Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

She began to learn Spanish from Jerónimo de Aguilar, without a blackboard or a grammar book. Within a few months, she no longer needed her teacher at all.

Messengers came back from Moctezuma twice, each time bearing gifts and promising more in the future, but also categorically refusing to escort Cortés and his party to Tenochtitlan. There was a drought, said Moctezuma’s emissaries, and the king could not entertain them in the style to which they were undoubtedly accustomed. Cortés, however, was absolutely determined to get there.

Undaunted, he considered what he had learned from some nearby Totonac villagers and from Malintzin herself—namely, that Moctezuma had many enemies who would help him in his travels.

then go on to Tlaxcala, where the people hated the Mexica. There, his forces would have access to food and water and other support.

he had left the Caribbean without the governor’s permission, so he was, technically speaking, an outlaw.

He arranged for all the Spaniards present to band together and sign a document insisting that they found a Spanish town (it was to be called the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, or the “Rich City of the True Cross”), and that he lead them where they wanted to go—which was to Tenochtitlan.

Finally, Cortés ordered that the remaining ships be beached. They weren’t permanently destroyed, but leaving would now be a major undertaking requiring many weeks of repair work. It was a way of preventing discontented men from easily going home.40

Cortés sent one of the riders galloping back in case reinforcements were needed, and then he and the others approached the Indians. Suddenly, hundreds of warriors seemed to rise out of nowhere and surrounded them completely.

Cortés had learned a crucial lesson: a handful of armored men was not enough to withstand an onslaught, not even if they were mounted on horseback.

Tlaxcalan messengers arrived. They apologized for the incident and blamed it on foolish and rambunctious Otomí who lived in their territory.

A huge Tlaxcalan force attacked at daybreak. The Spaniards were ready for them, and with their armor on, they could inflict more casualties than they received,

That night, Cortés took the thirteen remaining horsemen galloping over the plain to the nearby hills, where lighted fires signaled the presence of villages. “I burnt five or six small places of about a hundred inhabitants,” he later wrote to the king.

This time, the Spanish even used their guns, which were really tiny cannons that couldn’t be aimed well but could scatter grapeshot with deadly effect. “The enemy was so massed and numerous,” commented one of the Spaniards later, “that every shot wrought havoc among them.”43 Many dozens of Tlaxcalan men died that day, each one swept up into the arms of his comrades

Yet only one Spaniard died.

“I burnt more than ten villages,” he reported. For the next two days, the Tlaxcalan chiefs sporadically sent emissaries suing for peace, but they somehow sounded unconvincing, perhaps because no gifts were forthcoming.

The emissaries learned nothing, and Cortés cut the fingers from the hands of a number of them, so that “they would see who we were,” as he said, and then sent them home.

He had Malintzin on horseback with him and had her shout aloud that the strangers offered peace and friendship, if they chose to accept it. Something she said convinced them, for the war ended that night. Peace talks began in earnest in the morning.

The Mexica could not bring them down without losing more men than they could spare, but they did not really need to, because they could use the traditional enmity to fuel the ritual Flower Wars that often ended in death.

The Tlaxcalans brought the Spaniards to the imposing palace of the tlatoani Xicotencatl (Shee-ko-TEN-kat) of Tizatlan, one of the two largest sub-altepetls. There, they offered the newcomers women, ranging from princesses whom it was intended the lords should marry, to slave girls meant as a form of tribute.

Strings of young women being given to the Spaniards, together with the names of the most important ones, looked out from the painting; they personified the treaty of alliance that the Tlaxcalans believed had been made.47

He wanted several thousand warriors to go with him to Tenochtitlan. The Tlaxcalans agreed. It was the kind of alliance they had had in mind when they offered Xicotencatl’s daughter as a bride to one of the strangers’ leaders. When the company set out, it was at least three times larger than it had been before. It gave the appearance of an army of victory.48

He sent messengers offering annual tribute—including gold, silver, slaves, and textiles—to be delivered as the strangers desired. The only provision was that they not enter his lands, as he could not host so large a company. Moctezuma and his council assumed that this arrangement was what the foreigners’ sought.

What he absolutely could not afford, politically speaking, was a confrontation with such a force anywhere close to home. He knew from his sources that the strangers won their battles.

They stopped in Cholula, now a subject town of Moctezuma’s. He gave orders to the Cholulans that they not feed the strangers well. It seems that he also commanded them to attack the party as they left the city, when they would be forced to pass through certain narrow ravines as they entered the ring of mountains surrounding the central valley. At least, Cortés claimed that Malintzin gathered this news from an old woman who lived in the city.

Whether he wanted a battle or not, the Tlaxcalans were spoiling for a fight. They had not forgiven the recent turncoats in Cholula. If they could bring down the present chiefly line and install one more sympathetic to Tlaxcala, the result would be of lasting benefit to them.

However it came about, the Spaniards and the Tlaxcalans combined forces in a terrible rampage. The temple to Quetzalcoatl was burned—Quetzalcoatl was the primary protector god of the Cholulans—as were most of the houses. “The destruction took two days,” commented one Spaniard laconically.

Spaniard named Bernal Díaz wrote of his impressions many years later: “These great towns and cues [pyramids] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadís.” (Amadís was a legendary knight, and a book about him had recently become a best seller in Spain.)

remembered, “Some of our soldiers asked if it were not all a dream.”

The lord’s palace there rivaled buildings in Spain. Behind it a flower garden cascad...

“Today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”

Moctezuma had wisely decided to handle the situation by putting on a grand show of two brother monarchs meeting. At the gate at the edge of the island, hundreds of dignitaries had gathered, including multiple representatives of each of the central altepetls.

“I stood there waiting for nearly an hour until everyone had performed his ceremony,” he said huffily.

It put the tiny, mazelike streets of European cities to shame, and the small downtown area of Tlaxcala also paled in comparison. For

Anyone could see that he was the high king. Over him his retainers held a magnificent canopy, a great arc pointing toward the sky, its bits of gold and precious stones glinting in the light.53 It was as if he carried with him a reflection of the sun itself.

None of the royal children had ever known a day’s hunger until now. Even through this scourge, they had had good care as long as there were any servants left to tend to them: their good fortune had helped them survive. It helped that they were grown girls, too.

People said that her father, the Lord Moctezuma himself, had been found strangled by the Spaniards like a common criminal.4 It was probably true. However it had happened, he was gone, as were the others.

“Are we born twice on this earth?” the singers called out when people died. And the chorus knew the tragic, angry, tear-laden response, “No!” The child understood what they meant now.

It had been a joyous moment when the Spaniards left, when they were pushed out of the seething, resentful city and forced to flee for their lives. If she had known then that the ordeal was far from over, that the worst was yet to come, she might not have found the fortitude to forge ahead and join her people in putting their world back together.

There had been tensions from the earliest moments of their arrival when Hernando Cortés dismounted from his horse, took a few steps forward, and made as if to embrace Moctezuma. The tlatoani’s shocked retainers had stepped forward quickly to prevent such marked disrespect.

A year later, Cortés made the remarkable claim that Moctezuma had immediately and contentedly surrendered his kingdom to the newcomers, on the grounds that an ancestor of his had gone away generations before, and that he and his people had long expected that his descendants would return and claim the kingdom. 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.

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 co...

But Bernal Díaz admitted, “The great Moctezuma continued to show his accustomed good will towards us, but never ceased his daily sacrifices of human beings. Cortés tried to dissuade him but met with no success.”9 Another man seemed to remember mid-paragraph that Moctezuma was supposed to have been their prisoner.

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.

Moctezuma continued to govern in the weeks and months that followed, and that he treated the strangers, even the Tlaxcalan leaders, like honored guests,

The Spaniards toured the city, rudely demanding gifts everywhere they went.

Tellingly, Moctezuma sent for Tecuichpotzin and two of her sisters to be turned over to the newcomers as potential brides. It was a test. If the strangers treated them only as concubines and not as brides, it would be bad news, but he would at least know where he stood.

Then they were taken away to live with the Spaniards in their quarters in Axayacatl’s former palace. What happened to them there is undocumented, but some of the Spaniards later said that Cortés violated multiple princesses during those early years; and other, less public figures than Cortés would never have been brought to account for anything they might have done.