Part 12

It was the hour of vespers when the Aztec monarch surrendered. This was the end of the contest. During that night a tremendous tempest burst on the fallen city of Tenochtitlan. Thunder and lightning shook the shattered teocallis and levelled them to the ground. The elements finished what the Conquistadores had begun,--the ancient city of the Aztecs was in ruins.

After the surrender of Tenochtitlan, Cortés withdrew to Coyoacán, still a picturesque old town in the suburbs of the modern city. There he remained while the capital was rebuilt. It is said that he gave a banquet to his captains in honor of the victory they had achieved, an occasion made genial by some good wine which opportunely arrived just then at Vera Cruz. The house he occupied with Marina, is still to be seen on the northern side of the plaza of the little town. Over the doorway are carved the arms of the conqueror, much obscured by repeated coats of whitewash. In the church-yard is a stone cross set up on a little mound, said to have been placed there by Cortés himself. His first labor was to cleanse the city and dispose of the dead, then to clear away the ruins in order to erect new buildings. The Spaniards were greatly disappointed not to find vast treasures belonging to the Aztec crown, which they were convinced were somewhere concealed. To his everlasting dishonor Cortés allowed Cuahtemoc to be tortured by putting his feet in boiling oil, in order that he might reveal where such treasure was to be found. The king of Tlacopan was tortured also for the same object, but with no result. Both victims were of opinion that the precious objects so coveted by the Spaniards, if they existed at all, must have been thrown into the lake, but the Spaniards explored in vain the bottom of the shallow expanse and found nothing. If such treasures were there, there they still remain.

The country was put under military rule, although the Mexican chiefs were allowed to retain their titles and nominal authority. Cortés assumed the titles of Governor, Captain General, and Chief-Justice, in all of which he was later confirmed by the King of Spain. He had next to make sure of the subjugation of the other tribes of Anahuac. He organized expeditions and embassies to all the peoples thereabouts, and among others to Michoacan, where, as we have seen, was a kingdom of strength and power, which had never surrendered to the Aztecs. Tangaxoan II., when he heard of the conquest of Mexico, awaited his own turn with terror. Cortés at first sent a peaceful ambassador, led by a soldier named Montaño, who returned after some dangers with a detailed account of the wonders of Calzonzi--the name given this monarch by the Spaniards. Shortly afterwards Christobal de Olid was sent out with seventy horses and two hundred foot soldiers; this force was sufficient to subjugate the monarch and make him swear allegiance to the King of Spain. Afterwards Calzonzi came to Mexico on a visit to Cortés; he beheld with amazement the ruins of the great city which he had never seen in the days of its splendor. The destruction of his hereditary rival gave him much to reflect upon, and hastened his willingness to accept the religion of the Conquistadores. In his ancient capital of Tzintzuntzan there is a pathetic picture, crude and of course not ancient, which depicts the Tarascan king accepting the cross.

During the rule of Cortés, Tangaxoan lived peacefully, enjoying the nominal control of his vast kingdom. In the course of three years, Cortés greatly extended the dominion of Castile in New Spain, as it was then called; for all his conquests were of course referred to his sovereign, Charles V. of Spain, to whom from time to time he sent presents of gold, specimens of the wealth of the new possessions. His power extended as far as Honduras, where Christobal de Olid was put in power. At a safe distance from his chief, Olid conceived the foolish idea of asserting his personal control, and made himself king of the colony. Olid lost his life in this attempt; and Cortés determined to go himself to Honduras. It was on this expedition that, without knowing it, he passed close to the ruins of the serpent city, Nachan, now Palenque. But, as we have seen, Cortés was more in the way of making ruins on his own account, than of regarding the mighty ones wrought by time; and had he known of the existence of the city, it is doubtful whether he would have stopped to cut away the massive growth in which it was concealed. In Izancapac, a Tabascan town, Cortés suddenly ordered the death of the three royal captives of Anahuac, whom he had brought thus far with him, perhaps for this purpose. On the charge of a conspiracy to restore the Aztec rule, they were hung upon a ceyba tree,--Cuahtemoc, and the kings of Tacuba and Texcuco,--all denying any thought of conspiracy.

This was the sad end of the life of Cuahtemoc, the last of the Aztec kings. The rest of the native chiefs died off gradually, so that in a few years, all the old governments of the country were obliterated. Few of the other states discovered by the Spaniards made resistance, and none of them any thing like that of the Mexican. Remains of various uncivilized tribes retreated to the sierras or the deserts of the north, where they continued for generations in perpetual war with the white race.

During the remainder of his life, Cortés made several voyages to Spain to defend his interests and arrange his affairs. In Mexico he employed the greater part of his time and fortune in the discovery of new lands in the neighborhood of Jalisco and the western coast. Finally, considering himself neglected and overlooked, he returned to Spain to make one more attempt at recognition at court. He was but coldly received by his sovereign. His time had gone by. The wonders of Peru had eclipsed the glory of the Mexican Conquest. He was taken ill, perhaps as much of disappointment as disease, and withdrew to Seville; afterwards to a small town in that neighborhood, Castilleja de la Cuesta, where he died on the 2d of December, 1547. His body was carried thence in great state and buried in the chapel of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. But Cortés had ordered in his will that his bones should be brought in ten years time from his death to Mexico, and this wish was fulfilled, and the remains were interred at Texcuco. On the 2d of July, 1794, the bones of the great Conquistador were placed in a marble sepulchre which had been prepared for them in the church of Jesu-Nazareno, which he had founded himself. Even then they did not rest, for in the first years of the revolution, so great was the popular hatred of everything Spanish, safety required that they should be hidden; they were secretly removed, by the orders of the heirs of Cortés, and by last advices, they are now at rest in Italy, in the vaults of the Dukes of Monteleone, his descendants.

XVIII.

DOÑA MARINA.

During the two years occupied, with varying fortunes, in the conquest of Mexico, Cortés was always accompanied by Malintzi, who was indeed indispensable to him as interpreter. Her tent was always near that of the commander. His lieutenants treated her with consideration and respect, always giving her the title of Doña.

Through his reverses, and on the terrible _Noche triste_, it is said, that Malintzi never lost her courage. She was put in charge of some brave Tlaxcallans, by Cortés, who could not have her with him at the head of the fray, and their devotion brought her through the wild confusion of flight.

The long struggle over, Cortés, as we have seen, went to live at Coyoacán. Doña Marina was with him.

Now she is happy. Her hero rules triumphant over millions of men. She lives in a palace, with her guards, her maids of honor, her pages, and esquires. The long, sad days of her youth of slavery are at an end, she has resumed her rank. She has a son, baptized under the name of Martin Cortés, whom she tenderly loves, and with this child and his father, now at peace with all the vast empire he has conquered for his sovereign, she passes a tranquil, happy life.

Suddenly, to break in upon this dream, comes the news that Doña Catalina Juarez Cortés has landed at Vera Cruz, and is approaching the capital.

Very likely Cortés had forgotten to mention his marriage to Marina. Perhaps he had forgotten it himself. But the reader will remember Doña Catalina, the cause of the jealousy of Velasquez in the early days of Fernando's career. It is said that his first ardor for her cooled off after a time, and that the marriage would never have taken place but for the persistence of the Doña. It was not happy, and the adventurer sailed away, without regret for the cheerless home he left behind in Cuba.

Her name was never mentioned during the long period which passed between the landing of the Spaniards and their successful establishment in Mexico. But the deeds of Fernando Cortés were known to all the world, and especially sounded about in the island whence he set out. Doña Catalina, with every right on her side, set out to join her recusant spouse, encouraged by Diégo Velasquez, who saw with no pleasure the continued triumphs of Cortés.

Bernal Diaz says that Cortés hated his wife, but he dared not bring down upon himself the wrath of the Church by ignoring her, and Doña Catalina was received on her arrival with all the honors due to the wife of the great conqueror. She made a splendid entrance into the capital, and at once stepped into the position of head of his household, and succeeded to the homage of maids of honor, pages, and esquires.

Malintzi withdrew, persuaded of the necessity by the good father Olmedo, who baptized her, trained her in the Christian faith, and now, in the hour of trial, stood by her side.

Doña Catalina was not destined to enjoy long her new state. The air of the lofty plateau did not suit her constitution, accustomed to the lower atmosphere of Cuba. She died suddenly.

At Coyoacán there is a tale that Doña Catalina was drowned by her husband, and the well is even shown to tourists into which she is supposed to have been thrown. This legend is probably of later date than the time of her death, but even then rumors arose that it had been a violent one, and reports were rapidly circulated about Cortés likely to injure his reputation and, moreover, that of the Malintzi.

At that time Cortés was thinking of a return to Spain. He was thirty-five, still young enough to thirst for a full recognition at home of his great deeds. While making his preparation for departure, he heard of the insurrection of his lieutenant Olid in Honduras, who had declared himself independent. It was necessary for him to hasten at once to chastise his boldness. Aguilar, the interpreter, was dead, and Cortés, who had never troubled himself to acquire the Mexican dialects, had to send for Marina to accompany him, as interpreter only. This caused the rumors about the death of his wife to circulate more than before. Cortés, warned of the danger, took a decisive step to silence all such insinuations. At Orizaba, he caused the sudden marriage of Marina with one of his officers, Don Juan de Jaramillo.

Poor Marina was required to carry her devotion, her absolute obedience to her chief, to the extreme point of marrying a man she scarcely knew. She yielded. It is said that she never lived with her husband, but withdrew at once to her birthplace, at Païnala, where her own family still lived; that her guilty relatives threw themselves at her feet, afraid that she would have them destroyed by the Spaniard. She forgave them, and passed the rest of her life far away from the capital, in obscurity. She died young, when Cortés was yet at the height of his fame, before he had suffered the mortification of seeing himself overlooked by the court of Spain.

Not long after the expedition to Honduras, Cortés carried out his intention of crossing to Spain. On this first visit he was, as we have seen, received with acclamations, and loaded with praise and honors. When he again entered Mexico, with the title of Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, he brought with him a Spanish bride, Doña Juana de Zuñiga, daughter of the second Count of Aguilar, and niece of the Duke de Bejar.

So Malintzi, if her shade returns to wander under the _ahuehuetes_ of Chapultepec, has her own grief to mourn, in addition to the ruin she helped to bring upon her people.

XIX.

INDIANS.

The Conquest was complete. Tenochtitlan was no more, and the Aztec kings with their dynasty were blotted out. So were all the other independent states of Anahuac, for if here and there a petty chieftain were allowed still to call himself lord of his domains, it was a mere form, to keep him and his people contented, while in reality the Spaniard controlled every thing throughout the conquered land. The terrible war gods were overthrown, their temples and images thrown down and hidden under ground. Even the annals of the country, the picture-writings, which the Spaniards imagined to be impious scrolls connected with the heathen belief of the savages, were destroyed. Before long distinctive names of the separate tribes were wiped out, as details of no importance, and all the native races of the country went by the common title of Indios.

This of course is the Spanish word for Indians, with the same source. Columbus in seeking a new world believed that when found it would be India, little thinking that the earth he had rightly guessed to be round, was big enough to contain a whole continent between the western shore of Europe and the Indies, a remote land almost fabulous for its riches and precious stones.

The first natives Columbus encountered in the Western World, he therefore naturally called Indios, and this name attaches to all the indigenous tribes of America. So the first settlers farther north, on the shores of the Atlantic, called the red men who came to meet them Indians. But the Red Men of the north are a distinctive race from the Indios of Anahuac. If allied at all, they are but distant relatives. Their color, their skulls, their brains, their manners and customs are all different. As we have seen, the Nahuatl tribes that migrated from Aztlan belonged, with scarce a doubt, to a people antecedent to the Red Indians of North America.

Nevertheless, the word Indian is so fixed in the minds of most of the people of the United States, as belonging to the savage of the tomahawk and war-whoop, that it is rather common to fancy the Mexican Indios to be of the same stock. Many a reader of Prescott's "Conquest" has been surprised to find that the natives who were terrified at the approach of Cortés on his war-horse, were not first cousins to the Mohawks and Algonquins whom Parkman has described.

It is necessary to dwell on this, in order that any fair opinion should be formed of the native races of Anahuac, belonging to the different tribes of Indios, descendants of Tarascans, Otomies, Zapotecs, Mextecs, Mazahuans, Popolocs, Zotzils, Mayas, etc., which now form a large part of the population of Mexico.

Whatever are or have been their virtues, they are wholly different from those of the North American Red Man. Whatever their vices, they are equally so, or if similar, similar on account of like conditions of life. Climate, inheritance, and the vicissitudes of their fortunes, would have caused them to be somewhat different by this time, even if they had come from a common stock, but this is absolutely not the case, and long before the time of the Conquest, the characteristics of the Nahuatl race, which still cling to their present descendants, were as strongly marked as those of the Red Man, while they were widely remote from them.

The indigenous inhabitants of Mexico, however, have as good a right to the name, wholly unappropriate in either case, of _Indian_, as the "North American Savage" has. This latter title would be totally misapplied in connection with the native Mexicans, because for long generations, these have been above the level of wild men. After the Conquest, for years the Spaniards were disturbed by remaining savage tribes who, resisting civilization, had retreated to the woods and mountains; but these tribes have been long exterminated. Their successor, the highway robber of roads and mountain passes, was of another breed, imported, with other products of civilization, from old Spain.

The Aztec dynasty, then, was extinct, but the Aztec nation, a large population, even after the great diminution in the wars of the Conquest, remained on the plateau to begin a new life under the influences of Christian rulers. The horrid rites of their old religion were utterly done away with, relinquished, it would seem, with no great regret, by the common people. To them there had been no glory, no gratification, in the wholesale slaughter of the sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli. The part of their ceremonies which appealed to their source of enjoyment was the feasting and dancing, and general rejoicing on such occasions.

The first government of the Spaniards was a military one, whose chief was Fernando Cortés. He had wisely surrounded himself by a body of advisers or approvers, in the early time of founding Vera Cruz when he established the _Ayuntamiento_, composed of his companions of the voyage. This organization was maintained during the time of Cortés' administration. Its duties were to found new cities, parcel out lands and farms among the colonists, establish markets, regulate sanitary conditions, and enforce the laws; thus standing between the natives and new settlers, who began to enter the country. Many of the rules and ordinances of the early Ayuntamientos are still in force.

On account of complaints which reached the court of Spain, against the rule thus established by Cortés, the king resolved to put the new country in the hands of a body of magistrates who should be obeyed by all the governors of provinces, representing the person of the monarch and enforcing his authority. The members of the first _Audiencia_ arrived in Vera Cruz on the 6th of December, 1528. There were five of them; their president was Nuño de Guzman, a cruel and sanguinary man, whose despotism left the most bitter recollections throughout the country. With his _oidores_, as the other members were called, he displayed the greatest cruelty toward the Indians, in direct disobedience to his instructions, which were to treat them with the greatest gentleness; he continued the traffic in slaves, by which he and his Audiencia expected to enrich themselves. They quarrelled with the ecclesiastics and religious orders, so that they were excommunicated by the bishop, in return for which they broke up by force a religious procession in the streets of the capital. In short, they made themselves intolerable alike to natives and colonists. Nuño de Guzman, finding himself thus unpopular, went away from Mexico in 1529, and paid a visit to Michoacan, where he strove to extort quantities of gold from Calzonzi, who, as we know, had hitherto escaped the violence of the invaders, and was living happily in his palaces of Tzintzuntzan and Patzcuaro, nominal sovereign of his Tarascans.

Calzonzi could not or would not satisfy the greed of the cruel Guzman, whereupon he was burned alive, as is shown in the same picture where he embraces the cross, in the town-hall of Tzintzuntzan. Nuño went away without any treasures or precious stones, and made war upon the natives of Jalisco, founding in that country a town which he called the Holy Ghost. This afterwards became Guadalajara, now one of the finest cities in the whole of Mexico.

This career of destruction and tyranny came to an end by the arrival of the second Audiencia, sent in response to the volume of complaints which reached the court of Spain. This second body had for its task to undo all that the first had done.

It published a royal decree which declared all the Indians free, and condemned to death all those who had made slaves of them. It had the care of diffusing instruction among the natives, and establishing the teaching of Latin in a college founded for the education of the natives. Its authority was used only for beneficial ends, and was of good effect in calming the agitation caused by its predecessors. The archbishops and bishops, by their religious character, also exercised a great influence over both colonists and Indians, with whom they were objects of veneration and respect.

Complaints, however, still reached the court of Spain, which, weary of so much dissension, resolved to send a viceroy as the supreme head of the colony, to represent in every thing the person of the king, subject only to the orders received from home, and controlling all affairs, civil and military, connected with the government. Difficulties often arose from quarrels between the viceroy and the Audiencia, and in extreme cases the will of the latter prevailed, while advices from the parent government were on their way from Spain; but in general the functions of the Audiencias were from this time limited to the simple administration of justice.

The country of New Spain, at the time of the the arrival of the first viceroy, had a wide extent; large tracts at that time unknown, were afterwards explored and included in its territory, through colonization by settlers. These lands extended over the immense prairies of the north, and included Texas, Alta California, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which now belong to the United States.

XX.

THE FIRST OF THE VICEROYS.

Antonio de Mendoza, Conde de Tendilla, was the first viceroy sent by Charles V. to New Spain. He arrived in the autumn of 1535.

He belonged to the great Spanish family of Mendoza, which counted twenty-three generations, and claimed descent from the Cid himself. Better than this, he had a well-balanced and moderate character, and governed the country with justice and generosity combined. He had no intention of enriching himself by his position, but at heart put the interests of the Spanish colonists before every other consideration, except those of the Indians, for whose welfare he had from the first a genuine regard. It would seem that Charles V., harassed as he was with the intrigues and difficulties of his own empire, already revolving the design which he put in practice later, of retiring from the world, had himself selected for his first representative in the new country a man whom he knew personally to be equal to the task, one not only of noble blood, but honorable character.

Mendoza set himself to reform the abuses which had already appeared, protected the Indians from the humiliations which the newly arrived Spaniards were disposed to put upon them; he stimulated all branches of agriculture, and finding the natives were already well informed in the cultivation of land, he encouraged them in this pursuit by all possible efforts.

In order to develop the growth and manufacture of wool he caused sheep of fine breed to be brought from Spain; he encouraged the silk industry, and all employments coming from the productions of the earth, which the climate of Mexico greatly favors.

Before his arrival the Franciscan brotherhood had founded several convents. As early as 1521 Cortés, after the conquest of Tenochtitlan, had sent home an urgent request that priests should be sent from Spain to convert the heathen in the new province. For Cortés, through all his undertaking, earnestly regarded his mission as a crusade against the unbeliever; he never hesitated to destroy the temples and gods of the Aztecs, and his first step after victory was to forcibly baptize all his prisoners and the inhabitants of conquered cities into the Christian religion.