[393] For two days, says Tapia, Id., and Bernal Diaz intimates that it ended with the second day. Hist. Verdad., 60.
[394] ‘Tomaron los Castellanos el oro, y pluma, aũque se halló poco.’ Herrera, dec. ii. lib. vii. cap. ii. ‘Ovo mucho despojo de oro é plata,’ says Oviedo, iii. 499, probably because he knew Cholula to be rich; but a great deal of private treasure at least must have been taken out of the city when the women were sent away. The Tlascaltecs carried off 20,000 captives, he adds.
[395] Herrera, ubi sup. Oviedo allows a reinforcement of 40,000 Tlascaltecs to join in the massacre and pillage, iii. 498, and Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 60, says the late comers joined in the pillage on the second day. The Tlascaltecs brought the Spaniards food, of which they had fallen short. Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., 295.
[396] A very similar massacre and raid was perpetrated by the Chichimec-Toltecs at the close of the thirteenth century. Native Races, v. 484-7.
[397] Gomara, Hist. Mex., 95. Finding that the brother of the deceased was, according to custom, entitled to the office, Cortés appointed him. Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 60. Oviedo intimates that one governor was chosen to take the place of all the other ruling men. iii. 499.
[398] It is also said ‘que la trajo un religioso franciscano á quien se le apareció en Roma.’ Veytia, Hist. Ant. Méj., i. 156. ‘Disgusted with the idol which had played them false, they installed another in its place,’ says Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 61. The disregard shown by Spaniards even for the temples and relics of Quetzalcoatl might have struck the natives as peculiar in men whom rumor pointed out as his descendants, yet no chronicle refers to it.
[399] Spanish chroniclers as a rule approve the deed as necessary and just, either in tacit or open comment, and a few devout missionaries, who have assumed the rank of Indian apostles, are the only ones to take exception. Chief among these stands Las Casas, as might be expected from his sympathy with Velazquez, and from his character as Indian protector. He condemns it in the most unmeasured terms as a base murder of innocent and defenceless people, committed merely with a view to spread terror. Six thousand carriers, he writes, were shut up in a court and put to the sword, while the many discovered alive on the following days were thrust through and through. The chiefs of the city and neighborhood, to the number of over 100, were chained together to a circle of poles and burned alive, and the king, who fled with 30 or 40 followers to a temple, met the same fate there. While the soldiers were butchering and roasting the captives, ‘eorum Capitaneum summa lætitia perfusum in hunc cantum prorupisse:
Monte ex Tarpeio Romana incendia spectans
Ipse Nero planctus vidit, nec corde movetur.’
Las Casas, Regio. Ind. Devastat., 26-8. A number of finely executed copper plates are appended to illustrate these deeds.