In Our Time - The Siege of Tenochtitlan

Episode Date: October 27, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Siege of Tenochtitlan. In 1521 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes led an army of Spanish and native forces against the city of Tenochtitlan, the spectacular island capital of the Aztec civilisation. At first Cortes had been welcomed by the Aztec leader, Moctezuma, and he and his men were treated like kings. But their friendship proved short-lived, and soon celebrations turned into vicious fighting. After a prolonged siege and fierce battle, in which many thousands died, the city finally fell. This major confrontation between Old and New Worlds precipitated the downfall of the Aztec Empire, and marked a new phase in European colonisation of the Americas.With:Alan Knight Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of OxfordElizabeth GrahamProfessor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at University College, LondonCaroline Dodds Pennock Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, a 16th century adventurer to the New World wrote these awestruck words. These great towns and temples and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision.

Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. The palaces in which they lodged us were very spacious and well-built of magnificent stone, cedarwood and the wood of other sweet-smelling trees, with great rooms and courts, which were a wonderful sight, and all covered with awnings of woven cotton. That's how the Spanish conquistador Bernaldez de Castillo described the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, when he first laid eyes on it in November 1519. But two years later, the city was no more, its buildings in ruins and almost 90% of its inhabitants lay dead. The fall of Tenochtitlan marked the end of the Aztec Empire

and the turning point for Spanish dominance over the whole of Central America. But how did a journey of discovery turn into one of the continent's bloodiest battles? Joining me to discuss the siege of Tenochtlan are Alan Knight, Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of Oxford, Elizabeth Graham, Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at University of College London, and Caroline Dodd's Penick, lecturer in international history. at the University of Sheffield. Howland Knight, can you give us an idea of who the Aztecs were at that time at the beginning of the 16th century?

Well, the Aztecs is the name we give slightly loosely to a whole group of people who established first a city and then an empire, which was the empire that the Spaniards encountered when they arrived in 1519. And it was based in the valley of Mexico, which was a very productive highland zone, right in the middle of Mexico or Mesoamerica, which had produced a whole series of empires through centuries. and the Aztec Empire was the last of several to be created. The Aztecs originally arrived there about 200 years or more before,

so they were relative newcomers. They arrived as fairly insignificant migrants from the northwest and established a city on an island in the middle of a series of connected lakes in the Valley of Mexico, which gave them enormous powers of production and very good communications. And in alliance with other city states, we imagine a kind of set of feuding cities, not unlike, say, Renaissance Italy.

they established a triple alliance on the basis of which they came to dominate first the valley of Mexico itself and then on the basis of those resources and population they could spread out to the south and east particularly and establish a huge ramified empire based on tribute constant military campaigns human sacrifice and this was an empire which the Spaniards encountered it was very large it was of recent creation but it had a number of major internal instabilities and problems which made it vulnerable to an external attack What was the major problem? The major problem was that the empire had been created very rapidly over the previous 200 years,

and in fact the city of Tenochtitlan itself went from naught to 200,000 in less than 200 years. So it was a dramatic rapid progress. And the Aztec Empire was not a highly integrated empire like the Roman or perhaps the Inca. It depended rather on a series of military campaigns designed partly to exact tribute and subjection from other cities and regions,

also to get humans for sacrifice, which was an essential part of Aztec culture and cosmology. But it left, it met the empire was not any full of potentially rebellious groups and subjects, but there were actually large holes within it, one in particular, the Tlascalan kingdom to the east, which was another crucial part in the story, because the Tlascalans were key allies of the Spaniards who rebelled against the Aztecs and indeed made possible the eventual Spanish victory. And how far, by, say, 1519, had the European conquers, the request of the Americas progressed, particularly the Spanish. Again, it was fairly recent. Of course,

Columbus had first made landfall in the West Indies in 1492. And in the 1490s and early 1500s, the Spaniards have begun a process of colonization, in a sense building what they'd done previously in the Atlantic Islands, the Canary Islands, initially based on plantation production, slavery, the extraction of bullion. They found relatively little bullion in the West Indies. The native population there, caribs, tynos, arrawaks suffered both abuse and even more seriously huge population loss due to disease.

And so the Spanias found themselves controlling a number of islands but without getting sufficient returns and therefore there was a major impetus for them, Cortez and others, to try and seek their fortune on mainland America first in North and South America was now Venezuela, but

eventually they made landfall in Mexico which was when the contact with the Aztecs first began. I don't know how much panic, as Alanaita said, the Spanish didn't face much resistance in Hispaniola and Cuba. Now, turning to the Aztecs, back to the aspects, so they're going towards that in a moment. How important was warfare in Aztec society?

Warfare was incredibly important to Aztec culture. You might argue that it's founded on warfare. It's a society whose mythical histories are based around the idea that they follow Hwitzel-Apochele, God of War, and the God of the Sun, in a long migration which eventually leads them via very warlike exploits to Tenochtitlan, this base in the Valley of Mexico. And warfare is something that in Aztec culture doesn't just have the usual political and economic purposes.

So, for example, bringing in tribute to expand the city and expanding the boundaries of the empire. But it's also at the root of their social and political hierarchies. So because this is a society based around human sacrifice, as Alan said, the Aztec practice of war is tailored to fulfil the demands of a society based on human sacrifice. And so warfare is tailored to provide opportunities to secure victims. And that leads to a social system in which hierarchy is based on the securing of victims. So a young man's first official victory is the opportunity for him to enter, into warrior hierarchy, into full male adulthood,

and his future success is based on his ability to better a variety of opponents in battle. So vital is warfare to Aztec society that even Moctezuma, the ruler at the time that the Spanish arrive, would have had to prove himself after his election by leading his men on campaign. The entire social system is based on the idea that the glorious, the active, the most successful warriors

lead themselves to the front. Two questions come up in me then. First of all, to explore a little more the human sacrifice. Why, as you've been so emphatic about it, was it so essential and vital to them? And secondly, their view of war, therefore, was more to do with capturing people than with killing them, which was to prove extraordinary important. Is that right? Absolutely, yes.

The human sacrifice is believed to be essential in order to perpetuate the world. The Aztecs believed that at the beginning of the time, the gods gave blood of themselves in order to create human beings. and that they must continually reciprocally pay back that blood debt in order to continue the world and to continue the success of their culture and of the world as a whole. Now that does, of course, then lead to a society, excuse me, in which captives are essential in order to perpetuate not just their own power and glory and authority in the valley, but also the entire civilization in their own mind.

and that means that although there are elements to the warfare which we would recognize, which will inevitably kill, so for example, arrows and long-range weapons, which you can't really control, when it closes into hand-to-hand combat, very often they're trying to capture rather than kill. So, for example, to cut someone on the legs to allow them to fall and be dragged off the battlefield. And that totally changes the nature of the conflict between the Aztecs and the Spanish, because both have such different expectations as to what they're trying to get out of it. And as I understand it, your rating, as it were, depending on how many captives you could have,

the more captive you got as a young, or not so young soldier, the better placed you were, the more ennobled you were, and so on. Yes, that's right. Although it's not literally a numerical game. So different types of captive are considered to have different values. It's a little bit like a card collecting system. You can only have five Chichimeck captives, say, before you have to start capturing other kinds of people

in order to get more status. So for each captive, you get more status, you get a new adornment, it's very visible status, it's something where you're rewarded and everyone can see that you've achieved these things by new feathers, new hair adornments, new decorations on your cape, for example. But you don't keep getting those for every captive.

You have to capture different kinds of people because the different cities are regarded as having some are braver than others, some have different attributes, and so it isn't literally numerical. Back to the human sacrifice, in the city, which I'll ask you to elaborate on a little bit, there are these pyramid structures in which the sacrifices take place. Apart from the temples, it's a lower-level city, so people cannot but see these all the time. Are they happening every day?

Is it something that has to be done every day? It's not necessarily daily. You're absolutely right. Because only nobles are permitted houses of above one story, the great ceremonial precinct at the heart of the city absolutely towers over the city and is visible from throughout the urban population. People will have seen these sacrifices on the summit taking place day to day. And it certainly, if not daily, is a regular round of rituals. They have 18 tresenaes, what are sort of like months, in which each of these tresenaes

festivals take place, most of which incorporate human sacrifice. I opened the programme by referring to Bernalde de Castillo's description of Tenocht de Lann. Have you anything to add to that? This is, as Alan said, an island city in the middle of a great lake, and for some conquistadors, it conjures up images of a sort of ideal Venice. Unlike the higgledy-piggledy streets you see in Europe, this is a planned city with great causeways running in three directions to join the city to the mainland.

There are wide streets, masonry buildings, there are regular, ordered ceremonial centres. And it's also almost certainly the largest city any of the conquistadors would ever have seen. At perhaps 200,000 to a quarter of a million people, though estimates vary wildly. This is maybe twice as large as any European city at the time. So Seville is approximately 70,000, 60,000 people at that time. This is maybe 200,000. So it must have made an incredible impression on the Spaniards, especially by contrast with the smaller settlements they'd seen up to that point.

And we're talking about a city that was very clean, that's how they say, and so on. Yes, very, very clean, very ordered. The Spanish, in fact, incredibly admire the control that allows the Aztecs to maintain this very regular, ordered, particularly clean city. I mean, to put it in mind, it's a colossal feat of engineering, isn't it? It's an incredible feat of engineering. Much of it is based on land that he's. been reclaimed from the lake. It has

Chinampa Gardens around it, these incredible engineering structures. Elizabeth Graham, Hanan Cortez was the leader of the Spanish expedition to Mexico. Can you give us something of his background? Well, that's interesting. He seems to have been from a good family in Spain, from a

place called Medellín and Estremadora. But he doesn't seem to have had a great deal of wealth, and that is probably what stimulated his interest in going to the Americas. In fact, that's true when you read any of the accounts that many of the soldiers and officers who went to the New World were interested in wealth, which they didn't have in Spain.

And so I think that was his stimulus. And he originally went to Hispaniola and then to Cuba, where he had some plantations. And it's interesting because he must then have excelled intellectually to some extent and strategically because he does come to the attention of the governor of Cuba and does manage to get himself appointed on this expedition. And it's hard to know why it's him and not others. In fact, Bernal Diaz was in the New World in Yucatan with Juan de Griehalla, who had led an earlier expedition. And he comes across as a very competent leader. And yet, Cortes won out over him. And it seems like he must have. have had very good powers of persuasion as well.

And you do see that as you follow the conquest, that he's a very clever man and very good at people, manipulating people and pleasing people, bringing them over to his side. Hadn't he thought well in various battles? Wasn't Velasquez impressed by that aspect of him too? Well, from what I understand, it was largely the connection with Velasquez

was largely the fact that Cortez married a woman and as a result of that became Velasquez of sort of fictive kin and Cortez certainly did excel in battles in the new world. I don't really know about his history

in Spain. But he was given as you say I didn't know that he was picked from so many other good people but said he was and he led what was by the standards of that time in that place a big expedition wasn't it? Can you describe what set off with and the little incident that almost prevented him from setting off.

Well, when I say picked, there are, some of Belasquez's closest associates had argued that Cortez should leave this expedition. And a lot of that, it's, again, I don't know that much about Spanish history because I'm actually more knowledgeable about the indigenous side. But it looks as if it involved, you know, persuasion and bribery and family connections. But I think what does distinguish Cortez, that even in the... that's true. He does seem to have been very good at managing. Can you describe the size of the expedition then that he set up with the moment? It turned out to be when he first left, it seemed to be about five or six hundred people in total,

about 100 officers, and the rest were soldiers, also sailors, pilots, people who took care of the supplies. And it took him a while to assemble his crew because he went from city to city in Cuba, before he did leave. And it's interesting that he almost lost the expedition because when he was ready to set sail, Belasquez started to change his mind and decided that he didn't want Cortez to leave this expedition, but Cortez managed to get away to, manage to set sail in time with his crew. And one of the things I found interesting is that their food consisted of salt pork and cassava bread, because they didn't have cattle and sheep in the in Hispaniolo or Cuba yet.

So a lot of the supplies that they took with them was cassava bed, which is the local sort of Arawak staple food. And they took a few horses, and they took cannon? They took horses, which were not that easy to get. They took cannon. They took crossbows. They took musketeers.

They took swordsmen. They took pilots, of course. Pilots were very important because the pilots had already, Many of them already knew and had explored the Caribbean, and so they knew the waters around Yucatan. So he set sail in 1519, and he reached the Mexican coast. Can you tell us what he did then when he got there? He first got to Cozumel, which is in the Maya area,

and that's on the east coast of Yucatan. And this is really interesting because the earlier expeditions, the Maya resisted the Spaniards quite readily. And I think the reason for this is because there were Spaniards living among the Maya and when Cortez went to Cozumel he figured this out whereas the earlier expeditions had not

he talked to some of the Maya chieftains well communicated with them and they actually told him that there were Spaniards living among the Maya in Yucatan and he took the time to try to get those Spaniards back and that made all of the difference in the world it was a little complicated because he

it took a while to get in touch with them and then they missed. Yeah, but he got them and they were translating and so he was going forward. Well, not both of them, one of them. One of them stayed behind and that's critical because the one who stayed behind gave the excuse that he had a Maya family and he had no wish to go back. And that person was to prove very critical in the Maya battles against the Spaniards because he informed the Maya of Spanish battle techniques. The other person, Juan Diaz, who was a priest, did stay with Cortez,

and he spoke Chantal, which was one of the very important languages that all of the people spoke along the coast, going all the way to Tabasco. And he also spoke, I'm sorry, I said Juan Diaz, Hadanamo de Aguilar, and he also spoke Yucatech, so he could translate. So we have a translator all the night, and we must get to the Aztecs now. How did Cortez and his men make first contact with the Aztec rulers,

and if you can take us to Mokitiz, well, first of all, his emissaries, Moktizumus, emissaries. Well, Moktizuma and the Aztecs had some intimation that this was happening because there had been two prior Spanish voyages up the coast and so reports had come back to Ternotland of these huge castles floating at sea and of strange people with beards and white faces. And so there was some awareness something was happening. And when Cortez made landfall near Veracruz, the Aztecs sent emissaries. Just for once, if I may be aimed. There was nothing there. We planted a flag and said it was a city which gave him legal advantages when he communicated back to Strait.

Yeah, it was a crucial feature of Cortez's a whole adventure. Because he had exceeded his authority and leaving Cuba, he had both to be successful quickly, and he had to legalise what was in some ways illegal. So you have this interesting combination of rather reckless buccaneering with a kind of legalistic attempt to legitimise, to send back reports to the King of Spain, stressing how wonderful the exploits, how much bullion he was getting.

So there is an interesting combination. And founding Veracruz was an aspect of that legalistic policy. Now, Moctizuma therefore knew something. something was happening, sent emissaries. And I think for both sides, this was an amazing meeting of two cultures who had no knowledge of each other. And in a way, it's almost unprecedented in human history. The Spaniards knew the Ottoman Empire. They were dimly aware of India and China. The Aztec's probably even more extreme, because they'd never dealt with people of this kind before. And one other thing, just to stress in terms of the warfare, the technology, is to say that the

Spaniards were in a way in an Iron Age culture. They had the weaponry that's been mentioned. They had horses. they had many of the benefits of the whole Eurasian cultural inheritance. The Aztecs had no draft animals, they had no horses, they had, in a sense, a neolithic weaponry. And so they were a great disadvantage, except in one respect, that of numbers. So I think there was a great lack of intelligence on both sides, and both sides were feeling each other out. And so Moktizumas sends emissaries, he sends gifts, including gold,

which is probably not a good idea. And his initial objective is to keep the Spaniards away from Ternoch-Titlan. On the other side, the really important initial development is that Cortez realizes quite quickly, in his connection with the Tottenac people, who were a subject people, that they were dissatisfied, resentful, and potentially rebellious. And so he realizes quite quickly that there's the possibility of winning over large chunks of dissatisfied Mesoamerican people

in opposition to the Aztec Empire. Without that, he would stand no chance. So he's moving in on the empire. He's already, as Elizabeth said, is a very fine negotiator. He's found himself an ally who's going to prove in Biden, or because of numbers apart from anything else. And again, Elizabeth said something about translation, but he found another translator, Donia Marina,

with whom he had a long relationship for her, whatever we want to call it, but she turned out again to be an invaluable translator from different languages and took him through. Yes, Alan was talking about how negotiating with the peoples and making use of the divisions within the Aztec Empire was incredibly vital, and there's no way he could have done that

without the ability to communicate. with the indigenous people. So we have Diorno de Aguilla, who is a Spaniard who speaks Spanish, although not very well, after eight years amongst the Maya, apparently, and Chantal Maya. And then he finds, or in fact, is given

amongst a group of women, a woman who we believe her indigenous name was probably Malinale, but she comes to be baptized and to be known to the Spanish as Donia Marina. And she speaks, because she was originally a Nahuah woman, Nahuahua being the language,

language of the Aztecs, and she's been enslaved by the Maya. So she speaks both the Maya language and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. And so by an incredibly laborious and probably terribly inaccurate process by which you will have someone speaking in Nahwatel, and then Donia Marina will translate it from Nahuatl into Maya, and then Agila will translate it from Maya into Spanish, and then it works back the other way. So although it is very, very laborious, you do have a means of communicating with both the Maya peoples and the Nahuah peoples. And we told that she learns Castilian quite soon, and so that speeds up the process considerably. Yes, it does seem, we don't know exactly when she becomes the sole translator,

but we certainly know that in indigenous accounts, pictorial accounts of the conquest, Aguilar is not really pictured, and she and Cortez appear as a single voice almost, one that is often called Malinsin. So we have this luck again, like the Pilgrim phyllis had with Squanto, up in the northern part of America, the essential translators to take them in. Elizabeth Graham,

Alan referred to this alliance with the Las Kalans tribe. Can you just tell us a little bit more about them and why they were so available for Cortez to become his ally? The Kalashkalans were one of the groups that were never really

conquered by the Aztecs. And it's interesting because if you look at a map of the Aztec Empire, I always say it looks like a moth-eaten blank because there are these big holes and the Tlaasgallans were one of the major big holes. And they had, they spoke Nawadal, but they had a different government, different kind of organization. How different? Well, they had, the Aztecs actually had councils, but the Tlashkalans, dare I say,

had a more democratic way of governance and they used these councils in ways in which they decided on policy. And their buildings were slightly different, but they did speak Nalwadal. no water was their language. And it is interesting that they were not conquered by the Aztecs. And from an indigenous point of view, that's explicable, given what Caroline was talking about in terms of the battle tactics of the Aztecs. And those battle tactics have deep roots in Mesoamerica. They didn't fight to kill people. They fought to capture them, not just to take them back and kill them, but to appropriate resources. So the Tlachgallans, one of the reasons that they weren't completely wiped out, is that they were tremendously effective and not getting captured by the Aztecs.

And for that reason, they could maintain independence. But if you read the documents, they say, we can't get salt, we can't get cotton. And that tells you that they are not able to appropriate resources for themselves. So they were in a very sort of precarious position. They weren't conquered. They weren't governed. but they really didn't have a lot of control over their lives. So Cortez was a lifeline for them in a while.

Yes, it is interesting, though, that they fought him very strongly at first. And I think it's almost you get this idea that they are so used to just having to fight so fiercely that that was their first reaction. And then when they realized, as you say, that he was their lifeline, they completely changed tactics and became very loyal supporters. Alan, you mentioned very graphically these two most strangest meeting or unique in the history of the world up to then. So the Spanish let

get to the great city. How were they treated by Monkete's humor, this smallish force has turned up with these horses and these white faces and these beards and these armour, these guns which people didn't know anything about. There at the city under these causeways, this magnificent city, what happened then? What was the encounter?

Well, he arrives, Cortez and the Spanish arrived, still no more than a few hundred, they now have quite a lot of allies, Clascarlans and others, which are crucial in terms of military auxiliaries and giving them support and food and so on. And Moctezuma has another dilemma which is how to confront these

people who he wanted to keep out of the city. They're now on his doorstep. He goes out to meet them again, behaves in a very diplomatic and polite, courteous kind of way. And I suppose one way almost to try and explain why he does this. We don't have any records that would tell you what Moctezuma's thinking. Obviously, you have to

based this on a certain amount of empathy and understanding would be that it was probably better in his mind, if you like, to almost paraphrase President Johnson to have the Spaniards inside the tent spitting out than outside spitting in, rather than have them roaming around in the valley, destroying resources, bring them into Tenoch Titlan, where to some extent some of their military capacity with horses would be neutralised and then try to deal with them once, as it were, they were literally under his roof. The Spaniards equally have the idea, Cortez in particular, that I think by this point he had decided he was going to decapitate the Aztec Empire, that his only hope of really achieving victory was to take off the top

and superimpose Spanish power on top of the empire, rather than to get involved in a whole series of very costly dispersed military campaigns, it would be a sort of centralized coup de man in Tenochtitlan. So both sides, in their different way, conspired to bring about the situation where the Spaniers are actually brought into Tenochtitlan initially as welcome visitors. And they find it wonderful. weeks there in these great temples and huge rooms and so on. You wanted to come in there. One other thing that, of course, what Cortez almost immediately does is he takes Moctezuma effectively

prisoner. And Moctizuma becomes a kind of constrained puppet in the hands of the Spaniards who use him to try and pursue their own sort of rail politic in the heartland of the empire. And so a very anomalous situation is created, particularly for the Aztec elites, who have the problem that their emperor is now, in a sense, in the hands of the Spanish invading enemy. But it seems to be an elected emperor, wasn't it? so they weren't stuck with him as it were forever. It was part elected, part hereditary, but there was no way he was likely to get removed any time quickly.

Caroline, you want to come in. And in trying to understand Moctezuma's actions, one thing we haven't mentioned, we talked about the different tactics of war, but what we haven't mentioned is there are different expectations in going into conflicts. So Moctizuma is presiding over what is often called a hegemonic empire, where he's simply interested in exerting power

over this empire and drawing tribute from it. he isn't expecting Cortez to come and impose a territorial empire where he simply demands power. They're used to working within a system where someone would come. They'd demand tribute. They'd demand your fealty and go away again. So the threat, I think, is perceived very differently. Can we move one, Elizabeth Graham?

They're in there, and it seems, they're in there. And then Cortez is called away because Velasquez has sent a little fleet out to him saying, stop this, I didn't want you to go in the first place. So he hears of that, goes to the coast, makes short shrift of them, brings them back to on his side, as it were. By the time he comes back, there's uproar. And the man is left in charge has done something which has displeased the Aztecs. And they have to flee. I'm sorry to rush that bit, but we've got to get on.

Do you want to add to what Alvarado is it? Had done that. Yeah. What he'd done to upset the Albuquer and then how they got out of the city, which Cortez said they've got to get out. Well, there were mixed stories. Alvarado killed some of the Aztecs during one of their religious ceremonies, and the Aztecs said that that was the reason why they attacked him. Alvarado gives other reasons, but essentially they were attacked, and perhaps he did act reciprocously, and they had to leave the city.

So when Cortez came back with reinforcements, as it were, up for continuing his negotiation strategy or fight, he found that the only real option for him was to get out of the city. Which they attempted to, which they did. Can you describe that? Well, they had been attacked in the city itself, and they finally realized that because the Aztecs generally didn't fight at night, their best chance was to leave at night.

And they were almost successful, but either they were informed on or some people heard them. And so they were attacked as they left the city along one of the causeways, and they lost many men as a result of that. but they did escape. And it's interesting. I think it's partly what Caroline was saying, that the Aztecs, to the end,

still try to capture Spaniards rather than killing them. So it made for the Spaniards, in a sense, it gave them a little breathing space. And I think it's one of the reasons why they were able to escape. Alan Knight, can I come to, how did Sir Cortez has been kicked out. He's had a lot of men wounded and some killed.

How did he regroup? because that's what he had to do. We should just add one other thing we've left out, which is that Moctezuma gets killed. Who kills him is a matter of debate? But it means the Aztec Empire loses an emperor. A new emperor is appointed. There is then a lot of ritual,

which rather holds up proceedings on their side. And that emperor also then contracts smallpox, which is a crucial factor in the whole story, because the Aztecs at this point, in the latter part of 1520, are beginning to die in vast numbers, which affects their morale, their fighting capacity. And does it affect their view of what the gods

are doing to them? Well, I think it has a psychological effect in that sense too, that notably the Spaniards, of course, are not dying. They can live with smallpox. They brought it. For what for them is a nasty disease is for the Aztecs and, of course, for the Spaniards allies, La Clascarlans, it's also a very costly plague for them as well. So clearly it has a psychological, has an organizational impact, it depletes manpower. So cumulatively, it's a crucial factor in determining the ability, the question you just asked, of Cortez, having made this precipitate retreat, in very difficult circumstances. He has to regroup. He can go back to Clascala, where he has a safe haven to recuperate, acquire more Indian allies, more Spanish reinforcements come up from the coast,

and then he embarks on the serious conquest. It's no longer going to be just a sort of coup d'etat in the city. It now is a prolonged, costly siege involving not only a great deal of fighting, at which points I rather think the taking of captives had sunk. I think by then the Aztecs were fighting a sort of war to the death. and it also involves, interestingly, naval warfare.

So you have the interesting phenomenon at 7,500 feet, naval battles, along with land battles, for the final conquest of Tenochtetland. Because Cortez had got boats built by, he'd got a carpenter and they built boats and carried them over the mountains and put them on this lake. Again, a prodigious amount of work. They brought them down, they reassembled them,

they dug a canal and launched them in the lake, and that way they could overcome the Aztecs, quite formidable lake defences, huge fleets of war canoes. that they had to deal with. Can you tell us, Caroline, finally, how they took the city? So they've got the boats on the lake. They're cutting off the causeways.

They're laying siege. They're starving them out in many ways. And they went in, and what was the final thrust? Well, for a very long time, Cortez hoped that they would surrender. He wanted to take the city whole, and so he left the north causeway open as a means of escape. But eventually he realizes that, as Alan said, the Aztecs were going to fight to the death.

they are never going to surrender. And so he closes the North Causeway, and they begin to advance through the city in battles where, instead of withdrawing at night, they destroy buildings and move forward burning the city as they go. The accounts say that Kualtamok is either trying to escape or coming to surrender, which seems more likely. He's the new leader.

I'm sorry, yes, because the first leader elected barely lasts long enough to appear in any of the accounts because he dies of smallpox. A new leader, Kualtamok, who is, a really very warlike figure. He's heralded as the last great Aztec warrior and he's determined to fight to the death but eventually he's either escaping in a canoe or coming to surrender having realised that the vast majority of his forces have been decimated either by disease or by warfare and he is caught by the Spanish escaping on the lake. And at that point the city is essentially in ruins. There is no single coup d'etatah. That's the symbolic moment but there's so much of

city in ruins by that stage? I was going to say because one of the problems they had was that the houses wouldn't burn the Spaniards and so they knocked down house after house after house after house, after house, which was very successful in that one of their problems was that people would throw rocks on them from the roofs of the houses and that was part of the reason. And the thing is when you see what Cortez talks about it, he doesn't want to do this, but he has to destroy one house after another and eventually in order to enter the city,

it's really destruction. A lot of the final destruction and killing is actually done by Clascarland and other Indian allies, which again very much bears out the fact that the Aztecs were hated by a lot of the subject people. So this was in many ways the end of a huge Mesoamerican civil war, not just a European conquest. Have you got a scene there?

Have we got these? Because an immense number of people, we're talking about 200 to 250,000. People in that city we're talking about an immense number of people being felled by smallpox. I'm sorry if you're so sort of comic and graphic as it were, but how we've got bodies in the streets and

wailing and absolute, completely mayhem as to not knowing what is happening both to their bodies and to their city? Yes. But what sources do we have for that? Well, we have not only the conquistadors sources, which even the conquistadors are pretty

astounded and devastated by the extent to which people are, um, prepared to fight to the death and are prepared to live through this incredibly grim experience simply in order to try and protect their city. But the sources that are probably the most powerful are the indigenous poetry, which talk about how there is blood in the streets, spears are broken, people are wailing and the Tenochtitland, the great Tenochtland, the sky has fallen effectively.

There are a number of accounts from after the conquest that are very problematic because how far they're indigenous when they're being recorded by Spaniards is really, really troubling. But the grief and the devastation is absolutely clear in these incredible poems and songs. Can you take that on, Little Isbeth... Sorry, Elizabeth Cohn.

Can you take that on a little and say what this meant to the rest of the Aster Campire? They're a great city on an island in the lake which is... We'd be talking about this enormous feat of engineering, this magnificent place. What happened around the empire when word went out that this was leveled?

Well, in a way, it's difficult to say. There were many groups were probably happy to see the Aztecs destroyed. On the other hand, by then, most indigenous peoples knew about the Spaniards, knew how they fought in wars. And I think there was a great trepidation about what the future would hold under the governance of the Spaniards because they were, well, before Cortez actually entered Tennessee, and he also battled with many of the towns around the lake.

And that took quite a long time. I think it took over three months. and so he actually engaged with many different groups of people around the lake. So many people were introduced, I guess you could say, to what to expect from the Spaniards. So there were probably two things, I would think. One, glad that the Aztecs had been conquered because tribute burdens had got pretty considerable. But some trepidation because they knew that the systems were changing, the type of warfare was changing. Alan, I know you want to come in, but on a sort of almost on a school level, because they had guns, because they had horses, did those make a massive, we were told at school, they had guns, they had horses, the others had little chance because of this. Is there any truth in that?

Yeah, there is some truth in that. I mean, these were, as we said, very serious military encounters in which technology counted, and horses were important, artillery was important, particularly in the siege of Tertliland, sea power or naval power on the lake was important. There was also an organizational factor. The Spanish fought in a sort of tightly disciplined way. Some of them had fought in the campaigns in Italy. The mode of warfare, as we said, was rather different. The Spaniards had this particular commitment to sort of kill and to win at all costs. We should also add one thing we didn't touch on, which is the Spaniards did have a sort of providential mission behind them.

The cliché was they went for the glory, God and gold, and though the glory and the God was pretty important, the gold was also important. But the god, the clerical, Catholic element, which of course was extremely strong in the whole reconquista of Spain earlier and the continued crusades in the 16th century was replicated in New Spain. And so Cortez could legitimize what he did both legally and then also in, if you like, religious terms. And before long the friars came in shortly after Cortez and began to set up a more religious form of legitimation,

which was one of the most successful ways the Spaniards placed their control over what would eventually become New Spain or Mexico. So they enslaved first and then, then the priors came to convert the slaves so that that made it legitimate? They did enslave to some extent, although the more normal pattern was a kind of more quasi-fudal system called in Comienda, which was a tribute system. In many ways the Spanias took over what the Aztecs did and operated a similar tribute system, although actually I would say in some ways the Spanish exactions were less severe. And the one thing the Spaniards did, apart from bringing Catholicism, which you may argue about,

was they did bring eventually a measure of peace and order. and the chronic warfare of the late Aztec period was not replicated. Mexico, circa 1650 is a much more peaceful place than it had been in 1500. And in legal terms, we have to be careful talking about slavery because the Spanish right to the Americas is based on a papal bull which says they can basically have the Americas if they evangelise the people. And they totally undermine that legitimation if they enslave all of them. So although there's a legal formula which is rather abused,

where if you can enslave rebels, everybody else has to be treated as if they're going to become a subject, a citizen of the Spanish Empire. And so this is why that formula encomienda that Alan mentioned is brought in, because supposedly then what you do is you get a grant of Indians

and they work for you and you evangelise them. It's supposed to be a reciprocal system. Of course it turns into a kind of slavery, but it never is the sort of slavery that we kind of conjure up in our own mind when we think about British slavery. Elizabeth Graham, was this sort of trauma for the peoples around Middle America for the next few hundred years, this and acts like this, which followed up? Yes, it was, well, it was traumatic.

Alan is right, and to some extent the Spaniards used the Encomianda system was a tribute system, very much like what the Aztecs had. The difference was that they did emphasize different products. So much of what had been valued previously was no longer valued, and that took quite a bit of adjustment. The feathers weren't valued as much as gold. No. Well, and actually, the gold, there wasn't all that much gold, and it's interesting to compliment what Caroline said. By 1550, slavery was, I believe it was outlawed,

because it didn't prove to be economically viable. So there were some places in which silver proved lucrative, but otherwise it was textiles. Yes. The gold was cloth. Yes. And so in a sense, textiles were very valuable. under the Aztec Empire and earlier empires

and it became very valuable with the Spaniards and they exported a great deal of cotton to Europe. Indian slavery was banned and this was partly because of Las Casas and various clerics who propagandized about it but of course black slavery was allowed and there was a fairly large influx of black slaves into Mexico in the 17th century.

So finally, can you some briefly? Sorry, Alan. Was this the beginning of the pattern that obtained in Middle and Southern America from Dunham. Well it was very much the model for what Pizarro then did in Peru, and he decapitated and took over the Inca Empire in Peru and what is now Bolivia,

in probably an even more violent and sort of buccaneering kind of way. I'd like to just add, well, I have a minute, that the whole legacy of this experience is very important in Mexico as a whole. There's a sense in which Moktizuma is seen as still a weak villainous figure and Qua Tammok a great hero. So these repercussions carry on right down through Mexican history till today. Thank you very much.

Thank you to Elizabeth Graham. Caroline Dodds Penneck and Alan Knight. Next week we'll be talking about the moon. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservis.com slash forum.