No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
This study recounts the fate of Moctezuma II’s heirs during the early colonial era, focusing on three in particular. The first is Isabel Moctezuma (Tecuichpotzin), daughter of Moctezuma’s principal wife, Teotlaco, and known for her marriages, especially to her third Spanish husband, Juan Cano. Because none of Moctezuma’s male children from this marriage survived the conquest, Isabel became his primary heir. Her biography has much to say about Spanish interactions with the indigenous nobility, particularly its female members, in the early postconquest years. Chipman also discusses two other heirs, doña Mariana (known also as doña Leonor), a half-sister of Isabel, and don Pedro, a half-brother. The origins and statuses of their mothers figured in their life outcomes and in the legal conflicts in which each became embroiled.The book originated in Chipman’s research on Isabel and Mariana, as well as the unpublished research of his former doctoral student Ann Prather Hollingsworth on Pedro Moctezuma and his heirs. It begins by surveying Aztec history, then concentrates on Isabel, Mariana, and Pedro Moctezuma, and finally examines the lives of Isabel’s heirs, particularly those descended from the liaison between Isabel and Hernán Cortés and their resulting child, Leonor Cortés Moctezuma. Cortés’s relationship with Isabel was complex for at least three reasons. He had a sexual relationship with her that produced a child, and through this relationship to Moctezuma’s primary heir he partially rooted and legitimized both his own rule and that of the Spanish. He also celebrated or approved of Isabel’s marriages to three Spaniards, with two of whom she had children. Cortés saw these marriages as crucial to the project of acculturation through religious and social means.Chipman demonstrates the extent to which Cortés viewed the supposedly peaceful and voluntary passing of sovereignty over the Mexica (and by extension the Aztec Empire) to himself and Charles II as key to his legitimacy. With Moctezuma dead by mid-1520, Isabel came to play a key role in this legitimizing project, even though at the time of the conquest she was married to the last independent Mexica ruler, Cuauhtémoc. In 1526, Cortés awarded her an encomienda to Tacuba, one of the principal cities of the Triple Alliance, and its subject communities. This encomienda, given as dowry for her marriage to Alonso de Grado, symbolized Isabel’s status as Moctezuma’s most important heir, as well as the significance of her political support. Yet she was critical to another aspect of early Spanish rule: the desire to encourage mixed marriages with noblewomen, who would then acculturate and Christianize their own and other children. Her sixth husband made this clear when he described her as a “gentlewoman of all things and a friend of Christians, and because of respect and her example, quiet and repose are implanted in the souls of the Mexicans” (p. 63). Yet this gentlewoman’s estate set off bitter lawsuits among her husband, children, and other heirs.Pedro Moctezuma wound up involved in the most complex lawsuits, owing to the property grant of Tula, given by Cortés for Pedro’s support, and in honor of his mother’s ties to Tula’s ruling dynasty. Tula’s native leadership objected, contending that his mother, Miahuaxochitl, was illegitimate, and that the second audiencia had banished him from the province. Pedro’s heirs would ultimately secure these rights, but the complex litigation suggests that even as indigenous dependence upon Spanish courts increased, the cultural influence of both state and church was uneven. Pedro dictated his own will in Nahuatl, and he noted that his principal heir, Martín Moctezuma Cortés, had little understanding of Castilian law. Pedro died in 1570, Martín in 1576, and his half-brother Diego Luis went on to inherit the estate, marry into Spanish nobility, and produce descendants who would accumulate titles but no great wealth.A relative through this line, Joseph Sarmiento de Valladares, the Count of Moctezuma, bought for himself the office of viceroy of New Spain in 1697. He did so probably in hopes of collecting payments from the Tula estate that he believed were owed his late wife (a great-great-granddaughter of Diego Luis), but he achieved no distinction while serving in the position. Meanwhile, Isabel’s descendants, especially female, played important roles in the north, helping to fund and legitimize the founding and settlement of both Zacatecas and New Mexico. Juan de Oñate, who led Spanish efforts to settle New Mexico, married a granddaughter of Cortés and Isabel Moctezuma, enriching himself both through the positions he held and through litigation to defend his wealth and status.Such observations raise the question: what kind of history does this book represent? Though it deals with indigenous individuals, it is not an ethnohistory, since it does not situate these people deeply in the context of Nahua culture or language. It discusses Spanish behavior, law, and expansion of empire, yet it is not an institutional history because it focuses more on individuals and their genealogies and biographies than on the workings of institutions they were involved with. Fundamentally, it is a collective biography of Isabel Moctezuma and her relatives. As such, it offers insights into Moctezuma II’s descendants and also examines the ways their alliances with the Spanish aided the Spanish quest for imperial legitimacy.Yet, that this legitimacy so often flowed through women is an ironic reflection of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultural practices, in which marriage to high-ranking noblewomen conferred prestige upon ambitious men, a practice that some of Moctezuma’s male descendants continued when they married into important Spanish families. This book, gracefully written and handsomely produced (with excellent, informative genealogical diagrams), does not pretend to tell the larger story of the native nobility, a history that other scholars, especially Mexican, are beginning to deeply engage. Chipman interprets this story as ultimately being about privileges and rights granted to native peoples by the Spanish. Yet neither the Black-nor the White-Legend approaches suffice for telling the complex and highly variable stories of engagement, exploitation, alienation, and resilience by native peoples in the face of early globalization. In this period, in which Spanish colonialism reshaped native lives, native peoples also reshaped Spanish law, policies, and culture.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.