Old Spain, New Spain

A couple years back I leafed through Matthew Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortés at a Barnes & Noble. Restall aimed to debunk a host of myths about that fabled encounter. Unfortunately one of those "myths", which featured in the first few chapters, concerned the "Aztec" Mexica love of human-sacrifice and cannibalism; Restall thought the Mexica fully comparable to fifteenth-century Spain and the Habsburgs. I suspected Restall of political-correctness (see, now, also here) so I didn't purchase the book; soon afterward, my suspicions were dramatically justified [MOAR 1/1/2021: and it's never going to look better]. On that much.

So today I found the book again in the Estes Park library. Not having aught better to do, I continued where I left off. On this much, Restall seemed more credible. To sum up: Gary Jennings (reliant on Prestcott, Díaz, and de las Casas) may have been right about the Tlatoani regime; but he was wrong about Montezuma and Cortés.

They all were.

"The Conquest of New Spain" happened during pleine histoire, to borrow a Renan-ism; but not quite en it. The Gulf of Mexico was not yet well-mapped; so to get to the Mexica, the Spaniard - based in Cuba and Hispaniola - had to sail to Yucatan and to hug the coast. And to get to Spain required a run through an already pirate-infested Caribbean. Meanwhile the king of Spain was a Habsburg also concerned with his holdings elsewhere in Europe [UPDATE 1/1/2021: if we're to believe this dickhead, we can almost delete the "also"]. So if a ship did land in a friendly Iberian port (that is, not a Portuguese port) it was even money if the king's court was even on the peninsula at the time.

The conquest itself, says Restall, was protracted and chaotic. At first, says Restall, it wasn't a conquest. The Cuban governor Diego Velázquez (later appended, "of Cuellar", because there's been an artist of that same name since then) commissioned a colonising expedition but that ... didn't go as planned. Velázquez chose Cortés to lead the force not because Cortés was the best man for it; but because he was a beta male nonentity who - Velázquez figured - could never earn the trust of the captains under him. In that much, Velázquez had the example of Columbus' failed governorship before him; and Velázquez turned out to have pegged Cortés pretty much right. Where Velázquez erred was in his assumption that the captains - with Cortés or without - could control their own situation, on that side of the Gulf.

The captains and their troops and horses swiftly became pawns in the Mesoamerican "game of thrones"; Cortés, their leader, had to follow them. First the coastal Totonacs launched the Spaniards against Tlaxcala; then, when the Spaniards didn't surrender or flee (because they couldn't) Tlaxcala sicced them on Chololan / Cholula. Next, Tlaxcala dragged them to Tenochtitlan where the latter's tlatoani ("amir" is the best translation) basically put them in his zoo. (To give Jennings due credit here, he related that the Tlatoani had a zoo where the Serious Historians have denied it.)

I am inclined to believe Restall on account of the curiosity that nobody in this Mexica menagerie was sending messages back to Cuba. Not boasts of victory; not pleas for help - nothing. The Spaniards were incommunicado.

Skipping ahead to Mexico City's fall, this opened central Mexico to Spanish immigration of course. But there weren't enough to shift Mesoamerican demographics. Several Nahua-speaking nobles under the Mexica continued on as bilingual nobles under the Spaniards. The demographics, I think, shift in earnest only after the cocoliztli.

As to why the farrago of legend [REMINDER 9/22- it wasn't all legend]: first, the Cortés family put out a self-serving story about the Don's heroics. Second, the locals damned the memory of the tlatoani whose miscalculations led to the disaster. Later, as Spanish Catholic overlordship became more and more entrenched, several major Mesoamerican cities promoted stories that they had served Spain (and/or embraced Catholicism) first and most loyally; by which, they hoped to improve their position relative to other cities.

...

Anyone think that parallels might be drawn with the accounts of the conquests which Islam had made against Spain beforehand...? I mean, besides Chase Robinson.