Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (28 page)

All the conquistadors shared a clear-cut agenda to crush indigenous opposition, loot the countryside for gold, convert heathens to Christianity, enjoy the local women, father mestizo children—Cortés seems to have had several—and then establish local estates and baronies in which landed Spanish magníficos might oversee vast gangs of Indian laborers in exporting New World foods and bullion. In his early twenties Cortés announced in his first year in the New World that he would either “dine to the sound of trumpets or die on the scaffold,” and then spent much of his twenties and early thirties amassing a fortune from gold mining and ranching on Cuba—capital to help finance an expedition to the new lands of Mexico that might bring in even more fortune.

Given free rein to explore and conquer an unknown Caribbean world between 1492 and 1540, within fifty years the conquistadors were anachronistic curiosities, if not nuisances altogether. Witness the decline in the fortunes of Cortés and his caballeros within a decade of the conquest of 1521. The great critic of Spanish imperialism in the New World, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, railed against the “forty years” (1502–42) in which a handful of his countrymen, through military conquest, disease, and economic exploitation, had wiped out the population of the Caribbean basin. By 1550 Spanish America was a world of bureaucrats, miners, and priests, with no room for impoverished Castilian loose cannon, who wished to intrigue without supervision in the affairs of the crown and pope and thereby ruin others’ more careful work of extracting souls and gold from the people and soil of the Americas. King and church alike were coming to understand that men like Cortés had a disturbing tendency to flay, rather than shear, the sheep of the New World, and they spared no effort in ensuring that the era of the conquistador was over just a few years after its inception.

This first generation who settled and exploited the Caribbean basin were tough men like Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, seasoned from Columbus’s second voyage and the final battles to free Granada; Francisco de Garay, ruler of newfound Jamaica, another veteran of the Columbus explorations and in-law to the famous explorer; and Pedro Arias Dávila, caudillo of Panama, battle-hardened survivor of the Spanish civil wars, and at seventy-eight, the most ruthless of the Spanish governors. Hernán Cortés himself was a native of Medellín, the son of a legendary soldier with fifty years of military service for the crown.

The conquistadors were a world apart from the priests and men of the quill who followed to solidify and bureaucratize what these far more brutal men had won by the sword, men who shared what to us now seems an uneven morality: slaughtering unarmed Indians in battle brought no odium, nor did turning an entire conquered population into gangs of indentured serfs. In contrast, human sacrifice, cannibalism, transvestitism, and sodomy provoked moral indignation and outrage, as did the absence of clothes, private property, monogamy, and steady physical labor. Much of the Castilian ethical world was predicated on professed status, manners, and the presumption of civilization, not fundamental questions of life and death:

The member of a civilized polity, then, as conceived by the sixteenth-century Spaniard, was a town-dweller who was dressed in doublet and hose, and wore his hair short. His house was not overrun with fleas and ticks. He ate his meals at a table and not on the ground. He did not indulge in unnatural vice, and if he committed adultery he was punished for it. His wife—who was his only wife and not one among several—did not carry her children on her back like a monkey, and he expected his son and not his nephew to succeed to his inheritance. He did not spend his time getting drunk; and he had a proper sense of respect for property—his own and other people’s. . . . (J. Elliott,
Spain and Its World,
55–56)

SPANISH RATIONALISM

The legacy of Cortés’s men and of men like them was brilliant military conquest—and the decimation of the indigenous population of the Caribbean and Mexico in a mere thirty years through military conquest, the destruction of native agricultural practice, and the inadvertent importation of smallpox, measles, and influenza. Like the “Hellene” Alexander the Great, the “Christian” Cortés slaughtered thousands, looted imperial treasuries, destroyed and founded cities, tortured and murdered—and claimed he had done it all for the betterment of mankind. His letters to Charles V proclaiming interest in establishing a brotherhood among all natives and Spaniards read a great deal like Alexander’s oath at Opis (324 B.C.), in which he proclaimed a new world embracing all races and religions. In both cases the body count told a different tale.

The conquistadors were far from ignorant fanatics. For all their religious devoutness, they did not live in the mythic world of the Mexicas— Montezuma sent an array of wizards and necromancers to hex and bewitch the approaching Castilians—but in a romantic cosmos that, ultimately despite its wild tales and improbable rumors, ceded to sensory perception and hard data. The Spaniards, for all their bluster, did not believe that the Mexicas were superhuman agents of the devil, but sophisticated indigenous tribes, who could be met, thwarted, and conquered through a combination of political intrigue and Castilian arms. The Mexicas were as unfamiliar to the Spaniards as the Spaniards were to the Mexicas, but the difference—besides the obvious fact that the Spaniards, not the Mexicas, had sailed halfway around the world to conquer an unknown people—was that Cortés’s men drew on a 2,000-year-old tradition that might account for strange phenomena without resorting to religious exegesis. Through sense perception, reliance on a prior body of abstract knowledge, and inductive reasoning, the Castilians quickly sized up the political organization of Tenochtitlán, the military capability of its army, and the general religion of the Mexica nation.

They had never seen anything like the Mexica priests with their matted hair, caked blood, and cloaks of human skins, nor mass sacrifices or the rites of tearing bleeding hearts from drugged victims. But they soon surmised that these Indian holy men were no gods. For all the rhetoric of the Catholic church, they were not even devils, but humans, conducting some sort of bizarre religious rites which might logically incur the hatred of their subjugated allies. Christianity told them the Aztec religion was evil; but the European intellectual tradition gave them the tools to investigate it, probe its weakness, and eventually destroy it. In contrast, the Aztecs for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies.

Cortés himself was half-educated, and for a time worked as a notary, studied Latin, and read Caesar’s
Gallic Wars,
Livy, and other classical military histories. At least some of his success in the darkest hours of the Mexica wars was due to his mesmerizing oratory, laced with classical allusions to Cicero and Aristotle and punctuated with Latin phrases from the Roman historians and playwrights. Spain, we must remember, in the first century B.C. during the latter days of the Roman Republic and early years of the Principate, was the intellectual center of Europe, producing moral philosophers such as the elder and younger Senecas, the poet Martial, and the agronomist Columella.

Although the Inquisition and religious intolerance that were sweeping Spain would soon isolate the Iberian Peninsula from the main centers of learning in northern Europe, leading to clear decline by 1650, in the sixteenth century the Spanish military was still at the cutting edge of military technology and abstract tactical science. Many of the men who marched with Cortés were not merely notaries, bankrupt hidalgos, and priests acquainted with Latin literature but avid readers of contemporary Spanish political and scientific tracts. More important, they were trained as bureaucrats and lawyers in the inductive method of adducing evidence, prior precedent, and law to prove a point before an audience of supposedly disinterested peers.

Cortés’s conquistadors may not have been intellectuals, but they were equipped with the finest weapons of sixteenth-century Europe and buttressed by past experience of fighting the Moor, Italian, and Turk. The fundamentals of some two millennia of abstract Western military science, from fortification, siegecraft, battle tactics, ballistics, and cavalry maneuver to logistics, pike and sword fighting, and medical treatment in the field ensured that it would take literally hundreds of Mexicas to kill each Castilian. When rushed and swarmed, the Spaniards fell in rank and file, fought in unison with unquestioning discipline, and fired group volleys. In the myriad sudden and unexpected crises that arose each week, Cortés and his close advisers—the brilliant Martín López, the courageous and steady Sandoval, and the mercurial Alvarado—did not merely pray but coolly met, argued, and worked out a tactical or mechanical solution to salvage their blunder of marching into an island fortress of thousands. Cortés also worried that his actions would be recorded, criticized, audited, and made known to thousands back in Spain.

Spanish individualism was evident throughout. The most unlikely came forward with ideas—some half-baked, like the veteran of the Italian wars who, as powder grew short, convinced Cortés that he could build a vast catapult (it would prove an utter failure). There was a familiarity between soldiers and general that was unknown among the Mexicas: no Aztec warrior might dare approach Montezuma or his successor Cuauhtémoc to propose a new approach to ship construction, tactics, and logistics. Just as Alexander’s “Companions” enjoyed a level of intimacy with their king unimaginable between Darius and his Immortals, so Cortés ate, slept, and was rebuked by his caballeros in a manner unthinkable among the Mexicas.

Westerners had ventured in non-Western lands to travel, write, and record since the emergence of the Ionian logographers of the sixth century B.C. Periegetics such as Cadmus, Dionysius, Charon, Damastes, and Hecataeus—ultimately to be followed in Asia and Egypt by explorers and conquerors like the Athenian imperialists, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and Alexander the Great—had written didactic treatises on Persia
(Persica)
and voyages outside Greece
(Periploi).
In contrast, during Xerxes’ great invasion of Greece (480 B.C.), the king apparently had little, if any, information about the nature of the Hellenic city-states.

This rich Hellenic tradition of natural inquiry was continued by Roman merchants, explorers, conquerors, and scientists whose canvas widened to include the entire Mediterranean, northern Africa, and Europe. Unlike the Aztec emperors, Cortés had the benefit of an anthropological tradition of written literature describing foreign phenomena and peoples, cataloging and evaluating them, and making sense of their natural environment that went back to Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Pliny—the age-old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is inexplicable to the god Reason, if only the investigator has enough empirical data and the proper inductive method. Montezuma either feared or worshiped the novelty that he could not explain; Cortés sought to explain the novelty that he neither feared nor worshiped. In the end that is one reason why Tenochtitlán and not Vera Cruz—let alone Seville—would lie in ruins.

WHY DID THE CASTILIANS WIN?

The
Inexplicable

Nearly a quarter million people lived in the twin island cities of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. More than a million more Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas surrounding the lake were tributary subjects of the Aztec empire. Even more people outside the Valley of Mexico gave Tenochtitlán their obeisance. The great marketplace of Tenochtitlán could hold 60,000 people. The city itself was larger than most of the major urban centers of Europe—Seville, the largest city in Spain, had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. Ingeniously crafted causeways with numerous drawbridges, a huge stone aqueduct, pyramid temples larger (in volume) than those in Egypt, and fleets of thousands of canoes on an engineered lake made the island fortress impregnable and an architectural marvel.

Floating gardens, zoos of exotic tropical animals, and an enormous privileged religious and political elite, bedecked in gold, jewels, and exotic feathers, intrigued Cortés’s men enough to swear in contemporary accounts that no city in Europe could rival Tenochtitlán in wealth, power, beauty, and size. Yet within two years a tiny Castilian force—without sure supply lines, unfamiliar with local territory and custom, initially attacked by every native group they encountered, suffering from tropical diseases and an unfamiliar diet, opposed by their own superiors in Cuba, and later confronted by another Castilian force sent to arrest Cortés—defeated the Aztec empire, inaugurating a series of events that would wipe out most of its population and ruin the majestic capital of Tenochtitlán.

The Spanish themselves incorrectly attributed their amazing success to innate virtue, superior intelligence, and the Christian religion. For nearly five hundred years both Mexican and European critics have offered a variety of contradictory explanations for this seemingly impossible feat, explanations that range from the role of the Tlaxcalan allies and disease to the genius of Cortés himself and cultural impediments in time-reckoning and systematic communication. Few have sought answers in the wider context of a long lethal Western military tradition.

Native
Allies?

Did Cortés play off native against native, in a cynical alliance that saw a civil war in Mexico destroy its own culture, with Cortés the sole and ultimate beneficiary? To understand the conquest of Mexico as essentially due to internal disputes between Mexica nations, three propositions would have to be true. First, Mesoamerican tribes
could
have accomplished the obliteration of Tenochtitlán sometime earlier on their own without Spanish aid. Yet contemporary accounts prove that all the neighboring tribes had failed to overthrow the Mexicas prior to the Spanish arrival, and afterward were ineffective in fighting the Aztecs without European support. Second, after the destruction of Mexico City, the natives of Mexico
could
have turned on the Spanish, renewed their assaults on the Europeans as they had during the arrival of Cortés, and then annihilated the Castilian presence altogether, ensuring their own perpetual autonomy from both Aztec and European oppressors. The opposite took place: the destruction of Tenochtitlán marked the end of
all
Mexica autonomy. Neither could an indigenous tribe before the Spanish arrival defeat the Aztecs, nor after the conquest could any natives overthrow the Spanish. Third, squabbling and fractious Mesoamerican peoples were co-opted by a united and cohesive European force, suggesting that native infighting, not Spanish military superiority, prevented an eventual Indian victory. The Europeans, however, had nearly as much dissension in their ranks as the natives of Mexico. Cortés himself barely escaped arrest in Cuba and became the target of several assassination plots. He was officially branded a renegade by authorities in Hispaniola and was forced to steal and expropriate supplies at gunpoint. In the midst of delicate negotiations with Montezuma, he was obliged to abandon Tenochtitlán. Leaving only a small force under Alvarado, his men marched the difficult and dangerous 250-mile route back to Vera Cruz and then faced and defeated a Castilian armada under Narváez larger than their own—the entire time under attack by various Mesoamerican peoples who sought to capitalize on just such signs of weakness.

In short, an embattled Cortés, without official sanction and suffering from near outlaw status among his Caribbean superiors, turned a preexisting native world of tension and constant battle into an entirely new war of utter annihilation against the most powerful people in the history of Mexico—something impossible without superior technology, horses, and tactics. Upon conclusion of that campaign, within a few years he pacified all of Mexico under Spanish authority, a condition that, aside from occasional revolts, would characterize Mexican history from the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 to the nineteenth-century Mexican war of independence.

In all discussions of the Mexican conquest numbers tell us little. The discipline, tactics, and technology of the invaders, not the unwieldy size of the Aztec army or the corresponding huge musters of their native enemies, explain why the Aztec empire vanished in less than two years after the arrival of Cortés. Routine native conflicts were turned into a final war of annihilation by the Spanish, who then ended the autonomy of every tribe in Mexico. After the disastrous
Noche Triste
of July 1, 1520, Cortés lost most of his Tlaxcalan allies and was surrounded by thousands of warriors from hostile tribes. Tlaxcala itself was miles distant and deliberating whether to continue its alliance. Yet the Spaniards, aided for the most part by just a few surviving Tlaxcalans, fought their way out from Lake Texcoco, slaughtered thousands of natives on their march, and coerced others back into their federation. Additionally, in early July 1521—almost a year to the day after the
Noche Triste—
after being ambushed in Tlatelolco, most of Cortés’s allies suddenly and without warning vanished as dozens of Castilian captives in a gruesome public festival were herded up the Great Pyramid to their slaughter. Native accounts of the spectacle that followed explain why Cortés’s coalition suddenly evaporated:

One by one they were forced to climb to the temple platform, where they were sacrificed by the priests. The Spaniards went first, then their allies, all were put to death. As soon as the sacrifices were finished, the Aztecs ranged the Spaniards’ heads in rows on pikes. They also lined up their horses’ heads. They placed the horses’ heads at the bottom and the heads of the Spaniards above, and arranged them all so that the faces were toward the sun. (M. León-Portilla, ed.,
The Broken Spears,
107)

Contemporary sources emphasize that from the once-vast native army that Cortés had mustered from the villages on the lake, fewer than a hundred Mesoamerican natives at this point remained. The more distant peoples of Malinalco and Tula revolted outright, causing Cortés to send punitive expeditions against them to secure the confidence of the wavering lords of Cuernavaca and Otomí.

In all such engagements, the numerical disparities are staggering, as the Castilians were outnumbered on the battlefield by well over one hundred to one—a far greater disparity even than the British experienced during most of the engagements of the Zulu wars in 1879. In the midst of such revolts and the dissolution of his army, Cortés nevertheless maintained the siege of Tenochtitlán, conquered the rebellious allies, and restored the skeptical Mesoamericans to his army. Apparently, the besieged Aztecs could not conquer the isolated Castilians; nor did the other peoples of Mexico feel confident on their own to destroy Tenochtitlán without Spanish assistance—and yet themselves did not march on the causeways to kill the weakened Cortés.

Perhaps it is hard for modern deskbound scholars to understand the utter dread that existed in the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs, and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts—not to mention those thousands who were summarily executed without warning by Cortés and Alvarado in Cholula and at the temple of Tlacochcalco. Throughout contemporary oral Nahuatl and written Spanish accounts, there are dozens of grisly scenes of the dismemberment and disemboweling of Mesoamericans by Spanish steel and shot, accompanied by descriptions of the sheer terror that such mayhem invoked in indigenous populations. We of the twentieth century who have witnessed millions of Jews gassed by just hundreds of Nazi guards, or hundreds of thousands of Cambodians murdered by a few thousand deranged and cowardly Khmer Rouge, should not be surprised that the horror and the fright incurred by sophisticated tools of death so often and so easily trump sheer numbers.

The distinguished Aztec scholar Ross Hassig has rightly pointed out that most narratives of the conquest underplay the Mesoamerican contribution to the Spanish victory. So let us be clear: Cortés could not have conquered Tenochtitlán within a mere two years without vast support of native allies (initially the Totonacs and later the Tlaxcalans); nor could the surrounding Indians, who had fought the Aztecs in vain for decades prior to the European arrival, have destroyed the Aztec capital without the support of Cortés. The answer in assessing the critical role of the native involvement is one of degree, and involves the question of time and cost.

The tens of thousands of Indians who, as warriors, porters, and construction workers, aided, fought alongside, and fed Cortés were indispensable to the Castilians’ effort. Without their assistance Cortés would have required thousands of Spanish reinforcements and lost hundreds more men in an effort that might have taken a decade or more. Nevertheless, he would have accomplished his conquest even had he battled a united Mexico without native assistance. The Spanish conquest of Mexico— against populations without horses, the wheel, steel or iron weapons, oceangoing ships, gunpowder weapons, and a long tradition of scientific siegecraft—is emblematic of a systematic pattern of brutal conquest of the New World that elsewhere did not necessarily demand native complicity.

The Mesoamericans fought the Aztecs not because they were enamored of the Spanish—indeed for much of 1519 and early 1520 they tried to exterminate Cortés—but because they met an unexpected and powerful enemy who could be unleashed on their even greater adversary, Tenochtitlán, which had systematically butchered their own women and children in a most gruesome and hideous fashion. The near constant wars of the past century with the Aztecs had left most Mesoamerican peoples between the interior and the coast—the Tlaxcalans especially—under either an oppressive subjugation that stripped their fields and often their population for material and human tribute, or a state of siege for as much as six months out of the year to ward off Aztec depredations.

The appearance of the Spanish convinced most of the subjects of the Aztec empire that here was a people whom they could not defeat, yet who could annihilate their archenemies, the Mexicas, and possessed such technological and material advantages—as the prescient Aztec defenders reminded the Tlaxcalans during the last bitter days of the siege—as to be able to establish a lasting hegemony over
all
the natives of Mexico. We should see the indigenous contribution as the fuel that fed the fire that consumed the Aztecs, but concede the spark and flame to be all Spanish. Without the Spaniard presence even the brave Tlaxcalans would not have freed—and heretofore had never freed—themselves from Aztec oppression. Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.

The key to dismantling the Aztec empire, which centralized its communications, bureaucracy, and military in an island fortress, was the destruction of Tenochtitlán—a task that no Mesoamerican tribe could carry out, much less even envision. It is true that native peoples sought to use Cortés as a tactical asset in their ongoing war against the Mexicas. But they failed utterly to understand the Spaniards’ larger strategic goals of destroying the Aztec empire as prerequisite to annexing Mexico as a tributary of the Spanish empire—and therefore unwittingly became pawns in the age-old European tradition of strategic thinking that was mostly alien to their own idea of what war was for.

Neither the Tlaxcalans nor the Mexicas had any abstract notion that war is the ultimate and final arbiter of politics, a uniquely Western idea that goes back to Aristotle’s amoral observation in the first book of his
Politics
that the purpose of war is always “acquisition” and thus a logical phenomenon that takes place when one state is far stronger than the other and therefore “naturally” seeks the political subjugation of its inferior rival through any means possible. Such views are later thematic in Polybius’s
Histories,
omnipresent in Caesar’s
Gallic Wars,
and once again amplified and discussed in abstract terms by Western thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Clausewitz. Plato in his
Laws
assumed that every state would, when its resources were strained, seek to annex or incorporate land that was not its own, as a logical result of its own ambition and self-interest.

Disease?

No precise figures exist on the final tally of Aztecs who died of sickness during 1519–21. It is a highly charged subject that involves not merely numbers but questions of deliberate intent and European culpability. For most of the sixteenth century Mexico was beset by a succession of European diseases—smallpox, flu, plague, mumps, whooping cough, and measles—that reduced its indigenous population by some 75 to 95 percent of its pre-invasion total. In one of the great tragedies of the entire European subjugation of the Americas, a Mexican subcontinent that may have supported nearly 25 million people before the Spanish conquest was within a century inhabited by only a million or two.