The Conquistadors (25 page)

However, by Indian standards it was a small enough force, and when he reached Tepeaca the inhabitants decided to defy him. Cortés seized on this opportunity to draw up a decree before the Notary Royal condemning them to slavery as renegade Spanish vassals. This decree embraced all allies of Mexico who had revolted after swearing allegiance to the Spanish crown; it should be borne in mind that this was perfectly in accordance with contemporary thought and practice. Cortés probably did it because his war chest was almost empty. He needed funds to
support the campaign he was already planning, and slaves were the equivalent of gold. However, in his second dispatch to the Emperor he finds it necessary to produce reasons to justify his action – ‘For in addition to having murdered the Spaniards and rebelled against your Majesty's service they eat human flesh …' His third reason is perhaps the most convincing – that he had done it as an example to all the other Mexican tribes. An attempt, in fact, to terrorize them into obedience.

The defenders of Tepeaca now repeated the mistake the Mexicans had made at Otumba; they came out and fought the Spaniards on the level ground of the maize-fields, where the cavalry cut them to pieces. Most of the wretched inhabitants of the town were branded with a special brand and sold into slavery.

This ruthlessness was almost certainly inspired by the campaigns of Philip against the Moors, and its effect was similar. Towns hastened to renew their allegiance, whilst his captains and his Tlaxcalan allies ranged far and wide, destroying Mexican garrisons and bringing in slaves and loot. His luck, too, had turned, favouring, as luck always does, the man of single purpose and determination. Two ships from Cuba put into Vera Cruz, loaded with arms, powder and stores for Narváez' ill-fated expedition, and Garay sent a force from Jamaica to settle the Pánuco river, backed by a further shipload of reinforcements, all of which fell into Cortés' hands. Thus, his hostile rivals for conquest, the governors of Cuba and Jamaica, unwittingly contributed a hundred and fifty men, twenty horses, cannon, arms and powder, all of which he desperately needed.

In addition, he had an unseen ally – smallpox. This deadly disease had been brought into the country by a negro, who was a slave in the Narváez expedition: a fair return, Bernal Díaz comments, for the buboes, or syphilis, which the Spaniards had got from the Indians. Starting from Zempoala, where the negro had died, smallpox had now spread through the country, and Cortés was much in demand as the arbitrator of land disputes and the appointer of caciques to replace those who had died. The disease had penetrated to Mexico itself. Cuitlahuac had died of it and had been succeeded by Cuauhtemoc, who was the husband of one of Moctezuma's daughters.

Another ship arrived, this time from Spain, and the arms and powder and stores on board were purchased with gold. Cortés was now able to send a vessel to
Jamaica to buy horses secretly from the settlers there, and another to Spain, via Santo Domingo, with Ordaz and Ávila, to put his case against the representations of Diego Velázquez. At the same time, he began the construction of thirteen sloops to operate on Texcoco lake.

All this took time, and it was not until Christmas 1520 that he was ready to march. The first objective was Texcoco, which he found as deserted as it had been when he had marched to the relief of Alvarado. By April 1521 his forces were moving round the lake, subduing town after town in spite of the Mexicans, who constantly harried them and operated from the lake in great numbers of canoes. Battle followed battle. At Xochimilco, now the only place where you can see the beauty of the lake as it once was, Cortés nearly lost his life. He was riding a fat, pampered chestnut called El Romo, which means Mule – throughout all the campaigns horses were so important that their names are recorded as punctiliously as those of the captains who rode them. The animal faltered in the midst of the fray and Cortés was dragged from its back. Immediately the Mexicans closed in, hoping to achieve fame by capturing him alive for sacrifice. A group of his old guard fought their way through to him and, though he was wounded in the head, he was able to remount in the brief space they cleared for him.

The battle for Xochimilco was the toughest of this particular campaign. After its capture, they climbed to the temple tower and from there they could see all the cities of the lake, and Mexico itself shining white in the sunlight. They also saw some two thousand canoes heading towards them and more warriors advancing overland – ten thousand of them. It was time to retire, and they marched north in good order, though many were wounded. Coyoacán was deserted. They pushed on to Tacuba. It was raining heavily now. They looked at the causeway, where they had lost so much gold and so many comrades in the retreat of the Noche Triste, but decided against any attempt to force it. North again, marching in deep mud to Azcapotzalco, which was also deserted. Continuing north, they completed the circumnavigation of the lake, returning to Texcoco.

Here a mutinous element, composed mainly of Narváez' men and led by Antonio Villafaña, hatched a plot to murder Cortés. Villafaña was one of the Velázquez faction, which had caused so much trouble at the start of the expedition more than eighteen months before. A ship had just arrived from Spain and the plan was for several of the conspirators to bring a sealed letter to Cortés whilst he was dining with his captains. They were to say the letter was from his father, Martín Cortés, and stab him and his captains as he sat reading it. Like all conspirators, however, they could not keep it to themselves. They even sounded out and elected a new captain-general and all the various officials to replace those already appointed. Inevitably a soldier blabbed. The plotters were surprised in Villafaña's quarters, and after a brief trial, in which Villafaña confessed, he was hanged from his own window. The others, who had been arrested with him, were released. Cortés needed all the men he had, and the hanging of their leader seems to have
acted as a sufficient warning, since he had no more trouble with them after that.

The ship from Spain had brought more arms, and also some hidalgos with their own horses, young soldiers of fortune who had come out to join the expedition for what they could get out of it. Even better, it brought the news that Fonseca was out of favour at court and the Emperor was now shifting his support from Diego Velázquez to Cortés. The fame of Cortés was spreading, his star in the ascendant. The Church itself was lending him support, sending a Franciscan with bulls from a new Pope offering, doubtless at a price in gold, absolution from any and every type of sin that the soldiers might have committed during the struggle. With the new arrivals, Cortés now had a cavalry force of 86 horsemen, 118 cross-bowmen and musketeers, and more than 700 foot soldiers, as well as three heavy iron guns, fifteen small bronze field pieces and half a ton of powder. Moreover, the thirteen sloops, or brigantines, were finished.

After mass on Sunday, April 28, 1521, the boats were launched, with their flags flying. Then Cortés reviewed his army and gave them his customary pep-talk. He was ready to march, and the following day he sent messengers throughout the provinces of Tlaxcala, Cholula and Huejotzingo summoning their warriors to gather for the attack on Mexico within ten days. In less than a week the ever-loyal and fiercely eager Tlaxcalans arrived, marching into Texcoco in a well-disciplined column fifty thousand strong, all well armed and in closed ranks, their feathered head-dresses nodding to shouts of ‘Castile, Castile', and ‘Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala'. They took three hours to enter the city, their banners flying and the white crane standard, with its wings outstretched, carried high.

By the feast day of the Holy Ghost Cortés had more than seventy-five thousand Indian warriors assembled in Texcoco. Two days later he paraded his army and issued his battle orders. His force would advance in three divisions. Alvarado, with 30 horse, 18 crossbowmen, 150 foot and 25,000 Tlaxcalans, and Olid, with 33 horse, a further 18 crossbowmen and 160 foot, together with 20,000 Indian warriors, were to march north round the lake: Alvarado to occupy Tacuba, Olid to take up his station at Coyoacán. Sandoval, with 24 horse, 4 musketeers, 13 crossbowmen, 150 foot and another 30,000 Indians, was to strike south at Iztapalapa, destroy the city and advance along the causeway by which they had first entered Mexico. Cortés himself would command the brigantines, to each of which were allocated nineteen Spaniards – a captain, six archers or musketeers, and the rest at the oars.

The Indians moved out ahead of the Spaniards, probably because their numbers were so great that they had consumed all the food they had brought with them. The whole plan of campaign was nearly wrecked at the outset by the defection of the Tlaxcalan war chief, Xicotencatl the Younger. Cortés, who was utterly dependent on the Tlaxcalans to fight his way through the Mexican hordes, acted swiftly. He notified the Tlaxcalan war chiefs, including Xicotencatl's father, that in the Spanish army desertion in the face of the enemy was punishable by death. Xicotencatl was executed, and since the Tlaxcalan code also punished desertion with death, even his father accepted it. All this took time.

The volatility of his own men now proved almost as dangerous as Indian politics. On arriving at Acolman, Alvarado and Olid nearly came to blows in a stupid dispute over quarters. Again Cortés had to intervene, but thereafter the two captains were barely on speaking terms, so that when they reached Tacuba and Alvarado wanted to keep the two forces together, Olid insisted on sticking to the letter of his instructions and moved his men on to Coyoacán. This was after Alvarado's men had fought most of the day to carry out their orders and destroy the wooden pipes of the main aqueduct supplying water to Mexico.

Sandoval, meanwhile, was having great difficulty in taking Iztapalapa. In the midst of the battle, smoke signals were seen rising from a nearby hill. This call for reinforcements was answered by smoke signals from the lake towns, and Cortés, who was then attacking a rocky island close to Mexico itself, found himself faced with more than a thousand canoes. There was no wind at the time, but by rowing hard his men managed to keep clear until the breeze came in with the sun and filled their sails. Immediately, Cortés turned his brigantines about and headed into the Mexican fleet. ‘We destroyed an infinite number of canoes and killed and drowned many of the enemy – the greatest sight to see in the world'. Thus, gloating at his success, which gave him virtual command of the lake, Cortés went on to capture the little causeway fortress of Xoloc. Then began the campaign against Mexico. It was to last two months and involve the Spaniards in the most bitter fighting.

The defence of Mexico by the Aztecs, though little known, must rank as one of the epics of military history. Under their young commander, Cuauhtemoc, they fought with an utter disregard of death, with the bravery of men whose business was war – first on the causeways, and then, when the bridge-gaps were all filled in and the watchtowers taken, in the streets of the city itself, defending it house by house, canal by canal, rebuilding during the night the barricades that the Spaniards had torn down during the day, re-opening the canal gaps that had been filled. It was an incredible display of energy and determination by men who, in the later stages of the siege, were suffering from hunger, thirst and the stinking accumulation of unburned corpses. They were ingenious, too, driving in stakes to keep the brigantines from giving close support to the Spaniards fighting their way up the causeways, digging underwater pits to trap soldiers and horsemen attempting to wade the gaps, using captured swords tied to long poles to halt the charges of the Spanish cavalry. At first, they were able to bring food and water in from the lake country at night by canoe; but as the blockade tightened the supplies dwindled, and with the defection of the lakeside towns, they ceased altogether. The Mexicans existed then on brackish water sieved from mudholes in the city, on roots and plants and the bodies of men killed, or those captured and sacrificed.

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.