From the Halls of Montezuma

Tragedy, most often in the more inclusive modern vein but sometimes in the classical Aristotelian sense as well, is the dark thread that ties together the books under review here.

Of course, not all Indian leaders were warriors whose prowess or "medicine" earned them a following in war until their strength or luck gave out. Or "pragmatists" selected from the Indian pack by white interlocutors who sensed that they could be wheedled or bullied into "touching the pen" in the name of their people. There were hereditary rulers among the Indian peoples of the Americas, perhaps enough of them to reinforce the European belief that such potentates must be universal. The most famous of these indigenous "kings" was Montezuma, the tale of whose downfall and death at the hands of Cortés and his band of Spanish conquistadors in the early sixteenth century contains the stuff of true Aristotelian tragedy and gave rise to the American tradition of "the Indian chief as tragic hero."

The story of the decline and fall of the native peoples of the Americas thus starts with the enigmatic demise of Montezuma, cast as a tragic hero in Gordon Sayre's book under review here and as a tragedy for his people by Peter Tsouras, in his biography of the great Aztec leader in Potomac Books' "Military Profiles" series. Some readers of this journal may be surprised to find Tsouras's name affixed to this book. But the author known for such counterfactual tours de force as Hitler Victorious: Alternate Decisions of World War II (2006) acquits himself well as Montezuma's biographer, if less well as a chronicler of the bloody conquest of Aztec Mexico.

Biographers have a tendency to crowd everyone but their subject off the historical stage and, unfortunately, Tsouras falls victim to this temptation. Montezuma, he writes, was "the single point of failure of his empire, indeed, of his civilization" (p. xi). The king's major flaw was that he had taken power so completely into his own hands that he had "induced a level of rigidity and lack of initiative that deprived the Aztecs of the flexibility to resist Cortés" (pp. 95–96). Tsouras does observe that the king's brutal and exploitative rule of subject peoples spawned important allies for the invading Spaniards, but much more might have been made of this point. The time-honored imperial strategy of divide and conquer was on full display here, and Cortés was eventually able to rope in as many as 150,000 Indian allies from among the Aztecs' disgruntled subjects. They provided the great bulk of the cannon fodder deployed for the eventual siege and conquest of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. And then there is the smallpox epidemic that would carry off much of the Aztec population, including about half of the defenders of Tenochtitlán, and in less than a century kill some 95 percent of Mexico's Indian peoples. This gets one page in Tsouras's biography. If you want a succinct, reliable account of the tumultuous life and pitiful end of the last Aztec king, Tsouras's biography is good value. But if you want to know how it transpired that the glittering Aztec empire fell into the improbable lap of a handful of conquistadors, you might want to turn instead to Ross Hassig's classic Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (2nd ed., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).

The purpose of Gordon Sayre, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, in his survey of the portrayal in American literature of a broad range of Indian "tragic heroes," is to try to explain the "sudden transformations in the receptions of these Indian chiefs, from enemy to hero, from savage foe to noble friend." His conclusion may be a familiar one to students of early American literature, with its obsession with giving the new nation a heritage which, if not as venerable as that of "old Europe," was at least respectable in its age and gravity, but it may come as a bit of a surprise to some readers of this journal. Thus, he writes...