How does the most powerful empire in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica fall to a few hundred strangers in three years? The honest answer, on the evidence assembled around the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán on 13 August 1521, is that it mostly did not fall to the strangers. Between 1519 and 1521 Hernán Cortés ran a coalition war, and the majority of the coalition was indigenous: Tlaxcaltecs, Tettecocans, Cempoala and Huejotzingo, tributary states and old rivals of the Aztec Triple Alliance who saw the arrivals as a lever against their own overlords.
The mechanism was structural before it was military. The empire ruled hegemonically through local rulers, and its power rested on the perception of unchallengeable military supremacy, a system inherently unstable the moment prestige took a hit. When people from Tlaxcala, Mexico’s smallest state, travel the country today they are still sometimes insulted as traitors, and much recent history work has gone into revising that charge into what it arguably was, a war of liberation fought against Mexica domination. The arithmetic supports the revision. “It was thousands and thousands of Tlaxcalans, Huejotzingas or other peoples, who were under the Mexica yoke and wanted to liberate themselves,” archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma told Radio Formula. The headcount comes from Aurelio López Corral, an archaeologist in Tlaxcala: “Cortés had 30,000 to 40,000 Mesoamericans fighting with him,” he said. “He couldn’t have done it on his own.”
Intriguingly, the technology story is the one historians now trim down. The first wave of smallpox in 1520 killed an estimated 5 to 8 million people, and the Spanish, returning with reinforcements on 13 August 1521 under Tlaxcalan commander Chichimecatecuhtli, took a capital already weakened by famine and disease, capturing the emperor Cuauhtémoc. As one historian puts it, the advantage held by a few hundred Spanish soldiers over Aztec weaponry “was not overwhelming”; cavalry was the arm of decision, useful for breaking offensives, no formula for conquest. The Spanish were also unpredictable in a way local powers were not, since their ignorance of the empire’s politics made a direct strike on a city as mighty as Tenochtitlan unlikely and unexpected.
What researchers found in Tlaxcala itself is a colder ledger. Tlaxcalans shared a cosmovision and the Náhuatl language with the Mexica but governed collectively, and when Cortés arrived, part of the leadership saw a chance to topple an old enemy; the region later supplied the boats, reputedly built there, for the lake assault. “It was a question of political survival,” said Yassir Zárate Méndez, who made a documentary on the state’s treatment by official history; to save yourself, “you had to turn to whatever allies were necessary.” The payoff was real, special colonial status, self-rule, the right to settle lands elsewhere in the colony, Spaniards marrying into the local nobility, until independence in the 1820s flipped the mythology and cast the allies as traitors. “There’s a nagging thorn in most Tlaxcalans’ minds [about the conquest] and a sort of anger because the adjective ‘traitor’ has been so strong,” Juan de la Rosa, delegate of the National Institute of History and Anthropology, said in 2019.
The sources even disagree on the famous disaster, the Noche Triste evacuation of 1520, one account putting the dead at 400 Spaniards and 4000 native allies, another at roughly 1,000 Spaniards plus the same number of Tlaxcalans. In Tlaxcala, meanwhile, Cortés himself goes oddly quiet, remembered, in Zárate’s words, as “someone who played a complicated role in history,” below local figures like Xicohténcatl the Younger, the prince who opposed the alliance. The practical upshot for Mexico’s founding trauma: the conquest was less a conquest than a civil war the Spanish happened to win from the front of someone else’s column.
Sources
- Don’t call us traitors: descendants of Cortés’s allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire | Mexico | The Guardian
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire | Climatetrack
