(Note: I wrote this in response to a request from a high school student for information on Hernando Cortés and the conquest of Mexico. It seems that her class was going to have a mock trial, and she was to be on the defense team for Cortés. How could a defense attorney justify the actions of the Spaniards during the conquest? I wrote this in part to explore that  question, and in part to challenge some misconceptions about the conquest of Mexico.)

OK, this should be fun. I assume that Hernando Cortés will be the defendant, and Moctezuma will be the plaintiff (or the victim). If each were placed on the witness stand, they would probably give similar accounts of the conquest, as the disagreement over the character of the conquest is not really about facts, but about values. Having said that, most people are very selective about which facts they present, focusing on the greed and brutality of the Spaniards and ignoring the greed and brutality of the Aztecs. This encourages the unfortunate use of history as an exercise in blaming – we look to the past to find “good” and “bad” actors as seen from a twentieth-century point of view. I will present you with some evidence that both sides were greedy, autocratic, cruel, and used warfare as a means to exact wealth from others. The conclusion I hope to leave you with is that judging the Spaniards or the Mesoamericans be the standards of twentieth century Americans is somewhat arbitrary, and useless in terms of advancing our understanding of the fall Aztec empire or the legacies that event left to modern Mexico.

I have a Master’s Degree in history from the University of Colorado, with a minor in Latin American history. I do not consider myself an expert on the conquest of Mexico, but I will cite some authors who I do consider experts on this subject. Hopefully, you will have time to review their books, if not before the “trial” then afterward. They will show you a picture of the Aztec empire and the Spanish conquest that may liberate you from stereotypes of “good” and “bad,” as you come to see elements of both in each side.

I’ll do this in outline form, listing my sources at the bottom of the document. Otherwise, this will become a long research paper, and neither of us wants to wade through 20 pages of writing.

1.  Let’s begin by examining the character and history of the Aztec empire.

Many people mistakenly believe that the Aztecs represent all native Mesoamerican peoples. That is not true. The Aztecs migrated to central Mexico and fought with local cultures to establish themselves at Tenochtitlan. In fact, they founded their city in 1325, just 200 years before the Spaniards arrived! (Clendinnen, 22-23 and 36-37)

Ironically, the Aztecs established a system of central authority and tribute that the Spaniards would later use to their own benefit. They replaced Moctezuma and the Aztec lords with the authority of the Spanish crown and the conquistadores, and took payment and tribute from the Indians in gold, and later in land and labor.

The Mesoamericans, like the Indians of North America were not just hunting and fishing and peacefully stringing beads when the Europeans arrived to take their land and put them to work in mines and plantations. Mesoamericans were warlike societies, with warrior castes who fought other Indians for control of territory, for slaves, for revenge, and – in the case of the Aztecs – for tribute. The Aztecs killed and sacrificed partly for religious purposes, and partly to enforce their domination over neighboring tribes.

Australian historian Inga Clendinnen describes the central role of warfare and ritual sacrifice in Aztec society:

There is one activity for which the Aztecs were notorious: the large-scale killing of humans in ritual sacrifices.... The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carryning gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots.... (Clendinnen, 2)

Historian Ross Hassig described the Aztecs’ relationship with other Mesoamerican tribes as one of “hegemonic domination.” He explains it as a process whereby a central authority (Tenochtitlan) extracts goods from its political hinterland through coercive means such as taxation or tribute.” (Hassig, 86) The Aztecs took tribute in the form of goods, grain and labor, just as they had paid tribute to superior tribes before becoming dominant power.  Spaniards would take tribute in land and labor when they supplanted the Aztec rulers. In that sense, the Spaniards continued a tradition of authoritarian rule and exploitation that preceded them by at least two hundred years.

Clendinnen offers a more poetic description: “Tenochtitlan was a beautiful parasite, feeding on the lives and labour of other peoples and casting its shadow over all their arrangements....” (Clendinnen, 8) Such domination, enforced by the Aztec warrior caste, meant that whenever a vassal tribe refused to pay tribute to the Aztecs, “they could expect a wave of warriors, bloody punishment, and a steep increase in their tribute demands.” (Clendinnen, 26)

Subjugated tribes did offer resistance. Tlaxcala (pronounced tlaz-CA-la) is only about 60 miles from Mexico City – the former location of the Aztec capital. Despite their proximity to Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalans fought the Aztecs rather than pay tribute. The rivalry between the two tribes made the Tlaxcalans natural allies of the Spaniards once they arrived in 1519. Hernando Cortés had a shifting alliance of Indian tribes at his back when he took the Aztec empire in 1519, and the Tlaxcalans made up a large part of his army.

Cortés himself acknowledges that he accomplished the initial stage of the conquest only with the support of the Tlaxcalans and other indigenous peoples who were eager to throw off the yoke of Aztec domination. In fact, it is not entirely accurate to say that “Cortés conquered Mexico.” In reality, Cortés initiated a civil war between the Aztecs and competing tribes, and led those tribes to victory with the help of thousands of Indian warriors – many from coastal tribes the Spaniards had defeated as they marched inland. Those tribes may or may not have regarded Cortés as a god, but they certainly regarded him as favored by the gods. They interpreted power as evidence of divine intervention, for in the Mesoamerican world there was a sacred explanation for everything.

In his second letter to King Carlos V, Cortés tells of his meeting with the Indians near Vera Cruz, and of their willingness to unite with the Spanish against the Aztecs:

(The province of Cempoal) includes as many as fifty thousand warriors and fifty villages and strongholds, all very secure and of peaceable disposition, and as certain and loyal subjects of your Majesty at the present moment as they have ever been: for they became subjects of... Moctezuma as I have been informed but little time past and that by force; but on hearing from me of your Majesty and my friends, begging me to defend them from that lord who ruled them by force and tyranny, taking their children to kill and sacrifice them to his idols and giving them other grievous causes for complaint of which they informed me. (Cortés, 33)

2.  Next, let’s examine the conquest itself. Rather than looking at the conquest of Mesoamerica as an isolated expedition in search of gold, it is more accurate to see it as part of a larger project to expand the power of Spain and the influence of the Catholic Church. Spain itself was conquered and occupied by the Moors from about 900 to 1500 A.D., and the re-conquest (reconquista) of Spain led to the expulsion of the Moors and the re-assertion of Catholic authority. Spain’s adventures into the New World were – in the Spanish mind – very much an extension of this same process. They wanted to do what other nations across the globe were doing: extend their influence through conquest of other peoples.

They also were intensely interested in converting pagans to Christianity. Consequently, the conquest of Mesoamerica involved the extension of the power of the Spanish crown, the taking of land and gold, and the conversion of pagan peoples to Christianity – by force if necessary.

The Spanish conquistadores were nothing if not ambitious. Can you imagine attempting to conquer an empire that encompassed between 15 and 20 million people (Hassig, 154) with a force of about 550 men, some horses, six cannon, some muskets and metal weapons? Upon landing, Cortés burned his ships to impress upon his men that there was only one possible course of action. Although Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, it took about six years of conquest (1519 – 1525) for him to subdue the Aztec empire, and he did it with an amazing sense of purpose and resolve.

Cortés never doubted that God was on his side – a conviction that grew with his success. His sense of predestination shows in his letters, where at one point he quotes scripture: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” (Cortes, 53)

Why did the Spaniards fight? Primarily, it was for empire, and all that they did was formally done in the service of the Spanish crown. To this end, the Spaniards were very careful to follow legal formalities in the conduct of the conquest. For example, according to Spanish law, only representatives of Spanish towns could claim territory for Spain. As soon as Cortés and his men landed, they established the city of Vera Cruz, in the name of the king of Spain. They immediately organized a town council, elected Cortés mayor, and drew up a town charter. With this legal authority, they could now proceed to claim treasure, slaves and land in the name of the king of Spain. It was all perfectly legal.

A secondary consideration was the extension of the Christian faith to pagan peoples. A sixteenth-century Spaniard was a very religious person, and believed literally in the tenants of the Catholic faith. In the introduction to the book Five Letters to the Emperor, which contains Cortés’s correspondence to the King of Spain,  J. Bayard Morris points out that conversion was an important part of the conquest. To the conquistadors “heaven, hell, purgatory, redemption and damnation were certainties, not vague philosophical speculations.” (Morris in Cortés, xxii) Consequently, the mission of Christianizing the Indians was a central part of the conquest – sanctioned by God and the Church.

There was no contradiction in the mind of Cortés between plundering gold (for himself and the Spanish king), building an empire, taking land for himself and his men, and converting the Indians to Christianity. They blended together in a single mission ordained by the Catholic Church and sanctioned by Spanish law.

After the fall of Tenochtitlan, completion of the conquest was a matter of installing a Spanish bureaucracy, putting down Indian resistance, partitioning Indian lands into estates and formalizing the relations between the Spanish and the conquered peoples of Mesoamerica. As we will see, the Indian were not simply enslaved. They were given some of the rights and protections of Spanish citizens. Although the Spanish can be blamed for the decimation of Indian populations, this was not primarily the result of mistreatment or warfare. Rather, it was the unplanned and unintended result of the spread of Old World diseases among people that had no natural immunity. Measles, smallpox, influenza and yellow fever devastated Indian communities in a series of plagues that swept across Mexico. These plagues would resurface periodically for over 200 years.

Still, the Spanish conquistadores and settlers that followed mistreated the Indians terribly. The Spanish encomienda system gave settlers rights to land and Indian labor, and this resulted in a system of Indian servitude that served the Spanish colonists. The injustices, however, did not go unnoticed. The Spanish friars who accompanied the conquistadores to Mesoamerica (dubbed New Spain after the conquest) wrote critically of the treatment the Indians received at the hands of their new masters. A Dominican friar named Bartolome de Las Casas wrote a critical account of the conquest titled A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which was published in Seville in 1552. (Morris in Cortés, xxxiv) In it, Las Casas points out the cruelty and hypocrisy of pursuing religious conversion during the act of conquest.

In response to the criticisms brought by Spanish friars, the crown passed laws intended to protect the Indians from the excesses of the conquistadores. An early example was a warning, called the requerimiento, that was intended to be read to indigenous people demanding they convert to Christianity and declare their homage to the king of Spain or war would be declared against them. If they ignored the warning they could be killed or enslaved. Las Casas observed that the conquistadores subverted the spirit of the law out of self-interest. With due attention to legal formalities, the Spaniards would halt and dismount outside of an Indian town and read the requerimientio (in Spanish). Then they would attack.

3.  Written protests, such as those of Las Casas, got the attention of the Spanish crown, and initiated a discussion of the rights and protections that should be afforded Indians as citizens of Spain. The Spanish court had to deal with the apparent contradiction of conquering native peoples and at the same time Christianizing them and incorporating them into the Spanish empire. The result was the Laws of the Indies, pronounced by the king of Spain in 1542. They were a sincere attempt by the Spanish court to extend the protection of the crown to its Indian subjects. In fact, they threatened to deprive Spanish settlers of their “rights” to Indian labor, and were revoked in Mexico and Peru when the Spanish viceroy was killed for trying to enforce them. (see more at: www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1542newlawsindies.html)

In his book El espejo enterrado (The Buried Mirror) Mexican author Carlos Fuentes approaches the issue of Indian servitude after the conquest as a trade-off of servitude for protection. The Indians lost much of their freedom, but gained some protections under Spanish law, as the crown extended legal protection to its new subjects. The debate over whether or not to treat Indians as Spanish subjects was a very important event in modern history. Fuentes asserts that the decision to regard Indians as people with souls, and therefore human beings in the eyes of God, led the Spanish crown to insert itself between the peninsulare colonists and the Indians for the protection of the Indians’ rights as Spanish citizens. Fuentes says this was the first discussion in modern history of the application of human rights to conquered peoples. (Fuentes, 175-176)

Other friars compiled the first comprehensive written history of the Aztecs, and deserve credit for documenting and preserving much of their culture, history and language. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún directed a research project into Aztec culture and history that resulted in a 12-volume work titled A General History of the Things of New Spain. We know it today as the Florentine Codex, named after the town where it is kept. It was written in both Spanish and Nahuatl – the Aztec language. (Clendinnen, 8)

In conclusion, I think that you could make a case in a mock courtroom that Cortés acted within the bounds of Spanish law and even within the moral framework of the people of his time. Remember, slavery and conquest were the norm for thousands of years of human history. From the sixteenth century they were carried out on a grand scale, and more effectively than ever before, but does the sheer size and impact of the conquest make it morally different than the history that preceded it? Was it morally different than the acts of conquest, warfare and taking of slaves by indigenous peoples against each other?

Certainly the conduct of the conquistadores shocks our conscience, and it shocked the conscience of the men of the Catholic Church who saw it and wrote to condemn it. On the other hand, if the purpose of our investigation is to assign moral blame, then should we not weigh the moral sins of the Aztecs themselves on the other side of the scales? Perhaps the best conclusion we can come to is that history is best studied to explain how we arrived at this point in time, and how things are different than what came before. The study of the past tells us about ourselves by drawing contrasts between how we live and think today and how people lived and thought hundreds of years ago. Part of what we are today is the legacy of events that transpired long ago. A verdict of “guilty” or “innocent” against Cortés may satisfy in some way our desire to undo injustices that were committed long before our own ancestors arrived in the New World, but they will not undo the chain of events that the conquest set in motion.

What was the legacy of the conquest, and how has it affected Mexico and all of Latin America? How does it affect Latin America today? Those are the questions that will linger after the verdict has been pronounced on Cortés and his men. Perhaps that is where the study of the conquest really begins.

Sources:

Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Cortés, Hernando. Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor. J. Bayard Morris, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969)

Hassig, Ross. Trade, Tribute and Transportation. (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985)

Fuentes, Carlos. El espejo enterrado. (México: Taurus, 1998)