Moctezuma Xocoyotzin (Montezuma)

Moctezuma Xocoyotzin

‘The Younger’
Montezuma is a tragic figure; or is he? The Empire his forefathers created crumbled in the wake of his death; his decisions in the crucial year of 1519 granted Cortes entry into Tenochtitlan itself, setting the stage for Montezuma’s own seizure at their hands, and internment as a royal captive within his own palace. But was this enough to bring about an empire’s ruin, and the death of its leader? More importantly, why did Montezuma, master of dominions spanning Mesoamerica, bring the Spanish and their allies into Tenochtitlan itself?
What we know of Montezuma himself comes first from Spanish eyewitness accounts by Cortes and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, among others. Castillo considered him to be “about forty years old, of good height and well proportioned...his face was somewhat long, but cheerful, and he had good eyes and showed in his appearance and manner both tenderness and...gravity.” When Cortes met him, in November 1519, Montezuma came forth bedecked in the finery of an emperor. This did little to awe the Spanish leader, who exchanged gifts with Montezuma not as an inferior, but as an equal (though doubtless Cortes and Montezuma both felt superiority over the other). What can explain this cordial meeting? Since he had first learned of Cortes’s arrival, Montezuma was unusually inactive, dispatching embassies to meet Cortes and persuade him to halt his advance, instead of bringing the full might of the empire against him and his forces.
Post-conquest Nahua accounts, transcribed into writing by Spanish priests - or under their auspices, speak of dark omens in the decade before Cortes’s arrival. When the Spanish showed up, these old portents loomed large again, perhaps causing Montezuma’s reluctance to do battle. The veracity of these accounts is suspect, at best, completely ignoring the strategic situation on the ground, while playing into the traditional idea of Aztec primitiveness, in believing Cortes to be Quetzalcoatl incarnate, or emissaries of that particular deity. Odd though these astronomical events were, Montezuma was not one to scare easily; his seventeen-year reign marked the epoch of Aztec power. Military expansion had never been greater; the power of Tenochtitlan over its allied cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan solidified under his rule. But with this expansion, imperial power began to ebb. Overextension, and failure to reduce the independent pocket of the Tlaxcalans directly west of Tenochtitlan, curbed Aztec power, in the eyes of allies and subjects alike. “In much of Mesoamerican warfare,” Ross Hassig argued, “the perception of power was as effective as the actual force wielded, often more so.” Loss of that prestige lessened Tenochtitlan’s mysticism, while Montezuma’s consolidation of power in his own hands not only antagonized ally and subject alike, but also the nobles and priests of the city. With the combination of its brutality towards the conquered, thinness on the ground induced by Montezuma’s conquests, and Montezuma’s internal alienation, the empire was in a vulnerable state when Cortes showed up.
The Spanish arrived completely ignorant of Mesoamerican customs, much to their advantage. Tenochtitlan held no aura for them. Montezuma’s actions had been outwardly cordial towards Cortes’s troops as they advanced towards Tenochtitlan, and when he arrived, the two leaders met in full finery on the causeways of Tenochtitlan, speaking through interpreters in all politeness, as equals. But why? Ross Hassig affirms several reasons for Montezuma’s actions: first of all, because they were in a mysterious and complex land, the Spaniards were not subject to its norms. Montezuma was a powerful figure, yes, but no Spaniard was in awe of him as his enemies were, so intimidation was out of the question.
Secondly, because the Spaniards were not outwardly hostile against the Aztec lord and had maintained their peaceful intentions to every one of Montezuma’s ambassadors, they were not treated as invaders. War was not a foregone conclusion, but Montezuma was taking no chances. The meeting of the emperors occurred in November, when the Aztec armies were at home bringing in the harvests. Calling them up would have taken time, and what troops Montezuma had in Tenochtitlan, perhaps, could have handled the Spaniards best when Cortes and his allies were housed in Tenochtitlan itself (a city of a hundred thousand, surrounded by water with no way out, except across several narrow causeways).
It was a deathtrap extraordinaire. Montezuma’s civility was genuine, but bringing the Spaniards into his very midst was a deliberate and calculated decision. If the Spanish lost their veneer of politeness and turned to violence, they would be surrounded by tens of thousands of Aztecs. But things backfired. Relations with the Spanish soured. Housed in a rich palace in which the Spanish discovered hordes of treasure, Montezuma was seized by the Spanish during a weekly meeting and made a hostage, though Cortes stresses that he had full liberty to move about in his own palace! Compounded by the slaughter of Aztec chiefs celebrating a festival (by Spanish troops, while Cortes was out of Tenochtitlan), the atmosphere quickly turned hostile. Montezuma’s prestige was gone; his death came in trying to placate his furious people, who’d risen to throw out the Spanish. Castillo says he lost his life when the crowds assailed him with stones and arrows, but it's not impossible that the Spanish killed him. Either way, Montezuma had fallen from on high - his life extinguished - with his empire following soon after.
A conqueror and autocrat, Montezuma’s conquests advanced an empire beyond the limits of stability; his consolidation of that power ostracized his allies, weakening it from within, while the unexpected arrival of the Spanish perturbed him and his lords as to how to handle the situation. Gambling that the Spanish could be better overcome within Tenochtitlan itself, Montezuma invited the wolf into his home, and paid a steep price.

Montezuma did not live to see his empire fall. His death preceded that calamity by more than a year, but it was such a death that laid the foundations for Tenochtitlan’s fall: death at the hands of his own people. Montezuma’s fall was fierce, swift, and terrible. “Lord of Tenochtitlan” was reduced to a hostage in his own palace; but how? Centuries-old myths that Montezuma believed Cortes to be Quetzalcoatl incarnate came about after the conquest, and hearken to the idea of Mesoamerican primitiveness (which the Aztec Empire and its ruler were anything but). So why, then, did Montezuma bring Cortes into Tenochtitlan, a plan that backfired spectacularly? What was the context of such actions, and what could Montezuma have done instead?

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