When Cortés got back to Tacuba with Alvarado he found his men in a panic, he says. Some Mexican troops had come up and were attacking them, as were the soldiers stationed in the town. It seems that a Tlaxcalan told him of a pyramid temple about four miles away in a hill town called Totoltepec (The Hill of the Turkey Hen). We have seen how these pyramid temples made good fortresses. Cortés resolved to march there at once. His men and horses were very exhausted, but he managed the retreat so skilfully that in spite of a harassing pursuit there were no more losses. After dawn Mexican troops arrived and tried to take the temple-courtyard. They continued to attack all day. The Spaniards, bandaged and starving, were in a desperate state, yet succeeded in beating them off. Nevertheless, the situation seemed bound to get worse. The main body of the Mexicans had not appeared so far; when it did the end would come.
Cortés, however, had his plan. The Tlaxcalans had proved themselves faithful allies. If the Spaniards could reach Tlaxcala they might find sanctuary there. But it was about a hundred miles away. Could they fight a rearguard action all that distance? Moreover, he was not certain of their reception. He wrote: ‘We were not quite positive of finding the Tlaxcalans friendly. Seeing us so reduced, they might decide to kill us in order to recover the independence they had once enjoyed.’ It was indeed a question. So far the Tlaxcalans had helped the Spaniards against the Mexicans, even though a Spanish victory would mean Spanish domination over the whole country. Would they now think better of such an alliance? On the whole Cortés felt they would not desert him, such was their hatred of the Mexicans. To get to them, however, remained the problem. He resolved to set out that very night.
Leaving fires burning to deceive the enemy, the Spaniards left the Hill of the Turkey Hen at midnight. Soon after daylight their pursuers came up with them. But it was not the main army. For some reason the Mexicans were not following up their victory on the causeway with the full forces at their disposal. What could be the meaning of this?
The probable explanation is that they were busy sacrificing to the Humming Bird the Spaniards whom they had captured. The number captured is unknown. Bernal gives the total loss on the causeway and on the march to Tlaxcala at over eight hundred men. As the Mexican tactics were always to capture rather than to kill, some hundreds are likely to have been available for sacrifice. The ritual of so important a god-feast may well have required a temporary cessation of hostilities. The soldiers who had taken the captives would have had to be present and what with the dancing and the eating of the bodies the festival would have lasted some days. Bernal records the threats which the Mexicans shouted at them a day or so before the flight: ‘We will sacrifice your hearts and blood to our gods and there will be enough of you to glut their appetites. We will feast on your arms and legs, and throw your bodies to the serpents and carnivora, which are very hungry because we have not fed them for two days on purpose.’ War in Mexico, as explained earlier, was closely connected with religion. If in this case the correct procedure of sacrifice so required, the pursuit would have had to be postponed. The soldiers would not have thought religion was interfering with strategy. The religious reason for postponing the pursuit would have seemed also a military one. If the magical liturgy was carried through correctly, the Humming Bird, revived and indulgent, would give them victory. If it was neglected, no strategy, however apparently sound, would be effectual.
But if this was the reason why the Commander-in-Chief, whose title it will be recalled was the Serpent Woman, did not order an immediate pursuit by the whole of his command and left it for the time being to local forces to harry the Spaniards as they fled, he was mistaken in thinking that he had the magical texts on his side, for his original misreading of them was fatal and he had already signed his own death warrant, as the sequel was to show. Montezuma had given the correct reading: any attack on Cortés-Quetzalcoatl would result in the destruction of the country. The Commander-in-Chief as a member of the council who had elected Cuitlahuac had been partly responsible for amending Montezuma’s reading. That vitiated all the rest. No amount of captives, no matter how correctly they were sacrificed, could abate the fatal consequences of such a fundamental error.
The route taken in their flight by the Spaniards was round the north shore of the lake, the same road that they had recently traversed when marching in from Tetzcuco. They would be branching off it, however, fourteen miles north of that city and would make straight for Tlaxcala via Otumba. Though battered and famished, their valour was undiminished. Bernal gives the moving picture: ‘The Tlaxcalans went cautiously in front as guides. We marched with the wounded in the middle, the lame walking with sticks, the badly wounded on the croups of horses too lame to fight. The horsemen who were unwounded covered the flanks. The less wounded of us kept our faces to the enemy who harassed us with loud cries and whistles.’ In this way, warding off stones, arrows and javelins with their shields, and sometimes having to repulse charges, they marched for six days, and on July 7th reached the plain before Otumba, distant forty miles from Tlaxcala.
The Commander-in-Chief had taken his army across the lake to Tetzcuco and marched it the fifteen miles to Otumba. There he was awaiting the arrival of the Spaniards with ‘the flower of Mexico and Tetzcuco and the towns around the lake, who all came in the belief that not a trace of us would be left. There had never been seen throughout the Indies such a great number of fighting men in any battle,’ says Bernal.
The Spaniards suddenly came upon this host. Turning a comer of a hill their scouts descried it covering the plain a few miles away. Cortés, who had been wounded in the head and in his left hand, but had not given in to pain and weariness, halted his men, who were straggling along, and told them the news. ‘When we heard this, we were indeed alarmed, but did not lose our nerve. We were ready to meet them and fight to the death,’ says Bernal. Cortés drew them up in battle formation and reminded them of the tactics used in the battles when, in numbers approximately the same, they had successfully resisted the big Tlaxcalan army. He said that the horsemen should charge in squads of five, aim at the face, and return at a hand gallop; the soldiers should then attack the enemy disordered by the charge and were to thrust rather than cut. They should make a point of seeking out and killing the leading Mexicans, easily distinguished by their gorgeous accoutrements, plumes, banners which were attached to their backs, mantles with devices, face jewels and headdresses in the form of serpents and ocelots. He called on his men for a supreme effort, though, as he afterwards reported to Charles, ‘we were already exhausted, and almost all of us were wounded and fainting from hunger’.
In this mood of desperate valour they advanced into the plain. The Codex Mendoza, one of the few Mexican manuscripts which have survived, has drawings of many varieties of the uniforms in use at this time. As a sartorial display the Mexican army must have been a spectacle of colour and fantasy surpassing the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But what followed was far from a pageant. ‘They attacked us on all sides so violently,’ wrote Cortés, ‘that we could not distinguish each other, for being so pressed and entangled with them. We spent a great part of the day in this struggle, until it pleased God that one of those persons, who must have been an important leader, fell, and with his death all the battle ceased,’ This personage was no less than the Serpent Woman himself. Bernal is more explicit on this matter. After writing: ‘Oh, what a sight it was this fearful and destructive battle! We moved all mixed up with them, foot to foot. The thrusts we gave them! With what fury the dogs fought! What wounds and death they inflicted on us with their lances and their two-handed swords!’ he goes on to describe a charge led by Cortés. With him, it seems, were all his captains, as formidable in their mail and on their mailed horses as is a tank among infantry to-day. ‘They reached the place where the Captain General of the Mexicans was marching with his banner displayed, wearing rich golden armour and great gold and silver plumes. Cortés struck his horse against him. However, it was Juan de Salamanca, riding with Cortés on a good piebald mare, who gave him a lance thrust and took from him the rich plumes that he wore. On the death of that captain all their attack slackened.’
In old battles the death of the leader was often such a moral shock to his troops that they lost the heart to go on fighting. In this battle the fall of the Serpent Woman was far more than a moral shock. It was a sign that there had been a mistake in the magico-religious calculations on whose correctness the issue depended. The Mexicans could not tell where the mistake lay. It was more difficult to find than would be an error in a page of modern equations, because there was an unknown element, the magical counter measures which Cortés-Quetzalcoatl must have used. Cortés himself attributed his victory to Christ: ‘Our Lord was pleased to show His great power and mercy to us, for despite our weakness we broke their great pride.’ Bernal is as emphatic and fuller: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ and our Lady the Virgin Mary gave us courage and St. James certainly aided us.’ The Mexicans, whose system was more elaborate and mechanical, did not think that Cortés had been saved by the intervention of divinities, but because, as a divine apparition himself, he had a reserve of magical secrets and had been able to manipulate them in the confusing cosmic play of forces which was the universe, in such a way as to checkmate the magical measures they had taken. If Montezuma had been alive he would not have been surprised at their discomfiture. They had gone against his opinion that, from the magical point of view, it was a mistake to try to overcome Cortés by force. That being a fundamental governing factor, all their subsequent calculations were in the air. So, to the question—how did the Spaniards manage to be victorious at Otumba?—the answer is—because the Mexicans thought themselves beaten.
From Otumba the hills surrounding Tlaxcala were visible, a glad sight. The Spaniards marched on, satisfying their hunger on maize, cooked or roasted, on melons and on the flesh of a horse that was killed in battle. Some regiments of the enemy followed, but did not attack. The next day they crossed the Tlaxcalan frontier and rested in safety. Bernal gives their numbers at this time as 440 men, with 20 horses, 12 crossbows and 7 muskets. They had no powder left and were covered with wounds. It was still uncertain whether the Tlaxcalan federation would receive them, though its contingent had supported them so bravely throughout. The federal army, which as we know was the largest in the country after the Mexican, had not come to their assistance. If this meant that the Tlaxcalans were no no longer friendly and intended to attack them in their weakness, they had little chance of survival. But on the day following, July 9th, the leading men of the federation arrived and bade them an affectionate welcome. After embracing Cortés, they said, weeping: ‘Oh, Malintzin! Malintzin! how grieved we are at your misfortunes, and at the number of our people who have been killed with yours. But it cannot be helped and now we must feed you up and take care of you. We have quarters ready for you at Tlaxcala.’ And they told him that if they had admired him before, their admiration was now much greater, seeing that he had escaped from Mexico, that impregnable city, and been victorious at Otumba. As for their not having marched to his assistance, he must excuse them for that; they had not had time to mobilize.
Cortés, who knew the knack of responding gracefully to such advances, joined in their tears, embraced them again and distributed little trifles from what remains of Montezuma’s treasure he had managed to bring through. In a day or so they all left for Tlaxcala and in that comfortable city, where nothing was lacking but salt and cotton, their wounds were cared for and they were bountifully fed.