Heroes & Villains: Inside the minds of the greatest warriors in history by Frank McLynn

Author:Frank McLynn [McLynn, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

THE LURE OF GOD AND GOLD

Cortés’s rank and file certainly had reason for their suspicions about peculation. Financially dishonest along with his other ‘sterling’ qualities, Cortés collected gold worth 700,000 pesos from the mines and then gave out that the figure was only 160,000. Bernal Diaz famously said that he and the conquistadores had come to the New World to serve God and become rich, and in these limbo days in Tenochtitlán there was a curious symbiosis between the sacred world and that of Mammon. When not wrangling about the gold uptake, Cortés was engaged in boorish outbursts over Christianity and idolatry. When Cortés revisited the Great Temple and found idols covered in blood from recent human sacrifice, he flew into a rage and attacked an idol with an iron bar, proceeding then to tear off the gold masks that adorned the other idols. He stormed back to Montezuma and peremptorily demanded that the idols be removed and a cross and a temple of the Madonna be put in their place. This was the exact, selfsame demand he had made earlier of Montezuma. The hapless emperor this time offered a compromise whereby both Christian and pagan idols would inhabit the same temple, but the disillusioned Aztecs removed their idols and hid them in a secret location.

By the beginning of March 1520 the Aztecs seemed to have recovered from their initial paralysis. More and more rumours of plots began to surface, and Montezuma himself explicitly warned Cortés to leave before the Spanish were attacked. Cortés asked for carpenters so that he could build an ocean-going fleet in which to return to Europe but then crushed Montezuma’s short-lived lifting of the spirits by adding, as if in an afterthought, that it would of course be necessary for the emperor to go with him when he returned to Spain. Montezuma supplied the labourers, who returned to the coast with Martin López, and soon the Atlantic coast rang with the sound of felling trees, sawing wood and hammering nails.

In reality Cortés had not the slightest intention of returning to Spain in the immediate future, for the lure of gold was still strong. But every day there were more signs that the Aztecs had reached the limit of their patience with their white tormentors. The spies whom Cortés had placed close to the person of Montezuma kept hinting, without providing any clear proof, that Montezuma was carrying on secret negotiations with his more warlike chiefs outside the palace, and that a general rising was imminent. Suddenly, there was more dramatic news. The seesaw oscillation between the Aztec and Cuban factors suddenly swung violently in the form of a major expedition sent to Mexico by Velázquez, governor of Cuba.

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