Friday, November 8, 2013

Cortes Meets Motecuhzoma: November 8, 1519

The meeting between Motecuhzoma and Cortes that Bernal Diaz said happened on this day was at first accepted at face-value. The two met, it was historic, dramatic, consequential and has loomed large for both parties and many others, down to the current day. Cortes had been wanting this day to come for some months and he would also want it to be remembered in a certain way. The locals had their varying recollections, and Bernal Diaz had his version, too. But those stories that came from the sixteenth century had accepted the initial story told by Cortes with little in any means for scrutiny or understanding of the immediate environment, the temporal context of the day and these prior months of Spanish advancement in Mesoamerica.

Matthew Restall gives a great breakdown of the meeting between Cortes and Motecuhzoma as one centerpiece in his fifth chapter of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. There was an attempted handshake, according to Cortes and a gift by him of a great necklace. Cortes says he tried to hug the great leader but was stopped by his guards from touching him. Restall points out that Gomara in the official biography of Cortes 'glosses over this and said they saluted each other.' Bernal Diaz said they both 'bowed deeply' toward each other, but Restall says that neither Cortes nor Gomara mention this.
Further, Restall points out that the bowing and the direct address of Motecuhzoma to Cortes, as told by the locals of friar Sahagun decades later, broke with the strict adherence to the leader's own protocol. No one was allowed to look directly at the great leader unless he gave permission. But Restall says, the way they tell it "... suggests that Moctezuma took the initiative in breaking the taboo, permitting Cortes to look right at him, attempting to meet him at a cultural  halfway point."  He sees the same thing in the Spanish versions of this meeting but says they put a greater emphasis on Montezuma essentially "submitting to Cortes ... prostrated himself". [p. 80]

There really is no way to square these overlapping circles. One can only set the accounts beside each other and compare them and think through the events that led them to this point. Like any encounter. Unless another way is found to hear them or witness it, some other definitive document or some type of time machine that could take us back to the event. As we recall and remember and set things down, it's human nature, we also ammend, reformulate, focus on specific items and re-interpret, for whatever reasons. As time goes by. We want stories to be remembered that make us look good. We want them to show the best aspects of people we like, or are like us. We want to see people putting their best foot forward, to try to do 'good' things. Cortes said he was doing it for God and King and for his men. These basic motives were themselves, we know, subject to quite a bit of manipulation. Then and later.

What compelled Moctezuma that day to go meet Cortes down on the causeway? He didn't have to. Was it curiosity? A mixture of political pressure, a sense of superiority that such a great leader might after all, have? A need perhaps, to show dominance toward this stranger, who Moctezuma might well expect to use at some point for his own advantage. Perhaps even against the long-term enemy of the Tlaxcala or others toward the coast. Perhaps they might act as decent buffers against these soldiers from the ocean, for awhile. But first, what sort of people were they? They were obviously people. After all the evidence of how they ate and lived, this had to be obvious. We also, as we have to eat, as humans, we want to know the truth, as well as somehow, to see justice done. Whatever that is and for whoever that is. But then there are divisions, if not over what happened, and what is to be done, but then over what it all means.

Many years later, historians and officials wanted in hindsight, for their own reasons, to see Montezuma giving away the empire, even accepting that he had been beat or that he thought the Europeans were gods or otherwise invincible. Maybe he did, but probably, he didn't. But truly, the two leaders did not understand each other, coming from two very different cultures and with very different assumptions about what was to be gained in such a meeting. Different ideas about what the future could look like from this point on could develop.
Finding out what lay in common between them depended on the translators of Aguilar and Malintzin to explain every subtlety in every conversation. These conversations between the two would continue for several days. Malintzin knew the subtleties of the Nahua elite from the point of view of a child but not those of the Mexica. Aguilar knew how wily Cortes could be but had failures in diplomacy himself.
It is entirely possible that Motecuhzoma did not realize the danger he was in, especially considering how many diverging and converging forces he was used to balancing in his great realm over a seventeen year reign. His days as leader would soon come to an end.
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quotes from Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall, New York, Oxford University Press Inc., 2004



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