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New Perspectives on the conquest of Mexico (When did the myth come?…

- - - - the answer lies in the protein of the plants: part time makes sense for bananas or squash but it makes great sense for the wheat and peas
      - corn was part-time cultivated for a very long time and it took ages to turn the wild teosinte with its tiny bunches of seeds into approaching something of todays corn. By then they had lost valuable time -> therefore the natives had not been sedentary for as long as the europeans had and this resulted in technical disparities.
- - - - We in fact have only one set of documents that were undoubtedly
        written at the time of conquest by someone who was certainly there-the letters of Cortes. The Cartas are masterful constructions, loaded with political agendas, but we are at least certain of their origin, and Cortes never wrote that he was taken for a god.
    - - Andres de Tapia, a Spanish noble who was a captain under Cortes, wrote an account predating L6pez de G6mara's, and, in the 1560s, two aging conquistadors wrote their memoirs: Francisco de Aguilar, who by then had renounced worldly
        wealth and was living in a Dominican monastery, dictated a short narration, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, then a landholder in Guatemala, wrote a long and spicy manuscript that has come to be beloved by many
    - - Besides the testimony of these few conquistadors, we have the writings of priests who were on the scene early, and who were bent on making a careful study of indigenous beliefs, the better to convert the natives. In 1524, twelve Franciscan "Apostles" arrived in Mexico City and were warmly greeted by Cortes. One of them,
        Fray Toribio de Benavente (known to posterity by his Nahuatl name, "Motolinia" or "Poor One"), wrote extensively.
      - Bernardo de Sahagún
        
        the efforts led to the founding in 1536 of a formal school for Indian noblemen in Tlatelolco in Mexico City and culminated during the 1550s in the work of Bernardo de Sahagun, who spent years orchestrating a grand project in which students did extensive interviews with surviving notables of the ancien regime. The most complete extant version is the Florentine Codex.
      - Diego Durán
        
        The Dominican Fray Diego Duran, though not born until
        the 1530s, is also particularly valuable to us because he moved with his family from Seville to Mexico "before he lost his 'milk teeth,'" was raised by Nahuatl-speaking servants, and became fluent in the languag
    - - The last group of sources were produced by the indigenous themselves, but here is the heart of the problem: we have none that date from the years of conquest or even from the 1520s or 1530s. There are sixteen surviving pre-conquest codices
        (none from Mexico City itself, where the conquerors' book burning was most intense), and then, dating from the 1540s, statements written in Nahuatl using the Roman alphabet, which was then rapidly becoming accessible to educated indigenous
        through the school of Tlatelolco.18 The most famous such document about the conquest is the lengthy Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex. Although it was organized by Sahagun, and the Spanish glosses were written by him, the Nahuatl is the work of his Indian aides.19 At the end of the century, a few indigenous men wrote histories.
      - Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl
  - - - the first part of the book reads very differently than the second part. The first part s covering the violent attack on prior dancers participating in a religious festival and the second part the pursing of the warriors against the Spanish and their ultimate defeat later reads like a militaristic record of events. They were not part of Moctezumas inner circle because those people were killed. It makes sense that the first part is filed with omens while the second is a militaristic record of events.
      - Therefore, it is unlikely that they have the first part of the story straight. However, as they do not appear in other Nahuatl sources, it seems unlikely that they were commonly accepted.
      - why would they then come up with such omens?
        
        we must bear in mind that they were the sons and grandsons of the most elite e tenochtitlan citizens - descendants of priests and nobles.
        
        the fact that cortes was understood as the returning god of Quetzalcoatl is also presented as fact in Book Twelve. Moctezuma send different gifts to different gods to see how they respond and then decide that it is Quetzalcoatl
        
        the problem in the story
        
        First, Quetzalcoatl was not a particularly prominent god in the pantheon worshiped in Mexico's great city. The one city in the empire where Quetzalcoatl was prominent, Cholula, was the only one to mount a concerted attack against Cortes as he made his way to the Aztec capital. Many aspects of the usual post-conquest description of Quetzalcoatl-that he was a peace-loving god who abhorred human sacrifice, for example-are obviously European mythological constructs, thus rendering the whole story somewhat suspect. Furthermore, in the Codex itself,
        when the earlier explorer Juan de Grijalva lands on the coast in 1518, he is taken to be Quetzalcoatl. So much for the explanation that Cortes happened to land in the right year, causing all the pieces to fall into place in the indigenous imagination
      - Susan Gillespie
        
        Susan Gillespie has made a careful study of every sixteenth-century text (preand post-conquest) where Quetzalcoatl appears, and has proven that the story as we know it did not exist until Sahagun edited the Florentine Codex in the 1560s.
        
        some information about the Quetzalcoatl
        
        Quetzalcoatl was, as his name indicates, a feathered
        serpent, a flying reptile (much like a dragon), who was a boundary maker (and transgressor) between earth and sky. Like most gods, he could take various forms and was envisioned differently in various villages and epochs: he could be the wind,
        for example. His name became a priestly title, an honorific for those liminal humans whose role it was to connect those on earth to those beyond. In myth, he was associated with the city of the Toltecs, an ancient state-building people who had preceded the Aztecs in the Central Valley of Mexico. As the invading Mexica often claimed legitimacy by insisting that they were the heirs of the Toltecs, the symbol of Quetzalcoatl often appeared as an iconographic legitimator of a kingly line. In the Aztec ritual calendar, different deities were associated with each cyclically
        repeating date: Quetzalcoatl was tied to the year Ce Acatl (One Reed), which is correlated to the year 1519 (among others) in the Western calendar.
        
        There is no evidence of any ancient myths recounting the departure or return of such a god, but, in the early years after conquest, discrete elements of the story that has become so familiar to us do appear separately in various documents, with the
        main character being mortal rather than divine. The wandering hero is called Huemac or Topiltzin ("Our Lord" as in "Our Nobleman"); he is not given the name "Quetzalcoatl" until the 1540s, and then not in Nahuatl language texts
  - - - Sixteenth-century dictionaries say that teotl meant simply dios, but they, we must remember, were written years later, after semantic shifts had occurred in the process of Indians and priests working together.38 Bernal Diaz first says that teotl meant "god" (dios) or "demon" (demonio). We might assume he meant "demon" only in the sense that the Christians called the entire Nahua pantheon "devils," but an anecdote that he relates indicates otherwise. The Spaniards seem to have been
        given to understand-quite accurately-that the word could mean "devil" in the sense of a capricious immortal over whom mortals had no control, or a ceremonial human impersonator of such a character. After the Spanish had gleaned the word's
        meaning, they thought to reinforce the notion as follows
    - - That the word had some ambiguity embedded within it is made clear in several texts. Duran's history-written in Spanish by a Spaniard who spoke Nahuatl and had Nahuatl sources-provides revealing examples. While the Spaniards are wending their way toward the city of Mexico, Moctezuma decides to send out
        medicine men to combat them. If the newcomers were really understood to be "gods" according to the term's definition in Spanish, then such an action makes no sense-since sorcerers fought human enemies, not gods.
    - - Motolinia was the only Spaniard present in the early 1520s who explicitly addressed this issue. He asserted that, in the first villages the Spaniards entered, the locals thought that the horse-and-man figures were single beings, like classical
        centaurs, one imagines. Within days, they learned of their error, saw that "the man was a man and the horse a beast," and so had to seek new words. They used mazatl (deer) to refer to the horses, and they used the Spanish corruption of their own
        initial label (teotl), or teul, to refer to the people, as the Spanish were now introducing themselves as such. They knew no other word for the newcomers until after the victory, when they were instructed to call them cristianos. Some Spaniards complained about that shift, Motolinia says scornfully, preferring to be called
        Teules.
- - - - He did this partly because he was a traitor in a legal sense, having launched his expedition from Cuba without the governor's permission, and so needed to make a case in his own defense. Equally important, he knew he would need reinforcements and
        supplies. In order not to lose contact with the wider world, he left a number of men in the newly founded town of Vera Cruz who would be there to meet reinforcements (or enemies) when they arrived. That the Veracruzanos not starve or be killed, Cortes took several coastal Indian chiefs hostage
  - - - Even though posterity has tended to accept it, the story is in fact more than a little difficult to believe. The idea that the Aztecs peacefully surrendered their kingdom fits well with the notion that the Mexica responded to the Europeans as gods. If we do not proceed on that assumption, however, the story flies in the face of common sense. The Spanish numbered only about five hundred, the city folk a quarter of a million. The Spanish had only one translator to tell them what was occurring; Moctezuma's people could watch every move that every Spaniard made. Simply to eat every day, the Spaniards were desperately dependent on those they dreamed of ruling. How vulnerable they were in this regard becomes painfully clear in the Codex Aubin, in which a resident of Tenochtitlan recalled that, when the people later stopped feeding the invaders, the horses began to eat the straw mats
        that lined the floors. Although it is certainly true that the Spanish maintained a "seize the king" policy both before and after Tenochtitlan, early in their dealings with the impressive Aztecs, the newly arrived Spanish were unlikely to have been arrogantly sure of their course. They certainly did not have the power to arrest the emperor without bringing on a state of chaos, as events proved
      - Carl V problem
        
        John Elliott and others have explained the content of Cortes's letter to the king, which subsequently formed the basis for the story as we have come to know it.45 Besides justifying the actions he had taken without receiving royal permission,
        Cortes was using language to leap another legalistic hurdle: Carlos V could only annex territories that came to him voluntarily or through a just war. It was thus very important that Moctezuma swear fealty to the Spanish monarch early in the letter, before his people rebelled, when they technically became traitors. Placing Moctezuma under arrest without his protesting the Spaniards' right to do so was a crucial symbolic step.
    - - Francis Brooks has argued that there is strong evidence against Cortes having immediately arrested Moctezuma. First, although he was supposedly in full control of the kingdom from November to May, Cortes made no effort to inform anyone else in the world of his successes, even though he had men perfectly capable of
        building ships, as they later proved. Second, Cortes's own story contradicts itself often, describing Moctezuma as a prisoner one moment and in control the next Cortes himself describes what he was doing during those months-continuing to become acquainted with Moctezuma and the city, consulting the mapmakers, sending representatives to visit surrounding towns, collecting gifts of gold, and waiting for his ship to return with an answer from Spain.47 It is perfectly possible to believe that he was doing all these things as an honored visitor but not as the leader of a handful of coup-staging interlopers.
    - - It is, however, equally certain that Moctezuma was put in irons before the end of the drama. There is real evidence that it occurred in April of 1520, coinciding with the sudden appearance of his rival Captain Narvaez. At that point, Cortes had nothing left to lose. On the one hand, a Spanish army larger than his own had
        arrived on the coast with the intention of arresting him; on the other hand, the Aztecs were aware of this turn of events and planned to use it to their advantage. Only with a gun to Moctezuma's head could Cortes assure the newly arrived
        Spaniards that he was in control of the kingdom and gain their allegiance, as well as stave off an indigenous uprising. Numerous sworn witnesses in later court cases claimed that Spanish soldiers guarded Moctezuma around the clock in this period.
        Duran mentions eighty days of confinement, which would indeed place the arrest in April. 48 Cortes claimed that Moctezuma begged to be of service to the Spanish king in defending the land against these evil new arrivals, but that scenario is so preposterous as to be laughable, except when considered in the legalistic light discussed above. Indeed, no other Spaniard writing about these events described them thus: the others universally described Moctezuma's obvious hostility (or duplicity). 49 One is left thinking that Cortes did protest too much; it is quite likely
        that, rather than swearing eternal friendship, he chose this moment to have Moctezuma clapped in irons. Yet precisely because his situation was so precarious, it was particularly important that he portray his control of the region as long-term.
      - Aguilars version
        
        Aguilar went on to say (as per Cortes) that the arrest had taken place because the Spanish had learned that Moctezuma had plotted against them and had ordered one of the men left in Vera Cruz to be killed
      - the friars undermine the story of an immediate arrest
        
        The friars who wrote about the events also undermined the notion of an immediate arrest,55 and, although later indigenous sources accept it, the earliest known indigenous record does not. The Annals of Tlatelolco was probably written in the mid-1540s, possibly based on a story that had been memorized in the late
        1520s. Here, Moctezuma is detained sometime after Cortes finds he must leave for the seashore and before the Spanish initiate a massacre at a religious festival, leading directly to their own expulsion. Until that point, the city's only relationship with the newcomers had been to provide them with food, water, and firewood, as they would have done for any honored guests
      - we must abandon the assumption that a few were enough to defeat the aztecs
        
        Just-as we must refrain from imagining that the Spanish arrived with the power to arrest Moctezuma immediately, we must also avoid the equally wrong-headed assumption that they were able to defeat the Aztecs militarily with a few well-aimed
        shots. When Cortes struck inland from Vera Cruz, he had only fifteen horses with him. Later, when the Aztecs rebelled and ejected the Spanish from the city, between four and six hundred men were killed as they fled along the causeways leading out of the city, along with at least a thousand Tlaxcalan allies. Narrow passages rendered the Europeans vulnerable to attack: on at least two different occasions, over forty Spaniards were ambushed and killed while traveling through gorges.
      - However the Spaniards were much more powerful
        
        Yet, in the end, it was no accident that the Europeans won
        
        Outside the city, on open ground, the Spanish were nearly invincible.
        
        Both their harquebus and crossbow firings were able
        to slice through the Indians' cotton armor, and, because of their weapons' range, they could attack lethally when the Indians were still distant; furthermore, mounted Europeans carrying long metal lances could forge a path through the throngs. The Indians could fire their arrows at six times the rate of a Spanish blunderbuss, but to no avail, because metal armor rendered the Europeans nearly impervious
- - - - As the Spanish began their ascent toward Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma organized a veritable war room. "A report of everything that was happening was given and relayed to Moctezuma. Some of the messengers would be arriving as others were leaving . . . There was no time when they weren't listening, when reports weren't being given