The Study of Racialism

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Five First-Hand Accounts of Cortes’s Conquest of Mexico

Beyond Cortés’s unwavering goal of getting rich by conquering others for their gold, mutual attitudes between invaders and Indians were not static. Each saw the other differently between March, 1519, when the Spaniards landed, and August, 1521, when Tenochitlán fell. Cortés and his men changed from seeing the natives as savages to considering them equals (albeit sadly cursed with a repulsive religion). Also, the natives went from considering the invaders inhuman monsters to seeing them as worthy political allies (albeit tragically obsessed with overthrowing the gods). This report describes perception shift in four topics: soldiers’ views, technology, religion, and three cultural entities (“race,” gender, and class).

Changing soldiers’ views are exemplified by field medicine, organizational terminology, and leadership titles. Sixteenth-century medical treatment of slashes entailed cauterizing wounds with hot animal grease. Before August of 1519, each after-action report ends with the men cutting open Indian corpses to extract grease for the medics (Díaz, 59). Such treatment of enemy casualties as animals becomes rare as the men march inland, and vanishes entirely after the Spaniards engage well-trained and organized Tlaxcala troops.

Organizational terminology is a second example. At the start of the campaign, Cortés refers to “bands” of Indians. By late 1519, his reports say that he was attacked by so many escuadrónes (a squadron is equivalent to a 100-man infantry company). And from mid-1520 onwards, he describes his allies in terms of regimientos (regiments), thus revealing an awareness that the natives employed a chain of command resembling his own.

Titles also expose attitude change. In early reports, native leaders are referred to as caciques (the Cuban word for “Indian chief”). Later they are labeled more precisely as capitán (captain), alcalde (mayor), or rey (king). The most revealing terminology, however, comes from Bernal Díaz’s account. This enlisted man’s early descriptions of native leaders refer to “the fat cacique” or “the tall cacique” with no recognition of actual role, title, or proper name. But his later descriptions use, for example, “Señor (Lord) Mase Ecasi” or “Señora (Lady) Xicotenga” when referring to civilians, and military rank when writing about native officers (Díaz, 154). One can easily imagine soldiers of both nations saluting, in their own fashion, the officers of either nation.

A summary of the campaign explains the change in soldiers’ attitudes. As they marched inland, Cortés’s forces clashed with the Tlaxcala army in their first encounter with troops of the core Aztec empire. Reconnaissance patrol fought counter-reconnaissance patrol and ambush was parried with counter-ambush, culminating in three large combined-arms battles (Cortés, 42-48). After the close-run Spanish victory, each side came to respect the other. Tlaxcala political leaders accepted Spanish suzerainty and put their officers under Cortés’s command (Cortés, 50). For the rest of the campaign, Tlaxcala units gave unwavering service. Their regiments fought beside Cortés’s men in the initial victories that culminated in their stay in Tenochitlán as guests of the peace-seeking Moctezuma. They backed up Cortés’s men in defeating a much larger Spanish force led by Pánfilo de Narvaez (sent by Spanish authorities to capture and hang the rebel Cortés). Many were killed (along with half of Cortés’s men) in the terrible retreat from Tenochitlán when Moctezuma’s successor, Guatemoc, mobilized the imperial army to crush the invaders. Tlaxcala soldiers, under the command of Spanish engineers, pulled down the walls of Tenochitlán in the final siege. My point is not the unidirectional finding that Spaniards came to respect Indians, but that each nation’s soldiers came to respect the others’.

Regarding the second topic, the Spanish quickly learned that some facets of Aztec technology were more effective than their own and vice-versa. Aztec workmanship of jewelry and tiny gold animals was finer than Spanish or Moorish, and Aztec cloth was more tightly woven. Spanish soldiers put aside their mail armor and adopted Aztec quilted cotton tunics because the latter were lighter, cooler, and more effective against Aztec weapons (Díaz, 56). Similarly, Aztec soldiers adopted close-order ranks of pike men as defense against Spanish cavalry. Not facing mounted opponents, the Spaniards had not brought pikes, and so the Aztecs apparently devised the solution independently. By the summer of 1521, Aztec armorers were turning out thousands of pikes and training companies in their use. Also, by then, Aztec javelins were metal-tipped, rather than stone, and some Aztecs had begun to use captured crossbows (Díaz, 274, 441).

Religion is where mutual culture shock manifested itself most strongly. When they found the disemboweled and dismembered bodies of five natives in a blood-spattered temple on Cozumel, the men of Grijalva’s 1518 expedition were so horrified that they named the place “Island of the Sacrifices,” thinking that the bizarre custom was unique to that island (Díaz, 26). But after founding Vera Cruz, Cortés learned that each local temple sacrificed about one person per week. He computed that this summed to four or five thousand deaths per year in the local area. He found this so hard to believe that he wrote the Emperor to ask the Pope to send an investigative commission (Cortés, 23-5).

Apparently, the worship of Huitzilopochitli forbade mopping up sacrificial blood, because all five texts report that priests’ hair was stiff and matted with blood, and that temples’ interior walls and floors were covered with damp layers of rotting blood so thick that it stank. Early in their accounts, both Cortés and Díaz write that, to avoid pointless repetition, they will refrain from reporting further on native rituals, but both writers repeatedly break their resolutions and come back to the subject again and again. Their horror grows as each new aspect of Aztec worship becomes evident. For example, by tallying detailed accounts, one can compute that about seventy percent of the victims were children. For another, whereas hearts were burned, torsos were discarded, and heads flayed, Huitzilopochitli apparently required his priests to eat victims’ arms and legs. The sheer volume of death reported suggests that human flesh was the major protein source of the priestly diet (Cortés, 223; also see Britannica 2:551). No matter how much they came to respect the natives, even their allies, the Spaniards never overcame revulsion at human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. In each town where they stopped, the Spaniards habitually freed the caged men, women, and children awaiting death.

On the other hand, natives who tolerated the invaders’ religion could not understand Spanish intolerance of theirs (Díaz, 102-4). The people of Tlaxcala let Cortés’s priests erect their idol of a man on a cross, clearly suffering agonies more prolonged and cruel than instant death by heart-removal. Why could their new allies not accept their ceremonies in return? One interaction was revealing. After the Spanish chaplain celebrated mass in their main square, Tlaxcala’s political leaders agreed to ally with Spain against the Aztec empire. Cortés thereupon ordered them to stop the sacrifices. He immediately hit coercion’s final limit. According to the texts, the native leaders said that their people would gladly die, to the last man, woman and child, rather than comply. If they stopped sacrificing, Huitzilopochitli “would destroy the whole province with famine, pestilence and war.” The impasse was broken by the Spanish chaplain and by the Tlaxcalan concubines of the Spanish officers (more about them later). They persuaded Cortés that such change could happen only over generations, after the union of their peoples (Díaz,155). The scene was repeated in other provinces. In each town where they stopped, the native allies routinely rounded up and re-caged for death, the men, women, and children that their Spanish allies had just released (Cortés, 160).

Regarding “race,” nothing in these texts contradicts Ivan Hannaford that, “there is very little evidence of the conscious idea of race until after the Reformation” (Race: The History of an Idea in the West, 1996, p. 187). Not only are the Indians of New Spain explicitly described as intellectually and spiritually the equals of Spaniards, but the sole African mentioned was the unfortunate man who inadvertently infected the land with smallpox. He is mentioned as simply a Black Spanish soldier (Díaz, 293-4).

The sharpest contrast between texts regards gender. Cortés neglects to mention the women who marched with his force.* Díaz, on the other hand, says that some officers brought their Spanish wives on the expedition (Díaz, 320), and credits Doña Marina de Jaramillo with engineering several important victories. This wife of Captain Don Juan Jaramillo de Orizaba was a native of noble blood who served as Cortés’s interpreter and aide-de-camp throughout the campaign.

At the intersection of class and gender, the unaffected naturalness with which the text assumes that concubinage with a Spanish Don bestowed nobility on well-born Indian women and their children is breathtaking. The following sentence is typical of those in a long passage telling what became of several officers’ concubines in later years.