Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (26 page)

With shouts of “Castilla, Castilla, Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala!” Cortés led his Spanish-Indian army toward Tenochtitlán itself. While contemporary observers put the coalition’s size at nearly half a million, the invading army more likely numbered around 50,000 to 75,000. With last-minute reinforcements from Vera Cruz, it was spearheaded by some 700 to 800 Castilian foot soldiers, 90 horsemen, 120 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, and three large cannon, as well as smaller falconets and the firepower of the fourteen brigantines. Many Castilians also had new steel helmets, swords, occasional breastplates, and shields, in addition to spare parts for their firearms.

Cortés’s plan was simple. His three veteran knights—Alvardo, Olid, and Sandoval—would each lead a quarter of the army along the three main levees into the city. The causeway to Tlacopán would for a while be left open but guarded, to allow fugitives to flee the siege. Cortés himself would take the fourth component and embark on the brigantines, with some three hundred Castilians, about twenty-five men to a ship. In addition, thousands of Texcocans and Tlaxcalans would follow in boats— Ixtlilxochitl, the leader of the Texcocans, would later claim his people manned 16,000 canoes in Cortés’s armada. The combined fleet would aid the three land assaults, enforce the blockade, and destroy the enemy vessels.

By June 1, 1521, Cortés had cut entirely the city’s supply of fresh water and stormed the island fortress of Tepepolco, which the Mexicas used to coordinate their attacks on the multipronged Castilian invasions. The Spaniards deemed that the siege had officially begun on May 30, when they had blockaded the city’s sources of supply—later memorializing the destruction of Tenochtitlán as “the seventy-five days” between May 30 and August 13, 1521. But progress remained difficult for the rest of the summer as the Aztecs still vastly outnumbered the invaders. They placed sharp sticks in the mud of the lake to tear up the brigantines and swarmed all over the flagship, the
Capitana.
Had it not been for the courageous Martín López—in some ways the most impressive of Cortés’s men—and a small group of swordsmen, who rallied to expel the Aztec boarders and slaughter those who would bind and drag off the caudillo, both the
Capitana
and its captain would have been captured.

The Castilians were also learning that they not only had to defeat the Aztec army but had to storm the city and raze it to the ground if they were to crush all resistance. The four-pronged Spanish attack would slowly advance along the causeways, enter the suburbs, and then retreat back to safety during the evening. Success was determined by the degree to which Cortés could fill in breaches in the dikes and keep the causeways intact. That way, the Spaniards could move freely, as they began to dismantle the city blocks of Tenochtitlán, tearing down temples, walls, and houses. Gradually, the horsemen, crossbowmen, and harquebusiers gained room to operate and found clear lines of fire, while eliminating the source of ambushes in corners and narrow streets. Cortés drew on 2,000 years of European siegecraft—the ancient Hellenic science of poliorcetics (“fencing in the polis”)—that addressed the target city’s supply of water, food, and sanitation, as artillery, sorties, and missile attack were concentrated on weak places in the Aztec defenses to augment nature’s assault of hunger and plague.

If the Spanish proceeded too far inside Tenochtitlán proper—where they could be ambushed and swarmed, while their levees of retreat were breached—they faced annihilation. But if the brigantines kept the causeways passable, then each day the attackers could cross into the city, destroy another block or two, kill hundreds more Aztecs, and then retreat during the night to their fortified compounds. Usually, foot soldiers advanced, supported by the fire of cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows, slashing away at the unarmored Aztecs with their Toledo blades. At key moments, dozens of mounted mailed lancers would charge concentrations of the enemy or ambush the Mexicas when at dusk they rashly pursued the retreating foot soldiers. By late June the emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had seen the futility of Aztec tactics and radically revised his defenses by removing most of the surviving population of Tenochtitlán proper—warriors, civilians, and even the idols and effigies of the gods from the Great Temple— to the adjoining northern island suburb of Tlatelolco. This was a wise move: the change of defense drew in the Spaniards, who wrongly believed the Aztecs were defeated and fleeing. In addition, the Castilians were unaware that Tlatelolco was a far more crowded precinct, far more suitable for urban warfare than the broad avenues of the mostly destroyed Tenochtitlán.

The key to the entire struggle was to deny the Spaniards room for their horses to charge, space for their infantry to form into ranks, and clear lines of vision for their artillery and firearms. Now as the battle shifted to Tlatelolco, the Tlatelolcons joined the Aztecs in swarming the Castilians in the winding and narrow streets and cutting the causeways to the mainland. Cortés himself was unhorsed and for the third time nearly dragged off; Cristóbal de Olea and an unnamed Tlaxcalan hacked away at the enraged Mexicas, severing their hands and thus saving their caudillo. In the initial ambush at Tlatelolco, more than fifty Spaniards were bound and dragged off and twenty more killed, as thousands of Tlaxcalans paid for the Castilians’ impetuosity by being killed or captured. One brigantine was sunk and another precious cannon lost.

The Mexicas immediately beheaded some of their captives, waving them in front of the retreating Spaniards, claiming them to be Cortés and his officers: “So we shall kill you, as we have killed Malinche and Sandoval.” Once the Spaniards reached safety, the sound of drums was heard. Bernal Díaz del Castillo recalls what followed:

When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole. (
The Discovery and Conquest of
Mexico
, 436)

The Spanish feared a repeat of the
Noche Triste.
The Mexicas yelled at the Tlaxcalans, throwing them roasted legs of their captured brethren and pieces of the Castilians. “Eat of the flesh of these Teules [Castilians] and of your brothers, for we are already glutted with it, and you can stuff yourselves with this” (
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
, 437). When news spread throughout Cortés’s Indian alliance that the Aztecs were eating Spanish flesh, and dozens of bound conquistadors were feathered and marched up the steps of the pyramid to their deaths, nearly the entire Indian alliance suddenly collapsed. Most indigenous leaders feared the return of the Aztec terror, realizing that the Europeans themselves were as vulnerable before the hungry Aztec gods as they themselves had been before the Spanish arrival. Meanwhile, Cortés and his men nursed their wounds and regrouped as Cuauhtémoc rallied his allies, sought new support, and sent the body parts of captured Castilians and their horses among the villages around Lake Texcoco as proof of the Spaniards’ failure. But then an odd thing happened—or perhaps a predictable occurrence, given the earlier Mexica failure to follow up immediately on the morning after the
Noche Triste.
The Aztecs for most of July did not storm the beleaguered Spanish compounds. Hunger, disease, the great destruction of their city, and thousands of battle casualties had decimated their army. Once again, it was almost as if the Aztecs were dispirited after their dramatic victory. Killing and sacrificing Castilians did not stop the invaders, even as Cortés grew more confident after a setback.

By the latter part of July the wearied Aztecs could no longer cut the dikes, thereby ensuring the Castilians free access in and out of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. Supplies from Vera Cruz reached Cortés uninterrupted. His men fabricated additional gunpowder by lowering themselves into Mount Popocatépetl to fetch the critical ingredient of sulfur. Aztec deserters confirmed that Tenochtitlán was starving and the eighteen-year-old emperor increasingly unable to marshal an effective resistance. Cortés in his famous third letter to Charles V described the desperate plight of the Aztecs:

The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it. Countless numbers of men, women, and children came toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned amid the multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench. So that we should not discover the plight in which they were in, they dared neither throw these bodies into the water where the brigantines might find them nor throw them beyond their boundaries where the soldiers might see them, and so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them. (
Letters from Mexico
, 263–64)

Castilian horsemen roamed the dikes at will and slaughtered hundreds who emerged from their hovels in Tlatelolco searching for food. The Tlaxcalans became increasingly hard to rein in; they roamed the city butchering—and occasionally eating—any of the Mexicas they found. On August 13 Sandoval and García Holguín caught Cuauhtémoc fleeing in a canoe. Both fought over honors for the prize of his capture, prompting Cortés to intervene, in the manner, he mused, that Marius and Sulla had fought over the shackled Numidian king Jugurtha. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the allied prince of Texcoco, Ixtlilxochitl, who wrote a history from the allied Indian side decades after the conquest, related Cuauhtémoc’s surrender speech.

Ah Captain, I have already done everything in my power to defend my kingdom and free it from your hands. And since my fortune has not been favorable, take my life, which would be very just. And with this you will put an end to the Mexican Kingdom, since you have destroyed my kingdom and vassals. (
Ally of Cortés,
52)

Cortés would spare the young emperor, then drag him along during his disastrous expedition to Honduras—only shamelessly to hang him in transit in 1523 on trumped-up charges that he was inciting revolt among the Indian allies.

Since the city had been cut off in late May, more than 100,000 Aztecs had fallen in the fighting, along with at least a hundred Castilians and 20,000 Indian allies. But that was a small percentage of the actual losses in the two-year struggle for Mexico City. Disease, hunger, and constant fighting had essentially wiped out the population of Tenochtitlán. The final tally of the dead would eventually reach more than 1 million of the peoples surrounding Lake Texcoco. In the entire two-year campaign since Cortés had marched in from Vera Cruz, Spanish losses were no more than 1,000 out of some 1,600 who had at various times fought for Tenochtitlán.

The eventual carnage was to be even more appalling. In the ensuing decades smallpox was followed by measles, bubonic plague, then flu, whooping cough, and mumps, reducing the population of central Mexico from more than 8 million when Cortés landed to well below a million a half century later. In less than two years Cortés and his tiny army had inaugurated a chain of events that changed the face of an entire subcontinent and destroyed a civilization.

AZTEC WAR

Misconceptions and stereotypes abound concerning the Aztecs at war. Too often Mesoamericans are seen as little more than bizarre savages who fought in hordes solely to facilitate human sacrifice on a vast scale, captive-takers whose queer rules of engagement preempted real killing on the battlefield. More recently, apologists have reinvented them as New World Greeks whose impressive architecture symbolized an enlightened and progressive civilization that did not really sacrifice or eat fellow humans, and saw no reason to craft military technology they did not need. In fact, the Aztecs were neither Greeks nor savages, but shrewd theocratic imperialists who had ruthlessly created a loosely knit political empire based on the perception of terror, backed up by a deadly army, and fueled by a vast system of tribute.

What differentiated Aztec from European warfare were its far greater cultural and geographical constraints. Without horses or oxen, or even the wheel, the operational range of Aztec armies was limited by the amount of food and supplies their human porters could carry along. As Tenochtitlán expanded its influence in Mesoamerica, as the size of the city grew, and as war became even more predictable, the political organization of the entire Mexican subcontinent grew more vulnerable to attack: Europeans might topple the entire imperial structure by decapitating a tiny elite on an island city, which needed thousands of tons of food shipped in daily for its very survival.

Wars ceased for brief periods between October and April—precisely the time Cortés entered Tenochtitlán in November 1519—to allow agricultural laborers to work the harvests. Fighting was rare altogether in the rainy period between May and September, while battle at night was also discouraged. In contrast, the Spaniards, as a maritime people in a temperate climate, and as veterans of the murderous wars in Europe and on the Mediterranean, were willing and able to fight year round, day or night, at home and abroad, on land and sea, with few natural or human restrictions.

Many confrontations between the Aztecs and their neighbors began as “flower wars”
(xochiyaoyotl).
These staged contests, without much killing between elite warriors of either side, revealed Aztec superiority— through the greater training, zeal, and battle experience of its warriors— hence the futility of real armed insurrection. Should the enemy persist in resistance, flower wars might escalate into full-fledged battles of conquest designed to defeat an enemy outright and annex its territory. In that regard, we should assume that the creation of the Aztec empire had resulted in hundreds of thousands of Mesoamericans killed in wars during the fifteenth century alone.

Whereas Mesoamerican warriors were adept at handling weapons, there were two further factors that inhibited their ability to slay enemy soldiers in vast numbers outright. In all wars the taking of captives for human sacrifices was important proof of individual battle excellence and social status and was deemed critical to the religious health of the community at large. More often still, sacrifices were shrewd occasions for nightmarish intimidation, spectacles of bloodletting to warn potential adversaries of the consequences of resistance. For example, the Aztec king Ahuitzotl purportedly organized the butchery of 80,400 prisoners during a four-day blood sacrifice at the 1487 inauguration of the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán—an enormous challenge in industrialized murder in its own right. Ahuitzotl’s killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau. The presence of four convex killing tables—so arranged that the victims could be easily kicked down the pyramid—turned human sacrifice into an assembly-line process. Companies of fresh executioners periodically replaced those exhausted from the repeated obsidian-blade strokes, to ensure that the entire train of victims could be dispatched during the festival. We do not know the number of victims otherwise sacrificed under normal conditions, but surely it was in the thousands. Ixtlilxochitl believed that one of every five children of Mexica tributaries was killed each year, though Bishop Don Carlos Zumárraga’s lower estimate of 20,000 a year is more plausible. Oddly, few scholars have ever likened the Aztec propensity to wipe out thousands of their neighbors through carefully organized killing to the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and other eastern Europeans.

Although under dire circumstances Aztecs could fight to the death, the warrior’s training in the methods of stunning, binding, and passing back captives through the ranks would prove an impediment against the Spanish. Scholars who argue that the Aztecs quickly dropped their notions of ritual fighting against Cortés are correct, but they must concede that years of such military training were hard for many warriors to discard in a few months—especially when pitted against Spanish swordsmen and pikemen who had drilled since adolescence in the art of killing with a single stroke.

To what degree such rituals were predicated on technological constraints we cannot be sure, but the tools of Aztec warfare—oak, stone, flint, obsidian, hide, and cotton—were incapable in themselves of killing warriors in any great numbers. Broadswords
(machuahuitl)
and spears
(tepoztopilli)
were wooden, with flakes of obsidian embedded along their double cutting edges. Both could match the sharpness of metal, but only for a few strokes before chipping or losing their edge. Aztec swords were without points, while the stone heads of lances likewise made them poor thrusting weapons.

Since the aristocratic infantry arm of the Aztec military was singularly inefficient against Spanish foot soldiers and cavalry, native commanders depended upon an array of missile weapons that might penetrate the unprotected arms, legs, necks, and faces of Cortés’s men. A peculiar type of spear-thrower
(atlatl)
was made from a wooden stick about two feet in length, with grooves and hook at one end in which to place the projectile. Fire-hardened darts
(tlacochti)
were occasionally flint-tipped; when used with the
atlatl
these missiles could achieve accurate ranges of 150 feet. But they were essentially useless against metal armor and at great distances incapable of tearing even through layered cotton. The Aztecs used simple, rather than composite, bows
(tlahuitolli).
While they could achieve a rapid rate of fire with more than twenty arrows
(yaomitl)
per quiver, such weapons lacked the penetrating power and distance of European models that since classical antiquity had been fabricated from glued horn, hide, and wood.

Many accounts testify to the danger of Aztec stone missiles; and while native slingers were without metal bullets and sophisticated slings, nevertheless they were able to wound unprotected flesh at ranges approaching a hundred yards. The Aztecs’ wood, hide, and feathered shields, like cotton war suits, might ward off Mesoamerican stone blades but were of no value against Toledo steel, metal crossbow bolts, or harquebus shot. It is an accurate generalization that Montezuma’s arms were of an inferior caliber to the artillery, missile weapons, body armor, and offensive armament of Alexander the Great’s army some eighteen centuries prior.

Mexico had all the natural resources necessary for a sophisticated arms industry. There was no shortage of plentiful iron ores at Taxco. Copper was in abundance in Michoacán. The volcano Popocatépetl furnished supplies of sulfur. Indeed, within a year of the conquest Cortés himself, against the edicts of the crown, was producing gunpowder and casting muskets and even large cannon in the former domains of the Aztecs. Why amid such a cornucopia of ingredients for munitions did the Mexicas produce only clubs, blades of obsidian chips, and javelins and bows and arrows? The most popular explanations suggest need. Because Aztec warfare was designed largely to capture rather than kill, stone blades were sufficient against similarly armed Mesoamericans. The implication is that the Aztecs
could
have fabricated weapons comparable to the Europeans’, but saw no need for such additional expense in their brand of ritually crafted warfare whose aim was to stun rather than cause death. Yet such claims of latent technological know-how are preposterous for a culture without a sophisticated rational tradition of natural inquiry. The opposite is more likely to be true: the Aztecs had no ability to craft metals or firearms and so were forced to fight ritual wars with weapons that would largely wound and not easily kill. Against a large and fierce army such as the Tlaxcalans, it is hard to envision how the Aztecs, despite vast numerical superiority, might have waged a war of annihilation with nonmetallic weapons—explaining why Tlaxcala was largely autonomous, and settled its disputes with the Aztecs through quasi-ceremonial flower wars.

Aztec battle, like Zulu fighting or the attacks of Germanic tribes, was one of envelopment. Swarms of warriors systematically attempted to surround the enemy, the front lines mobbing and stunning their adversaries, before passing them through the rear ranks to be bound and led off. The ensuing need to march prisoners back with the army also contributed to the Aztecs’ inability to campaign at large distances, since the combined throng of victors and defeated only increased logistical requirements. While there was a national Aztec army, in fact local contingents thronged around their own captains and might exit the field altogether should their leaders or standards go down. Francisco de Aguilar relates the desperate fighting at Otumba, after the
Noche Triste:

As Cortés battled his way among the Indians, performing marvels in singling out and killing their captains who were distinguishable by their gold shields, and disregarding the common warriors, he was able to reach their captain general and kill him with a thrust of a lance. . . . While this was going on, we foot soldiers under Diego de Ordaz were completely surrounded by Indians, who almost had their hands on us, but when Captain Hernándo Cortés killed their captain general they began to retreat and give way to us, so that few of them pursued us. (P. de Fuentes, Conquistadors, 156)

Relays of soldiers might enter the fray every fifteen minutes or so, as there was no concept of decisive shock battle in which heavily armed foot soldiers sought to collide head-on with the enemy at the first encounter. Ranks and files were nonexistent; warriors failed to charge and retreat in step or on command; missiles and arrows were not launched in volleys. Nor were missile troops used in concert with infantry charges. Without horses, Aztec battle doctrine was largely a one-dimensional affair, in which the greater training and numbers of the emperor’s warriors, together with the pomp and circumstance of feathered warriors and standards, were enough to collapse or scare off resistance.

Finally, Aztec society was far more ranked than even aristocratic sixteenth-century Spain. The weapons, training, armor, and position in battle of most Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence—and then led again to even more privilege. The Spanish were a class-bound society as well, but during the invasion, a variety of lowly conquistadors mounted horses as the military situation demanded. Harquebuses, crossbows, and steel blades were distributed freely throughout the army. The fuel that drove Cortés’s army was not so much aristocratic privilege as a desperate desire by both hidalgos and the impoverished to acquire enough money and fame to advance upward in Castilian society. On the battlefield itself, the result was that in matters of weapons, tactics, recruitment, and leadership the Spanish army operated on meritocratic principles of sheer killing: men and tools were trained and designed to dismember people first and provide social advancement, prestige, and religious rewards second. Killing was more likely to result in status than status was in killing.