The Rest Is History - 387. The Fall of the Aztecs: Prisoners of Montezuma (Part 4)

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

The year is 1519. Hernán Cortés and his Spanish comrades have arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs, and have been welcomed by their Emperor Montezuma. But what is Montezuma planning? Are the Spaniards his guests - or his prisoners? Has he really acknowledged them as his overlords? Or are they destined for a rather darker fate, as the latest inmates in his mysterious zoo? In today’s episode, Tom and Dominic follow the Spaniards as they explore the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan, from the crowds in the markets to the blood-drenched shrines atop the temple pyramids.   The days pass, the smiles fade and the tension rises. And then Cortés hears news from the coast that changes everything, and must roll the dice one more time in the greatest gamble of all … *Dominic’s book The Fall of the Aztecs is available now from bookshops across the UK - the perfect Christmas present!* *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in New Zealand and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. That night, as Hernan Cortes stood on his balcony and stared out across the lights of the city, his mind was uneasy. To seek his fortune, he had travelled thousands of miles across land and sea, and here he was, in the centre of an island city, in the heart of a foreign empire, surrounded by people who didn't speak his language, didn't worship his god, and could turn on him at any moment. And as a deep silence fell across the city, one thought preyed on his mind. So far,

he had been lucky, but one day, very soon, his luck might run out. Thrilling stuff there, Dominic, from your new book, The Fall of the Aztecs, one of your Adventures in Time series. Great stuff. And we are, what is this? I'm losing track. Episode four? Episode four, Tom. Into our Aztec epic.

And Cortes and his Spanish adventurers are in Tenochtitlan, the great Aztec capital, and what is going to happen next? Well, this is the question, isn't it, Tom? Because this thought must have been on their minds. Yeah. I mean, how could it not be? Cortes, just to recap, has made this extraordinary gamble. He has gone against his orders with this company, many of whom are probably not particularly loyal to him and have their own agendas. They have gone inland, as we discussed last time. They seem to have struck this alliance with a city-state called Tlaxcala. And then they've gone across the causeway. They've been welcomed by the Mexica, by their emperor Montezuma or

Moctezuma or whatever one might call him. And they've been welcomed. They've been welcomed by the Mexica, by their emperor Montezuma or Moctezuma or whatever one might call him. And they've been welcomed. They've been installed in the palace in the center of the kind of big ceremonial temple quarter. And what is going on? I mean, the truth of the matter, of course, they don't know. They don't speak the language. They're entirely reliant on Malinche, this former slave girl, to translate for them. But actually, I think in the first few

days, they're probably quite relieved because they have servants to wait on them. Bernal Diaz, all these sources are very suspect, but he's our best source. And he sort of says, there are people there with tortillas and with bits of turkey and chocolate and corn and these kinds of things. And actually, it's fine. I mean, you say they don't know what's going on. Important to emphasise at this point that actually historians can't be certain what's going on as well. So this is a further dimension to the mystery, as we will come to, that actually the sources for this are treacherous in so many ways.

Very treacherous in so many ways. Very treacherous. Yeah. And as a result, there are actually lots of quite opposed theories as to what happens in the days and then the weeks and months that follow. So we should look at that. But I think one thing that is absolutely clear is that the Spaniards would have been completely blown away. I mean, we keep harking back to science fiction. This is the equivalent to Captain Kirk beaming down and finding himself in the middle of some spectacular galactic space scape. Except that it's on the face of the earth. They crossed the oceans and found this stunning, stunning city. Yeah, you're right. The science fiction parallel is a good one because so much science fiction

is clearly based on these sort of European encounters with indigenous people. The remarkable thing is that, as we said before, the Aztec or the Mexica civilization is, what would you call it, Tom, a kind of Bronze Age civilization, I suppose? Yeah. They don't have steel swords. They're about the level of what? Camilla Tenzin compares it to the Sumerians. The Sumerians, yeah. So it's kind of the early Mesopotamian civilizations. So it's a sophisticated urban civilization, but technologically it is, as it were,

if you want to think of it this way, behind the old world. And yet, Tenochtitlan is a much bigger city than anything they have seen in Europe. As we were saying before, the sort of metro area, it's probably got a million people in it. It's also, they say straight away, it's astonishing to them how well-ordered, how regimented, how well-maintained, how clean. Yeah, because it's new, isn't it? So unlike Rome or Paris, where the streets have grown up over many, many centuries, this is much more like an American city, a modern American city, kind of grid systems and laid out like that. It has shops more like an American city, a modern American city, kind of grid systems and laid out like that. It has shops though, which American cities of course don't, if you're

branded out as American shops. So it doesn't have shopping malls, although it does have floating gardens, which is nice. Yeah. And I think I suppose the difference, it's not as chaotic as it, as a European city, as Seville, where many of them would have sailed from. You know, Seville is an old city and had recently, relatively recently anyway, been retaken from the Moors. So there's a jumble of different influences in Seville, whereas somewhere like Tenochtitlan is probably much more uniform.

You've got the Great Pyramids, but also it's so regimented. So it's divided into quadrants and each quadrant is divided into neighborhoods and there are different kinds of officials who supervise the different neighborhoods and things and everybody has their place and to go against the expectations of society of your world is kind of unthinkable there's no evidence that people really did it and in a sense i think even though it's a sort of bronze age

civilization that clearly is a very powerful apparatus of kind of state regimentation. So they go, for example, to this huge market at Tlatelolco, which is another island kind of connected with Tenochtitlan, like a kind of suburb basically. And they go to the market where you can buy everything. You can buy all these amazing things that they've never seen before, the chocolate and the spices and chilies and feathers. Quetzal feathers. Right, exactly. Feathers and all these things. But Bernardia says the thing that really is striking to them is how regimented it is, how well-ordered, how there are officials everywhere

to sort of regulate the weights and measures and all these kinds of things. And this is very Moctezuma, isn't it? He seems to have been very into this, the idea that this state that has emerged very, very recently should be set on a firm organizational footing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So there's that. That amazes them.

But also, as you say, the sheer science fiction kind of culture shock. So Cortez says in one of his letters at one point, it was all so wondrous that we could barely believe it. Another of his comrades says the city was a place of enchantment. We were never sure whether it was real or if we were dreaming. And as we said before, they've come having read all these chivalric romances and suddenly they're in one. I suppose the equivalence is like an astronaut who's grown up with Star Wars and Star Trek and all of these things. And then he lands on an alien planet and it's just like,

you know, there are people with three heads, kind of bustling bazaars and amazing towers and things. Yeah. And I think that that kind of sense the Spaniards convey of entering a dreamscape hangs over the whole historiography of it as well. Yeah. Because the sense of the greatest culture clash, perhaps in the history of human civilization, it's difficult for all of us to get a handle on. Yeah.

Because it's gone. Tenochtitlan has gone. Yeah. And so it's difficult for us to get back to a sense of what it must have been like. And the only way that we can really do it is through the eyes of the Spaniards. Because the Spaniards are the embodiment of the culture that is coming. And the most arresting moment from Bernal Diaz's account of these early days is when they go to the Great Temple. Now you said Tenochtitlan is gone, but I was in Mexico City earlier this year

and went to the Great Temple, the ruins of the Great Temple. It's still, even the ruins are a remarkable historical site. And I have to say the museum is absolutely brilliant. It really is. And Bernardi's account of when they go to that temple, I mean, unlike me, they don't know what to expect. I'd been primed for it for years of reading about the Aztecs since I was a little boy. They're not primed at all. The sheer size of it, I think 114 steps and this sort of stepped pyramid, they go up to the top.

And one of the early afternoons, it's Montezuma's officials who lead Cortes and his men up to the top. The emperor is already up there sort of doing some sacrifices or whatever. So they go up there to the 11. The emperor is already up there doing some sacrifices or whatever. So they go up there to the 114th step. And you can imagine the scene that they now have the view over the whole city, over the lake. They can see the order of it. They can see the size. Just an incredible scene. Bernardier says some of his companions who had been to Constantinople and Rome and traveled through the whole of Italy. Of course, they've traveled through Italy because they've probably been mercenaries or merchants,

or they've been involved in the many Italian wars in the early 16th century. And they say, God, this is incredible. I've never been anywhere like this. But then there's this absolutely extraordinary culture clash scene. If you believe Bernal Diaz's account, and I'd see no reason to disbelieve this,

Cortes says to the emperor, to Montezuma, I'd love to see your gods. And Montezuma takes him in to the shrine, which is on the top of this temple. So it's a double pyramid. And one of the shrines is to the god Huitzilopochtli. He's their patron, isn't it? He's their patron. That's exactly the word I was looking for. When they reinvented their own history, they claimed they were his kind of chosen people yeah and an amazing scene bernal diaz description they go in

and they can't really see anything because it's dark and then they see the statue of huitzilopochtli with distorted and furious looking eyes covered all over with jewels and pearls and bernal diaz describes him covered with kind of stone writhing serpents and there are carved sort of human faces hanging from his neck and next to him is another sort of idol which looks like half a man and half a lizard and it looks like it's been made of seeds or something that have been stuck together with human blood yeah so at this point, the Spaniards are clearly thinking, oh God, this is pungent stuff. Well, probably what they're thinking is that they're thinking of descriptions of the idols and blood sacrifice in the Bible. Yeah, well, that would be where

they would have, yeah. And so they would have no doubt that these are statues of demons. That seems totally plausible. I mean, that must be the one place where you read about idols or other gods. That is the, you know, you talked about chivalric romances, but now they would feel like they're walking into the Old Testament. Yeah. Would be my guess. Well, especially what they see next, because then, according to the account, if you take the account in sort of chronological order, Bernard Dias says they see braziers, three braziers, in which are smouldering these kind of blackened lumps of flesh,

and they peer into the braziers and they realise they're, or they think they're seeing human hearts. And Bernal Diaz says, every wall was black and clotted with human blood and the stench was worse than in a Spanish slaughterhouse. It was so abominable that we could hardly wait to get away. Now, there'll be some people listening to this who say, how much is this propaganda, orientalizing propaganda? Right. Because if you're expecting the Old Testament, this is what you would expect to see. Yeah. But we do know that they, I mean, we talked about this with Camilla Townsend. We know that the Mexica did carry out human sacrifices, probably not quite on the scale that Spaniards claimed. But human sacrifice was undoubtedly a part of their religious rituals,

wasn't it, Tom? Absolutely. And I think that to imagine that this is ipso facto a bad thing is to reflect the Christian assumptions of the Spaniards. If you're saying, they must have just made this up because human sacrifice is so evidently evil and wrong, then that is fundamentally a Christian perspective. You've got to try and think outside that box. Because there are reasons why the Mexica are doing it that make perfect sense in the context of their understanding of the cosmos. That if blood is not spilled, then the universe will come to an end. Yeah, that's undoubtedly what they think, isn't it?

In her book, Fifth Sun, Camilla Townsend is brilliant on this, on the way in which they think the cosmology works. The sun rises and falls, and it's actually the constant flow of blood that keeps it going. It's kind of like net zero. Unless you do it, the planet will end. My word. It will be engulfed by fire. That is not a comparison I expected. But I think that that's the kind of comparison that you have to understand to understand why

they're doing it, is that they feel that they're faced by the ruin of the planet if they don't do it. Right. I mean, they're not doing it out of pure sadism. No, they're not doing it because they're evil or cruel. Yeah. They're doing it for deeply held reasons. Yes. Yeah.

Well, you see, so there's an exchange now recorded by Bernard Diaz, which I think rings absolutely true. Cortes, by the way, he's coming more and more into focus, I think, as the journey goes on. His character, which is quite obscure when he's out there in the Caribbean or when he's in Spain, now we see more of him and he's an extraordinary opportunist. But just because he's opportunistic and ruthless later on doesn't mean that he doesn't have deeply held convictions. And so when he says to Montezuma, I think he does say this and I think he means it. He says to him, I don't understand why such a wise king hasn't realized that these idols are not gods, they are dev devils and i really hope you will allow us to

put up a christian cross and then cortez says slightly boastfully when we do put up the christian cross your gods will quail in terror because they are nothing but demons absolutely no reason to believe that cortez wouldn't have thought that very sincerely. And then Montezuma, he is really offended. He's outraged. And he says to him, if I had known that you would say something so dishonorable, I would never have shown you our gods. They bring us health and life, crops and rain, and they bring us victory. Never talk about my gods in this way again. Well, I mean, imagine a load of Aztecs turn up in Seville and say, you've got to get rid of that guy on the cross and put up a statue of Wistel Potchley. Yeah, yes.

That wouldn't go down well at all, would it? No, it's exactly the same. I think Montezuma is pretty restrained, all things considered. Yeah, because they then go away and he says, I have to stay up here and basically I now have to make penance for the abysmal, the appalling way in which you have spoken about my gods. And that whole exchange, I think, is absolutely... I mean, there are many things in the standard story that are implausible.

That exchange seems to me immensely plausible. And actually, in a way, you could say it's quite gutsy of Cortes to say it, but also culturally insensitive, Tom. But let's put it this way, that even if it didn't, even if he didn't say it, Diaz is undoubtedly articulating what Cortés probably thought. So he may be dramatizing something that didn't happen. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point.

But Cortés must have thought that. He must have done. He must have done. And it must have been obvious to the Mexica that their guests were hugely discomforted. Because this is the one thing the Mexica understand about the Spaniards is that they are very, very devoted to their God. Yeah. I mean, that's how they come to define them, I think. Yes. So there's one historian we've mentioned, I think once or twice, Fernandez Cervantes, who wrote a book called Conquistadores. And as I said,

I think previously, this is music to your ears, Tom. He says, you will not understand anything that happens if you think the Spanish are just greedy and violent. You have to understand that they genuinely believe that the Mexica are doing something absolutely terrible by not following the one God, and that we're more tolerant that we have a kind of broader understanding of the diversity of opinions across the world i mean are you in favor of human sacrifice is the question well yes so we'll be coming on to this the weird thing is we're doing these episodes but we're also in the middle of preparing some episodes about captain cook another very different personification of european very different and oddly enough the same issue comes up with captain cook doesn't it anyway to go back to Cook, another very different personification of European colonialism. And oddly enough, the same issue comes up with Captain Cook, doesn't it? Anyway, to go back to the relationship, that key relationship between Cortez and Montezuma,

I think their relationship seems to have been pretty good, actually, given how suspicious they are of each other and all the possibilities for- They're kind of, they're scoping each other out, aren't they? They are, yeah. Montezuma has them for dinner. Bernal Diaz has these lovely passages about all the fancy things they eat. They would have smoked tobacco with him because that was a Mexica kind of pastime. They're clearly given guided tours. I know you love a guided tour, Tom. I love a guided tour. Yeah. They're given guided tours. Especially if it's coming from the emperor himself. Yeah. Well, I mean, he has the amazing palace complex where he would have his records, the kind of painted books.

There would be workshops. There would be fancy gardens. There would, Tom, be a zoo, which I imagine we will come back to in the second half. Yes. Yes. They play games with him so there's a story about a game they play called totolocke where basically you throw little kind of pellets try and hit a gold bar gold bar i mean they must have loved seeing that and cortez's sort of comrade pedro de alvarado the story is that he offers to

keep the score as cortez plays the emperor but alvarado is a cheat he keeps inflating cortez's score because he wants the spanish to win that's not cricket and montezuma notices and says plays the emperor. But Alvarado is a cheat. He keeps inflating Cortés' score because he wants the Spanish to win. That's not cricket. And Montezuma notices and says, don't think I can't see

what you're doing. You're trying to cheat in this game. And there's also a story that the emperor took a shine to one of Cortés' page boys. I'm guessing it's probably a teenager

called Juan Orteguia. And he teaches him some Nahuatl and Orteguia tells him stories about life in Spain. Yeah, we have this thing called tapas. I see, that's what he said, Tom. Yeah.

So I think that's very plausible. They also do have little sort of jaunts, don't they? They go kind of hawking and they go hunting. Well, I mean, Dominic, you go abroad, you want to go on a jaunt, don't you? You do. You want a guided tour and you want a jaunt. I know you love a jaunt. Well, I like a jaunt. I go abroad, you want to go on a jaunt, don't you? You do. You want a guided tour and you want a jaunt. I know you love a jaunt. Well, I like a jaunt.

I don't love a guided tour, Tom. I think that's where you and I, it's one of the great cleavages in the rest of history, isn't it? You love a guided tour. I don't really like guided tours because I like to do my own thing. Because you are the cat that walks alone. I am the cat, but I do like a day trip. And they do go on day trips to the sort of lakeshore and they go hunting and things.

And the most extraordinary thing, which historians are puzzled over is they undoubtedly build ships. So they show off that they can build these ships. He must have heard about their extraordinary naval technology, extraordinary to the Mexica. They build some ships with room for cannons and things. Now, is that them showing off or is that them doing a job for him? Well, so this is the question, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, basically, who is in control of who at this point? That's the key.

Here's the thing. Is he their plaything or are they his? Are they his guests? Are they his prisoners? Is he their prisoner? This is the great... Or are they perhaps animals in his zoo, which is a brilliant recent theory that perhaps we should come to after the break when we discuss exactly who is exploiting who at this point. Very much debated.

So we will be back in a few minutes to discuss that. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in Tenochtitlan with Moctezuma and Cortes. Dominic, before the break, we were discussing who exactly has the whip hand at this moment. Moctezuma, presumably, because he's the emperor, he's the ruler of a vast empire. But Cortes is a figure so alarming, I think, to Moctezuma that he hasn't done the obvious thing and tried to have the Spaniards killed. That's the dog that doesn't bark in the night, really. But I suppose you would say, Tom, why would he have them killed? In other words, to use your science fiction analogy, if aliens landed on our planet with tremendous technology,

and there were 300 of them, and they arrived in Washington, DC or in London or Paris or whatever, would your instinct be to kill them? I think your instinct would be to treat them with extreme nervousness, to try and find out what their technology was, to find out exactly what they can do, how dangerous are they, and to try and work out how many more of them are lurking in the background. So in other words, if I kill all the aliens, is there an entire fleet of flying saucers waiting to come in? I mean, those would be the two things that I would want to do. And you were saying about how Cortez develops a ship. I mean, this is obviously of interest to Moctezuma, but it is also Cortez's way of demonstrating. If we can build a ship like

this and think how many of us can come across the great ocean. Yeah, I think that's very plausible. I mean, I think another way of thinking about it is this. Imagine if people with 19th century technology had pitched up in 15th century England, the time of the Wars of the Roses. So a period we know a fair amount about. We know how people thought. We know what kind of assumptions Edward IV and Richard III and people like that had. Is it plausible that if Captain Cook or David Livingstone or General Gordon had arrived, that they would have been killed immediately? No. People would have been absolutely fascinated, as I'm sure the Mexica were.

What I don't think is plausible is that the hosts in that situation just completely abased themselves and groveled. Now, that is the image that you get in the Spanish sources and in the kind of orthodox histories of the conquest of Mexico that so many of our listeners would have read probably when they were children or teenagers or something. Because this is the claim that Cortes makes, isn't it? Writing shortly after to the king, saying that Montezuma, the first thing he's done is essentially surrender his kingdom to the Spanish king. Yeah. So in Cortes' account, in the standard account,

Montezuma surrendered his kingdom almost immediately, within hours of their arrival and said, I am the vassal of Charles V. My kingdom now belongs to you. And obviously this then was layered over with all the stuff about him thinking they're gods and all this business, which I think is clearly not true. And then in the standard account, quite soon they decide they'll actually take him prisoner and they hold him as a hostage for months and months and months. But weirdly, he carries on ruling the kingdom, but under their supervision. Right. And in the Spanish accounts, they will describe Montezuma going off and doing whatever he likes. And then suddenly you remember that he's meant to have been a prisoner and try and kind of offer explanations as to how, if he was a prisoner, he was going off on grand processions and things.

They keep forgetting their story. Right. Exactly. So when they're going on the day trips, they say, one day we decided to go hunting with hunting with montezuma he assembled all his men we went off he was of course still our prisoner yeah and i mean the historian who really destroys this is matthew restall in his brilliant brilliant book on the meeting between montezuma and cortez but even before that it was inherently implausible idea that for months and months and months the people of tenochtitlan would just be so passive and traumatized and lacking in agency that they would just sort of plod along to the markets as though nothing had happened while their emperor was being held prisoner. It's true that the Spanish are well-armed. It's also true they had the Tlaxcalan allies.

But I would assume that at some stage, the Tlaxcalans must have gone home. Yeah, because they're a very mysterious presence in the whole story we were talking about in the last episode. It's unclear what they're doing. There aren't thousands of them billeted in the city for months and months and months. There's no reference to that, actually, in the sources. So I think at some point they must have gone home. The Spanish, of course, they're formidable. But, you know, if the Wagner group descended on London, took Rishi Sunak hostage, and holed up in Whitehall, it's utterly implausible for nine months or something.

Yeah, no attempt would be made to get him back. No attempt would be made to rescue him. There wouldn't be some uprising. I mean, it's just utterly unbelievable. So the question is, as the sort of new conquest historians say, the question is what is going on? And Matthew Restle has this absolutely fascinating argument that all the stories about them being Montezuma's guards and him being the prisoner is actually a massive exercise in projection. And that they really are his prisoners. And he has them under guard in that palace, that they are probably at his beck and call.

And that's because he has a very, very specific fate in mind for them. Because we mentioned that one of the things he showed them was his zoo. And Montezuma is very unusual in having a zoo at all, because European monarchs didn't have zoos. Is that right, Tom? So we talked about this, I think, in a previous episode about the zoo in the Tower of London, and zoo very loosely. They have wild animals there. But Moctezuma's appetite for collecting seems to have been on an order that would be familiar, say, to Pliny the Elder, or to the authors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or even to Wikipedia. We've talked about this before, how great empires often express their sense of their universal purpose and destiny with a mania for collecting and tabulating and constructing encyclopedias, or even better, constructing great museums or zoos. This is what Moctezuma is evidently doing. It's such a brilliant theory. that he was reading a thesis by a mexican scholar so it hadn't been translated into english and this was all about dr zuma and his mania for collecting and he was so impressed by it that he got in touch

with the scholar and then married her so yeah wow that's a lovely detail yeah great detail isn't it that's very summerton man that's what happened in the summerton man story isn't it the investigator married one of them yes to a degree to a degree um so that will mean nothing to people who haven't heard tom's brilliant brilliant true crime podcast about the greatest mystery in australian history i think it's fair to say tom yes so montezuma zoo there's a royal judge later on a spanish judge called alonzo zuazo and he spoke to the conquistadors and he later recorded montezuma had for show a house in which he had a great diversity of serpents and wild animals, which included tigers, bears, lions.

By the way, spoiler, he definitely didn't have tigers and lions, did he, Tom? No. Wild boar, vipers, rattlesnakes, toads, frogs, many other snakes and birds, right down to worms. And each one of these things was in its place and in cages as needed. So that's the classification mania, Tom, with people assigned to give them food and all that was necessary to take care of them. Now, here's the interesting thing. He also had other people that were monstrous, such as dwarves and hunchbacks, some with one arm and others that were missing a leg, and other monstrous races that are born as such. So in other words, like so many monarchs,

like Peter the Great or something, Montezuma is fascinated by people who are different. So the hunchbacks or whatever. And as Matthew Restle says, it's perfectly plausible that an emperor who wants to collect everything, because that will show he has power, he has dominion over flora, fauna, and all the different peoples.

Yeah, it's the same thing as beasts in the arena in Rome. Yeah. It's a display of the global reach of the emperor. It's perfectly plausible that he would see the arrival of these extraordinary new people as a chance to add to his collection. I mean, he's obviously not going to stick them in cages, you know, like they're at Chester Zoo or something, but it's telling that the place where he houses them, the Palace of Aksaya Castle, is very close to the zoo complex. So he might be

sort of thinking, well, it would be great to have this addition, these people who work for me, who are my playthings. And also the fact they're armed, they're technologically adept. He might also be thinking they make great bodyguards. But he's clearly never watched Jurassic Park. Spanish Park, Conquistador Park. Yeah. I mean, if that's what he's doing and he thinks that he can keep them safely in their complex, I mean, obviously they're going to break out and run amok. But the thought that they would become a kind of elite guard. See, I'm reminded of Roman Empress, Tom Caligula. He had a group called the Germans, didn't he? The Batavians. Yeah, they were Batavians. And the Varangians in

Constantinople. Well, we've done podcasts about Baghdad, haven't we? So the Abbasid caliphate, they employed slave soldiers as an elite guard. The Mamlu, you know, in Egypt. And this, of course, is what the Tlaxcalans are after as well. I mean, I guess kind of competitive tendering. Yeah. Whoever can get the Spaniards on their side. But obviously, from Moctezuma's point of view, they have to be subordinate to him. And that is not at all what the Spaniards think. So there's an inherent tension there. Yes. Because they behave badly, I think it's fair to say. The Spaniards. Yeah. I mean, I'm guessing that these months are a process of both sides trying

to work out what the measure is of the other. Yeah. But of course, the Spanish have come there. Most of them, we used the phrase before, Matthew Restle's phrase, armed entrepreneurs. Most of them have come to make money. That's what they're doing. It's a great adventure, but they're there in the long run to get money, to get gold, to improve their status and that of their family and their clan and their patronage network and whatever. And over time, you can well imagine people saying to Cortes, what's going on here? We've been here like two and a half months and enough of the kind of going and hawking with the emperor. When are we going to get the gold and go back?

And there are stories, first of all, that Cortes is constantly pestering Montezuma for more gold, but also stories that some of the Spanish behave badly, that they don't stay in their cage, as it were. They roam out through the kind of palace complex. They will ransack rooms. They will basically steal fans and feathers and necklaces that they've been heaping up gold, and they've even started to melt it down. So there's an advisor in Montezlaces that they've been heaping up gold and they've even started to melt it down so there's an advisor montezuma who says they've been shouting and quarreling they seized the treasures as if they were their own like slaves they agreed they were laughing like like beasts actually that comparison with beasts perhaps gives you some sense of how some of

montezuma's people are thinking of them and cortez is already muttering about building ships and presumably he wants to build ships more ships because he knows he might be stopped on the causeway. It'd be very helpful for him to have ships to get across the lake. And then he's got to think about transporting the gold to the coast. So one obvious question would be, well, if the Spaniards are causing trouble, if they're clearly not going to be very good as exhibits in a zoo or even effectively employable as bodyguards, what do you do with them? And one obvious choice would be to sacrifice them or kill them or have them wiped out. And sacrificing them might be the best opportunity to keep the gods happy.

Oh, definitely. And it so happens, doesn't it, that winter is turning to spring and that brings a particular month having into view. And this month has the brilliant name of the flaying of men. Yes. I know you love this, Tom, because you were very keen when we had a World Cup of Gods. So for those people who think this is just babble, we organized a vote on Twitter and did some podcasts about which was the best god in human history. You were very keen to see the Mexica god Chibitotec thrive. Our lord, the flayed one. He crashed out in the first round, I'm afraid.

He did very poorly. For reasons that may have to do with the general vibe that surrounds his cult. So basically, he's the god of fertility and he flays himself to give food to humanity. And there's this idea of life growing out of the flayed body, which you can kind of see the point of. But I think to our non-Meshika way of thinking, I think Chippy is the most terrifying of all the gods. And the festival that's celebrated during the month of the flaying of men, which marks the spring equinox, the Meshika would get prisoners and they would fight the equivalent of kind of gladiatorial combat. I mean, they would have a chance of winning, which marks the spring equinox, the Mashika would get prisoners and they would fight the equivalent of gladiatorial combat.

They would have a chance of winning, of surviving, but the odds are massively, massively against them. And effectively, this is a form of ritualized execution. The bodies then get skinned and the priests of Chibi then wear the flayed skins as kind of cloaks for the following 20 days. And it's a kind of terrifying trick and treat that they're going around with these flayed skins. And it's all part of the fun of the festival is that they're kind of entering houses and demanding gifts and arms and presents from people for the love of Chippy Totec. And then when the festival

is over, the flayed skins are removed and they're put into special stone containers with very tight fitting lids. And the aim of these lids is to stop the stench of putrefaction from wafting away. And then they're stored beneath the temple. And I think it's very difficult, no matter how open you are to celebrating the diversity of human cultures across the world, not to feel that this is an unsettling way of marking a festival. It is, isn't it? So I love the trick-or-treating detail and i also love there's another detail because there are different accounts of how this worked there's another detail that as people pitched up wearing wearing the flayed skin of the uh and also also stabbing their penises with thorns that's also part of the fun yes there is that element when

they would pitch up families would bring their children to come and come and hug them so yeah people will be delighted to hear that in my children's book the fall of the aztecs When they would pitch up, families would bring their children to come and hug them. So people will be delighted to hear that in my children's book, The Fall of the Aztecs, there was a long section. Of course there is. Discussing this. And my editor said to me, kind of raised his eyebrows, if you can raise your eyebrows digitally on an email, and said, really, for children? And I said, listen, if you've ever met a child, a 10-year-old or 11-year-old child.

Well, this is one of the things I remember from reading about the Aztecs as a child. The whole wearing a flayed skin, snapping your penis with a thorn, eye-opening stuff. Frankly, this is the true spirit of Halloween, isn't it? It's been lost. It really is. It really is. So anyway, Matthew Restle argues, and of course so much of this is supposition, speculation. He says, would it not have made sense for the Aztecs to be thinking, this is the time, this is the way we get rid of the Spaniards? That perhaps they've been sent by Chippy.

Yeah, because it also comes at the end of their hunting season, I think. Yeah, very serendipitous, the timing. Everything, that it just feels like the perfect solution. However, now there is a massive twist. Because at some point, late April, early May, at the point at which Montezuma could well have been thinking, okay, now these wild beasts are out of control, it's time to get rid of them and'm bored of them now at that point he clearly gets word from the coast that something unexpected has happened more strangers have arrived 18 ships near the town of vera cruz the town founded by cortez carrying more than a thousand

men that the strangers are the same they have red hair, what seems to the Aztecs reddish hair. They have pale skins. It seems beyond doubt that Montezuma hears about this before Cortes does. And he is almost certainly sending agents to talk to these newcomers and to say, who are you? What is going on? And clearly he finds out they have not come as allies of cortez they have actually come to apprehend him this is a i mean we'll save the full explanation for this for the

next episode tom because it's so exciting but this for montezuma this really is a game changer because he sends for cortez and he says to him i know you're thinking about building new ships and getting home and all this there is no need your friends have arrived on the coast. You can go home without delay to Spain. It was lovely to see you. Goodbye. And for Cortez, this is a terrible moment because he doesn't know who the newcomers are, but remember, he had disobeyed his orders. He had taken this massive chance and he must at that point have had a strong suspicion. They had been sent by Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba, the guy whose orders he had disobeyed.

He had sailed off in full view of Velazquez when he was being told to stay. And this is awful. This is a terrible turning point in the story for Cortez. And for a few days, he does nothing. And then he summons the big wigs, the big cheeses from his company. And he says, what on earth are we going to do about this? And supposedly, he ends the meeting by saying, listen, we're in too deep now. We have to just, we're going to have to kill them.

We're going to have to get rid. We're going to have to get rid of them. Death to all who oppose us. Now, the thing is, Tom, he doesn't have many men because I'm guessing people have deserted. Some people have died of disease. Been killed in brawls. Killed in brawls. So he's probably got about 200 men in Tenochtitlan left. The Tlaxcalans just don't seem to be in the picture at all at this point. So what he does is he divides his company. He says, I'm taking Malinche and I'll take about 80 men.

The rest will stay and he's going to leave them under Pedro de Alvarado to stay in the capital. And there is a theory among some more recent historians, Matthew Restle, Camilla Townsend, for example, disagreeing with more orthodox historians like Hugh Thomas and Fernando Cervantes, that it's at this point that he thinks, okay- In for a penny, in for a pound. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's do this. I've got to move against Montezuma. So this is April, May 1520. I think it's at this point that he takes Montezuma hostage. He's often gone in to see Montezuma. Bernadier says this happened in the autumn. I don't think it did. I think it happened now. But I think the details of Bernadier's account are perfectly plausible. chief officers alvarado sandoval lugo leon and abila and our interpreters alinche and geronimo d'aguilar who's still hanging around though increasingly redundant and they were armed they're carrying weapons but bernal diaz says we'd always carried weapons when we visited montezuma so he won't think this is untoward and cortez says to him we want you to follow us now to our palace we will treat you with respect but if you make any alarm or if you call out to your attendants you are a dead man and montezuma says there's no way

i'm going with you and then they have an argument which goes on and on for some time clearly he's he's so complacent at this point that he's not surrounded by guards or they have somehow been dealt with and then one of the conquistadors ju Juan Velázquez de León, says, what's the use of throwing away so many words? He must either quietly follow us or we will cut him down at once. Be so good as to tell him this. This must be to Malinche. For on this depends the safety of our lives.

We must show determination or we are inevitably lost. And Malinche doesn't quite translate this, though it's obvious to Montezuma that this guy is waving a sword at him. Malinche says, Great King, I advise you, go with them. They will treat you with respect. They will treat you with courtesy.

But if you refuse, they will kill you. And he goes. He says to his servants, I'm actually going to go over there with these guys to their palace and visit them. And people are clearly stunned, but they don't dare to question the emperor. So he is installed in the palace. I would imagine probably, Tom, I think it seems plausible that they're not beating him or tying him up or something.

No, no, because if they were, then that would obviously raise the suspicions of the millions of his subjects who are kind of just waiting to pile in. And I guess that the difference between Varangians serving an emperor and an emperor who is the prisoner of the Varangians is not immediately obvious. No, not if they're still bowing and treating him with courtesy and whatnot. And of course, they have the weapons. They carry them at all times, the steel swords that the Aztecs cannot compete with. But you know, what a double gamble. What a double gamble. It's not enough to decide that Cortes is going to divide his forces, which you should never do, and go off with a party to confront another group of Spaniards who massively, massively outnumber them. But at the same time, to take the emperor of the Mexica hostage.

I know. I mean, these are two lunatic gambles. But what choice does he have? I mean, you can just imagine, he's off going down the causeway and absolutely everything hangs in the balance at this point. He's done the one thing I think that nobody expected. And he's going off to the coast with only 80 men, leaving the rest behind with Montezuma.

He's going off to the coast with only 80 men, leaving the rest behind with Montezuma. He's going through this alien landscape to fight his own people. Everything hangs in the balance. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the most extraordinary punts in history. And I think we should stop this episode here. And when we come back, we will look at what the upshot of these two extraordinary punts are. Cortés going off to confront his fellow Spaniards by Veracruz on the coast and the capture of Moctezuma and the taking of him as hostage by the Spaniards who remain in Tenochtitlan.

So absolute scenes. What a cliffhanger, Tom. Absolute cliffhanger. We will be back next week. But not for everybody. Unless, Dominic. Yeah. Unless you are a member of

the rest is history club in which case you can go in here the remaining four episodes find out what happens resolve this incredible cliffhanger so the choice is yours but either way we will see you back very soon for episode five bye I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news

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