Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

Then in 1517, the townsfolk heard that some strangers with remarkably hairy faces had landed a very large boat at Champoton, another Chontal town lying to the east. After a skirmish, the outsiders were driven off, with many of their men badly wounded, but they left many Chontal warriors wounded and dying. The strangers were clearly dangerous to the political order—a political order that required the Chontal to appear invulnerable to the surrounding peoples.

A huge dog aboard the strangers’ boat spotted land, jumped overboard, and began to swim toward the shore. The young Chontal men gave a great shout and showered the creature with arrows.

some even asserted that they governed a huge island six days’ sail to the east of Cozumel,

The interpreter told them the strangers were indeed dangerous and that they sought gold and food in regular supplies. To the indigenous, this signified that they were demanding tribute; it was not good news.

In 1519 a messenger arrived, saying that no fewer than ten of the big boats were sailing westward from Cozumel.

They offered food and advised the strangers to leave before anything unpleasant happened. The foreigners’ leader, a man in his early thirties who called himself “Hernando Cortés,” refused to listen. Instead, he made plans to come ashore.

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

the newcomers were left in command of the abandoned center of Potonchan, a square surrounded by empty temples and halls. There they slept, with sentries standing guard. Armed and armored and in a large group, they were relatively invulnerable. But they soon grew hungry.

When they sent out foraging parties, the Chontal attacked them guerrilla-style and killed several men.

Wave after wave of warriors attacked the group of metal-clad foreigners, perishing before the lethal steel weapons, but wearing them down nevertheless.

The Chontal lords thought the strangers would surely tire soon, and then their own greater numbers would carry the day. Then, from behind, there suddenly came thundering over the plain more enemies mounted on huge quadrupeds, twenty times as strong as deer.

Under cover of night, the Spaniards had unloaded ten horses from the ships that were still...

It was a time-consuming and difficult task, requiring pulleys and canvas slings, but the men were protected by darkness and their armor, and whichever Chontal were watching could not possibly have kno...

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.

Moreover, it seemed likely that more of these strangers would arrive the following year. So it was that the Chontal sued for peace.

He said that his leader, Cortés, would forgive them if they made amends. Among many other gifts, the Chontal leaders sent twenty slave girls down to the shore. The young woman from Coatzacoalcos was among them.

Daughter Child’s new name, she learned, was Marina. Her captors did not ask what her former name had been, nor did she tell them.

Marina’s spiritual baptism, it turned out, had simply been a preliminary to rape.

She found she could speak easily to the foreigner named Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had been relaying messages to the Chontal.

Aguilar did not speak Chontal, but Marina and some of the other women spoke enough Yucatec Mayan that they could communicate with him easily.

Fortunately, Marina had a razor-sharp mind, and she soon realized that there was a staggering amount of information that she needed to absorb and process rapidly if any of it was going to be of use to her.

They thought they had learned that on this mainland there was a rich nation somewhere to the west. It was important that they find it, Aguilar added, for there were now about five thousand Spaniards living in the Caribbean, and there simply was not enough wealth for all of them.

Over four hundred men and another hundred or so servants and retainers had come away with Cortés on his expedition, convinced as they were that better things awaited them over the western horizon. They would be grievously disappointed and therefore dangerous, at least to their own leaders, if they did not find what they sought. But Hernando Cortés had no intention of letting them taste such bitterness.

He struggled. “May you be joyful, oh sainted Mary, you who are full of gracia.” He left just that one word in Spanish; it was too difficult to translate. He went on, “God the king is with you. You are the most praiseworthy of all women. And very praiseworthy is your womb of precious fruit, is Jesus. Oh Saint Mary, oh perfect maiden, you are the mother of God. May you speak for us wrong-doers. May it so be done.”

When they were given a chance to speak, they said nothing about God or his mother. Instead, they worked to convince the Spaniards that the type of tribute they sought could best be delivered by the Mexica, to the west.

Within half an hour, two canoes approached the flagship of the fleet, which bore Cortés and Puertocarrero and their Indian servants. Moctezuma, they would later learn, had ordered that this spot be watched since the strangers had visited it the year before.

Aguilar spoke Yucatec Mayan well enough, but unbeknownst to him, the expedition had now left Maya territory. He was hearing Nahuatl and could make nothing of it. Cortés grew angry. He had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to ransom the castaway, and the man had assured him he could speak to Indians. Now it seemed he couldn’t, after all.

Marina did have alternatives. She could have remained silent. No one expected a young slave girl to step forward in that moment and become an international conduit. But she chose to explain what the Nahuatl speakers were saying. By the end of that hour, she had made her full value felt.

He meant that he would make her rich; it was what he promised everyone who agreed to help him.

As it was, she was the concubine of Puertocarrero—a man with so few morals that he had once even abandoned a Spanish girl whom he had persuaded to run away with him. When he tired of his Indian slave girl, or when he was killed, Marina would be passed on and might even become the common property of all the men. Alternatively, she could speak aloud, earning the respect and gratitude of every Spaniard there, especially their leader.

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.

No one in her world could have imagined that she owed loyalty to the Moctezuma’s people.

It would not have occurred to them to expect any loyalty from her, any more than they would have from anyone else whom they had made war against.23

he worked hard to convince Moctezuma’s messengers that he needed to be taken to meet their lord in person.

Many years later, it would become an accepted fact that the indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortés to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated

Even he, however, had he known what people would one day say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.

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.

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,

And in his letters, written on the spot, Cortés never claimed that he was perceived as a god.

In a fascinating turn of events, by the 1560s and’70s, some of the Indians themselves were beginning to offer up the story as fact.

The young indigenous writers were from elite families, the same ones who, forty or fifty years earlier had lost everything with the arrival of the Spaniards. And they were longing for an explanation. How had their once all-powerful fathers and grandfathers sunk so low?

Interestingly, the stories they told bore a distinct resemblance to the narrations in certain Greek and Latin texts that were in the Franciscan school library.

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.

The only element that rapidly became clear was that the strangers considered themselves to be representatives of their god.

They had no way of knowing that in the Old World, people had been full time farmers for ten thousand years. Europeans had by no means been the first farmers, but they were nevertheless the cultural heirs of many millennia of sedentary living. They therefore had the resultant substantially greater population and a panoply of technologies—not just metal arms and armor, but also ships, navigation equipment, flour mills, barrel-making establishments, wheeled carts, printing presses, and many other inventions that rendered them more powerful than those who did not have such things. In the New World, people had been full-time farmers for perhaps three thousand years. It was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians.

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.

First of all, the Spaniards were hungry. 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.”

What Cortés did not want others to realize was that if Malintzin hadn’t been there, they could not have succeeded.

women who had been ripped from their homes and had no love for the Mexica were now scattered all across Mesoamerica. But Cortés had been especially lucky, and on some level he knew this. Not all women who hated the Mexica spoke both Nahuatl and Yucatec Mayan. And of those who did, not all of them were the daughters of noblemen and spoke with such finesse, with the ability to understand and use the high register of the nobility, which even had its own grammar.