Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (25 page)

Cortés was now on dry land, away from the infernal causeways and the canoes, with room for his horses and phalanxes of swordsmen. In his fear and depression after the
Noche Triste
he did not yet realize amid the slaughter of his Castilians and Tlaxcalans that there were still thousands of Indians—Tepanecs, Totonacs, Chalcans, and fresh Tlaxcalans—who were not yet ready to join the Aztecs, but wavering still. Many were secretly eager for the Castilians to return to Tenochtitlán.

To Cortés the
Noche Triste
had been a great defeat. But for the most stalwart of the Aztecs’ native enemies, who provided food for the tables of the Aztec elite and their own bodies for the infernal Aztec gods, the thought that the caudillo’s army had pranced its way into the fortress city, kidnapped the hated emperor, and slaughtered thousands of Aztecs on their retreat was cause for wonder, not contempt. The tales that flew across the Valley of Mexico were not all of Aztec triumph over the Castilians; they also emphasized that the audacious and lethal white men had slashed their way out to safety along the frightful causeways. The reports stressed the butchery of the thousands of Aztecs, not merely the hundreds of Castilians killed. The new Aztec emperor, Cuitláhuac, might claim that his display cases of flayed skins and skulls were those of Cortés, Sandoval, and Alvarado, but the truth soon emerged that all three legendary killers were alive and determined to return. Even the Aztec ambassadors’ confident tales that some forty-five Castilians left behind in Tlaxcala had been waylaid and slaughtered en route to the coast made little impression. As the wavering tribes of Mexico weighed the odds and nursed their grievances over the yearly human tribute demanded by the Aztecs, a great many would prefer Castilian to Aztec brutality—and perhaps the strange Jesus Christ of the white killers they did not know to the bloodthirsty Huitzilopochtli they were only too familiar with.

Finally, it was rumored that a recent European arrival on the coast— purportedly an African slave from Narváez’s contingent—was ailing from smallpox. The Castilians, on the verge of extinction in summer 1520, had thus gained a new and unforeseen ally: a lethal bacillus amid a population without much immunity. New germs among people who slept in group huts, who were largely urban rather than rural dwellers, who communally ate and washed together, and who had neither biological nor cultural experience with European epidemics would soon wipe out hundreds of thousands—friendly, neutral, and hostile alike—killing far more Aztec warriors than the Toledo blades of the Castilians. On the morning of July 2, wet, wounded, and facing annihilation, little did Cortés and his pathetic band at Tlacopán know that in a few months his men would not only regain their reputation as the dreaded strangers with steel blades and thundering weapons but once again take on the appearance of supermen whom alone this terrible new curse of angry gods did not infect.

So Cortés on this July 2, 1520, gathered his men together and for the next few days lumbered out under constant harassment. Finally, about halfway back to the safety of the Tlaxcalans, at the small village of Otumba, the new Mexica emperor, Cuitláhuac, and his vast army caught up with the Castilians. The Spanish annals later claimed that 40,000 were assembled, a plausible number given the change of heart among the surrounding villages in the immediate vicinity of Tenochtitlán. The Mexicas quickly surrounded Cortés’s men and for the next six hours gradually beat them down, inasmuch as there were fewer than twenty horses left, all were wounded, and they were without cannon or harquebuses. Even skeptics concede that Cortés’s Spaniards may have been outnumbered on the Plain of Otumba by as much as a hundred to one.

As the Spaniards were nearing obliteration, Cortés spotted the commander of the Aztec line, the
cihuacoatl,
and his subordinates decked out in bright colors and gaudy feathers, the leader himself carrying the Aztec plumed standard on his back. Díaz del Castillo notes that Cortés was unimpressed by the terrible insignia, but instead selected Sandoval, Olid, Ávila, Alvarado, and Juan de Salamanca—the most deadly lancers of the age—and rode with them into the throng. “When Cortés saw him with many other Mexican chieftains all wearing great plumes, he said to our Captains: ‘Now, Señores, let us break through them and leave none of them unwounded’ ” (B. Díaz del Castillo,
The Discovery and Conquest of
Mexico,
320). Despite vast numerical superiority and the recent victory on the causeways, the Aztecs were defenseless against mounted attacks on the plains and dense ranks of swordsmen—and the Plain of Otumba was tailor-made for Spanish horsemen. None of the Mexicas had ever encountered a mounted enemy that charged directly at their
cihuacoatl.
With their leader torn apart by the lancers, and the Aztec war banner in Spanish hands, thousands fled back to Tenochtitlán.

The battle at Otumba, coming as it did just eight days after the
Noche
Triste,
was in many ways Cortés’s greatest victory. In a famous passage William Prescott noted the role of discipline, military science, and the personal leadership of Hernán Cortés in the sudden reversal of Aztec fortune (Cuitláhuac, as Montezuma before, kept out of the fighting):

The Indians were in all their strength, while the Christians were wasted by disease, famine, and long protracted sufferings; without cannon or firearms, and deficient in the military apparatus which had so often struck terror into their barbarian foe,—deficient even in the terrors of a victorious name. But they had discipline on their side, desperate resolve, and implicit confidence in their commander. (
History of the Conquest of Mexico,
465)

When at last Cortés fought his way to safety at Tlaxcala, many of his men, especially the few surviving late-comers who had joined him after defecting from his archenemy Narváez, were spent and tired of Mexico. Most were ready to march to Vera Cruz to find passage back to Cuba. Others were furious that Juan Páez, left behind in Tlaxcala when Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, had stayed put—although he had a force of thousands of Tlaxcalans who were eager to march to the relief of the beleaguered conquistadors when they learned that they and their kinsmen were trapped in the Aztec capital. In addition, news reached the exhausted army of the ambush and slaughter of an auxiliary of forty-five Spaniards who had attempted to reach Vera Cruz.

Then Cortés only made things worse: he announced that he would confiscate all the gold carried out of the city to pay for provisions. He also forbade any of the survivors to march to the coast to find a ship home. Francisco López de Gómara wrote of their grumbling:

What does Cortés think he is doing? Why does he want to keep us here to die the evil death? What has he got against us that he won’t let us go? Our heads are broken, our bodies are rotting and covered with wounds and sores, bloodless, weak, and naked. We are in a strange land, poor, sick, surrounded by enemies, and without hope of rising from the spot where we fall. We would be fools and idiots if we should let ourselves in for another risk like the past one. Unlike him, we do not wish to die a fool’s death, for he, in his insatiable thirst for glory and authority, thinks nothing of dying himself, and still less of our death. He does not consider the fact that he is without men, guns, arms, and horses (which bear the brunt of war), and has no provisions, which is the worst lack of all. (
Cortés,
228)

No one could envision that in a mere thirteen months Hernán Cortés would return to Tenochtitlán, kill thousands, and then end the Aztec nation forever.

The
Destruction
of
Tenochtitlán—April 28–August
13,
1521

Once the Castilians reached safety at the Tlaxcalan town of Hueyotlipan on July 9, 1520, their plight improved incrementally during the rest of the year. In July the Tlaxcalans agreed to a perpetual alliance—they had the wherewithal to muster nearly 50,000 warriors from their allied domains—in exchange for a share of the booty from Tenochtitlán, perpetual relief from tribute, and a fortified presence inside the city once the Aztec capital was conquered. During August Cortés re-formed his army and at the head of thousands of Tlaxcalans stormed the fortress of Tepeaca and began systematically to overrun its surrounding villages. In September the brilliant Martín López was given the best craftsmen in the army, thousands of Tlaxcalan workers, and the salvaged hardware from the destroyed ships in Vera Cruz, and told to build fourteen brigantines that could be dismantled, carried over the mountains to Tenochtitlán, reassembled, and then launched on Lake Texcoco.

By the end of that month the virulent smallpox epidemic had made its way from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán. Thousands of Mexicas began dying from what they at first thought was a mysterious skin ailment. Years later Mexica survivors related to Bernardino de Sahagún the terrible symptoms; he in turn recorded their accounts in near Thucydidean fashion:

Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great many died from this plague and many others of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. Some people came down with a milder form of the disease; they suffered less than the others and made a good recovery. But they could not escape entirely. Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a sore broke out, it gouged an ugly pockmark in the skin. And a few of the survivors were left completely blind. (M. León-Portilla, ed.,
The Broken
Spears,
85–86)

Montezuma’s successor, Cuitláhuac, who had attacked Cortés at Otumba, fell to the disease and was replaced by the younger and more audacious Cuauhtémoc. The latter would eventually surrender a destroyed Tenochtitlán—the third Aztec emperor in less than a year to deal with Hernán Cortés.

This strange sequence of events that gradually turned Cortés’s ruined army into a terrible force of vengeance against the Aztecs continued unabated. In the late fall of 1520 seven squadrons of ships docked in Vera Cruz, adding another two hundred men to Cortés’s remnant of four hundred to five hundred conquistadors. For the first time in six months, there were fresh horses and plenty of powder, cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. Cortés, in addition, sent ships to Hispaniola and Jamaica for even more horses and arms. Meanwhile, for much of December 1520 while he was putting down the Tepeacans, the ever-dependable Sandoval had conquered all the tribes between Tlaxcala and the coast, and thus ensured safe transit of supplies from Vera Cruz to the conquistadors’ headquarters in Tlaxcala. If the huge city of Tenochtitlán was amply supplied by water transport, the Spanish had the entire Atlantic to draw in supplies in safety at Vera Cruz. But whereas Cortés could build a fleet to cut off the canoes of Tenochtitlán, no Aztec warrior had a clue how to prevent the “floating mountains” from docking at Vera Cruz with even more of the infernal whiteskins and their thunderous weapons.

By new year 1521, Cortés had pacified most of the hostile tribes between Vera Cruz and Tenochtitlán and had gained plentiful supplies and additional soldiers. He was in the midst of an enormous shipbuilding program to ensure naval protection when his infantry and cavalry returned to the causeways on the lake. Cortés may have started his march back to Tenochtitlán with some 550 Spanish infantrymen—still only half as many Castilians who had fled the city the prior June—including 80 harquebusiers and crossbowmen, along with at least forty fresh horses and nine new cannon. In addition, he selected 10,000 of the best Tlaxcalan warriors, as preparations were made for the march on the satellite cities that surrounded Tenochtitlán. By early April 1521 the new army was on the outskirts of the Mexica capital, the ships were readied for launching, and roving parties had systematically begun to cut off food and water supplies to the city. This second offensive had none of the pretense of conciliation and alliance of the first “visit.” After the
Noche Triste
Cortés was intent on either obtaining the unconditional surrender of the new emperor, Cuauhtémoc, and his people or defeating the Aztec army in battle. Should the Aztecs not capitulate, the Castilians would destroy Tenochtitlán block by block and turn it over to the Tlaxcalans to loot— reminiscent of the manner in which Alexander had leveled Thebes and then allowed the surrounding Boeotians to rob, enslave, and kill the survivors with impunity.

In late April, after six months of constant campaigning in the surrounding countryside to amputate the Aztec tributary empire, Cortés’s reconstituted army was back on the causeways and blockading Tenochtitlán. Most of the cities on the lakeshore and in the Valley of Mexico were subdued or had joined Cortés. A year earlier it may have been unwise for the Spanish to enter an island fortress city, but now Cortés was eager to prove it was even more foolish for the Mexicas to stay in it, as the Castilians’ former besiegers would become the besieged. By April 28, 1521, Martín López’s flat-bottomed brigantines—masted, oared, decked with cannon, and bristling with crossbowmen and harquebusiers—were over the mountains, reassembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco, ensuring that the Aztec canoes could no longer attack the Castilians on the causeways. In a world without horses or oxen—or even the wheel—an enormous city of a quarter million like Tenochtitlán could only be supplied by water. Indeed, its daily survival depended on tons of maize, fish, fruits, and vegetables shipped over the lake by thousands of canoes. The destruction of that fleet would not only cripple Aztec military power but starve the city into submission.