THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO 65
battle the superiority of their weapons and their
fi ghting capacity before they obtained an alliance
with this powerful nation. Then Cortés marched on
Cholula, an ancient center of Classic cultural tradi-
tions and the cult of Quetzalcóatl. Here, claiming
that the Cholulans were conspiring to attack him,
Cortés staged a mass slaughter of the Cholulan no-
bility and warriors after they had assembled in a
great courtyard. When news of this event reached
Tenochtitlán, terror spread throughout the city.
The Spaniards continued their inexorable
advance:
They came in battle array, as conquerors, and
the dust rose in whirlwinds on the roads. Their
spears glinted in the sun, and their pennons
fl uttered like bats. They made a loud clamor as
they marched, for their coats of mail and their
weapons clashed and rattled. Some of them
were dressed in glistening iron from head to
foot; they terrifi ed everyone who saw them.Moctezuma’s fears and doubts had by now re-
duced him to a hopelessly indecisive state of mind.
He wavered between submission and resistance,
between the conviction that the Spaniards were
gods and half-formed suspicions that they were
less than divine. He sent new envoys, who brought
rich gifts to Cortés but urged him to abandon his
plan of visiting the Aztec capital. Moctezuma’s na-
ive efforts to bribe or cajole the terrible strangers
who “longed and lusted for gold,” who “hungered
like pigs for gold,” in the bitter words of an Aztec
account, proved futile. As Moctezuma’s doom ap-
proached, his own gods turned against him. A
group of sorcerers and soothsayers sent by the
king to cast spells over the Spaniards were stopped
by the young god Tezcatlipoca, who conjured
up before their terrifi ed eyes a vision of Mexico-
Tenochtitlán burning to the ground. His forces
spent, Moctezuma ended by welcoming Cortés at
the entrance to the capital as a rightful ruler re-
turning to his throne. The Aztec king completed
his degradation by allowing himself to be kidnaped
from his palace by Cortés and a few comrades and
taken to live as a hostage in the Spanish quarters.
The Aztec nation had not said its last word. In
Cortés’s absence from the city—he had set off for
the coast to face an expedition sent by Governor
Velázquez to arrest him—his lieutenant Pedro de
Alvarado ordered an unprovoked massacre of the
leading Aztec chiefs and warriors as they celebrated
with song and dance a religious festival in honor
of Huitzilopochtli. The result was a popular upris-
ing that forced the Spaniards to retreat to their own
quarters. This was the situation that Cortés, hav-
ing won over most of the newcomers and defeated
the rest, found when he returned to Tenochtitlán to
rejoin his comrades. His efforts to pacify the Aztecs
failed. The Aztec council deposed the captive Mocte-
zuma and elected a new chief, who launched heavy
attacks on the invaders. As the fi ghting raged, Moc-
tezuma died, either stoned by his own people as he
appealed for peace, according to Spanish accounts,
or strangled by the Spaniards themselves, according
to Aztec sources. Fearing a long siege and famine,
Cortés evacuated Tenochtitlán at a heavy cost in
lives. The surviving Spaniards and their indigenous
allies at last reached friendly Tlaxcala.
Strengthened by the arrival of Spanish rein-
forcements from Cuba and by thousands of indig-
enous enemies of the Aztec Empire, Cortés again
marched on Tenochtitlán in December 1520. A fe-
rocious struggle began in late April 1521. On Au-
gust 23, after a siege in which the Aztecs fought for
four months with extraordinary bravery, their last
king, Cuauhtémoc, surrendered amid the laments
of his starving people. Cortés took possession of the
ruins that had been the city of Tenochtitlán.THE AFTERMATH OF CONQUEST
From the Valley of Mexico, the process of conquest
was extended in all directions. Guatemala was con-
quered by Pedro de Alvarado and Honduras by Cor-
tés himself. In 1527, Francisco de Montejo began
the conquest of Yucatán, but as late as 1542, the
Maya rose in a desperate revolt that was crushed
with great slaughter. Meanwhile, expeditions from
Darien subjugated indigenous Nicaraguans. Thus
did the two streams of Spanish conquest, both orig-
inating in Hispaniola, come together again.
For a brief time, Cortés was the undisputed mas-
ter of the old Aztec Empire, renamed the “King dom
of New Spain.” He made grants of encomienda to
his soldiers, reserving for himself the tributes of the