Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

Then in April of 1520, the situation changed dramatically. Moctezuma received news from his network of messengers that at least eight hundred more Spaniards in thirteen ships had arrived on the coast.19 The Spaniards did not yet know. The tlatoani eventually decided to tell them, in order to gauge their reaction.

Cortés could not hide the panic he experienced in that moment.

Velázquez, who had once led the brutal conquest of the island of Cuba, now decided that he was extremely concerned about the violence Cortés had inflicted on the Indians along the Maya coast.

Moctezuma learned of Cortés’s tension and the reason for it. He detected an opportunity to divide the Spaniards and, hopefully, defeat them.

For the first time, he ordered his people to begin preparations for war—though he could not have been entirely certain which group of the outsiders he would initially side with.21

Cortés risked all by doing what he only claimed he had done before: he took Moctezuma hostage—literally put him irons, where he would remain for about eighty days.

The Spaniards took Moctezuma by surprise, dragged him back to their quarters, and guarded him around the clock, threatening to kill him if he ordered his people to resist. Then Cortés took Malintzin and a substantial portion of his men and traveled with haste down to the coast.24

At the end of May, they attacked the camp suddenly in the middle of the night. The fighting was brief—only about ten men died—for once the obstreperous Narváez was captured, few others seemed to have the heart to go on with the battle. They reached an accord almost immediately. Cortés now had approximately eight hundred more men armed with steel, eighty additional horses, and several ships full of supplies at his disposal.

On the twelfth day, however, as Cortés was in the midst of making plans and arrangements, some Tlaxcalans brought Malintzin a devastating piece of news. The people of Tenochtitlan were in open rebellion. The Spanish forces had turned Axayacatl’s palace into a fortress, but they could not hold out much longer.

“I must,” they begged, “for the love of God come to their aid as swiftly as possible.”25

A young woman who had been paid to do their laundry was found dead near their quarters, a clear sign to others not to do business with them.

Perhaps he simply believed that a struggle was coming and that whoever attacked first would secure victory. In that case, he sought only an excuse, and the days of warlike dancing provided one.28 What followed was etched in the altepetl’s memory for many years to come.

When … the moment had come for the Spaniards to do their killing, they came out equipped for battle. They came and closed off each of the places where people went in and out [of the courtyard]…. And when they had closed these exits, they stationed themselves in each, and no one could come out anymore.

they went into the temple courtyard to kill the people. Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just went on foot, each with his metal sword and leather shield….

They struck a drummer’s arms; both of his hands were severed. Then they struck his neck; his head landed far away.

That evening, Mexica warriors raised their cry promising vengeance. The Spaniards and those Tlaxcalans who were still in the city walled themselves into their “fortress” and waited. The Mexica attacked en masse, but they couldn’t penetrate the wall of crossbows and steel lances.

For more than twenty days, they left the Spanish alone in silence and uncertainty.

They were preparing, in short, for a cataclysmic urban battle. During that period, Cortés and his army reentered the city and made their way back to their quarters.

When the warriors were ready and felt the strangers had grown hungry enough, they attacked.

For seven days, Tecuichpotzin and her sisters listened to the sounds of battle—to the rising murmurs and then shouts of their own warriors,

The fighting began anew every day at dawn as soon as it was light enough to see. The Spaniards could not escape, but the Mexica could not penetrate their defenses, either. At length Moctezuma tried to speak to the people from a rooftop, conveying his words through the booming voice of a younger man who served as his mouthpiece.

May the arrows and shields of war be laid down. The poor old men and women, the common people, the infants who toddle and crawl, who lie in the cradle or on the cradle board and know nothing yet, all are suffering.

Moctezuma had eighteen years of experience as a ruler of tens of thousands of his people and was well aware of how many of the people around them hated the Mexica. Furthermore, he had spent the last half year conversing in depth with Malintzin and the Spaniards, and he knew that many more of the strangers were coming. He understood that in this case, no victory would be permanent.

A younger half brother of Moctezuma, the militant Cuitlahuac of Iztapalapan, emerged as the de facto leader of the city’s enraged young men. The long-term consequences of their actions were not uppermost in their mind. What they knew was that they could endure no more.

Cortés understood that escape from the island city offered the Spaniards their only hope of survival. There was one causeway left still connecting the isle and the mainland, but the segments connecting its separate segments had been destroyed, so that it was impassable. They would not let this stop them: some of the men worked all through one night constructing a portable bridge out of whatever wood they had available.

According to the Indians, this was the moment when he commanded that Moctezuma be killed, lest the tlatoani serve as a rallying point for his people, though Cortés himself never admitted he had done so.

Warriors in canoes descended on their fleeing enemies from all sides: they were intent on destroying the makeshift bridges and stabbing upward at the armored horses on the causeway, as they were vulnerable from below. They killed fifty-six of the eighty or so horses that night.

the escaping forces drowned in droves.

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.”

Approximately two-thirds of the Spaniards died that night,

Almost all of the men who had come with Narváez were killed, for most of them were in the rear. The only ones who stood a good chance of surviving the ordeal were those who departed first.

But the few hundred who were left still wore their armor, still had their swords—and could not be easily attacked if they stayed together. And they still had Malintzin and the Tlaxcalan princess. It was toward Tlaxcala that they now turned.

The girls had been recognized, and their people surged forward to help them. Isabel’s brothers had, in fact, accidentally been killed.

La viruela had come aboard one of Narváez’s ships as an invisible passenger, perhaps in a scab in a blanket.

Most of the Europeans had been exposed to the smallpox before, and they were, in effect, inoculated. But the indigenous were a previously unexposed population, utterly without defenses.38

Those leaders who were able came together for a series of great council meetings; there they debated for twenty days. Many saw the Spaniards as a plague of hungry grasshoppers who had come in a time of sickness; they pointed out that the strangers’ war-mongering had already cost the lives of hundreds of young Tlaxcalan warriors. These leaders were for killing the Spaniards, finishing the job that the Mexica had started.

Malintzin likewise agreed that it would be wisest to stay the course, cement the alliance, and use the victory they would ultimately attain to gain the upper hand over Tenochtitlan. Eventually, this side carried the day.39

Cortés himself needed to have two fingers on his left hand amputated.

If the Spaniards were going to gain and keep enough indigenous allies to secure a permanent victory, they had to be perceived as the strongest force in Mexico, the one group most feared on a long-term basis, not a group who would soon leave. They could not be just another playing piece on the chessboard of local politics; they had to be by far the most frightening figures in the game.

Cortés gathered intelligence from the Tlaxcalans. Whenever a nearby altepetl was found to have entertained emissaries from Tenochtitlan, he gathered his horsemen and made another one of his famous early morning raids.

The Mexica let it be known that they were offering a year’s tribute relief to all who refrained from going over to the strangers—implicitly reminding everyone that they were the leaders who were there to stay and that they wouldn’t forget who their friends and enemies were

But that was a distant reward compared to the immediate threat of having mounted lancers ride through town, bu...

Malintzin, who had always counseled that responsible leadership entailed caution, circumspection, and peaceful overtures toward the powerful strangers, would have reminded all those to whom she spoke that if they swore loyalty to Cortés’s king, the Mexica would be destroyed, and the endless wars between the altepetls would cease forever.

More of the indigenous were gradually learning what Malintzin and Moctezuma had understood months before—that far more Spaniards were coming, and would bring more of their arsenal with them. While resting in Tlaxcala, Cortés had forced every man to turn over whatever gold he possessed so it could be collected and used to buy horses and weapons in the Caribbean.

He then sent a number of mounted men to the coast, charged with repairing one of the boats and setting forth to make the purchases. They found to their delight that seven more ships had already arrived. One came from Cortés’s father, who had been working to collect goods for his son since his message first arrived with Puertocarrero.

At one point after the war had actually started, the Spaniards lost a battle: several dozen men were cut off from their company and then captured and killed.

But in this case, something else had occurred: messengers had come from the coast carrying word of the arrival of yet another ship, and they brought powder and crossbows as proof, which would have been visible to any indigenous who were spying on them. Almost immediately, in the words of Cortés, “all the lands round about” made the decision to return to their erstwhile allies.

Many altepetls—or rather, certain lineages within altepetls—needed little convincing to throw in their lot with the strangers.

One of these younger brothers, Ixtlilxochitl (Eesh-tlil-SHO-cheet), an extremely successful warrior, decided to seize the day and ally with the strangers in order to oust Moctezuma’s favorite, Cacama, and unite Texcoco under his own and his full brothers’ control. Cortés was delighted with him, calling him “a very valiant youth of twenty-three or twenty-four years” who worked hard to bring along “many chiefs and brothers of his.”

Martín López, a shipbuilder in their company, taught the Tlaxcalans how to build brigantines to sail on the great lake. Canoe makers, carpenters, ropemakers, weavers … all were needed. They built twelve different boats in pieces, and then, when the time was right, carried them to the shores of the great lake and assembled them there.