Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

The central valley of Mexico now contained about 1.5 million people, most of them farmers. In the very center of the fertile basin, on this little island of 5.5 square miles, there lived as many as 50,000 people.

An early aqueduct, built to bring fresh water to the island, had collapsed in a flood in 1449, just before the great famine had started, and under Axayacatl a new one had recently been built, significantly higher, and with two water troughs, so that even if one needed to be cleaned or repaired, there would be no interruption of water flow.29

Some said that the people of Tlatelolco were by now so enraged that the women bared their bodies in an insulting gesture, and that those who could squeezed milk at the oncoming enemy. It might be true: the author of the Annals of Tlatelolco claimed almost proudly that their women fought in the last stages of the war against the Spaniards, too, as if it had been something they considered culturally appropriate for their women to do in moments of extremity.36

Moctezuma wanted to increase the level of direct control. He started by setting up thirty-eight administrative provinces (there were later fifty-five provinces), each with its own tightly organized bureaucracy. Representatives of his government were sent to live in each. In a town far away in the Toluca valley, they created such neighborhoods as (in Nahuatl) “Place of the Temple Lords,” “Place of the Merchants,” “Place of the Rulers,” and “Place of the Mexica people.”44 Permanent military garrisons were built at key locations in order to support the Mexica who were scattered far and wide.

The tlatoani of each local altepetl would continue, as he always had, to distribute farmlands among his own people, but in the case of any unresolved disputes, and certainly of any disputes with other altepetls, it was the prerogative of Tenochca judges to decide upon the proper distribution. They intervened with some frequency; years later, long after the Spaniards were in power, some local families were still simmering about Tenochtitlan’s decisions, which were generally still in force, by then having the weight of custom behind them.49

One part of the market featured luxury goods—gold and silver, turquoise, jade and other gems, the feathers of exotic birds. Merchants sold these to artisans as raw materials, and to wealthy customers as finely crafted textiles and beautiful jewelry. Likewise, they sold plain cotton thread or cloth and also beautifully made embroidered cloaks and other clothing. In another area, they offered firewood and lumber, as well as wood carved into tool handles, paddles, and columns for buildings. They sold copper axe-heads and needles, white bark paper, pitch pine for torches, rubber balls, herbal medicines, tobacco, pipes, and row upon row of ceramic pots and dishes. They hawked goods made of sisal: twine, rope, nets, and sandals, as well as all manner of animal furs, tanned or untanned, dyed or undyed. They sold rough grinding stones and fine obsidian knives or mirrors, in which one could see every detail of one’s face.. In one corner, men could pay to have their hair cut. In another, they could buy a slave or find a prostitute.57

It was the section selling food stuffs, though, that most impressed people who had never been to the marketplace before. The stalls offered everything—every type of corn and bean, all varieties of salts and herbs. Birds and animals rustled in their cages. There were fruits and vegetables, cacao and honey, bird eggs and the delicious bars of dried algae from the lake. But what was remarkable about Tlatelolco, what made it different from neighborhood food markets, was that food could be bought partially prepared, for urban customers too busy to make everything from scratch. One could buy pre-made tortillas and little cakes, squash already cut into pieces, smoked chilis, and ground cacao. Hungry shoppers could go to what was effectively a restaurant—a stand where prepared meals were available for sale.58

Startlingly—at least to newcomers—the market also served as a repository for the urine collected in clay pots in households across the city. Whether people were paid for what they brought or fined for what they didn’t bring is not clear. In either case, the practice served two purposes. The collection of the waste in one place rendered most of the city very clean. Ammonia was also needed for tanning hides and making salt crystals, and there was no better source than the urine from the island’s tens of thousands of people. Canoes full of basins of it were lined up near the market, and there the tanners and salt-makers brought their requisite supplies.60

Every girl learned the proper prayers for her marriage ceremony and for daily life. She learned to spin and weave and embroider if she had not already become adept, and she also learned her duties as a future wife and mother. She discovered, for instance, that she would have very little sleep for much of her adult life, and that she must not resent it. “Here is the task you are to do: be devout night and day. Sigh many times to the night, the passing wind. Call to, speak to, cry out to it, especially in your resting place, your sleeping place. Do not practice the pleasure of sleep.” Nursing mothers and the mothers of young children could expect to be up part of every night, and they must still rise early to haul the water, rekindle the fire, and start the breakfast without complaint. When that time came, a young woman should not be surprised. The adults in her life were preparing her to handle the harshness of reality.61

Every boy studied warfare, unless he had been selected as a likely priest or had been born into a merchant family. Merchants formed their own tight-knit group and educated their children for the harrowing treks across unknown country; priests were educated in a separate school, where they would learn far more than other boys about religious matters, the calendar, and the pictographic writing system. Those two groups aside, every young male had to learn to be a warrior. That had always been true in almost every village in Mexico, but now the Mexicas’ predominant position absolutely depended on their success; there was no room for failure or for doubt if they did not want all the surrounding altepetls that hated theirs to rise up against them. The boys learned a craft from their parents at home—perhaps sculpting ceramic vessels, or making tiny golden animals with charcoal and wax molds, or gluing the velvety fibers of exotic feathers in intricate designs on shields—but when they were about thirteen, they all left home to train as warriors. In the early weeks after starting school, they swept and collected firewood; they sang in the evenings and enjoyed themselves. The violent exercises began gradually. The boys learned to withstand pain and to fight. As older teenagers, they might accompany warriors to battle, on the understanding that whole groups of them should try to bring in a captive by separating a man on the battlefield from his cohort and then working together as a w...

If, on the other hand, a young man was especially adept at fighting, he won honors for himself and his whole family. A commoner could rise to become a quauhpilli (kwow-PIL-li), an eagle lord, or honorary nobleman. The slaves and other loot he brought back from battle made him rich. If he liked, he could take more than one wife, just like a born nobleman, for he could support them and the resulting children. Often such men were honored with an official position, and no one quarreled with their right to hold it.64

When a student at a calmecac, as the schools were called, committed a particularly serious infraction, such as drinking, he was doomed to participate in a ceremony in which the priests attempted to drown him—or seemed to attempt to do so. “They plunged him under the water and dragged him. They went pulling him along by the hair. They kicked him. As he swam under the water, churning, beating, and swirling it up as he went, he escaped the hands of the priests…. When he finally reached the shore, he lay half dead, breathing his last, gasping in his last agonies.” At that point the boy’s parents were allowed to take him home. The system was not without a certain moral impurity. If a mother and father were convinced that their child was not a good swimmer and thus might actually die, they could bribe the school officials. “They would give the priests a turkey or some other kind of food, so that they would let [their boy] be.”65

Traditionally, every month in the Nahua ceremonial calendar had seen sacrificial victims die, but by the end of Moctezuma’s reign, so many were killed in Tenochtitlan every month that a significant number of priests had to have worked full time preparing for, orchestrating, and then cleaning up after the deaths. They cleaned the skulls and plastered them into great tzompantlis (skull racks). They no longer killed only specially arrayed impersonators of the god but also a variable number of ordinary captives, whose dead bodies, sprawled on the lower steps, were understood to receive the god figure into their arms as he or she fell down the pyramid.

Only a few decades earlier, Mexica society could not possibly have dedicated so much time, manpower, and psychic energy to the rituals of death. But their strength enabled them to do so by the later decades. And their leaders were convinced that if they could do so, they should, as they believed the practice reduced distant altepetls to abject terror. By this time, a number of elite figures and their priests clearly took a cynical view of the question of human sacrifice. When they were making war on peoples at the edge of their empire whom they wished to incorporate into the realm, they would seize some of the men and bring them to Tenochtitlan, not in a public procession so that they might serve as sacrifices, but secretly, so they could be made to watch. Then they were released to bring word home to their people of what awaited them if they did not accept Mexica terms peacefully. “Thus they were undone, and disunited,” a man who had seen these spectacles later commented.67 Moctezuma especially liked to bring such visitors to see the gladiatorial sacrifice ceremony in the month of Tlacaxipeualtli, when captured warriors were forced to fight for their lives—only to be slain anyway. There was definitely an underside to the controlled, well-oiled workings of the beautiful city.

At some point one of them must surely have sung one of the perennial favorites about the fragility of flowers, the fleeting nature of earthly joys. Such a song would have flowed easily from the heart of a woman taken from the land of her birth to serve others until her death: My heart is angry. We are not born twice, not engendered twice. Instead we leave this earth forever. We are in the presence of this company but a moment! It can never be—I will never be happy, never be content. Where does my heart live? Where is my home? Where does my house lie? I suffer on this earth. The singer’s next lines were addressed

it was their very definition of the duty of a tlatoani. “The ruler used to keep vigil through the night,” they remembered.78

The foreigners’ leader, a man in his early thirties who called himself “Hernando Cortés,” refused to listen. Instead, he made plans to come ashore. He divided his men into two groups. One landed at the mouth of the river on the coast and then moved overland toward the town, and the other sailed upriver, then drew near the settlement in smaller boats and began to wade ashore in a tight formation. Their glinting swords were bared, creating a circle of space around them, and their outer clothing was likewise made of metal, so they could move with relative impunity, as the Indians’ stone arrowheads and spear tips shattered against it. Still, it was tough going for them. One of the strangers later described the scene: With great bravery the [locals] surrounded us in their canoes, pouring such a shower of arrows on us that they kept us in the water up to our waists. There was so much mud and swamp that we had difficulty getting clear of it; and so many Indians attacked us, hurling their lances and shooting arrows, that it took us a long time to struggle ashore. While Cortés was fighting, he lost a sandal in the mud and could not recover it. So he landed with one bare foot.11 As soon as they were ashore, the invaders began to use their crossbows and lances against the indigenous, who were armored only in padded cotton, forcing them to retreat. With their metal weapons, the strangers broke through the wooden stockades that had been constructed, and then the other group of outsider...

The leaders of Potonchan counted their missing men, whose bodies lay strewn over the field of battle. They had lost over 220 warriors in only a few hours. Nothing comparable had ever occurred in all the histories recorded in stone or legend. They simply could not afford to keep up a fight like that. Even if in the end they could drive these men away, the battle would do them no good, for everyone in their world would learn of it. They would be left weak and defenseless, vulnerable to their enemies, having lost many hundreds of their own.13 Moreover, it seemed likely that more of these strangers would arrive the following year. So it was that the Chontal sued for peace. One of the enemy, strangely enough, spoke some Yucatec Mayan, a language well known to the Chontal. He had been a prisoner on the peninsula for years. He said that his leader, Cortés, would forgive them if they made amends.

Mexicans today generally consider Marina to have been a traitor to Native American people. But at the time, if anyone had asked her if she should perhaps show more loyalty to her fellow Indians, she would have been genuinely confused. In her language, there was no word that was the equivalent of “Indians.” Mesoamerica was the entire known world; the only term for “people native to the Americas” would have been “human beings.” And in her experience, human beings most definitely were not all on the same side. The Mexica were her people’s enemies. It was they who had seen to it that she was torn from her family, and their merchants who had sold her in Xicallanco. Now this relatively small group of newcomers wanted to make war on the Mexica. No one in her world could have imagined that she owed loyalty to the Moctezuma’s people. While she lived, and for many years afterwards, no one expressed surprise at the course she chose. Only modern people who lacked knowledge of her situation would later say that she was some sort of traitor.

What really happened when the messengers returned with their report was that he sent scouts out to every important town between Tenochtitlan and the coast, and then set up a veritable war room. This is exactly what one would expect him to have done, given his history as a ferociously successful tlatoani who believed whole-heartedly in order, discipline, and information. Years later, a man who had been young at the time remembered: “A report of everything that was happening was given and relayed to Moctezuma. Some of the messengers would be arriving as others were leaving. There was no time when they weren’t listening, when reports weren’t being given.”26 The scouts even repeated a summary of the religious instruction that was being regularly offered by the Spanish priest and translated by Aguilar and Marina. When the Spaniards later got to Tenochtitlan and tried to deliver a sermon to Moctezuma, he cut them off, explaining that he was already familiar with their little speech, his messengers having presented it to him in full.27

And in his letters, written on the spot, Cortés never claimed that he was perceived as a god. The idea first appeared, albeit in somewhat incoherent form, in some writings by Europeans in the 1540s. Fray Toribio de Benavente wrote of the indigenous observers’ purported understanding: “Their god was coming, and because of the white sails, they said he was bringing by sea his own temples.” Then, remembering that he had earlier claimed that all the Spaniards were supposed to have been gods, the priest quickly added, “When they disembarked, they said that it was not their god, but rather many gods.”28 It was a deeply satisfying concept to this European author and his readers. In such a scenario, the white men had nothing to feel remorse about, no matter how much the Indians had suffered since their arrival. The Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been worshipped. Indeed, could there be a European man living who didn’t like the idea, who didn’t feel flattered and pleased by the notion? In years to come, other invaders would try out comparable assertions. John Smith, for example, would claim that in Virginia, the local chief’s daughter had been wildly in love with him and had been willing to sacrifice her very life for his. He didn’t mention that when he had known her, she had been only ten years old. And interestingly, he only told the story of her adulation when she and her English husband had both been dead for years and couldn’t possibly refute what he said; in th...

The group that had wandered away to the east had been following the peaceful leader. If they decided the man’s name was not Huemac, as a leading culture hero of numerous ancient stories was called, but rather Quetzalcoatl, as the former teacher fray Toribio was the first one to suggest, the story would work perfectly, as one of the many year signs associated with the god Quetzalcoatl corresponded to 1519. The mortal man could have become a god and been expected to return then. Unfortunately, the students got the matter a bit confused. From their people’s own records, they knew of the arrivals along the coast in the two preceding years, and they said it was the second captain who was thought to be Quetzalcoatl returning from the east.32 That one was actually Juan de Grijalva, sailing in 1518, not Cortés arriving in 1519. But no matter. The gist of the story was there, and it could be taken up in generations to come and embellished as much as future authors saw fit to do.

None of the original Nahua histories written down by the earliest generation of students in the privacy of their own homes had said anything like this. In fact, none of the elements ring true, given what we know about Mexica culture. The Mexica did not believe in people becoming gods, or in gods coming to earth only in one particular year, or in anybody having a preordained right to conquer them. They didn’t consider Quetzalcoatl to be their major deity (like the Cholulans did) or originally associate him with an abhorrence of human sacrifice. When we add the fact that we can actually watch the story’s birth and evolution in European-authored and European-influenced works, the case for its being a later fabrication seems closed.33

In general, the Nahuas struggled to come up with terms that would apply to the Spaniards. In their world, everybody was named for the place from which they came (the Tenochca from Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalteca from Tlaxcala, the Culhuaque from Culhuacan, etc.). If a person’s geographical origins were unknown, then it wasn’t clear what to call him. The newcomers presented a problem in this regard. The only element that rapidly became clear was that the strangers considered themselves to be representatives of their god. That made sense to the Nahuas. Until they were certain what the name of the newcomers’ god was—and the strangers used a confusing array of terms—it apparently seemed most logical to refer to them by a word that conveyed they were the representatives of a revered divinity.35 Their choice of labels apparently left even some of their own grandchildren believing that the white men really had been considered gods. The fact remained that those grandchildren desperately needed to come to terms with the conquest. That their ancestors had been benighted savages, as the Spaniards sometimes said, they knew to be false. But their ancestors could perhaps have made a mistake of this nature, and if they had, it might explain a great deal.36

The Mesopotamians were stunningly impressive—but they could not have defeated Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire working in combination with the Pope. Had the young indigenous writers of the late sixteenth century known all of this, it would have been a relief to their minds. But that relief was denied them. And so they participated in constructing a version of events that Moctezuma would have derided—but that he had no power to change from the land of the dead.

Marina bargained as effectively as she could. From the people living nearby, she bought cages full of turkeys, and some of the other women plucked and stewed them. She bought tortillas and salt, fruits and vegetables. The people grew used to dealing with her and sought her out. They did not have an “r” in their language, so they heard her name as “Malina.” They added the honorific “-tzin” to the end, and it became “Malintzin,” which sometimes came out as “Malintze.”

As the Spanish speakers did not have the “tz” sound in their language, they heard the “Malinchi” or sometimes “Malinche.” Thus when they did not call her “doña Marina,” they called her “Malinche,” and so she has remained to historians ever since. What the Spaniards found disorienting was that to the various groups they dealt with, this woman seemed to be the most important member of their party. They did not even seem to see Jerónimo de Aguilar, and they called Hernando Cortés himself “Malinche,” as if her name must be his name, too, though the Spaniards felt it should have been the other way around.37

The Tlaxcalans, they explained, truly hated the Mexica, for although they had remained independent, they had done this by participating in the dreaded Flower Wars against them for years.41

Cortés added that a few days later (because he doubted that he really had full control) he had placed Moctezuma under house arrest and never let him walk free again. Cortés’s statements would be utterly mystifying—except that they were absolutely necessary for him to make at the time. When he wrote of these events a year later, the Mexica people had ousted him and all his forces from the city. At that point, he was desperately trying to orchestrate a conquest from near the coast, in conjunction with indigenous allies and newly arrived Spaniards. He did not want to look like a loser, but instead like a loyal servant to the Spanish monarch who had already accomplished great things and would soon do more. According to Spanish law, he was only in the right in launching this war in the name of the king … if in fact he was attempting to retake a part of the kingdom that was in rebellion. He had no authority to stir up trouble by making war against a foreign state that had just ejected him. Thus it was essential that the Mexica people were understood to have accepted Spanish rule in the first place, so that their present choices could be interpreted as acts of rebellion.8

Moctezuma knew well that his own ancestors were invaders and that there had been other waves of invaders, some of whom had moved on or turned back. It would make sense for him to believe—or at least seem to believe, in front of his people—that the strangers were other descendants of his own fearsome ancestors, in short, that these visitors were long-lost relatives, whose existence did not surprise him at all. Such a scenario makes perfect sense. But we can’t know with any certainty what really passed in that first conference between the Mexica tlatoani and the men from Europe. All that the children of the indigenous elites ever mentioned was that Moctezuma recounted his own ancestral lineage in great detail, before calling himself the newcomers’ “poor vassal.” If he really said that, then he was only underscoring his great power in the speech of reversal that constituted the epitome of politeness in the Nahua world. It certainly would not have been an indication that he actually intended to relinquish his throne without further ado.11

“All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I have marveled at the subtle intellects of men in foreign parts.” The stories, of course, traveled even faster than the exhibit—many of them full of wild exaggeration. Unbeknown to him, Cortés became a famous man in Europe. His father immediately began to outfit a shipload of supplies. Ships and printing presses ensured that the news passed from port to port in weeks rather than years, a speed that was to make a huge difference. Within months, there were people in every part of western Europe considering the possibility of investing in the newly discovered lands or even going there themselves.20

The Mexica later recalled what the Spanish never spoke of: “It was as though they had fallen off a precipice; they all fell and dropped in, the Tlaxcalans … and the Spaniards, along with the horses and some women [they had with them]. The canal was completely full of them, full to the very top. And those who came last just passed and crossed over on people …”—they hesitated over the words—“… on top of the bodies.”34

Many altepetls—or rather, certain lineages within altepetls—needed little convincing to throw in their lot with the strangers. Due to old internal tensions, these family lines and their followers were ready and willing to fight with the powerful newcomes.

The foreigners used their cannon to knock down the walls that the Mexica had built as obstructions and even demolished whole buildings. Then they sent in their indigenous allies to fill in the canals with rubble or sand, while the long-range crossbows and guns guarded them. Once the Spaniards had access to a flat, open space, they could easily maintain control of it with their horses and lances. Every day, the Spaniards killed dozens of the Mexica at a minimum; once they killed several hundred in a single day. One of the warriors, when he was an old man, remembered: “Bit by bit they came pressing us back against the wall [at Tlatelolco], herding us together.”51

They contested every single foot of ground; at night, they sometimes managed to re-excavate canals that had been filled in. Famous warriors performed death-defying deeds and occasionally managed to topple a horse and bring down the rider. Twice they were able to isolate and bring down large groups of the Spaniards (once fifteen of them, once perhaps fifty-three). They sacrificed the prisoners atop the tallest pyramid in full view of their ashen compatriots, then strung their heads in a grisly necklace and left it hanging in the air. The courage of individual warriors sometimes stunned the younger boys who watched.

On one occasion the Spaniards reached a neighborhood no one had thought they would reach until the next day. They began to seize the women and children who had not yet evacuated. A warrior named Axoquentzin (Ah-sho-KEN-tzeen) came running. His rage seemed to lend him superhuman strength. He ran out into the open and picked up a Spaniard and whirled him around until he dropped a girl whom he had seized. Then Axoquentzin picked up another man and flung him about. But this sort of action couldn’t go on forever, and the Spaniards brought him down: “They shot an iron bolt into his heart. He died as if he were stretching out when going to sleep.” Thirty years later, such stories lived on in the people’s collective memory and in the songs they sang. The fearlessness of their greatest warriors made them deeply proud.52

They learned not only to make extra-long spears to rival Spanish lances but also to zigzag their canoes so quickly in unexpected patterns that the Spaniards could not easily take aim from their brigantines. Yet such tactics could not bring them victory; they could only hinder their enemies. The old men remembering their people’s efforts found it too painful to say this directly, but one came close. “In this way, the war took somewhat longer.”

The Mexica knew that they were losing. They had no way to explain the discrepancy between their power and that of their enemies; they had no way of knowing that the Europeans were heirs to a ten-thousand-year-old tradition of sedentary living, and they themselves the heirs of barely three thousand. Remarkably, through it all, they seem to have maintained a practical sense of the situation: they knew what needed to be explained. They did not assume greater merit or superior intelligence on the part of their enemies. Rather, in the descriptions they left, they focused on two elements: the Spaniards’ use of metal, and their extraordinary communication apparatus. The old men talking about their experiences used the word tepoztli (metal, iron) more than any other in reference to the Spaniards: “Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies in iron. They put iron on their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron, and their shields and lances were iron.” They grew ever more specific: “Their iron lances and halberds seemed to sparkle, and their iron swords were curved like a stream of water. Their cuirasses and iron helmets seemed to make a clattering sound.”57 When the elderly speakers paused in wonder at the events, it was to ask how the word had gone out so efficiently to so many people across the sea about their marvelous kingdom.58 The warriors had seen the ships—but not the compasses, the navigation equipment, the technical maps, and the printing presses ...

The Spaniards kept the prettiest of the captive young women for themselves; other starving girls whose families had been destroyed came to them voluntarily. In at least one case, a group of these girls was kept locked in a building in forced prostitution. Conscience-stricken observers of the treatment meted out to the girls told tales back in Spain, and in June of 1523, the king issued a plea to his people that they rein themselves in and cease their abuse of the native women.12

The Spaniards had the upper hand in all these arrangements, yet at no point did Cortés and his peers lose sight of the fragility of the peace. There were, after all, still millions more Indians than Europeans in this vast land. In early 1524, Cortés issued a new edict insisting that all Spanish men maintain a full set of arms. Each one was required to own a dagger, sword, and lance as well as a shield, helmet, and breastplate. Any man who did not acquire these goods within six months and then appear on command at military parades was subject to stiff fines.

Those who had received encomiendas of up to five hundred Indians also had to arrange to purchase either a crossbow and bolts, or, failing that, a firelock musket and enough ammunition to fire two hundred times. If an encomienda contained between five hundred and one thousand Indians, the recipient additionally had to obtain a horse. Those who received even larger encomiendas had to purchase more such goods. If an encomendero did not comply, he stood to lose his grant in its entirety.18

In these more recent discussions, scholars have had to rely upon indirect evidence—for instance, if the Nahuas didn’t have a word for “the Devil,” how could they possibly have come to believe in him so immediately? In their proselytizing efforts, the friars were reduced to using the word tlacatecolotl (tla-ka-te-KOL-ot) for a more generic type of “devil.” This term had been used before the conquest to refer to a type of malicious shaman who could take the shape of a horned owl and fly about casting spells and generally wreaking havoc in unsuspecting people’s lives. A tlacatecolotl generally came forth at night and was at all costs to be avoided. These creatures were hardly on par with Lucifer, but the friars decided that the word would have to do, as there was none better for their purposes.

The priest spelled out the myriad reasons they had to be grateful to their gods and concluded, “It would be a fickle, foolish thing for us to destroy the most ancient laws and customs left by the first inhabitants of this land.” He added that if the Spaniards were so daring as to insist on the destruction of the old gods, they would be courting political disaster. He spoke as if he were giving friendly advice, but he conveyed a threat. “Beware,” he said, “lest the common people rise up against us if we were to tell them that the gods they have always understood to be such are not gods at all.” Eventually he came to his climax: “All of us together feel that it is enough to have lost, enough that the reed mats, the thrones [political power, the royal jurisdiction] have been taken from us. As for our gods, we will die before giving up serving and worshipping them. This is our determination; do with us what you will. This will serve in reply and contradiction to what you have said. We have no more to say, lords.”

The people painted the insides with swirling flowers, placing a jaguar and an eagle in prominent positions. These were the characters of the ancient Nahua story—the ordinary animals who bravely jumped into the fire at the creation of the Fifth Sun and who had symbolized the qualities of warriors ever since.57

Cristóbal picked up the quill, ready to write. And don Alonso de Castañeda Chimalpopoca began to speak. He told an ancient tale, about the breakup of a happy community centuries earlier. It was a story his people had been telling for many, many years, since they were wanderers. “When Huemac became a young man, he gave orders that the Nonohualca tend to his home. Then the Nonohualca said to him, ‘So be it, my lord. May we do what you desire.’ The Nonohualca came to tend to his home. And then he demanded women of them. He said to the Nonohualca, ‘You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide.’” Surely don Alonso stopped here to have a good laugh at the preposterous arrogance of the man. But then he would have faced the cultural divide that was beginning to form between him and his descendants. Was young Cristóbal’s Nahuatl still good enough for him to get the joke? Did don Alonso have to explain everything to the younger man, brought up in a different time? Did he tell him that the story was particularly rich because “Huemac” meant “Big Gift”? He had been a foundling and was supposedly a gift from the gods. Some “Big Gift” he turned out to be! It was because of him that all the discord between the ancestors originally arose. “Huemac” indeed! He had been no gift, but he certainly had brought the unexpected—like so much of life, don Alonso must have thought, as one who had seen one world give way to another and who had survived with his humor intact. H...

Don Martín was different. His early childhood memories were of his mother, Malintzin, or doña Marina as the Spaniards called her, twice a prisoner, ever a survivor, the bravest of women, as all men said. When he was eight years old, his father took him to Spain and left him there to become a page to Prince Philip, and he then learned the meaning of the word alone. He grew up a “half-breed Indian” in the eyes of those who surrounded him in the Spanish court. Silent, distant, he survived, but he was not stunned when humanity turned its face away from him. If anyone had ever looked past him, belittled him, or made him feel insignificant, they would learn who he was.

What the Spaniards were afraid of was, ironically, the Indians.

The new viceroy, don Antonio de Mendoza, decided to select a member of the Tenochca ruling family to act as gobernador, or head of an indigenous cabildo, a collective that would be charged with maintaining order and assembling needed labor drafts. His goal was to establish such a body in every altepetl, and thus it was especially important that a proper model be established in Tenochtitlan, or the City of Mexico, as it was now called. The Indians, he thought, would govern themselves more effectively than any outsider could; offering self-rule was also a gesture of good will, for this was what the Indians said they wanted.14

It had, apparently, never occurred to him that the children and grandchildren of the Aztecs who had ruled the Mesoamerican world only forty years earlier might protest becoming impoverished, tribute-paying plebeians in such short order.

The senior Audiencia judge, Francisco Ceynos, became the interim authority in the colony. He was a deeply cold man, who once said scathingly to a group of indigenous petitioners who were complaining of Spanish policy, “When it was still the time of Moctezuma, didn’t the people used to give their own children to have their breasts cut open for their devil-gods?”40