7.
Many factors conditioned the ways Europeans responded to Native Americans and the ways Native Americans responded to Europeans. Motivations, expectations, political and social structures, religious beliefs, concepts of civilization, and perceptions of wealth and power all played a role. Perhaps nowhere is the complex mingling of such forces more evident than in Hernan Cortés's encounter with the Mexica (Aztecs). Cortés landed at what is now Veracruz in Mexico on Good Friday, April 22, 1519. He set sail from the flourishing Spanish colony of Cuba. His troops included many men who had arrived on the island too late to grab their own estates. Thus when they came to Mexico, their greed was alloyed with a desperate resolve to capitalize upon a second shot at riches. To illustrate their mindset, we offer the "Requerimiento," a proclamation in which the Spanish spelled out, quite bluntly, the deal they had in mind for the natives of the Americas: Convert to Christianity or be attacked. The traditional story of the Aztec relationship with the Spanish, rooted in the Spanish perspective, describes how a "handful" of soldiers overwhelmed the Aztecs and wiped out their civilization. Much of that story comes from a series of letters Cortés sent to his royal sponsor King Charles I, and here we read an excerpt from his second letter, in which he expresses his awe at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (modern Mexico City). For over four hundred years the Indians' accounts of Mexico's conquest were not easily accessible, but in 1959 Mexican anthropologist Miguel Léon-Portilla published Visión de los Vencidos (Vision of the Vanquished, published in English as The Broken Spears). It weaves together selections from a variety of sixteenth-century indigenous accounts, some as early as 1528, into a narrative that describes among other things, Cortés's landing, the battles he fought and alliances he made on his march to Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs' defensive maneuvers, their almost successful retaliation, and finally their fall. An engaging read translated from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, it reveals a world of omens, splendor, intrigue, diplomacy, and treachery (included also in #6: INDIANS' ACCOUNTS).Not only did Indians recount the cruelty of the Spanish conquest, so did a Spanish priest in Mexico, Bartolomé de las Casas. A human rights activist in today's terms, he compiled his eyewitness accounts of Spanish atrocities with others' from across the Caribbean and Central America, and presented them in 1542 to the Spanish king, imploring him to "extirpate the causes of so many evils." The king responded as las Casas hoped, issuing "New Laws" to moderate the treatment of the Indians, but they saw little enforcement in the New World. Las Casas titled his compilation A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; we present his introductory and concluding statements here, which you will find sufficient to absorb his horror and moral anguish. Finally, the three images by European artists illuminate the post-conquest fate of the Mexican Indians. The picture of the juggler lying on his back balancing a log dates from about 1529, just a few years after the Aztec conquest in 1521. It was painted by Christoph Weiditz, a German artist who saw Aztec acrobats perform in Madrid at the court of Emperor Charles V (of the Holy Roman Empire; also King Charles I of Spain). The scenes depicting the making of feather art come from the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume encyclopedia of Aztec culture compiled in the late sixteenth century under the direction of the Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagún. The unknown artist was probably trained by Franciscans in their effort to create a utopian Christian community among the Indians. Finally, the painting depicting the burning of Aztec idols dates from the early 1580s. It is the work of Diego Muñoz Camargo, a mestizo from an elite family in Tlaxcala, a city that allied itself with Cortés as he marched to Tenochtitlán. (28 pages, including the illustrations and their descriptions.) Discussion questions
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Image: Theodore de Bry, engraving in Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written 1542, orig. publ. 1552, engraving from de Bry 1598 publication. Reproduced by permission of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, #0683-2. |