It is amusing here to read in pretentious text-books that "Cortez now ironed Montezuma and made him pay a ransom of six hundred thousand marks of pure gold and an immense quantity of precious stones." That is on a par with the impossible fables which lured so many of the early Spaniards to disappointment and death, and is a fair sample of the gilded glamour with which equally credulous historians still surround early America. Moctezuma did not buy himself free,—he never was free again,—and he paid no ransom of gold; while as for precious stones, he may have had a few native garnets and worthless green turquoises, and perhaps even an emerald pebble, but nothing more.
Just at this crisis in the affairs of Cortez he was threatened from another quarter. News came that Pamfilo de Narvaez, of whom we shall see more presently, had landed with eight hundred men to arrest Cortez and carry him back prisoner for his disobedience of Velasquez. But here again the genius of the conqueror of Mexico saved him. Marching against Narvaez with one hundred and forty men, he arrested Narvaez, enlisted under his own banner the welcome eight hundred who had come to arrest him, and hastened back to the City of Mexico.
Here he found matters growing daily to more deadly menace. Alvarado, whom he had left in command, had apparently precipitated trouble by attacking an Indian dance. Wanton as that may seem and has been charged with being, it was only a military necessity, recognized by all who really know the aborigines even to this day. The closet-explorers have pictured the Spaniards as wickedly falling upon an aboriginal festival; but that is simply because of ignorance of the subject. An Indian dance is not a festival; it is generally, and was in this case, a grim rehearsal for murder. An Indian never dances "for fun," and his dances too often mean anything but fun for other people. In a word, Alvarado, seeing in progress a dance which was plainly only the superstitious prelude to a massacre, had tried to arrest the medicine-men and other ringleaders. Had he succeeded, the trouble would have been over for a time at least. But the Indians were too numerous for his little force, and the chief instigators of war escaped.
When Cortez came back with his eight hundred strangely-acquired recruits, he found the whole city with its mask thrown off, and his men penned up in their barracks. The savages quietly let Cortez enter the trap, and then closed it so that there was no more getting out. There were the few hundred Spaniards cooped up in their prison, and the four dykes which were the only approaches to it—for the City of Mexico was an American Venice—swarming with savage foes by the countless thousands.
The Indian makes very few excuses for failure; and the Nahuatl had already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuátzin in place of the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner; and when the Spaniards brought him out upon the housetop to speak to his people in their behalf, the infuriated multitude of Indians pelted him to death with stones. Then, under their new war-captain, they attacked the Spaniards so furiously that neither the strong walls nor the clumsy falconets, and clumsier flintlocks, could withstand them; and there was nothing for the Spaniards but to cut their way out along one of the dykes in a last desperate struggle for life. The beginning of that six days' retreat was one of the bitterest pages in American history. Then was the Noche Triste (the Sad Night), still celebrated in Spanish song and story. For that dark night many a proud home in mother Spain was never bright again, and many a fond heart broke with the crimson bubbles on the Lake of Tezcuco. In those few ghastly hours two thirds of the conquerors were slain; and across more than eight hundred Spanish corpses the frenzied savages pursued the bleeding survivors.
After a fearful retreat of six days, came the important running fight in the plains of Otumba, where the Spaniards were entirely surrounded, but cut their way out after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle which really decided the fate of Mexico. Cortez marched to Tlacala, raised an army of Indians who were hostile to the federation, and with their help laid siege to the City of Mexico. This siege lasted seventy-three days, and was the most remarkable in the history of all America. There was hard fighting every day. The Indians made a superb defence; but at last the genius of Cortez triumphed, and on the 13th of August, 1521, he marched victorious into the second greatest aboriginal city in the New World.
These wonderful exploits of Cortez, so briefly outlined here, awoke boundless admiration in Spain, and caused the Crown to overlook his insubordination to Velasquez. The complaints of Velasquez were disregarded, and Charles V. appointed Cortez governor and captain-general of Mexico, besides making him Marquis de Oaxaca with a handsome revenue.
Safely established in this high authority, Cortez crushed a plot against him, and executed the new war-captain, with many of the caciques (who were not potentates at all, but religious-military officers, whose hold on the superstitions of the Indians made them dangerous).
But Cortez, whose genius shone only the brighter when the difficulties and dangers before him seemed insurmountable, tripped up on that which has thrown so many,—success. Unlike his unlearned but nobler and greater cousin Pizarro, prosperity spoiled him, and turned his head and his heart. Despite the unstudious criticisms of some historians, Cortez was not a cruel conqueror. He was not only a great military genius, but was very merciful to the Indians, and was much beloved by them. The so-called massacre at Cholula was not a blot on his career as has been alleged. The truth, as vindicated at last by real history, is this: The Indians had treacherously drawn him into a trap under pretext of friendship. Not until too late to retreat did he learn that the savages meant to massacre him. When he did see his danger, there was but one chance,—namely, to surprise the surprisers, to strike them before they were ready to strike him; and this is only what he did. Cholula was simply a case of the biter bitten.
No, Cortez was not cruel to the Indians; but as soon as his rule was established he became a cruel tyrant to his own countrymen, a traitor to his friends and even to his king,—and, worst of all, a cool assassin. There is strong evidence that he had "removed" several persons who were in the way of his unholy ambitions; and the crowning infamy was in the fate of his own wife. Cortez had long for a mistress the handsome Indian girl Malinche; but after he had conquered Mexico, his lawful wife came to the country to share his fortunes. He did not love her, however, as much as he did his ambition; and she was in his way. At last she was found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.