How Hernán Cortés Overthrew The Mighty Aztec Empire | Line Of Fire | Chronicle

It was one of the most prosperous cities in the world. The waterways which punctuated the artificial islands were the highways of commerce for an empire. The rulers took tribute from towns and settlements hundreds of miles away. The knights and noblemen who ruled the place wore fine clothes, ate exotic foods and walked the cleanest streets in the world. In 1519 the imperial city of Tenochtitlán was exciting, rich and powerful. But a man from overseas was coming to change all that. Over the course of two years, a single ruthless man was able to forge an alliance which destroyed the gorgeous city, rooted out its ancient religion and created a new realm for his king. The disease his people unwittingly brought with them would finish the job by massacring the people who remained in the Empire of Mexico. Moctezuma II, the emperor in Tenochtitlán, was concerned with signs and portents. His people, the Mexica or Aztecs, had seen a comet in the sky and in 1518 had heard stories of strange, pale bearded men from the coast. The Mexican religion predicted an apocalyptic time of great trouble and his people wondered whether the time had come. Tenochtitlán was built on Lake Texcoco, high in the mountains of what is today Mexico. The city itself was built on an island in the middle of the lake and the citizens farmed artificial islands all around. The Mexica were not a seagoing people and they had only a vague idea that a few hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico there were islands inhabited by the men of Spain. In the years since Christopher Columbus had come to the islands and coasts of South America, colonists from all over Spain had followed. The warring kingdoms of Spain had come together by conquest and marriage, expelled their Jews and Muslims, and now Spain looked outwards seeking new lands to rule, to Christianize and to milk for profit. The deputy governor of Cuba selected the 34-year-old mine owner Hernán Cortés to lead an expedition to some islands in the west, islands which turned out to be the American mainland. Like his relative Francisco Pizarro, Cortés was the son of a poor but blue-blooded Spanish family who was making his fortune in the Caribbean. Cortés was an educated man who went to Salamanca, who studied law. He was very much an adventurer. He had this sense of adventure very clearly in his mind. He wanted to discover new lands and, of course, he wanted to improve his wealth. He knew exactly what he wanted and why he wanted to do it. He was a good thinker in all circumstances. He could make decisions quickly. I think that he saw an opportunity. He was highly energetic, very organized, ambitious, but also wise, I think. And he was the man for that particular season. He did extremely well in the New World. Hernán Cortés was of medium height, thin, had a thin beard and fair skin. He read and wrote Latin and had studied law. He had led a plantation owner's protest to the deputy governor about slave allocation, which made him a good man to send away. Cortés' mission was to skirt the supposed islands at the western edge of the Caribbean Sea, claiming them for Spain and making peace with the native people. He christened his men the Holy Company. With eleven ships, they would explore, seek news of past Spaniards who had disappeared, and spread the word of God. There were only a few career paths open to those who did not themselves inherit land. There was the church, you could become a priest, you could become a sailor, go to sea, and you could go into royal service. So there was a requirement to find work for the younger sons in rather narrow fields. They had been schooled since childhood to seek glory, to seek prominence for themselves and for their families. And the opportunities for seeking glory had become very narrow. So there was tremendous pressure for young Spanish men to seek fame away from Spain. The Holy Company carried with them the military traditions of Europe, and Europe was armed with gunpowder and steel. The leaders of the expedition rode horses and wore steel European armor. They carried lances and steel swords. Most of the Europeans would fight on foot. Some carried crossbows. Others carried hackbutts, an early form of musket. The expedition's artillery were lightweight lombard guns and small brass naval cannon. Early in the expedition, the Spaniards realized that they did not need steel armor to protect them from the weapons of the Mexica. For most purposes, they wore lightweight armor made from densely woven cotton. But they found that putting on the steel helmets and breastplates of Spain instilled fear in the aboriginal peoples. The Mexica were cultured and sophisticated, but they had never before seen steel. Cortes chafed under the restrictions imposed on him by the governor of Cuba. Soon after landing on the North American mainland, Cortes declared his mission accomplished, established a new colony, and under ancient Spanish law, declared that the colony was self-ruling. Cortes reached out to local rulers who feared Moctezuma, who hated paying tribute to Mexico, but were too weak to refuse. It was fortuitous that Cortes was given as a gift a slave who he renamed Marina, who had been trained in both the Maya and the Nahuatl language groups. And the result of that was that as Marina got better and better at speaking Spanish, she became an invaluable asset to Cortes because she could speak directly, translate directly between Cortes and any of the Nahuatl-speaking people they ran into. They became the team that controlled the interface, the linguistic interface between the Spanish and the Mexica, and that meant that Cortes himself was, in country, up in the mountains, very powerful. Nobody could depose him from within his own company because nobody else could talk to the locals. On a visit to one of these rulers, Cortes watched the tax collectors arrive from Tenochtitlan. These men wore bright cloaks of coloured feathers, sniffed special flowers reserved to the upper classes, and had slaves to whisk the mosquitoes away. The townsfolk treated them with fear and respect. Cortes subtly manipulated the visit of the tax collectors to his advantage. He convinced the local chief to imprison the tax collectors, though the local man was quaking in his boots at the prospect. Then, at night, Cortes freed two of the Mexican tax collectors, told them that he wanted to be friends with Moctezuma, and sent them back to Tenochtitlan. When the local chief discovered two of his prisoners were gone, he was ready to put the remaining Mexicans to death. Cortes intervened, suggesting that they be imprisoned aboard one of his ships instead. Cortes had turned a coastal chief against Moctezuma, had sent a powerful message of friendship to Moctezuma, and acquired important hostages all in the course of one night. The local chief came to Cortes and told him that he and his 100,000 men would rise up against Moctezuma if Cortes would lead them. This changed Cortes' plans. Instead of making himself prosperous by setting up a gold prospecting town on the edges of the Spanish Empire, Cortes could march inland and take over the fabulously wealthy empire of Mexico. Moctezuma was not very quick to react to the threat of the Spaniards. He was a religious man. He was very much concerned with religion, with philosophy, and in many ways he was a victim of his own philosophical and religious ideas. But he was also very keen to welcome the Spaniards. He sent messengers with all kinds of presents, which made the Spaniards even more interested in meeting him. If you view it from an Aztec point of view, everything that went on in the meetings between Moctezuma and the Spaniards made sense in the Aztec cultural system. For example, when Moctezuma first met the Spaniards, he brought gifts which the Spaniards accepted and then in turn gave him gifts. And in the cultural system of the Aztecs, that meant you were not going to wage war. And in fact, by giving Moctezuma gifts in the Aztec cultural system, that translated into Cortes recognizing Moctezuma's sovereignty. The coastal peoples began to rebel against Moctezuma's authority and Cortes began to fight. The Mexicans were frightened by Cortes's 16 horses, more frightened by the Spaniards' full beards. Victory brought Cortes allies, and the coastal people thanked the Spanish men by giving them women slaves. As Cortes grew more powerful, he tried to make himself more independent from the governor of Cuba. He sent messengers to Spain telling the king that the governor was a poor manager and demanding that his settlement at Veracruz should be considered a self-ruling Spanish town. The Cuban governor's friends in Veracruz rebelled against Cortes and Cortes hanged or mutilated the rebels. To ensure that there could be no talk of returning to Cuba, Cortes had all his ships run aground at Veracruz and broken up. Cortes told his people that they would march inland to Tenochtitlan. In August of 1519, 300 Spaniards of the Holy Company began the journey. Their carpenter built wagons to carry supplies and guns, pulled by allies from the coast. They had about 15 horses and a pack of fighting dogs, all of which frightened the aboriginal people. The road from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan wound upwards from the hot coastal plain, climbing 2,000 meters into the mountains. As the Spaniards marched, messengers ran across the high plains and through the mountain passes to Tenochtitlan, telling Moctezuma of Cortes' approach. Cortes came as an ambassador, they said, which shaped their welcome. If Cortes had come to make war, Moctezuma would have assembled his army, begun the new sacrifices and assigned idols to his regiments. The Aztecs were very familiar with war. They were great warriors. In fact, Aztec rulers had to prove themselves in the battlefield. They had to be great at warfare before they were even elected. The Mexica's idea of honor in war was not found in a glorious death on the battlefield the way a Spanish soldier might find it. It was finding glory on the battlefield by capturing the enemy or finding glory on the battlefield by being captured, by being taken away and sacrificed to the enemy's gods. But for ambassadors, there needed to be no preparations for war. The Mexicans must have been comforted, for it was the wrong season for war and fighting at the wrong time would have been difficult. Moctezuma knew that there was a group of powerful people coming up the road, but Moctezuma had no way of dealing with this group of powerful people. If they were Maya or if they were Mexica or if they were Tlaxcalan, if they were any one of his neighbors, he would know how to deal with them. But at every turn, at every interaction between Cortes and Moctezuma, Moctezuma sees that something is completely wrong. He does not know how to deal with these people. Nothing that he does makes them bow to his will. He can't threaten them, he can't manipulate them, and as a result, every means that Moctezuma uses to try to achieve his aims with respect to the Spaniards is ineffective. As the Holy Company marched, the towns along the way hosted them extravagantly. Granaries were emptied to feed the Spaniards and their coastal allies, and slaves were slaughtered in sacrifices. All along the way, chiefs aided or joined the Holy Company, eager to throw off Mexican domination. At Tlaxcala, a highland kingdom proud of its independence from the Mexicans, the Holy Company first had to fight. When they saw horses, Tlaxcalan scouts fled, drawing Cortes and a few other Spanish cavalrymen after them. When Cortes caught up, the Tlaxcalans turned to fight, killing two horses with their razor-sharp but brittle swords. The rest of the Tlaxcalan army was waiting, thousands drawn up in battle order, their faces horribly painted. The Mexica did not want to kill their enemies on the battlefield. They wanted their enemies to surrender, and they wanted their enemies to be marched up to the top of a pyramid and be sacrificed to their gods. So, they did not use weapons designed to kill. The Mexica used weapons designed to disable. The Mexica used clubs. You hit the guy over the head, you break the guy's knee, he can't run away, and you sacrifice him. The Mexica, therefore, did not have armor designed to protect against killing weapons. If somebody is going to threaten you with a club, well, it's no point having chain mail. Just have a big pillow. And he hits you at the club, it hits the pillow, it goes whoomp, and you live to fight another day. The weaponry of the Aztecs, again, was geared not to kill on the battlefield, but to draw blood, because warriors were esteemed if they gave blood. So, even the arrow points, which they used, were small, were not designed to kill. They were designed to make people bleed. So, Mexican armor and weapons were wholly unsuited to going up against the Hispanic. The Tlaxcalan soldiers attacked in lines, armed only with obsidian-bladed swords intended to wound. The Spanish, armed and armored with steel, supported by light artillery, handguns and crossbows, killed many in the first wave before the rest of the Tlaxcalans came to grips. This style of warfare frightened the Tlaxcalans. Dying on the battlefield was alien to their way of thinking. They wanted to capture or be captured, with blood spilling on sacrificial altars in honor of their gods. For the locals, this was pointless slaughter, and they ran away. For days, Cortes fought and negotiated with the Tlaxcalans and their allies. The Spanish armor had to stop arrows, spears thrown by atlatl launchers, and some were killed and wounded. Cortes punished the Tlaxcalans by conducting a pogrom against their priests and civilian population, burning and mutilating. Astonishingly, the Tlaxcalans were cowed into supporting the Spanish. Tlaxcala joined forces with Cortes, allowing his coastal allies to return home. As the Holy Company and their Tlaxcalan allies moved closer to Tenochtitlan, they were again met by ambassadors and magicians from Moctezuma, who told Cortes to come no closer. As these emissaries walked back to the imperial city, they had visions of destruction and the burning of the city. The Mexican religion was built on visions. And like many religions elsewhere, visions were assisted by eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. And when Moctezuma is trying to deal with Cortes, and he makes apparently irrational decisions, there is a clash of cultures at work, there is a clash of paradigms at work, but just as Cortes or his party would use alcohol as part of their daily lives, Moctezuma and his advisors were using hallucinogenic mushrooms as part of their daily lives, part of understanding the world around them, and part of their way of worshipping their gods. Moctezuma's advisors told him to fight, to attack the allied army of the Spanish and Tlaxcalans before they got to the city. For a time, Moctezuma again considered going to war, but he soon resumed his old ideas. Welcome them, give them gifts, make them his friends. In early November, the Holy Company reached the shores of the great lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan was on an island in the lake, and on their approach, the Spanish were able to see the city for the first time. The local chiefs welcomed Cortes as a liberator from Mexican taxation, and they fed his soldiers and allies. Tenochtitlan was connected to the mainland by causeways, and on the 8th of November, 1519, Cortes took the company on the narrow way. The dogs came first, huge brindled mastiffs, which frightened the aboriginal people with their gaping mouths and slavering jaws. In front rode four horsemen in full metal armour, followed by the company's banner bearer, who twirled and flourished the silken colours as he marched. The rest of the Spanish followed, with Cortes riding in state as the climax of the parade. Behind Cortes marched his aboriginal allies, armed and painted for war. The Holy Company was a frightening sight to the Mexicans, who had never seen metal armour, horses, or even the wheeled carts which brought up the rear. The city which they approached was the largest most of them had ever seen. Paris, London, Naples and Constantinople were the only European cities which approached the scale of the imperial city of the Mexica. Moctezuma welcomed Cortes riding in a feathered litter, with Mexican noblemen sweeping the ground before him. Cortes dismounted and shook hands with the Mexican emperor. The Spanish celebrated their arrival by firing their muskets and cannon, amazing and intimidating the citizens. Moctezuma conducted his guests to an important palace in the city and made a flowery speech of welcome. Cortes took this polite speech literally as a formal submission to Spanish authority and from that point on assumed that he was now the ruler of the Mexican Empire on behalf of the King of Spain. The Spanish spent several days as tourists in Tenochtitlan. They were lavished with gold, cloth and slave women and Cortes was taken to the top of the city's highest pyramid to see the centre of the Mexican Empire spread out before him. Moctezuma offered Cortes his own daughter and more women for the Spanish officers. Moctezuma was trying very hard to buy off the Spanish, to get them to go away. Cortes quietly and reasonably told Moctezuma to come back to the palace where the Holy Company was quartered and to come quietly. Moctezuma argued trying for hours to talk them out of it but the Spanish captains put it to him plainly. Come with them or they would kill him on the spot. Moctezuma offered his children instead but Cortes refused. Moctezuma must come away as a prisoner. Cortes had succeeded. Moctezuma was his hostage. Moctezuma could still rule his empire but Hernan Cortes, son of a poor foot soldier from the province of Extremadura, would rule the emperor. Moctezuma didn't know what to do. He was demoralised. He had been humiliated by the Spaniards. He was more or less worshipped as God in his lifetime. So the fact that he had been captured, that he had been imprisoned, made him even more vulnerable. When Moctezuma first met Cortes, he was still operating on his own cultural system. Cortes had given him gifts so he thought things were going to proceed a certain way. It didn't happen. Then he was taken captive. Cortes actually touched Moctezuma, which you don't do with an Aztec ruler. So already, in a sense, his sacred space had been violated. So I would think that he was probably crushed. Everything he knew, his whole system, had disintegrated before his eyes. And you can get through those situations when you can see an out, when you have a goal and you say, I'm going to do this. What was he going to do? Because the rules were gone. The Spanish consolidated their hold over the Mexican empire. Cortes' emissaries travelled with Moctezuma's authority and were looked after by local chiefs. The empire settled into an uneasy quiet under Spanish domination. And when a group of Mexican princes plotted to get rid of the invaders, Cortes had them imprisoned. The Mexican effigies were removed from the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan and a Christian church was established instead. Cortes had started to refer to himself as Captain General and Chief Justice of New Spain, the first modern European name for the landmass that would become America. Cortes had shrugged off the authority of the Deputy Governor of Cuba. The governor's agents in Spain fought at court with the agents of Cortes to little effect. Gifts to the king of Mexican gold had spoken louder than the governor's legalistic arguments. The governor resorted to force. On the 5th of March 1520, Panfeo de Narváez set sail from Cuba with 900 men to overthrow Hernán Cortes. Cortes had to take most of his force down from Tenochtitlan to fight Narváez on the coast. He defeated the new force, recruited most of Narváez's men into the Holy Company and began the trek back to Tenochtitlan. Meanwhile, in the imperial city, the Mexicans stopped feeding the Spanish garrison. The preparations for an important festival were underway, with steaks and pans ready for the human sacrifices. When the Spaniards asked whom the preparations were for, their Tlaxcalan allies said they were to cook and to eat the Spaniards with garlic. The Mexican festival worked its way to its climax. The figures of the gods, the human sacrifices, the feathered and furred costumes were all prepared. The rosewood drums beat and hundreds of noblemen danced. The formal course of the ritual had to be followed exactly. Each dance and each sacrifice sublime in its perfection. The songs and dances followed one another in sacred order as the Spaniards and the Tlaxcalans moved to block the exits from the sacred precinct. As the Mexicans around them awaited the climactic sacrifice, the Holy Company awaited a signal. When the exits from the temple precincts were blocked, Cortes' deputy Alvarado gave the signal. Kill, he cried, putting his plan into action. Sixty of the Spaniards had been detailed to murder the dancing Mexican noblemen, while sixty would guard Moctezuma and slaughter his attendants. The dancers, the priests, then the spectators. All the Mexicans were unarmed and they made easy prey for steel Spanish swords and razor-sharp obsidian blades. The Spaniards moved out of the temple precincts as the spectators fled for their lives. When they returned to their palace, they saw that most of Moctezuma's attendants had been killed and the emperor was in chains with the few surviving princes. Mexican mobs surrounded the palace, threatening to burn down the doors. Spanish boats on the lake were burned to the waterline, cutting off the Holy Company's escape. The Mexicans closed off the bridges around the palace, cutting it off, and the citizens sat down and began mourning their dead. The Aztecs wasted time. They wasted days that were very important at this time of warfare and conflict, giving the people a decent burial, which normally were very elaborate and normally took several days. Then, four days after that, a sullen silence descends on Tenochtitlan. The Spanish soldiers and their Tlaxcalan allies find this very disturbing. There are visions seen. The visions could be part of a deliberate campaign of psychological warfare because there are demonic apparitions seen of Mexican gods and Mexican demons by the Spanish. Cortez marched back into Tenochtitlan with the Holy Company and their Tlaxcalan allies. The city was silent. The thousands of inhabitants were indoors, mourning and planning. Cortez marched to his palace in the foreboding choir. Cortez could not feed his soldiers without the city's food markets, and he sent Moctezuma's brother, Cuitlahuac, to demand in the emperor's name that the markets open. Cuitlahuac walked from Cortez's palace, disappeared into the city, and immediately began to organize the Mexica against the Holy Company. In the last days of June 1520, Cortez's patrols began to run into ambushes. The drawbridges across the city's canals began to rise. The Holy Company and the Tlaxcalans were trapped. The Holy Company began to fight its way out of their palace against hordes of organized Mexicans. For days they fought in the streets of Tenochtitlan, taking casualties when they left their palace and even when they stayed inside as a hail of stones from nearby roofs kept them out of the courtyards. Fresh water began to run low, and the brackish water of Lake Texcoco had become a barrier instead of a resource. Suddenly, fighting in Tenochtitlan, the Spanish are conducting operations in a built-up area. They're fighting in narrow streets. They're fighting house to house. So in a field, being up high on a horse might be an advantage. But in a street, when your enemy is higher than you on the roof of a building and able to throw things down at you, then it is no longer an advantage. The Spanish try to use European military technology to advantage, but their technological advantages do them no good in the confined spaces of Tenochtitlan, and it becomes a much more even battle. And an even battle is exactly the kind of battle the Spanish can't win. In the street fighting, the Spanish soldiers saw that one of the Mexican leaders was dressed in a specially gorgeous plumage and was treated reverently by the other leaders. Cortes began to realize that the Mexica had chosen a new emperor. He concluded that Cuitlahuac had convinced the citizens that Moctezuma was dead or disabled, so he arranged to display Moctezuma on the roof of the palace. There was a hush at the sight of Moctezuma on the palace roof. Then the Mexican leaders began to hurl abuse. Perhaps even before Moctezuma was able to get a word out, stones, arrows and darts began to fly at him. Moctezuma, mortally wounded, was taken down inside the palace. He died the next morning, and Cortes butchered all his remaining princely prisoners. It was time to leave. Cortes reluctantly ordered a plan to escape the city, and the Spanish began to load up pack animals and stuff their armor with gold. By night, they set out with a portable bridge and spare timber to cross the canals. With the horses' hooves muffled, they tried to leave undetected. They crossed one canal, then another, then two more. The way seemed open to the safety of the lakeshore, where their horses and guns would be an advantage, when a woman drawing water saw them moving. She cried out a warning, and soon the war drums were sounding from the city's highest pyramids. The Spanish ran for the shore, while the Mexicans scrambled into their canoes and began attacking. The old Mexican ways of war were set aside, and instead of striking to wound, they struck to kill. Two canals stood between the Spaniards and safety. The first few Spaniards made it across, and Cortes turned to help the Holy Company fight its way across the causeway. One canal was filled with Spanish and Tlaxcalan dead. Much of the Holy Company and their Tlaxcalan allies were left behind to be taken prisoner by the Mexica, and made ready to be sacrificed to the gods and eaten by their captors. That sad night, La Noche Triste, was the first great defeat for Europeans in the New World. Cortes made his way towards his allies' stronghold of Tlaxcala, with 400 men and 30 horses, almost all wounded. But as they straggled from village to abandoned village, the new emperor, Quitlahoc, gathered his army and put it into the hands of his military deputy. At the village of Otumba, about halfway from Lake Texcoco to the safety of Tlaxcala, a large force of Mexica attacked the Holy Company. Returning to their traditional way of war after the single episode of night fighting, the Mexica swung their clubs and obsidian-bladed swords to wound and capture, not to kill. For hours, the surrounded Spaniards and Tlaxcalans fought for their lives in a grim battle of attrition. Cortes saw the new emperor's military deputy and his fellow officers in their bright feather cloaks, and he ordered a cavalry charge. Five Spanish horsemen rode through the enemy soldiers and knocked the Mexican commander to the ground, killing him with lancets. The Mexican attack disintegrated, and in the face of decisive cavalry action, the Mexicans retreated. After ten days' retreat, the Holy Company came to the kingdom of Tlaxcala, where they were safe. People often talk of what a small army the Spaniards had and how successful they were in conquering a huge territory. But what people often ignore is the fact that the conquest was not made by the Spaniards. The conquest was made by the Mexicans. The Mexicans actually helped the Spaniards, the Tlaxcaltecans, and many other groups join Cortes' forces and help him destroy the Aztec Empire. Cortes sees a tremendous threat. He has been defeated. He has been shown to be weak. He has been shown to be defeatable. So the first thing that Cortes does is he goes to the Tlaxcalans and he says, Who would you like to destroy? And the Tlaxcalans say, Well, we've always hated the people in Tepeyacá. And Cortes says, All right. Well, let's go destroy them. And after the defeat in Tenochtitlan, Cortes ensures that he has a very bloody victory in Tepeyacá. And they march up to Tepeyacá, and they absolutely slaughter the locals. So what Cortes does is, out of the ashes of defeat, he arranges a victory, and Cortes rebuilds the Holy Company as a fighting entity. Cortes and the Tlaxcalans set about pacifying the land between the Mexica and the sea, defeating the town's men in battle and branding the faces of the women and children as they were sold into slavery. Spanish settlements were planted in the conquered towns, and the territory controlled by the Spanish-Tlaxcalan alliance grew, cutting Tenochtitlan off from the coastal peoples and from the sea. Cortes' people began to build brigantes, small sailing ships which would enable the Spaniards to sail across Lake Texcoco and attack the Mexicans from the water. But by October of 1520, Cortes had a new ally, disease. The great smallpox plague, which depopulated North America and the Caribbean, started on the island of Hispaniola in 1518 and slowly spread to Cuba. Narvaez, the Spanish officer sent to reign Cortes in, probably brought the disease to the Mayan peoples in the peninsula of Yucatan, and one of Narvaez's porters brought the disease to Cortes' allies on the Mexican coast. Smallpox spread through the aboriginal communities rapidly, killing half the population wherever it struck. Village chiefs pulled houses down on the heads of sick families, trying to contain the contagion, but instead killing the survivors of the disease. When the women who processed and cooked food were gone, the men died of hunger. In their highly organized society, men did not have the skills to mill flour and bake bread. The Spaniards brought smallpox as early as 1519, and of course the natives, having no immunities to cope with the disease, were decimated in no time. There were about 22 million inhabitants in ancient Mexico at the time, and it's calculated that only 80 years later the population was reduced by about 90%. It wasn't just smallpox, there were flus, and it wasn't just what the humans brought, of course, it was the animals as well. One of the first things that happened was that cattle and sheep polluted streams, and that had not existed in the New World before, so there were micro-environments in which bacteria and other microbes could just flourish, so it was a disaster waiting to happen. Corn stood unharvested, and even the ritual human sacrifices began to grind to a halt. The Mexican Empire was gravely weakened. Cortes, on the other hand, grew stronger. Spanish reinforcements, intended for naviz, or bent on new conquests, joined the Holy Company, bringing new guns and much-needed supplies. Mexican gold went with men to Hispaniola and Jamaica to buy fresh horses and supplies of ammunition. Both Cortes and the new emperor, Cuauhtemoc, prepared for war. Cuauhtemoc offered sacrifices and prepared to muster his army for the only kind of war his people understood, a huge battle on a field where many prisoners would be taken for sacrifice to the Mexican gods. Cortes readied himself for a long campaign of siege. Cortes knows that water is a problematical issue if you live on Lake Tenochtitlan, because Lake Tenochtitlan is not fresh water. It is brackish water, and they had to rely for water in Tenochtitlan on wells on the lake shore, with the water brought by conduit into the city. Cortes knew that if he could take the seaward side, the lakeward side of Tenochtitlan with his brigantine, and on the landward side, if he could cut the water supply, that he would fight against the Mexica from a position of advantage. On the last day of December 1520, the reinforced Holy Company came to Texcoco. The rulers of the town, eager to rid themselves of imperial domination, welcomed Cortes and offered assistance. But many of the townsfolk took to their canoes and paddled off to warn the Mexica. Cortes took his revenge by pillaging the city and enslaving the women and children. The towns of the lake shore began to offer their submission to Cortes. At Ixtapalapa, the Holy Company massacred the town's army and expelled its citizens. At Chalco, the citizens' own soldiers drove off a Mexican army. Bit by bit, the emperor was losing control of his own lake. Tribute was no longer coming in from the empire and supplies began to run short in Tenochtitlan. Cortes divided his army into four divisions. Three divisions would fight on land. Each would hold one of the causeways which connected Tenochtitlan to the mainland. One division would cross the lake from Texcoco in canoes and 12 brigantias, small sailing ships. Each brigantias was about 65 feet long and each could carry between 25 and 30 men as well as a cannon. These brigantias would destroy the Mexicans' canoes further cutting them off from the mainland. One causeway would be left open as a tempting escape route. At the end of May 1521, the divisions of the Holy Company began to march and on the 1st of June, the fleet of brigantias set sail from Texcoco. Thousands of canoes paddled out from Tenochtitlan to face thousands of canoes and 12 small ships. The guns, crossbows and muskets of the Spaniards crashed through the Mexican fleet and the large number of canoes filled with Cortes' lakeshore allies pushed them back into the protected canals of Tenochtitlan. Once the Emperor Cuauhtemoc saw Cortes' deployment, he split his own army into four divisions. Three of them met Cortes' landward divisions and one stood ready to defend the city from Cortes' brigantias. For weeks, the fighting at the causeways ground on and the last causeway was blocked. The Mexica were cut off in their grand city. The situation that existed in the final siege of Tenochtitlan was very different and surely the Aztecs who were fighting must have realized that. They must have seen that it signaled the end of their empire. Once you go to another country and you say we are going to destroy your empire, we are going to destroy your way of life, we are going to take your religion away from you, they have no choice but to fight back with everything they've got. Cortes has to fight for every stone in that town. He has got to destroy Tenochtitlan in order to take it. Cortes could not get the Mexica out so he cut off the remaining causeway and ordered his brigantias to begin torching houses in Tenochtitlan. Then, on the 10th of June, Cortes began to fight his way into the depleted city. But the narrow streets were vulnerable to attack from the rooftops so as Cortes pulled back, he torched more houses. Five days later, Cortes forced his way into the city center again and again he burnt what he could before retreating. The Mexica consolidated their defense in the suburb of Tlatelolco. Here they were more successful and on June the 30th their counter-attacks were able to overwhelm the Spaniards and their allies briefly, capturing prisoners. The Mexicans got hold of the Spaniards, sacrificed them, they practiced decapitation, they put the skull in the skull rack, they sacrificed both Spaniards and the horses of the Spaniards and the Spaniards were shocked and terrified to recognize the faces of some of their soldiers. This was the last celebration of the Mexica. Short of food, short of water, they never again managed to muster a major counter-attack. As Cortes burnt their city around them, the Mexica stopped breaking up the causeways. They were reduced to drinking the brackish lake water and gnawing on mud bricks to get at the straw inside. On the 13th of August, 1521, it ended. The Mexicans' will to resist collapsed and they began surrendering. The emperor, like Moctezuma before him, was permitted to rule under Cortes' control. When the Spaniards did not find the heaps of gold they expected, Emperor Cuauhtémoc was tortured by fire and crippled for life. Later, Cortes hanged the emperor for plotting a return to power. Cortes ruled like a king, for a while sending the required one-fifth of the wealth to Spain and keeping a fifth of the remainder for himself. But then the king of Spain extended his hand to New Spain. He confirmed Cortes as governor and captain general of New Spain, but appointed a treasurer, a factor, a bookkeeper and an inspector. All of them, Cortes included, would be on modest fixed salaries. This very promising New Spain that Cortes constructs, it falls apart. Everybody dies because everybody gets smallpox and the city of Tenochtitlan is destroyed by an earthquake and next to nothing remains of the old Mexica empire. The consequence of the conquest, the Mexicans became drunkards, they were given to alcoholism, there were diseases, there was smallpox, typhus, no real prospect of a better life. They were equally slaves under the rulership of the Spaniards. So that, together with the overthrow of their cities, made them utterly depressed. Cortes returned to Spain in 1528. Out of favour at court, he retired to Seville and died there, aged 62, in 1547. Cortes sought to take over the majesty of Tenochtitlan and make it his own. The son of a poor Spanish family wanted to carve out a golden kingdom for himself in the new world. He wanted to redeem the Mexicans and preserve a Christian version of their culture under his domination. Cortes could not know that he and his conquistadores were the leading edge of a tidal wave that would sweep up from the sea to drown forever the ancient civilizations of the new world.