Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

7 Myths of the Spanish conquest 3 (Apoes and Men (the real reasons…

- - - - According to the anthropologist Samuel Wilson, we seek to distance ourselves from the history of the Contact and conquest because of the tragedy it contains
      - Colonial chroniclers and the modern historians who followed them have a very simple explanation of what happened
        
        they found a simplifying simplicity and safety in the following circular argument: Spaniards conquered natives because they were superior, and they were superior because they conquered natives.
        
        In its most extreme form, indigenous inferiority was expressed in terms that denied Native Americans their humanity. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s com ment is often cited because it suggests this image so candidly. The Spanish jurist and philosopher openly stated that natives “hardly deserve the name of human beings.” Even full conversion and subjection to the Spanish empire could only partially turn these “barbarians” into “civilized men.” 2 While much opprobrium has been heaped upon Sepúlveda for his views, he merely ar ticulated more vividly and directly what most Spaniards and other Europe ans assumed at the time to be the case.
        
        opposition of civilised and barbarous
        
        In its most extreme form, indigenous inferiority was expressed in terms that denied Native Americans their humanity. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s com ment is often cited because it suggests this image so candidly. The Spanish jurist and philosopher openly stated that natives “hardly deserve the name of human beings.” Even full conversion and subjection to the Spanish empire could only partially turn these “barbarians” into “civilized men.” 2 While much opprobrium has been heaped upon Sepúlveda for his views, he merely ar ticulated more vividly and directly what most Spaniards and other Europe ans assumed at the time to be the case.
  - - - Attributing to divine intervention an outcome that surprised or otherwise perplexed Spaniards was an easy option to which conquistadores often resorted.
      - Pedrarias de Avila implied in a letter to the king that both he and the local natives shared a of the epidemic disease as providential: more than 400 , 000 souls have been converted to our holy Catholic faith of their own free will, and more continually come to request baptism, because the Indians in one town where a wooden cross had been set up tried to burn it and never succeeded, and then all the people of the town died of pestilence without an Indian remaining, and seeing this miracle and other miracles that have occurred, the Indians of the region around came to be baptized and request crosses.
      - sometimes the citing of miracles was specific
        
        Sometimes the citing of miracles was specific, as in the claims that the Inca siege of Cuzco was lifted in 1537 by the appearance of the Virgin Mary, or by Santiago (St. James) riding his white horse into the Andean forces. In fact, early colonial accounts of the siege by both Spaniards and Andeans— Antonio de Herrera, Titu Cusi, Cristóbal de Molina, Garcilaso de la Vega, and fray Martín de Murúa—all credit the intervention of Santiago and the Virgin as important explanatory factors, if not the deciding factor. 8 On other occasions, the references to God by sixteenth-century Spaniards—to His will, blessing, and intervention—seem so much a part of the linguistic currency of the day that they can be seen as no more than convenient façades for complex explanations and understandings.
      - why would god intervene on the side of the Spaniards?
        
        The most obvious question begged by the conquest-as-miracle explana tion was why did God intervene on the side of the Spaniards? The answer was deceptively simple: because their endeavors were sanctioned by God. As Sahagún explained, “Many were the miracles which were performed in the conquest of this land.” The sentence appears in Sahagún’s 1585 revision of the Conquest account that is Book XII of the Florentine Codex , which the Franciscan friar felt gave insufficient credit to such factors as the role of provi dence. Before Sahagún, Las Casas and Motolinía had similarly argued that the Conquest was ordained by God in order to bring Christianity to natives. In general, the Franciscans and Dominicans worked hard to promote their evangelization efforts in the Americas not just as God’s own work but as the very purpose and justification of the entire Conquest.
      - justification from Cortez
        
        The most obvious question begged by the conquest-as-miracle explana tion was why did God intervene on the side of the Spaniards? The answer was deceptively simple: because their endeavors were sanctioned by God. As Sahagún explained, “Many were the miracles which were performed in the conquest of this land.” The sentence appears in Sahagún’s 1585 revision of the Conquest account that is Book XII of the Florentine Codex , which the Franciscan friar felt gave insufficient credit to such factors as the role of provi dence. Before Sahagún, Las Casas and Motolinía had similarly argued that the Conquest was ordained by God in order to bring Christianity to natives. In general, the Franciscans and Dominicans worked hard to promote their evangelization efforts in the Americas not just as God’s own work but as the very purpose and justification of the entire Conquest.
    - - The second mythic explanation blames native peoples for their own defeat. It combines the notion that native resistance was hindered or forestalled by the belief that the Spaniards were (or may have been) gods, with the interre lated blaming of the Mexica and Inca emperors for the subsequent collapse of their empires. Spanish superiority is promoted through the contrast between native and Spanish leaders—the more that Moctezuma is condemned as “timo rous and cowardly,” in Sepúlveda’s words, the more Cortés seems “noble and valiant”—and by the implication that the appearance, abilities, and actions of the conquistadors inspired natives to take them for gods.
    - - The third myth-based explanation stems from the view of native cultures as inadeq uate to the task of fending off the Spanish invasion. Again, native inferiority serves to feed the myth of Spanish superiority. Early European views of Native Americans included the belief that they either lacked culture in any “real” sense, or that their cultures were weakened by naiveté or a rot ten moral core. Such views also gave rise to explanations for the Conquest’s outcome. That sixteenth-century Spaniards found such explanations con vincing is not surprising, but these cultural explanations were also perpetu ated in modern history books. For example, J. H. Elliott, the prominent Englishhistorian of Spain and its empire, argued that Spanish weaponry alone does not explain the Conquest.
      - J.H Elliot
        
        There must here have been a superiority that was more than merely technical, and perhaps it ultimately lay in the greater self-confidence of the civilization which pro duced the conquistadores . In the Inca empire they confronted a civilization that seems to have passed its peak and to have started already on its descent; in the Aztec [i.e. Mexica] empire, on the other hand, they successfully challenged a civilization still young and in the process of rapid evolution. Each of these empires was thus caught at a moment when it was least capable of offering effective resistance, and each lacked confidence in itself, and in its capacity for survival in a universe ruled by implacable deities, and for ever poised on the brink of destruction. The conquistador , hungry for fame and riches, and extremely confident of his capacity to obtain them, stood on the threshold of a fatalist world resigned to self-surrender; and in the sign of the cross he conquered it.
      - This passage embraces much of Conquest mythology: the Conquest is achieved by a few gold-hungry exceptional men; native empires quickly col lapse; natives are handicapped by fatalism and a lack of confidence; and Span iards enjoy a double “superiority,” technical and civilizational. Elliott does not explicitly blame native religion, but the idea is implicit in his phrase “fatalist world,” which amounts to a modern version of the “superstition” of which colonial-era Spaniards accused natives. As Santiago Mendez, Yucatan’s governor in the early 1840 s, remarked, in “Indian” minds “superstition and ” 15 credulity go hand in hand.
      - discussion of Tintin
      - Historians who believe in the civilised european and barbarous others. michael Wood suggests that the Mexica accepted their defeat because " the Aztec polity was, unquestionably, a moral order with a deep, if tormented spirituality."Totonacs, and the Mexica were profoundly religious tribes, completely sub servient to the order of the gods and to the rule of their priest-kings.” 19 Charles Dibble, misled by the Florentine Codex upon which he labored for decades, explained the Conquest of Mexico largely in terms of the Mexica cultural outlook as “omen-ridden” and “permeated with a resigned fatalism”; the Mexica were traumatized by the apparent “ineffectiveness of native religion and magic” and the realization that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl.
      - juxtaposition between a progressive civilisation and a traditional one -> Benjamin Keen, in his popular textbook on Latin American history, also contrasts European and Native American civilizations as one reason for the success of the Conquest. “The Spaniards were Renaissance men with a basi cally secular outlook, while the Indians represented a much more archaic worldview in which ritual and magic played a large role.” Spaniards viewed war as “a science or art,” but “for the Aztecs and Incas, war had a large reli gious component.” Jacques Soustelle, in his classic study of the Mexica, first published in French a half century ago, made the same argument. Mexica civilization “went down above all because its religious and legal conception of war paralyzed it,” argued Soustelle; “by reason of its material inadequacy or the rigidity of its mind, the civilization was defeated.” The juxtaposition is thus between a progressive civilization and a traditional one. However the argument is articulated, the trope of civilization and barbarism always lurks in the background.
    - - One of the oldest definitions of the difference between civilization and barbarism is that of writing. The fourth myth-based explanation of the Con quest assumes a Spanish superiority in language, literacy, and reading “signs.” Columbus’s comment, at first seemingly extraordinary, that he would bring Caribbean natives to Spain “in order that they may learn to speak,” is echoed in Le Clézio’s declaration that Mexico’s Conquest “was achieved thanks to Cortés’s chief weapon—his ability to speak.” Columbus and Le Clézio mean to compare not the mute and the vocal, but superior and inferior communi cators. Thus despite Todorov’s claim that his explanation of the Conquest as a native defeat “by means of signs” is one that “has hitherto been neglected,” the myth of the superior communication skills of Europeans is both deeply rooted and still alive. 22 Antonio de Nebrija’s famous statement in his Intro duction to the first published Spanish grammar that “language has always been the partner [ compañera ] of empire” is often quoted partly because of the symbolism of his book’s presentation to Queen Isabella in 1492 . 23 But it is also cited because it functions as a bumper-sticker slogan to support the idea that Spaniards enjoyed what Samuel Purchas termed “the litterall advan tage.” Purchas, an Englishman writing in the early seventeenth century, meant that literacy gave its possessors both a moral and technological advantage. Modern proponents of this idea have abandoned its moral dimension (al most reversing it in their anticolonial sympathy for native peoples), but cling to its technological aspect.
    - - The final myth-based explanation is rooted in the notion that Spanish weaponry in and of itself explains the Conquest, something that not even the conquistadors believed. While weapons were clearly a factor in the Conquest’s outcome, the extreme version of this explanation—whereby weap onry explains everything—has become a modern manifestation of the old superiority myth. As the once-dominant notion of civilizational superiority became unfashionable, the idea of Spanish technological superiority became a politically acceptable alternative.
      - Early expressions of this view in Cortés’s letters to the king and in Díaz’s account tend to mix the straightforward idea of differences in weapons with other explanations more clearly based in Conquest mythology. Later, Ilarione da Bergamo was given to understand from his travels in Mexico in the 1760 s that the crucial moment of divine intervention in Cortés’s campaign was the Spanish discovery of “saltpeter” at the mouth of the Orizaba volcano, with which gunpowder could be made. “For if there had not been powder,” wrote Ilarione,
      - Ilarione
        
        to charge the field cannons with their cartridges and withstand the tremendous number of Indians who resisted their advance into their country, and (according to the his tory) nearly darkened the sky with the immense quality of arrows launched against the aggressors, they would not have been able to decimate them as they did. . . . These wretched Indians had all the more reason to claim that the Spaniards manipulated lightning when they heard the noise and saw the fire from the artillery and, at the same time, countless numbers of their own people dropping dead. 27
      - When the weapons factor is removed from context and privileged as the sole or overwhelming Spanish advantage, the entire Conquest comes down to the clash of superior and inferior weapons. But behind that clash lies the larger more problematic clash of civilization and barbarism. Whether the focus is on weapons, words, ideas, or the intervention of God, as long as the implication is that Spaniards were in some sense better than Native Ameri cans, we are not moving any closer to better understanding the Conquest.
  - - - The conquistadors had two great allies, without which the Conquest would not have taken place. One of these was disease. For ten millennia the Ameri cas had been isolated from the rest of the world. The greater numbers of people in the Old World, and the greater variety of domesticated animals from which such diseases as smallpox, measles, and flu originated, meant that Europeans and Africans arrived in the New World with a deadly array of germs. These germs still killed Old World peoples, but they had devel oped relatively high levels of immunity compared to Native Americans, who died rapidly and in staggeringly high numbers. During the century and a half after Columbus’s first voyage, the Native American population fell by as much as 90 percent.
      - Sudden epidemics had immediate impacts on the invasions of the Mexica and Inca empires. When Prescott put the fall of Tenochtitlán down to “causes more potent than those from human agency” he was in a way correct. The Mexica capital fell not by the force of Spanish arms, but to disease and plague. The siege of the island city cut off food supplies, but as starvation approached, defenders succumbed to plague or disease. Smallpox seems to have been the prime culprit. As Spaniards and their Nahua allies moved through the dev astated city, they found pile after pile of corpses, and huddled groups of the dying, covered with telltale pustules. As the Franciscan chronicler Sahagún later put it, “the streets were so filled with the dead and sick people that our men walked over nothing but bodies.”
      - Sudden epidemics had immediate impacts on the invasions of the Mexica and Inca empires. When Prescott put the fall of Tenochtitlán down to “causes more potent than those from human agency” he was in a way correct. The Mexica capital fell not by the force of Spanish arms, but to disease and plague. The siege of the island city cut off food supplies, but as starvation approached, defenders succumbed to plague or disease. Smallpox seems to have been the prime culprit. As Spaniards and their Nahua allies moved through the dev astated city, they found pile after pile of corpses, and huddled groups of the dying, covered with telltale pustules. As the Franciscan chronicler Sahagún later put it, “the streets were so filled with the dead and sick people that our men walked over nothing but bodies.”
      - speed of the disease
        
        Diseases moved through the Americas faster than germ-carrying Europe ans and Africans could. Moctezuma’s successor, Cuitlahuac, was killed by smallpox during the siege of Tenochtitlán, but the Inca emperor Huayna Capac, and then his successor, both died of the disease before Pizarro and his colleagues had even reached the empire. A succession dispute arose as a result; Huayna Capac’s two surviving sons, Atahuallpa and Huascar, at tempted to share power, but the arrangement soon dissolved into a civil war that Pizarro was able to manipulate to his own benefit.
      - where the diseases stemmed from
        
        The two great native empires in the early sixteenth century were not the only regions hit by Old World diseases. It is unlikely that any corner of the Americas escaped unscathed. The virus that killed Huayna Capac in the late 1520 s was probably a continuation of the great pandemic that arrived in the Caribbean in 1518 . It was brought to Mexico by the Narváez expedition of 1519 , spread by the Spaniards and Africans led by Cortés and Alvarado through central and southern Mexico and into Guatemala, traveling rapidly through Central America in the early 1520 s, before fanning out across South America. This smallpox pandemic, which alone killed millions of Native Americans, was followed in the 1530 s by a lethal pandemic of measles that likewise ran from Mesoamerica to the Andes. These and successive waves of disease pen etrated up into North America, decimating the densely populated lower Mississippi, and southwest into Amazonia, where large towns shrank to vil lages or became uninhabited. Whereas disease aided and accelerated the Con quest among Nahuas, Mayas, and Andeans, it averted invasion in regions such as the lower Mississippi and Amazon. Too few people were left to at tract major expeditions and not until modern times were the population levels of the original native empires even realized.
    - - The second great ally of the conquistadors was native disunity in its many forms and manifestations. Native American identity was highly localized; native peoples saw themselves as members of particular communities or city- states, very seldom as members of larger ethnic groups and certainly not as
      - anything even approaching the category of “Indians” or “natives.” The na ture of native identity was thus the root of a native disunity that the invaders encouraged to blossom. Natives allied to the Spanish cause were essential to the Conquest, almost always outnumbering many times over the Spanish and African members of an expedition. Their role in saving companies from disaster and turning the tide of Conquest wars can hardly be overstated. As Cortés himself admitted in a rare moment of candor, one of the factors in the Spanish favor was that “many of the natives were our allies and would assist.” 35 Two further examples of how native disunity aided Spaniards were the roles played by native interpreters and the cooperation and collabora tion of native rulers—the latter often stemming from their desire to advance their own dynasties and communities at the expense of neighboring ones.
    - - overall importance
        
        The third well-evidenced factor that helps to explain the Conquest’s out come is weaponry. Much has been made of five military advantages that Spaniards allegedly enjoyed: guns, steel, horses, war dogs, and the tactical skills needed to maximize the impact of these. But the advantages they of fered faded during the Conquest period, as unconquered natives acquired the same technology; the Araucanian use of pikes and horses is a good ex- ample. 36 Furthermore, the theoretical tactical advantage of Spanish weap ons was often very different from the actual possibilities for their application in the Americas. Arguably, the limited applicability of Spanish weapons such as guns and horses made the way in which they were used all the more im- portant. 37 Nevertheless, it seems clear that guns, horses, and mastiffs were a minor factor.
      - horses and dogs
        
        Horses and dogs were in limited supply for most of the Conquest period, and both animals could only be used in battle under certain circumstances— horses on open ground, and dogs at close quarters, preferably against the unarmed. The insistence by the conquistador Vargas Machuca on the im portance of dogs was based entirely on his opinion that “the Indian greatly fears the horse, and the harquebus, but he fears the dog more.” Yet the gen eral fearfulness of the “Indian” was mostly wishful thinking on the part of invaders. Another colonial writer, Herrera, details the gutting by a dog of an unarmed native chief on Hispaniola in 1502 , but otherwise offers no evi dence in his eight-volume Conquest history of the military utility of dogs.
        
        Conquistadors greatly prized horses, and during campaigns they ex changed hands for high prices. But this was not primarily because they of fered a military advantage against native warriors. To some extent horses were valued because expeditions often traveled long distances over difficult ground, but they were only a rapid means of transportation if the whole company was mounted. Above all horses were prized because they were a status symbol; there were not enough to go around, they were expensive to buy and maintain, and their ownership placed one in a separate category that came with a larger share of the spoils. At the fundición , or meltdown of precious mineral booty, at such places as Cajamarca in 1533 , larger shares were given to men with horses. Yet despite the enormous social importance of being a horseman, when it came to fighting, even Francisco Pizarro pre ferred to be on the ground.
      - Guns
        
        Guns, too, were of limited use. Cannons were few in number in the Ameri cas, and without roads or navigable rivers, their transportation was a major challenge. Much of the Americas where Spaniards fought was tropical or sub tropical, and in the humidity the powder became too wet to fire. Firearms, in the form of harquebuses, whose unwieldy barrels required the support of tri pods, were likewise not plentiful and required dry powder. Vargas Machuca advocated Spaniards using harquebuses in the Americas, but his detailed ex position on how to avoid damaging the gun, getting it wet, or discharging it prematurely or by accident would surely have caused any conquistador to think twice about carrying such a weapon. 40 The more reliable and faster-loading musket was not invented until decades after Cortés and Pizarro invaded the American mainland. Nor had Europeans yet developed volley-fire techniques, in which soldiers formed banks of rows in order to provide continuous fire, although there were seldom enough firearms in a Conquest company to have made good use of such a technique. Those Spaniards who did have firearms were lucky to get a single shot off before reversing the weapon to use as a club or dropping it to concentrate on sword wielding.
      - steel sword
        
        The one weapon, then, whose efficacy is indubitable was the steel sword. It alone was worth more than a horse, a gun, and a mastiff put together. Because a steel sword was longer and less brittle than the obsidian weapons of Mesoamerican warriors, and longer and sharper than Andean clubbing weap ons or copper-tipped axes, a Spaniard could fight for hours and receive light flesh wounds and bruises while killing many natives. Spanish swords were just the right length for reaching an enemy who lacked a similar weapon. Pizarro preferred to fight on foot so he could better manipulate his sword. Descrip tions of battles in which Spanish swordplay caused terrible slaughter among native forces pepper the Conquest accounts of Cieza de León, Cortés, Díaz, Gómara, Jerez, Oviedo y Baños, Zárate, and others. Military historian John Guilmartin deftly summarizes the point: “While Spanish success in combat cannot be attributed to a single factor, it is clear that the other elements of Spanish superiority took effect within a tactical matrix established by the ef ” 42 fectiveness of Spanish hand-held slashing and piercing weapons.
    - - This trilogy of factors—disease, native disunity, and Spanish steel—goes most of the way toward explaining the Conquest’s outcome. Remove just one and the likelihood of the failure of expeditions under Cortés, Pizarro, and others would have been very high. As Clendinnen has observed of the Spanish-Mexica war, both Spaniards and natives were aware that the Con quest was “a close-run thing,” a point that applies broadly across the Con- quest. 43 The failed expeditions outnumbered successful ones, and cautionarytales can be found by looking at the fate of Spanish expeditions such as Montejo’s early attempts to conquer Yucatan, the early campaigns into Oaxaca’s northern sierra, or the Pizarro-Orellana journey into Amazonia. 44 Spaniards would have suffered steady mortality from fatal wounds, starva tion, disease, and so on, with survivors limping back to Spain or to colonial enclaves scattered along the coasts and islands. Time and again, this out come was averted because Spanish steel weapons permitted them to hold out long enough for native allies to save them, while the next wave of epi demic disease disrupted native defenses.
    - - A fourth factor also played an important role—the culture of war. For example, the Mexica were hampered by certain battle conventions that the Spaniards ignored. Mexica methods of war emphasized the observation of prebattle ceremonies that eliminated the possibility of surprise attacks and the capture of Spaniards for ritual execution rather than killing them on the spot. 45 The conquistadors were outraged by the apparent native disdain for human life, as manifested in elaborate rituals of human “sacrifice.” But from the Mexica perspective, it was the Spaniards who disrespected human life by slaughtering natives en masse, killing noncombatants, and killing from a distance. 46 Indeed, the pomp and ritual with which the Mexica—and to some extent all Mesoamericans—preferred to take a human life suggests profound respect, in contrast to Spanish practices, which seem indiscriminate and in sufficiently ritualized.
      - further explanation
        
        But the culture of war must be considered along with other explanatory factors for several reasons. First, it is only one aspect of the combat that took place during the Spanish invasions of Mesoamerica. Both Spaniards and natives engaged at times in the killing of noncombatants, in mass slaughter, in killing from a distance (natives used arrows most effectively), and in ritual displays of public violence and ritualized executions—such as the Spanish burning alive of native lords in town plazas. Second, the point applies most to the Mexica, less to other Mesoamericans such as the Mixtecs and Mayas, and very little to Andeans and other Native Americans. 47 Third, the larger context of the point about different methods of war is not that of general cultural differences between Spaniards and natives, as it is usually presented, but that of the circumstances of war. Natives were fighting on their home ground; Spaniards were not. Spaniards had nothing more to lose than their lives. This may seem like everything—Cortés told the king that the conquis tadors prevailed in part because “we had to protect our lives.” 48 But Native Americans stood to lose their families and their homes and were thus quicker to compromise, to accommodate the invaders, to seek ways to avoid full- scale or protracted wars. While Dibble describes the “seasonal” Mexica view of war—”there was a time to plant, a time to harvest, and a time to fight”— as distinct to Mexica culture, this was a practical consideration that would have been made by all Native Americans - and by Spaniards, had they been fighting on their home ground
- - - - The circumstances of Cuauhtémoc’s death have survived in sources that tell the story from four different perspectives. There are similar Spanish accounts written by Cortés and Gómara, and the somewhat different version by Díaz. There is an account by a Nahua nobleman, don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a descendent of Coanacoch, the ruler of Texcoco who had been brought along on the expedition and was one of the lords hanged in Itzamkanac.
      - supply
        
        Cortés and Gómara both report the ruse of Paxbolonacha’s alleged death, and b oth claim that Cortés saw through it, persuading the king’s son to bring his father to the small town where the expedition members had been spend ing the week. Paxbolonacha arrives, apologizes “shamefacedly” (Gómara’s term), and brings Cortés and his vast company back to Itzamkanac. There the Maya ruler provides abundant supplies, and even “some gold and a few women, although I had not asked him for anything” (claims Cortés). Gómara numbers the women at 20 , and adds that the Spaniards “were fed bounti fully the whole time they were there.”
        
        Diaz perspective is completely different
        
        None of this is mentioned by Díaz, who offers a different episode alto gether , one whose slaving and plundering nature he seems to find embar rassing for the Spaniards (as opposed to the lie that supposedly embarrassed the Maya king). In return for Mactun Maya assistance during the next stage of the expedition’s journey into the Itzá Maya kingdom of the Petén, in north ern Guatemala, Cortés agrees to send a raiding party of 80 Spaniards (Díaz included) to a border region that had recently rebelled against Mactun au thority. The raid benefits the Maya lords in Itzamkanac and helps provide Cortés’s company with supplies.
        
        The starting point for the Spanish accounts is the onset of the journey from Tenochtitlán. Cortés’s narrative is part of the missive known to us as his fifth letter to the king, which begins with his departure from the new colonial capi tal in October 1524 . The sojourn in Itzamkanac is thus merely an episode in the long, difficult journey from Mexico to Honduras, and it comes on gradu ally as the expedition moves slowly into Mactun territory. The Spaniards and their allies help themselves to local resources, despite which, according to Cortés, the people were “unafraid” and “very friendly.” Gómara likewise portrays the natives as most accommodating and very impressed by the Spanish construc tion of a bridge across the San Pedro Martír river gorge. In Díaz’s version, native hospitality is begrudging, several Spaniards are killed, and the expedi tion arrives in Itzamkanac in dire need of provisions.
    - - Spanish versions
        
        According Diaz there was merely some talk between Cuautemoc and some of the natives but nothing of a plot . Diaz also reports that there was a last speech and that cortes fell down the stairs
        
        Gomoras and Cortes stories are nearly identical. It just says that there was a plan to kill the Spaniards and then regain control of the empire. They take three lords and the the m that the other has already confessed. Two of them were consequently hanged, according to Cortes , gomoras version is slightly different it was three there.
      - native versions
        
        Ixtlilxóchitl’s version is simi lar to Díaz’s, only more sympathetic to the alleged plotters and centered on a unique defense of the condemned lords.
        
        In Ixtlilxóchitl’s version, the discovery of the plot is initiated by Cortés, w ho has his Mexica spy find out what the Nahua lords are talking about. The spy tells the truth, but that is not enough for Cortés, who sees an opportu nity to manufacture a native plot and execute the royal conspirators, “so there would be no natural lord in the land.” At dawn, Cortés hangs the lords, one at a time—not just the three kings, but also eight alleged plotters. The last to be strung up is Coanacoch. When the Texcocan ruler’s brother begins to rally his warriors in response, Cortés cuts Coanacoch down. But, writes Ixtlilxóchitl, his royal ancestor died anyway, a few days later.
        
        Maa version: staying for twenty days