Appendix
The chronicles and other accounts written by the men who discovered and conquered the New World were a startling revelation to the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Old World, with its long history, was suddenly eager to learn more about the "barbarious peoples" who had recently been discovered, and the reports brought or sent back by the "Chroniclers of the Indies" were received with the liveliest interest. At times these new facts we requestioned or disputed, but they never failed to elicit reflection and interpretation. The conquistadors themselves attempted to describe clearly, in European terms, the different physical and human realities existing in the New World; so also did the missionary friars and the European philosophers and humanists, as well as the royal historians.
The results were varied. Some were "projections" of old ideas: for instance, Fray Diego de Duran argued that the Nahuas were actually the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Others were apologies-more or less intentional-for the Conquest, such as the letter-reports of Cortes. The Indians appear in some chronicles as idolatrous savages given over to cannibalism and sodomy, while in others they are described as models of natural virtue.
On the basis of these reports and chronicles, a number of histories were written in Europe from the humanistic point of view of that epoch. One outstanding example is De Orbe Novo by the celebrated Pedro Martir de Angleria, who often expresses his amazement on discovering the arts and folkways of the Indians; another is the wealth of firsthand material which the royal chronicler, Antonio de Herrera, incorporated in his Historia general de los hechosde los castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme de el Mar Oceano. European historiography, not only in Spain and Portugal, but also in France, England, Germany and Italy, gained new life when it turned its attention to the reports coming back from the New World.
We rarely consider, however, that if Europe showed so great an interest in this astonishing new continent, the Indians must have shown an equal interest in the Spaniards, who to them were strange beings from a totally unknown world. It is attractive to study the different ways in which the Europeans conceived of the Indians, but the inverse problem, which takes us to the heart of indigenous thought,is perhaps even more instructive. What did the Indians think when they saw the strangers arrive on their shores and in their cities? What were their first attitudes toward the invaders? In what spirit did they fight them? And how did they interpret their own downfall?
There are no complete and final answers to these questions; but there are some partial answers, provided by the native cultures that had then attained the highest development, the Mayas of Yucatan and the Nahuas of the Valley of Mexico. The Spanish accounts of the Conquestare only one version of it; the Indians who were its victims recorded another, in words and pictures. Inevitably there arc major disagreements between the two versions. But in spite of all the mutual accusations and misunderstandings, or perhaps because of them, both accounts are intensely human. They should be studied without prejudice, for only a calm examination, free of bias and preconceptions, can help to explain the Mexican people of today, who are the living consequence of that violent clash between two worlds.
Within Middle America, the Nahuatl and Mayan cultures left us the most ample indigenous descriptions of the Conquest. Both cultures possessed a mode of writing, an oral tradition and a sense of history. A brief consideration of their efforts to record the past will illustrate their earnest desire to depict their own version of this most shattering event.
Interest in History in the Indigenous World
The Mayan stelae, the other commemorative monuments of the Mayas and Nahuas, and the historical codices or xiuhamatl (books of years) of the Nahuas all testify to the care with which both cultures chronicled the important events in their past. These records were complemented by oral texts, which were faithfully passed down by memory in the pre-Hispanic centers of education. Students were taught, among other things, the history of what had happened year by year, anamplified version of what was contained in the codices.
A single contemporary report will make clear the Indians' concern to preserve their history. It is taken from the Historia general by Don Antonio de Herrera, royal chronicler of Philip 11. Don Antonio never pretended to glorify the Indians, but he gathered together, better than anyone else, a great mass of reports and information concerning them. In section four, book ten, he observes:
The nations of New Spain preserved the memory of their antiquities. In Yucatan and Honduras there were certain books in which the Indians recorded the events of their times, together with their knowledge of plants, animals and other natural things.
In the Province of Mexico, they had libraries of histories and calendars, which they painted in pictures. Whatever had a concrete form was painted in its own image, while if it lacked a form, they represented it by other characters. Thus they set down what they wished.
And to remember the times in which each event came to pass, they had certain wheels, each of which represented a century of a hundred and two years. Also, depending on the year in which memorable events took place, they painted their pictures and characters, such as a man wearing a helmet and a red mantle, under the sign of the cane stalk, to show the year in which the Castilians entered their land, and so with the other events.
And because their characters were not sufficient, like our own writing, they could not set things down exactly, only the substance of their ideas; but they learned in chorus many speeches, orations and songs. They took great care to see that the youths learned them by memory, and for this they had schools in which the old taught them to the young. By this means, the texts were preserved in their entirety.
And when the Castilians entered that land and taught the Indians the art of writing, the natives wrote out their speeches and songs as they had known them since antiquity. They also recorded their discourses in their own characters and figures, and in this manner they set down the Paternoster, the Ave Maria and all of the Christian doctrine.
In all these ways, Nahuas and Mayas recorded the most impressive and tragic event in their history, the fall of their civilization at the hands of strangers, ending with the destruction of their ancient ways of life. The present book, a kind of anthology of texts and pictures, offers some examples of the different impressions preserved by the Nahuatl-speaking Indians regarding Cortes and the Spaniards, the events of the Conquest and the final ruin of the Aztec capital and its culture.
A similar book could be prepared on the Mayas, who also left indigenous accounts of the Conquest, including those in the Anales delos Xahil, the Titulos de la Casa Ixquin-Nehaip and the Cronica deCbac-Xulub-Cben, and at least fragments in certain books of theChilam Balam. But this task remains for those who dedicate themselves to the study of Mayan civilization.
We must turn next to a brief discussion of the various sources from which these Nahuatl records of the Conquest have been selected.
Indian Texts and Paintings Describing the Conquest
Fray Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinia, arrived in Tenochtitlan in June 1524, one of a celebrated group of twelve Franciscan friars. He was the first to discover the Indians' determination to preserve their own memories of the Conquest. In the beginning of the third part of his Historia de los indios de la NuevaEspana, he reported:
Among the events of their times, the native Indians took particular note of the year in which the Spaniards entered this and, for to them it was a most remarkable happening which at he first caused them great terror and amazement. they saw a strange people arrive from the sea, a feat they had never before witnessed nor had known was possible, all dressed in strange garments and so bold and warlike that, although few in number, they could invade all the provinces of this land imperiously, as if the natives were their vassals. The Indians were also filled with wonder at their horses, and the Spaniards riding on their backs. They called the Spaniards "teteuh", meaning "gods", which the Spaniards corrupted into "teules".
The Indians also set down the year in which the twelve friars arrived together.
There are twelve surviving documents, written or painted, in which the Indians described the coming of the Spaniards and the great conflict that ensued. They are not of equal importance and antiquity, but they reveal the characteristic impressions that the Nahuas formed of the Conquest. The most valuable of these documents are:
(1) Songs of the Conquest. The oldest native accounts of the Conquest are in the form of songs, composed in the traditional manner by some of the few surviving cuicapicque, or Nahuatl poets. Trueicnocuicatl (songs of sorrow) are the stanzas describing the final days of Tenochtitlan (in Chapter 14) and the grief of the Mexican people over their defeat (in Chapter 15). As Dr. Angel Maria Garibay has pointed out in his Historia de la literatura nabuati, the first of these poems must have been composed in about 1524, the second a year earlier.
(2) Unos anales historicos de la nacion mexicana. This title has been given to the important "Manuscript 22" in the National Library in Paris. The manuscript dates from 1528, only seven years after the fall of the Aztec capital, and was written in Nahuatl by a group of anonymous natives of Tlatelolco. The most remarkable thing about this document is the fact that its Indian authors somehow how learned the correct use of the Latin alphabet (the Colegio de Santa Cruz had not yet been founded) in order to write out some of their memories of past events, above all, their own account of the Conquest.
The work is valuable to us as historical evidence, but its literary and human value is perhaps even greater. It presents for the first time, and in detail, a picture of the destruction of Nahuatl culture, as witnessed by a few of its survivors. The relevant passages from the manuscript, which has been translated from Nahuatl into Spanish by Dr.Garibay, are given in Chapter 14 of this book.
(3) Codex Florentino. The description of the Conquest preserved in this codex was recorded later than that in "Manuscript 22", but it is much more ample. It was written in Nahuatl, under the eye of Fray Bernadino de Sahagun, by his Indian students from Tlatelolco and elsewhere, using the reminiscences of aged natives who had actually seen the Conquest. The first version of the text "in the Indian language, and in the crude manner in which they spoke it", seems to have been completed in about 1555; unfortunately it has been lost. Fray Bernadinolater made a resume of it in Spanish. Still later, in about 1585, he prepared a second version in Nahuatl to correct the first, which, he said contained "certain things that were not true, and was silent about certain others where it should have spoken".
As Dr. Garibay has remarked, it is impossible to say whether the text has gained or lost from these amendations. It is, however, the most complete indigenous account of the Conquest now known from the sighting of various omens, when the Spaniards had not yet come to this land, to a transcript of one of the speeches in which Don Hernando Cortes admonished all the lords of Mexico, Tezcoco and Tlacopan to deliver their gold and other treasures. We have drawn a number of selections from this invaluable source.
(4) The Major pictographic records. The texts by Sahagun's informants and other native historians are supplemented by various records in which events of the Conquest are set down as paintings, the traditional Indian manner of writing history. The three principal works of this nature are the paintings corresponding to the Nahuatl texts by Sahagun's informants, preserved in the Codex Florentino; the Lienzode Tlaxcala (dating from the middle of the sixteenth century), a collection of eighty paintings describing the actions of the Tlaxcaltccas, a subject tribe who allied themselves with the Spaniards; and the improperly named Manuscrito de 1576 (it mentions several later dates), also known as the Codex Aubin, with both texts and related paintings. There are also some pictures, clearly indigenous in nature, in the manuscript called the Codex Ramirez. This codex was probably compiled from the data assembled before 1580 by Fray Diego de Duran, who is known to have had access to many other native accounts which have since been lost.
(5) Briefer indigenous accounts. We have also drawn several passages from briefer works in Nahuatl. The Codex Aubin is especially valuable; one of the descriptions of the massacre at the chief temple (in Chapter 9) was taken from it. Other important material was set down by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc in his two chronicles, "Mexicana" and "Mexicayotl", and by the celebrated historian of Chalco, Domingo Francisco de San Anton Munon Chimalpain Cuauhtlehuanitzin. From Chimalpain's VH relation we have used a selection (in Chapter 13) describing the demands made by Cortes after the fall of the capital. Finally, there are the Codex Ramirez, which includes important data from the informants of Tlatelolco, and the brief sections about the Conquest in the Anales Tepanecas de Azcapotzalco and the Anales deMexico y Tlatelolco, both of which are written in Nahuatl.
(6) Accounts by the native allies of Cortes. Any presentation of indigenous texts describing the Conquest must contain at least a few of the accounts written by certain historians, Indian and Mestizo, descended from those natives who joined with Cortes to defeat the Aztecs. The versions they present of certain events, while differing from the other indigenous narratives, do not fall outside the general scope of this book. It is true that the Tlaxcaltecas and Tezcocanos fought at the side of the conquistadors, but the effects of the Conquest were as unhappy for them as for the other Nahuas: all were placed under the yoke of Spain, and all lost their ancient culture forever.
Along with the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (mentioned previously), we have made use of the Historia de Tlaxcala by Diego Munoz Camargo, amestizo who wrote in Spanish during the second half of the sixteenth century. His obviously slanted version of the massacre at Cholula (in Chapter 5) is particularly interesting. We have also used the descriptions of the Conquest which Don Feranado de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the ruling house of Tezcoco, wrote down from the point of view of the Tezcocanos. His XIII relation and Historia chichimeca, both written in Spanish, contain data which he gathered from old Nahuatl sources no longer existant, but which he interpreted in a manner very different from that of the writers of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco.
