Mexico and the Spanish Conquest

by Ross Hassig

Overview

What role did indigenous peoples play in the Spanish conquest of Mexico? Ross Hassig explores this question in Mexico and the Spanish Conquest by incorporating primary accounts from the Indians of Mexico and revisiting the events of the conquest against the backdrop of the Aztec empire, the culture and politics of Mesoamerica, and the military dynamics of both sides. He analyzes the weapons, tactics, and strategies employed by both the Indians and the Spaniards, and concludes that the conquest was less a Spanish victory than it was a victory of Indians over other Indians, which the Spaniards were able to exploit to their own advantage.

In this second edition of his classic work, Hassig incorporates new research in the same concise manner that made the original edition so popular and provides further explanations of the actions and motivations of Cortés, Moteuczoma, and other key figures. He also explores their impact on larger events and examines in greater detail Spanish military tactics and strategies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806148199
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	08/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	824,274
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ross Hassig, a historical anthropologist specializing in Mesoamerica, is the author of Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico; Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control; and Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico.

Read an Excerpt

Mexico and the Spanish Conquest

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By Ross Hassig

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2006 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4819-9

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CHAPTER 1

THE SPANISH BACKGROUND TO THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO

Spanish colonial expansion into Mexico grew out of Spain's earlier success in expelling the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, which in turn was part of a broader pattern of expansion by Christian Europe. The Moors had invaded from North Africa and conquered much of Spain in the early eighth century as part of a general expansion of Islam. There they remained for more than three centuries, with little effort by the Christian kingdoms to expel them. Even when the Reconquista (Reconquest) of Spain (al-Andalus) finally started, it did so gradually. By the beginning of the eleventh century, wider and more sustained ties had been established between Spain and the rest of Europe, largely through the emergence of the cult of relics centered on the pilgrimage church of Santiago (St. James) at Compostela and the gradual resettlement of much of Iberia by Christians. After the early, largely peaceful resettlement of Spain, the Reconquista became more militarized, with forced attempts to seize and hold territory, although this was a power struggle as much among Christian states as against the Moors. When Moroccan warriors began fighting for the Muslim states in Spain toward the end of the eleventh century, the Reconquista became more religiously and culturally defined, taking on the character of a crusade.

The Reconquista was aided by internal disputes within the Moorish states. What had been a united caliphate since A.D. 711 disintegrated into many small states after 1008 and no longer presented a unified front to Christian expansion. Those centuries also saw a major increase in commerce in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, and crusading knights and financial aid from other Christian countries and the papacy helped fuel the reconquest. In the early thirteenth century, King Alfonso IX received a pledge of fealty from the Moorish ruler of Valencia, who hoped to secure Christian help against royal contenders in Morocco. With Castilian support, this ruler conquered other Moorish states in Spain, including Córdoba, which Castile occupied after the Moorish ruler's assassination.

Events in North Africa also drew Moorish attention away from Iberia. Internal struggles over rule in Morocco led many Moorish leaders in Spain to raise armies and leave for battle across the Mediterranean, effectively ceding control of their Iberian territories to Christian rulers. Thus the Reconquista increased in momentum, fueled as much by Moorish distractions elsewhere as by Christian successes. Moorish populations increasingly became incorporated into Spanish kingdoms, and where Moorish rulers remained in power, they now did so as tributaries of Christian kings. Most of Spain was reconquered and in Christian hands by the end of the thirteenth century, with the major exception of Granada, which remained under Moorish rule. When Granada fell in 1492, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula was at last complete. But it by no means marked the end of Spanish political and economic expansion, which continued into Europe, the Mediterranean, and ultimately the Americas.

Spain's expansion was part of a general European pattern that emerged in the wake of the economic and social dislocation following the massive depopulation caused by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. But Europe also felt threatened by Moors to the south and Ottoman Turks to the east, and much of its expansion—made possible by technological advances in seafaring—was dictated conceptually and guided geographically by these concerns. Along with other Europeans, Spaniards ventured into foreign lands, driven by the zealotry of the Church Militant but also encouraged by the lure of greater trade, new territory, and subject populations. Thus, when Spaniards moved into the Americas, they brought with them the powerful legacy of their expansionary experience, which was to color their relations with the Indians.

The men who reached Mexico had already participated in the earliest Spanish exploration of what was to them the New World, and they built on their experiences of conquering and colonizing Arab Spain and the Canary Islands. Spanish expansion beyond Iberia was primarily economic in motivation, especially the push into the Canary Islands, which was undertaken in order to establish sugarcane plantations. Similar considerations undergirded the settlement of the Indies.

Religious justifications, if not a crusadelike religious fervor, marked much of the expansion into Mexico, as it had the Reconquista. Such justifications are repeated throughout the accounts of the conquistadors, which describe, among other things, the appearance of Santiago on a white horse leading the Spaniards to victory—the same apparition credited with leading them during the Reconquista. The Spaniards used essentially the same ideology in their conquest of native populations as they had against the Moors during the Reconquista. The conquest of Mexico, however, was primarily a political and military affair.

During the Reconquista, settlements throughout the Iberian Peninsula had organized town militias. These militias were used defensively, but they also took offensive actions against the Moors as needed and feasible. They produced a large pool of skilled and seasoned fighters, all free men and all required to bear arms, regardless of class. The subsequent success of Spanish forces against the Aztecs, however, was the result not simply of larger armies but of better organization.

The Spaniards were the beneficiaries of a long tradition of European military organizational development. Medieval warfare, at least up to A.D. 1200, largely reflected the politically fragmented condition of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Great emphasis was placed on the construction and defense of strongholds to control surrounding territories. Armies increasingly consisted of heavy (that is, armored) cavalry supported by archers and later crossbowmen, but these troops had to be constituted for specific campaigns; they were not part of a permanent, standing army. As a result, the armies seldom trained as units. They did emphasize quality over quantity, but at an individual level: armies rarely functioned as integrated wholes. Moreover, because the leadership came from the mounted knights, the use of infantry was largely discouraged except during sieges, and armies were small—rarely more than ten thousand men.

This situation began to change in the thirteenth century. Greater wealth enabled kings to employ professional soldiers, and improved transportation significantly lessened logistical constraints. But most of the changes arose from new technological innovations. Heavier armor had kept the knights immune to most weapons, especially those of the commoner infantry, but by the mid-fourteenth century cannons had become widespread, followed by a variety of handguns, although they could not yet compete against the crossbow. All these weapons could pierce armor, and the role of mounted heavy cavalry diminished. Now, heavy infantry dominated European warfare. Wearing less armor and fighting in organized, trained units, infantry formations broke the domination of heavy cavalry. In the Spanish army in particular, pikemen often replaced fighters carrying swords and shields. The Spaniards would not face the same sorts of material and technological innovations in the New World, but their new organizational sophistication would serve them well there, in a way the earlier emphasis on heavy cavalry and little integrated-unit combat would not have done.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had created the royal guards—heavy cavalry units of twenty-five hundred lances divided into twenty-five captaincies of a hundred men each, entirely under the control of the monarchs. Nevertheless, the Spaniards relied more heavily on infantry than did the French, who regarded commoner foot soldiers as incompetent. The Spaniards held them in high esteem and used them effectively. This reliance on infantry culminated in the famed tercio (corps) system, begun in 1536 and organized around a commander of ten 250-man companies, each divided into squads of twenty-five men, giving the reorganized Spanish forces enormous mobility and flexibility.

Part of the emphasis on infantry was an adaptation to Spanish terrain. The hilly countryside was unfavorable to heavy cavalry, so infantrymen armed with pikes, swords, and shields dominated, at least during the late phases of the Reconquista. Combat was largely between opposing individuals rather than opposing organized forces. Spanish combat in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth marked a change, with the partial adoption of the Swiss square of densely packed heavy infantrymen. Combining pikemen and harquebusiers (soldiers armed with harquebuses—smoothbore matchlock guns somewhat smaller than muskets, which replaced harquebuses in the mid-sixteenth century), the Spaniards decisively defeated the French. Thereafter the Spanish army was remodeled to emphasize pikes and harquebuses in large infantry formations.

Some of these developments were irrelevant to the Spaniards who came to the New World, because much of the ongoing development of military strategy in Europe did not reach them before the conquest. But the conquistadors who reached Mexico did draw on general European trends, relying heavily on infantry armed with pikes and swords, wearing various quantities and types of armor, and augmenting the infantry with crossbowmen and harquebusiers. To the infantry was added a small cavalry unit, but the bulk of the combatants were foot soldiers trained in the Iberian tradition of individual combat.

The idea of national armies and national wars was still alien to Europe, and although entire populations could be raised for battle, as in Spain's Reconquista, soldiers of many cities and countries fought for others on a financial basis. Nevertheless, these wars often entailed huge losses of life, and continual tactical, organizational, and technological advances combined to make them more deadly yet.

European formations, tactics, and arms were more than adequate defense against the first natives the Spaniards met in the New World—those in the Indies (now the West Indies, to distinguish them from what were subsequently known as the East Indies). Native political organization was relatively simple in the Indies—loosely centralized chiefdoms at best—and warfare was largely a matter of raiding and individual glory. It was not the organized clash of trained military formations. Spanish arms and tactics were decisive against the Caribbean Indians, so on the eve of the discovery of Mexico the Spaniards had no reason to believe that anyone they were likely to encounter elsewhere in the New World would pose a more serious military threat.

Aside from the martial disparity between the Spaniards and the native peoples of the New World, major differences existed in the ways wars were fought, the ways people were governed, and who the king was and what powers he could legitimately exercise. Warfare had a spiritual dimension; the conquest was also a conflict waged by Christians against non-Christians. But the religious imperative was not always present in European conflicts, and the Spaniards shared with the rest of Europe the idea that most war was a political exercise in the use of force. Religion provided a justification for war, but as we will see, the conquest found its cause in more pragmatic matters of wealth, power, and privilege.

The Spaniards also brought to the New World broader European notions about what constituted legitimate and appropriate government—notions that were undergoing ferment. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, strong European monarchs consolidated their power and increasingly claimed rule based on divine right. But who should rule depended on legitimate succession and was not simply a matter of power. The monarchs of Castile and Aragón ruled by divine right derived from their predecessors in a known and predictable fashion. Moreover, they ruled by law rather than by whim, at least in theory. They expanded into the inhabited lands of the New World under the color of law, although the legitimacy of the enterprise was the subject of long and acrimonious debate. Imperial expansion under such monarchs meant the domination—usually military—of other lands and the control of these territories under the laws of Spain. Thus, Spanish rulers exercised power by divine right, they could legally expand their holdings in the New World, and they held and dominated the territories they conquered, changing forever the lives of those they ruled.

The Indies were the portion of the New World Christopher Columbus first reached in October 1492. Probably landing initially in the Bahamas, Columbus also sailed to Cuba and then to the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He sought gold, which he believed must be plentiful, on the basis of the ancient idea that it was engendered by heat in these warm lands (whereas silver arose from cold), and he immediately began searching for it. Although he failed to find any on the first islands, he was spurred on by seeing a native ornament of silver and, in Hispaniola, a few natives wearing small gold ornaments and by hearing stories of large quantities of the metal. Ultimately, placer gold was discovered in the mountainous interior of Hispaniola.

When Columbus arrived, the Indies were already densely populated, supporting almost six million people. These were largely divided between two distinct language families. The northern islands—the Greater Antilles: Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas—were occupied largely by Tainos (also called Arawaks). The southern islands—the Lesser Antilles—were mostly inhabited by Caribs.

Filled with luxurious vegetation, the Indies had been colonized as early as 5000 B.C. by groups from Central America—Honduras and Nicaragua. A second wave of migration around 3000 B.C. brought the Tainos from lowland South America, who pushed the earlier settlers into the more marginal areas. A third wave of migrants, the Caribs, also from South America, entered the Indies during the last few centuries B.C. They moved northward, pushing the earlier inhabitants out, but by 1492 they had reached no farther north than Puerto Rico.

The Tainos were organized into ranked societies with rulers (caciques) and other social statuses, which the Spaniards interpreted as classes, imposing the more rigid divisions of their homeland onto the flexible Indian societies. The Tainos were agriculturalists who lived in large villages sustained by the cultivation of sweet potatoes, yams, and other tubers that they had originally brought from South America. They also had a second, less important complex of seed crops, including maize, beans, and squash, which had recently reached the islands from Mesoamerica. It was in Taino fields that the Spaniards first saw the crops they were to find and exploit on the mainland. Hunting and fishing supplemented this vegetable diet, but aside from ducks and dogs, the Indies held no domesticated animals.

Columbus embarked on a second voyage in 1493, intent on settling the lands he had discovered. This effort was not aimed at settling unoccupied areas but rather at settling where population was densest, so that native labor could be readily exploited. Reaching Hispaniola in November, Columbus's expedition brought fifteen hundred men—no women—along with livestock, seeds, and plants. With this, the colonization of the New World began.

In the early years, Hispaniola, with its dense population, was the primary focus of Spanish settlement. The inevitable clashes of those years were eased by the tolerance of the Tainos, who did not object to the Spaniards' presence, at least initially. In 1494, however, the first Indian rebellion broke out, in response to the capture of a native ruler. Spanish retribution was harsh, and over the next two years Columbus militarily subdued all the natives of the island and subjected them to Spanish control. Hispaniola offered little of direct material wealth for the Spaniards to seize, save the labor of the Indians themselves, and this they controlled through the institution of the encomienda. The encomienda was a political-economic system in which rights to the labor of the Indians residing in a granted area were allocated to designated Spanish encomenderos. Their labor was managed through the cooperation of the local caciques but enforced by the Spaniards.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Mexico and the Spanish Conquest by Ross Hassig. Copyright © 2006 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Maps,
Acknowledgments,
Nahuatl Pronunciation Guide,
Short Chronology of the Conquest of Mexico,
Introduction,
1. The Spanish Background to the Conquest of Mexico,
2. Mesoamerica and the Aztecs,
3. The Discovery of Yucatan,
4. The Conquest of Central Mexico,
5. The March to Tenochtitlan,
6. Moteuczoma's Tenochtitlan,
7. Flight and Recovery,
8. The Return to Tenochtitlan,
9. Conquest and Defeat,
10. Aftermath,
11. Consequence and Conclusion,
Brief Sketches of the Participants,
Notes,
Glossary,
Recommended Reading,
References,
Index,