Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

It was an empowering, even thrilling experience, and it became an important long-term memory. In the short term, though, it meant that Cortés and his forces would never be dependent on the causeways again.

Cuitlahuac, her father’s younger brother and the new tlatoani, had died of the smallpox after only some eighty days of rule.45 With every family in the city devastated, they could not even mourn their ruler properly, as their religion demanded.

He was from the other branch of the family—the one descended of Itzcoatl—a son of the former king Ahuitzotl. He had a Tlatelolcan mother,46 so he had Tlatelolco’s support.

If they could not prevent the defection of the majority of the surrounding altepetls, then they would almost certainly be destroyed. Cuauhtemoc believed the only response was to make a show of brutal force.

Moctezuma’s living sons were a threat to Cuauhtemoc and his policies. Two had died in the fighting on the night of the Spanish retreat, but a number were still alive. Cuauhtemoc had the support of most Tlatelolcans, but the sons of Moctezuma had the support of many, possibly most, of the Tenochca.

They thus represented an opposing school of thought; they offered an alternative to the war that the city was undertaking. Fortunately for Cuauhtemoc, they were also vulnerable: these sons of Moctezuma could be presented as weak, as emblematic of the mistakes that had been made.

Then, in short order, he had six of them killed; some said he even killed one with his bare hands.

Despite his ferocity—and he did bring many allies to the city, among them some of the loyal Texcocans, even some of the brothers of Ixtlilxochitl—he was unable to keep enough of the altepetls on his side.

The people had not realized how fast the ships could move when in full sail with the wind behind them or how many people they could carry. One morning, the brigs made straight for the neighborhood of Zoquipan (or “Mudflats”) on the island’s shore. The residents ran about frantically, calling to their children. They tossed the little ones into canoes and paddled for their lives.

Over the ensuing weeks, a pattern emerged. 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.

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.”

At no point do the warriors seem to have been awestruck or paralyzed with fear by the strangers’ weapons. Instead they analyzed them in a straightforward way: The crossbowman aimed the bolt well. He pointed it right at the person he was going to shoot, and when it went off, it went whining, hissing, and humming. And their arrows missed nothing.

Unfortunately, when the Mexica secured some of the powerful weapons and tried to use them themselves, they were unable to do so. At one point, they forced captured crossbowmen to try to teach them to shoot metal bows, but the lessons were ineffective, and the arrows went astray. The guns, they soon learned, would not work without the powder the Spanish had.

On one occasion the Spaniards decided to build a catapult, thinking that it would petrify the Indians. Cortés wrote: “Even if it were to have had no other effect, which indeed it had not, the terror it caused would be so great that we thought the enemy might surrender.

the carpenters failed to operate their machine, and the enemy, though much afraid, made no move to surrender, and we were obliged to conceal the failure of the catapult by saying that we had been moved by compassion to spare them.”

The Mexica by no means believed his claim that only compassion stayed his hand, and in fact, for them, the incident bordered on the humorous:

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 warriors had seen the ships—but not the compasses, the navigation equipment, the technical maps, and the printing presses that made the conquest possible.

The Mexicas’ efforts to demonstrate that they were not short of courageous warriors or of food supplies could not mask the truth for long. By August 13, their remaining corner of the city had come almost to a standstill.

The young ones heard cries of lamentation in the distance, as some of the adults gave vent to their grief, and some saw young women being seized by individual Spaniards despite the agreement.62 But the children couldn’t help feeling happy at this change in their fortunes. They did not understand as yet that their world as they knew it was ending.

They stood and watched as all their worldly goods crackled and disappeared. Some cried; some were too stunned to react. The riders, whom everyone knew had been sent by the prior of the nearby Franciscan mission, thundered off into the distance.

The Spaniards had been in the region for more than thirty years, but until now their presence hadn’t been very meaningful to most of the villagers.

He and a number of other community leaders had spent much of the last two years attempting to convince the local villagers that the Spaniards really meant it when they said the people must now leave their rural hamlets and move to the larger town of Cuauhtinchan (Kwow-TIN-chan), where they could be more efficiently turned into Christians, taxed, and generally kept in line. Those who resisted were to be burned out.

he was invited to the home of Tozcocolli, the Pinome chief who was now the paramount chief of all of Cuauhtinchan, by a messenger who spoke with extreme courtesy. The optimistic Cotatzin went to Tozcocolli’s village. It turned out to be a mistake. “The murderers were already there,” his son later remembered, and they strangled him.

Less than a year later, in 1521, word came that Tenochtitlan had fallen to the Spaniards. Like much of central Mexico, the people of Cuauhtinchan waited tensely, wondering what this would mean for them.

was not many months before the Spaniards arrived—alongside their battle-hardened Tlaxcalan allies, who were showing the newcomers the way to all the key altepetls that needed to be defeated if their victory were to be considered secure.

The men of a number of altepetls in the region gathered together to make a stand. This was a subject upon which Chimalpopoca did not like to dwell in later years. “We were defeated,”

using a form of the verb that implied absolute destruction.

The messengers reappeared. They could all return to their homes, they announced, if they agreed to deliver annual tribute to an overlord, who would be one of the newcomers, people from a place called Castile. “What was the tribute?” they asked. A certain number of woven blankets, gold pieces, and turkeys, as well as a goodly supply of corn. Smoking Shield considered his options. He sent the emissaries back to get more specific numbers and to work out an exact measuring unit for the corn, a basket size that both parties recognized as the right amount.

They were hopeful that, after mourning their dead, they would be able to pick up their lives and carry on. And for a few years—like most of Mexico—they did just that.

Cuauhtemoc. He was kept in a locked room and heated rods were applied to the soles of his feet when he claimed not to know where his forebears’ stores of gold were held. If Tecuichpotzin, or Isabel—still a girl but rapidly growing into a woman—had ever feared her husband, she could only pity him now.

they began to brand prisoners of war they had collected—undoubtedly including some of Smoking Shield’s compatriots from the battle in Cuauhtinchan—and marched them to the coast for shipment to the Caribbean as slaves. In 1522, one-fifth of the profits of this venture (5,397 pesos, as the meticulous records specified) were set aside as tribute for King Charles.

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 June of 1523, the king issued a plea to his people that they rein themselves in and cease their abuse of the native women.

The great central square of Tenochtitlan became the Plaza Mayor, flanked by a newly rising cathedral, as well as a massive government building with battlemented towers at either end. The sound of hammering could be heard morning to evening.

Each conquistador was awarded the villages of a particular altepetl or sub-altepetl as an encomienda, or “package.” This did not mean that the people living there became that conquistador’s chattel slaves. In theory, it meant that the conquistador was to guard their spiritual and political well-being, and in exchange, the people were to pay him tribute in goods and also labor on his behalf for part of each year.

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.

They convinced the whole world that they had successfully converted Mexico to Catholicism in relatively short order. Only in the 1990s did it become commonplace for scholars to argue that this premise was indeed false—that in fact the indigenous had not simply rejected generations of belief and accepted Christian teachings without question.

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.

Yet despite these problems, the source remains credible in essence, for what it quotes both sides as saying is in keeping with assertions they made elsewhere. And what it claims the Indians said is in no way what the Spaniards would have wished them to say.

If the Mexica were to defend their faith, someone who was not in a political hot seat would have to do it. So it was that in the morning, a collection of priests from the ancien régime came to hear the Christians speak of their beliefs.

You also say that those we worship are not gods. This way of speaking is entirely new to us, and very scandalous. We are frightened by this way of speaking, because our forebears who engendered and governed us never said anything like this.

They said that these gods that we worship give us everything we need for our physical existence. We appeal to them for the rain to make the things of the earth grow.

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.

“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.”

One of the twelve friars muttered under his breath something to the effect that they would just have to wait for these old men to die; the young people would be better listeners.26 And that is more or less what the Spaniards proceeded to do.

Indeed, they reminded themselves, the Indians were not actually rejecting Jesus. Some seemed quite willing to add him to their pantheon.