In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

12 The Conquest of Mexico (1524 –1536) Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Yucatan in February 1519 with an army of some five hundred adventurers. Forming alliances with the Tlaxcalteca and other native peoples eager for the overthrow of the dominant Mexica Empire, and reinforced from time to time by fresh arrivals from the Spanish Caribbean, he managed by November to enter Tenochtitlan as the guest of Motecuzoma and there to take his host hostage. For eight months, with the reluctant blessing of the captive emperor, Cortés used the Mexica capital as his base of operations. In May 1520, while Cortés attended to a crisis on the coast, Pedro de Alvarado was left in charge of the Spanish contingent in Tenochtitlan. During Toxcatl (the Festival of Dryness), the nervous Alvarado ordered the slaughter of several thousand unarmed Mexica dancers and spectators. Sahagún’s informants remembered it well. Each of the Spanish soldiers was armed “with his leather shield, . . . with his iron-studded shield, and each with his iron sword. Thereupon they surrounded the dancers. Thereupon they went among the drums. Then they struck the drummer’s arms; they severed both his hands; then they struck his neck. Far off did his neck [and head] go to fall. Then they pierced the people with iron lances and they struck them each with the iron swords. Of some they slashed open their backs; then their entrails gushed out. Of some they cut their heads to pieces; they absolutely pulverized their heads; their heads were absolutely pulverized. And some they struck on the shoulder; they split openings, they broke openings in their bodies. Of some they struck repeatedly the shanks; of some they struck repeatedly the thighs; of some they struck the belly; then their entrails gushed forth. And when in vain one would run, he would only drag his intestines like something raw as he tried to escape . Nowhere could he go.”1 When Cortés returned, the mood was tense. In late June, in the aftermath of the massacre and the subsequent death of the compliant Motecuzoma, the Spanish expedition and its native allies were forced to fight their way out of the city. Suffering many casualties, they remembered their exodus as the “night of sorrows.” By August 1521, Cortés and his allies were sufficiently recovered and reinforced to capture Tenochtitlan and defeat the Mexica (now led by Motecuzoma’s cousin Cuauhtemoc), razing in the process the city they had once thought more beautiful than any in Europe.2 Ambition unquenched, Cortés sent several expeditions into Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Michoacan, and, further afield, to Honduras and Guatemala. When the leader of one such expedition, Cristóbal de Olid, renounced Cortés’s authority and asserted 117 an independent jurisdiction for himself in Honduras, Cortés set out, in October 1524, to quell the insurrection. Among those he took with him were some 150 Spanish soldiers, three thousand Indian auxiliaries, two Franciscan friars, a physician , a surgeon, and, for entertainment, several musicians, an acrobat, and a puppeteer . The last Spanish settlement they reached, before launching into an arduous march of several months through thick jungle and steep mountain ranges, was Coatzacoalcos, on the Gulf of Mexico. There, the expedition was met, according to Bernal Díaz, with “triumphal arches, . . . ambushes of Christians and Moors, and other grand entertainments and quasi-dramatic games.”3 This is the first mention of a moros y cristianos in the Americas. We cannot tell what form it took, although the term “embuscadas [ambushes]” may denote something similar to the successive groups of Moors that pretended to threaten Enrique IV when he visited Jaén in 1464. As for its intent, we can only speculate. Arturo Warman suggests that the ambushes “reflected the risk that the conquistadors were running,”4 but the performance may also have portrayed Cortés as a conquering hero, implicitly comparing his campaigns in Mexico to the Catholic reconquest of Spain. The triumphal arches under which Cortés’s army passed, with their connotations of Roman imperial triumph, would have reinforced this image. But, if the mock battles were intended to anticipate the outcome of the campaign against Olid, they bore unintended ironies, for then the victorious Christians corresponded to a largely Indian army, led by Cortés, and the defeated Moors to a Spanish force led by a rebellious Christian, Olid. A simple equation of Moors and Indians was impossible. From the...

Share