Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (24 page)

For the next two decades the survivors of that awful night of sorrows would engage in mutual recriminations, lawsuits, and slander to determine exactly how much gold was carried out and how much saved. Most was clearly lost, and yet the accusations went on. Cortés would confiscate anyway what precious metal the lucky had brought out on their persons. But all that was years and hundreds of dead in the future. For the moment Cortés’s 1,300 conquistadors had to find a way out of this island maze that had so suddenly been transformed from their paradise to their execution yard.

Noche
Triste—June
30–July 1,
1520

It was pitch-black and raining. Still, the Castilians had nearly made it, miraculously crossing three canals—the Tecpantzinco, Tacuba, and Atenchicalco—that bisected the causeway of escape leading to the shore town of Tlacopán. They were mostly out of Tenochtitlán proper and strung in a long column on the levee above Lake Texcoco. Their wondrous portable bridge was successful so far in spanning the gaps in their path of escape. But as they began to make their way over the fourth canal, the Mixocoatechialtitlan, a woman who was fetching water spotted the clumsy band and sounded the alarm: “Mexica, come quickly, our enemies are leaving.” The priest of Huitzilopochtli heard her screams and ran wildly to muster the warriors: “Mexican chiefs, your enemies are escaping! Run to your canoes of war” (H. Thomas,
Conquest,
410).

Within minutes hundreds of canoes dotted Lake Texcoco, embarking their crews at various places along the narrow causeway to ambush the column. Others docked beside the army and smothered the Castilians with missiles. The portable bridge quickly gave way under the weight of the frantic fugitives. From now on, the only way out was to trample over the baggage horses and the bodies of those in the vanguard who fell into the canal—and had the macabre effect of providing enough flotsam and jetsam to offer footing for their terrified comrades. Hordes from Tenochtitlán left the city and attacked the retreating conquistadors from the rear, while a new Aztec muster blocked the advance. The Spaniards’ four sloops—control of Lake Texcoco was critical for any successful fighting on the causeways—had long since burned. Help by water was impossible.

What followed in the next six hours was the greatest European defeat in the New World since its discovery by Columbus, as the heavily armed Spaniards, far too many laden with gold tucked up in their armor, struggled to bring up their cannon, to keep the horses calm, to organize their harquebusiers and crossbowmen, and somehow while under constant aerial attack to fill in with rubble the chasm that blocked their escape. Contemporary Mexica witnesses later recounted the confused scene as the Spaniards realized their highway of escape was breached, the bridge down, and an open canal blocking their advance:

When the Spaniards reached the Canal of the Toltecs, the Tlatecayohuacan, they hurled themselves headlong into the water, as if they were jumping from a cliff. The Tlaxcaltecas, the allies from Tliliuhquitepec, the Spanish foot soldiers and horsemen, the few women who accompanied the army— all came to the brink and plunged over it. The canal was soon choked with the bodies of men and horses; they filled the gap in the causeway with their own drowned bodies. Those who followed crossed to the other side by walking on the corpses. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed.,
The Broken Spears,
85–86)

Those luckily at the fore of the column made it to shore, followed closely by Cortés himself and the second division—but no others. Rounding up five of his best horsemen who had reached safety—Ávila, Gonzalo, Morla, Olid, and the redoubtable Sandoval—Cortés plunged back among thousands to carve out a pocket through which the few still alive of his army might yet be saved. Too late.

At least half his Castilians were swarmed by Mexicas, while dozens of others were knocked off the causeway and into the water, some being clobbered to death with obsidian blades by warriors in canoes, others captured, bound, and dragged off by those in Lake Texcoco. Many Mexica warriors were excellent swimmers and far more mobile in the water than the heavily laden and often mailed conquistadors. Cortés himself was hit, stunned, and nearly cuffed before being pulled back to safety by his companions Olea and Quiñones. It would not be the last time that the Aztec obsession for capturing Malinche for their gods, rather than killing him outright, saved Cortés from being hacked to pieces.

By early morning even the murderous Alvarado was at last overwhelmed and lost control of the rear guard. Unhorsed and wounded, he staggered to the shore alone, after leaping his way over the breach. His co-commander, Juan Velázquez de Léon, was never heard from again, presumably either slain, drowned, or dragged off alive to be sacrificed and eaten. Although the Spaniards had marched out in the rainy and foggy night as an ordered army of four divisions, the escape march had quickly become every man for himself, as the confused Europeans were surrounded and mostly pushed into the lake along the mile and a quarter of causeway over Lake Texcoco.

Seeing the human detritus ahead, some of Alvarado’s men at the rear turned around and fled back to the compound inside Tenochtitlán. They apparently preferred a glorious last stand on dry land to being clubbed to death at night in the muck of the causeway. Once there, this doomed band of stragglers purportedly met a few other terrified Castilians who had been left behind in confusion—presumably barricaded in the nearby temple of Tezcatlipoca—or who had not been willing to risk the sortie across Lake Texcoco. As many as two hundred Castilians never made it back out of Tenochtitlán. Later Aztec accounts related that after a few days of stout resistance they were killed or captured and sacrificed.

Fewer than half the Castilians and Tlaxcalans finally stumbled onto shore. What saved them from seeming annihilation was the near maniac determination of Cortés himself. Far from panicking, Cortés quickly organized in Tlacopán what was left of his little army and then set out the next day on the long way back to the Tlaxcalan capital, nearly 150 miles away, much of it through hostile and rugged terrain. For all the Aztec slaughter, the best of his men had survived. Alvarado—under dubious circumstances—had made it across the causeways, though he lost nearly all the men he was entrusted to lead. The other great knights—Ávila, Grado, Olid, Ordaz, Rangel, Sandoval, and Tapia—were yet alive. So was the irrepressible and deadly María de Estrada, who had once so terrified the Mexicas as some sort of supernatural Christian she-god.

The survival of these skilled killers ensured that the Spaniards would retain a core of mounted warriors. These trusty few had had long experience in coolly charging through Indian swarms, lancing and hacking away with near impunity—in sharp contrast with the caliber of the later recruits from Narváez’s failed expedition. For the most part, the newcomers took far too much gold, were far more terrified of the Mexicas, and felt little affinity with Cortés and his original, battle-hardened cohort that had landed in fall 1519.

Cortés also noted that the loyal and invaluable translator Doña Marina, La Malinche herself, was safe. Even more important, his brilliant shipwright, Martín López, had sliced his way through along the levee. Though badly wounded, he, too, survived. The caudillo remarked to his shattered and demoralized troops, “Well, let’s go, we lack nothing.” At the moment of his greatest defeat, Cortés realized he still had the services of the one man who could craft new ships, which would allow him victory in his inevitable and deadly return to come. The contrast with the Mexicas was startling: after expelling the Spaniards, thousands of the courageous victors rejoiced and for critical hours ceased pursuit of a few hundred fugitives—who themselves on the brink of obliteration were already determined somehow to return to wipe out their tormentors.

Flight—July
2–9, 1520

When light broke after the
Noche Triste,
nearly eight hundred Europeans were dead or missing. More than half the Castilians who had entered Tenochtitlán during the prior month were gone, either rotting in the lake or about to have their chests ritually cut open. Nine months of the Spaniards’ constant campaigning and careful alliance-building among dozens of Indian cities were for naught. The half year of conniving inside Tenochtitlán itself to gain the city peaceably, characterized by alternate threats to and reconciliation with Montezuma, was likewise apparently wasted. In some six hours of slaughter on the dikes Cortés had literally lost the army that had taken nearly a year to create. Stalwarts like Alonso de Escobar and Velázquez de Léon were missing—and logically presumed to have been dragged atop the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli to have their hearts ripped out during the Mexica victory parade. The Mexica priests were already preparing trophies of Castilian heads to send around to the surrounding villages on the lakeshore and beyond as proof of the mortality of the newcomers—with accompanying threats not to aid the desperate fugitives, who bled and fled like men, not gods.

Contemporary Aztec accounts record the immediate aftermath at Tenochtitlán of the Castilians’ “Melancholy Night”:

But they laid out the corpses of the Spaniards apart from the others; they lined them up in rows in a separate place. Their bodies were as white as the new buds of the canestalk, as white as the buds of the maguey. They removed the dead “stags” [horses] that had carried the “gods” on their shoulders. Then they gathered up everything the Spaniards had abandoned in their terror. When a man saw something he wanted, he took it, it became his property; he hefted it onto his shoulders and carried it home. They also collected all the weapons that had been left behind or had fallen into the canal—the cannons, arquebuses, swords, spears, bows and arrows—along with all the steel helmets, coats of mail and breastplates, and the shields of metal, wood, and hide. (M. Leon-Portilla, ed.,
The Broken Spears,
89)

Nearly all the Spanish survivors were wounded or sick. Given weeks of marching and inhaling summer dust, poor food and wounds incurred in the compound in Tenochtitlán, the sudden rain and cold water of the lake, and the constant need to wear their heavy metal breastplates, many developed bronchial ailments—most likely pneumonia—and dozens expired along the route of escape. Despite the wretched condition of his men, Cortés nevertheless had to leave Tlacopán and the lake’s shore as quickly as possible while the Mexicas for a time celebrated and regrouped. Most of the stolen gold was gone. The cannon were at the bottom of Lake Texcoco. The harquebuses and crossbows were almost all lost. The few weapons remaining were without powder and bolts. In theory, the Mexicas, with the captured arms that they had stripped from the dead on the causeway and the doomed Spaniards back in the compound, had at their disposal better missile weapons than the Castilians.

No exact record exists of the number of Tlaxcalans killed or captured—no doubt their dead were more than a thousand. Further allied Indian reinforcements were miles away. The tiny Spanish garrison at Vera Cruz was incommunicado. All in all, Cortés figured that he had lost 70 percent of his horses and 65 percent of his men. Worse still, he was more than 150 miles from the first friendly town of Tlaxcala. Had he any allies at all left? For the moment he was at the shore of the seemingly still neutral city of Tlacopán. But in hours thousands of Mexicas would be at his heels, with bribes and incentives for any confederates who could bind and deliver the pitiful starving Castilians. The trick was getting out of the valley alive, since the entire plain was full of former allies increasingly hostile, and eager to ride the wave of Aztec victory.

Whether or not Cortés knew it at the time, his fortunes were about to change dramatically. First, he was not quite surrounded, at least not yet. Apparently, the Aztecs were not completely familiar with this new type of European battle, which, unlike their accustomed “flower wars,” campaigns aimed at submission, had nothing to do with rules or rituals, much less captives, but hinged on the science of killing the enemy outright, pursuing the defeated, ending his will to resist, and thus gaining through slaughter what negotiations and politics had failed to deliver. Under the tenets of European wars of annihilation, letting a man like Cortés—or an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Napoleon, or Lord Chelmsford—escape with his army after defeat was no victory, but only an assurance that the next round would be bloodier still, when an angrier, more experienced, and wiser force would return to settle the issue once and for all.

Cortés, for his part, had inflicted great damage on the Mexicas. Alvarado’s foolish and cowardly but deadly massacre a few weeks earlier at the festival of Toxcatl had robbed the unsuspecting Mexicas of the best of their military leadership—one almost wonders if Alvarado’s diabolical massacre had the implicit approval of the absent Cortés, since it did irreparable harm to the Aztec cause. Thousands more of the warrior nobles were dead or severely wounded from the week of fighting in late June. The Mexicas’ most powerful emperor was shamefully killed when (or immediately after) addressing his subjects. Vital tribute was permanently interrupted. Hundreds of houses inside Tenochtitlán had been burned, and dozens of shrines looted and desecrated.

In the battle’s aftermath the shell-shocked Mexicas were busy back in Tenochtitlán, as if the danger was at last past, cleaning up the mess in their streets, glad to be rid of these murderous interlopers and their terrible propensity to destroy almost everything they touched. More important than the considerable Mexica losses was a series of seven separate squadrons of Spanish ships on the seas headed for Vera Cruz, in transit with more powder, crossbows, horses, and cannon from Cuba and Spain, filled with desperate men sniffing profit and ready to join in on the rumored goldfest.

Cortés knew that the slaughter of so many Spanish kinsmen, and the subsequent rumors of human sacrifice and the eating of flesh, would enrage the proud Castilians and call forth each man’s sense of honor to return and bring fire and ruin to these cannibalistic infidels. Cortés had sized up the Aztec way of war: their emphasis was on capturing rather than on killing; their weapons could stun but rarely kill without repeated blows. Aztec warriors preferred individual sword- and clubplay, rather than mass tactics of shock assault in disciplined ranks and files. Their brigades centered around gaudy, feather-clad, banner-carrying lieutenants whose death might send their regional musters fleeing in terror. The commander in chief was remote and mostly apart from his men in battle. The Aztec army was even more hated by other natives than were the Castilians.