity. New germs among people who slept in group huts, who were largely urban rather than rural dwellers, who communally ate and washed together, and who had neither biological nor cultural experience with European epidemics would soon wipe out hundreds of thousands—friendly, neutral, and hostile alike—killing far more Aztec warriors than the Toledo blades of the Castilians. On the morning of July 2, wet, wounded, and facing annihilation, little did Cortés and his pathetic band at Tlacopán know that in a few months his men would not only regain their reputation as the dreaded strangers with steel blades and thundering weapons but once again take on the appearance of supermen whom alone this terrible new curse of angry gods did not infect.
So Cortés on this July 2, 1520, gathered his men together and for the next few days lumbered out under constant harassment. Finally, about halfway back to the safety of the Tlaxcalans, at the small village of Otumba, the new Mexica emperor, Cuitláhuac, and his vast army caught up with the Castilians. The Spanish annals later claimed that 40,000 were assembled, a plausible number given the change of heart among the surrounding villages in the immediate vicinity of Tenochtitlán. The Mexicas quickly surrounded Cortés’s men and for the next six hours gradually beat them down, inasmuch as there were fewer than twenty horses left, all were wounded, and they were without cannon or harquebuses. Even skeptics concede that Cortés’s Spaniards may have been outnumbered on the Plain of Otumba by as much as a hundred to one.
As the Spaniards were nearing obliteration, Cortés spotted the commander of the Aztec line, the cihuacoatl, and his subordinates decked out in bright colors and gaudy feathers, the leader himself carrying the Aztec plumed standard on his back. Díaz del Castillo notes that Cortés was unimpressed by the terrible insignia, but instead selected Sandoval, Olid, Ávila, Alvarado, and Juan de Salamanca—the most deadly lancers of the age—and rode with them into the throng. “When Cortés saw him with many other Mexican chieftains all wearing great plumes, he said to our Captains: ‘Now, Señores, let us break through them and leave none of them unwounded’ ” (B. Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 320). Despite vast numerical superiority and the recent victory on the causeways, the Aztecs were defenseless against mounted attacks on the plains and dense ranks of swordsmen—and the Plain of Otumba was tailor-made for Spanish horsemen. None of the Mexicas had ever encountered a mounted enemy that charged directly at their cihuacoatl. With their leader torn apart by the lancers, and the Aztec war banner in Spanish hands, thousands fled back to Tenochtitlán.
The battle at Otumba, coming as it did just eight days after the Noche Triste, was in many ways Cortés’s greatest victory. In a famous passage William Prescott noted the role of discipline, military science, and the personal leadership of Hernán Cortés in the sudden reversal of Aztec fortune (Cuitláhuac, as Montezuma before, kept out of the fighting):
The Indians were in all their strength, while the Christians were wasted by disease, famine, and long protracted sufferings; without cannon or firearms, and deficient in the military apparatus which had so often struck terror into their barbarian foe,—deficient even in the terrors of a victorious name. But they had discipline on their side, desperate resolve, and implicit confidence in their commander. (History of the Conquest of Mexico, 465)
When at last Cortés fought his way to safety at Tlaxcala, many of his men, especially the few surviving late-comers who had joined him after defecting from his archenemy Narváez, were spent and tired of Mexico. Most were ready to march to Vera Cruz to find passage back to Cuba. Others were furious that Juan Páez, left behind in Tlaxcala when Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, had stayed put—although he had a force of thousands of Tlaxcalans who were eager to march to the relief of the beleaguered conquistadors when they learned that they and their kinsmen were trapped in the Aztec capital. In addition, news reached the exhausted army of the ambush and slaughter of an auxiliary of forty-five Spaniards who had attempted to reach Vera Cruz.
Then Cortés only made things worse: he announced that he would confiscate all the gold carried out of the city to pay for provisions. He also forbade any of the survivors to march to the coast to find a ship home. Francisco López de Gómara wrote of their grumbling:
What does Cortés think he is doing? Why does he want to keep us here to die the evil death? What has he got against us that he won’t let us go? Our heads are broken, our bodies are rotting and covered with wounds and sores, bloodless, weak, and naked. We are in a strange land, poor, sick, surrounded by enemies, and without hope of rising from the spot where we fall. We would be fools and idiots if we should let ourselves in for another risk like the past one. Unlike him, we do not wish to die a fool’s death, for he, in his insatiable thirst for glory and authority, thinks nothing of dying himself, and still less of our death. He does not consider the fact that he is without men, guns, arms, and horses (which bear the brunt of war), and has no provisions, which is the worst lack of all. (Cortés, 228)
No one could envision that in a mere thirteen months Hernán Cortés would return to Tenochtitlán, kill thousands, and then end the Aztec nation forever.
The Destruction of Tenochtitlán—April 28–August 13, 1521
Once the Castilians reached safety at the Tlaxcalan town of Hueyotlipan on July 9, 1520, their plight improved incrementally during the rest of the year. In July the Tlaxcalans agreed to a perpetual alliance—they had the wherewithal to muster nearly 50,000 warriors from their allied domains—in exchange for a share of the booty from Tenochtitlán, perpetual relief from tribute, and a fortified presence inside the city once the Aztec capital was conquered. During August Cortés re-formed his army and at the head of thousands of Tlaxcalans stormed the fortress of Tepeaca and began systematically to overrun its surrounding villages. In September the brilliant Martín López was given the best craftsmen in the army, thousands of Tlaxcalan workers, and the salvaged hardware from the destroyed ships in Vera Cruz, and told to build fourteen brigantines that could be dismantled, carried over the mountains to Tenochtitlán, reassembled, and then launched on Lake Texcoco.
By the end of that month the virulent smallpox epidemic had made its way from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán. Thousands of Mexicas began dying from what they at first thought was a mysterious skin ailment. Years later Mexica survivors related to Bernardino de Sahagún the terrible symptoms; he in turn recorded their accounts in near Thucydidean fashion:
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 heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great many died from this plague and many others of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. Some people came down with a milder form of the disease; they suffered less than the others and made a good recovery. But they could not escape entirely. Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a sore broke out, it gouged an ugly pockmark in the skin. And a few of the survivors were left completely blind. (M. León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 85–86)
Montezuma’s successor, Cuitláhuac, who had attacked Cortés at Otumba, fell to the disease and was replaced by the younger and more audacious Cuauhtémoc. The latter would eventually surrender a destroyed Tenochtitlán—the third Aztec emperor in less than a year to deal with Hernán Cortés.
This strange sequence of events that gradually turned Cortés’s ruined army into a terrible force of vengeance against the Aztecs continued unabated. In the late fall of 1520 seven squadrons of ships docked in Vera Cruz, adding another two hundred men to Cortés’s remnant of four hundred to five hundred conquistadors. For the first time in six months, there were fresh horses and plenty of powder, cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. Cortés, in addition, sent ships to Hispaniola and Jamaica for even more horses and arms. Meanwhile, for much of December 1520 while he was putting down the Tepeacans, the ever-dependable Sandoval had conquered all the tribes between Tlaxcala and the coast, and thus ensured safe transit of supplies from Vera Cruz to the conquistadors’ headquarters in Tlaxcala. If the huge city of Tenochtitlán was amply supplied by water transport, the Spanish had the entire Atlantic to draw in supplies in safety at Vera Cruz. But whereas Cortés could build a fleet to cut off the canoes of Tenochtitlán, no Aztec warrior had a clue how to prevent the “floating mountains” from docking at Vera Cruz with even more of the infernal whiteskins and their thunderous weapons.
By new year 1521, Cortés had pacified most of the hostile tribes between Vera Cruz and Tenochtitlán and had gained plentiful supplies and additional soldiers. He was in the midst of an enormous shipbuilding program to ensure naval protection when his infantry and cavalry returned to the causeways on the lake. Cortés may have started his march back to Tenochtitlán with some 550 Spanish infantrymen—still only half as many Castilians who had fled the city the prior June—including 80 harquebusiers and crossbowmen, along with at least forty fresh horses and nine new cannon. In addition, he selected 10,000 of the best Tlaxcalan warriors, as preparations were made for the march on the satellite cities that surrounded Tenochtitlán. By early April 1521 the new army was on the outskirts of the Mexica capital, the ships were readied for launching, and roving parties had systematically begun to cut off food and water supplies to the city. This second offensive had none of the pretense of conciliation and alliance of the first “visit.” After theNoche Triste Cortés was intent on either obtaining the unconditional surrender of the new emperor, Cuauhtémoc, and his people or defeating the Aztec army in battle. Should the Aztecs not capitulate, the Castilians would destroy Tenochtitlán block by block and turn it over to the Tlaxcalans to loot— reminiscent of the manner in which Alexander had leveled Thebes and then allowed the surrounding Boeotians to rob, enslave, and kill the survivors with impunity.
In late April, after six months of constant campaigning in the surrounding countryside to amputate the Aztec tributary empire, Cortés’s reconstituted army was back on the causeways and blockading Tenochtitlán. Most of the cities on the lakeshore and in the Valley of Mexico were subdued or had joined Cortés. A year earlier it may have been unwise for the Spanish to enter an island fortress city, but now Cortés was eager to prove it was even more foolish for the Mexicas to stay in it, as the Castilians’ former besiegers would become the besieged. By April 28, 1521, Martín López’s flat-bottomed brigantines—masted, oared, decked with cannon, and bristling with crossbowmen and harquebusiers—were over the mountains, reassembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco, ensuring that the Aztec canoes could no longer attack the Castilians on the causeways. In a world without horses or oxen—or even the wheel—an enormous city of a quarter million like Tenochtitlán could only be supplied by water. Indeed, its daily survival depended on tons of maize, fish, fruits, and vegetables shipped over the lake by thousands of canoes. The destruction of that fleet would not only cripple Aztec military power but starve the city into submission.
With shouts of “Castilla, Castilla, Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala!” Cortés led his Spanish-Indian army toward Tenochtitlán itself. While contemporary observers put the coalition’s size at nearly half a million, the invading army more likely numbered around 50,000 to 75,000. With last-minute reinforcements from Vera Cruz, it was spearheaded by some 700 to 800 Castilian foot soldiers, 90 horsemen, 120 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, and three large cannon, as well as smaller falconets and the firepower of the fourteen brigantines. Many Castilians also had new steel helmets, swords, occasional breastplates, and shields, in addition to spare parts for their firearms.
Cortés’s plan was simple. His three veteran knights—Alvardo, Olid, and Sandoval—would each lead a quarter of the army along the three main levees into the city. The causeway to Tlacopán would for a while be left open but guarded, to allow fugitives to flee the siege. Cortés himself would take the fourth component and embark on the brigantines, with some three hundred Castilians, about twenty-five men to a ship. In addition, thousands of Texcocans and Tlaxcalans would follow in boats— Ixtlilxochitl, the leader of the Texcocans, would later claim his people manned 16,000 canoes in Cortés’s armada. The combined fleet would aid the three land assaults, enforce the blockade, and destroy the enemy vessels.
By June 1, 1521, Cortés had cut entirely the city’s supply of fresh water and stormed the island fortress of Tepepolco, which the Mexicas used to coordinate their attacks on the multipronged Castilian invasions. The Spaniards deemed that the siege had officially begun on May 30, when they had blockaded the city’s sources of supply—later memorializing the destruction of Tenochtitlán as “the seventy-five days” between May 30 and August 13, 1521. But progress remained difficult for the rest of the summer as the Aztecs still vastly outnumbered the invaders. They placed sharp sticks in the mud of the lake to tear up the brigantines and swarmed all over the flagship, the Capitana. Had it not been for the courageous Martín López—in some ways the most impressive of Cortés’s men—and a small group of swordsmen, who rallied to expel the Aztec boarders and slaughter those who would bind and drag off the caudillo, both the Capitana and its captain would have been captured.
The Castilians were also learning that they not only had to defeat the Aztec army but had to storm the city and raze it to the ground if they were to crush all resistance. The four-pronged Spanish attack would slowly advance along the causeways, enter the suburbs, and then retreat back to safety during the evening. Success was determined by the degree to which Cortés could fill in breaches in the dikes and keep the causeways intact. That way, the Spaniards could move freely, as they began to dismantle the city blocks of Tenochtitlán, tearing down temples, walls, and houses. Gradually, the horsemen, crossbowmen, and harquebusiers gained room to operate and found clear lines of fire, while eliminating the source of ambushes in corners and narrow streets. Cortés drew on 2,000 years of European siegecraft—the ancient Hellenic science of poliorcetics (“fencing in the polis”)—that addressed the target city’s supply of water, food, and sanitation, as artillery, sorties, and missile attack were concentrated on weak places in the Aztec defenses to augment nature’s assault of hunger and plague.
If the Spanish proceeded too far inside Tenochtitlán proper—where they could be ambushed and swarmed, while their levees of retreat were breached—they faced annihilation. But if the brigantines kept the causeways passable, then each day the attackers could cross into the city, destroy another block or two, kill hundreds more Aztecs, and then retreat during the night to their fortified compounds. Usually, foot soldiers advanced, supported by the fire of cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows, slashing away at the unarmored Aztecs with their Toledo blades. At key moments, dozens of mounted mailed lancers would charge concentrations of the enemy or ambush the Mexicas when at dusk they rashly pursued the retreating foot soldiers. By late June the emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had seen the futility of Aztec tactics and radically revised his defenses by removing most of the surviving population of Tenochtitlán proper—warriors, civilians, and even the idols and effigies of the gods from the Great Temple— to the adjoining northern island suburb of Tlatelolco. This was a wise move: the change of defense drew in the Spaniards, who wrongly believed the Aztecs were defeated and fleeing. In addition, the Castilians were unaware that Tlatelolco was a far more crowded precinct, far more suitable for urban warfare than the broad avenues of the mostly destroyed Tenochtitlán.
The key to the entire struggle was to deny the Spaniards room for their horses to charge, space for their infantry to form into ranks, and clear lines of vision for their artillery and firearms. Now as the battle shifted to Tlatelolco, the Tlatelolcons joined the Aztecs in swarming the Castilians in the winding and narrow streets and cutting the causeways to the mainland. Cortés himself was unhorsed and for the third time nearly dragged off; Cristóbal de Olea and an unnamed Tlaxcalan hacked away at the enraged Mexicas, severing their hands and thus saving their caudillo. In the initial ambush at Tlatelolco, more than fifty Spaniards were bound and dragged off and twenty more killed, as thousands of Tlaxcalans paid for the Castilians’ impetuosity by being killed or captured. One brigantine was sunk and another precious cannon lost.
The Mexicas immediately beheaded some of their captives, waving them in front of the retreating Spaniards, claiming them to be Cortés and his officers: “So we shall kill you, as we have killed Malinche and Sandoval.” Once the Spaniards reached safety, the sound of drums was heard. Bernal Díaz del Castillo recalls what followed:
When they got them up 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 Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, 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 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 when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole. (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 436)
The Spanish feared a repeat of the Noche Triste. The Mexicas yelled at the Tlaxcalans, throwing them roasted legs of their captured brethren and pieces of the Castilians. “Eat of the flesh of these Teules [Castilians] and of your brothers, for we are already glutted with it, and you can stuff yourselves with this” (The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 437). When news spread throughout Cortés’s Indian alliance that the Aztecs were eating Spanish flesh, and dozens of bound conquistadors were feathered and marched up the steps of the pyramid to their deaths, nearly the entire Indian alliance suddenly collapsed. Most indigenous leaders feared the return of the Aztec terror, realizing that the Europeans themselves were as vulnerable before the hungry Aztec gods as they themselves had been before the Spanish arrival. Meanwhile, Cortés and his men nursed their wounds and regrouped as Cuauhtémoc rallied his allies, sought new support, and sent the body parts of captured Castilians and their horses among the villages around Lake Texcoco as proof of the Spaniards’ failure. But then an odd thing happened—or perhaps a predictable occurrence, given the earlier Mexica failure to follow up immediately on the morning after the Noche Triste. The Aztecs for most of July did not storm the beleaguered Spanish compounds. Hunger, disease, the great destruction of their city, and thousands of battle casualties had decimated their army. Once again, it was almost as if the Aztecs were dispirited after their dramatic victory. Killing and sacrificing Castilians did not stop the invaders, even as Cortés grew more confident after a setback.
By the latter part of July the wearied Aztecs could no longer cut the dikes, thereby ensuring the Castilians free access in and out of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. Supplies from Vera Cruz reached Cortés uninterrupted. His men fabricated additional gunpowder by lowering themselves into Mount Popocatépetl to fetch the critical ingredient of sulfur. Aztec deserters confirmed that Tenochtitlán was starving and the eighteen-year-old emperor increasingly unable to marshal an effective resistance. Cortés in his famous third letter to Charles V described the desperate plight of the Aztecs:
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. Countless numbers of men, women, and children came toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned amid the multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench. So that we should not discover the plight in which they were in, they dared neither throw these bodies into the water where the brigantines might find them nor throw them beyond their boundaries where the soldiers might see them, and so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them. (Letters from Mexico, 263–64)
Castilian horsemen roamed the dikes at will and slaughtered hundreds who emerged from their hovels in Tlatelolco searching for food. The Tlaxcalans became increasingly hard to rein in; they roamed the city butchering—and occasionally eating—any of the Mexicas they found. On August 13 Sandoval and García Holguín caught Cuauhtémoc fleeing in a canoe. Both fought over honors for the prize of his capture, prompting Cortés to intervene, in the manner, he mused, that Marius and Sulla had fought over the shackled Numidian king Jugurtha. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the allied prince of Texcoco, Ixtlilxochitl, who wrote a history from the allied Indian side decades after the conquest, related Cuauhtémoc’s surrender speech.
Ah Captain, 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 with this you will put an end to the Mexican Kingdom, since you have destroyed my kingdom and vassals. (Ally of Cortés, 52)
Cortés would spare the young emperor, then drag him along during his disastrous expedition to Honduras—only shamelessly to hang him in transit in 1523 on trumped-up charges that he was inciting revolt among the Indian allies.
Since the city had been cut off in late May, more than 100,000 Aztecs had fallen in the fighting, along with at least a hundred Castilians and 20,000 Indian allies. But that was a small percentage of the actual losses in the two-year struggle for Mexico City. Disease, hunger, and constant fighting had essentially wiped out the population of Tenochtitlán. The final tally of the dead would eventually reach more than 1 million of the peoples surrounding Lake Texcoco. In the entire two-year campaign since Cortés had marched in from Vera Cruz, Spanish losses were no more than 1,000 out of some 1,600 who had at various times fought for Tenochtitlán.
The eventual carnage was to be even more appalling. In the ensuing decades smallpox was followed by measles, bubonic plague, then flu, whooping cough, and mumps, reducing the population of central Mexico from more than 8 million when Cortés landed to well below a million a half century later. In less than two years Cortés and his tiny army had inaugurated a chain of events that changed the face of an entire subcontinent and destroyed a civilization.
AZTEC WAR
Misconceptions and stereotypes abound concerning the Aztecs at war. Too often Mesoamericans are seen as little more than bizarre savages who fought in hordes solely to facilitate human sacrifice on a vast scale, captive-takers whose queer rules of engagement preempted real killing on the battlefield. More recently, apologists have reinvented them as New World Greeks whose impressive architecture symbolized an enlightened and progressive civilization that did not really sacrifice or eat fellow humans, and saw no reason to craft military technology they did not need. In fact, the Aztecs were neither Greeks nor savages, but shrewd theocratic imperialists who had ruthlessly created a loosely knit political empire based on the perception of terror, backed up by a deadly army, and fueled by a vast system of tribute.
What differentiated Aztec from European warfare were its far greater cultural and geographical constraints. Without horses or oxen, or even the wheel, the operational range of Aztec armies was limited by the amount of food and supplies their human porters could carry along. As Tenochtitlán expanded its influence in Mesoamerica, as the size of the city grew, and as war became even more predictable, the political organization of the entire Mexican subcontinent grew more vulnerable to attack: Europeans might topple the entire imperial structure by decapitating a tiny elite on an island city, which needed thousands of tons of food shipped in daily for its very survival.
Wars ceased for brief periods between October and April—precisely the time Cortés entered Tenochtitlán in November 1519—to allow agricultural laborers to work the harvests. Fighting was rare altogether in the rainy period between May and September, while battle at night was also discouraged. In contrast, the Spaniards, as a maritime people in a temperate climate, and as veterans of the murderous wars in Europe and on the Mediterranean, were willing and able to fight year round, day or night, at home and abroad, on land and sea, with few natural or human restrictions.
Many confrontations between the Aztecs and their neighbors began as “flower wars” (xochiyaoyotl). These staged contests, without much killing between elite warriors of either side, revealed Aztec superiority— through the greater training, zeal, and battle experience of its warriors— hence the futility of real armed insurrection. Should the enemy persist in resistance, flower wars might escalate into full-fledged battles of conquest designed to defeat an enemy outright and annex its territory. In that regard, we should assume that the creation of the Aztec empire had resulted in hundreds of thousands of Mesoamericans killed in wars during the fifteenth century alone.
Whereas Mesoamerican warriors were adept at handling weapons, there were two further factors that inhibited their ability to slay enemy soldiers in vast numbers outright. In all wars the taking of captives for human sacrifices was important proof of individual battle excellence and social status and was deemed critical to the religious health of the community at large. More often still, sacrifices were shrewd occasions for nightmarish intimidation, spectacles of bloodletting to warn potential adversaries of the consequences of resistance. For example, the Aztec king Ahuitzotl purportedly organized the butchery of 80,400 prisoners during a four-day blood sacrifice at the 1487 inauguration of the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán—an enormous challenge in industrialized murder in its own right. Ahuitzotl’s killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau. The presence of four convex killing tables—so arranged that the victims could be easily kicked down the pyramid—turned human sacrifice into an assembly-line process. Companies of fresh executioners periodically replaced those exhausted from the repeated obsidian-blade strokes, to ensure that the entire train of victims could be dispatched during the festival. We do not know the number of victims otherwise sacrificed under normal conditions, but surely it was in the thousands. Ixtlilxochitl believed that one of every five children of Mexica tributaries was killed each year, though Bishop Don Carlos Zumárraga’s lower estimate of 20,000 a year is more plausible. Oddly, few scholars have ever likened the Aztec propensity to wipe out thousands of their neighbors through carefully organized killing to the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and other eastern Europeans.
Although under dire circumstances Aztecs could fight to the death, the warrior’s training in the methods of stunning, binding, and passing back captives through the ranks would prove an impediment against the Spanish. Scholars who argue that the Aztecs quickly dropped their notions of ritual fighting against Cortés are correct, but they must concede that years of such military training were hard for many warriors to discard in a few months—especially when pitted against Spanish swordsmen and pikemen who had drilled since adolescence in the art of killing with a single stroke.
To what degree such rituals were predicated on technological constraints we cannot be sure, but the tools of Aztec warfare—oak, stone, flint, obsidian, hide, and cotton—were incapable in themselves of killing warriors in any great numbers. Broadswords(machuahuitl) and spears (tepoztopilli)were wooden, with flakes of obsidian embedded along their double cutting edges. Both could match the sharpness of metal, but only for a few strokes before chipping or losing their edge. Aztec swords were without points, while the stone heads of lances likewise made them poor thrusting weapons.
Since the aristocratic infantry arm of the Aztec military was singularly inefficient against Spanish foot soldiers and cavalry, native commanders depended upon an array of missile weapons that might penetrate the unprotected arms, legs, necks, and faces of Cortés’s men. A peculiar type of spear-thrower (atlatl) was made from a wooden stick about two feet in length, with grooves and hook at one end in which to place the projectile. Fire-hardened darts (tlacochti) were occasionally flint-tipped; when used with theatlatl these missiles could achieve accurate ranges of 150 feet. But they were essentially useless against metal armor and at great distances incapable of tearing even through layered cotton. The Aztecs used simple, rather than composite, bows (tlahuitolli). While they could achieve a rapid rate of fire with more than twenty arrows (yaomitl) per quiver, such weapons lacked the penetrating power and distance of European models that since classical antiquity had been fabricated from glued horn, hide, and wood.
Many accounts testify to the danger of Aztec stone missiles; and while native slingers were without metal bullets and sophisticated slings, nevertheless they were able to wound unprotected flesh at ranges approaching a hundred yards. The Aztecs’ wood, hide, and feathered shields, like cotton war suits, might ward off Mesoamerican stone blades but were of no value against Toledo steel, metal crossbow bolts, or harquebus shot. It is an accurate generalization that Montezuma’s arms were of an inferior caliber to the artillery, missile weapons, body armor, and offensive armament of Alexander the Great’s army some eighteen centuries prior.
Mexico had all the natural resources necessary for a sophisticated arms industry. There was no shortage of plentiful iron ores at Taxco. Copper was in abundance in Michoacán. The volcano Popocatépetl furnished supplies of sulfur. Indeed, within a year of the conquest Cortés himself, against the edicts of the crown, was producing gunpowder and casting muskets and even large cannon in the former domains of the Aztecs. Why amid such a cornucopia of ingredients for munitions did the Mexicas produce only clubs, blades of obsidian chips, and javelins and bows and arrows? The most popular explanations suggest need. Because Aztec warfare was designed largely to capture rather than kill, stone blades were sufficient against similarly armed Mesoamericans. The implication is that the Aztecs could have fabricated weapons comparable to the Europeans’, but saw no need for such additional expense in their brand of ritually crafted warfare whose aim was to stun rather than cause death. Yet such claims of latent technological know-how are preposterous for a culture without a sophisticated rational tradition of natural inquiry. The opposite is more likely to be true: the Aztecs had no ability to craft metals or firearms and so were forced to fight ritual wars with weapons that would largely wound and not easily kill. Against a large and fierce army such as the Tlaxcalans, it is hard to envision how the Aztecs, despite vast numerical superiority, might have waged a war of annihilation with nonmetallic weapons—explaining why Tlaxcala was largely autonomous, and settled its disputes with the Aztecs through quasi-ceremonial flower wars.
Aztec battle, like Zulu fighting or the attacks of Germanic tribes, was one of envelopment. Swarms of warriors systematically attempted to surround the enemy, the front lines mobbing and stunning their adversaries, before passing them through the rear ranks to be bound and led off. The ensuing need to march prisoners back with the army also contributed to the Aztecs’ inability to campaign at large distances, since the combined throng of victors and defeated only increased logistical requirements. While there was a national Aztec army, in fact local contingents thronged around their own captains and might exit the field altogether should their leaders or standards go down. Francisco de Aguilar relates the desperate fighting at Otumba, after the Noche Triste:
As Cortés battled his way among the Indians, performing marvels in singling out and killing their captains who were distinguishable by their gold shields, and disregarding the common warriors, he was able to reach their captain general and kill him with a thrust of a lance. . . . While this was going on, we foot soldiers under Diego de Ordaz were completely surrounded by Indians, who almost had their hands on us, but when Captain Hernándo Cortés killed their captain general they began to retreat and give way to us, so that few of them pursued us. (P. de Fuentes, Conquistadors, 156)
Relays of soldiers might enter the fray every fifteen minutes or so, as there was no concept of decisive shock battle in which heavily armed foot soldiers sought to collide head-on with the enemy at the first encounter. Ranks and files were nonexistent; warriors failed to charge and retreat in step or on command; missiles and arrows were not launched in volleys. Nor were missile troops used in concert with infantry charges. Without horses, Aztec battle doctrine was largely a one-dimensional affair, in which the greater training and numbers of the emperor’s warriors, together with the pomp and circumstance of feathered warriors and standards, were enough to collapse or scare off resistance.
Finally, Aztec society was far more ranked than even aristocratic sixteenth-century Spain. The weapons, training, armor, and position in battle of most Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence—and then led again to even more privilege. The Spanish were a class-bound society as well, but during the invasion, a variety of lowly conquistadors mounted horses as the military situation demanded. Harquebuses, crossbows, and steel blades were distributed freely throughout the army. The fuel that drove Cortés’s army was not so much aristocratic privilege as a desperate desire by both hidalgos and the impoverished to acquire enough money and fame to advance upward in Castilian society. On the battlefield itself, the result was that in matters of weapons, tactics, recruitment, and leadership the Spanish army operated on meritocratic principles of sheer killing: men and tools were trained and designed to dismember people first and provide social advancement, prestige, and religious rewards second. Killing was more likely to result in status than status was in killing.
THE MIND OF THE CONQUISTADORS
The brutal conquistadors (“the conquerors”) who followed Hernán Cortés into the valley of Tenochtitlán seem at first glance a poor representation of the Western rationalist tradition. Many of the most notorious were fanatical Castilian Christians who lived in a Manichean world of absolute good versus evil. Sixteenth-century Spain under Charles V was in the midst of the Inquisition (begun officially in 1481), and witch burning, torture, and secret tribunals terrorized the countryside. Jews, Moors, and Protestants were fair game, in addition to Catholics of dubious faith who were accused of anything from bathing daily to reading imported literature. Unwavering adherence to a beleaguered orthodox Catholicism was expected of all in royal service, and was the ideology of almost every conquistador who sailed westward—sometimes to the detriment of military and political logic.
Cortés and his followers, when surrounded by an enemy of some 200,000 Mexicas in the middle of Tenochtitlán, insanely demanded of Montezuma that he cast down Aztec idols so that his subjects might convert en masse to Christianity. Catholic priests were ubiquitous in the New World; various Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jeronymite friars were given imperial powers of audit to ensure that the Indians were converted to Christianity, rather than gratuitously slaughtered. What they saw—the tearing out of beating hearts from sacrificial victims, rooms smeared with human blood, racks of skulls, priests with flayed human skins on their backs—terrified the Spanish priests. They were convinced that the Aztecs and their neighbors were satanic, their rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism the work of the Antichrist. An anonymous conquistador summed up the Spanish revulsion:
All the people of this province of New Spain, and even those of the neighboring provinces, eat human flesh and value it more highly than any other food in the world; so much so, that they often go off to war and risk their lives just to kill people to eat. The majority of them, as I have said, are sodomites and they drink to excess. (P. de Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 181)
To protect the tiny forces of Christendom from the contamination of these purported legions of darkness, mass, confession, and absolution were prerequisites of the Spanish before battle. Throughout the vicious two-year campaigning the conquistadors were convinced that a series of supernatural beings hovered in protection over their heads. Shrines soon dotted the Mexican landscape to thank the Virgin and various saints for victories and salvation from Aztec infidels. The conquest was as much to convert souls as to gain gold and ground, the church’s de facto attitude often being that the conquistadors’ killing was wrong and counterproductive, but that Mexicas were better off dead than as live practicing agents of the devil.
Martin Luther was excommunicated in the year Cortés first occupied Tenochtitlán, yet nascent Protestantism and its accompanying debate about religious doctrine would find no receptive audience back in contemporary Castile. A mere three decades before Cortés set foot in Mexico Ferdinand and Isabella had at last finished the four-century-long Reconquista, by uniting Aragon and Castile and expelling the Moors from Granada in 1492, establishing in the struggle the modern nation-state of Spain. For much of the subsequent century the crown was busy putting down insurrection in southern Spain among the Moriscos, who agitated for a return of Islamic rule. Moreover, due to its presence near Italy and North Africa, Spain also found itself a frontline state in the European resistance to the Ottoman onslaught, as well as bogged down in its periodic fighting against the Italian city-states and the rebellious Dutch. Thus, the grim veterans who landed at Vera Cruz were a world away from the farmers and religious exiles who landed off Plymouth Rock.
Christian fanaticism and strict Catholicism were the bedrock defenses of southern Mediterranean cultures besieged by Islamic enemies to the south and east, and the newer Protestant adversaries of northern Europe. Protestant Europeans were far from the front lines of Islamic attack; and, without the strong traditions of adherence to a centralized autocrat in Rome, they might find religious reform an indulgence that beleaguered Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks could not afford. In the era of the conquest of Mexico, Spain increasingly felt itself besieged on all sides. Powerful Jews, through economic might and commercial influence, might exploit and dominate the Catholic peasantry; Protestant fanatics might scour the Spanish countryside, undermining local churches and papal estates; Moors and Ottomans might conspire to return Spain to the Islamic world and thereby overturn the new national creation of Ferdinand and Isabella. In the paranoid Spanish mind the Inquisition and the Reconquista alone had saved Spain, yet the new nation’s continued survival depended on a class of knights who might spread Catholicism to the New World before it, too, was colonized by northern Europeans and its treasures used to further religious strife in the Old World.
With real and perceived enemies such as these, no wonder that as the sixteenth century wore on, Spain would become even more repressive— foreign study sometimes discouraged, northern European scholarship often ignored, and research increasingly nonsecular. As Cortés set out for the New World, the old Mediterranean cosmos of the Roman Empire was soon to embrace a vast revolutionary shift. The exploitation of Atlantic trade routes, North American exploration, Protestantism, and radical economic changes would insidiously transfer economic power away from the Mediterranean world to the northern European Atlantic nations of England, Holland, France, and the German states.
Before the Castilians set foot in the New World there was already established a sense of missionary zeal and military audacity unknown to the same degree in the rest of Europe. Spain saw itself as the continuance of the Holy Roman Empire. The Hapsburg Charles V was not merely the emperor of the new nation of Spain but the proper inheritor of the domains of the old Roman imperators. The most gifted of the latter—Trajan and Hadrian come first to mind—had been born in Iberia. The courage of the ancient Iberians was legendary, both before and after the Roman conquest. Hannibal’s slaughter at Cannae, for example, would have been impossible without the audacity of his Iberian mercenaries. No more deadly and romantic figure exists in Roman literature than the renegade Sertorius and his army of Iberian rebels, which devoured Roman legions for nearly a decade in their Spanish redoubt (83–73 B.C.). Thus, it was particularly unfortunate for the indigenous peoples of Mexico that they experienced not merely European interlopers or religious pilgrims per se, but the most audacious, deadly, and zealous warriors of the sixteenth-century European world, the most vicious men Spain had to offer in its greatest century of imperial grandeur.
What drove on Cortés and his men were the quest for status back in Spain and the hope of material betterment in the New World: free land and vast estates in Mexico, of course, and, for the more idealistic, the spiritual rewards of converting millions to Christianity. But, above all, gold beckoned. Gold was the first topic of interrogation with the natives. Worthless trinkets, iron knives, and glass were traded for gold. Only gold, not the precious feathers, intricate cotton clothes, or even the elaborate silver plate of the Mexicas, satisfied the Castilians. Gold might make a man a noble in Spain; gold might ensure the bankrupt Spanish crown that it could keep up with the more efficient economies in England and Holland, and so maintain the Hapsburg empire in Europe. Eventually, a quarter of all imperial Spanish revenues would be bullion from Mexico and Peru: 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver were to reach Spanish shores from the New World between 1500 and 1650.
Mexica and Peruvian gold might fuel the galleys to keep the Turk at bay and pay the armies in Holland. Gold in the hand meant not beauty, but power, money, status—and so intricate Mexica golden lizards, ducks, and fishes, the products of hundreds of hours of careful New World craftsmanship, were melted down into portable golden bars that represented the purchasing power of both goods and services. To the Spaniard the shiny metal was an abstract and distant rather than an immediate and concrete pleasure; hours of native dexterity were of no value when compared to the goods, status, and security that such metal might buy. When Cortés saw the intricate goldwork of his hosts, his first thoughts were not merely of his own personal wealth to come, or even tribute to the Spanish crown, but of the stored capital to purchase more horses, gunpowder, harquebuses, cannon, and crossbows from ships arriving from Cuba and Spain. So bewildered were they by the conquistadors’ incessant demands for gold that the Indians of Mexico at first believed the Castilians’ ruse that they needed the metal as medicine for “their hearts”; some more thoughtful Aztecs believed that the Spanish even ate the silly gold dust!
The conquistador in the New World in the century after Columbus’s discovery was a law unto himself; there was little imperial oversight in the underpopulated and vast American domains. Foreigners were excluded from Central and South America—the French and English especially were not welcome. Governors arrived, became embroiled in petty local politics, typically were recalled, killed, died of disease—or looted the province under their care. The Spanish monarchy was nearly a five-week voyage away, and its bureaucracy transient, hard to locate, and notorious for inaction. One such audit looking into the retirement of the viceroy of Peru took thirteen years and 50,000 sheets of paper and even then did not conclude until 1603, long after the ex-viceroy had passed away.
There was a known propensity for the government to grant post facto sanction to any audacious explorers who might find new land and bullion for the crown. The way to beat a residencia, or royal inquiry into a provincial governor’s malfeasance, was to draw it out, to lead an expedition, colonize new territory for the crown, claim widespread baptism of the natives, and then send back the king’s fifth of all gold, silver, and jewels that could be looted from the Indians. Gold might trump insubordination; gold might mitigate the priests’ worries about decimating rather than converting the Indians of the Americas; gold might make a Castilian renegade or an Andalusian thug the equal of a viceroy in the eyes of the king’s ministers—earning him an imperial pension or at least a coat of arms in his old age. With the opening of the New World, Spanish society began to evolve more from a landed aristocracy to a plutocracy, allowing an entire sort of previously poor and middling adventurers to advance through the acquisition of a fortune in the Americas.
Few Castilian adventurers brought their families. Even fewer sought a new life through the drudgery of yeoman farming. The desideratum was not to plow a homestead, and thereby through self-sufficiency raise a family free and immune from Europe’s religious persecution and political oppression, but to become an absentee owner of a vast ranch, on which hundreds of Indians might tend cattle, mine, and raise luxury goods like coffee or sugar to guarantee the caudillo a steady income. Very few conquistadors had any doubts about the primacy of either the crown or the pope. Unlike the settlers of North America, the early Spanish came to the New World as emissaries of, rather than fugitives from, the church and state of their homeland. Some Castilian leaders in the Caribbean were battle-hardened veterans from the campaigns in Italy and continual wars against the Moriscos in Spain and the Ottomans on the Mediterranean. A few, like Cortés, were hidalgos of middling means but aristocratic pretensions, whose families enjoyed some relief from various imperial taxes. Most were young men in their twenties, keen to return to Spain by forty with rank, money, and vast estates—something impossible for most if they stayed in the homeland. The result was that Mexico was seen not as a place to start the world anew as in Puritan New England, but as a helpful source of Spanish vigilance against the forces of darkness.
Economic life was depressed in early-sixteenth-century Castile. Agriculture especially was on the wane, as petty lords and bishops presided over vast estates of cattle and sheep. The expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos—a quarter million of the latter in the fifteenth century— had decimated the economy of the Spanish countryside; immigration to the New World further robbed the Iberian Peninsula of hundreds of thousands of its most energetic citizens. While lucrative for a while, the Atlantic trade routes were perilous, given the weather, northern European raiders, and freelancing pirates. The exchange of New World bullion for Old World luxury goods—paintings, furniture, clothes, books—would eventually disrupt the economies of both Spain and Mexico, as each fell further behind northern Europe and North America, which were developing yeomen farmers and entrepreneurial capitalists. Simple mining and the crafting of luxury items were no substitute for large manufacturing production and market-oriented agriculture, as the gold of the New World hid for nearly a century structural deficiencies in the Spanish economy. There was a plethora of noble families and titles among the Castilian conquistadors, but little actual money and almost no opportunity back in Spain for upward mobility. No wonder nearly a million Castilians left for the New World in the two centuries after Columbus.
By 1500 printed books had spread through Spain, and an entire generation of aristocrats had versed themselves not only in religious tracts and military science but also in poems, ballads, and fantastic romances replete with Amazons, sea monsters, the fountain of youth, and legendary cities of gold. Bankrupt, would-be grandees sailed westward—more than two hundred Spanish ships voyaged to the Indies alone between 1506 and 1518—not only to escape poverty in Spain, not merely to enrich themselves and the Spanish crown, and not entirely to convert millions to Catholicism in the religious wars to come. The conquistadors also put to sea because the New World, with its bizarre flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples was seen as a fountainhead of popular myth, wonder, and sheer adventure—a suitable challenge for a young knight of courage and piety. Atlantis (the Antilles), Amazons (the Amazon River), and California (the island in the romance Las Sergas de Esplandián ) really did exist after all.
All the conquistadors shared a clear-cut agenda to crush indigenous opposition, loot the countryside for gold, convert heathens to Christianity, enjoy the local women, father mestizo children—Cortés seems to have had several—and then establish local estates and baronies in which landed Spanish magníficos might oversee vast gangs of Indian laborers in exporting New World foods and bullion. In his early twenties Cortés announced in his first year in the New World that he would either “dine to the sound of trumpets or die on the scaffold,” and then spent much of his twenties and early thirties amassing a fortune from gold mining and ranching on Cuba—capital to help finance an expedition to the new lands of Mexico that might bring in even more fortune.
Given free rein to explore and conquer an unknown Caribbean world between 1492 and 1540, within fifty years the conquistadors were anachronistic curiosities, if not nuisances altogether. Witness the decline in the fortunes of Cortés and his caballeros within a decade of the conquest of 1521. The great critic of Spanish imperialism in the New World, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, railed against the “forty years” (1502–42) in which a handful of his countrymen, through military conquest, disease, and economic exploitation, had wiped out the population of the Caribbean basin. By 1550 Spanish America was a world of bureaucrats, miners, and priests, with no room for impoverished Castilian loose cannon, who wished to intrigue without supervision in the affairs of the crown and pope and thereby ruin others’ more careful work of extracting souls and gold from the people and soil of the Americas. King and church alike were coming to understand that men like Cortés had a disturbing tendency to flay, rather than shear, the sheep of the New World, and they spared no effort in ensuring that the era of the conquistador was over just a few years after its inception.
This first generation who settled and exploited the Caribbean basin were tough men like Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, seasoned from Columbus’s second voyage and the final battles to free Granada; Francisco de Garay, ruler of newfound Jamaica, another veteran of the Columbus explorations and in-law to the famous explorer; and Pedro Arias Dávila, caudillo of Panama, battle-hardened survivor of the Spanish civil wars, and at seventy-eight, the most ruthless of the Spanish governors. Hernán Cortés himself was a native of Medellín, the son of a legendary soldier with fifty years of military service for the crown.
The conquistadors were a world apart from the priests and men of the quill who followed to solidify and bureaucratize what these far more brutal men had won by the sword, men who shared what to us now seems an uneven morality: slaughtering unarmed Indians in battle brought no odium, nor did turning an entire conquered population into gangs of indentured serfs. In contrast, human sacrifice, cannibalism, transvestitism, and sodomy provoked moral indignation and outrage, as did the absence of clothes, private property, monogamy, and steady physical labor. Much of the Castilian ethical world was predicated on professed status, manners, and the presumption of civilization, not fundamental questions of life and death:
The member of a civilized polity, then, as conceived by the sixteenth-century Spaniard, was a town-dweller who was dressed in doublet and hose, and wore his hair short. His house was not overrun with fleas and ticks. He ate his meals at a table and not on the ground. He did not indulge in unnatural vice, and if he committed adultery he was punished for it. His wife—who was his only wife and not one among several—did not carry her children on her back like a monkey, and he expected his son and not his nephew to succeed to his inheritance. He did not spend his time getting drunk; and he had a proper sense of respect for property—his own and other people’s. . . . (J. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 55–56)
SPANISH RATIONALISM
The legacy of Cortés’s men and of men like them was brilliant military conquest—and the decimation of the indigenous population of the Caribbean and Mexico in a mere thirty years through military conquest, the destruction of native agricultural practice, and the inadvertent importation of smallpox, measles, and influenza. Like the “Hellene” Alexander the Great, the “Christian” Cortés slaughtered thousands, looted imperial treasuries, destroyed and founded cities, tortured and murdered—and claimed he had done it all for the betterment of mankind. His letters to Charles V proclaiming interest in establishing a brotherhood among all natives and Spaniards read a great deal like Alexander’s oath at Opis (324 B.C.), in which he proclaimed a new world embracing all races and religions. In both cases the body count told a different tale.
The conquistadors were far from ignorant fanatics. For all their religious devoutness, they did not live in the mythic world of the Mexicas— Montezuma sent an array of wizards and necromancers to hex and bewitch the approaching Castilians—but in a romantic cosmos that, ultimately despite its wild tales and improbable rumors, ceded to sensory perception and hard data. The Spaniards, for all their bluster, did not believe that the Mexicas were superhuman agents of the devil, but sophisticated indigenous tribes, who could be met, thwarted, and conquered through a combination of political intrigue and Castilian arms. The Mexicas were as unfamiliar to the Spaniards as the Spaniards were to the Mexicas, but the difference—besides the obvious fact that the Spaniards, not the Mexicas, had sailed halfway around the world to conquer an unknown people—was that Cortés’s men drew on a 2,000-year-old tradition that might account for strange phenomena without resorting to religious exegesis. Through sense perception, reliance on a prior body of abstract knowledge, and inductive reasoning, the Castilians quickly sized up the political organization of Tenochtitlán, the military capability of its army, and the general religion of the Mexica nation.
They had never seen anything like the Mexica priests with their matted hair, caked blood, and cloaks of human skins, nor mass sacrifices or the rites of tearing bleeding hearts from drugged victims. But they soon surmised that these Indian holy men were no gods. For all the rhetoric of the Catholic church, they were not even devils, but humans, conducting some sort of bizarre religious rites which might logically incur the hatred of their subjugated allies. Christianity told them the Aztec religion was evil; but the European intellectual tradition gave them the tools to investigate it, probe its weakness, and eventually destroy it. In contrast, the Aztecs for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies.
Cortés himself was half-educated, and for a time worked as a notary, studied Latin, and read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Livy, and other classical military histories. At least some of his success in the darkest hours of the Mexica wars was due to his mesmerizing oratory, laced with classical allusions to Cicero and Aristotle and punctuated with Latin phrases from the Roman historians and playwrights. Spain, we must remember, in the first century B.C. during the latter days of the Roman Republic and early years of the Principate, was the intellectual center of Europe, producing moral philosophers such as the elder and younger Senecas, the poet Martial, and the agronomist Columella.
Although the Inquisition and religious intolerance that were sweeping Spain would soon isolate the Iberian Peninsula from the main centers of learning in northern Europe, leading to clear decline by 1650, in the sixteenth century the Spanish military was still at the cutting edge of military technology and abstract tactical science. Many of the men who marched with Cortés were not merely notaries, bankrupt hidalgos, and priests acquainted with Latin literature but avid readers of contemporary Spanish political and scientific tracts. More important, they were trained as bureaucrats and lawyers in the inductive method of adducing evidence, prior precedent, and law to prove a point before an audience of supposedly disinterested peers.
Cortés’s conquistadors may not have been intellectuals, but they were equipped with the finest weapons of sixteenth-century Europe and buttressed by past experience of fighting the Moor, Italian, and Turk. The fundamentals of some two millennia of abstract Western military science, from fortification, siegecraft, battle tactics, ballistics, and cavalry maneuver to logistics, pike and sword fighting, and medical treatment in the field ensured that it would take literally hundreds of Mexicas to kill each Castilian. When rushed and swarmed, the Spaniards fell in rank and file, fought in unison with unquestioning discipline, and fired group volleys. In the myriad sudden and unexpected crises that arose each week, Cortés and his close advisers—the brilliant Martín López, the courageous and steady Sandoval, and the mercurial Alvarado—did not merely pray but coolly met, argued, and worked out a tactical or mechanical solution to salvage their blunder of marching into an island fortress of thousands. Cortés also worried that his actions would be recorded, criticized, audited, and made known to thousands back in Spain.
Spanish individualism was evident throughout. The most unlikely came forward with ideas—some half-baked, like the veteran of the Italian wars who, as powder grew short, convinced Cortés that he could build a vast catapult (it would prove an utter failure). There was a familiarity between soldiers and general that was unknown among the Mexicas: no Aztec warrior might dare approach Montezuma or his successor Cuauhtémoc to propose a new approach to ship construction, tactics, and logistics. Just as Alexander’s “Companions” enjoyed a level of intimacy with their king unimaginable between Darius and his Immortals, so Cortés ate, slept, and was rebuked by his caballeros in a manner unthinkable among the Mexicas.
Westerners had ventured in non-Western lands to travel, write, and record since the emergence of the Ionian logographers of the sixth century B.C. Periegetics such as Cadmus, Dionysius, Charon, Damastes, and Hecataeus—ultimately to be followed in Asia and Egypt by explorers and conquerors like the Athenian imperialists, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and Alexander the Great—had written didactic treatises on Persia (Persica) and voyages outside Greece (Periploi). In contrast, during Xerxes’ great invasion of Greece (480 B.C.), the king apparently had little, if any, information about the nature of the Hellenic city-states.
This rich Hellenic tradition of natural inquiry was continued by Roman merchants, explorers, conquerors, and scientists whose canvas widened to include the entire Mediterranean, northern Africa, and Europe. Unlike the Aztec emperors, Cortés had the benefit of an anthropological tradition of written literature describing foreign phenomena and peoples, cataloging and evaluating them, and making sense of their natural environment that went back to Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Pliny—the age-old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is inexplicable to the god Reason, if only the investigator has enough empirical data and the proper inductive method. Montezuma either feared or worshiped the novelty that he could not explain; Cortés sought to explain the novelty that he neither feared nor worshiped. In the end that is one reason why Tenochtitlán and not Vera Cruz—let alone Seville—would lie in ruins.
WHY DID THE CASTILIANS WIN?
The Inexplicable
Nearly a quarter million people lived in the twin island cities of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. More than a million more Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas surrounding the lake were tributary subjects of the Aztec empire. Even more people outside the Valley of Mexico gave Tenochtitlán their obeisance. The great marketplace of Tenochtitlán could hold 60,000 people. The city itself was larger than most of the major urban centers of Europe—Seville, the largest city in Spain, had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. Ingeniously crafted causeways with numerous drawbridges, a huge stone aqueduct, pyramid temples larger (in volume) than those in Egypt, and fleets of thousands of canoes on an engineered lake made the island fortress impregnable and an architectural marvel.
Floating gardens, zoos of exotic tropical animals, and an enormous privileged religious and political elite, bedecked in gold, jewels, and exotic feathers, intrigued Cortés’s men enough to swear in contemporary accounts that no city in Europe could rival Tenochtitlán in wealth, power, beauty, and size. Yet within two years a tiny Castilian force—without sure supply lines, unfamiliar with local territory and custom, initially attacked by every native group they encountered, suffering from tropical diseases and an unfamiliar diet, opposed by their own superiors in Cuba, and later confronted by another Castilian force sent to arrest Cortés—defeated the Aztec empire, inaugurating a series of events that would wipe out most of its population and ruin the majestic capital of Tenochtitlán.
The Spanish themselves incorrectly attributed their amazing success to innate virtue, superior intelligence, and the Christian religion. For nearly five hundred years both Mexican and European critics have offered a variety of contradictory explanations for this seemingly impossible feat, explanations that range from the role of the Tlaxcalan allies and disease to the genius of Cortés himself and cultural impediments in time-reckoning and systematic communication. Few have sought answers in the wider context of a long lethal Western military tradition.
Native Allies?
Did Cortés play off native against native, in a cynical alliance that saw a civil war in Mexico destroy its own culture, with Cortés the sole and ultimate beneficiary? To understand the conquest of Mexico as essentially due to internal disputes between Mexica nations, three propositions would have to be true. First, Mesoamerican tribes could have accomplished the obliteration of Tenochtitlán sometime earlier on their own without Spanish aid. Yet contemporary accounts prove that all the neighboring tribes had failed to overthrow the Mexicas prior to the Spanish arrival, and afterward were ineffective in fighting the Aztecs without European support. Second, after the destruction of Mexico City, the natives of Mexico could have turned on the Spanish, renewed their assaults on the Europeans as they had during the arrival of Cortés, and then annihilated the Castilian presence altogether, ensuring their own perpetual autonomy from both Aztec and European oppressors. The opposite took place: the destruction of Tenochtitlán marked the end of all Mexica autonomy. Neither could an indigenous tribe before the Spanish arrival defeat the Aztecs, nor after the conquest could any natives overthrow the Spanish. Third, squabbling and fractious Mesoamerican peoples were co-opted by a united and cohesive European force, suggesting that native infighting, not Spanish military superiority, prevented an eventual Indian victory. The Europeans, however, had nearly as much dissension in their ranks as the natives of Mexico. Cortés himself barely escaped arrest in Cuba and became the target of several assassination plots. He was officially branded a renegade by authorities in Hispaniola and was forced to steal and expropriate supplies at gunpoint. In the midst of delicate negotiations with Montezuma, he was obliged to abandon Tenochtitlán. Leaving only a small force under Alvarado, his men marched the difficult and dangerous 250-mile route back to Vera Cruz and then faced and defeated a Castilian armada under Narváez larger than their own—the entire time under attack by various Mesoamerican peoples who sought to capitalize on just such signs of weakness.
In short, an embattled Cortés, without official sanction and suffering from near outlaw status among his Caribbean superiors, turned a preexisting native world of tension and constant battle into an entirely new war of utter annihilation against the most powerful people in the history of Mexico—something impossible without superior technology, horses, and tactics. Upon conclusion of that campaign, within a few years he pacified all of Mexico under Spanish authority, a condition that, aside from occasional revolts, would characterize Mexican history from the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 to the nineteenth-century Mexican war of independence.
In all discussions of the Mexican conquest numbers tell us little. The discipline, tactics, and technology of the invaders, not the unwieldy size of the Aztec army or the corresponding huge musters of their native enemies, explain why the Aztec empire vanished in less than two years after the arrival of Cortés. Routine native conflicts were turned into a final war of annihilation by the Spanish, who then ended the autonomy of every tribe in Mexico. After the disastrous Noche Triste of July 1, 1520, Cortés lost most of his Tlaxcalan allies and was surrounded by thousands of warriors from hostile tribes. Tlaxcala itself was miles distant and deliberating whether to continue its alliance. Yet the Spaniards, aided for the most part by just a few surviving Tlaxcalans, fought their way out from Lake Texcoco, slaughtered thousands of natives on their march, and coerced others back into their federation. Additionally, in early July 1521—almost a year to the day after the Noche Triste—after being ambushed in Tlatelolco, most of Cortés’s allies suddenly and without warning vanished as dozens of Castilian captives in a gruesome public festival were herded up the Great Pyramid to their slaughter. Native accounts of the spectacle that followed explain why Cortés’s coalition suddenly evaporated:
One by one they were forced to climb to the temple platform, where they were sacrificed by the priests. The Spaniards went first, then their allies, all were put to death. As soon as the sacrifices were finished, the Aztecs ranged the Spaniards’ heads in rows on pikes. They also lined up their horses’ heads. They placed the horses’ heads at the bottom and the heads of the Spaniards above, and arranged them all so that the faces were toward the sun. (M. León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, 107)
Contemporary sources emphasize that from the once-vast native army that Cortés had mustered from the villages on the lake, fewer than a hundred Mesoamerican natives at this point remained. The more distant peoples of Malinalco and Tula revolted outright, causing Cortés to send punitive expeditions against them to secure the confidence of the wavering lords of Cuernavaca and Otomí.
In all such engagements, the numerical disparities are staggering, as the Castilians were outnumbered on the battlefield by well over one hundred to one—a far greater disparity even than the British experienced during most of the engagements of the Zulu wars in 1879. In the midst of such revolts and the dissolution of his army, Cortés nevertheless maintained the siege of Tenochtitlán, conquered the rebellious allies, and restored the skeptical Mesoamericans to his army. Apparently, the besieged Aztecs could not conquer the isolated Castilians; nor did the other peoples of Mexico feel confident on their own to destroy Tenochtitlán without Spanish assistance—and yet themselves did not march on the causeways to kill the weakened Cortés.
Perhaps it is hard for modern deskbound scholars to understand the utter dread that existed in the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs, and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts—not to mention those thousands who were summarily executed without warning by Cortés and Alvarado in Cholula and at the temple of Tlacochcalco. Throughout contemporary oral Nahuatl and written Spanish accounts, there are dozens of grisly scenes of the dismemberment and disemboweling of Mesoamericans by Spanish steel and shot, accompanied by descriptions of the sheer terror that such mayhem invoked in indigenous populations. We of the twentieth century who have witnessed millions of Jews gassed by just hundreds of Nazi guards, or hundreds of thousands of Cambodians murdered by a few thousand deranged and cowardly Khmer Rouge, should not be surprised that the horror and the fright incurred by sophisticated tools of death so often and so easily trump sheer numbers.
The distinguished Aztec scholar Ross Hassig has rightly pointed out that most narratives of the conquest underplay the Mesoamerican contribution to the Spanish victory. So let us be clear: Cortés could not have conquered Tenochtitlán within a mere two years without vast support of native allies (initially the Totonacs and later the Tlaxcalans); nor could the surrounding Indians, who had fought the Aztecs in vain for decades prior to the European arrival, have destroyed the Aztec capital without the support of Cortés. The answer in assessing the critical role of the native involvement is one of degree, and involves the question of time and cost.
The tens of thousands of Indians who, as warriors, porters, and construction workers, aided, fought alongside, and fed Cortés were indispensable to the Castilians’ effort. Without their assistance Cortés would have required thousands of Spanish reinforcements and lost hundreds more men in an effort that might have taken a decade or more. Nevertheless, he would have accomplished his conquest even had he battled a united Mexico without native assistance. The Spanish conquest of Mexico— against populations without horses, the wheel, steel or iron weapons, oceangoing ships, gunpowder weapons, and a long tradition of scientific siegecraft—is emblematic of a systematic pattern of brutal conquest of the New World that elsewhere did not necessarily demand native complicity.
The Mesoamericans fought the Aztecs not because they were enamored of the Spanish—indeed for much of 1519 and early 1520 they tried to exterminate Cortés—but because they met an unexpected and powerful enemy who could be unleashed on their even greater adversary, Tenochtitlán, which had systematically butchered their own women and children in a most gruesome and hideous fashion. The near constant wars of the past century with the Aztecs had left most Mesoamerican peoples between the interior and the coast—the Tlaxcalans especially—under either an oppressive subjugation that stripped their fields and often their population for material and human tribute, or a state of siege for as much as six months out of the year to ward off Aztec depredations.
The appearance of the Spanish convinced most of the subjects of the Aztec empire that here was a people whom they could not defeat, yet who could annihilate their archenemies, the Mexicas, and possessed such technological and material advantages—as the prescient Aztec defenders reminded the Tlaxcalans during the last bitter days of the siege—as to be able to establish a lasting hegemony over all the natives of Mexico. We should see the indigenous contribution as the fuel that fed the fire that consumed the Aztecs, but concede the spark and flame to be all Spanish. Without the Spaniard presence even the brave Tlaxcalans would not have freed—and heretofore had never freed—themselves from Aztec oppression. Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.
The key to dismantling the Aztec empire, which centralized its communications, bureaucracy, and military in an island fortress, was the destruction of Tenochtitlán—a task that no Mesoamerican tribe could carry out, much less even envision. It is true that native peoples sought to use Cortés as a tactical asset in their ongoing war against the Mexicas. But they failed utterly to understand the Spaniards’ larger strategic goals of destroying the Aztec empire as prerequisite to annexing Mexico as a tributary of the Spanish empire—and therefore unwittingly became pawns in the age-old European tradition of strategic thinking that was mostly alien to their own idea of what war was for.
Neither the Tlaxcalans nor the Mexicas had any abstract notion that war is the ultimate and final arbiter of politics, a uniquely Western idea that goes back to Aristotle’s amoral observation in the first book of his Politics that the purpose of war is always “acquisition” and thus a logical phenomenon that takes place when one state is far stronger than the other and therefore “naturally” seeks the political subjugation of its inferior rival through any means possible. Such views are later thematic in Polybius’s Histories,omnipresent in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and once again amplified and discussed in abstract terms by Western thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Clausewitz. Plato in his Laws assumed that every state would, when its resources were strained, seek to annex or incorporate land that was not its own, as a logical result of its own ambition and self-interest.
Disease?
No precise figures exist on the final tally of Aztecs who died of sickness during 1519–21. It is a highly charged subject that involves not merely numbers but questions of deliberate intent and European culpability. For most of the sixteenth century Mexico was beset by a succession of European diseases—smallpox, flu, plague, mumps, whooping cough, and measles—that reduced its indigenous population by some 75 to 95 percent of its pre-invasion total. In one of the great tragedies of the entire European subjugation of the Americas, a Mexican subcontinent that may have supported nearly 25 million people before the Spanish conquest was within a century inhabited by only a million or two.
For our strictly military purposes, however, we are concerned here with the more narrow and largely amoral issue of sheer military efficacy. To what degree did the smallpox outbreak of 1520 per se account for the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán in August 1521? Native observers, who described the pox in excruciating detail to the later Spanish believed that the epidemic wiped out almost one out of fifteen inside Tenochtitlán itself. Modern scholars have estimated that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all the population of central Mexico—Aztecs and their enemies alike—perished from this first wave of the outbreak. Perhaps as many as 20,000 or 30,000 Aztecs died from the disease during the two years in which Cortés was engaged in the conquest of Mexico, a staggering number of fatalities that surely helped to weaken the power of the Mexicas.
As horrible as those figures are, it is not clear that smallpox had a great deal to do with the final destruction of Tenochtitlán, although the subsequent creation of the province of New Spain was brought about by the millions who died in the century following Cortés’s victory, especially during the typhus epidemics of 1545–48 and 1576–81. According to the Florentine Codex, the first outbreak of the disease had a definite and limited course, spreading among the population from early September to late November 1520. Then it was largely gone by the time of the final siege (April to August 1521). By the time Cortés approached Tenochtitlán for his second campaign in April 1521, the city had been largely free of the disease for nearly six months. Smallpox also killed thousands of Cortés’s allies in even greater numbers than the Aztecs, since the Totonacs, Chalcans, and Tlaxcalans were in closer contact with the succession of European arrivals at Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. Furthermore, the disease seems to have been most virulent on the coast, near the base of Spanish operations and in the midst of those tribes allied to Cortés. To a limited degree the island isolation of Tenochtitlán, its elevation, and the no-man’s-land of the battlefield provided an initial barrier, feeble as it would ultimately prove, to ready sources of the infection.
The disease argument cuts both ways: there was a variety of tropical illnesses with which the Europeans had almost no experience or immunity against. Most contemporary accounts mention constant bronchial ailments and fevers that severely weakened and sometimes killed Cortés’s soldiers. New World malarias and dysenteries were far more virulent than similar outbreaks in Spain. Some also suffered from syphilis-like cankers, an especially unpleasant experience for armored men in the tropics. Moreover, not all of Cortés’s men had been exposed to smallpox and gained immunity against a disease that still wiped out thousands in the major urban areas of Europe. Given the small numbers in his army, even a few dozen Spaniards with the disease could have had as great an effect on the relative military efficacy of the conquistadors as did the thousands of infected natives in an Aztec empire of more than a million. In Cortés’s own letters and the annals of contemporary Spanish observers, smallpox, though mentioned, is never characterized as a predominant factor on either side of the struggle. This was because the Castilians, themselves beset by a host of diseases and unable to detect any sudden weakness in the resistance of Tenochtitlán, never fully appreciated the degree to which the outbreak had become pandemic among their enemies.
What prevented the Europeans from being wiped out by these new fevers and old illnesses is explained as much by demographics and culture as by biological causes. As a largely heterogeneous group of younger male warriors with varying backgrounds and travel experience, the Castilians were rarely cooped up in small urban quarters in constant contact with women, children, and the aged. They also had almost no responsibility or need to care for the civilian infected. Besides some biological immunity to smallpox, there was among the Spanish arrivals a long empirical tradition of combating disease outbreaks—Seville would lose half its population to plague in 1600, yet recover without being destroyed by either the disease or opportunistic foreign invasion.
Throughout the fighting, the conquistadors applied wool and cotton bandages to wounds, and found, in a gruesome manner, that the fat from freshly slain Indians worked as an excellent salve and healing cream. While scientific knowledge of viruses and bacilli was, of course, absent in sixteenth-century Europe, and indeed the entire mechanism of infectious agents unknown, the Spaniards did draw on a long empirical tradition that went back to classical medical writers like Hippocrates and Galen, who drew on firsthand observations of epidemics in Greek and Italian cities and had thus helped establish Western traditions emphasizing the importance of proper quarantine, medicinal diets, sleep, and the careful burning of the dead.
As a consequence of that long legacy, the Spaniards realized that close contact with the ill spread infection, that the dead had to be immediately disposed of, that the course of diseases was predictable by acute observation of symptoms, and that the process of empirical observation, diagnosis, and prognosis was superior to mere incantation and sacrifice. Catholic priests may have argued that one became ill as God’s punishment for prior sins and offered prayer as healing, but most Spaniards realized that once the infection set in, there was a predictable course of illness to follow, one that to some degree could be ameliorated by medicines, careful nursing, diet, and isolation.
In contrast, the native people of Mexico, like the ancient Egyptians and many Catholic priests, believed that internal diseases were a result of gods or evil adversaries, who wished to punish or take possession of the afflicted—and could thus be thwarted by charms and incantations. Aztec fortune-tellers consulted the pattern of beans thrown on cotton fabrics to determine the etiology of the disease. Various sacrifices, human and animal, would surely appease the angry Macuilxochitl or Tezcatlipoca—or was it Xipa? The idea that communal sleeping and bathing, group sweat-houses, eating on the floor, wearing of human skin, cannibalism, or the lack of immediate burial and disposal of the dead had anything to do with the spread of diseases was poorly known even among the Mesoamerican herbalists.
The real advantage of the smallpox epidemic to Cortés was not the reductions in Aztec numbers per se but its cultural and political consequences. Because the Spaniards did not die at the same rate as the Indians, there spread the notion—mostly forgotten for a time after the Noche Triste—that the Europeans were more than mortal. As smallpox swept through the Mesoamerican population and wiped out its leadership, the Castilians were careful to support and assist only those new leaders who were favorable to their cause. Smallpox enhanced the Spanish reputation for superhuman strength and solidified their support among native allies, despite the fact that the disease killed as many supporters as enemies— and thus had no real effect on the numerical parity between attackers and besieged.
Cultural Confusion?
A recent popular explanation of the Spanish miracle is the notion of cultural confusion. Either a semiotic exegesis is adduced that the Aztecs conceived and expressed reality in radically different ways than the Spanish, and were thus bewildered to the point of impotence by the European arrival, or the more logical argument that their culture did not practice a type of warfare that could thwart such a radically different foe. It is true that the Aztecs at first were unaware of the danger that the Spaniards and their superior military technology and tactics posed. They may have believed that the conquistadors were some sort of divine beings—the long-prophesied return of the light-skinned god Quetzalcoatl and his retinue from across the sea. Many Mexicas believed that Spanish firearms were thunder weapons, their oceangoing ships floating mountains, horses some sort of divine centaurlike beasts, rider and beast being the same creature. Many scholars argue that the absence of a syllabic script, the highly ritualized nature of Aztec formal speech, and the foreign ideas of the Spanish made the Aztecs confused by European directness and vulnerable to their cause-and-effect method of state politics and warfare.
Montezuma, well before the arrival of the Spaniards at Vera Cruz, seems to have associated rumors of their presence in the Caribbean with the fated return of Quetzalcoatl and the overthrow of the Aztec empire. The combination of religious authority and absolute political power in the hands of a single ruler, coupled with Montezuma’s mythic worldview, in part explains the fatal decision of the Aztec hierarchy to admit Cortés into Tenochtitlán in November 1519. Soon they sized up the Spaniards as no gods at all, but their initial hesitancy and fear had given Cortés a critical edge in the campaign. Others have emphasized the ubiquity of religious ritual in Aztec life, especially the degree to which Aztec warfare was scripted and conventional, with its overriding emphasis on taking captives as sacrificial victims for their gods, rather than killing the enemy outright. In this view, hundreds of times Spanish conquistadors (Cortés among them) could have been easily killed, but escaped due to the failed efforts of the Aztecs to capture them alive.
As in the case of the smallpox outbreak, the argument is one of degree. The Mexicas may have believed that Cortés and his men were divinities and either let down their guard or feared to attack such “gods” when they were surrounded and vulnerable inside Tenochtitlán in late 1519. The Aztecs did not immediately attempt to kill the Spaniards in battle and thus lost countless opportunities to exterminate their vastly outnumbered enemy. But by the time of the Noche Triste the Spaniards had been in Tenochtitlán for nearly eight months. The Aztecs had the opportunity to examine the Spaniards firsthand—their propensity to eat, sleep, defecate, seek out sex with native women, and exhibit greed for gold. From reports that had long ago reached Montezuma they knew that in the prior Spanish wars with the Otomis and Tlaxcalans (April to November 1519), the Spaniards had bled like men. In fact, a few of them had been killed in battle, making it abundantly clear that their physical bodies were similar to any in Mexico. Before they entered Tenochtitlán, horses had also been brought down, sliced to pieces, and sacrificed: on arrival it was clear to all in the Valley of Mexico that these beasts were large deerlike creatures without any divine propensities.
At the first real military engagement on the causeways on July 1, 1520, the Aztecs surrounded Cortés with the clear idea of exterminating men, not gods. Under the conditions of these nocturnal mass attacks on the narrow dikes, it was nearly impossible to capture the Castilians, and it is no accident that the vast majority of the six hundred to eight hundred or so Spaniards lost that night were deliberately killed outright or left to drown.
In the subsequent fighting during the Spanish flight to Tlaxcala, and again at the final siege of Tenochtitlán, the Mexicas employed captured Toledo blades. They may even have attempted to coerce captured conquistadors to show them the intricacies of crossbows. The Mexicas often changed their tactics, learning to avoid swarming attacks in the plains, and during the great siege showed ingenuity in confining their fighting to narrow corridors of the city, where ambushes and missile attack might nullify the Spaniards’ horses and cannon. The Aztecs eventually guessed that the Spanish were intent on their slaughter, and so logically distrusted all affirmations of Spanish mediation. They taunted their Tlaxcalan enemies with prescient boasts that after their own demise, they, too, would end up as slaves to the Spanish.
If the Aztecs fought with any disadvantage, it was one of training and custom that had taught them to capture and bind rather than slice apart an adversary—habits that would prove hard to shake even against killers like the Spanish, who gave no quarter. Still, we must remember that the notion that soldiers should seek to capture rather than kill their enemy is a most un-Western one, and only reaffirms our general thesis that the entire menu of Western warfare—its tactics of annihilation, mass assault, disciplined files and ranks, and superior technology—was largely responsible for the conquest of Mexico.
Besides the overriding problem of inferior weaponry and tactics, the greatest cultural disadvantage of the Aztecs has often gone unnoticed: that of the age-old problem of systems collapse that threatens all palatial dynasties in which political power is concentrated among a tiny elite— another non-European phenomenon that has given Western armies enormous advantages in cross-cultural collisions. The abrupt destruction of the Mycenaean palaces (ca. 1200 B.C.), the sudden disintegration of the Persian Empire with Darius III’s flight at Gaugamela, the end of the Incas, and the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union all attest that the way of palatial dynasties is one of extreme precariousness to outside stimuli. Anytime a narrow elite seeks to control all economic and political activity from a fortified citadel, island redoubt, grand palace, or walled Kremlin, the unraveling of empire shortly follows the demise, flight, or discrediting of such imperial grandees—again in contrast to more decentralized, less stratified, and locally controlled Western political and economic entities. Cortés himself sensed that vulnerability and thus kidnapped Montezuma within a week of arrival. With the final flight of the successor emperor Cuauhtémoc in August 1521 the final resistance of the Aztecs came abruptly to an end.
Malinche
The great narratives of William Prescott and Hugh Thomas suggest that the abrupt collapse of the Mexicas at little Spanish cost would have been impossible without the singular genius and criminal audacity of Hernán Cortés—whom the natives dubbed “Malinche,” a derivative from the Nahuatl name, Mainulli or Malinali, of his constant companion and Mayan interpreter, the brilliant and irrepressible Doña Marina. The implication is prevalent in almost all modern European accounts of the conquest that other conquistadors—even intrepid men such as Governor Velázquez of Cuba, Narváez, who was sent to arrest Cortés, or Cortés’s own capable henchmen, the brave Sandoval and the reckless Alvarado— could not have replicated Cortés’s achievement.
One does not have to be a believer in the “great man” theory of history to realize that on a number of key occasions—the initial dismantling of the ships and march inland, the war against and then brilliant alliance with Tlaxcala, the kidnapping of Montezuma, the defeat of Narváez and miraculous appropriation of his troops at almost no cost in lives, the heroic trek after the Noche Triste, the return march and launching of the brigantines, and the recovery after the final setback at Tlatelolco—the bravery, oratory, and political savvy of Cortés alone saved the expedition. A mere seven years after the conquest of 1521, Pánfilo Narváez, who had failed to stop Cortés and lost an eye for the trouble, led an expedition into Florida, comparable in size to Cortés’s initial force in Mexico, replete with five hundred men and one hundred horses. Apparently, only four conquistadors survived. They took years to be rescued—illustrating the abject catastrophe that might befall even well-supplied Spanish forces in the New World when led by men without ability and courage.
Manuel Orozco y Berra paints a near Machiavellian figure of Cortés beyond good and evil, but clearly one unlike any of his generation:
Consider his ingratitude to Diego Velázquez, his double and deceitful dealings with the tribes, his treachery toward Montezuma. Put to his account the useless massacre of Cholula, the murder of the Aztec monarch, his insatiable desire for gold and for pleasures. Do not forget that he killed his first wife, Catalina Juárez, that in torturing Cuauhtémoc he committed a base deed, that he ruined his rival, Garay, that by retaining command he made himself suspected of the death of Luis Ponce and Marcos de Aguilar. Even accuse him of everything else which history records as proven. But then allow him the plea he was a sagacious politician and a valiant and able captain; that he concluded successfully one of the most astounding feats of modern times. (Ixtlilxochitl, Ally of Cortés, xxvi)
Cortés was indeed a warrior, ruthless intriguer, and politician of superhuman energy and talent unmatched even among his gifted rivals of the sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of the New World. He was deathly ill from tropical viruses numerous times and had contracted a serious case of malaria even before he set sail from Spain. In the battles for Mexico City he suffered a near concussion and wounds to the hand, foot, and leg. On three occasions he was nearly captured and dragged off to be sacrificed on the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlán. He put down numerous attempts on his own life by native and Castilian cabals and neutralized rivals in the far-distant court of Charles V. Cortés fathered several children by various women and was accused of murdering his first wife, Catalina. Almost wiped out during the Noche Triste, suffering from wounds himself, his army surrounded by enemies, Cortés—because of religious fanaticism, Castilian honor, Spanish patriotism, sheer greed, or personal repute, or a mixture of all that and more—refused to retreat to the safety of Vera Cruz:
I remembered that Fortune always favors the bold, and furthermore that we were Christians who trusted in the great goodness of God, who would not let us perish utterly nor allow us to lose so great and noble a land which had been, or was to be, subject to Your Majesty; nor could I abandon so great a service as continuing the war whereby we would once more subdue the land as it had been before. I determined, therefore, that on no account would I go across the mountains to the coast. On the contrary, disregarding all the dangers and toil that might befall us, I told them that I would not abandon this land, for, apart from being shameful to myself and dangerous for all, it would be great treason to Your Majesty; rather I resolved to fall on our enemies wherever I could and oppose them in every possible way. (H. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 145)
Cortés saw well over half his men—some 1,000 out of 1,600—killed or captured in a two-year period. On three occasions his sick and wounded survivors were ready to revolt. He kidnapped Montezuma, waged war against the Aztec emperor’s brother and nephew, at various times fought and repulsed his allied Tlaxcalans, and defeated and then won over a Spanish relief force sent to bring him back in chains. He sailed to Spain to plead his cause, took an enormous force to Guatemala, and claimed he still could lead a voyage to China if given ships and men. All this from a small man of five feet four inches and about 150 pounds, who arrived in Hispaniola penniless at the age of twenty in 1504.
All that being said, without horses, firearms, steel weapons, armor, ships, dogs, and crossbows, not to mention the military acumen of his lieutenants who between them possessed expertise ranging from shipbuilding to gunpowder fabrication to the use of integrated cavalry and infantry tactics, even Cortés would have failed. The disparity—far more marked than in the Roman-Carthaginian or Macedonian-Persian encounters—was too great for either a brilliant Aztec leader or an inept Spanish conquistador to alter the eventual outcome. Had an Alvarado or Sandoval led the Castilians into Mexico City in November 1520, and had they met a fiery Cuauhtémoc rather than a cautious and confused Montezuma, the entire expedition might have floundered. But just as seven successive fleets reached Mexican shores during Cortés’s rebound in 1521, there would have been larger expeditions to replace the losses of an initial setback, some of them led by better generals, with even more men—30,000 Spaniards were in the immediate Caribbean settlements. Cortés himself after the disaster of the Noche Triste claimed that his life was worth little, since there were now thousands of Castilians in the New World who would take his place and subdue the Aztecs.
The conquest of Mexico was one of the few times in history in which technology—Europe in the midst of a military renaissance pitted against foes that had neither horses nor the wheel, much less metals and gunpowder—in itself trumped the variables of individual human genius and achievement. The subjugation of western North America was accomplished in four decades of concerted warfare without a European conqueror as skilled as Cortés or a centralized and vulnerable nerve center like the island city of Tenochtitlán. The battle for the American frontier was marked by a number of incompetent English-speaking generals who lost their command and lives in idiotic assaults against brave and ingenious Indian tribes armed with Western weaponry and horses in a vast landscape—all without much effect on the continual encroachment on Indian lands and the systematic defeat of native war parties. We also should keep in mind that the Norse explorers of the northwestern coast of North America—the first European aggressors in the New World—during the tenth and eleventh centuries had little permanent success against native tribes because of their lack of firearms, horses, and sophisticated tactics and their inability to arrive in sufficient numbers on successive flotillas of large oceangoing ships. Neither Norse brilliance in navigation and seamanship nor legendary prowess in arms was enough to ensure conquest or colonization without an easy and continual supply of manpower and matériel.
Spanish Weapons and Tactics
Modern scholars who attribute the Castilians’ astounding success to cultural confusion, disease, native allies, and a host of other subsidiary causes are reluctant to admit to the critical role of Western technological and military superiority. Perhaps they fear that such conclusions might imply Eurocentrism, or suggest Western mental or moral preeminence. But the enormous gulf between the equipment and tactics of the Mexica and Spanish armies is a question not of virtue or genes, but of culture and history.
In all categories of arms and armor the Spanish were vastly superior to every native tribe they met. Their steel swords were sharper and lighter than the Mexicas’ obsidian-tipped clubs and held an edge far longer. When used by skilled swordsmen as both a thrusting and a cleaving blade, such weapons—as written sources and Mexica artwork attest—could lop off entire limbs and dispatch an unarmored opponent in a single blow. The conquistador sword was a direct descendant of the shorter Roman gladius, it, too, originally a Spanish blade that gave the Roman legionary the greatest degree of penetrating power of any weapon in the ancient Mediterranean. All 1,600 Castilians who fought at various times in Mexico were equipped with such lethal swords, which in large part accounts for Spanish victories even when their shot and bolts were depleted.
Many soldiers bore long pikes of ashwood. Most were twelve to fifteen feet in length, tipped with heavy sharp metal heads. Like the Macedonian sarissai, which inspired these weapons, Spanish pikes when wielded by dense bodies of men—the Castilian terciobecame for a time the deadliest infantry force in sixteenth-century Spain—created an impenetrable wall. In Spanish parlance it was an “iron cornfield” that could not be entered. When the pike was used as a lance by an armored horseman riding down stragglers, a single blow could take a man’s head right off. Finally, there were also hundreds of lighter, steel-tipped javelins, the jabalinas, which like the Roman pila were deadly when thrown by swordsmen closing in for the kill.
Nearly all the Spaniards wore steel helmets that also protected parts of the face and could not be penetrated by either arrow or stone. A great many donned steel breastplates and carried steel-reinforced shields, which explains why few were killed by Aztec club or sword blows. Instead, those killed were swarmed and pulled down, as dozens of Mexica warriors tried to trip or knock down the heavily laden Castilians. Nor had any tribe in the New World ever experienced the European idea of shock infantry collision—a tradition originating with the phalanx of the seventh century B.C. on the killing fields of ancient Greece, and rarely found outside of Europe.
The chief problem for the Europeans in many infantry battles with the Tlaxcalans and the Aztecs was one of exhaustion. The mailed Spaniards, nearly invulnerable from sword and missile attacks, soon tired after constant slashing and stabbing with heavy blades and lances, and at last were often forced to retreat behind the curtain of cannon and small-arms fire:
They surrounded them [the Spanish] on all sides, the Spanish started to strike at them, killing them like flies. No sooner were some slain than they were replaced with fresh ones. The Spaniards were like an islet in the sea, beaten by waves on all sides. This terrible conflict lasted over four hours. During this many Mexicans died, and nearly all the Spaniards’ allies and some of the Spaniards themselves. When it came noon, with the intolerable exertion of battle, the Spaniards began to lag. (B. Sahagún, The Conquest of Mexico, 96)
Each Castilian butchered dozens of the enemy, and in some cases hundreds, to ensure his own survival, an enormous effort of muscular strength and endurance for such relatively small men encased in mail. Their chief worry was either stumbling or being tripped and dragged off. Our sources report that over the course of the two-year fighting, hundreds of Castilians were wounded, but nearly all such cuts and contusions were to the limbs and rarely fatal. The way to kill a man is to penetrate his chest or face with thrusting metal blades, and that was nearly impossible for Aztec warriors pitted against mailed foot soldiers.
Scholars who dismiss the importance of Spanish steel must explain why, after the Noche Triste and the ambush at Tlatelolco, the Aztecs quickly employed the precious few Castilian swords and lances they captured. Why did the Tlaxcalans welcome the Spanish infantry as a cutting edge in all infantry engagements against the Aztecs, on the premise that only Castilians could hack their way through Aztec lines? During the humid season many conquistadors felt that lighter and more comfortable local quilted cotton fabrics offered enough protection from native stone-edged missiles and blades. On occasion they jettisoned their mail—dramatic proof that they feared little from Aztec weapons, despite being wielded by some of the most ferocious fighters in the history of warfare.
Superior metal arms were only part of the Spanish advantage. Harquebuses and crossbows were more accurate and had greater range and far more penetrating power than any native sling or arrow. The Spanish crossbow could send a bolt in an arc over two hundred yards and was deadly accurate in direct fire at nearly a hundred. Little skill was required in its use, and bolts and replacement parts were easily fabricated from indigenous materials. The chief drawback was the weight of the machine (fifteen pounds) and the relatively slow rate of fire (one bolt per minute). Although Aztec archers could shoot five or six arrows in a minute, they could rarely reach targets at two hundred yards, and at even close ranges their flint-tipped arrows could not penetrate the vital organs of the armored Spanish. Native arrows were also far less accurate than crossbow bolts. Moreover, archery took years of training to master, while a Castilian could reemploy the bow of a fallen or wounded crossbowman in minutes.
Harquebuses (early muskets with a matchlock firing device) had much the same advantages and drawbacks as the crossbow—enormous penetrating power, little required training, good accuracy, and great range, versus slow rates of fire and clumsiness—but were even deadlier in stopping numerous unarmored warriors with single shots. They were also easier to fabricate and repair. The real advantage of firearms lay not in their ease of use—they were awkward and hard to load—but in their greater accuracy and deadliness. A good shooter could kill with some assurance at 150 yards. His enormous projectiles—some lead balls might weigh up to six ounces—at closer ranges could often go right through the flesh of a number of unarmored Aztecs. Cortés had nearly eighty harquebusiers and crossbowmen when he returned to Tenochtitlán in spring 1521. In serried ranks with bowmen shooting over the heads of the gunners, his men were capable of putting down a sequential carpet of about ten or fifteen projectiles every ten seconds. For short periods of ten or fifteen minutes, against dense masses of Mexicas where misses were few, the Castilians were capable of killing hundreds, especially when placed behind pikemen, on boats, or atop fortifications.
In contemporary European warfare there was an ongoing renaissance in tactics and armament, as harquebusiers were blasting apart even the most disciplined ranks of well-armed Swiss and Spanish pikemen at Marignano (1519), La Bicocca (1522), and Pavia (1525). If the new muskets, fired in careful volleys, could tear apart columns of fast-moving and well-disciplined European pikemen, there was little doubt of their effectiveness against larger but less well organized and poorly protected swarms of Aztec warriors. Even if the Aztecs had captured and mastered the use of harquebuses, such technology, without a supporting framework of scientific research, would have soon stagnated: harquebuses were a mere phase in the continual evolution of European firearms that would soon see flints, better-cast barrels, rifling, and improved powder.
On the plains the Spanish had nearly a century of battle experience in integrating pikemen with harquebusiers—the latter walked out, shot, retreated behind a wall of spears to reload, then again came forward to shoot—to stave off the charges of European aristocratic cavalry. Against the near naked Mexica foot soldiers, these tried-and-tested Castilian squares were nearly invulnerable. Skeptics of European gunpowder superiority must remember that the swarming tactics of indigenous armies— the Zulus are an excellent example—made Western guns especially lethal well before the age of repeating rifles.
Spanish discipline was legendary. Cannon, musket, and crossbow were shot on orders, achieving a murderous symphony against charging masses. Rarely would a harquebusier or swordsman flee should his immediate superior go down. In contrast, regional contingents of the Aztecs were prone to disintegrate once the revered cuachpantli—the gaudy standards mounted on bamboo frames and worn on the backs of illustrious warriors—fell or were seized. Personal bravery and prowess in arms are not always synonymous with military discipline, which in the West is largely defined as staying in formation and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder.
What terrified the Aztecs most, however, were the Spanish cannon, some wheeled or fitted on carts, with at least a few of the more rapidfiring breech-loading models. Sources disagree about the actual number and types employed by Cortés’s men over the two-year campaign (many were lost during the Noche Triste), but the Spaniards brought along ten to fifteen, ranging from small falconets to larger lombards. When properly used against the Aztec mobs, they were absolutely deadly weapons, firing both grapeshot—canisters of smaller iron projectiles—and large cannonballs and stones up to ten pounds. The smaller breech-loading falconets could fire almost a round each minute and a half, point-blank at five hundred yards or with arced shots reaching nearly a half mile. When aimed at the charging Mexicas, each volley tore off limbs, heads, and torsos, as shots went through dozens of warriors.
Spanish chronicles make much of Cortés’s horses—forty were present at the final siege of Tenochtitlán—and the complete terror they brought to the Aztecs. The Mexicas at first considered them strange half-human centaurs or divine creatures who could talk with their riders, and only later realized they were large grazing beasts like some sort of gigantic deer. Besides the obvious advantages that horses brought to the fighting—terror, reconnaissance, transport, and mobility—they were unstoppable when ridden by mailed lancers, prompting Bernal Díaz del Castillo to label them the Spaniards’ “one hope of survival.”
Historically, the only way to defeat cavalry was to fight en masse, as the Franks had done at Poitiers, or with extended pikes in the manner of Swiss phalanxes, or, like the French, to put down a carpet of musket fire into the approach of a mounted charge. The Aztecs could do none of these, lacking a tradition of landed infantry, shock warfare, and firearms of any sort. If they tried to mass in great numbers to clog the lanes of charging horsemen, they soon became vulnerable to cannon volleys. Thus, in concert with artillery, the Spanish horsemen proved deadly in either riding down and spearing individual Aztecs or causing the enemy to seek protection in bunches and thus offering better targets for Cortés’s cannon.
Unlike the horses of antiquity, Cortés’s mounts were no ponies, but Andalusian Barb-Arabs, bred from larger Arabian horses brought to Spain by the Moors. English observers later exclaimed that the horses of the West Indies were the finest they had ever seen. Their great size and the expertise of their riders—Spanish aristocrats like Sandoval and Alvarado had ridden since childhood and were masters of the mounted lance thrust—made a terrifying spectacle:
It is extraordinary what havoc a baker’s dozen of horsemen could inflict on a vast horde of Indians: and indeed it seems as if the horsemen did not do the damage directly, but that the sudden appearance of these “centaurs” (to use Díaz del Castillo’s word) caused so much demoralization that the Indians faltered and enabled the Spanish infantrymen to dash at them with renewed force. . . . The Indians had no idea how to deal with this supernatural beast, half animal and half man, and simply stood paralysed while the pounding hoofs and flashing swords cut them down. (J. White, Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire, 169)
Not all the weapons that would prove so deadly were objects brought from Spain. Some of the most lethal were in the minds of the conquistadors themselves, latent mental blueprints of killing machines that sprang from their heads to became real only under the exigencies of the fighting. The Spanish quickly recognized that among the vast wealth of Mexico were untold—and untapped—raw materials for European-style weapons, ranging from fine lumber for ships and siege machines to metal ores for blades and ingredients for gunpowder.
It is popular to suggest that natural resources alone determine cultural or military dynamism. If true, we should remember that the Aztecs were sitting atop a war merchant’s bonanza—an entire subcontinent replete with the ingredients of gunpowder, iron, bronze, and steel. In truth, it was the absence of a systematic approach to abstract learning and science, not the dearth of ores or minerals, that doomed the Aztecs. They lacked wagon wheels perhaps because of the absence of horses; but they were also entirely without other wheel-based instruments of war and commerce—wheelbarrows, rickshaws, water wheels, mill wheels, pulleys and gears—because there was neither a rational tradition of science nor a climate of disinterested research.
Nowhere was the rational Spanish approach more apparent than in their ad hoc construction of battle machinery, which followed siege and ship designs dating back to classical antiquity. During the bitter fighting on the eve of the Noche Triste the Spanish within a few hours constructed threemanteletes, portable wooden towers that protected harquebusiers and crossbowmen who fired over the heads of the infantrymen. When Cortés next discovered that the causeways were breached, he ordered movable bridges built—a European specialty that dated back to Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Germany. After the flight from Tenochtitlán, gunpowder was fabricated, sulfur being drawn from the nearby “smoky mountain” (Mount Popocatépetl, 17,888 feet above sea level). Native metalsmiths were given Spanish designs and instructions to assist in the making of more than 100,000 copper arrowheads for their own bows, and another 50,000 metal bolts for the Spanish crossbows. In an effort to save powder, during the final siege a gigantic catapult was even fabricated—the mechanics of its winch, armature, and springs apparently being misdesigned by amateurs, since it proved ineffective.
The most impressive project was Martín López’s brilliant launching of thirteen prefabricated brigantines. These were enormous galleylike boats more than forty feet long and nine feet at the beam, powered with sails and paddles, and yet with flat bottoms that drew only two feet of water and were thus especially designed for the shallow and swampy waters of Lake Texcoco. Each held twenty-five men and could carry a number of horses, as well as a large cannon. To craft such ships, the Spaniards drafted thousands of Tlaxcalans to haul lumber and the iron hardware salvaged from their beached ships at Vera Cruz. Then López had his carefully organized native work gangs entirely dismantle the brigantines and transport them over the mountains in a large column of some 50,000 porters and warriors to Lake Texcoco. When they arrived in the dry season at Tenochtitlán, López engineered a canal twelve feet wide and about the same depth, through which to navigate the ships from the marshes into deeper waters of the lake: 40,000 Tlaxcalans were involved in the latter project for seven weeks.
The brigantines proved the deciding factor in the entire war, as they were manned by a third of the Spanish manpower and were allotted nearly 75 percent of the cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. The ships kept the causeways free, ensured that the Spanish camps were secure in the evening, landed infantry at weak points in the enemy lines, enforced a crippling blockade of the city, systematically blew apart hundreds of Aztec canoes, and transported critical food and supplies to the various isolated Spanish contingents. They turned Lake Texcoco from the Spaniards’ chief vulnerability to their greatest asset. Their high decks prevented boarding and gave ample cover for the harquebusiers and crossbowmen to fire and reload—characteristic of traditional Western skill in combined infantry and naval tactics:
However, in the final analysis, Tenochtitlán had an importance that cannot be assigned to Salamis: Tenochtitlán was synonymous with final victory, the conclusion of a war; Salamis was not. At Salamis a civilization was challenged; at Tenochtitlán a civilization was crushed. Possibly in all history there is no similar victorious naval engagement that concluded a war and ended a civilization. (C. Gardiner, Naval Power in the Conquest of Mexico, 188)
The brigantines, despite being fabricated more than a hundred miles from Lake Texcoco, proved to be far more ingeniously engineered for fighting on the Aztecs’ native waters than any boat constructed in Mexico during the entire history of its civilization—a feat possible only through a systematic approach to science and reason that had been ubiquitous in the West for two millennia.
Almost all elements of the Western military tradition played their respective roles in assuring a Spanish victory, trumping problems of numerical inferiority, logistics, and unknown geography. The hundreds of thousands of pages of postbellum Spanish lawsuits, formal inquiries, and judicial writs among the conquistadors attest to the strong sense of freedom and entitlement each warrior possessed: a sense of civic militarism of individuals with rights and privileges that neither Cortés nor the Spanish crown could infringe upon without constitutional support. While on the road to meet Narváez, some of Cortés’s men caught Alonzo de Mata, an emissary with legal papers and summons for their leader’s recall. What ensued next was a legalistic debate about the official status of de Mata, ending when the latter could not produce documentation to prove that he was a genuine king’s notary and therefore had no authority to vouch for the authenticity of his own decrees.
In fact, throughout the sixteenth century there was a strong sense of political freedom in Spain, perhaps best epitomized in Juan de Costa’s (1549–95) treatise Govierno del ciudadano, on the proper rights and behavior of the citizen in a constitutional commonwealth. About the same time, Jerónimo de Blancas, a biographer of Cortés, wrote Aragonesium re-rumcomentarii (1588), on the contractual nature of the Aragonese monarchy and its relationship with legislative and judicial branches of government.
The Castilians’ drive for decisive horrific engagements—in the streets of Tenochtitlán, on the causeways, in the Plain of Otumba, on Lake Texcoco—was not shared by the Mexicas, who preferred daylight spectacle, in which status, ritual, and captive-taking were sometimes integral to battle. Throughout the fighting, eager traders and entrepreneurs from the New World and Spain docked at Vera Cruz to supply Cortés with shot, food, weapons, and horses. Near extinction, Cortés nevertheless confiscated gold from enemy and friend alike to pay for his supplies, assured in a society of free markets that if there was profit to be made in Vera Cruz, there would eventually be European rascals replete with fresh powder, arms, and men in Tenochtitlán.
The conquistadors, whether led at times by Sandoval, Ordaz, Olid, or Alvarado, owed their lives to an abstract system of command and obedience, not just to a magnetic leader like Cortés. Throughout the conquest individual initiative gave Cortés innumerable advantages. Even the constant complaints of his outspoken men and the threat of formal audit and inquiry from Spanish authorities forced Cortés to consult on strategy with his top lieutenants and to craft tactics with every expectation that there were scores of critics who would appear should he fail. All these components of the Western military tradition gave the Spanish an enormous edge. But in the last analysis a tradition of rationalism, some two millennia old, guaranteed that Hernán Cortés’s tools of battle could kill thousands more than those of his enemies.
REASON AND WAR
People from the Stone Age onward have always engaged in some form of scientific activity designed to enhance organized warfare. But beginning with the Greeks, Western culture has shown a singular propensity to think abstractly, to debate knowledge freely apart from religion and politics, and to devise ways of adapting theoretical breakthroughs for practical use, through the marriage of freedom and capitalism. The result has been a constant increase in the technical ability of Western armies to kill their adversaries. Is it not odd that Greek hoplites, Roman legionaries, medieval knights, Byzantine fleets, Renaissance foot soldiers, Mediterranean galleys, and Western harquebusiers were usually equipped with greater destructive power than their adversaries? Even the capture or purchase of Western arms is no guarantee of technological parity—as the Ottomans, Indians, and Chinese learned—inasmuch as European weaponry is an evolving phenomenon, ensuring obsolescence almost simultaneously with the creation of new arms. Creativity has never been a European monopoly, much less intellectual brilliance. Rather, the West’s willingness to craft superior weapons is just as often predicated on its unmatched ability to borrow, adopt, and steal ideas without regard to the social, religious, or political changes that new technology often brings—as the incorporation of and improvement on the trireme, Roman gladius, astrolabe, and gunpowder attest.
Scholars are correct to point out that Europeans neither invented firearms nor enjoyed a monopoly in their use. But they must acknowledge that the ability to fabricate and distribute firearms on a wide scale and to improve their lethality was unique to Europe. From the introduction of gunpowder in the fourteenth century to the present day, all major improvements in firearms—the matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, smokeless powder, rifle barrel, minié ball, repeating rifle, and machine gun—have taken place in the West or under Western auspices. As a general rule, Europeans did not employ or import Ottoman or Chinese guns, and they did not pattern their technique of munitions production on Asian or African designs.
This idea of continual innovation and improvement in the use of technology is embodied in Aristotle’s dictum in his Metaphysics that prior philosophers’ theories contribute to a sort of ongoing aggregate of Greek knowledge. In the Physics (204B) he admits, “In the case of all discoveries, the results of previous labors that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on.” Western technological development is largely an outgrowth of empirical research, the acquisition of knowledge through sense perception, the observation and testing of phenomena, and the recording of such data so that factual information itself is timeless, increasing and becoming more accurate through the collective criticism and modification of the ages. That there were an Aristotle, Xenophon, and Aeneas Tacticus at the beginning of Western culture and not anything comparable in the New World explains why centuries later a Cortés could fabricate cannon and gunpowder in the New World, while the Aztecs could not use the Spanish artillery they captured, why for centuries the lethal potential of the land around Tenochtitlán was untapped, but was mined for its gunpowder and ores within months after the Spanish arrival.
Western technological superiority is not merely a result of the military renaissance of the sixteenth century or an accident of history, much less the result of natural resources, but predicated on an age-old method of investigation, a peculiar mentality that dates back to the Greeks and not earlier. Although the theoretical mathematician Archimedes purportedly snapped that “the whole trade of engineering was sordid and ignoble, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit,” his machines— cranes and a purported huge reflective glass heat ray—delayed the capture of Syracuse for two years. The Roman navy in the First Punic War not only copied Greek and Carthaginian designs but went on to ensure their victories by the use of innovative improvements such as the corvus, a sort of derrick that lifted enemy ships right out of the water. Long before American B-29s dropped napalm over Tokyo, the Byzantines sprayed through brass tubes compressed blasts of Greek fire, a secret concoction of naphtha, sulfur, and quicklime that like its modern counterpart kept burning even when doused with water.
Military knowledge was also abstract and published, not just empirical. Western military manuals from Aelian (Taktike theoria) and Vegetius (Epitoma rei militaris) to the great handbooks on ballistics and tactics of the sixteenth century (e.g., Luigi Collado’sPractica manual de artiglierra[1586] or Justus Lipsius’s De militia Romana [1595–96]) incorporate firsthand knowledge and abstract theoretical investigation into practical advice. In contrast, the most brilliant of Chinese and Islamic military works are far more ambitious and holistic texts, and thus less pragmatic as actual blueprints for killing, embedded with religion, politics, or philosophy and replete with illusions and axioms from Allah to the yin and the yang, hot and cold, one and many.
Courage on the battlefield is a human characteristic. But the ability to craft weapons through mass production to offset such bravery is a cultural phenomenon. Cortés, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Don Juan of Austria, and other Western captains, often annihilated without mercy their numerically superior foes, not because their own soldiers were necessarily better in war, but because their traditions of free inquiry, rationalism, and science most surely were.