Titans of History

CORTÉS

1485–1547

He came dancing across the water

With his galleons and guns

Looking for the new world

In that palace in the sun …

He came dancing across the water

Cortéz, Cortéz

What a killer.

Neil Young, “Cortez the Killer”

Hernán Cortés was like Pizarro the personification of the triumphant conquistador whose deeds—both blood-spattered and heroic—brought so much of the New World under the harsh rule of Spain. Arriving in Mexico at the head of a tiny mercenary army, he slaughtered the innocent and pillaged the land, destroying the civilization of the Aztecs and enriching himself beyond his wildest dreams. But the evidence suggests he was not himself cruel and rarely initiated atrocities. He was however a wholly remarkable leader—probably with Pizarro (a distant relative) the outstanding Spaniard of his time, who literally conquered a new empire.

Cortés was born of a noble Castilian family in Medellín, Spain, in 1485. After a sickly childhood, his parents sent him to the prestigious University of Salamanca in the hope that the rarefied intellectual environment might be the making of their son. It was not to be, however, and Cortés soon returned home. Small-town provincial life proved no more satisfactory to young Cortés (except where women were concerned), and in 1502 he decided to move to the New World. Arriving in Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1503, he soon established himself as a capable man with an eye for an opportunity.

In 1510, at the age of twenty-six, Cortés managed to obtain a place on an expedition to conquer Cuba. The expedition was led by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who went on to become the governor of the newly seized territory; having impressed Velázquez, Cortés was appointed as his secretary. The cordial relationship between the two men did not last, however—in part because of Cortés’ continual philandering, even as he secured the hand in marriage of Velázquez’s sister-in-law, Catalina.

Cortés grew increasingly restless with his life in Cuba, and in 1518 he persuaded Velázquez to give him command over an expedition that was to explore and colonize the mainland (modern-day Mexico). At the last minute the governor changed his mind and attempted to have Cortés removed from his command. But it was too late: Cortés ignored the countermand and proceeded as originally planned.

In March 1519 Cortés and a force of some 600 men landed on the Yucatán Peninsula, and a month later he formally claimed the land for the Spanish crown. To create a reality to match the rhetoric, Cortés marched first north and then west, achieving a series of victories over hostile native tribes and proving himself a skilled exponent of divide and conquer.

In October 1519 Cortés and his troops arrived at Cholula, then the second largest city in the region. Many of the city’s nobility had gathered in the town’s central square in the hope of parleying with the approaching Spaniard, but he was in no mood to listen to them. In an act of calculated terror, he ordered his troops to raze the city. Thousands of unarmed citizens were butchered in the process.

In the wake of this massacre, Cortés and his men were received peacefully by the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II, in the city of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City). The Aztec empire, which emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries from an alliance of three rapidly growing cities—Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan, had been fashioned by Moctezuma I (c. 1398–1469) into a cohesive political and cultural unit, with Tenochtitlán at its capital, and reached its zenith under Ahuitzotl (c. 1486–1502), who more than doubled the territory under Aztec control. He was succeeded on his death by his nephew, Moctezuma II—the man on the throne when Cortés and his mercenaries arrived seventeen years later. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice of men, women and children—sometimes on a vast scale. On one occasion in the 1480s, it was said that they sacrificed 84,000 prisoners at the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan.

Moctezuma believed Cortés to be the incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent), and, having heard of the military superiority of the intruders, was anxious to avoid direct confrontation. For his part, Cortés was determined to receive the submission of the Aztec emperor to the Spanish king, and to this end he took Moctezuma prisoner.

Back in Cuba, meanwhile, Velázquez had grown jealous of Cortés’ success, and in 1520 he sent a force under Pánfilo de Narváez to retrieve the insubordinate conquistador. Despite the numerical inferiority of his troops compared to those of Narváez, Cortés defeated the challenge. However, during his absence from Tenochtitlán, the man he had left in charge had slaughtered many of the city’s leading figures and provoked an uprising, during which Moctezuma was killed. After attempting to re-enter Tenochtitlán, Cortés was forced to abandon it and only just avoided defeat at the hands of pursuing Aztec forces.

Having regrouped in the lands of his allies, the Tlaxcala, he returned in late 1520, intent on recapturing the city. In the war that followed, the Spaniard sought to break the Aztec resistance through a strategy of attrition. Tenochtitlán was isolated, and resistance eventually crushed. The fall of the city effectively marked the end of the Aztec empire. Cortés was now the undisputed master of the territory, which he renamed the New Spain of the Ocean Sea.

As governor of the new colony from 1521 to 1524, Cortés oversaw the destruction of many artifacts of Aztec culture. The indigenous people were forced into a system of forced labor, under which they were ruthlessly exploited for centuries to come. All the while, the principal concern of the Spanish conqueror was personal aggrandizement. Those who suffered under Cortés’ yoke were finally relieved of their burden when he was dismissed from his post by the Spanish king, who had received various reports of his viceroy’s misrule. In 1528 Cortés returned to Spain to plead his case, but despite being made marques del Valle de Oaxaca, Cortés was not convinced he had won the king’s support. Charles V never forgave him for his insubordination to royal officials and would never let him command in Europe.

The final two decades of Cortés’ life saw the increasingly embittered conquistador journeying back and forth between Spain and his estates in the New World, and attempting to counter what he felt were the lies of his “various and powerful rivals and enemies.” Vastly rich, perhaps the most titanic European of his time, the marquis of the Valley died in 1547, en route to South America.