"Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty": Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico

Abstract

THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO matters to us because it poses a painful question: How was it that a motley bunch of Spanish adventurers, never numbering much more than four hundred or so, was able to defeat an Amerindian military power on its home ground in space of two years? What was it about Spaniards, or about Indians, that made so awesomely implausible a victory possible? The question has not lost its potency through time, and as consequences of victory continue to unfold has gained in poignancy. Answers to that question came easily to men of sixteenth century. The conquest mattered to Spaniards and to other Europeans because it provided their first great paradigm for European encounters with an organized native state;' a paradigm that quickly took on potency and accommodating flexibility of myth. In early 1540s, a mere twenty years after fall of MexicoTenochtitlan before forces led by Hernando Cortes, Juan Gines Sepulveda, chaplain and chronicler to Spanish emperor Charles V, wrote a work that has been described as the most virulent and uncompromising argument for inferiority of American Indian ever written. Sepulveda had his spokesman recite the history of Mexico, contrasting a noble, valiant Cortes with a timorous, cowardly Moctezoma, whose people by their iniquitous desertion of their natural leader demonstrated their indifference to good of commonwealth.2 By 1585 Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagun had revised an earlier account of Conquest, written very much from native point of view and out of recollections of native Mexicans, to produce a version in which role of Cortes was elevated, Spanish actions justified, and whole conquest presented as providential. The Mexican Conquest as model for European-native relations was reanimated for English-speaking world through marvelously dramatic History of Conquest of Mexico written by W. H. Prescott in early 1840s, a bestseller in those glorious days when History still taught lessons.4 The lesson that great history taught was that Europeans will triumph over natives, however formidable apparent odds, because of cultural superiority, manifesting itself visibly in equipment but residing much more powerfully in mental and moral qualities.

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