Victor Davis Hanson
Hernán Cortés was an unlikely conqueror of civilizations. He was born into a middle-class Castilian family, leaving Spain just 12 years after the European discovery of the New World. At 18, the young Cortés planned to get rich, acquire estates, and thus advance in the New World’s Spanish elite hierarchy—in a way impossible back in an impoverished Castille.
But after landing in what is now the Dominican Republic, Cortés languished for some 15 years, as a ne’er-do-well estate owner and minor official—before gaining permission in his mid-thirties to explore the vast but mostly unknown lands of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America.
On rumors of a vast, rich civilization in the heartlands of modern-day Mexico, Cortés landed in what is now Vera Cruz, on the eastern coast of Mexico, in February 1519. He immediately ordered his small army inland, following rumor and occasional guides for some 250 miles, until he entered the vast, city-upon-the lake, Tenochtitlán, the capital of a four-million-person empire, known then as the domain of the Mexica, now as Aztecs.
For the next few months, the rag-tag band of some 500 Spanish conquistadors, at times augmented by a thousand or so Tlaxcalan indigenous allies, who resented deeply their subservience to the Aztecs, camped out in Tenochtitlán under careful scrutiny if not at times confinement. The city was deemed nearly invulnerable to outside attack, a Venice-like island hub on a vast lake protected by various intricate levies, locks, and causeways.
After several months, the initial wonder disappeared from both sides. The Mexica no longer saw the bizarre Spanish interlopers as deities, demi-gods, or a supernatural race—despite their strange steel armor, Toledo blades, cannon, harquebuses, crossbows, horses, huge mastiff dogs, and strange white appearance. The Spanish seemed altogether a different species from the Aztecs, at least as perceived in their practice of Catholicism, lust for gold, repugnance for human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy, and various frightening Aztec gods.
Cortés, whether in transit or camped in Tenochtitlán, was under constant danger from increasingly angry Aztecs to a second Spanish expedition sent to Vera Cruz to arrest the insubordinate upstart. Yet he surmounted all such challenges—at least for a few months—by flipping the newcomer Spanish contingent to his own side, and thus augmenting his tiny conquistador force inside Tenochtitlán to some 1,500 while taking hostage the emperor Montezuma II himself.
And then everything fell apart.
His firebrand subordinate Pedro Alvarado, in the absence of Cortés, had murdered hundreds of Aztec festival goers. The bloodbath aroused the entire population of the city proper, somewhere between 200,000-300,000 well apart from the allied and subject lake tribes.
In what followed and became known as the Noche Triste (“Mournful Night”), the Spanish attempted a secret flight from their confinement amid storm and darkness, along the causeways to the mainland. It proved a disaster. Some 600-800 Spanish were captured or killed, and hundreds were subsequently sacrificed at the city’s center—and eaten.
For a year, Cortés’s once hopeful expedition was written off as an ungodly disaster. He fled to his only remaining allies the Tlaxcalans—his remnant force wounded, sick, and eager to sail back to Cuba.
Yet somehow Cortés regrouped, restored morale, was resupplied with men and materials, built a fleet of small ships, disassembled them, transported the brigantines over the mountains to Lake Texcoco, and launched his navy against the city. He then waged a combined land and sea attack over the causeways, bolstered by tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans eager for revenge against their Aztec nemeses.
Outbreaks of smallpox, malaria, and whooping cough decimated the Aztecs, who found themselves increasingly alone, as thousands of their allies either stayed home or began slowly to join what was thought to be the eventual winning Spanish side.
Like the false regrets of Alexander and Scipio, Cortés in his official reports to the Spanish crown, claimed he had to intention of destroying the city block by block but preferred to keep it intact as an indigenous jewel in the new Spanish province of Mexico. Perhaps. But when he was done, hundreds of thousands of Aztecs were butchered, more enslaved, the city leveled, and Aztec religion, dialect, traditions, and customs increasingly forgotten and relegated to isolated settlements of native peoples who remembered only in folklore and myth the once wondrous city on the lake.
Again, Cortés never had at one time more than 1,500 conquistadors. So how did he destroy an enormous empire? The Aztecs had no idea with whom they were dealing and missed several chances to kill Cortés and his small band when they were holed up on their initial visit to the city. They had little way of knowing that Castilian conquistadors were some of the most fearsome warriors of sixteenth-century Europe, honed by decades of warring against the Muslims of Spain during the Reconquista, and fighting nonstop against Protestant enemies of northern Europe as well as Italian rivals. And more unfortunately for them, Hernán Cortés was an unlikely but undeniably natural leader, a military genius who far surpassed his contemporaries in talent, courage, and sheer audacity.
Nor did Aztec leaders calibrate how hated were they by their subjects, given their yearly harvests of thousands of captives for sacrifice to their hungry gods, and their constant demands for tribute. How a Spanish interloper was seen as the salvation of thousands of indigenous peoples rather than their own kindred Nahuatl overseers is one of the more amazing aspects of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
“Cultural confusion” is often used to explain the abject dichotomy between the Spanish and the Aztecs: the Europeans fought to kill, take ground, and break the will of the enemy; the Aztecs often engaged in “flower wars” to hit, stun, bind, and capture human fodder for their mass human sacrifices at Templo Major. Moreover, they never fully understood the advantages in such Western wars that steel blades and armor, cavalry, gunpowder weapons, and crossbows gave the vastly outnumbered Spanish in conflict against warriors who often fought individually, without formation, protected by cloth, and equipped with sharp obsidian blades whose edges dulled after a few blows.
Like “new” Thebes, “new” Carthage, and “new” Kostantiniyye (later Istanbul), there was a new Mexico City built atop the center of Tenochtitlán. But it was a city founded not on similar but antithetical protocols to its flattened and soon forgotten predecessor.
Next: Is Civilizational Erasure Possible Today?
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The End of Everything. History Becomes Now? Part Five: The Annihilation of the Aztecs, 1521. appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.