Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

Cortés had heard that one of his captains, Cristóbal de Olid, who had been sent on an exploratory mission, had set up a rival government in Central America, and he was determined to root him out.

Cuauhtemoc and several other indigenous lords were forced to come along as hostages, so that their people would not rebel in Cortés’s absence.

the former concubine Malintzin, from a once tribute-paying land in the east, had grown startlingly powerful. It wasn’t merely that as translator, she was at the heart of all negotiations as they unfolded. As soon as the acute strain of the war of conquest had ended, Malintzin had conceived a child by Cortés.

Malintzin had been removed to her own household, for Cortés had a Spanish wife in Cuba, and as soon as the peace was made, she traveled to Mexico to join her husband.

Theirs was not, it seemed, a happy marriage. Cortés and doña Catalina fought in public and in private. Later, when Catalina died suddenly, people whispered that Cortés had strangled her, but he was never indicted for the crime, and it was never proven.

They did recall that Cortés at one point went into a rage when he imagined that Jerónimo de Aguilar himself had been eyeing Malintzin.27

When Cortés came to Malintzin and demanded that she leave her son behind and accompany him as translator on a massive overland expedition through the jungles and mountains of Maya country, the land where she had been enslaved, she would have been far from overjoyed. She had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain.

Cortés in recent months had bedded so many women—and enraged so many mothers and husbands—that it would have been impossible for Malintzin to believe that there was a special bond between them.

the boy, Martín, could be legitimized by petitioning the pope.

One might assume that Cortés simply forced Malintzin to accompany him, but this cannot reflect reality. All the records of the expedition indicate that Malintzin did more than go through the motions.

The expedition was first to travel through Coatzacoalcos, the land of her birth. Significantly, just before they crossed the river that bordered that territory, the enormous cavalcade came to a grinding halt for a full week.

In addition, Cortés gave a significant wedding present, the kind of gesture he would never have made of his own accord; she had to have made the demand herself. Malintzin was assigned her natal village of Olutla as an encomienda. She would rule there, rather than a Spaniard. Legal documents were signed, though they were later lost in the disastrous expedition.

Sacajawea, for instance, another war captive who was traded away to white newcomers, would later meet her birth family as well, on the overland trek with Lewis and Clark. No one recorded her feelings, either, before she was pressed back into service as a translator for the travelers making their way to the Pacific.

at the head waters of the River Candelaria, Cortés made a decision that has traumatized Mexicans to this day: he executed Cuauhtemoc. Accounts of what happened differ. Cortés later claimed that an indigenous informer revealed a plot hatched by the Mexica ruler: he had purportedly suggested that the Indians rise against the Spaniards in the midst of the jungle and free themselves,

Others, including a number of Spaniards, believed it was all a misunderstanding. Cuauhtemoc and his companions had merely been celebrating a rumor they had heard that Cortés had at last come to his senses and was ready to turn back.

Cortés had each of the men involved tortured separately. Malintzin had to translate the words they uttered in their agony.

had Cortés always planned to rid himself of these two Mexica preconquest rulers when he was far from Tenochtitlan, where their deaths could not cause rioting and unrest among the people?

they found that Cristóbal de Olid had been killed by Spaniards loyal to Cortés months earlier. As it turned out, the expedition had been entirely unnecessary. What was worse, the Spaniards living there on the coast were almost as hungry as those who had survived the overland trek from Mexico City. Once again, Cortés began coercing the local Indians to promise to offer tribute in the form of food and other valuable goods. He used the settlement’s lone ship to send messages to the Caribbean seeking support.

Soon enough, he received word in response that the power vacuum in the Mexican capital had given rise to a period of chaotic in-fighting among the Spaniards, which the Indians were watching with interest. Rumors of Cortés’s own death had been rampant in the city.

desperate need of cash to solve his many problems, Cortés instructed his underlings to sell some local indigenous people into slavery in the Caribbean. In order to avoid being accused of wrongdoing, he insisted that they sell only those who had been enslaved by other indigenous peoples prior to the conquest.

Other departing boats were loaded with human cargo that had been branded for sale in the Caribbean. Such, Malintzin knew, could so easily have been her fate or her daughter’s.

Even his lands and encomienda Indians had been taken over by others, the interim government having believed the rumors that he was dead.

When de Grado died, Cortés told the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of Moctezuma that because she was a wealthy, highly desirable widow, he was going to move her into his own household “for her own protection.” He was already in the habit of telling the Spanish world that Moctezuma, on his deathbed (struck down by rocks thrown by his own people, according to Cortés), had tearfully asked Cortés to protect his daughters.35 It was only a bit more fantastical to pose before Isabel herself as her protector.

A close friend of Cortés’s once commented laconically that “he had no more conscience than a dog.”

Four months later, Isabel faced childbirth, what she thought of as nomiquizpan, “my moment of death.” Among her servants, there were Nahua women, which was fortunate at this time of pain and uncertainty.

In her misery, Isabel found to her surprise that her husband, Pedro Gallego, was kind to her and sympathized, and she came to value him. The next year, she bore him a son, named Juan.

Two months after the baby’s birth, Pedro Gallego died suddenly, and Isabel seemed devastated. She turned even more fully to the child. All her life, she loved Juan best among her children; her next marriage to a Spaniard named Juan Cano lasted more than twenty years and seemed a happy one, but her other children never displaced Juan.

She breathed the suggestion to both of her daughters that they could become nuns if they wanted to, rather than the wives of Spanish men, and this is what they later did. In her will, she freed all the Indian slaves who served in her husband’s household.

As the Spaniards fanned out in the countryside, however, every community eventually faced its moment of crisis. In 1529, about the time Malintzin at last succumbed to one of the European microbes and died,

was 1529, and Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, who would soon launch a war of conquest in the west of Mexico, had just been named to preside over the governing high court in Tenochtitlan.47 Cortés was absent in Spain, and it was not yet clear who would be named viceroy, the representative of the king. In the meantime, Guzmán was in charge. He made the decision to arrest Ixtlilxochitl, the Texcocan nobleman whose family line had benefited from the arrival of the Spaniards. Throughout the 1520s, he had made the most of his alliance with Cortés and waged war against his neighbors when he deemed it necessary. Now Ixtlilxochitl was deposited in a dungeon cell in a Franciscan monastery, where he languished and died.

Although Smoking Shield did not mention the matter in the book of history he later wrote, other sources reveal that the local chiefs did indeed decide to accept baptism at that time.

He led his people to church and tried to look interested, as he understood that this was of central importance if he wished the Spaniards to treat his people with any respect. “But no one knew yet what was happening, if it was ‘Sunday’ or some other day [in the new calendar],” one of his connections later recalled. “We were really new at it…. We didn’t know what was going on.”50

noblemen began to feel some pressure to choose only one among their several wives—as if they would somehow be willing to expel the ones not chosen. At first they could ignore the hints and requests, but it wasn’t clear how long that situation would last.

In the long run, only generational change brought the noblemen around to monogamy. In the meantime, there were more public issues to contend with.51

Don Alonso and the other chiefs explained to the newcomers that in order to render the agreement binding in the eyes of the Christian authorities, the people needed to build a thatch-roofed temple where they could honor the Christian god; a priest would soon come from Tepeaca to bless their endeavor. The grateful settlers called their new village Amozoc and promised themselves they would never abandon it. Their resolve was to cost them dearly when the Franciscans later ordered everybody to leave the countryside and move to the town of Cuauhtinchan. It was the people of Amozoc, stubbornly devoted to their new home, who were burned out of their houses in 1558.

In early 1532, a fellow Cuauhtinchan chief named Huilacapitzin (Wee-la-ka-PEE-tzeen), or Heart of a Snail Shell, was accused by the Spaniards of practicing human sacrifice and executed.

a member of the family that had arranged to have Smoking Shield’s father killed some twenty years earlier. But Smoking Shield did not seem to hold this fact against him, at least not since having fought together in their failed attempt to defend Cuauhtinchan from the outsiders.

The man’s legs kicked until all life was driven from his body. Even then, one who mourned him did not give up hope: “His dog, white with black spots, stayed lying there beside his hanged master.”

The drawing master hurt the group by speaking scathingly of the paintings their forebears had done, but in the eyes of some of the boys, he made it up to them when he taught them how to introduce perspective; they were soon entertaining themselves drawing true-to-life animals: dogs, birds, and horses.

Sometimes the students argued with each other or told raunchy jokes in Nahuatl, and to their amazement, some of the friars actually understood and punished them.

as a king, Henry had set a very bad example, something the teachers hoped their own students would never do when they grew up to become chiefs.

Young don Felipe de Mendoza from one of the Pinome lineages, a connection of the hanged don Tomás, was invited without his respected father to another nobleman’s house specifically because he was, like his host, “raised afterwards, educated in the church.”66 That only he was welcome, not the elders in his family, apparently gave young Felipe pain, since he remembered the words and repeated them later.

Then, in 1544, worms ate the corn crop and people starved; and in 1545, the most terrible epidemic since the time of the conquest devastated the land. Cristóbal and his father must have lost family members—everyone did—but no record of the names of their dead has survived.

In March 1546, instead of launching a war, he and his fellow chiefs decided to make the most of their sons’ new style of literacy. They would sue the people of Tepeaca in a Spanish court of law. At root, this was a concept easily understood, as the Mexica overlords had been arbiters in their local affairs for many years.68

Even if a terrible epidemic were to strike dead all the specially trained men of the High Court tomorrow, others would be able to read these documents fully. It would be possible for men to hear his exact words generations later. That was certainly worth thinking about.

He then turned his attention to a new project: he had decided to orchestrate the writing of a great work of his people’s history, one using the new letters.

Don Alonso envisioned concrete uses for the volume over the years—it could provide evidence in Spanish courtrooms regarding traditional landholding arrangements, for example, or it could be carried to indigenous ceremonies as a sacred object lending authenticity to the procedures. But don Alonso dedicated untold hours of his family’s time to this project for deeper reasons than these. He foresaw that once his people’s memory of the meaning of the glyphs had faded, and their communities had sunk into the poverty that Spanish demands were pushing them toward, narrowing their horizons and forcing them to focus on survival, a great social amnesia would ensue.

‘You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide.’”

The judge’s decision that he was to be tortured had been read aloud to him several hours before, according to law, and he had been required to answer at that time that he understood the pronouncement and accepted it. Yes, he said, he understood that he had been accused of treason against the king, but he had not committed any treason and still refused to make a confession. He understood what would follow.1

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.