Conquistadors and Aztecs - A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan | Interview w/ Stefan Rinke

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I'm joined by author and scholar Stefan Rinke. Stefan is a professor at the Department of History at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and is the author of 14 books that have been translated into English, Spanish and Portuguese. Today though we are joined by Stefan to talk all about his new book, Conquistadors and Aztecs, a history of the fall of Tenochtitlan published by Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's gonna be great talking to you about your new book. It's a pleasure for me. Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure. Let's start off with what your book is all about. Well, my book is about a world historical event of great dimensions. It's about the conquest, the so-called conquest of Mexico or I rather call it the fall of Tenochtitlan. That is the war of European conquistadors together with their indigenous allies against the Aztec empire and about the fall of that empire and the way that the conquistadors managed to build up a new society in which they were on top. So they built the basis for the first colonial empire of Europe in the new world which was to become, of course, the basis for colonialism at large that was to be a characteristic of the centuries to follow. So in that regard it is really a world historical event of major proportions and one that is also still very much in the imagination of people. It seems almost everybody has some idea about that. Almost everybody has heard about that in their schooling and also perhaps in cinema films or in literature. So it is something that people seem to have in mind especially in the Western world as being a crucial moment for their history too, although it is maybe very far from their own circumstances, from their own lives, but still something which speaks to them, which is remembered and which is also considered to be important enough to be part of the subject in school where, of course, history is losing perhaps a little bit of its importance and, of course, history is a very long affair so you have to pick and choose what topics to concentrate on and the topic I wrote about is still considered to be very important. Absolutely. So did you choose to write on this topic because of its importance or was there another driving factor into choosing the topic of your book? I wrote about it because of several motives and reasons. First of all, when you write about topics that cover Latin America, here in Europe you are not considered to be at the center of historiography because historiography in Europe is still very much dominated by writing the history of one's own country, of one's own city, of one's own region. So if you look farther than that and if you look to non-European regions, you are considered to be a specialist, somebody who is working on rather marginal topics, so on, and if you do that, if you are specialized on that like I am, then you have to pick the topics that people can relate to in order to bring across the message that Latin America matters and that was a major motive for me writing this book. And also, of course, another motive was to shatter some of the myths about these events that are still very much in the minds of people and not just of people, of amateurs, but also of some professionals. And this myth has to do with the idea that a small group, a handful of Spanish people, went to what is later to become Mexico and in a surprising attack and a very victorious campaign, managed to bring down the powerful Aztec empire. And, of course, that is really a myth that we should put into the dustbin now and I'm trying to do that with my book also and to show that it's really a joint venture here by indigenous groups who are part of that Aztec empire, who have recently been subdued by the Aztecs, who have become part of that empire because of Aztec expansion and conquest and who are not yet integral parts and are still very dissatisfied with their situation and they hate paying tributes to the Aztecs. And so they are really there in the empire as a pole of so-called dissatisfaction, a pole of resistance. And then when the Spaniards come, a new situation is popping up for them, a chance, an opportunity, opportunity to get into real resistance, take up arms and to run the risk of opposing violently the Aztec invaders who, of course, are very mighty, who are very powerful and so the risk is very high. But the fact that they now have these foreigners at their side with new weapons, with new animals which are still not known in Mesoamerica, these facts contribute to their risking it and this alliance then finally manages to do what we all know as the conquest of Tenochtitlan and to bring about the fall of Tenochtitlan. So there was numerous factors obviously working together, not just this group of people coming in. So you're working to sort of dispel these myths and I noticed that you've written in the blurb of your book that you're using both indigenous records and Spanish records. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about working with those records? Did they help you with the sort of getting through the myth of this part of history? Yeah, that is crucial because if you only read the Spanish records, starting with the very letters of Cortes himself to the Spanish king, of course you get a very one-sided vision of what was going on. You will not hear a lot about the role of indigenous allies in Cortes' letters. You will not hear anything about them and you will also not hear a lot about the role of Malinche, the famous translator companion who was first given as a slave to Cortes but then, because of her intelligence and language capabilities, turned into an instrument that was absolutely important in the negotiations that were going on along the way because this group of Europeans in a very foreign environment, which was absolutely new to them because what they had known before in the Caribbean was very different from the state system that they found when they came to Mexico, all that, they would have been lost without the power of the translator of Malinche and she is not being mentioned by Cortes at all. She's later by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, another contemporary source, the most important contemporary source, there she is being mentioned but still in Bernal Diaz's text, the importance of the indigenous allies only gets hinted at and if you look at indigenous sources and if you read them closely, you get much deeper into what was really going on and you can see that in these sources, the vision of the conquest is quite different. The word conquista, for example, does not pop up in these writings although the word conquistador does and this word conquistador includes not only the foreigners, the Europeans, but the indigenous themselves too. They consider themselves to be part of the conquistadors and that of course is very important if you look at the events and that also gives you an idea of how important the role of these indigenous allies who were the great majority of the troops was in these bitter fightings and these battles that were going on in the death toll that had to be paid in order to conquer this very highly armed and fortified city and it shows us that the effort of these indigenous communities to bring down the Aztecs was really at the center of things but of course we shouldn't overdo this thesis and forget that there were also Spaniards around and of course what they did was they managed to keep themselves at the head of the war, at the head of the troops and also later on to profit from the havoc that was wrecked by the epidemics that they themselves had unconsciously of course brought into Mesoamerica and because of that problematic situation that the whole region came into when people died and the mortality rate rose, so the situation grew very intense and very bad for all indigenous communities and in that situation the Spaniards managed to replace indigenous elites, to also co-opt indigenous elites by arranging marriages and or by putting young and unexperienced weak princes into the role of tribal chiefs and so on whom they controlled and by doing that in a rather intelligent manner they step by step managed to build up their situation, to build up their strength and also to lay the basis, the foundations for their colonial empire because of course several decades later there was this Spanish empire in which the indigenous groups only played a rather marginal role. So by reading and using these indigenous sources as well as the Spanish sources you're getting a far more holistic idea and vision of this event and I'm assuming that's an issue that we've had previously in earlier works on this is that there were only, you know, schools only were using Spanish records and so we're missing half of the information, yeah? Yeah of course, what I'm doing in my book is not reinventing the wheel, I'm not the very first person to bring about this interpretation, there has been at least since the 1980s, 1990s a long historiography of ethnic history, of ethnic historians and so on who have laid the basis for the synthesis that I am offering now. So what I'm doing is actually drawing all these different strands of research, of important research that has been done in many, many countries and of course especially in Latin America itself, in Mexico, together and to present a synthesis of all this new research which I first intended for a German speaking audience, my book was first published in Germany in 2019, but it was considered so important, this synthesis, it was immediately translated to Spanish and now also, and I'm very glad about that, to English, but I consider myself to offer an informed synthesis of all that research that has been done before, so the synthesis for somebody who is interested in learning about this new way of looking at history, we all seem to know something about, you know, an informed way how professional historians today look at this history and as I said, and I also of try to put all these old myths into the dustbin and to show where they fail and where they really lead us astray, so to say, and yeah, that is my intention with this book. It's brilliant, so you've just brought all of this recent work all together into one book so that people that are currently interested can get everything they need from one source and that's great, I love that. So what is something as you were working on the book that surprised you, was there anything that you learnt that you didn't know before or anything that fascinated you? Oh yes, quite a bit, I mean when I, you know, my own research so far has concentrated on the also 19th, 20th century Latin American history and then I did some work on Columbus and the 16th century and when I went back to the sources, of course I had studied some of that in my own study time, you know, when I was a student in the master's degree and so on and in my, during my doctoral work, but now coming back to that I really was fascinated and surprised how much the historiography in recent decades has contributed to our knowledge and how far this knowledge has changed since then. So that was a first major understanding also for me and then another thing was when I went deeper into the sources I also found out that almost each source of the 16th century has a whole library of books that interpret these sources. So there's a huge body of literature out there studying not only the events but also the interpretation of events. And the third thing that really surprised me was of course when in 2019, at the moment when my book first came out in Germany, the Mexican president took up the issue with his famous letters to the king of Spain and to the pope demanding a new kind of conversation about what had been going on and also to beg pardon for what has been going on and for all the victims that had been caused by these of course very violent events. We are talking here about the two-year bloody war of extinction more or less in which at the end, you know, the city of Tenochtitlan, the very proud and impressive city where the Spaniards stood and watched and couldn't understand that this was possible outside of their own European world. And at the end it lay in ruins and people were lying, the dead bodies were lying all around and the smell of it all was simply annoying. And so this taking up this old historical event again showed me the importance, the relevance it has for Mexican national identity until this very day. And of course also it showed me that it is a comparted, a shared history of Europeans and Americans, however you might call them. Now of course they consider themselves proudly to be Mexicans, but the Mexicans themselves of course are partly, you know, descendants of the conquistadors too, so they're not only descendants of the victims but also of the perpetrators. So that is a very strange mixture and this relevance to this very day also brought me to the point where I thought it really is important to have a look at it from a professional historian's perspective, trying to take a step back from the day-to-day disputes of politicians and look at events and present a view that can inform people and give some background to what has been going on. And of course in the reception of my book, yet in the Mexican and European context, it was quite interesting to find that some people blamed me with being part of the black legend who puts too much blame on the Spaniards for what has been going on. And that of course surprised me because I did not intend to do that and I think I haven't done that, but of course what I do is I say, or as I said, for me the idea that it was only the Spaniards who went there and brought, you know, civilization to Mesoamerica for me is a complete myth, but for some people denying that also implies that you are a black legend person who wants to blame pure Spain for past crimes. And that is interesting and it shows me of course that I'm also part of this discussion, that I cannot stand outside, although I consider myself as a professional historian trying to be as objective as possible, but still I'm part of this historiographical discussion. Yeah, absolutely. You're right up in there with it all and I think that's brilliant. So probably the final question is, what is something that you would like everybody to know either about your book or about the topic overall? Yeah, I would like to know everybody that the fall of Tenochtitlan was a very complicated issue in which very many different ethnic groups fought against each other, in which it was not the superiority of Spanish culture or of Spanish weaponry which was decisive and it was not the heroes or the great European superiority that guaranteed the outcome of events. There were rather very many factors involved here, as I had said earlier, the importance of the indigenous troops who were the majority of the fighting troops and who had the highest death toll after all, and also the coincidental development of that deathly epidemic that hit Mesoamerica so hard. And these two factors should lead us also, should my readers lead to understand that we have to think of the beginnings of European colonialism differently, that it was not about Europeans having this great idea of going into the world in order to rule it, but that it was rather small groups of booty hunters who were out there, who were trying to make their way and who then by coincidence also came into a position in which they were able to build up what was later to be known as a colonial empire, which then of course survived almost 300 years until the early 19th century. So that for me is very important, and the second point that is most important is that people understand that indigenous participants in these events, Cuauhtémoc and Alvarado as a counterpart, but then the many indigenous chiefs and allies of the Spaniards had a role as subjects in these events. They were not just passive bystanders, but rather very, very active participants in their own right. Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. I am now very excited to get into this book once it is delivered to me. Thank you for joining me and talking all about your new book. If you are looking to purchase it, you'll be able to find a link down below to Oxford University Press' website. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Kelly. It was my pleasure. This video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia. For more great articles and interactive content, head to our website via the link below. If you like my sweater, you can find this design and a bunch more in our shop at worldhistory.store, or you can find a link for it down below. Thank you so much for watching, and we will see you soon with another video.