Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (31 page)

In contemporary European warfare there was an ongoing renaissance in tactics and armament, as harquebusiers were blasting apart even the most disciplined ranks of well-armed Swiss and Spanish pikemen at Marignano (1519), La Bicocca (1522), and Pavia (1525). If the new muskets, fired in careful volleys, could tear apart columns of fast-moving and well-disciplined European pikemen, there was little doubt of their effectiveness against larger but less well organized and poorly protected swarms of Aztec warriors. Even if the Aztecs had captured and mastered the use of harquebuses, such technology, without a supporting framework of scientific research, would have soon stagnated: harquebuses were a mere phase in the continual evolution of European firearms that would soon see flints, better-cast barrels, rifling, and improved powder.

On the plains the Spanish had nearly a century of battle experience in integrating pikemen with harquebusiers—the latter walked out, shot, retreated behind a wall of spears to reload, then again came forward to shoot—to stave off the charges of European aristocratic cavalry. Against the near naked Mexica foot soldiers, these tried-and-tested Castilian squares were nearly invulnerable. Skeptics of European gunpowder superiority must remember that the swarming tactics of indigenous armies— the Zulus are an excellent example—made Western guns especially lethal well before the age of repeating rifles.

Spanish discipline was legendary. Cannon, musket, and crossbow were shot on orders, achieving a murderous symphony against charging masses. Rarely would a harquebusier or swordsman flee should his immediate superior go down. In contrast, regional contingents of the Aztecs were prone to disintegrate once the revered
cuachpantli—
the gaudy standards mounted on bamboo frames and worn on the backs of illustrious warriors—fell or were seized. Personal bravery and prowess in arms are not always synonymous with military discipline, which in the West is largely defined as staying in formation and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder.

What terrified the Aztecs most, however, were the Spanish cannon, some wheeled or fitted on carts, with at least a few of the more rapidfiring breech-loading models. Sources disagree about the actual number and types employed by Cortés’s men over the two-year campaign (many were lost during the
Noche Triste
), but the Spaniards brought along ten to fifteen, ranging from small falconets to larger lombards. When properly used against the Aztec mobs, they were absolutely deadly weapons, firing both grapeshot—canisters of smaller iron projectiles—and large cannonballs and stones up to ten pounds. The smaller breech-loading falconets could fire almost a round each minute and a half, point-blank at five hundred yards or with arced shots reaching nearly a half mile. When aimed at the charging Mexicas, each volley tore off limbs, heads, and torsos, as shots went through dozens of warriors.

Spanish chronicles make much of Cortés’s horses—forty were present at the final siege of Tenochtitlán—and the complete terror they brought to the Aztecs. The Mexicas at first considered them strange half-human centaurs or divine creatures who could talk with their riders, and only later realized they were large grazing beasts like some sort of gigantic deer. Besides the obvious advantages that horses brought to the fighting—terror, reconnaissance, transport, and mobility—they were unstoppable when ridden by mailed lancers, prompting Bernal Díaz del Castillo to label them the Spaniards’ “one hope of survival.”

Historically, the only way to defeat cavalry was to fight en masse, as the Franks had done at Poitiers, or with extended pikes in the manner of Swiss phalanxes, or, like the French, to put down a carpet of musket fire into the approach of a mounted charge. The Aztecs could do none of these, lacking a tradition of landed infantry, shock warfare, and firearms of any sort. If they tried to mass in great numbers to clog the lanes of charging horsemen, they soon became vulnerable to cannon volleys. Thus, in concert with artillery, the Spanish horsemen proved deadly in either riding down and spearing individual Aztecs or causing the enemy to seek protection in bunches and thus offering better targets for Cortés’s cannon.

Unlike the horses of antiquity, Cortés’s mounts were no ponies, but Andalusian Barb-Arabs, bred from larger Arabian horses brought to Spain by the Moors. English observers later exclaimed that the horses of the West Indies were the finest they had ever seen. Their great size and the expertise of their riders—Spanish aristocrats like Sandoval and Alvarado had ridden since childhood and were masters of the mounted lance thrust—made a terrifying spectacle:

It is extraordinary what havoc a baker’s dozen of horsemen could inflict on a vast horde of Indians: and indeed it seems as if the horsemen did not do the damage directly, but that the sudden appearance of these “centaurs” (to use Díaz del Castillo’s word) caused so much demoralization that the Indians faltered and enabled the Spanish infantrymen to dash at them with renewed force. . . . The Indians had no idea how to deal with this supernatural beast, half animal and half man, and simply stood paralysed while the pounding hoofs and flashing swords cut them down. (J. White,
Cortés
and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire
, 169)

Not all the weapons that would prove so deadly were objects brought from Spain. Some of the most lethal were in the minds of the conquistadors themselves, latent mental blueprints of killing machines that sprang from their heads to became real only under the exigencies of the fighting. The Spanish quickly recognized that among the vast wealth of Mexico were untold—and untapped—raw materials for European-style weapons, ranging from fine lumber for ships and siege machines to metal ores for blades and ingredients for gunpowder.

It is popular to suggest that natural resources alone determine cultural or military dynamism. If true, we should remember that the Aztecs were sitting atop a war merchant’s bonanza—an entire subcontinent replete with the ingredients of gunpowder, iron, bronze, and steel. In truth, it was the absence of a systematic approach to abstract learning and science, not the dearth of ores or minerals, that doomed the Aztecs. They lacked wagon wheels perhaps because of the absence of horses; but they were also entirely without other wheel-based instruments of war and commerce—wheelbarrows, rickshaws, water wheels, mill wheels, pulleys and gears—because there was neither a rational tradition of science nor a climate of disinterested research.

Nowhere was the rational Spanish approach more apparent than in their ad hoc construction of battle machinery, which followed siege and ship designs dating back to classical antiquity. During the bitter fighting on the eve of the
Noche Triste
the Spanish within a few hours constructed three
manteletes,
portable wooden towers that protected harquebusiers and crossbowmen who fired over the heads of the infantrymen. When Cortés next discovered that the causeways were breached, he ordered movable bridges built—a European specialty that dated back to Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Germany. After the flight from Tenochtitlán, gunpowder was fabricated, sulfur being drawn from the nearby “smoky mountain” (Mount Popocatépetl, 17,888 feet above sea level). Native metalsmiths were given Spanish designs and instructions to assist in the making of more than 100,000 copper arrowheads for their own bows, and another 50,000 metal bolts for the Spanish crossbows. In an effort to save powder, during the final siege a gigantic catapult was even fabricated—the mechanics of its winch, armature, and springs apparently being misdesigned by amateurs, since it proved ineffective.

The most impressive project was Martín López’s brilliant launching of thirteen prefabricated brigantines. These were enormous galleylike boats more than forty feet long and nine feet at the beam, powered with sails and paddles, and yet with flat bottoms that drew only two feet of water and were thus especially designed for the shallow and swampy waters of Lake Texcoco. Each held twenty-five men and could carry a number of horses, as well as a large cannon. To craft such ships, the Spaniards drafted thousands of Tlaxcalans to haul lumber and the iron hardware salvaged from their beached ships at Vera Cruz. Then López had his carefully organized native work gangs entirely dismantle the brigantines and transport them over the mountains in a large column of some 50,000 porters and warriors to Lake Texcoco. When they arrived in the dry season at Tenochtitlán, López engineered a canal twelve feet wide and about the same depth, through which to navigate the ships from the marshes into deeper waters of the lake: 40,000 Tlaxcalans were involved in the latter project for seven weeks.

The brigantines proved the deciding factor in the entire war, as they were manned by a third of the Spanish manpower and were allotted nearly 75 percent of the cannon, harquebuses, and crossbows. The ships kept the causeways free, ensured that the Spanish camps were secure in the evening, landed infantry at weak points in the enemy lines, enforced a crippling blockade of the city, systematically blew apart hundreds of Aztec canoes, and transported critical food and supplies to the various isolated Spanish contingents. They turned Lake Texcoco from the Spaniards’ chief vulnerability to their greatest asset. Their high decks prevented boarding and gave ample cover for the harquebusiers and crossbowmen to fire and reload—characteristic of traditional Western skill in combined infantry and naval tactics:

However, in the final analysis, Tenochtitlán had an importance that cannot be assigned to Salamis: Tenochtitlán was synonymous with final victory, the conclusion of a war; Salamis was not. At Salamis a civilization was challenged; at Tenochtitlán a civilization was crushed. Possibly in all history there is no similar victorious naval engagement that concluded a war and ended a civilization. (C. Gardiner, Naval Power in the Conquest of Mexico, 188)

The brigantines, despite being fabricated more than a hundred miles from Lake Texcoco, proved to be far more ingeniously engineered for fighting on the Aztecs’ native waters than any boat constructed in Mexico during the entire history of its civilization—a feat possible only through a systematic approach to science and reason that had been ubiquitous in the West for two millennia.

Almost all elements of the Western military tradition played their respective roles in assuring a Spanish victory, trumping problems of numerical inferiority, logistics, and unknown geography. The hundreds of thousands of pages of postbellum Spanish lawsuits, formal inquiries, and judicial writs among the conquistadors attest to the strong sense of freedom and entitlement each warrior possessed: a sense of civic militarism of individuals with rights and privileges that neither Cortés nor the Spanish crown could infringe upon without constitutional support. While on the road to meet Narváez, some of Cortés’s men caught Alonzo de Mata, an emissary with legal papers and summons for their leader’s recall. What ensued next was a legalistic debate about the official status of de Mata, ending when the latter could not produce documentation to prove that he was a genuine king’s notary and therefore had no authority to vouch for the authenticity of his own decrees.

In fact, throughout the sixteenth century there was a strong sense of political freedom in Spain, perhaps best epitomized in Juan de Costa’s (1549–95) treatise
Govierno del ciudadano,
on the proper rights and behavior of the citizen in a constitutional commonwealth. About the same time, Jerónimo de Blancas, a biographer of Cortés, wrote
Aragonesium re-rumcomentarii
(1588), on the contractual nature of the Aragonese monarchy and its relationship with legislative and judicial branches of government.

The Castilians’ drive for decisive horrific engagements—in the streets of Tenochtitlán, on the causeways, in the Plain of Otumba, on Lake Texcoco—was not shared by the Mexicas, who preferred daylight spectacle, in which status, ritual, and captive-taking were sometimes integral to battle. Throughout the fighting, eager traders and entrepreneurs from the New World and Spain docked at Vera Cruz to supply Cortés with shot, food, weapons, and horses. Near extinction, Cortés nevertheless confiscated gold from enemy and friend alike to pay for his supplies, assured in a society of free markets that if there was profit to be made in Vera Cruz, there would eventually be European rascals replete with fresh powder, arms, and men in Tenochtitlán.

The conquistadors, whether led at times by Sandoval, Ordaz, Olid, or Alvarado, owed their lives to an abstract system of command and obedience, not just to a magnetic leader like Cortés. Throughout the conquest individual initiative gave Cortés innumerable advantages. Even the constant complaints of his outspoken men and the threat of formal audit and inquiry from Spanish authorities forced Cortés to consult on strategy with his top lieutenants and to craft tactics with every expectation that there were scores of critics who would appear should he fail. All these components of the Western military tradition gave the Spanish an enormous edge. But in the last analysis a tradition of rationalism, some two millennia old, guaranteed that Hernán Cortés’s tools of battle could kill thousands more than those of his enemies.

REASON AND WAR

People from the Stone Age onward have always engaged in some form of scientific activity designed to enhance organized warfare. But beginning with the Greeks, Western culture has shown a singular propensity to think abstractly, to debate knowledge freely apart from religion and politics, and to devise ways of adapting theoretical breakthroughs for practical use, through the marriage of freedom and capitalism. The result has been a constant increase in the technical ability of Western armies to kill their adversaries. Is it not odd that Greek hoplites, Roman legionaries, medieval knights, Byzantine fleets, Renaissance foot soldiers, Mediterranean galleys, and Western harquebusiers were usually equipped with greater destructive power than their adversaries? Even the capture or purchase of Western arms is no guarantee of technological parity—as the Ottomans, Indians, and Chinese learned—inasmuch as European weaponry is an evolving phenomenon, ensuring obsolescence almost simultaneously with the creation of new arms. Creativity has never been a European monopoly, much less intellectual brilliance. Rather, the West’s willingness to craft superior weapons is just as often predicated on its unmatched ability to borrow, adopt, and steal ideas without regard to the social, religious, or political changes that new technology often brings—as the incorporation of and improvement on the trireme, Roman
gladius,
astrolabe, and gunpowder attest.

Scholars are correct to point out that Europeans neither invented firearms nor enjoyed a monopoly in their use. But they must acknowledge that the ability to fabricate and distribute firearms on a wide scale and to improve their lethality was unique to Europe. From the introduction of gunpowder in the fourteenth century to the present day, all major improvements in firearms—the matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, smokeless powder, rifle barrel, minié ball, repeating rifle, and machine gun—have taken place in the West or under Western auspices. As a general rule, Europeans did not employ or import Ottoman or Chinese guns, and they did not pattern their technique of munitions production on Asian or African designs.

This idea of continual innovation and improvement in the use of technology is embodied in Aristotle’s dictum in his
Metaphysics
that prior philosophers’ theories contribute to a sort of ongoing aggregate of Greek knowledge. In the
Physics
(204B) he admits, “In the case of all discoveries, the results of previous labors that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on.” Western technological development is largely an outgrowth of empirical research, the acquisition of knowledge through sense perception, the observation and testing of phenomena, and the recording of such data so that factual information itself is timeless, increasing and becoming more accurate through the collective criticism and modification of the ages. That there were an Aristotle, Xenophon, and Aeneas Tacticus at the beginning of Western culture and not anything comparable in the New World explains why centuries later a Cortés could fabricate cannon and gunpowder in the New World, while the Aztecs could not use the Spanish artillery they captured, why for centuries the lethal potential of the land around Tenochtitlán was untapped, but was mined for its gunpowder and ores within months after the Spanish arrival.

Western technological superiority is not merely a result of the military renaissance of the sixteenth century or an accident of history, much less the result of natural resources, but predicated on an age-old
method
of investigation, a peculiar mentality that dates back to the Greeks and not earlier. Although the theoretical mathematician Archimedes purportedly snapped that “the whole trade of engineering was sordid and ignoble, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit,” his machines— cranes and a purported huge reflective glass heat ray—delayed the capture of Syracuse for two years. The Roman navy in the First Punic War not only copied Greek and Carthaginian designs but went on to ensure their victories by the use of innovative improvements such as the
corvus,
a sort of derrick that lifted enemy ships right out of the water. Long before American B-29s dropped napalm over Tokyo, the Byzantines sprayed through brass tubes compressed blasts of Greek fire, a secret concoction of naphtha, sulfur, and quicklime that like its modern counterpart kept burning even when doused with water.

Military knowledge was also abstract and published, not just empirical. Western military manuals from Aelian
(Taktike theoria)
and Vegetius
(Epitoma rei militaris)
to the great handbooks on ballistics and tactics of the sixteenth century (e.g., Luigi Collado’s
Practica manual de artiglierra
[1586] or Justus Lipsius’s
De militia Romana
[1595–96]) incorporate firsthand knowledge and abstract theoretical investigation into practical advice. In contrast, the most brilliant of Chinese and Islamic military works are far more ambitious and holistic texts, and thus less pragmatic as actual blueprints for killing, embedded with religion, politics, or philosophy and replete with illusions and axioms from Allah to the yin and the yang, hot and cold, one and many.

Courage on the battlefield is a human characteristic. But the ability to craft weapons through mass production to offset such bravery is a cultural phenomenon. Cortés, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Don Juan of Austria, and other Western captains, often annihilated without mercy their numerically superior foes, not because their own soldiers were necessarily better in war, but because their traditions of free inquiry, rationalism, and science most surely were.