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About the Book

The Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century was one of the most important and cataclysmic events in history. Spanish expeditions endured incredible hardships in order to open up the lands of the ‘New World’, and few stories in history can match these for drama and endurance.

In Conquistadors, Michael Wood follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest of the Spanish adventurers travelling from the forests of Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, the deserts of North Mexico, the snowpeaks of the Andes and the heights of Machu Picchu. He experiences the epic journeys of Cortes, Pizarro, Orellana and Cabeza de Vaca, and explores the turbulent and terrifying events surrounding the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.

Wood brings these stories to vivid life, highlighting both the heroic accomplishments and the complex moral legacy of the European invasion. Conquistadors is Michael Wood at his best – thoughtful, provocative and gripping history.

About the Author

For more than 20 years, historian and broadcaster Michael Wood has made compelling journeys into the past, which have brought history alive for a generation of readers and viewers. He is the author of several highly praised books on English history including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, In Search of England and In Search of Shakespeare. He has over 80 documentary films to his name, among them Art of the Western World, Legacy, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Conquistadors and In Search of Myths and Heroes.

Michael was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Oriel College Oxford, where he did post-graduate research in Anglo-Saxon history. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: ‘The Lord of the Snow Star’

1. Cortes and Montezuma

2. The War of the World

3. The Conquest of the Incas

4. The Great War of the Incas

5. El Dorado: The Journey of Francisco Orellana

6. The Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca

Epilogue: ‘All the World is Human’

Further Reading

Picture Section

Index

Acknowledgements

To Joaquin Garcia Såanchez and David Wallace

The age will come in the ripeness of time
When Ocean will loosen the chain of things
And bare new worlds to the storms.
Then a huge country will be revealed
and Thule will no longer be the last land.

•

SENECA’S Medea, quoted by AUGUSTINE DE ZARATE in The History of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, 1555

PROLOGUE: ‘THE LORD OF THE SNOW STAR’

Everything that has happened since the marvellous discovery of the Americas has been so extraordinary that the whole story remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it at first hand. Indeed, it seems to overshadow all the deeds of famous people in the past, no matter how heroic, and to silence all talk of other wonders of the world.

•

BARTOLOME DE LAS CASAS A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1542

UP JUST BEFORE 3 A.M., we gulp down several cups of hot coca tea and then each of us carefully packs a ball of coca leaves in the cheek. Outside the ground is white with frost. It is bitterly cold, and we cram on every available layer of clothing. A deep breath, then on with the rucksack. Hieronymo, the jolly horse-handler, has four helpers to carry the heavy gear, the tripod and boxes, though we have cut the shooting kit down to the minimum. I take the rucksack for my cameras, and soon regret it. Any extra weight becomes a struggle.

We start off at 15,000 feet, going up to nearly 17,000 on a steep rocky climb over a treacherous scree of boulders intersected by streams. The first few hundred yards from the camp are lung-bursting: you gasp in the freezing night air every few seconds and never seem to get enough, almost drowning in air. The night is cloudy, but a full moon, just on the wane, watery behind a thin curtain of cloud, helps to light our way. We stop every ten minutes for a rest, and in about an hour reach the foot of the glacier, the sacred ice that the pilgrims call in Quechua, the Inca language, Quoyllur Riti, ‘The Lord of the Snow Star’.

Coming up from below the glacier, the huge white mass of ice suddenly looms up under the deep blue night, framed between black crags like a still, pale monster. We stumble the last few yards down a rocky step to the very edge of the ice. Glistening, gently dripping, it almost feels alive. Rows of wax candles have been left under its lip, and little knots of people sit in silence, some praying, some just holding hands. Two women in traditional country dress with round fringed hats and huipils (tunics) sit by their candles, murmuring quietly.

Our guide immediately goes down into the trough by the ice edge, touches the ice with his forehead, salutes and embraces it, scattering coca leaves across its surface. Then he gestures with his feathered walking stick, and strokes the ice once more, mouthing a little prayer in Quechua to the apu, the spirit of the mountain. It is a magical moment, made all the more poignant by the plaintive sound of pipe, accordion and drum somewhere out in the darkness.

Higher up on the glacier, there is a magnificent view in the pre-dawn light: black jagged peaks, streamers of snow lifting off their tops, while the first hints of dawn soften the deep blue of the night sky. Up the snow slopes, groups of dancers perform their rituals with the bear men in their animal skins and whips. This is the most ancient kind of worship here, pre-Spanish, pre-Inca even.

The light grows, the peaks are touched golden; shining streaks of light spread across the snow in the high ravines. There are scenes of great jollity – brass bands and lilting songs. There is a snow slide on a steep part of the glacier and crowds have gathered, taking turns to whoosh down accompanied by loud whoops and cheers, one man cradling his euphonium. The sky is now an intense dazzling blue and around eight o’clock the sun flashes over the top to roars from the crowd.

Up the glacier, hundreds of tiny dots are visible, people bringing back the most important souvenir: ice hacked out of the ice floe. To one side, lone pilgrims are loading blocks of ice on their backs just as they are depicted on the old Andean drinking cups, and in the pages of the sixteenth-century Andean chronicler Waman Poma. One of them stops and, with a gesture to the surrounding peaks, speaks to us:

These mountains are our apus, our spirits. We are a community from Paucartambo in the Sacred Valley. We come here every year. After we have been up on the ice, we head off on foot to Tayankani along that path up there, to a huaca, a holy rock, up to the west of the valley. We walk till midday tomorrow. This is what our ancestors have always done. These ceremonies are not to do with the Church.

More people had joined us now, and an old man butted in, speaking in Spanish: ‘Ours is a true worship, though it is not to do with the Church.’ A third man, more educated, spoke:

We are told that when Inca Manco fought the Spanish at the time of the coming of the whites, he said this to the indigenous people: ‘Don’t forget the rituals of your ancestors…do what you have to in public, but in private keep our old customs and ceremonies close to your hearts.’ And this we still do.

It was a theme we would encounter again and again in our journeys through the Americas in the footsteps of the conquistadors.

This book is about events which took place nearly 500 years ago. The Spanish conquest was one of the most cataclysmic events in history, events which, in a couple of generations, overthrew the last high civilizations which had arisen independently on earth; which saw Spanish expeditions endure the most unbelievable hardships to open up lands from Tierra del Fuego to the Carolinas. Few events, if any in history, match these for sheer drama, endurance, and the incredible distances covered. And the conquest is still within living history; its effects are still with us, working themselves out now across the globe.

Here in Peru, as they had done in Mexico, the Spanish conquistadors swept away the indigenous state, the Inca empire, and its state religion, but below the level of the rulers, as we were to discover, history works in mysterious ways, and many beliefs and customs were maintained tenaciously by the ordinary Andean people. And this ceremony on the wild and forbidding slopes of the sacred mountain was one of them.

After the pilgrims had begun their descent, I lingered on the ice, unwilling to let go of such a haunting, splendid scene. History leaves many wounds – some never heal; in time some do. The Conquista was at once one of the most significant events in history, and one of the most cruel and devastating. But in history there is no going back – and blame or regret are pointless. All we can do is try to understand. The Inca past was already being idealized in the immediate post-conquest generation, by Peruvian historians such as Waman Poma and Garcilaso Inca. And it still is today. But that past is irrecoverable now. What we see is as much the product of the conquest, and of what has happened in the nearly 500 years since, as it is of that deeper past.

Many times on these journeys I found myself feeling pessimistic about the fate of all these traditional cultures, fighting against the onset of global culture, their encoded identities, built up over millennia, being scrubbed away so rapidly in a generation or two. But events such as the Quoyllur Riti pilgrimage are galvanizing mixes of past and present, Inca and Spanish, and they show that out of the debris of history, new identities are shaped from what is at hand and, in some magical way, these carry on the encoded memories, in societies and civilizations, just as in people. Something gets handed down, almost in the manner of genetics. At the start of the third millennium, the past still lives on in us, forming new worlds out of the debris of the old, and the remorseless and destructive march of history.

As we prepared to go, sunlight flooded the valley, the sound of brass bands echoed around the peaks, and a spindrift of snow floated along the glacier above our heads, swirling coca leaves in the wind, and what looked like the finest sparkling shards of gold. Looking back now, it was a fitting beginning to a series of journeys which would lead us in the footsteps of the conquistadors from Miami Beach to Lake Titicaca, from the deserts of northern Mexico to the snowpeaks of the Andes, and from the forests of the Amazon to the heights of Machu Picchu.

Michael Wood, July 2000

CORTES AND MONTEZUMA

When we saw all those cities and villages built on water; and the other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and shrines and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, never seen, and never dreamed of before.

•

BERNAL DIAZ DEL CASTILLO The Conquest of New Spain, c. 1565

AT THE END of the hot August of 1520 – Monday, the 27th, to be precise – the German artist Albrecht Dürer paid a visit to the royal residence of the Spanish king and Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, in Brussels. Dürer, now aged fifty, and a famous painter, wandered in the delightful garden behind the house, admiring the fountains, the labyrinth and the beast-garden, taking pleasure in the creations of the humanistic civilization of Europe. As it happened, that very day – indeed that very hour – far away in Mexico, Hernan Cortes, in the name of King Charles, was preparing to attack the Mexican town of Tepeaca, to massacre its warriors, to brand and enslave its women, to lance, burn and even feed human beings alive to dogs.

By now Cortes had been campaigning in Mexico for eighteen months. He had already sent the first news of Aztec wonders back to Europe: an account which included a map of the great capital city of Tenochtitlan, its myriad waterways and canals like a grander and more spectacular Venice (as Cortes said, ‘the most beautiful thing in the world’). Cortes had also sent treasures and works of art back to Europe from this hitherto unknown civilization. These had now arrived in Brussels and come to the king’s house. Dürer was taken inside to see the pieces laid out in several chambers. He recorded his reaction in his diary:

I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms of the armour of the people there, with all manner of wondrous weapons, harness, spears, wonderful shields, extraordinary clothing, beds and all manner of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies. These things are all so precious they are valued at 100,000 florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that touches my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express my feelings about what I saw there…

The gold disc (an Aztec calendar?) and the other precious metals have long since been melted down. But a few pieces have survived from what Dürer saw that day: ornate ceremonial spear-throwers crusted with gold, a tiny jade frog, an obsidian blade. Most remarkable of all, the featherwork sent to King Charles can still be seen: shields, fans, standards and cloaks, a mosaic depicting the demon Ahuitzotl; and, even now, nearly 500 years after they were made, although their colour is somewhat faded, the green quetzal plumes and blue macaw feathers, when breathed on, or gently brushed, still fluff out. In their vivacity and strangeness, they conjure up the shock of the new felt by the many during that astonishing time when treasures of the Aztecs and the Maya, or the gold of the Incas, landed in Europe.

‘It was a miracle,’ said the conquistador Cieza de Leon, ‘that these wonderful lands had remained unknown to the rest of the world through all of history, and were saved by God to be discovered in our time…’

The Shock of the New

THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD has been called the greatest event in history. It had a profound impact on the imagination as well as on the economies and cultures of the world. The scene Dürer describes epitomizes this collision of worlds: an extraordinary moment when things from an unknown continent came into European Renaissance society.

The conquistadors brought back exotic foods which would change the diet that Europeans had followed since the Stone Age: potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, maize, sweet potatoes, avocados, guavas, pineapples, tobacco and chocolate (a good Aztec word) are just a few of them. They also brought back samples of New World flora and fauna – magnolias from Central America, lupins from the Andes, and dahlias whose quilled petals were hybridized in Aztec gardens. They brought back parrots, macaws and toucans to satisfy the curiosity of the rich.

There was also human freight. Columbus had already shipped bemused Carib Indians back to Europe; now Cortes transported Mexican ball-players and jugglers to perform before the king in Seville. Later, they went to Rome and ‘juggled a log with their feet…before a delighted Pope’. In Paris, Amazonian Indians acted out their forest lives in circus shows; a Brazilian chief was presented to Henry VIII, and an Eskimo man and woman, from Baffin Island, impressed Londoners with their dignified bearing and modesty.

Artefacts made by these peoples were coveted by collectors, as they still are. Jade figures, turquoise masks, Aztec sacrificial knives – all found their places in antiquarians’ cabinets alongside ancient Greek votive phalli and Roman coins. Elizabeth I’s astrologer, John Dee, owned an Aztec obsidian disc and conjured spirits through his ‘devil’s looking glass’. Such things could thrill, inform, evoke a sense of wonder – and drive men mad. Images of New World Indians appear on Renaissance mausolea, and church pews, in sculptures by Bernini, and paintings by Velasquez. And the idea of the New World informs poems, plays and works of literature as various as Thomas More’s Utopia, Montaigne’s Essays and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with its problematical and ironical commentary on the ‘Brave New World’.

Other aspects of what has been called the ‘Columbian exchange’ between the Old and New World, were almost inconceivably destructive. The Conquista unleashed violence, death and destruction on a scale unknown until then. Smallpox, malaria, measles and many sexually transmitted diseases were among the bequests of the Old World to the New. Syphilis, perhaps (although this is still controversial), came the other way – from the New to the Old.

The impact of disease, as we shall see, was shattering – a holocaust (it may be called) unparalleled in history. Several tens of millions of people died during the sixteenth century. An equally momentous consequence of the Conquest and its pandemics was the slave trade with Africa, which the European colonial powers used to replace the devastated workforce throughout the Americas. This is estimated at one million people in the first century, but increasing until, in the eighteenth century, it is thought there were as many as seven million slaves in the New World, with eleven million people transported from Africa by force over the whole period. It was the largest movement of population in history. In the light of these horrifying statistics, it is no wonder that it was in the sixteenth century, and in Spain, that the fight began to establish universal human rights and to globalize justice (see here) – a fight which still goes on.

At the root of this amazing expansion was the lure of gold. The Age of Discovery was also the first Age of Capital. The bankers of Europe helped to finance the expeditions of the conquistadors. When he first touched the New World, Columbus asked for gold, ‘for with gold one may do what one wishes in the world’.

In Mexico, Cortes, with his finely tuned irony, told the Aztecs that he and his men ‘suffered from a disease of the heart which is only cured by gold’. Cieza de Leon was inspired to sail to Peru after seeing the Inca gold unloaded in Seville: ‘As long as I live I cannot get it out of my mind.’ All of which perplexed – and, in the end, disgusted – the native peoples. The half-Inca historian Waman Poma portrayed an Indian asking a Spaniard: ‘Do you actually eat this gold?’ And the Spaniard replies, ‘Yes, we certainly do!’ The last of the great Incas, Manco himself, bitterly remarked, ‘Even if the snows of the Andes turned to gold still they would not be satisfied.’

The encounter of the two worlds, then, was both a physical collision and a collision of mindsets. And these are, therefore, not only stories of conquest and exploration, heroism and greed, but stories about changes in the way we see the world; changes in our view of history and civilization, and in the way we understand humanity and nature.

The conquest of the New World also had a tremendous effect on the economies of the world, with reverberations extending far beyond the frontiers of Europe and the Americas; it accelerated a shift in the centre of gravity of the old Eurasian landmass to the lands of the Atlantic seaboard; it outflanked the traditional civilizations of China, India, Persia and the Arab world. The conquest saw the appropriation by European countries of a whole continent with its people and natural resources: the beginning of the modern globalization of politics and economies, of information technology and culture. And, in this light, the story of the conquest gains a poignancy today as its consequences unfold across the world. That is why Karl Marx and others have called it ‘the greatest event in the history of the world’.

What Cortes Didn’t Know

EVENTS MOVED SO FAST AFTER COLUMBUS that it is easy for us to treat the conquest almost as a fait accompli: a continent simply waiting to be appropriated by the winners of the game of History. But that is by no means how it appeared to those who were living at the time – the Spaniards or the Native Americans.

The discovery of the New World, as we call it from a European perspective, took place over quite some time, centuries rather than years. It unfolded in people’s minds as well as in physical space, and it would be a mistake to imagine that, in its early stages, the Europeans had any idea that a vast and populous continent was waiting to be discovered.

For all the high culture of the Renaissance, theirs was still a credulous age with undeveloped ideas of geography and comparative ethnology. Nothing in their past history had remotely prepared them for what was about to happen. Their understanding of Creation was still underpinned by the Bible. And, as we can see from maps painted in the years leading up to Columbus’s voyages (above) their conception of the physical world was still that of the classical geographers, for whom Europe, Africa and Asia constituted the ‘tripartite world’. They had no good instruments or maps, and even twenty or thirty years after Columbus, the view still persisted that what had been found, including the Yucatan and Florida, were merely islands between Europe and Asia. So, when the Pope divided the New World between Spanish and Portuguese zones of influence at the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, he was really drawing an arbitrary line of longitude in a blank space, with no anchor in reality.

To descend into the world of Cortes and his contemporaries, then, we have to imagine the world at progressive stages of a slow gathering of knowledge; a world where the space now occupied by the Americas was largely open sea, in which a cluster of islands were inhabited by strange and primitive peoples, people not ‘like us’ – perhaps not even of the same creation described in the Bible.

To some, the Native Americans were untouched by the word of God and had been debased by the Devil; to others, they were a remnant from before the Fall, living in an innocence long lost by the corrupted West. Either way, it was almost impossible, throughout this whole period, for the indigenous peoples to be considered as humans in their own right. The Europeans brought with them the baggage of centuries of Eurocentrism, and Christian monotheism, which espoused one truth, one time and one version of reality.

Artists such as Dürer might have been impressed by primitive people’s artistic works; activists, such as Las Casas, by their humanity; conquistadors, such as Cieza de Leon and Mansio Serra de Leguizamon, by their innate sense of justice, by the orderliness of their states, by the ‘rationality’ of their societies; but most treated them as inferior beings.

Europeans endlessly debated whether or not they had souls. Or were they people like them? Did their political organization constitute civilization in the sense understood by Christians? Was their religion the direct work of the Devil? Such arguments spawned a host of pronouncements: laws for Indians, rituals of submission, utopian texts, sermons, lectures, papal bulls; and, while the likes of Las Casas asserted that the Indians had full human rights, the humanist Juan Gines de Sepulveda saw them as a barbarous and inhumane people, whose beautiful art was ‘no proof of higher intelligence, for do not bees and spiders make beautiful things human beings cannot entirely emulate?’ How to see the Other is at the heart of our story.

What Cortes Knew

TIMING IS EVERYTHING IN HISTORY. The last of the four voyages of Columbus returned in 1504. By that time, the Portuguese had reached Brazil and, going the other way, had opened a trade route to India. In the Indian Ocean the Portuguese had made contact with Chinese navigators who had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the early fifteenth century. The Chinese ships were four or five times longer than Columbus’s vessels; huge ships using the technology later used by the West to dominate the globe: gunpowder, stern rudders, watertight compartments, compasses. Their sailing gazetteers mapped the staging posts from China to Madagascar; their fleets carried up to 27,000 men with shipboard gardens growing fresh vegetables. In the 1420s, a Chinese junk had sailed forty days into the South Atlantic; and Chinese sailors walked the streets of Jeddah on the Red Sea.

The story told in this book abounds with the ‘what ifs’ of history. It could so easily have been the Chinese in the New World. And what an interesting meeting that would have been if Ming navigators had walked into Inca Cuzco, meeting peoples who shared their ancient origins in Asia, and who still, in some aspects of their culture, had preserved uncanny deep connections with their Asiatic roots. No doubt they would have understood each other better and perhaps in some distant sense would have recognized each other. Instead, it was the Spanish and Portuguese, and then the French and the English, who would appropriate the New World.

After Columbus’s initial explorations, European geographical knowledge expanded rapidly. In January 1500, a Spanish navigator, Vicente Pinzon, struck the coast of Brazil near Pernambuco and reached the mouth of a river which they sailed for nearly a hundred miles into a maze of island channels. It was an immense river, which they named Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce (Saint Mary of the Sweet Sea). This was the Amazon.

A few months later, by accident, en route to India, but blown too far west, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral ‘discovered’ the southern part of Brazil. In the north, northern Europeans, Bretons and Bristoleans had long fished off the Grand Banks; the Scandinavian voyages to Newfoundland and Canada had not been entirely forgotten, but as the information had not been shared, the shape and extent of the continent, if such it was, was still unknown.

Although the Brazilian coast was seen in 1500, nothing more was heard for thirty years. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, further exploration of the Amazon coast of Brazil did not take place – perhaps because early reports were scathing about the harshness of the terrain and climate, and its unsuitability for colonizing. The real exploration was done from the Caribbean into Central America, and along the south-east coast of what is now the United States. The first maps show a cluster of islands in the Caribbean and a disarticulated length of shore beyond.

In 1508/9, the Spanish crossed to the Yucatan, which they thought was possibly another island; in 1510, they touched the shore of Florida. After Ponce de Leon’s voyage of 1513, there was no doubt that a large landmass extended north of Cuba and west of the Bahamas. But how far was still unclear until the 1520s. The view was that these must all be islands off Asia, or peninsulas jutting out from it, and that it ought to be possible to sail through them and reach China. At this moment, a dramatic series of voyages transformed the picture.

In September 1513, the conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa hacked his way through the tropical forests of the isthmus of Panama and gazed on the Pacific (the ‘South Sea’). The same year, the Portuguese reached the River Plate. With electrifying pace, knowledge opened up, culminating in the first circumnavigation of the globe by the Portuguese navigator Magellan. Then in 1517, the Spanish adventurer Grijalva explored the Yucatan and for the first time discovered not ‘primitive’ tribes, but an unknown civilization.

So, as we read this story, we have to remember that it was only after Cortes’s conquest of Mexico that it became clear that a single landmass extended from Panama to Florida. Had they put that knowledge together with Columbus’s last voyage and Cabral’s exploits in Brazil, then they might have seen that this land extended far below the Equator. But how far north did it run, and was it the same landmass as that associated with the cod fisheries in the far north, which had been long known to Bretons, English and Scandinavians? Or was there open water at some point so one could sail through to Asia?

These questions began to be answered in the 1520s. In 1521, Spanish captains, sailing from Santo Domingo (Haiti), made land at the Santee river in today’s South Carolina. Subsequently, they explored the coast from near Delaware Bay to Saint Simon’s Sound, nowhere seeing evidence of a strait. Meanwhile, in 1523, another Spanish pilot had sailed from the north and travelled along the New England coast to Long Island and the Hudson river, gazing on the peninsula of Manhattan, but again finding no strait.

So, by the end of 1525, the Spaniards understood that a great landmass stood between Europe and Asia, and, with the evidence from Magellan’s voyage now circulating, knew that beyond it was an ocean even wider than the Atlantic. Even though the Pacific coast of South America was still a blank, and the Incas’ world still unknown, the globe was beginning to take its modern shape. ‘The Indies’, as the Spanish called them, truly were a New World.

First Contact: The Yucatan, 1517

SO THIS BRINGS US TO THE YEARS when Cortes was in Cuba, his mind still bounded by a narrow horizon. There were rumours that, ‘other islands lay beyond’, that is to the west. But the crucial moment came with two exploratory expeditions to the Yucatan.

In 1517, the Spanish captain Cordoba took 110 men in four ships and, at Cape Catoche, saw Mayan urban civilization for the first time. Indians paddled out in canoes to his ships, came aboard to exchange beads and clothes, and the Spanish were impressed by their high culture. By then, Mayan civilization had been in a long decline from its heyday in the ninth century. Even the great city states of the later period, such as Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, were abandoned and overgrown. But there were still organized city states which traded along the coast, and used writing.

Cordoba went ashore to be greeted by the natives of what he thought was an island. There he stayed for several days as guest of the Mayan chief of a town that his men, on account of its pyramids, called ‘El Gran Cairo’. But news of the terrible events of the last twenty years in the Caribbean, when most of the population had died through Spanish violence and disease, must have got through to the mainland. At another place on the coast, near Campeche, there was a sudden ferocious attack by a local chief who had decided that the Spaniards were not gods, but merely predatory barbarians who should be repelled forthwith.

Over twenty of Cordoba’s Spaniards were killed, and most of the force was wounded and only evacuated with difficulty. One ship had to be abandoned and Cordoba got back to Cuba with half his expedition dead. It was not an auspicious first encounter, but Cordoba had brought back gold pieces which the Maya had traded from a land to the north, a land called ‘Mexico’. A chain reaction was about to start, which would reshape the history of the world.

The Spanish governor of Cuba, Diego Velasquez, immediately understood the importance of this discovery: ‘Better lands have never been discovered,’ he announced. A new expedition was organized under his nephew, Juan de Grijalva, and, in April 1518, Grijalva made his landfall at Swallow Island: Cozumel. Here the Spaniards saw unmistakable signs of a high civilization: ‘a towered land’ with pyramids and grand buildings. Coasting round the Yucatan, they saw more impressive towns, one of them with pillared buildings ‘as grand as the city of Seville’.

Grijalva now stopped where Cordoba had landed the previous year, and suffered the same outcome. The Mayan Indians told the Spaniards that they did not wish to have them as guests and that they should leave or they would be attacked. In the night, the Spaniards were unnerved by the terrifying noise of drums, and in a fierce skirmish many were wounded, thirteen of whom later died. Finally, after a sea journey of several hundred miles, Grijalva reached the coast of what is now Veracruz and landed at a little island inside a reef, where he saw grisly evidence of Aztec human sacrifice. He named the place the Isle of Sacrifices.

On the coast opposite, he communicated as best he could with the local people, who were Totonacs. (Two of his Mayan prisoners spoke a little Spanish and Totonac.) In no way shy, the Totonacs welcomed him and were keen to talk. They repeatedly mentioned a great city beyond the snowy range of mountains to the east. They told him that they lived under the empire of this city, and resented it. The empire had a political order, ‘laws, ordinances and courts for the administration of justice’. Grijalva and his men now realized that, judging by the size of the rivers, the height of the distant snow-capped mountains, and the variety and richness of human cultures and languages, they were on part of a continent, not an island. The empire was called Mexico.

‘A Gentlemanly Pirate’

THE NEWS OF GRIJALVA’S ENCOUNTERS AND DISCOVERIES made an electrifying impression on the Spanish colonists in Cuba. Among these was Hernan Cortes. Cortes’s story has been told many times but, like all the great stories in history, it never wearies in the retelling.

Cortes had been out in the Indies since 1506. He was descended from a turbulent family in the little fortified town of Medellin, in Estremadura, the wildest part of Castile. Many of the conquistadors came from this region. It was a harsh land, which in summer can be a dustbowl, and in winter a bleak landscape of cork trees, oaks and drystone walls. The old towns – like Trujillo – still resemble medieval fortresses with their great ramparts and bastions.

Families such as the Cortes clan were inured to war: they were of a rough, hardy stock, lesser gentry who had fought their way south during the conquest of Muslim Spain. Within living memory, they had seen the end of Muslim culture in Spain, the expulsion of the Jews and, more recently, many had fought as mercenaries in the wars in Italy. Cortes’s father, Martin, had been such a man, a smalltime gentleman who had carried his sword on foreign fields.

Cortes was born in 1484, and was a sickly child. At the age of twelve, he spent two years with his father’s family in the university town of Salamanca and while there seems to have had lessons in Latin and grammar as a preparation for a career in law. It is not certain that he went to the university itself, although he may have attended classes. His contemporary, Bartolome de Las Casas – the great Dominican human rights agitator and author of a history of the Indies – says he was a bachelor at law and a good Latinist who could converse in Latin, but this is still unproven.

When Cortes was seventeen, he returned to Medellin and, to the disappointment of his family, decided on a career not in the law but in arms. Like many young men, he seems to have had ambitions to fight in Italy, where fortunes were to be made, but for some reason he never set sail. For the next couple of years he wandered in Spain, and for a while we lose track of him between the royal city of Valladolid, his old haunts of Salamanca and the colourful markets of Granada in the south. Perhaps he paid his way by taking jobs as a notary. Of this time, his secretary, Gomara, later wrote disapprovingly that Cortes was ‘a mere wanderer, on the loose’. Then, still looking for somewhere to make his mark, he turned to the Indies, where many of his contemporaries were heading to carve themselves estates and live in a style beyond their dreams in old Castile.

So Cortes grew up as a typical product of Renaissance Spain, hankering after arms and letters, a seeker of glory and fame, as such ideals were articulated in the famous works of literature of his day. A young man already adept at discourse, he was an individualist in an age of individualism, in a century which ends with Hamlet and Don Quixote. He left Spain for the Indies in the summer of 1506, aged twenty-two. He lived first in Hispaniola, where he rapidly gained a reputation for gambling and womanizing. Both can get a man into trouble, and one fight left him with a scar on his chin.

Hispaniola had been devastated by disease and greed – and the native population decimated by rapacious colonists. There were better pickings to be had in Cuba, and Cortes moved there in 1509. Cuba was the laboratory of the destruction of the New World: slavery, mining, forced conversions, extermination. ‘The four months I was there seven thousand people died of starvation,’ says Las Casas in one of the great journalistic tracts of the age. Such cruelties did not, it would appear, unduly trouble Cortes. He settled in Baracoa, a picturesque little town at the eastern end of Cuba. As the first notary there, he shipped livestock over, and became the first man on the island to own cattle. But his biggest interest was gold.

In about 1512, at Cuvanacan, he and his Indian slaves began to pan and mine gold and he started to make a fortune. He established a hacienda – a country house – at Duaban. (‘It was the best hacienda in all the island,’ he later said, with the boastfulness of a self-made man.) Like all Spanish colonists, he used Indian women for sex, and had a daughter by an Indian girl – the first of many children by many different women (‘numberless mistresses’, as was observed later). Around this time, he seduced Catalina Suarez, the sister of a fellow colonist. Pressure followed from her family, who enlisted the support of the governor, Diego Velasquez (perhaps a source of lasting enmity between the two men), and Cortes reluctantly married her. With someone who plays such a great role in history, we sift through evidence of their early life for a clue to their character that portends later events, but with Cortes there is little to go on. At nearly thirty, he was known as a clever, tough-minded man who enjoyed being a big fish in a small pool. He was also resourceful, tenacious, and patient – a man who knew when to play a waiting game and when to move fast.

But perhaps there is a clue to his character in a remark that he made during his early days in the Caribbean: that he was a compulsive gambler and a man ‘inordinately given to women’. While we need to be wary about applying modern psychology to people of the past, the ‘qualities’ of both these male types – gambler and seducer – shade into each other. A gambler is adept at weighing up situations, calculating odds, a man who is willing to take risks, but also adept at hiding his true intentions. A womanizer must seduce, persuade, charm, conceal his true feelings, make the other feel desired, respected – treasured even.

What both have in common is a need to control. Cortes we are told ‘never lost his temper’ – which suggests something almost icy in his make-up. But much about him is a mystery, still hidden before he steps onto the stage of history. There is a story from this period of his life, that he drew a wheel of fortune and told friends that he would ‘either die to the sound of trumpets or die on the scaffold’. This suggests that he already had a myth of himself in which he believed, and which, given the chance, he hoped to act out.

The Expedition to Mexico

SO, DURING THOSE YEARS IN CUBA, Cortes kept a big house and worked hard. By 1517, he had moved to Santiago from Baracoa. Santiago was the centre of government on the island, and Cortes was now Chief Magistrate, his fortunes so high that he had been involved in getting backers for Grijalva’s expedition to the Yucatan. Now with Grijalva’s return, all the talk was of the Yucatan – and Mexico. It was ‘the finest land under the sun… All of us wanted to go there…believing we would each take more than 1000 pesos in gold from it… We believe this land to be the richest in the world in terms of value of precious stones.’

Governor Velasquez now spoke to Cortes. The islands of the Yucatan were rich and their inhabitants were ‘highly civilized people with law and order and public places devoted to the administration of justice’. The land would obviously yield great wealth. The failure of Grijalva had been due, many said unfairly, to his craven attitude. This is where Cortes came in as one of richest men in Cuba. A new expedition would make him a greater fortune, and make him famous. The governor would provide two or three ships if Cortes would find the rest of the money, and lead the army. Cortes saw his chance and agreed. He would pay the larger share of the costs. On 23 October 1518, Velasquez appointed him captain-general of the new expedition.

Cortes was expected to act within the law. The expedition was supposed to be a journey of discovery and modest trading; any Indians encountered were to be fairly treated, the women not abused. His instructions contain no hint that they expected to encounter a great empire. But Cortes knew he was entering lands occupied by civilized peoples with organized polities, and we must assume that his instructions left much unsaid: that Cortes and the governor had agreed he might exceed their bounds, if and when the opportunity arose.

Governor Velasquez perhaps regarded the expedition as a holding operation, to stake a claim in the face of rival speculators. Cortes, though, may already have had a grander design. Perhaps he secretly planned a more ambitious operation to find the route west. We know that he remained fascinated by the passage to Japan, even after his conquest of Mexico. In the end, we simply cannot guess his imaginings. But he surely must have talked about the mysterious empire of Mexico which seemed to lie inland from the Isle of Sacrifices. He may even have devised a plan to go there without sharing all the information with the governor, whom he tolerated but may have disliked and mistrusted. At any rate, he was careful to form his own team, among them the charismatic Pedro de Alvarado, who had already been to the Yucatan; he was a man who, although rash and cruel, Cortes knew he could trust.

This might explain why Cortes invested his all in the expedition. The stakes were high and he acted as if he felt Fortune was running with him. He organized the expedition swiftly, borrowed funds from friends, purchased ships, supplies, bought rations and hired footloose young soldiers on the basis of a cut of the profits. The atmosphere of those days was like a gold rush, and in hardly a fortnight Cortes had two ships, a brigantine and 300 men.

This rang alarm bells with Velasquez and his family and supporters, who became concerned about the scale and success of Cortes’s preparations. As part-funders of the enterprise, they now regretted giving Cortes control. For his part, Cortes began to worry that Velasquez would not keep his side of the bargain on the sharing of profits. Eventually Velasquez decided to remove Cortes as captain-general and issued orders that he should not be allowed to buy any more food and provisions. Cortes ignored this, and Velasquez then sent orders to relieve him of his command, but Cortes’s brother-in-law killed the messenger and took the governor’s papers to Cortes himself.

Alerted to Velasquez’s plans, Cortes now moved fast. Having seized all the meat supplies in Santiago, he decided to set sail at daybreak on 18 February 1519. At the last minute, Velasquez hurried down to the quayside where he had an almost comic last exchange with Cortes, who was pulling away in a small boat: ‘Come, come, my dear fellow [compadre], why are you setting off in this fashion? Is this a good way to say goodbye to me?’ Cortes shouted back: ‘Forgive me, but these things have all been thought about for some time before they were ordered. What are your orders now?’

Velasquez was too stunned to reply; Cortes gave the orders to sail.

Cortes’s Fleet Sets Sail

IT WAS A GAMBLER’S THROW. Cortes’s story is not only a series of incredibly risky moves against Native American kingdoms, but also against the representatives of the king of Spain. From the very beginning, Cortes was technically in revolt against his own ruler. The story is told in an unrivalled series of documents and eye-witness accounts, including Cortes’s own letters from the New World, sent while these events were happening – though obviously these are partisan in the extreme.

Remarkably, we also have material from the Aztec side. The most detailed and fascinating is the account produced in the Nahuatl language by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun, from interviews with Aztec eye-witnesses. But there are also several Aztec songs and poems, and a brief set of annals. Although most of these were written twenty or thirty years later, and were inevitably touched by the fact of defeat, they still constitute a remarkable insight into amazing events whose tragedy still has the power to move us.

The fleet that left Cuba comprised eleven ships, four of reasonable size (the biggest a hundred-tonner), the others smaller open boats, or brigantines. Cortes had 530 Europeans, thirty of them crossbowmen, and twelve with arquebuses, muzzle-loaded handguns – weapons that were to prove deadly and unnerving to the Aztecs. He also had fourteen small pieces of artillery and some portable breech-loading cannon on the ships.

Along with nearly a hundred sailors, there was also a doctor, several carpenters and at least eight women, one of whom would later proudly call herself a conquistadora. There were many non-Europeans, including several hundred Cuban Indians and some Africans, both freemen and slaves. Cortes also took a Mayan-speaking Indian fisherman, who had been captured in the Yucatan on an earlier expedition; his most pressing problem, of course, was how to talk to the natives.

His secret weapon was sixteen horses, which the Native Americans had never before seen. There were also many dogs, wolfhounds or mastiffs. In Europe, the use of dogs in war was common and they were deployed with horrible effect in the New World where, once again, the Indians had never seen such creatures. Like many of his contemporaries, Cortes had no qualms, when the necessity arose, about setting the dogs on defenceless human beings.

The crossing from Cuba to the Yucatan is only 120 miles, and Cortes coasted down to Cozumel, where, for the first time, he saw the Mayan pyramids, with their thatched sanctuaries on top. Almost immediately, he had an incredible stroke of luck. The people of the island told him that in the next-door land, known as the Yucatan, there were two Christians, who had been carried there a long time ago in a boat, and held as captives.

A message was sent and, some days later, a bearded sun-burned Spaniard, dressed as a native, arrived in a canoe. Geronimo de Aguilar had been on a ship in 1511, when the conquistador Valdivia had been shipwrecked near Jamaica. The crew had been washed ashore and, after many terrifying adventures, all had either been killed or sacrificed, save for two – Geronimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero.

Thanks to Aguilar’s survival, Cortes now had a translator who could speak the local Mayan tongue – the first necessary step if he wished to penetrate the interior. Aguilar was more than happy to go with him, but told him that his friend Guerrero had gone native. He now had a Mayan wife and children, and had been tattooed as a Mayan warrior. He was fighting with the Mayans in Chactemal against the Spanish, and would resist all appeals to return to ‘civilization’.

Guerrero had apparently told the Maya that the newcomers – the Spaniards – were men ‘who suffer death like other men’, and perhaps this is why the Mayans seem to have understood from the start that the Spanish were not divine, but simply ‘a powerful cruel enemy’: a new group of invaders who had come to conquer and rob. The dark presence of Guerrero was disturbing; the idea that a good Spanish Christian could become the Other was a threatening one, which must have cast a shadow as Cortes and his men sailed on, along the low surf-beaten shore that was fringed with palm trees and dotted with gleaming white pyramids.

Cortes journeyed on round the tip of the Yucatan. It is about 400 miles by sea, along the coast of the Yucatan, travelling first south-west, then turning northwards up to the Bay of Mexico. Stopping in the steaming jungle at the mouth of the Tabasco river, Cortes disembarked at Potonchan, a large native settlement (now the town of Frontera). The natives were nervous. They gave him small offerings of food and a gold mask, but asked the Spanish to go: ‘We wish neither war nor trade,’ they told Cortes. Word had obviously spread in the Yucatan about the newcomers. ‘We have no more gold – you will be killed if you do not leave …’