Thursday, October 17, 2013

In Cholula: mid October, 1519

It was a few days after Cortes & Company had entered the ancient mesoamerican city that the famous battle, or massacre of Cholula occurred. The brutality, the death toll, the destruction was remembered as particularly heavy this time, by all accounts. Cortes would say that they had been warned not to try to deceive them. And he used that prior warning at a later time, as part of his attempt at honest justification of his actions there, in his Second Letter to the King. The Nahuatl remembrances set down by friar Sahagun decades later, blame intrigue by the Tlaxcalans. The Historia de Tlaxcala written by Manuel Camargo in the 1580's blamed the Cholulans for not surrendering and for killing a Tlaxcalan messenger.

Malintzin was shown to be helpful in saving the europeans again, as told by both Cortes and Bernal Diaz. This was by way of an old woman who came to her one night and explained that all around were traps and ambushes, big pits dug in the streets and filled with spikes and spears, all covered over with concealing mattes. When the right time came the Cholulans would pounce and drive the europeans out and into the traps. This was all at the command and instruction of the Mexica, the rulers of the Cholulans, as some of their chiefs explained. Bernal Diaz spends some time on this part of the story with the back and forth retellings by Malintzin, and with the accusations of this given to the Cholulan caciques there. Diaz describes a tense standoff at dawn after a night being prepared for and believing that an attack from the locals would come [ch lxxxiii].

Bartolomeo de las Casas has at different times been both famous and infamous for his brief description of the violence that ensued. In his Brief Letters of the Destruction of the Indies, he claimed there was no reason for the senseless deletion of so many lives. Only to punish and strike fear into all the rest. Another similar telling, an eyewitness, Vazquez de Tapia, said that leaders and load bearers were called into a courtyard and there, were salughtered by order of Cortes, and by the spaniards*. Cortes claims there were three thousand killed there in two hours. Vazquez de Tapia puts the number as high as twenty thousand. Then they set fire to the place.

Cholula was an ancient religious center and mercantile hub, with perhaps a greater population than Rome. It was home to over 300 temples and today, remains home to the largest pyramid in the Americas and the largest pyramid by volume of any kind, in the world. It was built in successive overlapping layers for millenia. Since the Spaniards built a temple on top of it, and the innermost layer was built c. 300 BCE, the Great Pyramid of Cholula remains the oldest continuously used building of the Americas.
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*note 27, pp 465-66, from Hernán  Cortés: Letters From Mexico, translated, edited and with a new intro by Anthony Pagden, as a Yale Nota Bene book, Yale University Press, USA 2001

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