The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

Historians once marveled at how Cortés, with his army of five hundred soldiers, defeated the Aztec empire of over a million people. Various ideas have been advanced: that the Spanish had crucial technological advantages in horses, swords, crossbows, cannon, and armor; that the Spanish had superior tactics honed by centuries of fighting the Moors; that the Indians held back, fearful the Spanish were gods; and that the Aztecs’ subjugation and misrule of surrounding chiefdoms had created conditions ripe for revolt. All this is true. But the real conquistador was smallpox. Cortés and his troops occupied the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (the future Mexico City) in 1519, but this cannot be counted as a conquest: The uneasy Aztec emperor, Moctezuma, invited Cortés into the city, unsure if he were god or man. Eight months later, after Moctezuma was murdered under murky circumstances (perhaps by the Spanish, perhaps by his own people), the Indians rose up and handily drove the Spanish from the city, in the so-called Noche Triste, the “Night of Sorrows.” In this crushing rout, many Spanish soldiers either were killed or drowned as they fled the island on which the city was built, because they had overloaded their pockets with gold. After their flight, the Spanish encamped in Tlaxcala, thirty miles east of Tenochtitlan, licking their wounds and wondering what to do next. At that moment, smallpox invaded the Valley of Mexico. “When the Christians were exhausted from war,” one fr...