Conquest

...It was the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, just reaching nationhood after the Moorish Reconquest and not CONQUEST: MONTEZUMA, CORTES, AND THE FALL OF MEXICO Hugh Thomas Simon & Schuster/ 812 pages/ $30 reviewed by DONALD LYONS 64 The American Spectator June 1994 inclined to multiculturalist tolerance...

...The Aztecs, Prescott wrote, were a "barbaric empire" whose fall "we cannot regret": The Aztecs not only did not advance the condition of their vassals, they did much to degrade it...

...This battle, like more serious later encounters with imperial forces, was essentially won by terror and dazzle: the natives, including the Mexica, were unfamiliar with such Castilian tricks as wheels, horses (particularly frightening, these), dogs, armor-plating, steel swords, and guns that killed at a distance...

...there was a battle and an ugly massacre by Cortes' troops...

...Six days later, Cortes executed the master critical maneuver: he took Montezuma captive, removing the emperor bodily in a litter to the Castilian lodging, where Montezuma munched sweets and talked theology, an impotent and discredited figure...

...Cortes bested it easily, but had to rush back to Tenochtitlan to cope with a Mexican populace in violent uproar, ignited by a Castilian's slaughter of innocent celebrants of the flute-and-flower festival of the goddess of love...

...there was chilly ingratitude at home at the court of cold-fish young Emperor Charles V. Cortes died near Seville in 1547, at the age of 62, a valiant, charismatic conquistador who'd lived on, as many of that stamp do, into an age of bureaucrats in whom adventure had dwindled into mere greed and religious fervor into mere fanaticism...

...He would "in some as yet unrevealed way .. . through diplomacy and courtesy .. . without a battle" conquer a great kingdom...

...Machiavelli was writing The Prince in the 1510s...

...Now Cortes, his back to the wall, came up with his most brilliant stratagem to retake the city: he ordered built and portaged to Lake Mexico twelve flat-bottomed brigantines armed with cannon...

...Montezuma used elaborate but empty formulas like "I bow to you" that Cortes was, with some disingenuousness, to interpret as declarations of feudal submission to the King of Spain...

...The nearby cityof Cholula resisted...

...They were an iron race, who periled life and fortune in the cause and, as they made little account of danger and suffering to themselves, they had little sympathy to spare for their unfortunate enemies"—but he finds that on the whole and for their times these Conquerors operated on "principles less revolting to humanity" than many another up to Prescott's own day...

...As for the "Old Conquerors," Prescott can be severe on their occasional "cruel deeds"—"Let them lie heavy on their heads...

...p rescott married, as it were, the crusading fervor associated with the Beecher family to the narrative excitement of Virgil or Walter Scott...

...The Aztecs—or Mexica, as he calls them—may thus be assured an impartial hearer in Thomas...

...Captives, or select locals, not excluding women and children, were led "voluntarily" to the top, their hearts (euphemistically called "eagle cactus fruits") extracted, their limbs eaten with chocolate or chili by priests and court officials, their entrails tossed to the beasts in the imperial zoo, while the public gawked...

...Their subject peoples, who covered most of central Mexico, did not love the Mexica...

...The whole land was converted into a vast human shambles...

...Henry VIII was on the English throne...

...The good news is that the job has been done by Hugh Thomas, the superb English narrative writer whose The Spanish Civil War back in 1961 showed his stripes: learning, eloquence, a compassionate liberalism leaning to anticlericalism but eager to be fair...

...Thomas tut-tuts that these qualities may have blinded the allies to the Castilians' "intolerance," but is it not at least as likely that the allies were deliberately siding with the Castilians, warts and all, after long experience of the considerably nastier "intolerance" of the Huitzilopochtli worshippers...

...These cannon, incidentally, were low on gunpowder until a bold Castilian volunteered to lower himself by a chain into the crater of the Popocateped volcano to collect sulphur...

...Unlike Prescott, Thomas gives a vivid and plausible picture of the Castile that bore Cortes, the son of a marginal, but noble, mercenary in the wild, bellicose, hard province of Extremadura...

...Montezuma, who had prepared for the Spaniard's arrival mainly by doing astrology and eating sacred mushrooms, decided to welcome the invader—was he Quetzalcoatl returned?—in the heart of the inaccessible capital...

...How come Warner Brothers never made an Errol Flynn movie out of these events in the innocent 1930s...

...Hearing more and more about the inland Empire and clashing successfully a few times with their haughty tax collectors, Cortes began to concoct a "wild scheme...

...They had a richly rhetorical language, Nahuatl, but no real phonetic writing, unlike the earlier (and more interesting) Maya in the south...

...Cortes's alliance with the Tlaxcalans, whom he had continually to restrain from lurid anti-Mexica atrocities, was key...

...long abide...

...Cortes=bad...

...Above all there was the oppressive, ubiquitous religion, with thousands of temples and priests and gods, most remarkable among the last being the light-skinned, bearded Prometheus/Akhenaton figure of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, mysteriously exiled and due for a return...

...hungry for fame and inspired, perhaps, by thoughts of emulating Julius Caesar and El Cid, he thought of going to fight for the Borgias in Italy but instead shipped off to Hispaniola in 1506...

...C ortes's successful surprise attack on the lake began a long and terrible siege of the large lacustrine city...

...The fall of Tenochtitlan—half tragic, half glorious, very much like the fall of Troy in the old epics—was the untoppable climax to the life of Cortes...

...The meeting, on November 8, was courteous, the Mexica being, according to Thomas, "well known [for] natural good manners...

...How can a nation where human sacrifices prevail, and especially when combined with cannibalism, further the march of civilization...

...There were other expeditions, in accord with his unresting "frontier spirit...

...Moreover the doom of the Aztecs had for Prescott a very Enlightenment—and specifically an abolitionist—lesson: Its fate may serve as a striking proof, that a government which does not rest on the sympathies of its subjects cannot Donald Lyons is the author of the new book, Independent Visions: A Critical Introduction to Recent Independent American Film (Ballantine...

...He was driven, Thomas concludes, by a heady mix of Christian zeal and Castilian honor...

...In Hispaniola, he served the lazy, vain governor, Diego Velazquez, who, after sending out two timorous, inconclusive expeditions to the Yucatan in 1517 and 1518, tried a third with Cortes in charge...

...Today," he declares in the preface to his new book, "we are all, as it were, Gibbonians...

...that human institutions, when not connected with human prosperity and progress, must fall—if not before the increasing light of civilization, by the hand of violence, by violence from within, if not from without...

...his wife died suspiciously after a domestic row about native mistresses...

...The "moral view" aside, their military achievement was "too startling for the probabilities demanded by fiction, and without a parallel in the pages of history...

...Montezuma, who prided himself on being a priest more than being emperor, politely took Cortes up the main Huitzilopochtli pyramid...

...Born in 1484, Cortes got out of Extremadura quickly and scrambled himself some education in the university town of Salamanca...

...Cortes sailed from Cuba on February 18, 1519, with 530 troops, eleven ships, sixteen horses, many dogs, an array of cannon and crossbows and arquebuses, and armloads of glass beads and mirrors...

...By the time of Montezuma, the sun god was demanding a couple of hundred cactus fruits a day...

...Led by a more warlike brother of Montezuma, the Mexica drove the Conquistadors out of the city in July with a loss of some 600...

...Cortes, impressed by all the gold but revolted by braziers full of "still warm hearts," by blood-splashed walls, gore-drenched priests and necklaces of human heads, suggested cleaning the place up and dedicating it to the Virgin Mary...

...The wavering native allies were won back by such displays of recklessness, ruthlessness, energy, and charm...

...Block-by-block fighting grew in savagery and horror until the great and rich capital, Roman in its orderly grandeur, was gradually devastated...

...17I The American Spectator June 1994 65...

...The story has had its Homer in the Massachusetts Brahmin William H. Prescott, whose History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) remains unchallengeable as a classic of nineteenth-century American historical prose, its only rival the frontier histories of Francis Parkman...

...He had his ships disabled to forestall mutiny and made a stirring imperialist speech to the troops (I do not say to the "men" for there were a few women warriors along, as well as an all-important native woman interpreter...

...n May 1520, Cortes had to go back to the coast to battle an expeditionary force the jealous Velazquez had sent to recall him...

...straight from the pages" of a romance: march on it...

...His genius was his own, but Cortes's will, his appetite for the world, was very recognizably that of a young man of dubious social position in a turbulent but expanding land...

...Founding Vera Cruz on the Mexican coast, Cortes befriended the pleasant, sexually easygoing Totonacs and easily won them from allegiance to the puritanical (and hungry) Mexica...

...and the sun god/war god Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird, whose morning ascent into the sky had to be guaranteeddaily—by human blood...

...The huge pyramids were known as Huitzilopochtli's dining tables...

...Hating the Mexica above all things, the Tlaxcalans became eager Castilian allies and Christian converts...

...Tenochtitlan," Thomas writes, "was not an open city, nor were the conquistadors aesthetes or architectural historians...

...Written with a now-dated Ciceronean magniloquence, it was a noble performance, all the more so since Prescott was all but blind in the left eye as a result of a food fight in his junior year at Harvard and was never to visit either Spain or Mexico...

...The long march, through unknown country marked by salt lakes, deserts, and volcanoes, got to the Mexican vassal state of Tlaxcala in September 1519...

...Indeed, one might expect such an account, in today's climate of Europhobia, simply to reverse the Prescott value-batteries and light up: Aztec=good...

...Monte-zuma was not amused...

...Like Prescott, Thomas begins with a survey of the Mexican civilization: its recent date, its ruthless empire, its arts, its architecture, its island capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) reached by causeways into a huge lake, its high-strung monarch Montezuma...

...And who shall lament their fall...

...The empire of the Aztecs did not fall before its time...

...Cervantes—and Shakespeare—were a half-century away, but the Italian Renaissance was in full swing...

...it was la noche triste for the invaders...

...It is certainly time for a new account of these events to be addressed to the intelligent general reader...

...Then too, natives were loath to kill their opponents on the field, preferring to capture them live for later sacrifice—a distinct tactical disadvantage in combat...

...The Cortes-Montezuma story, so dramatic that it seems to tell itself, actually demands high narrative gifts...

...Different modes of worship seem to most of us as equally true, to our philosophers as equally false, and to our anthropologists as equally interesting...

...Finally, a new emperor surrendered, this time for good...

...When Montezumatried to quiet his own people, they stoned him to death...

...The heart was hardened, the manners were made ferocious, the feeble light of civilization, transmitted from milder race, was growing fainter and fainter as thousands and thousands of miserable victims, throughout the empire, were yearly fattened in its cages, sacrificed on its altars, dressed and served at its banquets...