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Burying the White Gods
by Camilla Townsend
Originally published in the American Historical Review
; June 2003, Vol 108, Issue 3
Reproduced with permission
The feathered serpent deity at Teotihuacan, a major urban center in the
Valley of Mexico
predating the Aztec civilization. Photograph by John Graham Nolan.
In 1552, Francisco López de Gómara, who had been chaplain and secretary
to Hernando Cortés while he lived out his old age in Spain, published an
account of the conquest of Mexico. López de Gómara himself had never
been to the New World, but he could envision it nonetheless. "Many
[Indians] came to gape at the strange men, now so famous, and at their
attire, arms and horses, and they said, 'These men are gods!'"^1
<#FOOT1> The chaplain was one of the first to claim in print that the
Mexicans had believed the conquistadors to be divine. Among the welter
of statements made in the Old World about inhabitants of the New, this
one found particular resonance. It was repeated with enthusiasm, and
soon a specific version gained credence: the Mexicans had apparently
believed in a god named Quetzalcoatl, who long ago had disappeared in
the east, promising to return from that direction on a certain date. In
an extraordinary coincidence, Cortés appeared off the coast in that very
year and was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl by the devout Indians. Today,
most educated persons in the United States, Europe, and Latin America
are fully versed in this account, as readers of this piece can
undoubtedly affirm. In fact, however, there is little evidence that the
indigenous people ever seriously believed the newcomers were gods, and
there is no meaningful evidence that any story about Quetzalcoatl's
returning from the east ever existed before the conquest. A number of
scholars of early Mexico are aware of this, but few others are. The
cherished narrative is alive and well, and in urgent need of critical
attention.^2 <#FOOT2>
In order to dismantle a construct with such a long history, it will be
necessary first to explain the origins and durability of the myth and
then to offer an alternate explanation of what happened in the period of
conquest and what the indigenous were actually thinking. In proposing an
alternative, I will make three primary assertions: first, that we must
put technology in all its forms?beyond mere weaponry?front and center in
our story of conquest; second, that we can safely do this because new
evidence from scientists offers us explanations for divergent
technological levels that have nothing to do with differences in
intelligence; and third, that the Mexicans themselves immediately became
aware of the technology gap and responded to it with intelligence and
savvy rather than wide-eyed talk of gods. They knew before we did, it
seems, that technology was the crux
In the last twenty years, scholars have made room for alternative
narratives in many arenas, demonstrating that power imbalances explain
the way we tell our stories. Yet despite our consciousness of narrative
as political intervention, the story of the white gods in the conquest
of Mexico has remained largely untouched. It is essentially a
pornographic vision of events, albeit in a political rather than asexual
sense. What most males say they find so enticing about pornography is
not violent imagery?which after all takes center stage relatively
rarely?but rather the idea that the female is /not/ concerned about any
potential for violence or indeed any problematic social inequalities or
personal disagreements but instead enthusiastically and unquestioningly
adores?even worships?the male. Certainly, such a narrative may be
understood to be pleasurable in the context of the strife-ridden
relationships of the real world. Likewise, it perhaps comes as no
surprise that the relatively powerful conquistadors and their cultural
heirs should prefer to dwell on the Indians' adulation for them, rather
than on their pain, rage, or attempted military defense. It is, however,
surprising that this element has not been more transparent to recent
scholars
Perhaps this relatively dehumanizing narrative has survived among us?in
an era when few such have?because we have lacked a satisfactory
alternative explanation for the conquest. Without such a
misunderstanding, how could a handful of Spaniards permanently defeat
the great Aztec state?^3 <#FOOT3> It is a potentially frightening
question?at least to those who do not want the answer to be that one
group was more intelligent or more deserving than another. The notion
that the Indians were too devout for their own good, and hence the
victims of a calendric coincidence of tragic consequences, is highly
appealing. We can argue that it was no one's fault if the Indians
thought the Spanish were gods and responded to them as such. The belief
was part and parcel of their cosmology and does not by any means
indicate that they were lacking in intelligence or that their culture
was "less developed." Thus even those participating in colonial semiosis
with a sympathetic ear, who study Indian narratives alongside colonists'
fantasies, often avoid or deny the Europeans' superior ability to
conquer /in a technical sense/, making statements that simply are not
believable. One has suggested that, "but for the cases of some
spectacularly successful conquistadors," the indigenous might have
killed off all approaching colonizers as successfully as the South Sea
Islanders did away with Captain Cook, another that, if the last Aztec
king, Cuauhtemoc, had met with better fortune, the Aztecs might have
"embarked upon their own version of the Meiji era in Japan."^4 <#FOOT4>
The obvious explanation for conquest, many would argue, is technology.
The Spanish had a technological advantage large enough to ensure their
victory, especially if we acknowledge that their technology included not
only blunderbusses and powder but also printing presses, steel blades
and armor, crossbows, horses and riding equipment, ships, navigation
tools?and indirectly, as a result of the latter three, an array of
diseases.^5 <#FOOT5> But even here we are in dangerous waters, as some
would thereby infer a difference in intelligence. Felipe
Fernández-Armesto writes: "I hope to contribute to the explosion of what
I call the /conquistador/-myth: the notion that Spaniards displaced
incumbent elites in the early modern New World because they were in some
sense better, or better-equipped, technically, morally or
intellectually."^6 <#FOOT6> But why need we conflate the latter three?
One group can be better equipped technically without being better
equipped morally or intellectually. A people's technology is /not/
necessarily a function of their intelligence. Even a superficial
observer of the Aztecs must notice their accurate calendar, their
extraordinary goldwork and poetry, their pictoglyph books: such an
observer calls them intellectually deficient at his or her peril.
Science can now offer historians clear explanations for the greater
advancement of technology among certain peoples without presupposing
unequal intelligence. Biologist Jared Diamond presents this new
knowledge coherently and powerfully in /Guns, Germs, and Steel: The
Fates of Human Societies/, which has not received the attention it
deserves from historians.^7 <#FOOT7> He sets out to provide a non-racist
explanation for "Why the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa Did Not Capture King
Charles I of Spain." After marshalling well-known evidence that turning
from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentary farming leads to
increasing population and the proliferation of technological
advances?including guns, steel, and (indirectly) germs?he says that we
must then ask ourselves why farming developed earlier and/or spread more
rapidly in certain parts of the world. The answer lies in the
constellation of suitable?that is, protein-rich?wild plants available in
a particular environment at a particular time?which scientists can now
reconstruct. It is a highly risky endeavor to turn from hunting and
gathering to farming. It makes no sense to do so, except on a part-time
basis, for sugar cane, bananas, or squash, for instance; it makes a
great deal of sense to do it for the wheat and peas of the Fertile
Crescent (and certain other species that spread easily on the wide and
relatively ecologically constant east-west axis of Eurasia). In the case
of the Americas, one rushes to ask, "What about corn?" Indeed, it turns
out that after the millennia of part-time cultivation that it took to
turn the nearly useless wild /teosinte/ with its tiny bunches of seeds
into something approaching today's ears of corn, Mesoamericans became
very serious full-time agriculturalists. But by then, they had lost
valuable time?or so we say if they were in a race with Eurasia. In 1519,
it would turn out that, unbeknownst to either side, they /had/ been in a
something akin to a race. Establishing that the Mexicans had not had
protein-rich crops available to them for as long as their conquerors,
and thus had not been sedentary as long, allows us to understand the
technical disparities that existed without resorting to comparisons of
intelligence or human worth. Diamond's work relieves us of an old
burden. We may proceed more freely with our business as historians.
Our first task must be to ask ourselves whence came the myths associated
with the conquest. The simple truth is that, by the 1550s, some Indians
were themselves saying that they (or rather, their parents) had presumed
the white men to be gods. Their words became widely available to an
international audience in 1962, when Miguel León-Portilla published /The
Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico/, translated
from his 1959 /Visión de los vencidos/. The work was perfectly timed to
meet with the political sympathies of a generation growing suspicious of
the conquistadors' version of events. The volume was printed in at least
eleven other languages and has remained a common reference for a variety
of scholars. It is an invaluable book, communicating the fear, pain, and
anger experienced by the Mexica when their great city of Tenochtitlan
crumbled.^8 <#FOOT8> Yet, ironically, the same text that lets
sixteenth-century Nahuas speak"within hearing distance of the rest of
the world"^9 <#FOOT9> also traps them in stereotype, quoting certain
statements made at least a generation after the conquest as if they were
transparent realities. "When Motecuhzoma heard that [the Spanish] were
inquiring about his person, and when he learned that the 'gods' wished
to see him face to face, his heart shrank within him and he was filled
with anguish. He wanted to run away and hide."^10 <#FOOT10>
Numerous scholars have analyzed these words while ignoring their
context. The best-known such work is Tzvetan Todorov's /Conquest of
America: The Question of the Other/. Although quick to say there is no
"natural inferiority" (indeed, he aptly points out that it is the
Indians who rapidly learn the language of the Spanish, not the other way
around), he insists that it is the Spaniards' greater adeptness in
manipulating signs that gives them victory. While the Spanish believe in
man-man communication ("What are we to do?"), the Indians only envision
man-world communication ("How are we to know?"). Thus the Indians have a
"paralyzing belief that the Spaniards are gods" and are "inadequate in a
situation requiring improvisation."^11 <#FOOT11> Popular historians have
been equally quick to accept this idea of indigenous reality, often with
the best intentions. Hugh Thomas's recent monumental 800-page volume is
a case in point. Thomas uses apocryphal accounts as if they had been
tape-recorded conversations in his portrayal of the inner workings of
Moctezuma's^12 <#FOOT12> court. "The Emperor considered flight. He
thought of hiding ... He decided on ... a cave on the side of
Chapultepec." Thomas does this, I believe, not out of naïveté but out of
a genuine desire to incorporate the Indian perspective. He does not want
to describe the intricate politics of the Spanish while leaving the
Indian side vague, rendering it less real to his readers.^13 <#FOOT13>
With such friends, though, perhaps the indigenous and their cultural
heirs do not need enemies. A different approach is definitely needed, or
the white gods will continue to inhabit our narratives. In beginning
anew, let us first ask what sources we have available. We in fact have
only one set of documents that were undoubtedly written at the time of
conquest by someone who was certainly there?the letters of Cortés. The
/Cartas/ are masterful constructions, loaded with political agendas, but
we are at least certain of their origin, and Cortés never wrote that he
was taken for a god. Andrés de Tapia, a Spanish noble who was a captain
under Cortés, wrote an account predating López de Gómara's, and, in the
1560s, two aging conquistadors wrote their memoirs: Francisco de
Aguilar, who by then had renounced worldly wealth and was living in a
Dominican monastery, dictated a short narration, and Bernal Díaz del
Castillo, then a landholder in Guatemala, wrote a long and spicy
manuscript that has come to be beloved by many.^14 <#FOOT14>
Besides the testimony of these few conquistadors, we have the writings
of priests who were on the scene early, and who were bent on making a
careful study of indigenous beliefs, the better to convert the natives.
In 1524, twelve Franciscan "Apostles" arrived in Mexico City and were
warmly greeted by Cortés. One of them, Fray Toribio de Benavente (known
to posterity by his Nahuatl name,"Motolinía" or "Poor One"), wrote
extensively.^15 <#FOOT15> The efforts of the Franciscans led to the
founding in 1536 of a formal school for Indian noblemen in Tlatelolco in
Mexico City and culminated during the 1550s in the work of Bernardo de
Sahagún, who spent years orchestrating a grand project in which students
did extensive interviews with surviving notables of the /ancien régime/.
The most complete extant version is the Florentine Codex.^16 <#FOOT16>
The Dominican Fray Diego Durán, though not born until the 1530s, is also
particularly valuable to us because he moved with his family from
Seville to Mexico "before he lost his 'milk teeth,'" was raised by
Nahuatl-speaking servants, and became fluent in the language.^17 <#FOOT17>
The last group of sources were produced by the indigenous themselves,
but here is the heart of the problem: we have none that date from the
years of conquest or even from the 1520s or 1530s. There are sixteen
surviving pre-conquest codices (none from Mexico City itself, where the
conquerors' book burning was most intense), and then, dating from the
1540s, statements written in Nahuatl using the Roman alphabet, which was
then rapidly becoming accessible to educated indigenous through the
school of Tlatelolco.^18 <#FOOT18> The most famous such document about
the conquest is the lengthy Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex.
Although it was organized by Sahagún, and the Spanish glosses were
written by him, the Nahuatl is the work of his Indian aides.^19
<#FOOT19> At the end of the century, a few indigenous men wrote
histories. Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the last
king of Texcoco, near Tenochtitlan, was prolific.^20 <#FOOT20> Though
removed in time, he is worth reading, having access to secretly
preserved codices; he railed against Spaniards who had confused matters
by making false assertions that were taken as truth.^21 <#FOOT21>
These, then, are the rather limited documents we have to work with.
James Lockhart has used circumstantial evidence to argue that we must be
mistaken in our notion that the Mexicans responded to the Spanish in the
early years with fatalism and awe. Even though we have no indigenous
records produced at contact, we have a corpus of materials from the
1550s, including not only explicit commentary on events but also the
data preserved in litigation and church records:
What we find ... is a picture dominated in so many aspects by
patently untouched pre-conquest patterns that it does not take much
imagination to reconstruct a great deal of the situation during the
missing years. It would be a most unlikely scenario for a people to
have spent twenty-five undocumented years in wide-mouthed amazement
inspired by some incredible intruders, and then, the moment we can
see them in the documents, to have relapsed into going about their
business, seeking the advantage of their local entities,
interpreting everything about the newcomers as some familiar aspect
of their own culture.^22 <#FOOT22>
It is in this context that we must approach the later understanding that
the Aztecs were convinced that their own omens had for years been
predicting the coming of the cataclysm, and that Cortés was recognized
as Quetzalcoatl and the Europeans as gods. The most important source for
all of these legends is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex. Lockhart
notes that it reads very much as if it were two separate documents: the
first part, covering the period from the sighting of the European sails
to the Spaniards' violent attack on warrior-dancers participating in a
religious festival, reads like an apocryphal fable (complete with comets
as portents), while the second part, covering the period from the Aztec
warriors' uprising against the Spaniards after the festival to their
ultimate defeat over a year later, reads like a military archivist's
record of events.^23 <#FOOT23> Indeed, this phenomenon makes sense: the
old men being interviewed in the 1550s would likely have participated as
young warriors in the battles against the Spanish, or at least have been
well aware of what was transpiring. On the other hand, they would most
certainly /not/ have been privy to the debates within Moctezuma's inner
circle when the Spaniards' arrival first became known: the king's
closest advisers were killed in the conquest, and at any rate would have
been older men even in 1520.
Still, the fact that the informants for the Florentine were not
acquainted with the inner workings of Moctezuma's court only proves that
they were unlikely to have the first part of the story straight;it tells
us nothing about why they chose to say what they did. It seems likely
that they retroactively sought to find particular auguries associated
with the conquest. The Florentine's omens do not appear to have been
commonly accepted, as they do not appear in other Nahuatl sources.^24
<#FOOT24> Interestingly, Fernández-Armesto notes that the listed omens
fall almost exactly in line with certain Greek and Latin texts that are
known to have been available to Sahagún's students.^25 <#FOOT25>
Why would Sahagún's assistants have been so eager to come up with a
compelling narrative about omens? We must bear in mind that they were
the sons and grandsons of Tenochtitlan's most elite citizens?descendants
of priests and nobles. It was their own class, even their own family
members, who might have been thought to be at fault if it were true that
they had had no idea that the Spaniards existed prior to their arrival.
Durán later recorded some of the accusations against seers as they had
been reported to him:
Motecuhzoma, furious, cried, "It is your position, then, to be
deceivers, tricksters, to pretend to be men of science and forecast
that which will take place in the future, deceiving everyone by
saying that you know what will happen in the world, that you see
what is within the hills, in the center of the earth, underneath the
waters, in the caves and in the earth's clefts, in the springs and
water holes. You call yourselves 'children of the night' but
everything is a lie, it is all pretense."^26 <#FOOT26>
Here Moctezuma himself is the speaker; whether any particular individual
ever gave vent to such rage at the time is unknowable. What is clear is
that the person speaking years later still felt deceived. It begins to
seem not merely unsurprising, but indeed necessary, that Sahagún's elite
youths should insist that their forebears /had/ read the signs and had
known what was to happen. In their version, the Truth was paralyzing and
left their forebears vulnerable, perhaps even more so than they might
have been.^27 <#FOOT27>
The idea that Cortés was understood to be the god Quetzalcoatl returning
from the east is also presented as fact in Book Twelve. Moctezuma sends
gifts for different gods, to see which are most welcome to the
newcomers, and then decides it is Quetzalcoatl who has come. There are
numerous obvious problems with the story. First, Quetzalcoatl was not a
particularly prominent god in the pantheon worshiped in Mexico's great
city. The one city in the empire where Quetzalcoatl was prominent,
Cholula, was the only one to mount a concerted attack against Cortés as
he made his way to the Aztec capital. Many aspects of the usual
post-conquest description of Quetzalcoatl?that he was a peace-loving god
who abhorred human sacrifice, for example?are obviously European
mythological constructs, thus rendering the whole story somewhat
suspect. Furthermore, in the Codex itself, when the earlier explorer
Juan de Grijalva lands on the coast in 1518, /he/ is taken to be
Quetzalcoatl. So much for the explanation that Cortés happened to land
in the right year, causing all the pieces to fall into place in the
indigenous imagination.
Susan Gillespie has made a careful study of every sixteenth-century text
(pre-and post-conquest) where Quetzalcoatl appears, and has proven that
the story as we know it did not exist until Sahagún edited the
Florentine Codex in the 1560s. Quetzalcoatl certainly was a deity in the
Nahua tradition. If we take as our only sources the pre-conquest
codices, archaeological remains of temples, and recitations of
pre-conquest religious ceremonies recorded elsewhere, we are left with
certain definite elements. Quetzalcoatl was, as his name indicates, a
feathered serpent, a flying reptile (much like a dragon), who was a
boundary maker (and transgressor) between earth and sky. Like most gods,
he could take various forms and was envisioned differently in various
villages and epochs: he could be the wind, for example. His name became
a priestly title, an honorific for those liminal humans whose role it
was to connect those on earth to those beyond. In myth, he was
associated with the city of the Toltecs, an ancient state-building
people who had preceded the Aztecs in the Central Valley of Mexico. As
the invading Mexica often claimed legitimacy by insisting that they were
the heirs of the Toltecs, the symbol of Quetzalcoatl often appeared as
an iconographic legitimator of a kingly line. In the Aztec ritual
calendar, different deities were associated with each cyclically
repeating date: Quetzalcoatl was tied to the year Ce Acatl (One Reed),
which is correlated to the year 1519 (among others) in the Western
calendar.^28 <#FOOT28>
There is no evidence of any ancient myths recounting the departure or
return of such a god, but, in the early years after conquest, discrete
elements of the story that has become so familiar to us do appear
separately in various documents, with the main character being mortal
rather than divine. The wandering hero is called Huemac or Topiltzin
("Our Lord" as in "Our Nobleman"); he is not given the name
"Quetzalcoatl" until the 1540s, and then not in Nahuatl language texts.
He is sometimes said to have ruled Tollan; the city is sometimes said to
have fallen in connection with his exile; the prophecy of his return is
occasionally made.^29 <#FOOT29> Motolinía rendered the story relevant to
Cortés: Quetzalcoatl (in his version, a mortal apotheosized into a god,
in good European tradition) was sent away to build up other lands, but
people in Mexico awaited his return, and when they saw the sails of
Cortés they said, "Their god was coming, and because of the white sails,
they said he was bringing by sea his own temples." Then, remembering
that all the Spaniards were supposed to have been gods, Motolinía
quickly added, "When they disembarked, they said that it was not their
god, but rather many gods."^30 <#FOOT30>
The elements did not all appear in the same narration until Sahagún's
Codex drew them together in the 1560s?although references to the more
traditional god Quetzalcoatl and a separate mortal hero named Huemac are
also peppered throughout the Codex. By that time, Spanish priests had
been interacting with the locals for years, and new European elements
had been incorporated almost seamlessly: as they were wont to do
elsewhere, the priests had theorized that a Christian saint had
previously visited the New World, and such a man makes his appearance in
these stories as the hero Quetzalcoatl, now a peace-loving man who is
driven into exile because of the people's belief in the devil (the god
Huitzilopochtli), and who foretells his own return.^31 <#FOOT31> In
about 1570, the author of the "Anales de Cuauhtitlan" became the first
Nahua to put all these elements together. To the generation of the
1570s, it seemed logical that their forebears had believed thus, for it
provided a needed explanation why they had made such an ineffective
defense.^32 <#FOOT32>
Even if it is untrue that anyone in 1519 thought Cortés was
Quetzalcoatl, there remains the question of whether or not Cortés and
his men were in general perceived to be gods. Cortés did not claim that
he was accorded godly status. It is, however, apparently true that the
Nahuas frequently referred to the Spanish as /teotl/ or /teutl/ (plural
/teteo/' or /teteu/'), which the Spanish rendered in their own texts as
/teul/ (plural /teules/); they translated this word as "god." Sahagún's
students in the 1550s clearly believed their parents had used /teotl/ as
a form of address in their dealings with the Spanish, and this was a
matter less open to reinterpretation than some others.^33 <#FOOT33>
Several conquistadors insisted on it. Perhaps the best question is not
whether the Indians used the word /teotl/ in their groping efforts to
categorize the Spaniards before they had any political relation to them
but rather why they did so, what it meant to them.
To turn an obvious point into a less obvious one, the indigenous had to
call the Spaniards something, and it was not at all clear what that
something should be. It is noteworthy that in Durán's history the issue
first surfaces in the initial communication efforts of the Indian
translator Malinche. "She responded, 'The leader of these men says he
has come to greet your master Motecuhzoma, that his only intention is to
go to the city of Mexico.'" But in the next interchange: "The Indian
woman answered in the following way:'These gods say that they kiss your
hands and that they will eat.'"^34 <#FOOT34> In the Nahua universe as it
had existed up until this point, a person was always labeled as being
from a particular village or city-state, or, more specifically, as one
who filled a given social role (a tribute collector, prince, servant).
These new people fit nowhere; undoubtedly, they had a village or
city-state somewhere, but it was not in the known world, and their
relationship to it was not clear. Later, they were called" Caxtilteca"
(people of Castile), but that came after closer acquaintance. There was
no word for "Indian," of course, and the indigenous struggled in certain
situations. How to describe the woman translator, for example, who came
with the newcomers but was not one of them? She became "a woman, one of
us people here."^35 <#FOOT35> If there were no "Indians,"there were no
"Spanish" in opposition to them. So what to call the new arrivals? One
of them might be a /tecuhtli/, a dynastic lord ruling over his own
people, but he was not so in relation to "us people here." The Nahuatl
word for king was /tlatoani/, meaning "he who speaks." Tellingly, in
Nahuatl texts where the Spaniards have previously been referred to as
/teotl/, first Cortés and then the viceroy become /tlatoani/ after the
Europeans vanquish the Indians and are in a position of authority over
them.^36 <#FOOT36>
In the Florentine Codex, the moment of political surrender is described
by the warriors: "There goes the lord Cuauhtemoc going to give himself
to the gods" (/teteu/'). Yet, in the preceding pages, the enemy has been
described as execrable rather than divine: in fact, when the Spaniards
are temporarily expelled, the warriors perform ceremonies "in gratitude
to their gods (/teotl/) for having freed them from their enemies."
Tellingly, in the negotiations /after/ the surrender, when the Spaniards
are demanding full restitution of all the gold and jewels they were ever
given, they are termed "our lords" as in "our earthly overlords"
(/totecuiovan/, from /tecuhtli/), but in a moment of rage, a leading
priest whose tone indicates he does not yet feel he owes allegiance
cries out, "Let the god (/teotl/), the Captain [Cortés] pay heed!" He
then refuses to pay, until the defeated Cuauhtemoc calms him and uses
the word /tecuhtli/ again.^37 <#FOOT37>
Sixteenth-century dictionaries say that /teotl/ meant simply /dios/, but
they, we must remember, were written years later, after semantic shifts
had occurred in the process of Indians and priests working together.^38
<#FOOT38> Bernal Díaz first says that /teotl/ meant "god" (/dios/) or
"demon" (/demonio/). We might assume he meant "demon"only in the sense
that the Christians called the entire Nahua pantheon"devils," but an
anecdote that he relates indicates otherwise. The Spaniards seem to have
been given to understand?quite accurately?that the word could mean
"devil" in the sense of a capricious immortal over whom mortals had no
control, or a ceremonial human impersonator of such a character. After
the Spanish had gleaned the word's meaning, they thought to reinforce
the notion as follows
[Cortés said], "I think we'll send Heredia against them." Heredia
was an old Basque musketeer with a very ugly face covered with
scars, a huge beard, and one blind eye. He was also lame in one leg
... So old Heredia shouldered his musket and went off with [the
Indians] firing shots in the air as he went through the forest, so
that the Indians should both hear and see him. And the /caciques/
sent the news to the other towns that they were bringing along a
/Teule/ to kill the Mexicans [Aztecs] who were at Cingapacinga. I
tell this story here merely as a joke and to show Cortés' guile.^39
<#FOOT39>
This story is barely comprehensible unless one accepts that the Spanish
had been told the word /teotl/ encompassed notions of"powerful one" and
"deity impersonator." For the impression one is left with here is not
that the locals thought the Spaniards were glorious and divine beings
but rather that they envisioned them as bizarre sorcerers who owed
allegiance to no one and whose powers could potentially be turned
against the Aztec overlords and tax collectors. It is even conceivable
that the indigenous were referring to "deity impersonators" as potential
sacrifice victims for the Aztecs; certainly, /teotl/ is used in that
sense in descriptions of religious ceremonies elsewhere in the Florentine.
That the word had some ambiguity embedded within it is made clear in
several texts. Durán's history?written in Spanish by a Spaniard who
spoke Nahuatl and had Nahuatl sources?provides revealing examples. While
the Spaniards are wending their way toward the city of Mexico, Moctezuma
decides to send out medicine men to combat them. If the newcomers were
really understood to be "gods" according to the term's definition in
Spanish, then such an action makes no sense?since sorcerers fought human
enemies, not gods. Durán's narrator deals with this inconsistency by
having a close adviser to the king mention tactfully that such a step
will probably be useless. Not long after, Moctezuma prepares to "receive
the gods" in his city but then makes the following speech within the
same paragraph: "Woe to us! ... In what way have we offended the gods?
What has happened? Who are these men who have arrived? Whence have they
come?"^40 <#FOOT40> Given the varied implications of the term /teotl/,
it is not surprising that the Spaniards chose to understand it simply as
"god" and to forget about the Heredia incident. Bernal Díaz himself,
after his initial avowal, never mentions the second definition again. In
other cases, it is clear that the Spanish chose translations of
ambiguous passages most in keeping with the notion that they were
perceived as divine.^41 <#FOOT41>
Motolinía was the only Spaniard present in the early 1520s who
explicitly addressed this issue. He asserted that, in the first villages
the Spaniards entered, the locals thought that the horse-and-man figures
were single beings, like classical centaurs, one imagines. Within days,
they learned of their error, saw that "the man was a man and the horse a
beast," and so had to seek new words. They used /mazatl/ (deer) to refer
to the horses, and they used the Spanish corruption of their own initial
label (/teotl/), or /teul/, to refer to the people, as the Spanish were
now introducing themselves as such. They knew no other word for the
newcomers until after the victory, when they were instructed to call
them /cristianos/. Some Spaniards complained about that shift, Motolinía
says scornfully, preferring to be called /Teules/.^42 <#FOOT42>
In the debates about what really happened at the time of conquest, two
facts stand out. Acknowledging them both simultaneously is perhaps
counterintuitive, as they appear to be in opposition to each other; they
are not. First, it was much more difficult than is commonly imagined for
the Spanish to vanquish the Aztecs; the Europeans were in desperate
straits on more than one occasion. Second, it was inevitable that Cortés
and his men?or some other soon-to-follow expedition?would conquer the
Aztecs. They had the technological advantage. The outcome was no
coincidence. The Spanish conquest of the Mexicans against large
numerical odds was replicated in innumerable other confrontations in the
Americas?between Francisco Pizarro and the Incas, Hernando de Soto and
the Alabama Indians, the English settlers and the Algonkians, etc.?and
much later between Europeans and Africans. Yet the victory was never
facile, for those less well equipped in a technological sense still did
all they could to defend their own interests.
Cortés rapidly learned from his translators what he needed to know?that
the Aztec army was the most powerful in the land, that the king offered
city-states the alternative of joining the empire peacefully and paying
an annual tribute or of fighting and facing brutal defeat, that the
Spaniards' most effective strategy would be to turn people against the
hated overlords. In July 1519, he scuttled his ships so his men would
not be tempted to turn back, and struck inland to seek the Aztec capital
of Tenochtitlan. First, however, he sent one ship to Spain with the news
of his coastal explorations, the information he had received thus far
about the Mexican empire, and his hopes of claiming that state on behalf
of Carlos V. He did this partly because he was a traitor in a legal
sense, having launched his expedition from Cuba without the governor's
permission, and so needed to make a case in his own defense. Equally
important, he knew he would need reinforcements and supplies. In order
not to lose contact with the wider world, he left a number of men in the
newly founded town of Vera Cruz who would be there to meet
reinforcements (or enemies) when they arrived. That the Veracruzanos not
starve or be killed, Cortés took several coastal Indian chiefs
hostage.^43 <#FOOT43>
The story has been told many times of how Cortés and his men made their
way to Tenochtitlan?fighting when necessary, turning the Indians against
each other through clever ruses, detecting plots and putting them down,
and finally coming face-to-face with the great Moctezuma on the causeway
leading to the island city. There, according to Cortés, Moctezuma
welcomed him, and shortly after agreed to become a vassal of the Spanish
king. One week later, following an ancient European tactic of war,
Cortés claimed to have seized Moctezuma's person and placed him under
house arrest, so that he could rule through him, and Moctezuma agreed to
remain in custody even when Cortés later offered to release him upon a
promise of good behavior. Cortés ruled the empire successfully for over
five months and then learned that an army from the Caribbean under
Captain Narváez had landed at Vera Cruz in pursuit of him. Leaving a
contingent in the city, Cortés made for the coast, and there he brought
the hundreds of newcomers over to his side. Yet the temporary division
in the Spanish ranks had become visible to the indigenous, and they
rebelled, ejecting the Spaniards from their city in the famed Noche Triste.
Even though posterity has tended to accept it, the story is in fact more
than a little difficult to believe. The idea that the Aztecs peacefully
surrendered their kingdom fits well with the notion that the Mexica
responded to the Europeans as gods. If we do not proceed on that
assumption, however, the story flies in the face of common sense. The
Spanish numbered only about five hundred, the city folk a quarter of a
million. The Spanish had only one translator to tell them what was
occurring; Moctezuma's people could watch every move that every Spaniard
made. Simply to eat every day, the Spaniards were desperately dependent
on those they dreamed of ruling. How vulnerable they were in this regard
becomes painfully clear in the Codex Aubin, in which a resident of
Tenochtitlan recalled that, when the people later stopped feeding the
invaders, the horses began to eat the straw mats that lined the floors.
Although it is certainly true that the Spanish maintained a "seize the
king" policy both before and after Tenochtitlan, early in their dealings
with the impressive Aztecs, the newly arrived Spanish were unlikely to
have been arrogantly sure of their course. They certainly did not have
the power to arrest the emperor without bringing on a state of chaos, as
events proved.^44 <#FOOT44>
John Elliott and others have explained the content of Cortés's letter to
the king, which subsequently formed the basis for the story as we have
come to know it.^45 <#FOOT45> Besides justifying the actions he had
taken without receiving royal permission, Cortés was using language to
leap another legalistic hurdle: Carlos V could only annex territories
that came to him voluntarily or through a just war. It was thus very
important that Moctezuma swear fealty to the Spanish monarch early in
the letter, /before/ his people rebelled, when they technically became
traitors. Placing Moctezuma under arrest without his protesting the
Spaniards' right to do so was a crucial symbolic step.
Francis Brooks has argued that there is strong evidence against Cortés
having immediately arrested Moctezuma. First, although he was supposedly
in full control of the kingdom from November to May, Cortés made no
effort to inform anyone else in the world of his successes, even though
he had men perfectly capable of building ships, as they later proved.
Second, Cortés's own story contradicts itself often, describing
Moctezuma as a prisoner one moment and in control the next.^46 <#FOOT46>
Cortés himself describes what he was doing during those
months?continuing to become acquainted with Moctezuma and the city,
consulting the mapmakers, sending representatives to visit surrounding
towns, collecting gifts of gold, and waiting for his ship to return with
an answer from Spain.^47 <#FOOT47> It is perfectly possible to believe
that he was doing all these things as an honored visitor but not as the
leader of a handful of coup-staging interlopers.
It is, however, equally certain that Moctezuma was put in irons before
the end of the drama. There is real evidence that it occurred in April
of 1520, coinciding with the sudden appearance of his rival Captain
Narváez. At that point, Cortés had nothing left to lose. On the one
hand, a Spanish army larger than his own had arrived on the coast with
the intention of arresting him; on the other hand, the Aztecs were aware
of this turn of events and planned to use it to their advantage. Only
with a gun to Moctezuma's head could Cortés assure the newly arrived
Spaniards that he was in control of the kingdom and gain their
allegiance, as well as stave off an indigenous uprising. Numerous sworn
witnesses in later court cases claimed that Spanish soldiers guarded
Moctezuma around the clock in this period. Durán mentions eighty days of
confinement, which would indeed place the arrest in April.^48 <#FOOT48>
Cortés claimed that Moctezuma begged to be of service to the Spanish
king in defending the land against these evil new arrivals, but that
scenario is so preposterous as to be laughable, except when considered
in the legalistic light discussed above. Indeed, no other Spaniard
writing about these events described them thus: the others universally
described Moctezuma's obvious hostility (or duplicity).^49 <#FOOT49> One
is left thinking that Cortés did protest too much; it is quite likely
that, rather than swearing eternal friendship, he chose this moment to
have Moctezuma clapped in irons. Yet precisely because his situation was
so precarious, it was particularly important that he portray his control
of the region as long-term. ^50 <#FOOT50>
The accounts of the other conquistadors are replete with inconsistencies
concerning their purported power. "While I stayed ... I did not see a
living creature killed or sacrificed," wrote Cortés. "The great
Moctezuma continued to show his accustomed good will towards us, but
never ceased his daily sacrifices of human beings. Cortés tried to
dissuade him but met with no success,"wrote Bernal Díaz.^51 <#FOOT51> In
the midst of describing Moctezuma's palaces, Francisco de Aguilar seemed
almost visibly to recall that he was supposed to be describing a
prisoner: "They brought him ... fish of all kinds, besides ... fruits
from the seacoast ... The plates and cups of his dinner service were
very clean. He was not served on gold or silver because he was in
captivity, but it is likely that he had a great table service of gold
and silver."^52 <#FOOT52> Aguilar went on to say (as per Cortés) that
the arrest had taken place because the Spanish had learned that
Moctezuma had plotted against them and had ordered one of the men left
in Vera Cruz to be killed. Aguilar and Andrés de Tapia and a third man
had been sent to the coast to ascertain the truth of the matter. But de
Tapia's own account says Indians were sent on that errand.^53 <#FOOT53>
His description of the five-month period of supposed Spanish control
seems odd: "In this manner we stayed on, the marques keeping us so close
to our quarters that no one stepped a musket-shot away without
permission."^54 <#FOOT54>
The friars who wrote about the events also undermined the notion of an
immediate arrest,^55 <#FOOT55> and, although later indigenous sources
accept it, the earliest known indigenous record does not. The Annals of
Tlatelolco was probably written in the mid-1540s, possibly based on a
story that had been memorized in the late 1520s. Here, Moctezuma is
detained sometime after Cortés finds he must leave for the seashore and
before the Spanish initiate a massacre at a religious festival, leading
directly to their own expulsion. Until that point, the city's only
relationship with the newcomers had been to provide them with food,
water, and firewood, as they would have done for any honored guests.^56
<#FOOT56>
Just as we must refrain from imagining that the Spanish arrived with the
power to arrest Moctezuma immediately, we must also avoid the equally
wrong-headed assumption that they were able to defeat the Aztecs
militarily with a few well-aimed shots. When Cortés struck inland from
Vera Cruz, he had only fifteen horses with him. Later, when the Aztecs
rebelled and ejected the Spanish from the city, between four and six
hundred men were killed as they fled along the causeways leading out of
the city, along with at least a thousand Tlaxcalan allies. Narrow
passages rendered the Europeans vulnerable to attack: on at least two
different occasions, over forty Spaniards were ambushed and killed while
traveling through gorges.
Yet, in the end, it was no accident that the Europeans won. I have
recounted the difficulties the Spanish faced, the impossibility of their
having taken over immediately, in order to be more credible in saying
that Europeans were bound to destroy the Mexicans eventually. Although
it can be argued that diseases weakened both the Mexica and the
Spaniards' Indian allies, and thus were not determinant, there remained
a huge divide between the military capabilities of the two sides.
Outside the city, on open ground, the Spanish were nearly invincible.
After regrouping in the wake of their expulsion from the city, Cortés
launched a campaign against Tenochtitlan. Several weeks and numerous
battles later, one Spaniard died of his wounds, and Cortés mourned "the
first of my company to be killed ... on this campaign."^57 <#FOOT57>
What nearby village chief could say the same? The Spanish had learned
how to use what they had to enable groups of two hundred men to
withstand masses of enemies. Both their harquebus and crossbow firings
were able to slice through the Indians' cotton armor, and, because of
their weapons' range, they could attack lethally when the Indians were
still distant; furthermore, mounted Europeans carrying long metal lances
could forge a path through the throngs. The Indians could fire their
arrows at six times the rate of a Spanish blunderbuss, but to no avail,
because metal armor rendered the Europeans nearly impervious.^58 <#FOOT58>
The horses were of utmost importance. Three horses could turn a dire
situation into a rout. They could even solve the problem of food
supplies: clusters of armed horsemen could take a village or market by
surprise and return with what the Spanish needed. The Europeans' own
engineering experience was also crucial. As soon as they arrived in
Tenochtitlan, Cortés put his master shipbuilder to work on four
brigantines in case they should be needed to escape across the lake.
They later came in handy in the final battles in the canals of the city:
"The key to the war lay with them ... As the wind was good, we bore down
through the middle of them, and although they fled as fast as they were
able, we sank a huge number of canoes and killed or drowned many of the
enemy, which was the most remarkable sight in the world."^59 <#FOOT59>
It is true as many have maintained that the Spanish would have been
crushed by greater numbers in the long run or starved to death had they
not worked with Indian allies ("special forces" style). A few hundred
Spaniards became an unbeatable force only when combined with thousands
of indigenous pouring in behind them. Cortés himself and several other
chroniclers willingly attest to this. "When the inhabitants of the city
saw ... the great multitude of our allies?although without us, they
would have had no fear of them?they fled, and our allies pursued
them."^60 <#FOOT60> What we must understand, though, is that the
technological advantage was what, in the last analysis, made it possible
for the Spanish to retain their indigenous allies. The indigenous
learned quickly that they did not have the requisite technology: they
saw that their civilian populations could not survive the onslaughts of
the Spaniards even in the short term, and they recognized the undeniable
long-range importance of the Europeans' maritime connections to distant
lands.
Much ink has been spilt over the question of why the Tlaxcalans, for
example, traditional enemies of the Mexica, briefly battled the
Spaniards, then sided with them as their unwavering and most significant
allies. The Tlaxcalans had little love for the Mexica and could not
afford the luxury of acquiring another powerful enemy in the persons of
the Spanish. Cortés, however, tells us what the clincher was. "I burnt
more than ten villages, in one of which there were more than three
thousand houses, where the inhabitants fought with us, although there
was no one [no warriors] there to help them." He kept 'round the clock
guard of their camp with their long-range weapons to make sure the
Tlaxcalans did not retaliate in kind, "which would have been so
disastrous." When they sued for peace, Cortés explained, "They would
rather be Your Highness's vassals than see their houses destroyed and
their women and children killed."^61 <#FOOT61> Likewise, when Cortés and
the other survivors of the Noche Triste made it back to Tlaxcala, they
made it their business within days to attack villages that were not
friendly to them. Most sued for peace. "They see how those who do so are
well received and favored by me," wrote Cortés, "whereas those who do
not are destroyed daily."^62 <#FOOT62> Meanwhile, Moctezuma offered one
year's tax relief to those who refrained from going over to the Spanish,
but that was a distant carrot compared to the immediate threat
constituted by mounted lancers riding through town. When a set of
villages received emissaries from Tenochtitlan, the Spanish torched the
towns. "On the following day three chieftains from those towns came
begging my forgiveness for what had happened and asking me to destroy
nothing more, for they promised that they would never again receive
anyone from Tenochtitlan."^63 <#FOOT63>
More important than any weapons or horses the Spanish had with them,
however, were Spanish ships, which had the potential to bring endless
reinforcements. One of Cortés's first acts after fleeing from
Tenochtitlan had been to send two expeditions loaded with treasure,
which they were to use to purchase horses and weapons. Before they could
return, in mid-1520, seven ships loaded with men and supplies appeared
off the coast, for word had spread since Cortés had dispatched his
initial messages in 1519.^64 <#FOOT64> Three more fully stocked vessels
would arrive in early 1521. Even though we have since tended to overlook
it, Europeans of the time understood how crucial this factor was. When
Aguilar narrated his memory of the post?Noche Triste period, he said
first that other ship shad arrived and then that the Indian towns had
chosen to "offer themselves peaceably."^65 <#FOOT65> Cortés recalled,
"One of my lads, who knew that nothing in the world would give me such
pleasure as to learn of the arrival of this [new] ship and the aid it
brought, set out by night [to bring me word], although the road was
dangerous."^66 <#FOOT66> Indeed, Cortés was so well aware of the
importance of his connection to the rest of the world that he made it
his first order of business to build and staff forts along the road from
Tenochtitlan to the sea, before proceeding with a campaign against
Tenochtitlan.
At last he was ready: "When, on the twenty-eight of April ... I called
all my men out on parade and reckoned eighty-six horsemen, 118
crossbowmen and harque-busiers, some 700 foot soldiers with swords and
bucklers, three large iron guns, fifteen small bronze field guns and ten
hundredweight of powder,... [t]hey knew well ... that God had helped us
more than we had hoped, and ships had come with horses, men and
arms."^67 <#FOOT67> After only a few days of battle, it was clear to
many of the towns surrounding Tenochtitlan how well supplied the Spanish
now were. "The natives of Xochimilco ... and certain of the Otomí,...
came to offer themselves as Your Majesty's vassals, begging me to
forgive them for having delayed so long." After a major defeat suffered
by the Spanish, in which forty were captured and sacrificed, many of the
Spaniards' allies withdrew again. It is commonly accepted that they
returned only when the Nahua priests' predictions of a great victory to
occur within the ensuing eight days did not come true. Cortés, though,
outlines events as follows: first messengers arrived from Vera Cruz
telling of the arrival of yet another ship and bringing powder and
crossbows to prove it, and then, in the next sentence, "all the lands
round about" demonstrated their good sense and came over to the
Spaniards' side.^68 <#FOOT68> Perhaps, after all, the Indians' decisions
were less spiritually than practically motivated.
We must now expand our list of relevant technological implements to
include printing presses. The comparatively quick and widespread
communication channels available to the Spanish gave them a geopolitical
perspective throughout the events that the Aztecs, for all their
intelligence, even brilliance, simply lacked. At the end of sixteenth
century, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China, would make a
comment about books that the Aztecs would have appreciated, although
they themselves envisioned texts in other ways: "The whole point of
writing things down ... is that your voice carries for thousands of
miles."^69 <#FOOT69> Matteo Ricci read the Spanish, Portuguese, and
Italian explorers, who themselves read Ibn Battutah and Marco Polo. As
Todorov put it, "Did not Columbus himself set sail because he had read
Marco Polo's narrative?"^70 <#FOOT70> In 1504, Amerigo Vespucci
published his suggestion that what Columbus had found was not the tip of
the Orient but a New World, and, by 1511, Peter Martyr's Latin
compendium of reported observations on the New World was available to
educated Europeans everywhere?within five years, it would even make its
way into the best-read fiction of the day.^71 <#FOOT71> In 1509, the
Spanish crown promulgated a law that no royal official was to do
anything to impede the sending of any information about the Indies back
to Spain.^72 <#FOOT72>
Albrecht Dürer is known for having spoken with awe of Aztec art that had
been shipped back by Cortés and that he saw in an exhibit in the town
hall in Brussels: "All the days of my life I have seen nothing that
rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I have seen among them
wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle intellects of men
in foreign parts."^73 <#FOOT73> What is less well known is that Dürer
saw these objects in July of 1520. Over a year before the conquest was
complete, the Europeans were already putting on exhibits of their
findings and spreading the word throughout their continent. Yet, on the
other side of the sea, the Aztecs did not even know what to call the
newcomers in their midst. The inequality of their positions is stunning,
the subtle intellect of the Aztec artists notwithstanding.
What, then, were the indigenous thinking? Available evidence indicates
that the Aztecs responded to their situation with clear-sighted analysis
of the technological differential, rather than by prostrating themselves
before the "white gods."^74 <#FOOT74> As difficult as it is, let us
first consider what we know of Moctezuma's thoughts. The version of the
king's response that later became popular was the vision of Moctezuma
sighing and lapsing into paralyzing depression, but the evidence that we
have about the steps taken by Moctezuma indicates that he actually
behaved like the experienced twenty-year sovereign he was. All sources
agree that, after the first sighting of a Spanish ship in 1517, he had
the sea watched from various vantage points. When Cortés and his men
landed near today's Vera Cruz and began conversing with the locals,
Moctezuma sent court painters to record the numbers of men,"deer," and
boats.^75 <#FOOT75> Even though the Spaniards saw these paintings as
quaint, we must keep in mind that Moctezuma moved within a world in
which accurate counts concerning distant territories were kept as
pictoglyphic records as a matter of course.^76 <#FOOT76> As the Spanish
began their ascent toward Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma organized a veritable
war room. "A report of everything that was happening was given and
relayed to Moctezuma. Some of the messengers would be arriving as others
were leaving ... There was no time when they weren't listening, when
reports weren't being given."^77 <#FOOT77> Cortés also reported that
Moctezuma's messengers were present in every town they visited, watching
every step they took. Bernal Díaz said by the time the Spaniards got to
the capital, the sermon they had given frequently along the way had been
repeated so often to Moctezuma that he asked them not to give it again,
as the arguments were by now familiar to him.^78 <#FOOT78> Despite his
intelligence and his organizational apparatus, however, Moctezuma still
had the problem that his frame of reference was not as wide as that of
the Spaniards: Durán's informant said that he called for priests and
sages from different parts of the kingdom to consult their libraries and
traditions and tell him who these strangers were, but they could find
nothing. Only one man said anything useful, describing the power of the
Spaniards and mentioning that the first explorers were merely there to
scout a route, that others would return.^79 <#FOOT79>
The words of Moctezuma's that we have come from Cortés, who claimed to
quote a long speech of greeting in which Moctezuma turned over his
kingdom to the Spaniard.^80 <#FOOT80> The elaborate statement may well
have been loosely based on something that Moctezuma actually said?minus
the immediate surrender of his entire kingdom?as it employs the classic
courtly Nahuatl style, makes no reference to Cortés being Quetzalcoatl
or any other god, and mentions facts that would otherwise have been
unknown to the Spanish at this early date?that the Aztecs themselves
were migrants to the region and had a long history of banished
kings?which Moctezuma found sufficient to explain the arrival of the
newcomers. Later, Cortés actually has Moctezuma insist to his Spanish
audience that he himself is /not/ a god, and does not possess untold
wealth: "I know that [my enemies] have told you the walls of my houses
are made of gold, and that the floor mats in my rooms ... are likewise
of gold, and that I was, and claimed to be, a god; ... The houses as you
see are of stone and lime and clay ... Then he raised his clothes and
showed me his body, saying, 'See that I am of flesh and blood like you
and all other men.'" This may have been invented by Cortés.^81 <#FOOT81>
But a Nahuatl speaker would have been very likely to use "floor mats"
and "flesh and blood"as important metaphors; their poets did so
frequently. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to think of a convincing
political reason for Cortés to throw in this particular paragraph. On
the other hand, Moctezuma had every reason to make the statement?to
minimize the extent of his wealth and in order to work his way around in
courtly and indirect speech in true Nahuatl style to his impolite punch
line: he wanted it known that he did not believe the Spaniards to be
gods. One is even more inclined to read the statement this way in that
it is apparently how the Spanish read it then, judging from the style in
which both López de Gómara and Bernal Díaz recounted the incident.
Bernal Díaz embellished: "You must take the [stories] as a joke, as I
take the story of your thunders and lightnings."^82 <#FOOT82>
If we cannot be certain of what Moctezuma said, we can at least analyze
his actions as a text of sorts: indeed, his decision to allow the
Spaniards and many hundreds of their Tlaxcalan allies to enter his city
has been analyzed for many years as if it were a declaration of
sentiment. In lieu of the traditional interpretation that he was a
coward or a fool, scholars have proffered various motivations?caution, a
desire for secrecy, a need to wait for the dry season.^83 <#FOOT83>
There is a central explanation for Moctezuma's decision, however.
Besides attempting to turn the potential conquerors back by offering
them annual tribute, the emperor apparently did try to have the Spanish
killed at least twice while they were still distant; somebody certainly
gave the order to attack them. Yet, when the Spaniards were nearing the
city, "Moctezuma did not give orders for anyone to meet them in
battle."^84 <#FOOT84> He could not: he knew now that the Spaniards won
battles in the open field. Even if he had had time to arm every warrior
in his kingdom and then surround and destroy the Spanish with the sheer
force of numbers, he would have been politically destroyed. The
casualties would have been immense, beyond anything ever seen, and the
people of the Central Valley accepted the arrogance of their Mexica
neighbors in exchange for peace and the privilege of living close to
power. If the Aztecs could not deliver a quick victory on the outskirts
of their own capital, they were doomed; so if his army could not win
quickly and easily here?and Moctezuma knew they could not?then they
could not fight. At the time, Cortés and his followers did not
understand the political situation well enough to grasp this fact;
centuries later, posterity tends to lose sight of the realities of that
world. Not so those who wrote a few decades later. Said López de Gómara:
"It seemed unfitting and dishonorable for him to make war upon Cortés
and fight a mere handful of strangers who said they were ambassadors.
Another reason was that he did not wish to stir up trouble for himself
(and this was the truest reason), for it was clear that he would
immediately have to face an uprising among the Otomí, the Tlaxcalans,
and many others." Said Bernal Díaz: "Moctezuma's captains and /papas/
also advised him that if he tried to prevent our entry /we would fight
him in his subject towns/."^85 <#FOOT85>
It is reasonable to assume that, while Cortés and his men were in the
city gathering information about the kingdom, Moctezuma was also
attempting to gather information about them. It may have been his hope
that they would eventually leave of their own accord. Almost all
accounts except the letter by Cortés indicate that it was Moctezuma's
messengers who first told of the arrival of Captain Narváez: it was the
Mexican king who told the Spanish the news, not the other way around.
Whether Moctezuma was initially behind it or not, his people did raise a
rebellion against the Spanish as soon as Cortés returned from the coast.
Moctezuma himself became known for the speeches he made from the
rooftops in which he asked the warriors to lay down their arms. "Let the
Mexica hear: we are not their match, may they be dissuaded [from further
fighting]."^86 <#FOOT86> By then, he was in irons, and so has been seen
as a coward doing his best to save his life. But it is possible that he,
the warrior king who had led so many successful campaigns, preached
peace in relation to the Spanish out of true conviction that his people
would be destroyed if they pursued violence. In interpreting his
actions, we would do well to remember that if so, /he was right/.
Moctezuma, with his knowledge of the capabilities of both sides, was one
of the few Mexica in a position to be able to see the /longue durée/.^87
<#FOOT87>
Inga Clendinnen has studied the reactions of the Mexica warriors to the
Spanish. She finds evidence that, despite the great respect the Aztecs
had for the horses, they held the Spanish men themselves in outright
contempt. When the Spanish returned to retake the city, there is no
evidence that the warriors operated according to sacred signs or
astrology; instead, they put immediate practicality before all else.
Contrary to popular opinion, they did not fight to take prisoners for
sacrifice rather than to kill: they did not even want the Spanish for
sacrifice, and, when they had a chance to destroy them, did so with a
blow to the back of the head, as they did with criminals. In general,
the only use the warriors made of sacrifice in this campaign was as a
tool to instill terror in the hearts of the Spanish who were close
enough to see what they were doing^88 <#FOOT88>
We have significant evidence about the military men's attitude toward
technology. The Aztecs cleverly used their own inventions against their
enemies whenever they could. When the Spanish approached the city in
what was to be the final campaign, the Indians secretly opened a dike in
an effort to trap the opposing forces on an island that was connected to
land by only one causeway.^89 <#FOOT89> More often, though, the
indigenous were in the position of needing to decode Spanish tactics and
technology as quickly as possible, rather than showing off their own.
Through keen observation, they were able to make remarkable headway.
First, there was the question of seizing some of the Spaniards' powerful
weapons and learning to use them. They quickly put captured lances to
use but recognized that the Spaniards' other weapons were more powerful:
"The crossbowman aimed the bolt well, he pointed it right at the person
he was going to shoot, and when it went off, it went whining, hissing
and humming. And the arrows missed nothing, they all hit someone, went
all the way through someone. The guns were pointed and aimed right at
people ... It came upon people unawares, giving no warning when it
killed them. However many were fired at died, when some dangerous part
was hit: the forehead, the nape of the neck, the heart, the chest, the
stomach, or the abdomen."^90 <#FOOT90> These weapons, however, were more
difficult to use: at one point, some captured crossbowmen were
apparently either forced to shoot at their countrymen or to give lessons
to Aztec soldiers; in either case, the arrows went astray. And the guns
of course would not work without powder, even if the Aztecs could have
learned to make bullets. When they captured a cannon, they recognized
they had neither the expertise nor the ammunition to make it useful to
themselves. The best they could do was make it impossible for the
Spanish ever to regain it: they wisely sank it in the lake.^91 <#FOOT91>
The second pressing concern was to thwart Spanish technology even if
they could not harness it themselves. The natives made extra long spears
and managed to take an occasional horseman by surprise, killing the
beast and pulling down the rider. Canoe men learned to zigzag so rapidly
that guns could not be trained on them, and, once, they were able to
lure two Spanish boats into shallow water and capture them.^92 <#FOOT92>
Yet what they could do in this regard was limited.
As frustrated as they were by their technological shortcomings in
comparison to the Spanish, at no point do the warriors seem to have
responded as if they were awestruck. In one case, the Spanish decided to
build a catapult to turn against the city. Cortés wanted to believe that
the Indian observers were petrified: "Even if it were to have had no
other effect, which indeed it had not, the terror it caused was so great
that we thought the enemy might surrender. But neither of our hopes was
fulfilled, for the carpenters failed to operate their machine."^93
<#FOOT93> Little did he know that, in Indian memory, the incident would
border on the humorous:
And then those Spaniards installed a catapult on top of an altar
platform with which to hurl stones at the people ... Then they wound
it up, then the arm of the catapult rose up. But the stone did not
land on the people, but fell [almost straight down] behind the
marketplace at Xomolco. Because of that the Spaniards there argued
among themselves. They looked as if they were jabbing their fingers
in one another's faces, chattering a great deal. And [meanwhile] the
catapult kept returning back and forth, going one way and then the
other.^94 <#FOOT94>
Indeed, this relatively straightforward view of Spanish accomplishments
is pervasive in Nahua accounts of the war. European technology is
mentioned frequently?not as something mystifying in the hands of gods
but as the clear and concrete explanation for indigenous military
losses. As early as the Annals of Tlatelolco, writers mentioned at the
key point in their narration that "the war leaders were dying from the
guns and iron bolts." As late as the end of the century, Ixtlilxochitl
mentions that a local king decides to heed his sister and not try to
stop Cortés: she warned of "a young man with a light in one hand that
would exceed that of the sun, and in the other an /espada/, which was
the weapon that this newly arrived nation used."^95 <#FOOT95> The
Florentine Codex, in the middle of the century, is full of the "We are
not their match" concept to which Moctezuma gives full voice before he
dies;indeed, it is the messengers' comment upon their first return from
seeing the newcomers.
Reading Book Twelve from start to finish, including the first part,
which contains the obviously revisionist account of the facts, as well
as the more faithful second section, one is left with two predominant
images?which surely speak to the most profound impressions the Indians
received and passed on to their children. Both images are direct
reflections of the technological discrepancy between the peoples
involved, of which the narrators are clearly very much aware. First,
page by page, the mounted Spaniards in their clanking armor with their
metallic weapons move ever closer to the great city. That the Spanish
had passed through the Iron Age was certainly not lost on the Mexica.
The word /tepoztli/ (metal, or iron) appears more than any other. The
initial report Moctezuma is given is presented in three sections. First
come the Spaniards' weapons. "Their war gear was all iron. They clothed
their bodies in iron, they put iron on their heads, their swords were
iron, their bows were iron, and their shields and lances were iron."
Next, the horses are described, and last the vicious dogs who accompany
their masters. Later, when the Indians attempt to fight, they lose
dramatically. "Not just a few but a huge number of them were destroyed."
After killing yet more Indians in Cholula, the Spanish set out again:
"Their iron lances and halberds seem to sparkle, and their iron swords
were curved like a stream of water. Their cuirasses and iron helmets
seemed to make a clattering sound." When they file into Tenochtitlan,
their metal weapons and armor are described in even greater detail,
filling whole pages.^96 <#FOOT96>
Secondly, throughout the narrative, although the Indians do not know who
the newcomers were, the newcomers know enough about the world to search
for Moctezuma; they will not rest until they find him. First, Cortés
uses his knowledge to flatter. "I want to see and behold [your city],
for word has gone out in Spain that you are very strong, great
warriors." The Spaniards ask many questions. "When Moctezuma heard this,
that many and persistent inquiries were being made about him, that the
gods wanted to see his face, he was greatly anguished."Later: "When they
saw [an Aztec general] they said, 'Is this one then Moctezuma?'" On the
causeway, Cortés greets the king: "Is it not you? Is it not you then?
Moctezuma?" and Moctezuma at last answers, "Yes, it is me."^97 <#FOOT97>
This element makes the indigenous feel at least as vulnerable as do the
metal weapons: the Spaniards have somehow used their knowledge to make
their way to the heart of Aztec power, but the Aztecs could not begin to
envision a similar expedition to the seat of Carlos V. They now knew
about the ships, but only a few?probably Moctezuma, for example?had seen
the compasses and printed books in the possession of the Spaniards.
Ordinary people could only begin to piece together an explanation. What
is remarkable is that they knew this is what needed to be explained.
This is a case in which the ending is only the beginning. In the first
few years after the conquest was complete, the Aztecs exhibited few
signs of believing that gods walked in their midst. Motolinía tells us
that, for the first five years, no one paid any attention to the priests
who were attempting to reach out to the people. In 1526, the Franciscans
held a marriage ceremony for a prince, but when they tried to convince
others to follow his example, the Indians said dismissively that Spanish
men themselves had more than one woman. When the fathers opened a school
and Cortés ordered the indigenous nobles to send their sons, the
families sent servants as substitutes. They had no intention of turning
their children over to such men and were confident that the newcomers
were too stupid or ill informed to know the difference.^98 <#FOOT98>
What would they have said if they could have known that posterity would
insist they believed the Spaniards to be divine?
I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who read, critiqued,
and improved earlier versions of this work: Antonio Barrera, James
Lockhart, Frederick Luciani, John Graham Nolan, David Robinson, Andrew
Rotter, Kira Stevens, Gary Urton, and Anja Utgennant, as well as Michael
Grossberg, Allyn Roberts, and the anonymous /AHR/ reviewers.
*Camilla Townsend* is an associate professor of history at Colgate
University. She is a comparativist, whose book /Tales of Two
Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and
South America/
(Austin, Tex., 2000) explores contrasting colonial legacies in the
Chesapeake and the Andean region. Recently, she has concluded that
New Spain is crucial to comparative colonial studies and has made
the study of Nahuatl her focus. Her book /Malintzin: The Woman Who
Went with Cortés/ is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico
Press, and a study of "The Chalcan Woman's Song" in the /Canares
mexicanos/ is in process.
Notes
^1 <#REF1> Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans. and ed., /Cortés: The Life of the
Conqueror by His Secretary/
(Berkeley, Calif., 1965), excerpted from Francisco López de Gómara,
/Historia de la conquista de México/ (Zaragoza, 1552), 137. (Although
all research was conducted in the Spanish originals, in the interest of
communication I have here cited published English translations wherever
there exists an edition that is generally considered definitive. Where
there is none, I have provided translations myself.)
^2 <#REF2> Several scholars have recently alluded to the unlikelihood of
the commonly accepted scenario, among them Susan D. Gillespie, /The
Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexica History/ (Tucson,
Ariz., 1989); James Lockhart, ed. and trans., /We People Here: Nahuatl
Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico/ (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); and Ross
Hassig, /Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico/ (Austin,
Tex., 2001). None have made it the focus of any work. This stands in
contrast to South Pacific history, at least as written by
anthropologists. Gananath Obeyesekere set out to challenge the "fact"
that Captain Cook was received as the god Lono in Hawai?i in 1779 in
/The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific/
(Princeton, N.J., 1992), thereby earning for himself several awards but
also the anger of Marshall Sahlins in /How "Natives" Think: About
Captain Cook, for Example/ (Chicago, 1995). Prominent Mexicanists who
have accepted the legends include David Carrasco, /Quetzalcoatl and the
Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition/ (Chicago,
1982); Jacques Lafaye, /Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of
Mexican National Consciousness, 1531?1813/, Benjamin Keen, trans.
(Chicago, 1976); Miguel León-Portilla, ed., /The Broken Spears/,
Lysander Kemp, trans. (Boston, 1962); and H. B. Nicholson, /Topiltzin
Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs/ (Boulder, Colo.,
2001). Similar ideas about the Indians having accepted the newly arrived
whites as gods developed elsewhere in the New World as well, but space
limitations prevent treatment of that subject here. For musings on the
situation in the Andean world, see Olivia Harris, "'The Coming of the
White People': Reflections on the Mythologisation of History in Latin
America," /Bulletin of Latin American Research/ 14, no. 1 (1995): 9?24.
^3 <#REF3> On the word "Aztec": this was a term introduced generations
later by outsiders to talk about a political conglomeration. The ethnic
group who held power called themselves the Mexica
(pronouncedme-SHEE-ka). They, and most of the people they governed, were
Nahuas, or speakers of the Nahuatl language. For ease of communication,
I will most often use the more generally known term. On the nature of
the Aztec state: it is now understood by experts that the "empire" in
fact consisted of profoundly divided ethnic groups residing in separate
city-states, thus rendering it particularly vulnerable to the invading
Europeans, as will be discussed. However, in conversations with
colleagues from other fields, I have learned that it is essential to
state unequivocally that the Aztecs did represent an advanced state?with
a capital city larger than any in Europe, a regularized taxation system
in which accounts of collections and expenditures were kept, and a
profoundly imperialist tendency toward expansionism. For a discussion of
the great differences between, for example, the Aztecs and the more
nomadic groups familiar to most U.S. historians, see John E. Kicza,
/Resilient Cultures: America's Native Peoples Confront European
Colonization, 1500?1800/ (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2003).
^4 <#REF4> Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "Aztec Auguries and Memories of the
Conquest of Mexico," /Renaissance Studies/ 6 (1992): 303; Hugh Thomas,
/Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico/ (London, 1993),
601.
^5 <#REF5> Scholars have argued that the Europeans' advanced
agricultural lifestyle, alongside animals and their use of ships,
contributed to the spread of disease and hence the development of
antibodies that the American indigenous did not have. The point may be
moot in the case of the defeat of the Aztecs, for, although their
soldiers were brought low by smallpox, the same was true of the
Spaniards' allies, on whom they relied for their victory. See Ross
Hassig, /Mexico and the Spanish Conquest/ (London, 1994), 101?02.
^6 <#REF6> Fernández-Armesto, "Aztec Auguries," 288.
^7 <#REF7> Jared Diamond, /Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies/ (New York, 1997). Gale Stokes included this Pulitzer
Prize?winning book in a review essay, "The Fates of Human Societies: A
Review of Recent Macrohistories," /AHR/ 106 (April 2001): 508?25. He
begins, "Not many historians would subtitle their book,'The Fates of
Human Societies,'" and goes on to say that it is biologist Jared Diamond
who has had the nerve. Although Stokes's overall argument is that
macrohistory when done well (and he implicitly includes Diamond's work
in this category) certainly has its uses, Diamond's theme of
"Eurasia-meets-the-rest-of-the-world [and wins]" is lost in the rest of
the essay, which focuses instead on the equally interesting question of
why Europe, as opposed to China, became the leader of the modern world.
Almost nothing has been written about the book in Latin Americanist
journals. To my knowledge, only one recent textbook on colonial America
opens with an explicit consideration of Diamond's argument: Stanley N.
Katz, John M. Murrin, and Douglas Greenberg, eds., /Colonial America:
Essays in Politics and Social Development/, 5th edn. (New York, 2001).
^8 <#REF8> León-Portilla has done important work beyond the ivory tower
as well, bringing Nahuatl-speaking indigenous poets to work at Mexico's
most prestigious universities and supporting /indigenista/ movements in
other ways. His political significance must not be underestimated.
^9 <#REF9> Jorge Klor de Alva, "Foreword," to León-Portilla, /Broken
Spears/, xi.
^10 <#REF10> León-Portilla, /Broken Spears/, 35. Most of the book
conveys similar images, coming from texts written in the 1550s and
later. As of 2000, a new textbook became available that translates
Nahuatl primary sources into English (/Victors and Vanquished: Spanish
and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico/, published by Bedford/St.
Martin's). The book's editor, Stuart B. Schwartz, is well acquainted
with the work of his colleague James Lockhart on early Mexico, and
includes mention of some controversy over the existence of the
Quetzalcoatl myth?but unfortunately only after recounting the story as
if it were true. Books that promise to be helpful in teaching include
Matthew Restall, /Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest/ (New York, 2003);
Stephanie Wood, /Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial
Mexico/ (Norman, Okla., forthcoming); and another by James Lockhart (see
note 18 below).
^11 <#REF11> Tzvetan Todorov, /The Conquest of America: The Question of
the Other/ (New York, 1984), 63, 69, 75, 87. See Inga Clendinnen's
analysis of this text in "Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico," in
Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, eds., /The Transmission of Culture in
Early Modern Europe/ (Philadelphia, 1990). See also Clendinnen, "Fierce
and Unnatural Cruelty: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,"
/Representations/ 33 (1991): 65?100.
^12 <#REF12> On the spelling of the Mexican emperor's name: the English
and Germans later used "Montezuma," but none of the players on the scene
did. The correct spelling of the name in Nahuatl is debatable and, in
any case, somewhat alienating to non-Nahuatl speakers. I amusing the
most common Spanish form ("Moctezuma") except where quoting someone who
uses a different version.
^13 <#REF13> Thomas, /Conquest/, 180. There are many such examples in
the book. Nor is this argument limited only to Thomas. Viewers of
Michael Wood's recent BBC series "Conquistadors" (2000) will not have
failed to detect his interest in and sympathy for the Indians. Yet he,
too, subscribes to the white gods theory and quotes the /Broken Spears/
text verbatim?and without raising hackles. His reviewer in /The
Chronicle Review/ mentions that he might well be more critical of the
"Black Legend" concerning Spain but argues that "his treatment of the
natives is politically faultless" (Diana de Armas Wilson, "Killing for
God and for Gold," May 4, 2001). There is a beautiful new trade book
that likewise takes the old stories for granted: Neil Baldwin, /Legends
of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God/ (New York, 1998).
^14 <#REF14> The most useful edition of Cortés is /Letters from Mexico/,
J. H. Elliott, intro., and Anthony Pagden, trans. and ed. (New Haven,
Conn., 1986). Bernal Díaz is valuable despite the fact that he takes the
structure of his book, almost section by section, from López de Gómara,
alternating between plagiarizing his words and arguing vociferously and
explicitly with them. A few have even argued that he fantasized his own
participation in the conquest, given that he situates himself at the
heart of all the action and that his name fails to appear on one list of
participants housed in the Archive of the Indies in Spain. But all the
chroniclers plagiarized; all exaggerated their own role; and no extant
list of men or equipment is complete. There is evidence that he was
there (in 1540, both Cortés and the viceroy wrote to the emperor on his
behalf), and the text includes many details that only a participant
would have thought of or gotten right. The most careful positioning of
Bernal Díaz in relation to his contemporaries has been accomplished by
Rolena Adorno, "Discourses on Colonialism: Bernal Díaz, Las Casas, and
the Twentieth Century Reader," /Modern Language Notes/ 103 (1988):
239?58; and "The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The
Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History," /William
and Mary Quarterly/ 49 (1992): 210?28. The edition of Bernal Díaz used
here is /The Conquest of New Spain/, J. M. Cohen, ed. (London, 1963),
trans. from /Historia verdadera de la conquista de la nueva España por
Bernal Díaz del Castillo/, Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, ed. (Mexico City,
1955). The chronicles of Andrés de Tapia and Francisco de Aguilar are
found in Patricia de Fuentes, ed., /The Conquistadors: First-Person
Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico/ (Norman, Okla., 1993). Another
supposedly firsthand account is now known as the chronicle of the
"Anonymous Conquistador." It appears to have been written by someone who
never actually saw Mexico City. Bernardino Vásquez de Tapia also left a
brief military summary. Another conquistador named Ruy González later
wrote a letter to the king, but, as the latter two do not help
significantly with the issue under discussion, I will leave them aside.
See Arthur P. Stabler and John E. Kicza, "Ruy González's 1553 Letter to
Emperor Charles V: An Annotated Translation," /The Americas/ 42 (1986).
^15 <#REF15> He had some direct sources: in the earliest days, Motolinía
worked with Malinche, the Indian woman translator who had worked with
Cortés; later, he came to know well the young Indian nobles who studied
Latin and other subjects with the fathers, even though communication was
at first minimal. He noted with humor, "The first one who taught singing
... was an old friar who barely knew a single word of the Indians'
language,... and he spoke as quickly as if he were speaking to students
in Spain. Those of us who heard him could not help laughing ... It was a
marvelous thing that even though at first they understood nothing ... in
a short time they understood and learned the songs." Fray Toribio de
Benavente Motolinía, /Historia de los indios de la Nueva España/
(Madrid, 1988), 271.
^16 <#REF16> The original is housed in the Laurenziana Medicean Library,
Florence. A facsimile edition is /Códice florentino/ (Florence, 1979).
An English edition is Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, eds.,
/The Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain/ (Salt
Lake City, 1950?82). Sahagún's earliest version of the text is published
as /The Primeros Memoriales/, Thelma Sullivan, H. B. Nicholson, Arthur
J. O. Anderson, Charles Dibble, Eloise Quiñones, and Wayne Ruwet, eds.
(Norman, Okla., 1997). On the Franciscan agenda in general, see John
Leddy Phelan, /The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New
World/, 2d edn. rev. (Berkeley, Calif., 1970).
^17 <#REF17> He interviewed extensively, often asking about codices he
knew villagers still had, once venting his frustration at "Indian
wordiness in telling fables?when anyone is willing to listen to them
they go on forever," but generally providing a sympathetic ear and
recording certain perspectives that are obviously indigenous. Of course,
we must approach his work cautiously: he did, for example, insert
statements clearly made by contemporaries into the mouths of historical
figures. He has Moctezuma make this bitter speech before the Spaniards
arrive: "They will reign and I shall be the last king of this land. Even
though some of our descendants and relatives may remain, even though
they may be made governors and given states, they will not be true lords
and kings but subordinates, like tax collectors or gatherers of the
tribute that my ancestors and I have won. Our descendants' only task
will be to comply with the commands and orders of the strangers." Diego
Durán, /The History of the Indies of New Spain/, Doris Heyden, ed.
(Norman, Okla., 1994), 511?12.
^18 <#REF18> James Lockhart in /We People Here/ has gathered together
the only six of these statements that describe the conquest and were
written before 1560, after which date it is unlikely that people who had
clear memories of the events still lived. This is an invaluable
collection because it includes careful transcriptions of both the
Nahuatl text and the Spanish summaries, and yet it is accessible to
everyone because it includes translations of each. A "student-friendly"
edition is in preparation at Stanford University Press.
^19 <#REF19> On the methods of interviewing and the names and positions
of those Indians who did the interviewing, see Lockhart, /We People
Here/; and Alfredo López Austin, "The Research Method of Fray Bernardino
de Sahagún," in Munro S. Edmonson, ed., /Sixteenth-Century Mexico: The
Work of Sahagún/ (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1974).
^20 <#REF20> There were a number of indigenous (or mestizo, but
Indian-identified) writers in this period, including a grandson of
Moctezuma named Don Fernando de Alvarado Tezozomac, Diego Muñoz Camargo
from Tlaxcala, and Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin from
Chalco. None left work as extensive or as useful in the case of this
particular project as Ixtlilxochitl, and so in the interest of space, I
am leaving them aside. Chimalpahin, however, deserves special mention
because he wrote for a Nahua audience. In his accounts, the Spaniards
appear not as gods but as a set of foreign invaders. The year summaries
for 1519?1522 resemble other year summaries. "The year Three House,
1521: At this time Quauhtemoctzin [Cuauhtemoc] was installed as ruler of
Tenochtitlan in Izcalli in the ancient month count, and in February in
the Christian month count, when the Spaniards still occupied Tlaxcala.
He was a son of Ahuitzotzin." Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder,
eds., /Codex Chimalpahin/ (Norman, Okla., 1997), 167. See also Susan
Schroeder, "Looking Back at the Conquest: Nahua Perceptions of Early
Encounters from the Annals of Chimalpahin," in Eloise Quiñones Keber,
ed., /Chipping Away on Earth/ (Lancaster, Calif., 1994), 377?97.
^21 <#REF21> For example: "No me he querido aprovechar de las historias
que hartan de esta material, por la diversidad y confusión que tienen
entre sí los autores que hartan de ellas, por las falsas relaciones y
contrarias interpretaciones que se les dieron." Fernando de Alva
Ixtlilxochitl, "Sumaria Relación de la Historia General de Esta Nueva
España desde el origen del mundo hasta la Era de Ahora," in /Obras
históricas/, Edmundo O'Gorman, ed., vol. 1 (Mexico City, 1975), 525.
There is no question that Ixtlilxochitl is a problematic source if one
is looking for a "pure" Indian voice: he sometimes relied, for example,
on the"Codex Xolotl" (Charles Dibble, ed., /Códice Xolotl/ [Mexico City,
1951]), which is clearly a post-conquest creation, and he was personally
and politically embedded in elite Creole culture. Fora discussion of the
latter issue, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, /How to Write the History of
the New World: Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World/ (Stanford, Calif., 2001), esp.
221?25. I read him, however, as having a distinctly indigenous
perspective in subtle ways. For example, he inserts "por lengua de
Marina" (through the words of Malinche) frequently when summarizing
communications made with the Spanish?even, in one case, when a local
king was asking Cortés and his men to accept some local girls as
sleeping partners."Historia de la nación chichimeca," in /Obras
históricas/, O'Gorman, ed., vol. 2 (Mexico City, 1977), 214.
^22 <#REF22> Lockhart, /We People Here/, 5.
^23 <#REF23> Lockhart, /We People Here/, 18. It is worth noting that
other sources purportedly based on interviews with those involved
reflect this same bipartite treatment?a history that reads like are
citation of myths suddenly becomes a detailed and realistic description
of battle scenes. See Ixtlilxochitl, "Compendio Histórico del Reino de
Texcoco," in /Obras históricas/, vol. 1. Ross Hassig also concludes
after working extensively with the second part of Book Twelve, "The
Aztecs did not lose their faith, they lost a war." /Mexico and the
Spanish Conquest/, 149.
^24 <#REF24> The one exception was the Tlaxcalan Diego Muñoz Camargo.
Writing in 1580, he claimed that people in his city were also
preoccupied with the foretellings of the white gods, but as proof he
offered the same set of omens that took the Aztec capital as their point
of reference, "an unimaginable attribute of a source resting on
authentic Tlaxcalan tradition" (Lockhart, /We People Here/, 17). The
repetition of details shows that Muñoz Camargo clearly copied straight
from the Florentine.
^25 <#REF25> Fernández-Armesto, "Aztec Auguries."
^26 <#REF26> Durán, /History of the Indies of New Spain/, 493. This is a
motif in Durán's text.
^27 <#REF27> In other versions, less famous to us today, the seers and
sorcerers similarly speak the Truth, but to no effect because Moctezuma
has grown proud and will not listen. See Stephen Colston, "'No Longer
Will There Be a Mexico': Omens, Prophecies, and the Conquest of the
Aztec Empire," /American Indian Quarterly/ 9 (1985): 244. Ixtlilxochitl
relies on this tradition in"Compendio Histórico del Reino de Texcoco,"
in /Obras históricas/, 1: 450?51. Additionally, Sahagún's young men were
mostly from Tlatelolco, once a neighboring city-state, not Tenochtitlan
proper, and although they were in many ways identified with the Aztecs,
their ancestors had in fact been conquered; thus, as Kevin Terraciano
has pointed out to me in a personal communication, they may have found
it satisfying to represent the heart of the Aztec state as crumbling in
panic.
^28 <#REF28> Gillespie, /Aztec Kings/, esp. 197?98. For a detailed study
of the feathered serpent motif throughout Mesoamerica, see Enrique
Florescano, /The Myth of Quetzalcoatl/ (Baltimore, 1999).
^29 <#REF29> Following is a drastic oversimplification of the
transformation of the narrative: I refer the reader to Gillespie's
/Aztec Kings/ for further details (185?95). In the 1530s, in the first
three Spanish texts recounting Aztec history, supposedly as told to the
writers by locals, two would-be kings fight, and one ends up leading his
followers away (also a common trope in the pre-Hispanic codices); in one
version, probably recorded by a well-known friar and linguist, Andres de
Olmos, the important hero is named Ce Acatl (One Reed), which is as
close as we come to the name "Quetzalcoatl." In the early 1540s,
however, while the mortal hero is still "Huemac" in the Nahuatl text
"Historia Tolteca Chichimeca" from the Puebla area, he is in Spanish
texts explicitly named Quetzalcoatl, apparently in honor of the god in
several cases, or as a man who was deified after his death (a common
element of European mythology) in Motolinía's and Andrés de Tapia's works.
^30 <#REF30> Motolinía, /Historia de los Indios/, 107?08.
^31 <#REF31> For a full treatment of the church's intellectual wrestling
with the Indian question, see Lafaye, /Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe/. The
most popular version among clerics held it that Quetzalcoatl had in fact
been the apostle St. Thomas. It was not only the New World's Christian
missionaries who looked for evidence that God had sent previous
emissaries to the lands they hoped to convert. By the late sixteenth
century, the Jesuits in China also believed they had found proof of an
earlier presence. (Personal communication from David Robinson.)
^32 <#REF32> At the end of the century, various authors continued to
"mix and match" the contrasting elements. In the case of Ixtlilxochitl,
his personal trajectory regarding the legend closely paralleled that of
his century. As a very young man, while he is still according to his own
testimony struggling simply to decipher certain codices or stories and
summarize them, he describes the rise and fall of the hero Topiltzin,
making no mention whatsoever of Quetzalcoatl or of anyone fleeing by sea
or promising to return. There is a fragmentary document attached to a
later work, apparently intended to be a commentary on an accompanying
picture, now lost, in which he suddenly says that Topiltzin at last went
east and died there and was burned to ashes along with all his treasure,
but that he promised to return in the year One Reed, which was when the
Spanish came. In a later work, Ixtlilxochitl introduces a section on the
pre-Toltec period, which he had never mentioned before, and here he
presents a sinless virgin hero "whom they called Quetzalcoatl, or by
another name, Huemac" who had come from the east and would come again.
The character does not appear anywhere else in the volume; the narrative
continues in a more traditional vein. In the magnum opus he wrote before
his death, Ixtlilxochitl begins with a full chapter on Quetzalcoatl, who
by now is a fully delineated character, indeed, the first great
historian of the Americas (implicitly a precursor to Ixtlilxochitl
himself), who leaves records of his own great works for posterity to
find, and who passes away by sea, promising that when he returned his
children would become "the lords and possessors of the earth." Thus
Ixtlilxochitl left Aztec history intact yet framed it between the by-now
expected departure of the early saint and the arrival of the Spanish.
Ixtlilxochitl, "Sumaria Relación de las cosas de la Nueva España" [c.
1600] (273, 387), and "Compendio Histórico del Reino de Texcoco" [c.
1608] (529), in /Obras históricas/, vol. 1; Ixtlilxochitl, "Historia de
la Nación Chichimeca," in /Obras históricas/, 2: 7?9. Durán inserts the
story even more awkwardly into his manuscript.
^33 <#REF33> Lockhart, /We People Here/, 20.
^34 <#REF34> Durán, /History of the Indies/, 499?500.
^35 <#REF35> This phrase was used in writing a few more times in the
sixteenth century, and Lockhart has taken it as the very apt title of
his book.
^36 <#REF36> "Annals of Tlaltelolco" and "Historia
Tolteca-Chichimeca,"both in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 271, 287.
^37 <#REF37> "Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex," in Lockhart, /We
People Here/, 244, 179, 252, respectively. The priest's resistance to
using the term that binds him as a vassal is particularly noteworthy in
that the Spanish tortured those Mexica leaders who did not participate
in helping them locate missing gold and jewels.
^38 <#REF38> Louise Burkhart has studied the Franciscans' early efforts
to"translate" religion. Theirs was no easy task, as the Nahuas did not
see the universe as a struggle between good and evil but rather between
order and chaos. There was, for example, no word for "sin,"and so the
word for "damage" was made to suffice. By the 1530s, the word chosen for
"devil" or "demon" was /tlacatecolotl/, or human-owl, a shape-changing
sorcerer of legends, so that /teotl/ could mean "God" in the Christian
sense. In 1519, however, the Spanish were on their own in trying to
understand and translate Nahuatl concepts. They seem to have come
remarkably close in their initial comprehension of what they were being
called. "A single divine principle? /teotl/?was responsible for the
nature of the cosmos, negative aspects of it as well as positive ones
... /Teotl/ could manifest itself in ritual objects, images, and human
deity-impersonators?forms not necessarily consistent with the Western
conception of deity." Burkhart, /The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian
Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico/ (Tucson, Ariz., 1989), 36?42.
^39 <#REF39> Bernal Díaz, /Conquest of New Spain/, 112, 117.
^40 <#REF40> Durán, /History of the Indies/, 513, 524?25.
^41 <#REF41> In the Florentine Codex, for example, Sahagún's students
wrote that when Moctezuma was in hopes of establishing a tributary
relationship with the Spanish by giving them annual gifts, he ordered
his men, "Xicmotlatlauhtilican in totecuio in teotl." This translates
best as "Address our political lord, the /teul/, in a courtly manner,"
but it was given in the Spanish gloss done by Sahagún as "Worship the
god in my name." Lockhart, /We People Here/, 68?69.
^42 <#REF42> Motolinía, /Historia de los Indios/, 193?94. A similar
corruption that became a permanent name, with no meaning attached, is
"Malinche." After receiving her as a slave, the Spaniards christened her
"Marina." As she was the all-important translator, the Indians added the
honorific "-tzin" and called her"Malintzin." (They did not have the
sound for "r" in their language.) The Spanish heard "Malinchi" or
"Malinche," and that became her name, familiar to both groups, with few
people knowing how it had come about.
^43 <#REF43> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 51. It is important to note that, in the earliest dealings
with the Nahuas, it was the lord of Cempoala who took the initiative and
made overtures to Cortés, not the other way around.
^44 <#REF44> James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz have noted in /Early
Latin America/ (Cambridge, 1983) both that a standard mode of operation
was developed early on in the period of conquest and that the Aztecs
more than any other group gave the Spaniards pause. I would argue that
by the time Pizarro faced Atahualpa in Peru, he had reason to have
greater confidence than Cortés could immediately have had that he could
use the techniques even when facing a great empire.
^45 <#REF45> J. H. Elliott, "Introduction," to Cortés, /Letters from
Mexico/; Clendinnen, "Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico." See
also Eulalia Guzmán, /Relaciones de Hernán Cortés a Carlos V sobre la
invasión de Anahuac/ (Mexico City, 1958).
^46 <#REF46> Francis Brooks, "Motecuzoma Xocoyotl, Hernán Cortés and
Bernal Díaz del Castillo: The Construction of an Arrest," /Hispanic
American Historical Review/ 75 (1995): 164?65. López de Gómara did see
the awkwardness of the communication issue, and wrote, "Now that Cortés
saw himself rich and powerful, he formed three plans: One was to send to
Santo Domingo and the other islands news of the country and his good
fortune." He then implied that Cortés had never quite had the time to
see to it before Captain Narváez and his men appeared. López de Gómara,
/Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror/, 187.
^47 <#REF47> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 113.
^48 <#REF48> Brooks, "Motecuzoma," 181; Durán, /History of the Indies/, 531.
^49 <#REF49> This even includes López de Gómara, usually faithful to the
Cortesian narrative, in /Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror/, 188?89.
^50 <#REF50> The fact that no Spaniard ever publicly accused Cortés of
lying about his ability to arrest the Mexican king within a week of his
arrival is not as significant as it first appears. Even those many
conquistadors who later came to hate him (and even testify against him
on other matters, financial and personal) would have understood,
consciously and unconsciously, the importance of maintaining a united
voice regarding the Spanish legal right to govern the indigenous
population. Juan Cano, married to Moctezuma's daughter Isabel, did later
claim in a lawsuit over his wife's inheritance that it was untrue that
the Mexica lords had gathered before the conquest to swear loyalty to
the Spanish and cede their property, or that, if they had gathered
together, they could not possibly have understood the purport of the
proceedings. Significantly, he reversed himself in his next document and
attempted to use other legal precedents to protect his wife's property:
someone had apparently made it quite clear to him how quickly he would
lose the judges' sympathy if he touched on the issue of the Spanish
right to rule in the first place. For the latter, see"Relaciones de la
Nueva España" (Madrid, 1990), 153, cited in Thomas, /Conquest/, 325.
^51 <#REF51> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 107; Bernal Díaz, /Conquest of New Spain/, 276.
^52 <#REF52> "The Chronicle of Fray Francisco de Aguilar," in Fuentes,
/Conquistadors/, 148.
^53 <#REF53> "The Chronicle of Andrés de Tapia," in Fuentes,
/Conquistadors/, 39.
^54 <#REF54> "Chronicle of Andrés de Tapia," in Fuentes,
/Conquistadors/, 44.
^55 <#REF55> Motolinía skipped from Moctezuma's welcoming speech on the
causeway to the arrival of Narváez, without addressing who ruled in the
interim (/Historia de los Indios/, 55). Durán writes in his own
inimitable style: "According to traditions and to paintings kept by
certain [indigenous] elders, it is said that Motecuhzoma left the
sanctuary with his feet in chains [the day he welcomed the Spaniards].
And I saw this in a painting that belonged to an ancient chieftain from
the province of Tezcoco. Motecuhzoma was depicted in irons, wrapped in a
mantle and carried on the shoulders of his dignitaries. This seems
difficult to believe, since I have never met a Spaniard who will concede
this point to me. But as all of them deny other things that have always
been obvious, and remain silent about them in their histories, writings
and narrations, I am sure they would also deny and omit this, one of the
worst and most atrocious acts committed by them. A conqueror, who is now
a friar, told me that though the imprisonment of Motecuhzoma might be
true, it was done with the idea of protecting the lives of the Spanish
captain and his men" (/History of the Indies/, 530?31). Durán, anxious
to demonstrate the ways in which the Indians were victimized, is willing
to move the day of arrest forward to the day of arrival?even more
impossible to believe. But his source is a native picture that would, if
in the standard format, only have been meant to portray a significant
episode, not necessarily to give it a date. It was apparently that same
native source that told Durán Moctezuma had been imprisoned eighty days.
Interestingly, the "conqueror who is now a friar" was probably Aguilar,
who said in his statement for public consumption that Moctezuma had been
arrested as a traitor to the Spanish king, not in a desperate power ploy
intended to protect their own lives.
^56 <#REF56> "Annals of Tlaltelolco," in Lockhart, /We People Here/,
257. There has been controversy surrounding the age of this manuscript,
as it bears the date "1528" in the scribe's handwriting, but this would
not have been possible, as Nahuatl speakers had not yet learned to write
their language in the Latin alphabet. Lockhart convincingly dates it to
the 1540s in /We People Here/, 39?42. This document's potentially very
early date makes it essential that we consult it in the general matter
under discussion in this article. Even though it makes no reference
whatsoever to Cortés being taken for Quetzalcoatl, it does use the word
/teotl/ or "god" to designate the Spaniards, as we would expect, given
the analysis of Book Twelve. What the speakers may have meant by this
has been addressed by Anja Utgennant, University of Cologne, "Gods,
Christians and Enemies: The Representation of the Conquerors in a
Nahuatl Account," paper presented at "El Cambio Cultural en el México
del siglo XVI," University of Vienna, June 6?13, 2002.
^57 <#REF57> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 176.
^58 <#REF58> Hassig, /Mexico and the Spanish Conquest/, 52, 65?68.
Hassig notes that a few did fall to slingstones, and others died when
minor wounds became infected.
^59 <#REF59> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 212.
^60 <#REF60> Cortés, "Second Letter" (131) and "Third Letter" (218), in
Elliott and Pagden, /Letters from Mexico/. There are numerous additional
examples.
^61 <#REF61> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 60, 62, 66. In case Cortés had some unfathomable reason
for making this story up, confirmation is easily found in the words of a
Tlaxcalan warrior as recounted to Durán: "If you wish to have my opinion
I shall give it to you: have pity upon your children, brothers, the old
men and women and orphans who are to die, all of them innocent,
perishing only because we [noblemen] wish to make a defense." /History
of the Indies/, 522. Some of the other conquistadors clearly felt
squeamish about this, or wanted to defend themselves from the likes of
Las Casas, for later accounts include strange stories of villages they
could have plundered at this point but did not. (See Aguilar, Tapia, and
Bernal Díaz.) Durán notes the inconsistency and says the Indians
definitely remembered events the way Cortés did.
^62 <#REF62> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 156, 158.
^63 <#REF63> Cortés, "The Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 181. The Florentine Codex, like Durán, confirms these
stories, only telling them with a tragic rather than triumphant tone.
^64 <#REF64> Two were sent to the aid of Narváez; four constituted an
independently got-up exploratory venture from Jamaica, and one was sent
by Cortés's father in Spain.
^65 <#REF65> Aguilar, in Fuentes, /Conquistadors/, 157; Bernal Díaz, in
/Conquest of New Spain/, 309, also comments on the affection and joy
with which new arrivals were greeted.
^66 <#REF66> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 182. See also 147?48, 164?65, 191?92.
^67 <#REF67> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 207.
^68 <#REF68> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 221, 247.
^69 <#REF69> Jonathan D. Spence, /The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci/
(New York, 1984), 22.
^70 <#REF70> Todorov, /Conquest of America/, 13. Indeed, Columbus
annotated his copy of Marco Polo's book.
^71 <#REF71> One of the speakers created by Sir Thomas More in /Utopia/
was supposed to have sailed with Vespucci: his utopia was thus a New
World island. More drew explicitly from Vespucci's 1504 work as well as
from Martyr's 1511 volume, seamlessly stirring in elements of ancient
European tales of fantasy. It was a popular book: /Utopia/ was published
in Latin in 1516, 1517, 1518, and 1519, in German in 1524, and in
English in 1551. Interestingly, the 1517 edition contained a map of
"Utopia" drawn by Ambrosius Holbein (younger brother to Hans Holbein);
it bears striking resemblances to a stylized map of Tenochtitlan that
appeared in Nuremberg in 1524 in a Latin translation of Cortés's Second
and Third Letters (supposedly based on a sketch sent back by Cortés).
^72 <#REF72> Lewis Hanke, /The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the
Conquest of America/ (Philadelphia, 1949), 9. Jared Diamond in his
previously cited chapter "Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca Emperor
Atahualpa Did Not Capture King Charles I of Spain," in /Guns, Germs, and
Steel/, shows in an interesting way that Spanish guns alone could not
have accomplished Pizarro's purpose for him but that the total
constellation of Spanish technology was of paramount importance.
^73 <#REF73> Dürer's diary, quoted in Benjamin Keen, /The Aztec Image in
Western Thought/ (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971), 69.
^74 <#REF74> We must sift our usual expectations. The Spanish, for
example, imagined that the Nahuas were overawed by their first sight of
European ships, and we have tended to repeat this. In fact, they seem to
have recognized them for what they were?boats that were larger and more
impressive than their own. Durán asserts that the native messenger found
them "wondrous and terrifying" but then elaborates that the messenger
"described how, while he had been walking next to the seashore, he had
seen a round [water]hill [the same word used for "village" or
"settlement"] or [water]house [same word used for "boat"] moving from
one side to another until it had anchored next to some rocks on the
beach." Durán, /History of the Indies/, 495. Durán's text gives the
Spanish for"hill" and "house," contributing to the myth that the Indians
perceived the boats as floating mountains or great houses, like temples.
However, any Nahuatl speaker cannot help but wonder what his Nahuatl
source originally said, as the word for "village" or"settlement" in
Nahuatl is "water-hill," and the word for"boat" is "water-house." Thus
it is quite likely that the speaker meant to say, "He saw some sort of
settlement, a boat, moving from side to side," and his Spanish hearer or
reader mistakenly removed the prefix meaning "water" from the two words,
thinking it referred to the fact that the messenger had seen these
things in the water. This view is supported by another messenger's
comment a few pages later (505): "Before showing him the paintings he
narrated that some men would come to this land in a great wooden hill.
This wooden hill would be so big that it would lodge many men, serving
them as a home. Within it they would eat and sleep." In the Florentine
Codex, after the famous hyperbole, Moctezuma's emissaries reached the
Spanish ship by canoe and reported matter-of-factly: "They [the
newcomers]hitched the prow of the [Indians'] boat with an iron staff and
hauled them in. Then they put down a ladder" (Lockhart, /We People
Here/, 70).
^75 <#REF75> Several conquistadors, Durán's source, and the Florentine
Codex all refer to this event.
^76 <#REF76> Cortés, "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 94. Walter Mignolo, /The Darker Side of the Renaissance:
Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization/ (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995),
studies Spanish resistance to seeing the kinds of information conveyed
in Aztec records and maps; see esp. 296?313. On the topic in general,
start with Elizabeth Hill Boone,"Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records
without Words," in Boone and Mignolo, eds., /Writing without Words:
Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes/ (Durham, N. C., 1994).
^77 <#REF77> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 94.
^78 <#REF78> Bernal Díaz, /Conquest of New Spain/, 222.
^79 <#REF79> Durán, /History of the Indies/, 503?06.
^80 <#REF80> Some form of the speech Cortés attributes to Moctezuma
appears in most of the later Spanish accounts, and a variation in the
Florentine Codex. For several centuries, it was assumed that these
sources were quoting the king verbatim; more recently, it has been
assumed that the king said nothing of the kind. The truth probably lies
in between. For examples of courtly Nahuatl speech, see Frances
Karttunen and James Lockhart, eds., /The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The
Bancroft Dialogues/ (Los Angeles, 1987).
^81 <#REF81> J. H. Elliott, "The Mental World of Hernán Cortés,"
/Transactions of the Royal Historical Society/, 5th ser., 17 (1967): 41?58.
^82 <#REF82> López de Gómara, /Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror/,
140?42; Bernal Díaz, /Conquest of New Spain/, 223?24.
^83 <#REF83> See esp. Clendinnen, "Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of
Mexico," 97?98; and Hassig, /Mexico and the Spanish Conquest/, 77.
^84 <#REF84> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 106.
^85 <#REF85> López de Gómara, /Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror/, 134;
Bernal Díaz, /Conquest of New Spain/, 205 (emphasis added).
^86 <#REF86> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 138.
Almost all the sources mention such speeches on his part.
^87 <#REF87> It is possible to get a sense of what the commoners thought
about the Spanish during all this time. Nahua sources refer not only to
the foreigners' insatiable demand for gold but also to the overwhelming
quantities of food and water that they consumed?and that the city folk
were asked by Moctezuma to provide. Not only food, added Sahagún's
students, but also hundreds of bowls, pitchers, and pans. One presumes
that there may also have been the usual tensions over women, but only a
single particularly egregious incident regarding lewd glances at sacred
women made its way into the oral tradition that was passed on to
Sahagún. "[Before the ceremonies] the women who had fasted for a year
ground up the amaranth ... in the temple courtyard. The Spaniards came
out well adorned in battle equipment ... arrayed as warriors. They
passed among the grinding women, circling around them, looking at each
one, looking upon their faces. And when they were through looking at
them, they went into the great palace." Far from regarding the Spanish
as gods, the city dwellers apparently saw them as dish thieves and
profaners of the sacred. Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People
Here/, 122, 128.
^88 <#REF88> Clendinnen, "Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of
Mexico,"esp. 107?14. She notes that there may have been one exception?a
single incident in which the Indians seem to have come close to killing
Cortés and apparently chose not to, perhaps hoping to take him alive so
as to sacrifice his still-beating heart to the gods. Hassig, /Time,
History and Belief/, echoes her incredulity that Aztec political and
military leaders were making practical decisions based on religious
tradition rather than realpolitik.
^89 <#REF89> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 175.
^90 <#REF90> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 146.
^91 <#REF91> Clendinnen, "Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of
Mexico,"107; and Hassig, /Mexico and the Spanish Conquest/, 121, both
working with the texts of Cortés, Bernal Díaz, Durán, and the Florentine
Codex. It is possible that Indians were learning to make some of the
Spanish goods, since Cortés mentions having nails, pitch, oars, and
sails made locally, but he probably meant that Spaniards were
manufacturing them. "Second Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 157.
^92 <#REF92> The Spanish describe such memorable events as atrocities,
but they are recounted with pride in the Florentine Codex; Lockhart, /We
People Here/, 188, 192, 210, 232. For a thorough discussion, see Hassig,
/Mexico and the Spanish Conquest/, 129?33.
^93 <#REF93> Cortés, "Third Letter," in Elliott and Pagden, /Letters
from Mexico/, 257.
^94 <#REF94> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 230.
Lockhart also comments on this incident in the same volume (7).
^95 <#REF95> Ixtlilxochitl, "Historia de la Nación Chichimeca," in
/Obras históricas/, 2: 244.
^96 <#REF96> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 80, 90,
96, 110.
^97 <#REF97> Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, /We People Here/, 74, 86,
98, 116.
^98 <#REF98> Motolinía, /Historia de los Indios/, 147?48, 173, 276. If
we believe that the 1540s write-up of the initial conversations between
the Franciscan Apostles and the Aztec priests represents a close
approximation of what was said, then we have a 1524 indigenous statement
to the effect that not only are the Spaniards not divine but they do not
even have the right to determine how the indigenous shall worship. The
speech begins with exaggerated courtesy,"Our lords, leading personages
of much esteem, you are very welcome to our lands and towns. We
ourselves, being inferior and base, are unworthy of looking upon the
faces of such valiant personages." In true courtly Nahuatl style, the
speaker builds gradually to his point:"All of us together feel that it
is enough to have lost, enough that the power and royal jurisdiction
have been taken from us. As for our gods, we will die before giving up
serving and worshiping them. This is our determination; do what you will
... We have no more to say, lords." "Chapter 7: In Which the Reply of
the Principal Holy Men to the Twelve Is Found," /Coloquios y doctrina
cristiana/, in Kenneth Mills and William B. Taylor, eds., /Colonial
Spanish America: A Documentary History/ (Wilmington, Del., 1998), 21?22.
Jorge Klor de Alva has worked extensively with the /coloquios/on the
question of their veracity. See, for example, "The Aztec-Spanish
Dialogues of 1524," /Alcheringia/Ethnopoetics/4 (1980): 52?193. While
acknowledging that we have only a text based on notes made at the time,
he asserts the probability that the notes reflect a genuine resistance
to the Spanish priests, as other evidence suggests. The notion that the
Aztecs simply accepted what the Christians had to say in a "spiritual
conquest" has been abandoned by scholars. To begin, see Burkhart,
/Slippery Earth/; and most recently, Viviana Díaz Balsera, "A
Judeo-Christian Tlaloc or a Nahua Yahweh? Domination, Hybridity and
Continuity in the Nahua Evangelization Theater," /Colonial Latin
American Review/ 10 (2001): 209?28.
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