The World полностью

Cortés was settled in a royal palace, where Motecuhzoma visited him. The Spaniards in turn visited the Supreme Speaker’s palace, where they were dazzled by its facilities including baths (the Mexica, unlike the grubby Spaniards, washed daily and changed clothes regularly), sated by the dishes – roast turkey and quail, tortillas – and impressed by a cocoa drink and a new intoxicant, tobacco, which Motecuhzoma smoked. All of these novelties would later catch on in Europe. But the Spaniards were horrified by the temples, where the priests, hair clotted with fresh human blood and earlobes bleeding from ritualistic piercings, showed them the staircase where sacrificed people were tossed, dripping with blood, and the top of the pyramid where a humanoid statue gripped a stone receptacle for human hearts. They also saw the techcatl, the spattered green execution stone, and braziers holding warm human hearts from the sacrifices that day. Their righteous horror should have been qualified by the knowledge that European cities were decorated with the heads of the executed, while they had regularly seen heretics burned alive.

Then Cortés discovered that Motecuhzoma’s troops on the coast had clashed with Spanish forces. He punished the Mexica commanders by having them mauled by his war dogs – mastiffs and wolfhounds trained to kill – and then burned alive, which shocked the Mexica.

As fear spread across the city, Cortés agonized over what to do and decided to arrest the monarch, afraid that he was about to be double-crossed. When he heard that Velázquez had sent a force to arrest him, he rushed back to the coast and succeeded in winning over the Spaniards. Meanwhile his henchmen in Tenochtitlan tried to stop a sacrifice, thus sparking a massacre followed by an uprising. Motecuhzoma was hit by stones thrown by outraged Mexica and then arrested. His brother Cuitláhuac, married to Motecuhzoma’s eleven-year-old daughter Tecuichpoch Ixcaxochitzin, was chosen as Supreme Speaker just as Motecuhzoma died, either of his wounds or on Cortés’s orders. Cortés hurried back to save his comrades.

In June 1520, besieged in the palace and lacking the forces to defeat the raging Mexica, Cortés broke out under ferocious attack, losing much gold and 600 men, a Night of Sorrows, escaping across the causeway. Facing defeat, he now proved his acumen, telling his men, ‘Onwards, for we lack nothing!’ Regathering his strength, he reported to Charles, ‘It seems to me the best name for this country is New Spain,’ of which he could call himself emperor ‘with no less title than of Germany’. But most significantly he sent gold regalia. ‘The gold-bearing world’ impressed the emperor.

Cortés rebuilt his army. The Mexica mystique had been shattered and the subjugated peoples were now keen to join the Spaniards in attacking the empire, now being devoured by an even more voracious hunter – a case of jaguar–crocodile predation. The second city of the Triple Alliance, Texcoco, now joined Cortés, who had left a worse weapon in Tenochtitlan: pathogens of smallpox. ‘A great plague broke out, lasting for seventy days, killing a vast number of our people,’ a victim later told Spanish priests. ‘Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies, we were covered in agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. A great many died from this plague, and many others … starved to death in their beds.’ Cuitláhuac perished, succeeded by a young nephew Cuauhtémoc, a respected warrior who also married Motecuhzoma’s daughter Tecuichpoch Ixcaxochitzin. As soon as he was chosen, Cuauhtémoc killed Motecuhzoma’s sons. Cortés struck back with terror, now deploying 700 Spaniards and 70,000 local troops, a hybrid army of warriors, Spaniards, Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca, the former in armour with arquebuses and Toledo swords shouting ‘Castile!’, Mesoamericans in feather headdresses and carrying machuahitl maces edged with obsidian shouting ‘Tlaxcala!’ First they attacked one of Tenochtitlan’s allies, Tepeaca, killing 20,000, tearing some to pieces with war dogs, eating others in cannibalistic feasts, then enslaving women and children, branded G for guerra – war. Cortés was guided by his Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca allies, eager for vengeance against their own enemies. ‘Clearly Cortés had to mould his plans to the objects of his indigenous allies,’ writes Fernando Cervantes. They believed they were using the Spanish – and vice versa.

On 22 May 1521, Cortés surrounded Tenochtitlan, cutting off food supplies.

ISABEL MONTEZUMA: THE LAST EMPRESS AND THE FALL OF THE MEXICA