1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [73]
Marching inland from the sea, the Spanish at first fought repeatedly with Tlaxcala, a confederation of four small kingdoms that had maintained its independence despite repeated Alliance incursions. Thanks to their guns, horses, and steel blades, the foreigners won every battle, even with Tlaxcala’s huge numerical advantage. But Cortés’s force shrank with every fight. He was on the verge of losing everything when the four Tlaxcala kings abruptly reversed course. Concluding from the results of their battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, the Indian leaders offered what seemed a win-win deal: they would stop attacking Cortés, sparing his life, the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance. To seal the partnership, one of the four kings—Tlaxcala’s main military leader—betrothed his daughter to Pedro de Alvarado, Cortés’s second-in-command. Mounted on their strange, monstrous beasts, the Spanish rode at the forefront of an army of perhaps twenty thousand Tlaxcalans. In November 1519, they entered Tenochtitlan, brushing by the objections of the startled and indecisive tlatoani, the famous Motecuhzoma (pronounced a bit like Mo-tayk-SZU-ma; he is better known, inaccurately, as Montezuma).
TRIPLE ALLIANCE, 1519 A.D.
Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders—it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens—none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never conceived of such a thing.)
And the whole of this wealth and power, Cortés subsequently explained to the Spanish king, flowed into the hands of Motecuhzoma.
Can there be anything more magnificent than that this barbarian lord should have all the things to be found under the heavens in his domain, fashioned in gold and silver and jewel and feathers? And so realistic in gold and silver that no smith in the world could have done better? And in jewels so fine that it is impossible to imagine with what instruments they were cut so perfectly?…In Spain there is nothing to compare with it.
Dazzled as he was, Cortés was also aware that with a single command Motecuhzoma could order his army “to obliterate all memory of us.” The Spaniards counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the tlatoani in his own palace, making him first their captive and then their puppet.
In both Europe and Mesoamerica kings ruled by the dispensation of the heavens. The Mexica reacted to the sacrilegious abduction of their leader with the same baffled horror with which Europeans later reacted to Cromwell’s execution of Charles I in 1649. Not wanting to act in a way that could result in Motecuhzoma’s death, the Mexica took seven months to mount a counterattack. Fearing the worst, the debased tlatoani made a begging public appearance on behalf of the Spanish. He soon died, either murdered by the Spaniards (according to Mexica accounts) or slain by his own countrymen (as Spanish chronicles tell it). Soon after came the long-delayed assault. Under the leadership of a vigorous new tlatoani, Cuitlahuac, the Indians forced the invaders into narrow alleys where horses were of little advantage. Under a pitiless hail of spears,