The Destruction of Old Mexico

By John Elson

For any writer, retracing ground covered by a classic of history or biography can be daunting. Who today wants to go one-on-one against Boswell or Gibbon? To be sure, the masters made errors that demand correction, and archaeology and archives can provide illuminating new data. But fresh facts are often double-edged: they are as likely to create new uncertainties about the past as they are to resolve old problems. That leaves the modern writer hemming and hawing where his predecessor made magisterial pronouncements.

A case in point is British historian Hugh Thomas. With Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico (Simon and Schuster; 812 pages; $30), Lord Thomas, author of what is arguably the finest study in English of the Spanish Civil War, has taken the heady risk of challenging a landmark of 19th century American historiography: William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). Thomas' account is richer in detail than Prescott's, more balanced in its assessment of the Mexica (pronounced mesheeca; the author insists that this is a more authentic name for the conquered people than Aztec). But Prescott's narrative has a grace and flow that Conquest simply cannot match -- not least because in the latter work countless sentences contain a hedging "presumably," "perhaps" or "it must have seemed." It's all those unsettling new facts, you see.

In either version, the story of Hernan Cortes' great adventure is a remarkable one. In early 1519 this wily and enterprising Castilian landed at what is now Veracruz. A few months later, he and his bedraggled company of 300 soldiers entered the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlan, a city more grand and imposing than any in Europe except Naples or Constantinople. Cortes managed to take the emperor Montezuma II hostage, but after Montezuma died during an uprising of the Mexica, apparently from wounds inflicted by his own people, the Spaniards were driven from the city. The undaunted Cortes returned with a larger force that included disaffected Indian vassals of the Mexica. In the course of a brutal seige, Tenochtitlan and the old Mexican empire were destroyed.

The Mexica far outnumbered the Spaniards, and the two peoples were equally bloodthirsty, but in the end, Thomas demonstrates, superior technology enabled the Spanish to prevail. The Mexica fought with lances and swords that were designed to wound, not kill. The Spanish had crossbows, harquebuses and armor- clad horses, none of which the natives had ever seen. The Spanish had two other advantages: a tactician of genius in Cortes and smallpox, which devastated an Indian population which had never previously been exposed to it.

The consequences of the Spanish invasion were of course profound and enduring. We can read about one of them in any recent newspaper: the peasants of Mexico's Chiapas province are rebelling against a landholding scheme that has remained essentially unchanged since it was imposed by the Spanish four bitter centuries ago.