Four years after Ganda the rhinoceros took his first steps on the harbour side in Lisbon, a Spanish expedition landed on the beaches of the Yucatán peninsula in southern Mexico. The encounter that followed was one of the most cataclysmic events in history.
Spain’s defeat of the Mexica civilisation – known as the Aztecs – has traditionally been viewed through the self-serving, self-mythologising accounts of events written by the Conquistadores themselves in the 1520s.1 Now much criticised and the subject of considerable re-evaluation, the story of the conquest as described by Hernan Cortés and the Conquistadores is likely to have been much embellished, exaggerating the courage, dynamism and tenacity of the Spanish invaders, and is wilfully blind to the resourcefulness with which the Aztecs attempted to defend their world. The traditional account also overstates the degree to which the culture of the Aztec people was erased during the conquest itself and in the years that followed, when an army of Spanish colonists and friars of the monastic orders arrived in Mexico. While there is no question that few encounters in world history were as devastating as that which took place between Spain and the Aztec empire in the sixteenth century, even here there was some degree of cultural survival and synthesis. Reports of the deaths of great civilisations are always exaggerated.
A century earlier, in 1402, another conquest had taken place, with the Castilian invasion of the Canary Islands. That series of landings, battles and consolidations lasted for almost the entire fifteenth century. Thousands of the indigenous Guanche people were killed or enslaved. Others fought on in a long and ultimately futile war of resistance against Castilian arms, but many succumbed to European diseases. Comparable events took place in the 1490s and the first decade of the sixteenth century, when the Spanish conquered the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Again, the indigenous people were enslaved and subjected to extraordinary levels of violence and brutality. Spanish settlers of the conquered lands – the Canary Islands, Cuba and Hispaniola – were among the first colonial settlers in the modern sense: men who had learned that their fortunes could be made and their positions within their home society radically rewritten through the acquisition of land and forced labour in far-off colonies. In the Canary Islands, and on the island of Madeira, which was colonised by Portugal in the 1450s, sugar-cane was introduced. African slavery followed, and the system that was to shape the futures of huge swathes of the New World began to evolve. Spain’s Caribbean colonies were kept financially buoyant not just by cultivation of cash crops but also by the discovery of gold in Cuba. This stroke of fortune enabled the Spanish to use their Caribbean holdings as a bridgehead between the Old World and the New, the jumping-off point for a new wave of conquest on a continental scale.
10. A drawing by Aztec artists recounting the landing of the Conquistadores in 1519, produced decades after the event and taken from Book XII of the Florentine Codex.
The first step came in 1517, when Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the Spanish governor of Cuba, granted Francisco Hernández de Córdoba permission to embark on an expedition from the Spanish West Indies to the Yucatán peninsula. During their travels, a fleeting but violent encounter between the Spanish and the Mayan civilisation occurred. The Córdoba expedition was not intent on invasion or conquest; its aims had been to capture local people, who were then to be shipped to Cuba as slaves. In that sense, it was a continuation of Spanish policies in the Caribbean, and not a break with the past. But ominously, de Córdoba did take the opportunity to claim the Yucatán formally for Queen Juana of Castile and her son, King Carlos.2 Christopher Columbus had done the same on 12 October 1492, when he first made landfall on the island of Guanahani in the Bahamas, the royal flag fluttering over the heads of the small Spanish party.
In 1518 Velázquez de Cuéllar dispatched his nephew Juan de Grijala on a second, more heavily armed, expedition to Mexico, but again the mission was partly motivated by the demand for slaves to work the plantations of Spanish Cuba. De Grijala and his men landed at Cozumel and there saw evidence of the developed local civilisation – stone buildings and depictions of animals in stone and terracotta. The Spaniards were now convinced that the lands west of Cuba and Hispaniola were not islands but part of a great continent. Elsewhere de Grijala’s men made contact with the coastal Totonac people, who revealed themselves to be the subjects of an imperial power known as Mexico. Both de Córdoba and de Grijala returned to Cuba with small quantities of gold. The following year Hernan Cortés, the son of a minor Spanish noble and a professional soldier, set sail on what had become a private mission to see the Aztec empire. He had no official sanction, and his expedition was in direct defiance of governor de Cuéllar, who, just too late, had got the true measure of Cortés.
Although the legend of Cortés has to be treated with great caution – much of it having been carefully fabricated by Cortés himself – it is safe to regard him as one of the greatest gamblers to have ever lived: the man who invaded an empire of millions with 600 men, fourteen horses and fourteen cannon.3 Both Cortés and his mind-set were products of the successive waves of expansion and ceaseless warfare that stretched back through the brutal subjugation of Cuba and Hispaniola, the invasion and colonisation of the Canary Islands and back to the Reconquista of Spain itself. Cortés was shrewd, duplicitous and ruthless beyond measure. The culture that had spawned Cortés and many of his men had imbued them with a strong sense of their own superiority as Christians over pagan peoples, whether island tribes on tiny Caribbean islands or the populace of a vast continental empire. Cortés landed in the Yucatán not on a slave-raiding mission or to reconnoitre a little-explored shore but to invade.
The eleven ships that carried Cortés and his expedition arrived in February 1519, landing near the site of what became the city of Veracruz. The men spent three months encamped on the coast gathering information. They learned that inland lay a great city that was the centre of a great empire. They also heard about the emperor, Moctezuma (as they named him). Like Juan de Grijala before him, Cortés made contact with the Totonac people, from whom he learned more about the Aztec empire. Within weeks, representatives of Moctezuma arrived at the Spanish camp tasked with checking out the outsiders and their intentions. Painters from the imperial capital – known as tlacuilos in the Aztec language, Nahuatl – were dispatched with instructions to depict the incomers and their equipment, along with the animals they had brought with them. The Aztecs lacked an alphabetic form of writing, instead using images in the form of glyphs which were incorporated into folded scrolls and books known as codices. A key form of cultural expression, these documents in themselves could be an embodiment of the divine in the complicated belief system of the Aztecs. In 1519 this highly sophisticated artistic tradition became an interface between two civilisations on the verge of catastrophic conflict.4
In August the Spanish marched inland towards the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. As Cortés drew closer the Aztec people had no reason to suspect that their empire was under threat. Theirs was an intricate civilisation of rich artistic output and enormous architectural achievement. Society moved to the rhythms of a complex calendar and an intricate, if bloodthirsty, religion, through which they attempted to make sense of the universe and their place within it. Famously, the Aztec had never developed the wheel and had no beasts of burden, but what left them acutely vulnerable to Cortés was the structure of their empire.
11. The Taking of Tenochtitlán by Cortes, a rather exaggerated impression by an unknown seventeenth-century artist, depicting one of the most catastrophic conquests in history.
In the early sixteenth century the Aztec empire was still young – just a century old. But Moctezuma, the ninth emperor, ruled over a number of dissatisfied subject peoples, some incorporated into the empire relatively recently and still resentful of their overlords. The fragile conglomeration of disparate peoples was held together by a bi-annual tribute system that stoked further resentment. The lack of real bonds between these subject people and their emperor was a profound weakness that the Spanish exploited with merciless precision. The most resentful of these sullen tribes were the Tlaxclalans, not formally subjects of the Aztecs but traditional enemies, whose territory was surrounded by that of Moctezuma. After having at first fought the Spanish, the Tlaxclalans, to their eternal regret, entered into a alliance with them against the Aztecs. His ranks enormously swollen by the armies of his new allies, Cortés reached Tenochtitlán on 12 November 1519.
Built at the centre of Lake Texcoco, the districts of Tenochtitlán were linked to one another and to the mainland by a network of man-made causeways. Home to around 200,000 people, it was probably larger than any European city of the time. The only traces of it that remain are in the accounts of Conquistadores and a handful of Aztec voices that were later recorded by the friars of the Franciscan order. The ruins and relics of what had been the most wondrous pre-Colombian metropolis now lie flattened under the gargantuan concrete footprint of modern Mexico City.
It was on one such causeway that Cortés and Moctezuma finally met. The Spanish numbered somewhere between four and five hundred; behind them were around 6,000 Tlaxclalans and a few hundred Totonacs. It was at this moment that Moctezuma and his inner circle saw the glint of Castilian swords and the gleam of steel armour. They were reportedly awed above all by the horses on which the Spanish rode, although some accounts suggest they were just as amazed by the sight of the fighting dogs – probably some form of mastiff – that also accompanied the Spanish. During the strange period that followed, the Spanish were treated as honoured guests and lavished with gifts; anything of value that was not offered to them was simply stolen. Having been invited to lodge in the royal palace, Cortés and his men took Moctezuma hostage and for almost half a year the empire was ruled by an emperor who was the prisoner of the invaders.
In April 1520 a second Spanish expedition arrived in Mexico, causing an internal struggle among the Spanish and forcing Cortés to leave Tenochtitlán. In his absence, the remaining Conquistadores massacred leading Aztec families during a ritual at which human sacrifices were offered. When Cortés returned, Moctezuma was deposed and finally killed, although the circumstances of his death are impossible to determine. Attempting to escape from Tenochtitlán, the Spanish and their allies were ambushed. Many of the Spanish dead drowned in Lake Texcoco, dragged to the bottom by the weight of the looted gold concealed in their pockets. Six months later the Spanish and their Tlaxclalan allies returned to besiege the city. By this point resistance was already being undermined by the effects of the diseases the Spanish had introduced. By the time Tenochtitlán fell it had already been partially destroyed and as many as 100,000 bodies littered its streets. In the wave of looting that followed, many more of the city’s inhabitants were put to the sword.
The armies of Moctezuma had faced the Spanish with swords whose cutting edges were made from chipped stones. Their arrows were tipped not with tempered metals but with wood hardened by fire. At first they had attempted to fight the Spanish through their own ritualised form of warfare, but this was no answer to the mounted Conquistador, the sixteenth century’s equivalent of the battle tank. Yet even with all these military disadvantages, their sheer weight of numbers should have made the conquest impossible – even with the Tlaxclalans marching under the banner of Cortés. What tipped the scales was the sheer cultural shock of the conquest and the calamitous impact of western diseases, the most significant being smallpox, a common enough virus in Europe but against which the Aztecs could offer no resistance.
The man who is believed to have unknowingly transmitted smallpox from the Old World to the New was himself a product of the growing age of globalism. Francisco Eguía, an African slave, made landfall on the east coast of the Yucatán peninsula in 1520 and is thought to have died from smallpox soon after. The disease he had harboured began to spread uncontrollably among a people utterly devoid of immunity. Both Spanish and later indigenous chroniclers left shocking accounts of the decimation of Aztec people. One Spanish friar who witnessed the event wrote:
When the smallpox began to attack the Indians it became so great a pestilence among them throughout the land that in most provinces more than half the population died ... they died in heaps, like bedbugs. Many others died of starvation, because, as they were all taken sick at once, they could not care for each other, nor was there anyone to give them bread or anything else. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died, and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead people they pulled down the houses over them in order to check the stench that rose from the dead bodies so that their homes became their tombs.5
Animated by their desire for gold, Cortés and his men showed little interest in the suffering of the Aztec people. Nor did they seek to understand the culture and art of the civilisation they had overwhelmed. During the siege and conquest of Tenochtitlán, and the destruction that followed, vast amounts of indigenous artefacts were looted and much of the city destroyed. Growing and genuine Spanish abhorrence at the widespread Aztec practice of human sacrifice encouraged a greater sense of religious mission among the Conquistadores, turning them towards greater acts of religiously motivated destruction. Cortés did, however, recognise how the art of the Aztecs might be used as exotic props in his ceaseless campaign for greater wealth and personal recognition. In order to win support and praise from King Carlos V, he dispatched three shipments of Mexican art, and other items of ceremonial and everyday life, to Europe. One collection was viewed by Albrecht Dürer, who, perhaps more than any other artist of his age, possessed a curious eye and an open mind. In his diary entry for 27 August 1520 Dürer wrote:
12. The Aztec Stone of the Five Eras. Intricately carved with various glyphs and icons, it is one of the most significant Aztec artefacts to have survived the conquest. Its religious and cultural functions are not fully understood.
I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armour of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds, and all kinds of wonder objects of human use ... All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.6
Dürer’s astonishment at the wondrous nature of the objects he viewed in Antwerp, and his praise for the creativity of the Aztec people, flowed from his artistic sensibilities, but, as for all those who encountered them, the sense of wonder they inspired arose from the realisation that they had been produced by a people whose existence had been entirely unknown just two years earlier. To early sixteenth-century Europeans the objects on display were truly the artefacts of an alien civilisation, a people from a continent about which both the scriptures and the ancients had been entirely silent. Even for the victorious Spanish, their encounter with the great civilisations of the New World was enormously disruptive to established systems of belief and accepted knowledge.
Most of the objects Dürer viewed are now lost. The survival rate for Aztec art and artefacts has been tragically low. The feather mosaics, fruits of what may well have been among the most highly evolved of the Mexican art forms, had little chance of survival, but thousands of other less fragile objects were lost in other ways. Items made of precious metals were frequently melted down and precious stones removed from their original mountings. One remarkable survivor is the so-called double-headed serpent, today held in the British Museum. It consists of a carved wooden body on to which tiny, cut pieces of turquoise have been meticulously fixed using plant resins. Minute fragments of brilliant white sea shells have been used to form the serpent’s teeth and pieces of red thorny oyster shell frame the two mouths. Some 2,000 individual planes of turquoise completely cover the body, creating a shimmering effect as light reflects off each tiny shard, resulting in an illusion of movement.7 The survival of the double-headed serpent may well be due to the fact that turquoise, although valued more than gold by the Aztec, was of little interest to the Spanish.
13. The double-headed serpent. One of the greatest surviving treasures of the Aztec civilisation. Carved from wood and covered with mosaic made of turquoise, it might have been one of the gifts Emperor Moctezuma gave to the Conquistador Hernán Cortés.
The original religious and ceremonial functions of the double-headed serpent, the only one of its kind to have survived, are today uncertain. Perhaps it was part of the ceremonial dress of Moctezuma himself, worn on the chest, attached by cords. Alternatively, the serpent could have been carried in ceremonies on a staff. But, however it was worn or presented, its symbolism would have been powerfully obvious to all who saw it. The object was loaded with the dualism that was a central feature of the Aztec belief system: not only does the serpent have two heads and multiple symbolic meanings; it may also be a hybrid creature – a serpent-bird, a feathered snake, the symbol of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the deity of whom Moctezuma may, disastrously, have believed Cortés to have been an incarnation.8
Mexico – renamed Nueva España (New Spain) – was brought under the rule of the kings of Spain and into the embrace of the Catholic Church. Almost immediately Cortés began rebuilding Tenochtitlán as a Christian capital, effectively obliterating Moctezuma’s realm. On the site of the main temple complex that had stood at the centre of the city, the Spanish cathedral was built. Those who survived the conquest and smallpox epidemics – their numbers can only be speculated at – were now subject to a second, spiritual and cultural conquest. Spain’s grip on the region tightened further when, after the initial flood of looted gold began to slow, the silver mines of Zacatecas were discovered. The wealth drawn from the mines, from the 1540s onwards, sparked migration from Spain and increasing investment in the territory by the Spanish Crown. The mineral wealth of New Spain thereby funded the administration of Mexico, which in turn assisted the monastic orders to embark on the wholesale conversion of the conquered people and the establishment of the Catholic faith.
Efforts to obliterate Aztec religion were carried out with incredible zeal, by both the Conquistadores and the friars of the Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican orders, who flocked to Mexico. Within a decade of the conquest 2,000 idols had been toppled and 500 temples destroyed.9 New churches were built on temple foundations, sometimes using the same stone. And cast on to the fires were the codices, the books of glyphs that had recorded Aztec history and transmitted its culture. To complete the process, the schools from which the tlacuilos painters and the priestly classes operated were shut down.
The conversion of the peoples of Mesoamerica in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was regarded as one of the great triumphs of Catholic evangelism. So great was the harvesting of souls that the new converts could not all fit into the new churches that were rapidly built with local labour and decorated by local painters schooled in European design. To draw the whole of the Aztec population to the new faith, the friars concentrated first on converting members of wealthy and aristocratic families, the people who had the greatest influence among their people. But they also focused on the young, who were regarded as ripe for conversion, having not been raised in the traditions of their parents.
Many of the Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican friars, the spiritual Conquistadores of New Spain, were astonished by the ease of their task. The Aztec appeared remarkably willing to accept the new faith – although there were concerns that internally, behind closed doors, the new converts were secretly faithful to the old gods. Some friars came to believe that the majority of conversions were insincere. They noted that traditional healers and prophets still operated, especially in the remote rural areas far from the centres of Spanish influence. In order to erase the last traces of the Aztec religion and drive out the pagan gods, the friars had first to develop the capacity to determine which indigenous practices and traditions were idolatrous – in Christian terms. This required them to acquire a greater understanding of the religion and the cultural practices they were seeking to eradicate, and by the 1530s the more astute friars, particularly the Franciscans, had come to realise that the codex books that had been destroyed had been the key to understanding Aztec religion. Surviving codices were closely examined, Aztec priests were questioned and the tlacuilos were called upon to explain and decipher the images and symbols of codices.10
Among the Franciscans who came to New Spain was Friar Bernardino de Sahagún. In 1536 he helped found the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, an institution dedicated to the study of the Nahuatl language and the training of indigenous men to be priests. Sahagún learned Nahuatl and embarked on a series of expeditions to the provinces to live among the local people and increase his knowledge of Aztec culture. He also recruited a number of indigenous artists and translators with whom he set about creating a written and pictorial record of the Aztec culture. The resulting works was the vast, twelve-volume Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain).
14, 15. Images from Book IX of the Florentine Codex show Aztec musicians performing and the consultation of maps. The images were created by Aztec artists who worked alongside the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún.
As the best-known extant version is today held at the Laurentian Library in Florence, Sahagún’s Historia has come to be known as the Florentine Codex. This vast work contains descriptions and paintings of the beliefs, gods, customs and world-view of the Aztec people, before and during the conquest. The text appears in both Spanish and Nahuatl, although not consistently. The first volume is a compendium to the twenty-one gods of the Aztec, a subject the Spanish found extraordinarily difficult to comprehend. Each deity is described and painted. Subsequent volumes deal with the ceremonies and rituals, the origin stories of the gods, the role of omens and superstitions, the forms of government that had prevailed before the coming of the Spanish and the customs and pastimes of the nobility. Volume XII is an account of the conquest as seen from the Aztec perspective, based on a series of accounts gathered by Sahagún himself between 1553 and 1555. Although mediated by Sahagún, the Florentine Codex does attempt to give voice to a people rendered mute in Cortés’s dubious and selective account. And that indigenous voice is often at its most vivid when delivered through the paintings that are the most striking and beautiful feature of this and other codices produced in the sixteenth century.
16. The Day of the Dead and the calavera, the stylised representation of the human skull, are now internationally recognised emblems of modern Mexico – here portrayed by James Bond in the opening sequence of Spectre – but the origins of the festival stretch back to the religious beliefs of the Aztecs.
The destructiveness of the conquest and the decades that followed is undeniable, but, as the codices reveal, there was some degree of dialogue and accommodation between the European and Aztec cultures that found themselves in sudden and close proximity. The most dynamic and visible element of Aztec culture that survived was their festival to the goddess of death. This tradition was kept alive by fusing it with the Catholic traditions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. It lives on today as the Day of the Dead, a modern, nationwide Mexican festival that remains partially pre-colonial and pagan in nature. The celebration of the spirits of lost ancestors, the symbolism of the skull, the offering of food and flowers to the spirits of the dead are not Catholic traditions but living echoes of Aztec belief systems, kept alive for five centuries by their descendants. The skull mask, the calavera, has become the ubiquitous symbol of the Day of the Dead and is fast becoming an internationally recognised icon of modern Mexican culture.
