Entering Tlaxcala: Cortes: September 1519

There are three different versions, of course, of how the europeans first entered the city of Tlaxcala. Bernal Diaz has one that gives remarkable, picturesque first-person details of how their troop entered the city and the amazing reception that he says they received. The local's tale documented by Sahagun decades later, had a remembered version that is just as remarkable for how different it is than both that of Diaz and the one Cortes offered in his second letter to the young King and Emperor Charles V. The version that Cortes told is almost entirely about geography and local economics.

Due to the stark differences, it is worth quoting them at length and verbatim.

After concluding the negotiations, accepting the friendship of the Tlaxcala and after much pleading from them, he says, Cortes and Co. went to the city "six leagues from our camp". He writes to the King:

"The city is so big and so remarkable that, although there is much I could say of it which I will omit, the little I will say is, I think, almost unbelievable, for the city is much larger than Granada and very much stronger, with as good buildings and many more people than Granada had when it was taken, and very much better supplied with the produce of the land, namely, bread, fowl and game and fresh-water fish and vegetables and other things they eat which are very good. There is in this city a market where each and every day upward of thirty thousand people come to buy and sell, without counting the other trade which goes on elsewhere in the city. In this market there is everything they might need or wish to trade; provisions as well as clothing and footwear. There is jewelery of gold and silver and precious stones and other ornaments of featherwork and all as well laid out as in any square or marketplace in the world. There is much pottery of many sorts and as good as the best in Spain. They sell a great deal of firewood and charcoal and medicinal and cooking herbs. There are establishments like barbers' where they have their hair washed and are shaved, and there are baths. Lastly there is amongst them every consequence of good order and courtesy, and they are such an orderly and intelligent people that the best in Africa cannot equal them.

In this province, which is in size ninety leagues or more about, there are many beautiful valleys and plains, all cultivated and harvested, leaving no place untilled; and the orderly manner in which, until now, these people have been governed is almost like that of the states of Venice or Genoa or Pisa, for they have no overlord. There are many chiefs, all of whom reside in this city, and the country towns contain peasants who are vassals of these lords and each of whom holds his land independently; some have more than others, and for their wars they join together and together they plan and direct them."

 Cortes continues to give an account of them dispensing justice, as a demonstration. A local had stolen some gold from a Spaniard. They caught him, brought him to Cortes and asked what they shoudl do with him. He thanked them for their 'diligence' and said they should do with him as they normally would since they were in their own land. He was marched through the big market with a crier announcing his crime.

"They made him stand below a kind of stage which is in the middle of this marketplace, and the crier climbed to the top of the stage and in a loud voice again announced his crime; when they saw him they all beat him over the head with cudgels until he died. Many others we have seen in captivity, where they say they are held for thefts and other crimes. There are in this province, according to the investigation I had made, 150,000 inhabitants together with another small province which is adjacent, called Guasyncango, and there they live as thse do with their natural lord; and these are no less Your Highness's vassals than those of Tascalteca."

This generous and generally revealing depiction is also quite surprisingly, admiring. In addition, Anthony Pagden offers a couple notes to this story. He says trade was conducted by barter. That money was not used except sometimes in cacoa beans 'to balance an exchange'. "Quills of gold dust and crescent-shaped knives were also used, and among the Maya red shells or beads and copper bells were common" [n 21, p 463].

Also, of course, Tlaxcala and the Mexica empire had a history that went back since before the Aztec began expanding outward from the Great Basin, perhaps as early as 1428. Tlaxcala had been wealthy, benefitting from this great market and the roads all around to all the different regions they reached. Over decades, eventually, the Mexica had this region surrounded. Literally, all the surrounding areas paid their portions to the Aztecs. With Cholula and Huexotzinco - what Cortes calls Guasyncango - Tlaxcala had reached an arrangement with the Aztecs where they fought staged battles with each other which provided frequent sacrificial victims for the victors of these contests. As Pagden says, "...the appearance of open hostility was maintained for the benefit of the common people, and neither side would have passed over an opportunity such as Cortes offered to overthrow the other." [n 13, p 461]
Pagden points out the main sources for all this is found in La Historia de Tlaxcala, a single manuscript found in the Glasgow University Library and in La Historia Chichimeca, vol II, lxxxiii et seq.
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all quotes from pp. 67-69, and notes, pagination, 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