Montezuma First Learns Of The Strangers

The story set down in the Florentine Codex describing the return of the messengers from the Spaniards and Moctezuma's reactions is very famous and virtually uncontested. What is there for evidence to contradict it? As I said before these were collected by one Bernardino de Sahagún a missionary-ethnographer c. 1555 who put these into Book 12 of what is now called the Florentine Codex. These were then selected and printed in a twentieth-century collection of inhabitant re-tellings called The Broken Spears.

But as it was set down, when the messengers returned, Moctezuma told his servants to tell them to meet him at the House of the Serpent where he then went and ordered the ritual slaughter of two captives...

"... before his eyes: their breasts were tore open, and the messengers were sprinkled with their blood. This was done because the messengers had completed a difficult mission: they had seen the gods, their eyes had looked on their faces. They had even conversed with the gods! 

When the sacrifice was finished, the messengers reported to the king. They told him how they had made the journey, and what they had seen, and what food the strangers ate. Motecuhzoma was astonished and terrified by their report, and the description of the strangers' food astonished him above all else.

He was also terrified to learn how the cannon roared, how its noise resounded, how it caused one to faint and grow deaf. The messengers told him: "A thing like a ball of stone comes out of its entrails: it comes out shooting sparks and raining fire. The smoke that comes out has a pestilent odor, like that of rotten mud. This odor penetrates even to the brain and causes the greatest discomfort. If the cannon is aimed against a mountain, the mountain splits and cracks open. If it is aimed against a tree, it shatters the tree into splinters. This is a most unnatural sight, as if the tree had exploded from within." [pages twenty-nine -- thirty]

The messengers told him, their clothes and arms and helmets, swords, bows, shields and spears were iron. That they had deer as tall as a roof of a house, that carried them on their backs. Only their faces can be seen but their skin is white - "as if made of lime" and their plentiful beard, and  mustache hair is yellow, curly and fine. Their food large and white and lightweight, and tasted like the pith of a cornstalk and sweet, like honey. Their dogs were  enormous, spotted, tongues hanging out, ears dangling and their eyes were yellow and "flash fire and shoot off sparks".

"When Motecuhzoma heard this report, he was filled with terror. It was as if his heart had fainted, as if it had shriveled. It was as if he were conquered by despair." [page thirty-one]

 After this, he sent out his most gifted men. Warriors, prophets and the magicians. He sent them captives to be sacrificed, thinking this might placate them. But those Spaniards who saw this, it is said. turned away in revulsion, wiped away tears and spat at the ground. The strangers would not eat food that was sprinkled with the blood of captive sacrifices, "... because it reeked of it; it sickened them, as if the blood had rotted." [page thirty-three]

"Motecuhzoma ordered the sacrifices because he took the Spaniards to be gods; he believed in them and worshipped them as deities. That is why they were called "Gods who have come from heaven." [pages thirty-three -- thirty-four]

Those sent to eyewitness the Spaniards were instructed to learn about them but to try any device that might trick them, change the wind against them that they might break out in sores, grow sick or die. Even using incantation. Nothing worked. When he heard this it was ordered that everyone had to act, on pain of death to provide everything possible to the new arrivals. It was their job '... to learn what the strangers needed and to provide it." [page thirty-four]
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All quotes from The Broken Spears: the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico, translated, edited with an introduction by Miguel León-Portilla, expanded and with a postscript, Boston, Beacon Press, 2006.


Just this week we have new discoveries about the ancient inhabitants from deep under Teotihuacan in subterranean passageways where it is already presumed ancient rituals were performed.

Another discovery in the Vatican has shown perhaps the earliest known depiction by westerners of Native Americans. In the old quarters of the Borgia palace has been found a Pinturrichio mural dating from about 1494 that was recently cleaned. This area of the papal chambers was closed off for nearly four hundred years, in the wake of the many scandals of the papacy of Alexander VI. His was a story I wanted to explore at length.