Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (29 page)

For our strictly military purposes, however, we are concerned here with the more narrow and largely amoral issue of sheer military efficacy. To what degree did the smallpox outbreak of 1520 per se account for the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán in August 1521? Native observers, who described the pox in excruciating detail to the later Spanish believed that the epidemic wiped out almost one out of fifteen inside Tenochtitlán itself. Modern scholars have estimated that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all the population of central Mexico—Aztecs and their enemies alike—perished from this first wave of the outbreak. Perhaps as many as 20,000 or 30,000 Aztecs died from the disease during the two years in which Cortés was engaged in the conquest of Mexico, a staggering number of fatalities that surely helped to weaken the power of the Mexicas.

As horrible as those figures are, it is not clear that smallpox had a great deal to do with the final destruction of Tenochtitlán, although the subsequent creation of the province of New Spain was brought about by the millions who died in the century following Cortés’s victory, especially during the typhus epidemics of 1545–48 and 1576–81. According to the
Florentine Codex,
the first outbreak of the disease had a definite and limited course, spreading among the population from early September to late November 1520. Then it was largely gone by the time of the final siege (April to August 1521). By the time Cortés approached Tenochtitlán for his second campaign in April 1521, the city had been largely free of the disease for nearly six months. Smallpox also killed thousands of Cortés’s allies in even greater numbers than the Aztecs, since the Totonacs, Chalcans, and Tlaxcalans were in closer contact with the succession of European arrivals at Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. Furthermore, the disease seems to have been most virulent on the coast, near the base of Spanish operations and in the midst of those tribes allied to Cortés. To a limited degree the island isolation of Tenochtitlán, its elevation, and the no-man’s-land of the battlefield provided an initial barrier, feeble as it would ultimately prove, to ready sources of the infection.

The disease argument cuts both ways: there was a variety of tropical illnesses with which the Europeans had almost no experience or immunity against. Most contemporary accounts mention constant bronchial ailments and fevers that severely weakened and sometimes killed Cortés’s soldiers. New World malarias and dysenteries were far more virulent than similar outbreaks in Spain. Some also suffered from syphilis-like cankers, an especially unpleasant experience for armored men in the tropics. Moreover, not all of Cortés’s men had been exposed to smallpox and gained immunity against a disease that still wiped out thousands in the major urban areas of Europe. Given the small numbers in his army, even a few dozen Spaniards with the disease could have had as great an effect on the relative military efficacy of the conquistadors as did the thousands of infected natives in an Aztec empire of more than a million. In Cortés’s own letters and the annals of contemporary Spanish observers, smallpox, though mentioned, is never characterized as a predominant factor on either side of the struggle. This was because the Castilians, themselves beset by a host of diseases and unable to detect any sudden weakness in the resistance of Tenochtitlán, never fully appreciated the degree to which the outbreak had become pandemic among their enemies.

What prevented the Europeans from being wiped out by these new fevers and old illnesses is explained as much by demographics and culture as by biological causes. As a largely heterogeneous group of younger male warriors with varying backgrounds and travel experience, the Castilians were rarely cooped up in small urban quarters in constant contact with women, children, and the aged. They also had almost no responsibility or need to care for the civilian infected. Besides some biological immunity to smallpox, there was among the Spanish arrivals a long empirical tradition of combating disease outbreaks—Seville would lose half its population to plague in 1600, yet recover without being destroyed by either the disease or opportunistic foreign invasion.

Throughout the fighting, the conquistadors applied wool and cotton bandages to wounds, and found, in a gruesome manner, that the fat from freshly slain Indians worked as an excellent salve and healing cream. While scientific knowledge of viruses and bacilli was, of course, absent in sixteenth-century Europe, and indeed the entire mechanism of infectious agents unknown, the Spaniards did draw on a long empirical tradition that went back to classical medical writers like Hippocrates and Galen, who drew on firsthand observations of epidemics in Greek and Italian cities and had thus helped establish Western traditions emphasizing the importance of proper quarantine, medicinal diets, sleep, and the careful burning of the dead.

As a consequence of that long legacy, the Spaniards realized that close contact with the ill spread infection, that the dead had to be immediately disposed of, that the course of diseases was predictable by acute observation of symptoms, and that the process of empirical observation, diagnosis, and prognosis was superior to mere incantation and sacrifice. Catholic priests may have argued that one became ill as God’s punishment for prior sins and offered prayer as healing, but most Spaniards realized that once the infection set in, there was a predictable course of illness to follow, one that to some degree could be ameliorated by medicines, careful nursing, diet, and isolation.

In contrast, the native people of Mexico, like the ancient Egyptians and many Catholic priests, believed that internal diseases were a result of gods or evil adversaries, who wished to punish or take possession of the afflicted—and could thus be thwarted by charms and incantations. Aztec fortune-tellers consulted the pattern of beans thrown on cotton fabrics to determine the etiology of the disease. Various sacrifices, human and animal, would surely appease the angry Macuilxochitl or Tezcatlipoca—or was it Xipa? The idea that communal sleeping and bathing, group sweat-houses, eating on the floor, wearing of human skin, cannibalism, or the lack of immediate burial and disposal of the dead had anything to do with the spread of diseases was poorly known even among the Mesoamerican herbalists.

The real advantage of the smallpox epidemic to Cortés was not the reductions in Aztec numbers per se but its cultural and political consequences. Because the Spaniards did not die at the same rate as the Indians, there spread the notion—mostly forgotten for a time after the
Noche
Triste—
that the Europeans were more than mortal. As smallpox swept through the Mesoamerican population and wiped out its leadership, the Castilians were careful to support and assist only those new leaders who were favorable to their cause. Smallpox enhanced the Spanish reputation for superhuman strength and solidified their support among native allies, despite the fact that the disease killed as many supporters as enemies— and thus had no real effect on the numerical parity between attackers and besieged.

Cultural
Confusion?

A recent popular explanation of the Spanish miracle is the notion of cultural confusion. Either a semiotic exegesis is adduced that the Aztecs conceived and expressed reality in radically different ways than the Spanish, and were thus bewildered to the point of impotence by the European arrival, or the more logical argument that their culture did not practice a type of warfare that could thwart such a radically different foe. It is true that the Aztecs at first were unaware of the danger that the Spaniards and their superior military technology and tactics posed. They may have believed that the conquistadors were some sort of divine beings—the long-prophesied return of the light-skinned god Quetzalcoatl and his retinue from across the sea. Many Mexicas believed that Spanish firearms were thunder weapons, their oceangoing ships floating mountains, horses some sort of divine centaurlike beasts, rider and beast being the same creature. Many scholars argue that the absence of a syllabic script, the highly ritualized nature of Aztec formal speech, and the foreign ideas of the Spanish made the Aztecs confused by European directness and vulnerable to their cause-and-effect method of state politics and warfare.

Montezuma, well before the arrival of the Spaniards at Vera Cruz, seems to have associated rumors of their presence in the Caribbean with the fated return of Quetzalcoatl and the overthrow of the Aztec empire. The combination of religious authority and absolute political power in the hands of a single ruler, coupled with Montezuma’s mythic worldview, in part explains the fatal decision of the Aztec hierarchy to admit Cortés into Tenochtitlán in November 1519. Soon they sized up the Spaniards as no gods at all, but their initial hesitancy and fear had given Cortés a critical edge in the campaign. Others have emphasized the ubiquity of religious ritual in Aztec life, especially the degree to which Aztec warfare was scripted and conventional, with its overriding emphasis on taking captives as sacrificial victims for their gods, rather than killing the enemy outright. In this view, hundreds of times Spanish conquistadors (Cortés among them) could have been easily killed, but escaped due to the failed efforts of the Aztecs to capture them alive.

As in the case of the smallpox outbreak, the argument is one of degree. The Mexicas may have believed that Cortés and his men were divinities and either let down their guard or feared to attack such “gods” when they were surrounded and vulnerable inside Tenochtitlán in late 1519. The Aztecs did not immediately attempt to kill the Spaniards in battle and thus lost countless opportunities to exterminate their vastly outnumbered enemy. But by the time of the
Noche Triste
the Spaniards had been in Tenochtitlán for nearly eight months. The Aztecs had the opportunity to examine the Spaniards firsthand—their propensity to eat, sleep, defecate, seek out sex with native women, and exhibit greed for gold. From reports that had long ago reached Montezuma they knew that in the prior Spanish wars with the Otomis and Tlaxcalans (April to November 1519), the Spaniards had bled like men. In fact, a few of them had been killed in battle, making it abundantly clear that their physical bodies were similar to any in Mexico. Before they entered Tenochtitlán, horses had also been brought down, sliced to pieces, and sacrificed: on arrival it was clear to all in the Valley of Mexico that these beasts were large deerlike creatures without any divine propensities.

At the first real military engagement on the causeways on July 1, 1520, the Aztecs surrounded Cortés with the clear idea of exterminating men, not gods. Under the conditions of these nocturnal mass attacks on the narrow dikes, it was nearly impossible to capture the Castilians, and it is no accident that the vast majority of the six hundred to eight hundred or so Spaniards lost that night were deliberately killed outright or left to drown.

In the subsequent fighting during the Spanish flight to Tlaxcala, and again at the final siege of Tenochtitlán, the Mexicas employed captured Toledo blades. They may even have attempted to coerce captured conquistadors to show them the intricacies of crossbows. The Mexicas often changed their tactics, learning to avoid swarming attacks in the plains, and during the great siege showed ingenuity in confining their fighting to narrow corridors of the city, where ambushes and missile attack might nullify the Spaniards’ horses and cannon. The Aztecs eventually guessed that the Spanish were intent on their slaughter, and so logically distrusted all affirmations of Spanish mediation. They taunted their Tlaxcalan enemies with prescient boasts that after their own demise, they, too, would end up as slaves to the Spanish.

If the Aztecs fought with any disadvantage, it was one of training and custom that had taught them to capture and bind rather than slice apart an adversary—habits that would prove hard to shake even against killers like the Spanish, who gave no quarter. Still, we must remember that the notion that soldiers should seek to capture rather than kill their enemy is a most un-Western one, and only reaffirms our general thesis that the entire menu of Western warfare—its tactics of annihilation, mass assault, disciplined files and ranks, and superior technology—was largely responsible for the conquest of Mexico.

Besides the overriding problem of inferior weaponry and tactics, the greatest cultural disadvantage of the Aztecs has often gone unnoticed: that of the age-old problem of systems collapse that threatens all palatial dynasties in which political power is concentrated among a tiny elite— another non-European phenomenon that has given Western armies enormous advantages in cross-cultural collisions. The abrupt destruction of the Mycenaean palaces (ca. 1200 B.C.), the sudden disintegration of the Persian Empire with Darius III’s flight at Gaugamela, the end of the Incas, and the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union all attest that the way of palatial dynasties is one of extreme precariousness to outside stimuli. Anytime a narrow elite seeks to control all economic and political activity from a fortified citadel, island redoubt, grand palace, or walled Kremlin, the unraveling of empire shortly follows the demise, flight, or discrediting of such imperial grandees—again in contrast to more decentralized, less stratified, and locally controlled Western political and economic entities. Cortés himself sensed that vulnerability and thus kidnapped Montezuma within a week of arrival. With the final flight of the successor emperor Cuauhtémoc in August 1521 the final resistance of the Aztecs came abruptly to an end.

Malinche

The great narratives of William Prescott and Hugh Thomas suggest that the abrupt collapse of the Mexicas at little Spanish cost would have been impossible without the singular genius and criminal audacity of Hernán Cortés—whom the natives dubbed “Malinche,” a derivative from the Nahuatl name, Mainulli or Malinali, of his constant companion and Mayan interpreter, the brilliant and irrepressible Doña Marina. The implication is prevalent in almost all modern European accounts of the conquest that other conquistadors—even intrepid men such as Governor Velázquez of Cuba, Narváez, who was sent to arrest Cortés, or Cortés’s own capable henchmen, the brave Sandoval and the reckless Alvarado— could not have replicated Cortés’s achievement.