Friday, November 27, 2015

After The Siege, In The Valley of Mexico: November 1521

In her many-voiced look, Camilla Townsend also pauses to reflect on the long but eventual Spanish success with the siege of Tenochtitlan. Like Matthew Restall's conclusions about the importance of steel crossbows and steel swords in this conflict, Townsend insists that these weapons were one of just a couple central elements to the westerner's brutal victory. Along with the distant supports from their network of information and the supply-chain reaching back to Cuba and Spain, the immediate spearpoint of force was the steel sword with its long-lasting effects from their wounds, and those by steel crossbow bolts.

The memory of these weapons filled the stories that were retold by the elders long after the siege. Townsend says tepoztli - their word for steel or iron - was the most commonly used term used by these elder storytellers concerning the sixty to seventy day siege. Over and over again they recalled metals in armor and blades, in shields and crossbow bolts and arrows. The sound they made clattering, the shape of the blades cutting, these are telling details issuing from a culture unused to such forms of violence.

One hero that Townsend mentions that the elders spoke of, and found in the Florentinus Codex, a local, Axoquentzin, who fought in the siege was struck down by such a metal bolt.
"Axoquentzin pursued his enemies, he made them let people go, he spun them about. But this warrior Axoquentzin died there ... they hit him with an iron bolt in the chest, they shot an iron bolt into his heart. He died as if he were stretching out when going to sleep."

It must be noticed that this quick quote is woven into a longer discussion of her summary of the 'Water-Pouring Song'. This was a handed down version of a much older song sung by locals. Water, symbolic of so many things for Mexica then, in its simplest state, was a source of life and of power. Those who held water, as a substance, as a surplus (and could thus pour it out for others) thereby held a form of power. If others would bring water for you, you held the power. Mexico City, built on a lake, source of water, trade, and life symbolised all that. Townsend reminds us that when the women left the city and revoked 'the right to have water carried to them', they did it for survival. Many thousands must have left that year. Those that had lost males in their families, and had to take care of the children out of harm's way, and the older one's too who had survived the smallpox. All these ravaged people came flowing out of the city. [p. 124]

After the initial attacks in the summer and the siege took hold during those months, Cortes would often return to the base he had established across the water from Teotihuacan at the place locally called Coyoacan. New plans and sorties were hatched here, information from the coast and their Tlaxcalan allies could come here. Cortes had made an old palace his headquarters in this place and stayed there for the next few years.  In his telling, he would go out on horseback with a trusted band of men, go to some local village and sack it or take prisoners, give out orders, or sometimes, work out negotiations. Much of these negotiations would happen at Coyoacan as well and with Malintzin as translator. A system was set up where the local leaders, from more and more locales in the surrounding region, were told to make tribute to Cortes, or suffer the consequences. Networks of locals, antagonistic to the goals of Cortes, were sniffed out, captured, held prisoner, tortured, and sometimes killed. Refusals, conflicts, rebellions were put down.

Leaders were put in place to control and use locals for employment to produce goods for more tributes for Cortes. This was the basis of the encomienda system of wealth production and extraction that Cortes had learned in Spain, seen in use in Cuba, and was now exporting to the Mexica. It wasn't long before many local nobles began seeing this as a possible means for advancement among those quick-witted enough to follow orders. Malintzin, very often of necessity, was the one tasked with delivering this news of these new methods and means. Years later she would be accused (by Jeronimo de Aguilar) of having her own door where tributes would arrive at the Coyoacan center. Cortes claimed in 1529 she was running a business then dealing with herbs and tobacco 'that she liked to smoke'. He could see her position as vulnerable and even deserving of special consideration. [p. 134] In the months since the end of the siege, Malintzin had become pregnant with the child of Cortes. This brief snapshot shows how their months were filled following the siege, and into 1522.

Meanwhile, in Santiago de Cuba, a letter was written by one Alonso Suazo, dated 21 November 1521. A former judge in Segovia, Suazo had been sent to Cuba by the court of King Carlos V. His job was to make an official inquiry into the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants in the new world. Diego da Ordas, on his way returning from the new world to Spain, had much to tell the King's man in Cuba about the advanced civilization and culture of these locals, about the siege, and had showed him a great many treasures. But despite all this, already, Suazo was dismayed at the idolatry and human sacrifice that the locals committed on each other. One wonders what he would think if he knew what was happening in the center of the Valley of Mexico at that same time. [pp. 126-7]
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notes and pagination form  Malintzin's Choices: an Indian Woman In The Conquest of Mexico, Camilla Townshend, University of New Mexico Press, as part of the series Dialogos, 2006

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