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Who's Who of the Conquistadors

Conquistadors

Conquest

The Last Conquistador

The Broken Spears

Aztec Thought and Culture

Letters from Mexico
By Hernan Cortes

In Defense of the Indians

Rivers of Gold

Crossing Ancient Oceans: How Prehistoric Explorers Visited the Americas

A Little Matter of Genocide

American Holocaust

 
Travel in the Middle Ages

The Da Vinci Code

The Rule of Four

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia

November 8, 1519

It was the year that Italy saw the death, on May 2, of Leonardo da Vinci, followed shortly by his countrywoman Lucrezia Borgia on June 24. 

In Rome, Germany’s Martin Luther was gazing on new works by Michelangelo and Raphael adorning the palace of Pope Leo X, while answering charges that he had called the pontiff “fallible”. Meanwhile, off the coast of Italy, Mediterranean traders sailed in fear of the corsairs of the notorious North African pirate, Khair ad Din (Barbarossa).

At the time, in England, the ink was scarcely dry on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), while elsewhere in Europe, King Charles of Spain was being elected Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Meanwhile, across the big pond, Pedro Arias de Ávila, the new Governor of Panama was no doubt explaining to his superiors in Spain why in January he had beheaded Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the explorer and conquistador. In Holland, Erasmus published his Colloquia.

To the east, Persia’s great Safavid Dynasty empire now rivalled that of the Ottomans, and in Switzerland, Protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli was busy banning the sale of Roman Catholic indulgences. On September 20, Portugal’s intrepid navigator, Ferdinand Magellan embarked to circumnavigate the globe, while over in Venice, Italy, rich citizens enjoying the full flush of the Renaissance were revelling in the works of the likes of the recently deceased Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, and the city was the glory of Europe ...

  

Cortés told the Aztecs that he and his men "suffered from a disease of the heart which is only cured by gold." Pedro de Cieza de León was inspired to sail to Peru after seeing the Inca gold unloaded in Seville. "As long as I live I cannot get it out of my mind," he said. All of which perplexed – and, in the end, disgusted – the native peoples. The half-Inca historian, Waman Poma, portrayed an Indian asking a Spaniard: "Do you actually eat this gold?" And the Spaniard replies: "Yes, we certainly do!" The last of the great Incas, Manco himself, bitterly remarked, "Even if the snows of the Andes turned to gold still they would not be satisfied." 
Source unknown

 

Tenochtitlán, Mexico’s great city of the world

Across the Atlantic Ocean stood the great Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, situated where Mexico City stands today. Criss-crossed with canals, and featuring many aqueducts and markets, and a grand lake with floating gardens, it was the Venice of the New World (or, rather, Venice was the mini-Tenochtitlán of Europe, for the Mexican city was much larger and grander than that Italian town). 

According to early Spanish accounts, it was unlike the European cities they knew, but more like the ones they had seen in romantic books, as it was not crowded and dirty. Tenochtitlán was larger, more beautiful and more complex than any European city at the time. The population of the lake city was some 200,000 - 300,000 people, at a time when London’s numbered about 40,000 and only 65,000 people lived in Paris. Tenochtitlán’s craftsmen, such as its fine goldsmiths, were a match for those in Europe, and the grandeur of the city’s pyramids rivalled that of the Egyptian wonders.

Indeed, buildings such as the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli* stood as reminders to the world of the mighty Aztecs’ awesome power. In just four days in 1487, to placate Huitzilopochtli and other deities during the dedication of the new temple, those same mighty Aztecs had sacrificed more than 10,000 captives in gory rituals. One source says the number was even much greater: Ahuitzotl, the eighth and most powerful emperor of the Aztec royal dynasty ...

" ...celebrated the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshalling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them. On this occasion as many as 80,000 were slain during a single ceremonial rite."
Hancock, Graham, Fingerprints of the Gods, Crown Trade Paperbacks, NY, 1995, p. 97

Human sacrifice, as seen here depicted by both European and Native American contemporaries,  was such a large part of Aztec religious life that at the time of the appearance of the conquistadors, as many as 20,000 people a year were killed for the gods, especially for Huitzilopochtli. The Aztec method of performing human sacrifice was to use a sharpened stone to excise the person's heart while it was still beating. After the hearts of the victims were removed and the bodies tossed down the temple steps, the limbs were severed and later cooked with the victim's blood and a potion of peanuts, chocolate, hot peppers and other spices. The conquistadors were by no means invading an ideal society, but one as cruel as any other authoritarian or totalitarian regime known to history.

 

Tenochtitlán was the place where the nochtli cactus, the nopal cactus, grew, where the Mexica found the sign promised them by Huitzilopochtli: an eagle on the cactus in the middle of the lake. 

 

Omens of the arrival of Cortés

The expedition of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán after nine months of fighting indigenous people and trudging across rough country, on up to the high Mexican plateau. 

So determined was their leader to find treasure that he had ordered his men to burn their boats in the harbour, ominously fulfilling a ten-year-old Aztec prophecy that a fire in the night sky would be a portent of doom. However, there are some reports that a spectacular heavenly light shone for a year before the arrival of the conquistadors, and what this might have been we as yet do not know. In the words of the Aztecs themselves:

"Ten years before the Spaniards first came here, a bad omen appeared in the sky. It was like a flaming ear of corn, or a fiery signal, or the blaze of daybreak; it seemed to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky. It was wide at the base and narrow at the peak, and it shone in the very heart of the heavens.

"This is how it appeared: it shone in the eastern sky in the middle of the night. It appeared at midnight and burned till the break of day, but it vanished at the rising of the sun. The thine during which it appeared to us was a full year, beginning in the year 12-House.

"When it first appeared, there was great outcry and confusion. The people clapped their hands against their mouths; they were amazed and frightened, and asked themselves what it could mean."
Codex Florentino

Other portents being observed by the Aztec equivalents of the Magi included a mysterious fire in Huitzilopochtli's temple, and the temple of Xiuhtecuhtli, which was built of straw, had been struck by a thunderbolt. An asteroid or comet had also shown in the sky, in three parts, "[flashing] out from where the sun sets and raced straight to where the sun rises, giving off a shower of sparks like a red-hot coal" (Codex Florentino), and the waters of Lake Texcoco had recently boiled (lashed by wind) and undermined many dwellings. The sages knew that the mighty Aztec Empire, whose powerful legions of brave warriors had conquered all their regional rivals, was soon to meet tribulation.

Then some fishermen had seen a crane with a mirror on its head, and when the Emperor Moctezuma II (Montezuma; Motecuhzoma, pictured above) looked in it, he saw the heavens and knew this to be an evil omen. When he looked again he saw a large number of warriors approaching his domain. 

"This bird wore a strange mirror in the crown of its head. The mirror was pierced in the centre like a spindle whorl, and the night sky could be seen in its face. The hour was noon, but the stars and the mamalhuaztli could be seen in the face of that mirror. Moctezuma took it as a great and bad omen when he saw the stars and the mamalhuaztli.

"But when he looked at the mirror a second time, he saw a distant plain. People were moving across it, spread out in ranks and coming forward in great haste. They made war against each other and rode on the backs of animals resembling deer."
Codex Florentino

There was also whirlwind of dust that rose like a sleeve from the top of the Matlalcueye, now called the Sierra de Tlaxcala, and in the province of Tlaxcala, just before the arrival of the Spaniards, was a radiance that shone in the east every morning three hours before sunrise, in the form of a brilliant white cloud that rose to the sky. Then, to cap it all, Moctezuma was presented by his subjects with a number of two-headed men (tlacantzolli – 'men-squeezed-together') "but the moment he saw them, they all vanished away", and a woman's voice had been heard wailing in the warm Mexican nights, "O, my beloved sons, now we are on the point of going". At other times she cried: "My children, where shall I take you?". Or, so it is said.

Technology (and disease) won the day

Not for the first time, technology was about to change the course of history. The Spaniards brought with them not only a hunger for murder and theft, but also the distinct advantages of steel swords and armour, crossbows, horses, cannons and firearms – all unknown in the Americas at that time. Combine the ravages of a war of conquest with the diseases the conquerors brought, to which the Aztecs had no immunity, and it becomes plain why it was that within 20 years, an estimated 19 million Mexican natives – more than 95% of the population – were wiped out. Mexico didn’t stand a chance.

Despite the prophecy and the many dead Aztecs already in Cortés’s wake, and unaware of the doom that would very soon befall their nation, thousands of Indians came out to greet the strangers at Mexico’s great city, filling the lake with their canoes, calling out cheerful welcomes and crowding the wide, 15 kilometre-long causeway. The visitors were almost dumbstruck by the opulence of what they saw, result of the conquests accomplished by Itzcoatl, who ruled between 1428 and 1440.

“Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, nor whether what appeared before us was real,” wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo, “for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake, so many more ... and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we – we did not even number four hundred soldiers!”  

Most of what Westerners know of the history of the conquest of the New World comes from such writings of the winning side, but there are also Aztec accounts. An Aztec chronicler wrote of this event:

"The 'stags' [horses] came forward, carrying the soldiers on their backs. The soldiers were wearing cotton armour. They bore their leather shields and their iron spears in their hands, but their swords hung down from the necks of the 'stags'. 

"These animals wear little bells, they are adorned with many little bells. When the 'stags' gallop, the bells make a loud clamour, ringing and reverberating. 

"These 'stags', these 'horses', snort and bellow. They sweat a very great deal, the sweat pours from their bodies in streams. The foam from their muzzles drips onto the ground. It spins out in fat drops, like a lather of amole. 

"They make a loud noise when they run; they make a great din, as if stones were raining on the earth. Then the ground is pitted and scarred where they set down their hooves. It opens wherever their hooves touch it."   Source

“Welcome to your land, my lords!” called Moctezuma, who probably suspected the leading invader of being a god. He had been told by his spies that The emperor, dressed in as much finery as an Egyptian pharaoh or European emperor, and with hundreds of servants sweeping the path before him, in person courageously had been borne part of the way across the lake to meet the conquistadors.  

"Year 13-Rabbit. The Spaniards were sighted off the coast. Year I-Canestalk. The Spaniards came to the palace at Tlayacac. When the Captain arrived at the palace, Moctezuma sent the Cuetlaxtecal to greet him and to bring him two suns as gifts.

"One of these suns was made of the yellow metal, the other of the white. The Cuetlaxteca also brought him a mirror to be hung on his person, a gold collar, a great gold pitcher, fans and ornaments of quetzal feathers and a shield inlaid with mother-of-pearl. 

"The envoys made sacrifices in front of the Captain. At this, he grew very angry. When they offered him blood in an 'eagle dish', he shouted at the man who offered it and struck him with his sword. The envoys departed at once. 

"All the gifts which the Cuetlaxteca brought to the Captain were sent by Moctezuma. That is why the Cuetlaxteca went to meet the Captain at Tlayacac: he was only performing his duties as a royal envoy. 

"Then the Captain marched to Tenochtitlán. He arrived here during the month called Bird,8 under the sign of the day one hundred and twenty-eight 8-Wind. When he entered the city, we gave him chickens, eggs, corn, tortillas and drink. We also gave him firewood, and fodder for his 'deer'. Some of these gifts were sent by the lord of Tenochtitlán, the rest by the lord of Tlatelolco."
Account written in Nahuatl in 1528 by anonymous Aztec authors in Tlatelolco

Cortés brought with him a Native American woman as his common-law wife, called Doña Marina by the Spaniards and La Malinche (c.1505 - c.1529) by the Aztecs. La Malinche acted as his interpreter:

"Cortes spoke first: 'Are you Moctezuma? Are you the king? Is it true that you are the king, Moctezuma?'

"The king replied: 'Yes, I am Moctezuma.' Standing up, he came forward, bowed his head low, and said, 'Our lord, you are weary, the journey has tired you, but now you have arrived on the earth. You have come to your city, Mexico. You have come here to sit on your throne, to sit under its canopy.' The speech by Moctezuma was a long one. He finished up by saying, 'This was foretold by the kings who governed your city, and now it has taken place. You have come back to us; you have come down from the sky. Rest now, and take possession of your royal houses. Welcome to your land, my lord.'

"It was only after the speech was finished that La Malinche translated it to Cortes."
Codex Florentino

Hospitality and plunder

Taking him home to the palace of his predecessor Axayacatl, Moctezuma treated Cortés as an equal, granting his regal hospitality to the Spanish soldiers and according them every respect. On the roof of the temple, the emperor took the conquistador to show off to him the view of the rich, mighty, bustling city beneath them. Cortés later wrote of Tenochtitlán:

"Some of the soldiers among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a market place and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before."

However, it was very soon, on November 16, that the emperor’s honoured guest quietly commanded his armed guard to take the great emperor away, and they led him by the hand; strangely, Moctezuma went peacefully – and was never seen again. Cortés placed the Aztec emperor under house arrest and attempted to rule the Aztecs through the emperor. (Tensions later reached boiling point when Pedro de Alvarado (1495 - 1541), Cortés's lieutenant, ordered a massacre during the great Aztec spring festival of Huitzilopochtli. On November 13, 1521, Moctezuma’s nephew and successor, Cuahtemoc – his name is spelled Guatimozin in some sources – surrendered to Cortés.)

Following their easy victory, the conquistadors ransacked the palace where they found a secret vault so full of treasure that it took three days just to divide the spoils. The hoard: about 8 tons, most of it gold – at a time when the whole of Europe could boast no more than 90 tons of the precious metal. Europe’s search for easy money in the New World was finally starting to pay off.

*  Huitzilopochtli: Chief god of Tenochtitlán; God of War and of the Sun; his name means 'Blue Hummingbird on the Left' or 'Blue Hummingbird of the South', pronounced 'wee-tsee-loh-poch'-tlee'; he is represented as a hummingbird, or with the feathers of a hummingbird on his head and his left leg, with a black face and holding a snake, and a mirror. Huitzilopochtli's mother Coatlicue became pregnant with him when a ball of feathers fell from the heaven and touched her. He slew his sister Coyolxauhqui and tossed her head into the sky where it became the moon.

July 1, 1520 | La Noche Triste

Read how Cortés fled Tenochtitlán

August 13, 1521 The fall of Tenochtitlán