Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (30 page)

One does not have to be a believer in the “great man” theory of history to realize that on a number of key occasions—the initial dismantling of the ships and march inland, the war against and then brilliant alliance with Tlaxcala, the kidnapping of Montezuma, the defeat of Narváez and miraculous appropriation of his troops at almost no cost in lives, the heroic trek after the
Noche Triste,
the return march and launching of the brigantines, and the recovery after the final setback at Tlatelolco—the bravery, oratory, and political savvy of Cortés alone saved the expedition. A mere seven years after the conquest of 1521, Pánfilo Narváez, who had failed to stop Cortés and lost an eye for the trouble, led an expedition into Florida, comparable in size to Cortés’s initial force in Mexico, replete with five hundred men and one hundred horses. Apparently, only four conquistadors survived. They took years to be rescued—illustrating the abject catastrophe that might befall even well-supplied Spanish forces in the New World when led by men without ability and courage.

Manuel Orozco y Berra paints a near Machiavellian figure of Cortés beyond good and evil, but clearly one unlike any of his generation:

Consider his ingratitude to Diego Velázquez, his double and deceitful dealings with the tribes, his treachery toward Montezuma. Put to his account the useless massacre of Cholula, the murder of the Aztec monarch, his insatiable desire for gold and for pleasures. Do not forget that he killed his first wife, Catalina Juárez, that in torturing Cuauhtémoc he committed a base deed, that he ruined his rival, Garay, that by retaining command he made himself suspected of the death of Luis Ponce and Marcos de Aguilar. Even accuse him of everything else which history records as proven. But then allow him the plea he was a sagacious politician and a valiant and able captain; that he concluded successfully one of the most astounding feats of modern times. (Ixtlilxochitl,
Ally of Cortés,
xxvi)

Cortés was indeed a warrior, ruthless intriguer, and politician of superhuman energy and talent unmatched even among his gifted rivals of the sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of the New World. He was deathly ill from tropical viruses numerous times and had contracted a serious case of malaria even before he set sail from Spain. In the battles for Mexico City he suffered a near concussion and wounds to the hand, foot, and leg. On three occasions he was nearly captured and dragged off to be sacrificed on the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlán. He put down numerous attempts on his own life by native and Castilian cabals and neutralized rivals in the far-distant court of Charles V. Cortés fathered several children by various women and was accused of murdering his first wife, Catalina. Almost wiped out during the
Noche Triste,
suffering from wounds himself, his army surrounded by enemies, Cortés—because of religious fanaticism, Castilian honor, Spanish patriotism, sheer greed, or personal repute, or a mixture of all that and more—refused to retreat to the safety of Vera Cruz:

I remembered that Fortune always favors the bold, and furthermore that we were Christians who trusted in the great goodness of God, who would not let us perish utterly nor allow us to lose so great and noble a land which had been, or was to be, subject to Your Majesty; nor could I abandon so great a service as continuing the war whereby we would once more subdue the land as it had been before. I determined, therefore, that on no account would I go across the mountains to the coast. On the contrary, disregarding all the dangers and toil that might befall us, I told them that I would not abandon this land, for, apart from being shameful to myself and dangerous for all, it would be great treason to Your Majesty; rather I resolved to fall on our enemies wherever I could and oppose them in every possible way. (H. Cortés,
Letters from Mexico
, 145)

Cortés saw well over half his men—some 1,000 out of 1,600—killed or captured in a two-year period. On three occasions his sick and wounded survivors were ready to revolt. He kidnapped Montezuma, waged war against the Aztec emperor’s brother and nephew, at various times fought and repulsed his allied Tlaxcalans, and defeated and then won over a Spanish relief force sent to bring him back in chains. He sailed to Spain to plead his cause, took an enormous force to Guatemala, and claimed he still could lead a voyage to China if given ships and men. All this from a small man of five feet four inches and about 150 pounds, who arrived in Hispaniola penniless at the age of twenty in 1504.

All that being said, without horses, firearms, steel weapons, armor, ships, dogs, and crossbows, not to mention the military acumen of his lieutenants who between them possessed expertise ranging from shipbuilding to gunpowder fabrication to the use of integrated cavalry and infantry tactics, even Cortés would have failed. The disparity—far more marked than in the Roman-Carthaginian or Macedonian-Persian encounters—was too great for either a brilliant Aztec leader or an inept Spanish conquistador to alter the eventual outcome. Had an Alvarado or Sandoval led the Castilians into Mexico City in November 1520, and had they met a fiery Cuauhtémoc rather than a cautious and confused Montezuma, the entire expedition might have floundered. But just as seven successive fleets reached Mexican shores during Cortés’s rebound in 1521, there would have been larger expeditions to replace the losses of an initial setback, some of them led by better generals, with even more men—30,000 Spaniards were in the immediate Caribbean settlements. Cortés himself after the disaster of the
Noche Triste
claimed that his life was worth little, since there were now thousands of Castilians in the New World who would take his place and subdue the Aztecs.

The conquest of Mexico was one of the few times in history in which technology—Europe in the midst of a military renaissance pitted against foes that had neither horses nor the wheel, much less metals and gunpowder—in itself trumped the variables of individual human genius and achievement. The subjugation of western North America was accomplished in four decades of concerted warfare without a European conqueror as skilled as Cortés or a centralized and vulnerable nerve center like the island city of Tenochtitlán. The battle for the American frontier was marked by a number of incompetent English-speaking generals who lost their command and lives in idiotic assaults against brave and ingenious Indian tribes armed with Western weaponry and horses in a vast landscape—all without much effect on the continual encroachment on Indian lands and the systematic defeat of native war parties. We also should keep in mind that the Norse explorers of the northwestern coast of North America—the first European aggressors in the New World—during the tenth and eleventh centuries had little permanent success against native tribes because of their lack of firearms, horses, and sophisticated tactics and their inability to arrive in sufficient numbers on successive flotillas of large oceangoing ships. Neither Norse brilliance in navigation and seamanship nor legendary prowess in arms was enough to ensure conquest or colonization without an easy and continual supply of manpower and matériel.

Spanish
Weapons
and
Tactics

Modern scholars who attribute the Castilians’ astounding success to cultural confusion, disease, native allies, and a host of other subsidiary causes are reluctant to admit to the critical role of Western technological and military superiority. Perhaps they fear that such conclusions might imply Eurocentrism, or suggest Western mental or moral preeminence. But the enormous gulf between the equipment and tactics of the Mexica and Spanish armies is a question not of virtue or genes, but of culture and history.

In all categories of arms and armor the Spanish were vastly superior to every native tribe they met. Their steel swords were sharper and lighter than the Mexicas’ obsidian-tipped clubs and held an edge far longer. When used by skilled swordsmen as both a thrusting and a cleaving blade, such weapons—as written sources and Mexica artwork attest—could lop off entire limbs and dispatch an unarmored opponent in a single blow. The conquistador sword was a direct descendant of the shorter Roman
gladius,
it, too, originally a Spanish blade that gave the Roman legionary the greatest degree of penetrating power of any weapon in the ancient Mediterranean. All 1,600 Castilians who fought at various times in Mexico were equipped with such lethal swords, which in large part accounts for Spanish victories even when their shot and bolts were depleted.

Many soldiers bore long pikes of ashwood. Most were twelve to fifteen feet in length, tipped with heavy sharp metal heads. Like the Macedonian
sarissai,
which inspired these weapons, Spanish pikes when wielded by dense bodies of men—the Castilian
tercio
became for a time the deadliest infantry force in sixteenth-century Spain—created an impenetrable wall. In Spanish parlance it was an “iron cornfield” that could not be entered. When the pike was used as a lance by an armored horseman riding down stragglers, a single blow could take a man’s head right off. Finally, there were also hundreds of lighter, steel-tipped javelins, the
jabalinas,
which like the Roman
pila
were deadly when thrown by swordsmen closing in for the kill.

Nearly all the Spaniards wore steel helmets that also protected parts of the face and could not be penetrated by either arrow or stone. A great many donned steel breastplates and carried steel-reinforced shields, which explains why few were killed by Aztec club or sword blows. Instead, those killed were swarmed and pulled down, as dozens of Mexica warriors tried to trip or knock down the heavily laden Castilians. Nor had any tribe in the New World ever experienced the European idea of shock infantry collision—a tradition originating with the phalanx of the seventh century B.C. on the killing fields of ancient Greece, and rarely found outside of Europe.

The chief problem for the Europeans in many infantry battles with the Tlaxcalans and the Aztecs was one of exhaustion. The mailed Spaniards, nearly invulnerable from sword and missile attacks, soon tired after constant slashing and stabbing with heavy blades and lances, and at last were often forced to retreat behind the curtain of cannon and small-arms fire:

They surrounded them [the Spanish] on all sides, the Spanish started to strike at them, killing them like flies. No sooner were some slain than they were replaced with fresh ones. The Spaniards were like an islet in the sea, beaten by waves on all sides. This terrible conflict lasted over four hours. During this many Mexicans died, and nearly all the Spaniards’ allies and some of the Spaniards themselves. When it came noon, with the intolerable exertion of battle, the Spaniards began to lag. (B. Sahagún,
The
Conquest of Mexico
, 96)

Each Castilian butchered dozens of the enemy, and in some cases hundreds, to ensure his own survival, an enormous effort of muscular strength and endurance for such relatively small men encased in mail. Their chief worry was either stumbling or being tripped and dragged off. Our sources report that over the course of the two-year fighting, hundreds of Castilians were wounded, but nearly all such cuts and contusions were to the limbs and rarely fatal. The way to kill a man is to penetrate his chest or face with thrusting metal blades, and that was nearly impossible for Aztec warriors pitted against mailed foot soldiers.

Scholars who dismiss the importance of Spanish steel must explain why, after the
Noche Triste
and the ambush at Tlatelolco, the Aztecs quickly employed the precious few Castilian swords and lances they captured. Why did the Tlaxcalans welcome the Spanish infantry as a cutting edge in all infantry engagements against the Aztecs, on the premise that only Castilians could hack their way through Aztec lines? During the humid season many conquistadors felt that lighter and more comfortable local quilted cotton fabrics offered enough protection from native stone-edged missiles and blades. On occasion they jettisoned their mail—dramatic proof that they feared little from Aztec weapons, despite being wielded by some of the most ferocious fighters in the history of warfare.

Superior metal arms were only part of the Spanish advantage. Harquebuses and crossbows were more accurate and had greater range and far more penetrating power than any native sling or arrow. The Spanish crossbow could send a bolt in an arc over two hundred yards and was deadly accurate in direct fire at nearly a hundred. Little skill was required in its use, and bolts and replacement parts were easily fabricated from indigenous materials. The chief drawback was the weight of the machine (fifteen pounds) and the relatively slow rate of fire (one bolt per minute). Although Aztec archers could shoot five or six arrows in a minute, they could rarely reach targets at two hundred yards, and at even close ranges their flint-tipped arrows could not penetrate the vital organs of the armored Spanish. Native arrows were also far less accurate than crossbow bolts. Moreover, archery took years of training to master, while a Castilian could reemploy the bow of a fallen or wounded crossbowman in minutes.

Harquebuses (early muskets with a matchlock firing device) had much the same advantages and drawbacks as the crossbow—enormous penetrating power, little required training, good accuracy, and great range, versus slow rates of fire and clumsiness—but were even deadlier in stopping numerous unarmored warriors with single shots. They were also easier to fabricate and repair. The real advantage of firearms lay not in their ease of use—they were awkward and hard to load—but in their greater accuracy and deadliness. A good shooter could kill with some assurance at 150 yards. His enormous projectiles—some lead balls might weigh up to six ounces—at closer ranges could often go right through the flesh of a number of unarmored Aztecs. Cortés had nearly eighty harquebusiers and crossbowmen when he returned to Tenochtitlán in spring 1521. In serried ranks with bowmen shooting over the heads of the gunners, his men were capable of putting down a sequential carpet of about ten or fifteen projectiles every ten seconds. For short periods of ten or fifteen minutes, against dense masses of Mexicas where misses were few, the Castilians were capable of killing hundreds, especially when placed behind pikemen, on boats, or atop fortifications.