Date:         Tue, 25 Jan 2000 02:36:25 -0600
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      The Conquest of Mexico

Cortez did not conquer the Aztecs of the Triple Alliance from the Valley
of Mexico because of firepower.  Cortex fought his initial battles (or
forays, or raids) as he worked his way up from Yucatan to the place
where he established the port of Veracruz.  His early opponents on the
mainland might have reacted in fear and shock to the sound of gunfire or
the sight of those strange creatures  that looked like combinations of
large deer and human-like beings, and such fear and shock might even
have led to an occasional early victory.  The cost, however, was that
Cortez entirely lost the advantage of surprising his enemy with unknown
and fearsome weapons.  By the time Cortez landed at Veracruz, detailed
and accurate reports of his ships, his weapons, the number of fighters
in his party, and their tactics had already reached Tenochtitlan and the
Tlatoani (First Speaker) Motekwtzumatzin we call "The Emperor
Montezuma".

Cortez's weapons, though surprising (even shocking), simply were
insufficient to the task of beating the Triple Alliance.  Aztec body
armor was more effective than the armor worn by the Spanish -- which is
why Cortez's soldiers started wearing Aztec cotton armor in place of
their own.  The weapons Cortez used in the field -- arquebusses, cannon,
crossbows, and horses -- were not nearly enough to even the odds between
Cortez's five hundred men or so and the tens of thousands of warriors
the Aztecs could put in the field.  Let's take a closer look.

The arquebus was a noisy, but inaccurate, weapon with an extremely slow
rate of fire.  Even the most skilled arquebussier would take three to
four minutes to reload and fire again.  In action, those old Spanish
blunderbusses were less accurate than a thrown rock, and almost as
likely to hit friends as foes.  Their effect on a battle was lessened
further because the arquebussiers did not use the tactic of firing by
rows.  (That drill was invented for the set-piece, open field battles of
later European wars.  In execution, the front rank  of riflemen fires at
the enemy. Next, the rank immediately behind them walks through their
line, aims, and fires.  Ranks that have already fired reload in place so
that they can then advance past their leading comrades and fire a
combined volley as they become the front rank. Cortez's arquebussiers
fired an opening volley, but after that their fire was scattered and
scarcely effective.)

Spanish cannon reached farther, and were used with considerably more
accuracy than the arquebus.  Cortez didn't have a whole lot of cannon,
however. Even if his entire army had consisted of cannoneer teams with
plenty of cannon to go around, they could hardly have stood up against
tens of thousands of of dedicated enemy warriors.

Cortez's crossbowmen certainly killed more Aztecs than the
arquebussiers, and might even have done away with more of the enemy than
Cortez's cannons.  Cortez was accompanied by no more than a few skilled
crossbowmen, and there just weren't enough of them. The crossbow (even
in the relatively inefficient form carried on Cortez's expedition) was
an extremely powerful weapon. A single bolt could kill several opponents
if an enemy attacked en masse. The trouble was that the crossbow's
mighty mechanical power came from an arduous cranking operation that was
best done by a two-man team.   The most skilled reloaders took more than
a minute to get ready to fire a second time. That's enough time for a
wave of enemies to overrun the crossbowman's position from a quarter of
a mile away.  So the tide of battle was not going to be decided by
crossbowmen, any more than by arquebussiers: they'd both be done in by
their slow rate of fire.

Cortez's other weapon, the horse, was effective against the Aztecs, who
hadn't developed the defensive tactic of massing long spears facing
points of possible horse attack. A sword-wielding horseman could cut a
wide swath through the enemy. The problem was that Cortez just didn't
have that many horses -- the initial party had, I believe, something on
the order of thirty of them.  Besides, the Aztecs were fast learners,
and they quickly developed their own tactics to nullify some of the
advantage the Spanish might have gotten from deploying a mobile cavalry.

How, then, did Cortez eventually defeat the Aztec Triple Alliance?

He didn't.

What happened was that Cortez sought out groups of local residents who
were longtime enemies of the Triple Alliance. The city of Cempoala alone
is said to have contributed some one hundred thousand warriors to the
forces Cortez led against Tenochtitlan. Cortez used all his considerable
skill as a diplomat to woo the Tlaxcalans, traditional enemies of the
Triple Alliance.  (The Aztecs fought many battles with the Tlaxcalans.
Reports from around the time of the Conquest say that Tenochtitlan
deliberately did not subjugate the rulers of Tlaxcala or occupy their
city-center.  To Aztec eyes, an independent Tlaxcala could serve as a
permanent source of war captives, while an occupation of Tlaxcala would
transfer responsibility to support and maintain that city to the Aztecs
themselves.)

Once Cortez had lined up a formidable army of Mexican Indians, he still
didn't beat the Aztecs in direct, face-to-face battle.  Instead, he and
his numerous allies subjected Tenochtitlan to an extended siege that
lasted several months.
Cortez and his allies cut the island nation off from its supply base.
During the siege, the city's inhabitants were struck by an epidemic
(probably of smallpox) that decimated them again and again.  With no
easy way to obtain food supplies, the people of the city found
themselves in a war with starvation as well as a war with Cortez and his
allies.

Eventually, the dual threat of disease and siege, combined with a
fantasticly high death rate inside Tenochtitlan, so weakened the Aztecs
opposing Cortez that they realized that they could not survive any
longer in the city.  In their reduced numbers, many of the defenders of
Tenochtitlan tried a mass breakout by canoe.  Most of the would-be
escapees were picked up by Cortez's forces, who manned a small fleet of
vessels Cortez had commissioned on Lake Texcoco.

One captured canoe was manned by two famed warriors accompanying the
last Aztec "Emperor" in his escape attempt.  The third man in the canoe
was Cuahtemoksin, the last independent Tlatoani, himself.  His capture
marked the end of Cortez's war on Tenochtitlan.

So the speculation about Cortez that began here on Anthro-L was a pretty
good guess about how Cortez succeeded. He didn't do it with a huge
Spanish army, or by superior arms, or by access to any huge apparatus of
supply lines. He did it, first of all, by establishing alliances with a
whole slew of people who had their own reasons to fight against the
Triple Alliance.  He did it by choosing siege rather than open battle.
He was greatly helped by the ravages of disease within the beleagured
city.  In the end, Cortez won his war by choosing not to engage in a
direct battle.

I hope you'll forgive my curmudgeonly conviction that everybody should
know all that I said here without needing me  to repeat it.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh@niu.edu>
PEACE !!!