by Don Hollway
from the August 1992 issue of Wild WeSt magazine

For a while, it seemed the tiny band of soldiers might actually make good its escape. Drizzling rain covered the sound of horses, wagons and cannons in the empty streets. The soldiers made for one of the causeways reaching across the lake to the mainland. The natives had cut it in several places, but the fugitives had fashioned a portable bridge to cross the gaps. With any luck, they might be safely off the island by morning.

Luck, however, was not with them. An Indian woman drawing water from a canal beside the road spotted their furtive passage and sounded the cry. Sentries passed the alarm; within minutes, the high priests raised a din with their seashell horns, a drum began to throb on the summit of the Temple of War, and rising from the darkness came the roar of the awakened city of Tenochtitlán. It was late June 1520.

Capitán-General Hernán Cortés hurried his men out onto the causeway, where they laid the bridge over the first gap. Even as they made their way across, however, they could hear the converging rush of hundreds of canoes, the first hiss of arrows and slingshot through the night, the screams of the wounded and dying, and thousands upon thousands of blood-maddened Aztecs.

The rush of men and horses weighted down with armor and gold wedged the bridge tight into the masonry—it could not be worked free. Pinned against the next breach in the way, surrounded by boatloads of savages, undergoing a terrible sleet of arrows, the tiny force that had hoped to conquer all of Mexico prepared to go down to the last man.

It seemed an inglorious end for a son of Estremadura, the high, bleak Spanish tableland that spawned Francisco Pizarro, Vasco de Balboa and a host of similarly hard-bitten conquistadors. Cortés himself showed little promise early in life. He dropped out of law school and missed an early opportunity to sail for the Indies due to injuries sustained escaping from a married woman’s boudoir. Having taken part in the conquest of Cuba, he was twice elected mayor of Santiago but ran afoul of the governor, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who briefly imprisoned him.

He was in his early 30s when the first explorers returned from Mexico. Reports of stone pyramids, golden idols and human sacrifice inflamed Spanish religious zeal and greed; Cortés had no problem filling out an expedition of his own. According to one of his men, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, “We numbered five hundred and eight, not counting the shipmasters, pilots, and sailors, who numbered about one hundred. There were sixteen horses and mares (and) eleven ships both great and small.”

This was more than twice the size of the force with which Velazquez had taken Cuba; gradually the governor came to see Cortés as a threat to his own dominion over the mainland. The conquistador departed for Mexico in 1518, just ahead of new orders for his arrest.

The fleet bumped along the coast of Yucatan and Tabasco. The local Indians welcomed them with arrows. Cortés had little military experience, but his men—many of them veterans of the Italian wars with France—had plenty. For the first time in history a handful of mounted, plate-armored knights charged a horde of half-naked Indians (a spectacle to be repeated many times in the hemisphere over the next few decades). Fourteen Spaniards—and 800 Indians—died. By taking a couple of their chiefs, or caciques, hostage, Cortés gained the compliance of the rest. Both tactics would serve him well in the months ahead.

Cortés opened diplomatic relations, using an Indian slave girl as translator. She claimed to be the daughter of an Aztec noble; the Spaniards good-naturedly christened her Dona Marina. Her knowledge of the Aztec language, Nahuatl, and the speed with which she mastered Spanish proved indispensable to Cortés, who admitted, “After God we owe this conquest of New Spain to Dona Marina.” (She eventually became his mistress and bore his son.)

No portraits were made of Dona Marina, “la Malinche,” during her lifetime. Heroine, Whore, Traitor, the popular perception of her has varied widely over the centuries.

Through her, Cortés learned that the Indians believed him a god. According to Aztec legend, this god, Queztalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”), had departed to the east after a falling out with Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), one of the fearsome Aztec deities who lived on the blood and still-beating hearts of sacrificed humans. He was due to return in the year One Reed—by Spanish reckoning, 1519. Cortés set foot ashore, about 45 miles north of the modern city of Veracruz, on Good Friday that year.

Visitors to the Spanish camp included Aztec emissaries from the vast empire to the west, who presented the god with a tantalizing treasure—disks of beaten gold and silver as big as wagon wheels, a chest full of gold figurines and a helmetful of high-quality gold dust. Cortés fired a few cannonballs into the trees and had his cavalry commander, Pedro de Alvarado, gallop his troops up and down the beach, but didn’t make quite the impression he hoped. Perhaps already suspicious of his divinity, the Aztecs refused his request to visit their emperor, Moctezuma II—refused, in fact, to have any more to do with him.

The neighboring Totonacs, disgruntled vassals of the Aztecs, saw the Spaniards as potential allies in a struggle to overthrow their masters. Cortés encouraged the imprisonment of imperial tax collectors, then secretly arranged for two to escape back to Moctezuma with a tale of good treatment at Spanish hands. Divided, the Indians would fall; Cortés meant to be on the winning side.

As a base of operations, he founded Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz—“the Rich Town of the True Cross”—the first Spanish city in Mexico. This exceeded his authority as an envoy of Cuba; to prevent mutiny and to free up his sailors for service ashore, he had his fleet destroyed and all dissenters hanged. He demanded that the Totonacs renounce their gods. (For men who’d almost certainly cheered the burning of heretics during the Inquisition, the Spanish took a dim view of human sacrifice.) When they resisted, the conquistadors seized their cacique and tumbled the bloodstained idols down the temple steps. Of the priests—black-painted creatures with blood-matted hair, ritually slashed ears and filed teeth, who stank of sulphur and decayed flesh—they made white-robed devotees of the Virgin Mary. Once the Christian god proved stronger than their own, the general populace readily, and no doubt with some relief, converted.

Cortés left 150 soldiers to defend Vera Cruz against Indian treachery or Cuban reprisal. The pick of his troops, about 400 men and a number of Indian warriors and porters, followed his red flag into the mountains of the interior. Between them and the Aztec empire lay 400 miles of hostile desert, mountains and natives.

The mountain-dwelling Tlaxcalans, bitter enemies of the Aztecs, had to be forcibly convinced to join the Spaniards, but eventually furnished Cortés with thousands of warriors. At the religious center of Cholula, sacred to the cult of Queztalcoatl, the Indians welcomed Cortés, but Dona Marina alerted him to treachery. Accordingly, he found it expedient to slaughter several thousand of them in order to head off an attack. The Spanish encountered no further opposition on the way to Tenochtitlán.

During 16 years of rule, Moctezuma had proved a capable emperor (as commanding general he once captured 12,000 prisoners; as high priest he consigned them all to sacrifice), but against Queztalcoatl no treachery, no military might, no magic could prevail. Ill omens—comets in the sky, temples struck by lightning, a mysterious woman wailing in the street night after night—foretold disaster; priests dispatched to curse Cortés had run across an old man—surely Tezcatlipoca himself?—who showed them a vision of Tenochtitlán in flames. “we will be judged and punished,” the emperor told his court. “and however it may be, and whenever it may be, we can do nothing but wait.”

El paso de Cortés, by Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau

Meanwhile, Cortés and his now formidable force crossed below the volcano Popocatepetl through the 12,000-foot high pass that today bears his name and is the only monument to him in all of Mexico. From there they were able to see the pyramids of Tenochtitlán rising above Lake Texcoco, 40 miles away.

In 1519, Tenochtitlán, a city of Venetian canals, floating gardens and pyramids to rival those of Egypt, numbered 90,000 people (compared to about 40,000 for London and 65,000 for Paris), who fought bloodless, ritual “flowery wars” to procure victims for human sacrifice, knew about iron and the wheel but had little use for either, and drank fermented cactus juice but punished drunkenness by stoning. As the Cortés expedition threaded down out of the mountains and across the lake on a causeway 8 yards wide and 9 miles long, thousands of Indians came out to greet them, crowding the walkway and filling the lake with canoes.

“Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real,” said Díaz, “for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more...and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers!”

The emperor himself, shaded by a canopy of green feathers detailed with gold, silver and pearls, wearing sandals of gold and precious stones, met them part way across. “Welcome to your land, my lords!” he cried. It was November 8, 1519.

The Meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma

The treachery and massacre at Cholula now conveniently forgotten, Moctezuma made the Spanish soldiers guests in the palace of his father and accorded them every respect. He treated Cortés, if not as a god, at least as an equal. At the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, war god of Tenochtitlán, he led the conquistador by the hand to the very edge of the drop. Below them sprawled the city: terraced roofs; streets, canals and causeways thick with traffic; great markets crowded with richly clad merchants trading in exquisite featherwork; gold- and silversmiths more skilled than those of Seville; and purveyors of foods ranging from insects and algae to dogs and deer.

Atop the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli

Cortés saw only the temple’s gore-caked walls and offertory dishes still lumped full of fresh human hearts. (In 1487 more than 10,000 captives had died in four days at the dedication of the temple.) Moctezuma refused his request to place Christian icons in the temple, a portent of things to come. Aware that his position rested on the emperor’s merest whim, Cortés determined to use on the grand scale the same strategy with which he’d won control of the coastal tribes. He accused Moctezuma of conspiring with several rebellious caciques and, backed by a band of armed men, made him a “guest” in the Spaniards’ quarters.

This done, the conquistadors felt free to ransack the palace. Behind a bricked-up doorway they found a secret treasure vault so rich it took three days to divide the loot among them. The tally came to about 8 tons, mostly of gold; at this time there were only about 90 tons of gold in all of Europe. “It was as if they had arrived in Paradise,” recalled an Aztec.

Cortés personally undertook “something we must venture for the Lord”—the destruction of the abominable idols. The gods exacted swift vengeance. Drought swept over the Valley of Mexico. Tenochtitlán stirred restlessly. The priests demanded the Spaniards’ expulsion. Moctezuma warned Cortés to leave Mexico or face war. Worse news came from the coast: 800 of Diego Velazquez’s men had landed at Vera Cruz.

Characteristically, Cortés saw them not as a threat but as new recruits. Leaving Alvarado in command, he marched to meet them with 250 men. Word of Mexican gold had weakened the enemy’s resolve; a sudden night attack convinced them to throw in with Cortés. But he led them back to Tenochtitlán to find Alvarado and his men besieged in the palace, forced to survive on foul water from wells dug in the courtyard.

Alvarado, recklessly ambitious, cruelly handsome, known to the Indians as Tonatiuh or “the Sun,” had given the Indians permission to stage a ritual dance in the great temple. Somehow the situation had gotten out of hand. Fearing treachery, and determined to strike first as Cortés had done at Cholula, or perhaps simply overcome with greed at the sight of the dancers’ jeweled bodies, the Spaniards blocked the exits and attacked. “The blood of the warriors flowed like water and gathered in pools,” recorded an Aztec account. “The pools widened, and the stench of blood and entrails filled the air. The Spaniards invaded every room, hunting and killing.”

Attempting to salvage the situation, Cortés sent Moctezuma’s brother Cuitlahuac as an emissary to the rebel chieftains, but in doing so, inadvertently gave them a real leader. Cuitlahuac, a king in his own right, had no religious compunctions about dealing with the new gods; the Aztecs immediately accepted him as war chief.

By morning the causeways were packed with warriors, and one of the bridges had already been cut. Four hundred men dispatched to scout the shortest causeway, west to Tacuba, met immediate attack and fell back, only to find the palace itself under all-out assault.

The fighting went on for days. “Neither cannon nor crossbow availed,” remembered Díaz, “nor hand-to-hand fighting, nor killing thirty or forty of them every time we charged...soldiers who were there with us and who had served in Italy swore to God many times that they had never seen such fierce fights.”

Cortés, for his part, swore that the Spaniards would flee the city if allowed. “They have already raised up another Lord and have made up their minds not to let you leave this place alive,” Moctezuma told him unhelpfully, “and therefore I believe all of you will have to die.”

Nonetheless, Moctezuma ascended the roof of the palace and looked out over his people. “Return to your homes...lay down your arms,” he commanded. “Show your obedience to me who have a right to it.”

His people answered with a shower of stones, spears and arrows. The emperor was quickly struck down, and died three days later. The Aztecs barricaded the streets and occupied the Great Pyramid, which commanded the palace grounds. Cortés’ men fought their way up its 114 steps, tossing the defenders down the terraces and destroying the temples atop it. “Some of their pride was taken out of them,” boasted Cortés.

“Gloria! Conquista!” by Leo Hao

Still, it was only a matter of time until the Indians starved them out. Their only chance was to try to sneak away by night—but out there on the Tacuba causeway, beneath the driving rain and press of the Aztec hordes, it seemed distinctly unpromising. “If there was some plan such as we had agreed upon it was an accursed one,” wrote Díaz.

In the crowd, the dark and the confusion, crossbows and arquebuses were of little use; it was black-armored cavalier against fearsomely costumed jaguar or eagle knight, Toledo steel against obsidian-edged, wooden maquahuitl. Any conquistador swept into the water was dragged down by the weight of his armor and ill-gotten gold, or carried away in canoes to ultimate sacrifice, while the temple drums boomed and flames climbed high from atop the pyramids like the fires of Popocatepetl.

The dead piled high around the causeway and in the breach, crushed beneath overturned artillery and baggage wagons as the hard-pressed Spanish rear crowded into those at the front. Finally, some of the men managed to scramble across the bloody debris to the other side, only to find another gap blocking their escape.

By this time, only a dwindling number of survivors remained to clamber across. Alvarado, to his credit, brought up the rear. Wounded, with his horse killed beneath him and more than 80 of his men dead, cut off at the very brink of the gap with hundreds of murderous Aztecs on every side and only seconds left, he set his lance point in the wreckage below and, in full armor, literally vaulted across. (The site is still known as Salta de Alvarado, “Alvarado’s Leap.”) He rejoined Cortés in command of four Spaniards and eight Tlaxcalans.

The next morning, Cortés stood beneath a cypress tree on the mainland and wept. All the artillery and muskets, two-thirds of the horses and most of the treasure, lost. Six hundred of his men dead, and more than 2,000 Tlaxcalans. All his hopes were dashed, and he was still a long way from safety.

The Indians harried them all the way around the northern reaches of the vast lake. At Otumba, in July 1520, Cuitlahuac massed the sum of his armies to destroy the invaders once and for all—“So great a multitude,” wrote Cortés, “we could not see the ground.... Certainly we believed that to be our last day.”

But in open battle, the Spanish had defeated the finest armies in Europe. Aiming their lances at the enemy’s faces, their horsemen charged straight for the Aztec chieftains, conspicuous by their tall feathered standards. The Indians scattered aimlessly before them. The next day the Spaniards reached Tlaxcala.

Cortés immediately set about rebuilding his forces. He had pieces made for 13 small ships, to be assembled on the shores of Lake Texcoco. He commandeered troops arriving from Cuba and Jamaica; crushing a revolt in the city of Tepeaca, he sold the inhabitants into slavery to finance the new army. By Christmas 1520, with 600 Spaniards and 2,000 Tlaxacalans, he was ready for a final, all-out assault on Tenochtitlán.

Meanwhile another enemy, even more fearsome than the Spanish—smallpox—ravaged the Valley of Mexico. With Cuitlahuac already dead, Moctezuma’s son-in-law, Cuauhtemoc, took over the defense. While the Spaniards scorched the earth around Lake Texcoco, raising troops, vanquishing cities friendly to Tenochtitlán and laying waste to the countryside to deny it provisions, the Aztecs prepared to defend the capital to the last man, woman and child. Even as the Spanish put together their ships, the Aztecs fixed stakes in the lake bottom to punch holes in them. They dug sinkholes in the shallows where the attackers were likely to wade, and cut the causeways linking Tenochtitlán to the shore.

For the final assault, Cortés split his forces into three divisions, each with two or three dozen horsemen and 20,000 to 30,000 Indians. While they advanced along the rebuilt causeways, he took command of the fleet, sweeping the lake of Aztec war canoes.

Battle on the causeways

It took a month for the forces led by Alvarado to cut the city’s main aqueduct at Chapultepec. Cortés had blocked all supplies from ashore. As the siege wore on into summer, the inhabitants resorted to eating the flesh of prisoners (except for the Spaniards’ heads, which they either stuck on pikes, along with those of horses, or rolled at the feet of the horrified conquistadors).

Meanwhile, they disputed every foot of the way with arrow, stone and sling. By feigning retreat they succeeded in luring into ambush first Alvarado, and then Cortés himself. Alvarado fought his way out; one of Cortés’ guards died hacking him free.

The Conquest of Tenochtitlán

Able to hear the pitiful screams of captives abruptly cut off as their hearts were torn out (Cuauhtemoc sacrificed several prisoners himself), the attackers forswore mercy. Their Indian allies gave vent to all their pent-up hatred for the Aztecs. “I have never known a race to be so pitiless,” wrote Cortés.

The Spaniards fought their way into the city a foot at a time, their cannons blasting the Indians down by the dozens, toppling buildings into the canals in order to cross. In this way—block by block, house by house, stone by very stone—the fabulous City of Mexico was gradually razed to the ground.

It was mid-August before the invaders gained the main plaza and captured the great temple. By that time seven-eighths of the city lay in total, smoking ruin. “Broken spears lie in the roads,” went one Aztec account. “The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood...splattered with gore. The water had turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine.”

The dead lay piled up by the thousands, choking the canals and rotting in the summer rains. “We could not walk,” wrote Díaz, “without treading on the bodies and heads of dead Indians.”

The Capture of Cuauhtémoc

On August 13, Cuauhtemoc attempted to flee the city in his ship of state and was quickly captured by one of the Spanish brigantines. He begged Cortés to kill him, but the conquistador would have none of it; the treasure lost on La Noche Triste had yet to be recovered.

Cuauhtemoc, though tortured, divulged little. The paltry amount recovered from the lake bottom, razed houses and the bodies of the dead was divided, and the king’s fifth sent to Spain. (A French privateer intercepted the treasure fleet; ironically, much of the loot for which Tenochtitlán died wound up in the hands of Spain’s enemy, French King Francis I.)

The ruins of the city were burned to clear the dead. The Spaniards rebuilt in their own manner with the help of the Indians, whom they gradually reduced to slavery. Many years after the conquest, Bernal Díaz recalled seeing the city as it once was, from the far shore of Lake Texcoco. “I stood looking at it and thought that never in the world would there be discovered other lands such as these…. Of all these wonders that I then beheld today all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing.”

It was a bitter requiem for a once-dazzling city and an accomplished, if unfathomably cruel, people.

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