CHAPTER 4 MESOAMERICA AND SPAIN: THE CONQUEST 165omens and prophecies helped them, after the fact, to justify their own defeat. Because
of the many contradictions among the various versions of this story, both Spanish
and native, it is not possible to construct one single “true” account of what really
happened. The following synopsis is based on a critical examination of native and
Spanish sources.
In February 1519, Hernán Cortés left the colony of Cuba on an expedition to ex-
plore the nearby mainland. Cortés had come to the Caribbean in 1504 from Ex-
tremadura in western Spain. He had participated in the campaign to take control of
Cuba and had served as secretary to Diego Velásquez, Cuba’s first colonial governor.
The 1519 expedition, funded largely with Cortés’s own money, consisted of eleven
ships and over 500 men, sixteen horses, and a few cannon. The first landfall was the
island of Cozumel off the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Here Cortés discovered
Gerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had survived a shipwreck eight years earlier.
Held captive by the local Mayas on the mainland in the intervening years, Aguilar had
learned to speak the Yucatec Mayan language. After he joined Cortés, he became an
interpreter for the expedition. Another Spaniard who had survived the shipwreck was
Gonzalo de Guerrero. Guerrero, however, had married a Mayan woman and was liv-
ing as a Maya. Unlike Aguilar, Guerrero had no interest in rejoining his compatriots;
instead he chose to fight the Spanish invaders, and he reportedly died fighting on
the Mayan side.
After sailing westward around the Yucatán Peninsula, Cortés’s expedition stopped
at Potonchan, near the mouth of the Grijalva River in what is today the Mexican state
of Tabasco. After initial hostilities, the local leaders offered Cortés gifts, including sev-
eral young women. One of these women was a native speaker of Nahuatl whose
mother and stepfather had sold her into slavery among the Tabascan Indians, from
whom she had learned the local Mayan tongue. She was given the Christian name Ma-
rina, or Malintzin in Nahuatl (she is often called Malinche or La Malinche). She and
Aguilar were able to translate for Cortés’s group from Maya to Nahuatl to Spanish
(and vice versa). Marginalized by her own people, Malintzin threw her lot in with the
Spaniards and proved an invaluable assistant to Cortés, especially as she quickly mas-
tered Spanish (see Box 4.2).
On Good Friday, April 19, 1519, Cortés landed near what is today the city of Ve-
racruz. Here he had his first encounter with representatives of Motecuhzoma, the
Aztec ruler. According to a native account written down in the 1550s and already in-
fluenced by some of the developing legends, Motecuhzoma’s emissaries brought gifts
to Cortés, which included complete costumes of three of the Aztecs’ most impor-
tant deities: Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and Tlaloc (see the discussion of these deities
in Chapter 3). These costumes were made up of headdresses of precious gold and
feathers; masks of turquoise; and ornaments of jade, gold, and seashells (Figure 4.3).
Motecuhzoma may have been seeking to establish a social relationship with the
strangers through the exchange of gifts, while impressing them with his wealth. The
Nahuatl account says that the messengers dressed up Cortés in the costume of Que-
tzalcoatl, but it is highly unlikely that the Spaniard actually permitted this. In any
case, his subsequent behavior diverged sharply from the model of the wise and priestly