Article suitable for older students

Encounters* Countdown (4): our guide to the quincentennial of the Spanish invasion of Mexico...

17th Aug 2021

Cortes and his troops enter Tenochtitlan by Augusto Ferrer Damau

This is the fourth and last part of our month-by-month itinerary commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Spanish-Aztec War, in partnership with Professor Matthew Restall (on our Panel of Experts), closely following the timeline published in his highly recommended book When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (Harper Collins, 2018). We’re sincerely grateful to Professor Restall for providing this scholarly and timely running commentary... *Why ‘Encounters’? As Restall says, ‘History IS encounter... the sum of all the narratives of encounters that have brought people together.’
(Cortes and his troops enter Tenochtitlan by Augusto Ferrer Damau)

On the first of this month, the invaders reached the great market in Tlatelolco. They could not hold it that day, but it was demoralizing for the defenders to see Spaniards on horseback lancing warriors in the market square. Soon afterwards, something happened that made the defeat of the Mexica and Tlatelolca imminent - something that reflected how much the war seemed at the time to be a struggle to determine if Tenochtitlan would remain the empire’s centre or if the centre would shift to Tetzcoco. Until this point, the tlahtoani of Tetzcoco, Ixtlilxochitl, had yet to assert control over all his subjects; many remained loyal to his brother, Coanacoch, and thus to Cuauhtemoc, and had continued to fight in defense of Tenochtitlan. But Ixtlilxochitl now captured his brother, and thousands of Tetzcoca warriors were thereby brought over to the allies. Within days, the allies had occupied the Tlatelolco marketplace, leaving the defenders in control of less than an eighth of the island. Cuauhtemoc requested peace, but the Spaniards refused - later blaming the Tlaxcalteca. As the hand-to-hand fighting continued, the attackers found houses strewn with the bodies of families who had died from disease or hunger or from fighting - or all three. The brigantines entered the city’s canals. Cuahtemoc attempted to flee across the lake. Finally, on the 13th, the surviving defenders surrendered, and the last huey tlahtoani of Tenochtitlan was captured. The siege was over. But the invasion was not. Warfare would continue in Mexico for two more decades, as the Spaniards steadily made their presence more permanent.
FIN.

Editor’s Note: We leave the commemoration of the fall of Tenochtitlan on a poignant note: to us, one of the most powerful images of all those telling the story of the Spanish invasion of Mexico in the 16th century is this: the point in the Codex Mendoza at which the tlacuilo - the Nahua artist who drew and painted the manuscript - decided to show the years 1519-1521 (1-Reed, 2-Flint, 3-House) in a washed-out grey colour, after all the previous years had been coloured a deep ‘precious’ turquoise. The lifeblood has symbolically been drained from the Mexica annals at this devastating time...