The Conquistadors, page 20
The Spanish attack on Mexico was mounted from the south and west using three causeways. Cortés, with Olid’s force, attempted to break in by the main causeway from Xoloc; Sandoval by the small subsidiary causeway that joined it at Acachinanco; whilst, from the west, Alvarado advanced by the Tacuba causeway. He was supported by four of the brigantines, and two more were sent to aid Sandoval on the smaller causeway. Without the brigantines to hold off the canoes the Spaniards would have had little hope of destroying the water defences of the city. The causeways were so encumbered with houses and fortresses, so interrupted by bridges and impeded by barricades thrown up by the Mexicans, that every yard gained was a major battle. Moreover, because of the obstructions and the mud and slime, the horses, which were the main advantage the Spaniards possessed on land, were of little use. And each night the gaps they had so laboriously filled were torn open again. Nevertheless, within a few days Cortés had penetrated into Tenochtitlan, the southern part of the city, had reached a square and captured a temple that was a hundred steps to the top, almost as high as the great teocalli itself. Now that Cortés was actually in the city proper, the young lord of Texcoco brought up the warriors of his province, so that the Spaniards were now advancing daily up the three causeways supported by no less than a hundred thousand warriors. The end seemed almost in sight. But the city itself was criss-crossed by innumerable canals, and with the bridges over them destroyed and the Mexicans defending each gap with extraordinary ferocity and pouring sling-stones and arrows down from the surrounding roof-tops, progress could only be made by filling each canal gap and destroying all the buildings that overlooked it. So began the house-by-house destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
It was at this point that Alvarado’s impetuosity nearly proved disastrous once more. Cortés had been trying to link up the two prongs of his attack by forcing a passage through some streets that connected with the Tacuba causeway. He was faced, however, with half a dozen canal gaps, and, after capturing three and filling them in, he retired for the night. His objective seems to have been the market square. Alvarado had the same objective, but his men were under such pressure that they were forced to retreat back down the causeway each night to their quarters in Tacuba, posting guards on the gaps that had been filled. A sort of rivalry seems now to have developed between Alvarado and Cortés, each wanting to be the first to reach the square, which, being a large open space surrounded by arcades and dominated by a number of temples, was ideal as an advance base. The Tacuba causeway led straight into it, and Alvarado, flushed with success after capturing several of the intervening bridges and barricades, made a dash for it, lured on by the fact that the Mexicans appeared to have broken and were in full flight. It was, however, a trap. Behind him he left a shallow water gap, sixty feet wide, through which he had plunged with his horses and men. Fifty soldiers had just begun the work of filling it in when the Mexicans turned abruptly and attacked with great ferocity. Canoes, waiting in ambush, closed in on the gap. The brigantines, impeded by a carefully prepared stake barricade, could not come to their aid. Alvarado fought his way through to another street and forced a passage across a much deeper gap where pits had been dug under water. It was a near thing, and he was lucky to save his life and escape with the loss of only one horse. But, apart from killed and wounded, five Spaniards had been taken alive.
Cortés was justifiably annoyed at this reverse, for he had repeatedly warned both his own men and Alvarado not to advance beyond an unfilled gap. Then, a few days later, he was himself caught in exactly the same trap. He was again making a determined effort to fight his way through to the market square. He had just captured a somewhat deep water opening across which the Mexicans had purposely left a very narrow causeway with several gaps in it. As he moved to occupy it they retreated as though they had now lost courage, luring him on step by step until suddenly they broke and fled. Cortés and his men followed hard on their heels, leaving the gap behind them unfilled, though Cortés later claimed that he gave orders for it to be filled. Bands of Mexican warriors under their bravest captains had been concealed in the houses, canoes were ready to attack the gap, and stakes had been driven into the mud to keep the brigantines off. The trap was sprung in an instant, and Cortés and his men were caught in a great rush of warriors He himself was badly wounded in the leg, was dragged from his horse, and was down in the water and mud of the gap when Olea, one of his old guard, who had saved his life once before at Xochimilco, hacked off the arm of the Mexican chief who was dragging him towards one of the canoes. Once again he was saved from death solely by the desire of the Mexicans to take him alive so that he could be sacrificed. Other soldiers rushed to his rescue, but by then Olea was dead. Altogether, Cortés lost some forty men in the ambush, most of them captured alive, and a thousand of his Indians had been killed. It was the worst defeat the Spaniards had suffered since the start of the siege.
Flushed with their victory, the Mexicans renewed their attack on Alvarado’s men. ‘Uttering loud yells’, Bernal Díaz says, ‘they threw in front of us five heads, streaming with blood, which they had just cut off the men of Cortés’ company.’ They were yelling that they had killed Cortés and Sandoval and would kill them, too. Worse, as the Spaniards retreated on to the Tacuba causeway, they heard the sound of trumpets from the great temple six miles away in Mexico, and the beating of the snake-skin drum, ‘a very sad sound’ – sad, because the Mexicans were then sacrificing ten of the Spaniards’ comrades.
On the other side of the city the war of nerves was carried into Cortés’ camp. The Mexicans, who had pursued him there and were attacking in force, threw four more severed and flayed heads amongst his men, screaming that they included the heads of Alvarado and Sandoval, whom they had killed. Fearing the worst, Cortés sent Andrés de Tapia, with an escort of three horse, round by land to Tacuba to get news of the situation there. Meanwhile, Sandoval, who had been advancing steadily in his own quarter of the city, was faced with such a press of warriors that he had to fall back after he had lost six men killed and had himself been wounded in the head, the thigh and left arm. The Mexicans displayed six more heads. Again they were all men that Cortés had lost, but they claimed that one was the head of Cortés himself and another Alvarado’s.
Wounded as he was, Sandoval immediately galloped off to Cortés’ camp. Finding his captain safe, but alarmed at the absence of news from Alvarado, he rode on to Tacuba. He was just in time to prevent one of the brigantines, which had run aground, being captured, and got a sling-stone in the face for his trouble. He was wounded yet again in an endeavour to clear the causeway of the hordes of Mexicans attacking down it, leading the cavalry in charge after charge, despite the slippery surface, with the crossbowmen and musketeers shooting whilst others loaded for them, the soldiers hacking and stabbing. Even cannon fire seemed to make no impression on the Mexicans, who attacked in a frenzy, drunk with victory. There was no let-up in the fighting until the Spaniards had retreated almost to the Tacuba end of the causeway and had put a broad gap of water between themselves and their attackers.
Now the great snake-skin drum3 sounded its dismal note again, to the accompaniment of conches, horns and trumpets. When the Spaniards looked towards the great temple, which stood out high above the city, they saw more of their comrades, who had been captured in Cortés’ imprudent charge, being dragged up the steps to a small platform where the priests stood waiting.
We saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them, and then they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huitzilopochtli. Then, after they had danced, the priests laid them on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces, which they afterwards prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for their drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes.
There is another account of the Mexicans attacking and throwing roasted arms and legs into the midst of the Spaniards, screaming, ‘Eat the flesh of these teules and your brothers, for we are glutted with it – stuff yourselves on our leavings.’
To us today these accounts are horrifying, but the Mexicans were fighting for their lives, for the state they had made the greatest state in the Indian world, for their beautiful city, and for the glory of their own true faith. From their point of view, what they did to their invaders was no more than their normal practice, and to taunt the Spaniards with the remains of their captured victims was merely grim psychological warfare. Undoubtedly it had an effect on the Spanish soldiery, inducing in each man the thought that there but for the Grace of God … Indeed, Bernal Díaz says frankly that the fear of being captured alive was always with him before a battle, so that ‘a sort of horror and gloom would seize my heart, and I would make water once or twice and commend myself to God and His blessed Mother’. As soon as he was in action, the fear left him, but as battles were daily occurrences this fear of being captured, which all of them must have experienced, undoubtedly constituted a terrific nervous strain, though it probably added to their value as fighting machines.
This form of psychological warfare seems to have had its effect also on their Indian allies; or perhaps they were getting bored by the protracted nature of the campaign. Indian campaigns were normally short-lived affairs since they refrained from living off the country, always carrying their own supplies of food with them. Whichever it was, they began to drift away. Bernal Díaz claims that the Spaniards on the Tacuba causeway were entirely deserted and worked for four days on a rota system, one company acting as labour corps, whilst two others did the fighting, until all the gaps that had been torn open again were filled in. This is not borne out by Cortés, who records that Chichimecatl, the Tlaxcalan war chief, mounted an independent and highly successful attack of his own whilst Alvarado’s Spaniards were resting in their camp.
Cortés had, in fact, given orders for the Spaniards to rest, only sending small companies into the city to give an appearance of aggressive activity. June to August is the rainy season in Mexico and his men had been fighting constantly for more than a month in wet conditions and with poor food. They needed time to recover, to refurbish their weapons and to bring up more powder from Vera Cruz, where a ship belonging to Ponce de León’s ill-fated expedition to Florida had providentially sought refuge. Moreover, there was trouble brewing in the surrounding country. After their victory the Mexicans sent the hands and feet of Spaniards they had sacrificed, and the heads of horses they had killed, through all the towns of their defecting allies. To stop the rot Cortés sent Tapia to Cuernavaca and Sandoval to Otomí, each with a considerable force ostensibly to ‘protect’ these allies. Sandoval had the support of sixty thousand Indians, which probably explains why the Spaniards on the Tacuba causeway felt themselves deserted. With this large force to aid him, Sandoval inflicted a crushing defeat on the Culhúan insurgents. All this took about ten days, but it had the desired effect, so that when Cortés resumed full-scale operations against Mexico, he was supported by the staggering total of 150,000 Indian auxiliaries. He opened his new offensive by following the example of the Mexicans and staging carefully prepared ambushes. The most successful of these occurred after nearly a week of hard fighting when he had gained the market square. Some five hundred ‘of all the bravest and most valiant of their principal men’ were killed, and he adds without comment or show of feeling, ‘our allies supped well because they cut up all those whom they had killed and captured to eat’. Next day he killed and wounded a further eight hundred, and the day following he linked up with Alvarado’s force. Since the resumption of the offensive, his orders not to advance beyond a gap before it had been filled in had been strictly obeyed, and using his Indians as demolition squads he was systematically destroying every building, levelling whole streets.
He claims that he repeatedly tried to induce the Mexicans to surrender and that he did his best to restrain his Indian allies from looting and senseless slaughter. The offensive was now degenerating into a massacre. In one engagement the Mexicans lost 12,000 killed, in another 40,000. Seven-eighths of the city was in the hands of the invaders, ‘which left them not even a place to stand, save upon the bodies of their own dead’, and ‘our allies handled the enemy most cruelly, for they would in no wise spare any life’. The other side of the picture was that in every quarter the Spaniards took they found the houses and stockades full of heads and corpses. ‘We could not walk’, Bernal Díaz says, ‘without treading on the bodies and heads of dead Indians.’
The Mexicans appear to have made two overtures of peace, but either they were only to gain time to prepare their defences or else on each occasion they were overruled by the stubbornness of their priests. Cortés, impressed by their suffering, also made offers, which were rejected. The end came suddenly on August 13, 1521, when Cortés mounted a final all-out attack on the small area of the city in which the Mexican survivors had been penned. More than fifteen thousand of them died that day. In the end, Cuauhtemoc and the remnants took to their canoes. Owing to its state trappings, the one occupied by Cuauhtemoc was easily recognized, and he was captured by a brigantine.
So ended the epic defence of Mexico. For two whole months the Aztecs had fought upwards of 150,000 of their own race, had faced without flinching the new instruments of war imported by alien invaders – cannons, ships, muskets, steel and the terrible power of armoured cavalry. They had also faced hunger, thirst and pestilence. Bernal Díaz gives a horrifying description of conditions in the quarter of the city which was the last to be over-run:
We found the houses full of corpses, and some poor Mexicans still in them who could not move away. Their excretions were the sort of filth that thin swine pass which have been fed on nothing but grass. The city looked as if it had been ploughed up. The roots of any edible greenery had been dug out, boiled, and eaten, and they had even cooked the bark of some of the trees … there had been no live birth for a long time, because they had suffered so much from hunger and thirst and continual fighting.
Yet, though they ate the flesh of those they killed or captured, they did not eat their own dead. Conditions were so desperate that Cuauhtemoc requested permission to evacuate all his people to the mainland. ‘Three whole days and nights they never ceased streaming out, and all three causeways were crowded with men, women and children so thin, sallow, dirty and stinking it was pitiful to see them.’
After ninety-three days of constant fighting and the noise of war, an unnatural silence had now fallen on the city. Cortés ordered his forces back to their quarters, away from the cloying smell of rotting flesh and the danger of pestilence. That same night the old gods seemed to take flight. It rained heavily and the pitch-black sodden darkness was rent with lightning, the stillness by great rolls of thunder as though the war-gods’ drum, magnified a thousandfold, was being beaten for the last time. Cortés and his captains were then celebrating their victory.
In the morning the work of cleansing the city began. Fires burned night and day, particularly in the northern quarter of Tlatelolco where the corpses lay in heaps. Cortés now had no further need of his Indian allies. They were paraded, speeches were made, gifts exchanged, and they marched away, loaded with loot and captive slaves. By then they numbered about 200,000 warriors. He then paraded his army for a service of thanksgiving. Led by Fray Bartolomé, the statue of the Virgin backed by the torn banners of Castile that they had carried with them through so many bloody battles, they marched quietly and in peace to receive the sacrament.
Uppermost, however, in the minds of almost all of them was the desire to know what had happened to all the gold they had lost on the night of the Noche Triste and the much greater quantity they had abandoned in the halls of Axayacatl’s palace. No trace of it had been found in the city, though plundering the dead had produced many bucklers of gold, plumes and fine featherwork. Counting what they got out of the houses, the total was valued at 130,000 pesos – a very small amount compared with what they had abandoned. Cuauhtemoc was repeatedly questioned, also his chieftains. Their explanation was that it had gradually filtered away by canoe to the lakeside cities and the surrounding country. Their greed unsatisfied, the army began accusing Cortés of having sequestered it for his own use. The accusation was even scrawled on the lime-washed walls of his headquarters in Coyoacán. Pressed by his men, and also by the treasurer, Alderete, he finally allowed Cuauhtemoc and the cacique of Tacuba to be tortured and their feet were ‘put to the fire’. All they got out of the Mexican king was that most of the gold had been thrown into the lake. Persistent diving produced a few items, and in a pond in the gardens of his palace they found a large golden calendar-wheel.
The king’s fifth, together with carefully selected examples of the finest jewelry work, was sent to Spain by three caravels, which finally left Vera Cruz in December 1522. Fonseca had planned to seize the treasure on arrival in Spain. Instead, the ships were attacked by a French privateer, who delivered their contents to his own king, Francis I. It was one of those extraordinary twists of fate, for the treasure assumed much greater importance in the French king’s hands than it would have done otherwise, and helped considerably in furthering Cortés’ affairs at the court of the Emperor Charles.
