The Rest Is History - 390. The Fall of the Aztecs: War to the Death (Part 7)

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

"Conquer or die indeed, Cortes thought… The hour of decision was at hand…" It is the spring of 1521 and the fate of Mexico hangs by a thread. Smallpox has ripped through the local population, while the ruthless Spanish commander, Hernán Cortés, has cut off the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, from its surrounding provinces.  So begins one of the bloodiest and most dramatic struggles in all history - an extraordinary clash between the Old World and the New, as the Spanish tighten their grip on the island city of the Mexica. But can the new Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, save his people? For he has a secret weapon - the terrifying Quetzal-Owl … In today’s episode, Dominic and Tom tell the story of the Siege of Tenochtitlan - the last stand of the Aztec warriors, as the Spanish and their allies close in for the kill. *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. To the sound of drums and trumpets, the Spanish flagship unfurled its sails and glided out into Lake Texcoco. From the stern flew a great standard, decorated with a blazing red cross. Behind followed the other 11 ships, the sunlight gleaming on their bronze cannons. And in their wake came hundreds of native canoes, like cygnets trailing a stately swan. At the prow, Hernán Cortés gazed across the lake. There, in the distance, was his goal, the island capital of the Aztecs. For a moment, he seemed to hear his men chanting on the beach before their march to Tenochtitlan,

what seemed like a lifetime ago. Conquer or die. Conquer or die. Conquer or die, indeed, he thought. The hour of decision was at hand. So that, I mean, it's excellent swan-based metaphors and similes immediately marks it out as Sandbrookian prose. Dominic, we're reaching the climax of this extraordinary story that we originally intended to trace through four episodes, didn't we? And we're now onto our seventh. And I think that that's a reflection not just of the fact that we're naturally prolix, but also that this is just an incredible story. It is an incredible story.

When you think where we started, Tom, we started with Hernán Cortés growing up in Medellín, going to Seville, going across to the Caribbean to seek his fortune. I mean, nobody, if they didn't know the story, could possibly have anticipated that we would end with this remarkable scene of them launching this little fleet of 12 ships surrounded by the canoes of their Tlaxcalan and Texcocan allies, Cortes and his men launching these ships into the lake in

the center of Mexico in an attempt to capture the city of this empire that nobody in Europe had previously known existed. It is, as we've said so often, the scene of a fantasy or a science fiction. Yeah. And your children's book, which has inspired us to do these episodes, is called The Fall of the Aztecs. Yes. And we are now approaching that moment, aren't we?

We are. So just to sort of recap, that scene that you read, so that was the 28th of April, 1521. That was the moment that Cortés launched these brigantines that had been built. We discussed at the end of the last episode, they'd been built far away in Tlaxcala by Martin Lopez, who was the shipwright.

I mean, he wasn't a professional shipwright. I think he was just a carpenter, but Cortes kind of pressed him into service as a shipwright. And they've launched these ships. So Montezuma is dead. His successor, Cuitlahuec, killed by smallpox that has ravaged Mesoamerica. Cortes has teamed up with the Tlaxcalans and other city-states. He has cut off Tenochtitlan from the coast. He has constructed this kind of noose around the Mexica capital.

So they've cut the trade routes. The Mexica are already beginning to run out of food. And now he's really going for the kill. His army, his Spanish army, we've said so many times it's not really an army, but obviously by this point, they are much more of an army. I mean, they're fully militarized. He has 700 infantrymen. He has 100 cavalrymen, hundreds of gunners and crossbowmen. He has installed these guns on the ships. And all the time, as you have been at pains to remind people, more recruits are coming in from the Caribbean and further back from Spain. But the interesting thing, I suppose, Tom, which we've touched on so

many times, one of the many issues that lies at the heart of the historiographical debates about the fall of the Aztecs is how much is Cortes calling the shots and how much is this an operation that's really being dominated by the tens of thousands of allies that he has from Tlaxcala and Texcoco and so on? Well, one of the things that has happened since Cortes and his, what was it, a third of his army manages to escape on the Noche Triste. So he's definitely, clearly, the junior partner with the Tlaxcalans at that point. But now more troops have arrived from Europe, and the Tlaxcalans have been devastated by smallpox. So I would imagine that the balance of power must have shifted. Yeah, I think so. Plus, there has been some element of a purge within the Tlaxcalan high

command. So Cortes has accused some people are plotting against him. Some Cortes skeptics have been eliminated. So there's a guy I mentioned last time, Xico Tincatl the Younger, he is gone, he is dead. And so Cortes within the Tlaxcalan kind of polity, they're now taking a much more Hispanophile line. Right. And the other thing is that the ships are Spanish. Yes. I mean, the other thing is that the ships are Spanish. Yes. I mean, it's the ships that enable the Spanish and the Tlaxcalans to actually get at Tenochtitlan. They do. They do. So the guy who commands the ships is really in pole position, I'd have thought. Yes, he is. So they don't launch the first naval attack until the 1st of June. And there's this extraordinary scene in the Spanish accounts. You know, it really is the stuff of a kind of swords and sandals blockbuster

that Cortes is leading the ships across the lake. They're blasting away with their cannons and their crossbows at the canoes of the Mexica. There's this great fight for a fort, a place called Xoloc, which is halfway across the causeway. With the ships, he's able to win control of the waters, which had previously obviously been dominated

by the Mexica. And again, it is kind of an amazing scene. And we've used this analogy as well before, those kind of computer games where different civilizations clash with one another so that you can end up having an early modern force attacking a bronze age capital city. That's basically what's happening now. Yes, it is. Although actually, the interesting thing is that the Spaniards do not have it all their own way. So it takes them quite a lot of time from launching the ships at the end of April to making the first really successful naval attack at the beginning of June. And then what happens in the next few days and weeks is we've alluded several times to these causeways. I mean, an extraordinary architectural achievement, by the way, that are linking the city of Tenochtitlan with the lakeside. And for the next few weeks, what Cortés basically does is he divides his forces

into four. So Pedro de Alvarado has a force, a guy called Cristobal de Olid, and Gonzalo de Sandoval. And each of them is given responsibility for taking a different causeway. And what they're doing is they're fighting this really kind of grueling attritional campaign along these causeways along the kind of bridges all the time the aztecs are kind of demolishing the bridges digging big trenches all of this kind of thing sending out sort of sappers to dig pits and stuff and the spaniards meanwhile are trying to inch along the causeway under sort of unceasing barrage of yeah missiles of arrows and trying to fill in the holes getting their engineers to fill in the holes and build bridges across the gap so they can get their troops across and so dominic the person who's in

charge now in tenors titlan is kohotomok yes yeah he's a very impressive figure yeah pretty brutal so it said that he killed one of moctezuma's sons with his own hands. Yes, strangled him, I think. And he's had, what, five others, I think, killed on his orders. And he is the embodiment of no surrender. He is, absolutely. He is. Because I think even at this point, the Spanish are, you know, there are multiple attempts

to negotiate. The Spanish say you must give in. But I suppose at this point, from the point of view of the Mexica, they have everything to lose by surrendering. In desperation, they think, well, maybe if we can hold out, the Spanish will go away. Not least, I think, because they are used psychologically. Well, they have ritualized understanding, don't they? Rhythms of war. They have ritualized warfare of a calendar. So they basically think, well, maybe if we can get to the autumn, the Spanish will all go home and it'll be over and we can rebuild. And they don't envisage that Cortes has a concept of total war, that he is going to cut off all

their trade, kill all their allies, that he is absolutely going for the jugular. But also, Dominic, in terms of total war, that he is prepared to obliterate their city. I mean, do you think they understand that? No. Doesn't Cortes say, I don't want to destroy your beautiful city? He does. Surrender now.

He does later on. Yes, he does. He says, I don't want to destroy the city, but I will do. So by early June, the Spanish and their allies have basically got control of all the major causeways.

So the city is cut off from supplies. On the 10th of June, Cortes' forces break into the city for the first time. They get as far as the main kind of the big square with all the temples. And then the Aztecs managed to drive them back. But it shows Cortes what can be done. From that point onwards, he thinks, well, if this is going to happen every time, if we're going to penetrate into the city, but then be driven back, the strategy must be to eliminate any possibility of us being ambushed. So flatten the buildings.

Exactly. So let's do a sort of Stalingrad, Berlin, 1945. Yeah, it's a very 20th century approach to total war, isn't it? Absolutely. They are demolishing buildings, burning buildings, basically leaving the defenders nowhere to shelter, nowhere to hide. But I think it would be wrong to suggest there's a total inevitability because by the end of June, for example, the Spanish seem to have all the cards. Almost all the lake towns have either been subdued or joined their alliance. They've got thousands more auxiliaries.

The blockade is very tight. The Aztecs are clearly running out of food. Cuauhtémoc has withdrawn north, to the very north of the city, near the big market at Tlatelolco. But Cortés' own captains are incredibly impatient because they're hungry too, and they're exhausted. And they say to him, come on, hurry up. We must make one last thrust and get this done and dusted. And so, ironically, on the anniversary, Tom, of La Noche Triste, the Night of Tears, the Night of Sorrows. Another one comes up.

He decides to go for broke. And he leads all his men in this great charge, hoping they'll break right through into the center of the city and smash the Aztec resistance. And they get quite far, but they walk into, ultimately, yet another Aztec ambush. Is it a bridge too far, Dominic? Very good. A bridge too far. That's the sort of banter you get on the We Have Ways World War II sister podcast. I'm actually recording this in my brother's study. Are you? Surrounded by Second World War memorabilia. So that's perhaps what's influencing it. So you're going to be dropping in random references to Arnhem or to the Battle

of the Bulge or something? Well, to obliterated cities. I mean, it's hard, you know, when describing this, not to think of those grainy black and white photos of Dresden or Hamburg after a bombing campaign. Well, that's presumably, that's what the cityscape is looking like at this point. Yeah. I mean, the one thing your brother's podcast does not have, they don't have lovely accounts from Narwhal chronicles. No, they don't. Nor do they have swan-based prose. They don't.

So this is an account of the ambush from a Narwhal some years later. He says, Our warriors crouched down, making themselves as small as possible, and waited for the call to stand up and attack. Suddenly they heard it. Oh, Mexica, now is the time. Captain Hecatzin leaped up and raced towards the Spaniards, shouting, Warriors of Tlatelolco, now is the time.

Then all the Mexica sprang up and charged into battle. The Spaniards were so astonished that they blundered about as if drunk, fleeing through the streets with our warriors in pursuit. And I said it wasn't inevitable. At this moment, Cortes could easily have been killed. Because he gets surrounded, doesn't he? He is surrounded. And there was a moment when the Mexica warriors are on him

and they don't kill him. And it seems plausible that that's because they actually want to capture him. And sacrifice him. And sacrifice him, presumably. They are still in that mindset where they are used to fighting the flower wars where you're captured. Playing by the rules. You obey the rules.

And his bodyguards are able to drag him clear. I mean, he dodges so many bullets, doesn't he? Over the course of this story. He's so lucky. Cat with 21 lives. He's so lucky, but you make your own luck to some extent, don't you, Tom? I guess in this business of colonization. I don't know.

Yeah, I guess. But a couple of dozen of his men are killed and another 50 or so are captured. And the same chronicler says there was a great harvest of prisoners, a great harvest of victims for the temple. Now, there is an amazing, amazing account in Bernal Diaz's memoir of all this. He says, they withdrew, the Spaniards. They were very downcast and bedraggled. They'd launched their great thrust and it hadn't worked.

And he says, as the sunlight waned, we heard the great drum of Huitzilopochtli echoing from the summit of the great temple, accompanied by the hellish music of conches, trumpets, horns, and other instruments. And so they hear all this music. They're not that far away in their own base. It's kind of on the causeway. So they can see the temples are so high and they can see their captured friends being dragged up the steps towards the top of the temples.

And they've been stripped naked and their heads are decorated with feathers. I mean, obviously they're terrified, they're exhausted. And Diaz writes, The priests forced them to dance before the god Huitzilopochtli. Then they stretched them one by one on the great sacrificial stone. With their stone knives, they cut open their chests and tore out their beating hearts and offered them to the gods. Then they took their dead bodies by the legs

and hurled them headlong down the steps of the temple. There the butchers were waiting to cut off their arms and legs and flay the skin from their faces and prepare their entrails for the jaguars, wolves, otters, and serpents in their cages. So the zoo is still going strong. The otters are still present. The deadly otters. Well, otters are still present. Yeah. The deadly otters. Well, otters are pretty deadly.

Would an otter eat a flayed man? Little chunks. Well, clearly. I mean, sea otters, they're murderous, and then they have sex with the corpses. So it was even worse than Bernal Diaz imagined. Well, I don't know if these are sea otters or not. That's a fair point. That's a fair.

You know, always the... Some people would see that as pedantry, Tom, but I like the forensic attention to detail. Well, it's the detail, isn't it? It's the detail that's important. I mean, that's what this is all about. You've got to sift every little fragment of evidence. The LDS says, we saw all these things with our own eyes

watching from our camp and you can easily imagine how we felt. We were so close to our unfortunate friends, but we could do nothing at all to help them. Dominic, that's interesting, isn't it? That we saw all these things watching from our camp. I mean, this must be relatively accurate because lots of people saw this. Yeah, I think this is very plausible. So this is a reliable account of sacrifice.

I see absolutely no reason to doubt that this is true. Because even if you were a total skeptic and you said, ah, once again, the Spaniards are trying to blacken them. They're tropes. Yeah. You would think, but the Aztecs could easily have done this. I mean, they're fighting this horrendous war and they've captured some of the enemy. They want to terrify the enemy. And what's more, Cuauhtémoc somehow smuggles messengers out maybe on canoes or something I don't know across the valley

of Mexico and some of them are carrying things like the hands or the feet or the heads of the Spanish captives to show people

in the lake towns to say the Spanish are actually going to lose this war you know you should think about changing sides are people convinced by this

no they're not actually because people are not idiots they can see the Spanish are still there encamped on the causeways they can see there are thousands of allies sides. Are people convinced by this? No, they're not actually, because people are not idiots. They can see the Spanish are still there encamped on the causeways. They can see there are thousands of allies. And they must also be used to the fact that prisoners get sacrificed. And so it must seem slightly less significant. Yes. There's then a couple of weeks or so, or 10 days or something of relative calm. The Spanish are very bruised by this. And obviously some of them are probably terrified or traumatized or whatever. But by mid-July, Cortes is sending raiding parties

again to hit the city. And then crucially, it starts raining. You're into the rainy season in Mexico. And everybody now is very, very tired and miserable. And Dominic, just one question. The the mashika are terribly impressed aren't they with the metal that the spaniards wear the iron yes the armor the helmets and so on do we know if they you know is it like the iliad are they stripping the corpses of their dead enemies of their armor and putting it on and also aren't i right that they get hold of crossbows and try and work them out but they can't make them work. That's absolutely right. Yeah. And they seize guns and they realize that you need powder.

Yes. So there's this terrible sense of frustration that they've kind of got this technology, but they can't make it work. Exactly. They can't turn the Spaniards' technology against them. The Spaniards, by the way, are getting more gunpowder. They found out a way of lowering each other into the mouths of the volcanoes in the mountains surrounding the valley. Yeah. They're very conveniently situated, aren't they? And getting kind of, I don't know, sulfur or whatever it is.

Saltpeter. I guess so. We're never pretended to be the rest of science. The rest is armaments. The rest is ballistics or munitions or whatever. But it'll be coming. Definitely. If Gohanger have their way, the rest is munitions.

It's only weeks away. Who would they get to present it? I don't know. Some former brigadier and your brother probably tom my brother's got other things other fish to fry well your brother is a military historian so he will know how important that an army marches on its stomach and i don't know what a besieged people do but they are also interested in their very much and the mashika have basically run out of food so they are ravaged by disease they've now totally run out of food so again we have a good chronicle about this the only food was lizards swallows hard corn cobs and the salt grasses of the lake people ate water lilies flowers and seeds

and chewed on deer hides and pieces of leather they ate the bitterest weeds they even ate dirt nothing compares with the horror of the siege. Nothing could equal the agonies of the starving. To go from such plenty to such starvation. Well, it's the classic siege story, isn't it? Once the defenders start to starve, they're really up against it. Also, fate in a really weird way plays into Cortes' hands because we've mentioned a few times this giant island to the north that people believe is, they call la florida yeah the flowering place and they are convinced that the fountain of youth is there it's so

interesting how the spanish are living in a world of the most gritty grim geopolitical realism on the one hand and yet they still have these weird romantic notions yes from the chivalric stories and they're led by this guy who when I first read I always thought he was called Juan Ponce did you? De Leon

yeah find that very funny the master of tongues yeah so Juan Ponce De Leon yeah he has led

an expedition to find the fountain of youth and foreigner it's gone horribly wrong he's dead the survivors come back and they're on their way back to the Caribbean but they stop in Vera prison. They get basically waylaid.

So hundreds more men pitch up now at the lake with more gunpowder, more supplies from this failed expedition to Florida. And so Cortes definitely has the upper hand. At this point, he offers Cuauhtémoc terms. Again, I'm guessing he does this through Melinche. He says, picking up what you said, Tom, Tenochtitlan is the most beautiful thing in the world. He hates the thought of destroying it. And that must be true, mustn't it? All the records from the Spaniards, they are so stunned by the beauty of the city, and yet they are the people who end up destroying it. And there must be a measure of regret at that. Yes, I think so. I think not least because the more you destroy,

the less wealthy you'll be at the end of it. Yeah, of course. I'm being unduly poetic in that understanding of their motives. But Tom, do you know what? That thing that we read out, what seems like 23 episodes ago from Bernal Diaz's, about Iztapalapan, how beautiful it was and the regret. There's no reason to doubt the veracity of that. No, I don't think, yeah. I think the Spaniards are not, you know, they may be being very brutal,

but that is not the only element of their characters. And I think that that is a kind of peculiar aspect of the horror of this story for us, is the sense of what might have survived. Yes, because so little of it does survive.

The sense of this stunning city, the descriptions are so haunting and poetic that the regret that it's all gone is terrible. Yeah, because Cuauhtémoc doesn't take the deal. He doesn't take it actually for the very good reason that he and his advisors say, listen, Cortes has proved again and again that he cannot be trusted.

So they turn down the deal and the seedery doubles. Clearly the end game is approaching and we will get to the end game in the second half time but we'll also get to something that i know you're very excited about we will get to the element of people dressing up as owls oh yes the quetzal owl yes so don't go away because people will be dressing up as owls after the break i mean what is a dramatic story without people dressing up in owls. Huge excitement to come. 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, and we are well and truly into the fall of the Aztecs.

And Dominic, at the end of the previous section, you promised people owls. So I read, when I was a child, I read Hugh Thomas's enormous, great brick of an account of the Spanish conquest. And really the one thing I remember is this guy who gets dressed up as an owl. And as I remember it, it's kind of the equivalent of launching a nuclear attack. Yeah. It's the ultimate weapon. It's the ultimate weapon that they've been keeping it in reserve. They don't want to use it because they know that it basically will end the world. This bloke dresses up as an owl and they think this is whatever, we're all going to go down together. And he goes out

and then it's like Indiana Jones, Spanish to shoot him. Is that right? Is my memory garbled? You're not far wrong. That's pretty much what happens. So the Hugh Thomas book, by the way, for people who don't know, it's about 7,000 pages long. Yeah, it's very long. It's weirdly both very, very detailed and oddly a bit boring, I think. Yeah, it is boring, but this is the bit I remember, the one bit. So we ended the first half quite saying about turning down Cortez's offer of terms. Pedro de Alvarado, who's been attacking from the West, by the way, Pedro de Alvarado, you do an excellent impersonation of Tom. His men said afterwards, he had been very slow

at cutting the Western causeway and getting into the city because his mistress stroke wife, Donna Louisa was based on the Western Bank. And so basically at five o'clock every day, wherever they were, he said, right, I've got to go back. I went back so he could spend the night with her. And his men were very displeased about this, a lot of grumbling. Well, he had to cement the Tlaxcalan Spanish alliance. Clearly he did. He's interested in diversity and inclusion. He's oiling the wheels of diplomacy. He is. That's a nice way of putting it. So he's finally broken through and inclusion he's oiling the wheels of diplomacy he is that's

a nice way of putting it so he's finally broken through to the edge of the great market the marketplace at slatololco cortez moves his headquarters inside the city the surviving mexica are really penned in now in the north of the city and alvarado is leading the latest attack when this extraordinary apparition appears. And he and his men are stunned. So actually, they don't shoot him straight away, Tom. They are stunned. And they are struck, some of them, with terror because it is a man, or rather a bird, armed with arrows and clad from head to toe in sort of gleaming green and gold feathers. Yeah. And this is the Quaming green and gold feathers. Yeah.

And this is the Quetzal Owl Warrior. Yeah. As you say. Yeah. A brilliant, brilliant scene and a tragic scene. The Quetzal Owl Warrior. So what the Aztecs would do is when they were fighting their battles, normally they would bring him out at the end.

And this is a ritualistic element that a man suddenly appears dressed as an owl yeah and this is sort of you do this when you're winning your enemies throw down their weapons and terror hurrah we've won and actually this figure that appears to be like a superhero from the annals of legend is actually a man in a suit called a poch sin who's been chosen for his strength and courage so he's crammed into this owl suit you like this i love it and i mean seriously this embodies for me a sense of the tragedy of the collapse of the aztec empire because of course there's all kinds of darkness to it yeah but there is also i mean a kind of beauty and poetry to its culture and the inadequacy of its customs to deal with this terrifying invasion force is i think very very painfully

embodied by this episode i think that's fair tom i mean it is funny it is kind of darkly comic but it is also i think deeply you, there's a deep vein of tragedy to it as well. Oh, there definitely is. So the thing about the empire of the Mexica is there is darkness to it. Of course, the human sacrifice we find revolting now, the flaying of men and trick-or-treating strikes us as at the very least politically questionable, I think. Punchy. Yeah, punchy. But it's a beautiful civilization. Great poetry, ballads, philosophy, arts, all of this stuff. And a kind of a sense of a mythology that is just beyond our grasp. Yeah. That occasionally when you hear stories like this

about the owl, you sense, well, what understandings of the cosmos and the nature of the relationship of humanity to the divine and everything, what is embodied in that? And of course, you can read studies and histories of it, but it's gone. Yeah, we'll never know. We'll never know. Because actually, as you say, this is a, it sounds ludicrous to us and to the people listening to this podcast, a bloke dressed in an owl suit. But at the time, there are priests behind him who are chanting these kinds of prayers. Loose the sacred arrow at our enemies, which is the serpent of fire, the arrow that pierces the fire. Loose it at the invaders. Drive them away with the power of Huitzilopochtli. I mean, they're not doing that ironically.

No, of course not. They are totally invested in this. I mean, that's why I found Camilla Tanzan's book, which we've mentioned before, The Fifth Sun. I mean, one of the most haunting and moving history books I've ever read, because it did feel like a feat of resurrectionism to the degree that I feel I can now understand the Aztecs. It's thanks to that book. Well, because what she's done is she's got lots of Nahuatl sources, previously relatively

untouched, and has really dug into them and extracted every last drop of meaning and significance. But I think she writes as someone in love with the culture that she's writing about. And that sense of love is, I mean, she's not soft-soaping the brutality and the horror that underpins every great civilization, but there is love there. Yeah, I think that's fair. So anyway, the Quetzal Owl, he doesn't last very long. He sort of dances on the roofs, and the Spaniards are stunned at first.

But in the account that we have, they close in around him eventually. And then he's sort of seen to fall or drop or something. And then he's never seen again. And you can well imagine that basically the Spanish have just butchered him. So that's the end of him. I think with that, in a weird way, that really is the sort of emotional climax for the Aztecs, for the defenders of the siege. So they fight on for only a few more days. Cortes sends another message. Have you no pity for your old men, your women and children? Still, they turn

it down. More and more Spanish assaults. There are bodies of now civilians piling up in the streets. And on the night of the 12th of Augustust we are told the aztecs see a comet blazing like a bonfire in the sky that sort of fizzes in the air and then plunges into the water we're told the people knew what it meant and they watched in silence i mean that's again that that is cinematic of course it is of course it is again one of those details that you think is that too good to be true but in a way i mean at this point you're just going to invest in the melodrama the story aren't you doesn't pay to be too skeptical i would say poetry rather than melodrama yeah i think that's fair tom melodramatic poetry maybe no just poetry i don't think it's melodramatic so the following day the 13th of um aug August, the Spanish launched their final attack.

It's a scene from a sort of apocalyptic war film. The remaining civilians, hundreds of them, are sort of stampeding down to the lake, desperate to get across in canoes. In the stampede, many of them are probably crushed. Some of them fall into the water and drown because, of course, a lot of them can't swim. Those canoes that are trying to get across are being attacked by the Spanish ships. At one point, one of Cortes' ship's captains, a guy called García Holguín, who comes from the same region of Spain as Cortes, Extremadura, he notices that one canoe, the people seem to be better dressed than the others. He

kind of zeroes in on that canoe. They chase it down. It turns out that this canoe is carrying Cuauhtémoc, last emperor of the Mexica. And he is dragged out of the canoe, taken out. And he is taken to the rooftop headquarters near the great marketplace where Cortés and Alvarado and Malinche are waiting. And the story is that Cuauhtémoc is shown in and Cortés stares at him and then pats him on the head and then tells him to sit and they sit down. Cuauhtémoc, who is a

broken man, says, I did everything to save my kingdom from you. But now that you've won, fate has turned against me. You've destroyed my city. You've killed my people. I urge you to take my life. And Cortez says, no, I'm sorry that you foolishly turned down my offers. But when this is all over, of course you'll rule your city just as you did before. Cortez is still the sort of, things like this made me see him as a smooth, plausible, utterly untrustworthy man. Yeah. But why is he saying that? I don't know. I genuinely don saying that? I don't know. I genuinely don't know.

I don't know whether he's saying it because he thinks he can use Cuauhtemoc as he once hoped perhaps to use Montezuma. Is he saying it because it's expected of him to be gallant in victory? Is the source even correct? You know, it's only one source. Is there some classical cosplay?

Exactly. There's so much of that with Cortez, isn't there? Yeah, I think there is. Yeah. You get a sense of him now. He's still only 35. I think you get a sense of him from some of these stories. You can imagine him as a young man in Salamanca reading the stories of Julius Caesar or of Alexander, and now he's acting them out. Well, he's like an Alexander who's captured Darius. Exactly that, Tom. Exactly that. But this is an empty promise. So that night, the 13th, it just rains for hours and hours. And the next morning, it's one of those sort of scenes like from the very, very last episode of Game of Thrones.

The city is all destroyed and in ruins. There's a real sense of the kind of morning after the night before. Steam rising from the rubble. The bedraggled feathers of the owl warrior. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly, Tom. So Cuauhtémoc is brought into the ruins of the palace, and he is wearing his imperial

finery, but it is all kind of muddy and tattered, and he looks a very downcast figure. And Cortes, his tone has changed now. The sort of smiling smoothness of the day before is gone. Cortes, as you can imagine him, him sitting on a big chair or throne or something and saying, where is the gold? You know, let's cut to the chase. Where's the gold? And Cuauhtémoc says nothing, but some of his men go out under guard

and they faff around a bit with their canoes. And then they come back and they basically bring out the gold that they'd hidden in the canoes to take across the lake when they were trying to escape. It's golden masks, it's the usual trinkets and stuff. And Cortes says, I'm not asking about these pathetic little trinkets. I want the good stuff. Where's all the gold was in the palaces. It was in Montezuma's palace. You took it and you lost it in the night of tears. And Cortes says, in that case, it must be in the lake. And if it's there, you will find it. I will force you to find it. And Malinche, we're told, says, I mean, she's all in with the Spaniards by now.

Because triumph for her. Triumph for her, exactly. She says, you must bring us 200 bars of gold and she gestures with her hands to show how much she wants and the advisor says rather weakly well perhaps the common people took it perhaps they took it from the lake so that evening cortez organizes a victory feast for his men and he organizes it not in the city but in the lake town of coahuacan, which is on the south side of the lake and is today a suburb of Mexico City. It's where you can see the Frida

Kahlo Museum, among other things. It's where you see Cortes' headquarters that he then built, his palace, is still there. It's an amazing place to walk around. Cortes, he has wine that's been brought from Spain. There's lots of food and drink. The story is that most of his men get absolutely wasted and they're dancing on the tables. They're so drunk when they leave, they're falling over in the streets and stuff. Meanwhile, of course, in the city, a scene of total despair. And the next morning, they basically empty the city. So the refugees start coming along the causeway, hundreds and thousands of people. They haven't eaten properly for weeks.

They are utterly distraught. They're suffering the most appalling psychological trauma that can possibly be imagined. It's like a scene from the end of the Second World War or something. And they go across the causeway, and halfway across, the Spanish soldiers are waiting. They separate them out. Again, a very Second World War scene, it has to be said. They take away the young women who will become their slaves. Obviously, often they're sexual slaves. And then the young men, they brand them on their faces, often with the G, guerra, war. They're declared rebels against the King of Spain.

Because, of course, this is the fiction that the whole thing is based on. That it's a rebellion. It's a rebellion. Not a war of conquest. Yeah. based on that it's a rebellion it's a rebellion not a war of conquest yeah and we are told they searched everybody for gold and they searched in every part of your body so these are very intrusive body searches yeah very aggressive intrusive searches they are looking in people's mouths and their ears everywhere for gold and then the refugees get across those that haven't been taken away as slaves and of course when they get to the other side-

There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing. They have lost- Yeah, it's a hellscape. Absolutely everything. And we'll do one more episode to talk about the consequences for Cortez, for Mexico, for the Aztecs, and to reflect on this as an episode in the history of the meat of the old and new worlds and the story of European colonization.

But perhaps, Tom, I know you love a poem. Perhaps you should end with this lovely poem, a very moving poem, actually, which was originally in Nahuatl and has since been translated. Our cries of sorrow rise up and our tears pour down. Nothing but flowers and songs of sorrow. I left in Mexico and Tlatelolco, where once we saw warriors and wise men. We have been crushed to the ground. We are lying in ruins. Nothing but grief and suffering are left in Mexico and Tlatelolco, where once we saw beauty and courage. Bye-bye. Goodbye. 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.