The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 83men after Tlacotzin lacked even his pedigree and were less
than palatable to the surviving Mexica elite. In 1526, Cortés
named don Andrés de Tapia Motelchiuhtzin, who like his
predecessor was a member of the Honduras campaign, but
was not a direct descendant of earlier huei tlatoque. 36 The
native historian don Domingo Francisco de San Antón
Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, writing at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, suggested his lack
of credentials in calling him “only a Mexica eagle-noble.” 37
Native pictorial histories likewise show Motelchiuhtzin
without the traditional regalia. Motelchiuhtzin’s rule
(1526–1530) coincided with a chaotic period in Mexico
City’s history. Charles V, more aware of the vast riches
that the New World promised and increasingly wary of
the quarrelsome leader’s pretensions, recalled Cortés to
Spain, and he was there from 1528 to 1530. But Cortés left
behind a large conquistador class that could easily impinge
on royal authority, so in lieu of the government that Cor-
tés had established, the Crown mandated that a panel of
judges called the Real Audiencia (royal court) govern New
Spain in late 1527. At the head of this first audiencia sat
Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, who was brought in as a check
to Cortés’s power but turned out to be a man of unpar-
alleled ruthlessness, particularly toward the indigenous
population; quite soon, conflict broke out between him
and the newly arrived Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, a Fran-
ciscan, over these abuses. When word reached Charles that
Guzmán was doing more damage than good to royal inter-
ests, he swept out the first audiencia, appointing Guzmán
as governor of the northern province of Nueva Galicia.
Upon leaving the city with troops to subdue the frontier
Chichimec tribe, Guzmán took Motelchiuhtzin and other
city leaders with him. Motelchiuhtzin was hit by an enemy
arrow and died far outside the city in 1530, like so many of
his immediate predecessors. 38 He left behind a son, Her-
nando de Tapia, who would come to be a powerful force
in the city.
Guzmán’s inept government was replaced by the sec-
ond audiencia, headed by the bishop of Santo Domingo,
Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, between January 1531 and
April 1535. Ramírez de Fuenleal was sympathetic to the
Franciscans and worked to protect native peoples from
excessive abuse. Recognizing the immense challenges that
ruling a native population entailed, he developed infor-
mal policies to employ native institutions when it served
the long-term interests of the Crown. Thus, Ramírez de
Fuenleal supported the recognition of the de facto native
government in the city, in no small part as a counter to the
abusive inclinations of the conquistadores. 39 At the same
time, he must have been wary about putting any of the
surviving Mexica high nobles into power, because in 1532,
he appointed to the governorship of the city don Pablo
Tlacatecuhtli Xochiquentzin, another lesser noble who
had proved his loyalty to the Crown by joining Guzmán
on the northern campaign. 40
While the slowly congealing royal government, led by
the second audiencia, seems to have been perfectly satis-
fied with any sympathetic native ruler, the strenuous objec-
tions to these rulers that colored native histories written
after the fact (Chimalpahin called Xochiquentzin “only a
nobleman-steward” and said Motelchiuhtzin was merely
an “interim ruler”) remind us that the native elite were still
a powerful one in the city and to them, the divine election
of these rulers still mattered; indigenous chroniclers, writ-
ing in Nahuatl, have given these elites an enduring voice. 41
While Chimalpahin was likely an educated commoner,
another prominent Nahua chronicler, whose manuscripts
Chimalpahin knew, was don Fernando Alvarado Tezozo-
moc, Moteuczoma’s grandson on the maternal side and
Huanitzin’s son, who thus traced his descent on both sides
back to pre-Hispanic huei tlatoque. Thus, the native intel-
lectual class who had an interest in the authority of rulers
spanned strict class lines.
While disapproval of the three “illegitimate” rulers of
1525–1532 could be passed off as self-interest of the high
Mexica elite and self-styled elites like Chimalpahin, it
extended to artists and scribes in the city, who carefully
employed visual symbols to distinguish “truly” legitimate
rulers from the three “interim” ones. On Humboldt Frag-
ment II, a number of these rulers appear (figure 4.6). The
huei tlatoani Moteuczoma is represented as a full figure
at the bottom of this list, with typical sartorial splendor:
his cloak is the distinctive xiuhtilmatli-techilnahuayo that
his cousin Nezahualpilli also wore (see figure 3.3). He sits
on the tepotzoicpalli and wears the xiuhhuitzolli. Above
Moteuczoma appear many of the post-Conquest rulers
up through 1554, including Cuauhtemoc (1520–1524) and
Motelchiuhtzin (named as Thapia [for Tapia] Motelchiuh).
Notably, Tlacotzin and Motelchiuhtzin, who were not
descended from huei tlatoque, do not wear the xiuhhuitzolli,
while Cuauhtemoc, Huanitzin, and Tehuetzquititzin do
(figure 4.7).
Such interest in marking the legitimacy of the Mexica
rulers extends across a broad spectrum of manuscripts