Chronicle (1966–1991): Season 0, Episode 0 - The Realms of Gold - full transcript
NARRATOR: The New World.
The Great Continent itself.
Uncharted and unexplored.
America.
A few Europeans had already set foot
on its shores,
driven onward by their hunger for the
legendary gold of the Indies.
They had raided and traded, but though
they had brought back enough
gold and jewellery to whet the appetites
of their compatriots,
politically they had achieved nothing.
Then, in February 1519, there appeared
off these jungle shores 1 1 ships,
commanded by a man of a different stamp
to any who had gone before him.
The first and greatest of
the conquistadors, Hernan Cortes.
His story is the story of the conquest
of the Mexican empire,
and of its emperor, Montezuma.
But it is also something more,
the first direct confrontation
in all their power and might
of the old world and the new.
This is Tulum, on the windswept east
coast of the peninsula of Yucatan.
When the Spanish sailors saw it for the
first time, they were amazed,
comparing it in size and beauty to
their own great city of Seville.
Tulum is smaller now, but its temples
and watchtowers still keep their vigil
over the Caribbean, just as they did
300 years before Cortes was born.
It was built, and in 1519 still
occupied, by the Mayas,
perhaps the most gifted of all the
peoples of ancient Mexico.
By the 6th century AD,
while England was still groping
through the darkest of the Dark Ages,
the Mayas were already
erecting their temples
in the dense rain-forests
of southern Yucatan.
Palenque. Almost a thousand years ago
it was abandoned by its inhabitants
and engulfed by the jungle.
In the last century, soon after its
rediscovery, it was so overgrown
that according to one account,
"The sighing of the night wind
"through the taut roots of the trees
sang like a deep Aeolian harp."
The Indians wouldn't go near it.
No one yet knows
how far Palenque extends,
or what other marvels still lie
hidden in the forest.
From temples to a palace.
Here, at Uxmal, is Maya architecture
at its most glorious,
buildings that would do credit,
in their grandeur and proportions,
to any city in the world.
Their upper walls are a honeycomb
of decoration in high relief,
black shadows stabbing
across the sun-baked stone.
But Hernan Cortes
knew nothing of all this.
He was now 34 years old, the son of
a poor Spanish landowner
from Extremadura in southern Spain,
who had left home when he was 16
to seek his fortune and arrived three
years later at Hispaniola, now Haiti,
the first of the Spanish colonies
in the West Indies.
Later he had moved to Cuba
and there he had lived until, in 1518,
he talked, intrigued and bribed
his way to the command
of a new expedition to the west.
One of the men who knew him best
describes him like this.
MAN: "He was tall and sturdy
and his face was grey.
"Had it been longer,
he would have been more handsome.
"He had a deep chest and broad shoulders
and was slightly bowlegged.
"He was a splendid horseman
and skilled with every kind of weapon.
"He said his prayers every morning
and attended mass with devotion.
"He was fond of cards and dice
and excessively fond of women."
NARRATOR: That was
an old soldier speaking,
Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
He had fought
at Cortes' side throughout.
Years after, he'd record every detail,
and his story is the most vivid
that has come down to us.
The expedition sailed
on the 10th of February, 1519.
It had two main objectives,
one material, the other spiritual.
The material one, as always, was gold,
a subject never very far
from the minds of the conquistadors.
But it's all too easy
in our cynical modern way
to forget that to them, the spiritual
one was every bit as important.
They were not only conquerors,
they were missionaries.
Heathen lands were legitimate prey,
which was why the Borgia pope,
Alexander VI, had,
in a sudden burst of generosity,
recently granted the whole
Western hemisphere to Spain.
But the right of conquest carried
with it the obligation to convert,
and here, too, the Spaniards
did their work well.
Westward the expedition sailed,
then hugging close inshore,
rounded the northern coast of Yucatan,
to Tabasco.
Cortes' resources were small.
His 1 1 ships carried only about
550 soldiers and 100 sailors.
But they also had three secret weapons:
muskets, a few cannon and 16 horses.
Such things were unknown
on the American continent.
At their initial encounter, the Indians,
terrified as they were,
had bravely stood their ground
against the cannon,
but the horses were too much for them.
At first, they took horse and rider
to be one single animal,
some monstrous centaur
bearing down to destroy them.
And they fled.
All these drawings are the work
of the Indians themselves,
produced to illustrate
the Spanish histories
a few years after the conquest.
Like the Bayeux Tapestry, they give us
a complete contemporary pictorial record
of the campaign.
On Monday morning they sailed away,
loaded with gifts from the Tabascans,
among which was perhaps the greatest
godsend that Cortes was ever to receive.
Her name was Marina.
Bernal Diaz tells us
that she was good-looking,
intelligent and self-assured.
Most important of all,
she spoke both Aztec and Maya.
From the moment she came on board,
Cortes' language problems
were effectively at an end.
Later, Marina was also to become his
mistress and the mother of his child.
But it was as her lover's
interpreter and advisor
that she was to play
so important a part in the conquest,
and to take her place in history.
Sailing slowly up the coast, the fleet
at last came to a long sandy beach
sheltered by a little island.
It offered a good temporary anchorage,
and the day, Good Friday, seemed an
auspicious one to make a landing.
The natives proved friendly,
and presents were exchanged.
But, as the Spaniards soon learned,
they were now within the borders
of the Mexican empire.
Montezuma's spies were watching them.
His people, the Aztecs, were
comparatively new arrivals in Mexico.
Harsh, warlike, friendless, they had
drifted down from the north
guided only by a prophecy that, one day,
they would see an eagle perched
on a cactus with a snake in its talons
and that where they saw it,
they would make their home.
In 1325, the prophecy was fulfilled
on an island in the great mountain lake
of Texcoco, 7,000 feet above the sea.
Once here, they set about
civilising themselves,
adopting the skills, traditions
and customs
from the people whom they had conquered,
and from all those who had
inhabited the valley before them.
Particularly, perhaps, from
the peoples of Teotihuacan,
this immense, sacred city
that had grown and flourished
a thousand years before they arrived,
in the days when Europe still bowed
before the might of Imperial Rome.
Away to the south,
on the man-made island,
they built their own capital.
Later, their descendants
were to call it Mexico City.
They called it Tenochtitlan.
They, too, had no knowledge
of horses or beasts of burden.
They had no wheel, plough, arch,
scales or weights.
Yet they were superb craftsmen,
whose works of art still have
the power to astonish
and to terrify.
And as astronomers, they were superb.
This is the famous Aztec calendar,
a votive monument to the sun.
At its centre, the face of the sun god.
Often, they identified their gods
with the animals they hunted.
The jaguar, whose flayed skin
they would wear in battle,
or the eagle, the symbol of
their bravest warriors.
But above all, the Aztecs were fighters.
They had to be.
For just as thoroughly as they
understood the movements
of the heavenly bodies across the sky,
they were equally thoroughly convinced
that these bodies could be maintained
in their courses only for as long
as the responsible gods
were kept propitiated,
and this in turn meant keeping them
perpetually gorged
on the most precious food available,
human hearts and human blood.
When an Aztec went to war, he went
not to kill but to take prisoners,
countless prisoners, for the sacrifice.
And the Aztecs could never
get enough of them.
For the great consecration
of the temple at Tenochtitlan,
in four days, no less than
80,000 victims
met their deaths
on the sacrificial altars,
each in the same way.
The officiating priest would rip open
his breast with an obsidian knife,
reach into the cavity and rip out
the still-palpitating heart
to offer to the gods.
Among these gods were
Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird wizard,
god of the sun and of war, and
beneficiary of most of the sacrifices.
Then there was
the earth goddess, Coatlicue,
her head made up
of two confronted snakes.
But there was also another god,
gentler than these,
yet still formidable.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
These are the remains
of one of his temples.
Long ago, so the legend ran, he had
descended to Earth in human shape,
white-skinned and black-bearded,
and after 20 years teaching in Mexico,
had sailed away to the east.
One day he would return, dressed in
black, and re-establish his rule.
His homecoming would be in a one reed
year, and would usher in a time
of great suffering and tribulation
for the Mexican people.
Now, one reed year,
according to the Aztec calendar,
fell only once in every 52 of our years.
There had been one in 1415,
another in 1467,
and it fell again in 1519.
And so, even before Cortes' arrival,
Montezuma was worried.
High priest as well as emperor,
no one knew the prophecies
better than he.
Among other portents,
for a whole year a tongue of fire
had appeared in the heavens, and now
the messengers arrived on foot,
for there was no other means of travel,
the 300-odd miles from the coast.
They told of how they had seen these
mysterious strangers fishing from a boat
and then climbing back onto two big
towers standing in the midst of the sea.
When he heard that they had white faces,
black beards,
and that their leader
was dressed in black,
Montezuma's worst fears were confirmed.
He couldn't possibly know
the reason for this last phenomenon,
that it was Good Friday.
For him, it was the nine wind day,
by another incredible coincidence
the one day of the year
sacred to Quetzalcoatl.
No further doubt was left in his mind.
The plumed serpent had come back
to claim his due.
There was still just a faint chance
that he might be headed off,
and bribed not to come to the capital.
Montezuma now ordered ambassadors
to hurry down to the coast
with presents for the strangers.
Virtually every gift they brought
was of gold,
including a huge golden sun disc
the size of a cartwheel.
But Cortes kept his head, giving them,
not perhaps entirely by way
of entertainment,
a demonstration of his
firepower that left them terrified.
Finally, he offered them food
and asked them to return to their master
with his greetings,
which, he added, he intended to
deliver personally before long.
The ambassadors instructed their scribes
to make careful drawings
of all they saw.
This picture is one of the results.
Cortes on his horse,
drawn at the time, on the spot.
But Cortes had already made up his mind.
The gold he had been given,
together with everything
he had heard from Marina,
had convinced him that he was indeed
on the threshold of El Dorado,
and here, at this moment, he resolved,
with a puny force under his command,
to march against Montezuma
and all his huge empire.
Naturally, the authorities in Cuba
would never allow him
to undertake such a task.
Before going any further, he would
have to shake himself free of them.
But how?
Only by establishing a new colony,
equal in status with Cuba itself.
And so, just a few miles up the coast,
he founded, 450 years ago,
the first democratically constituted
municipality in the Americas,
which, in honour of
the Good Friday landings,
he named Villa Rica de Vera Cruz,
"the rich town of the true cross",
thus neatly reflecting the two interests
predominant in the Spanish minds,
gold and the gospel.
Henceforth, it was to the emperor
Charles V, his own sovereign,
that he would be directly responsible.
Now Vera Cruz lay only a short march
from Cempoala,
an important city of the Totonacs.
MAN: "As we came among the houses
and saw how large a town it was,
"larger than any we'd yet seen,
we were filled with admiration.
"It was so green with vegetation
that it looked like a garden,
"and its streets were so full of men
and women who'd come out to see us
"that we gave thanks to God
for the discovery of such a country."
This is the great temple area
of Cempoala as it stands today,
perhaps even greener now
than it was then.
From what we know of them, the Totonacs
seem to have been a gay,
cheerful sort of people,
as is borne out by all these lovely,
laughing little statuettes
that they left in such quantities
behind them.
But as they explained to Cortes,
they were sorely oppressed
by the immense tributes exacted from
them by their Aztec overlords.
They saw in the Spaniards
a possible means of
freeing themselves from this oppression.
And that's why Cortes found them
not only friendly
but actively eager to help him.
Once he had made sure of his alliance
with the Totonacs,
Cortes felt free to tackle
his missionary duties.
Though the Totonacs were perhaps
one degree less addicted to sacrifice
than the Aztecs,
450 years ago, these walls and steps
were running red with human blood.
So Cortes insisted that there should be
no more sacrifices.
The Cempoalans pleaded,
but he was adamant.
The blood was scraped from the temple
walls, and several of the Cempoalans,
including eight noble maidens
for the Spanish captains,
received a Christian baptism.
And now, before leaving
for the interior,
Cortes performed what was,
for sheer cold-blooded courage,
one of the most remarkable
acts of his life.
He bribed a few of his sailors to riddle
the hulls of his ships with holes,
and then, on the pretext that they were
worm-eaten and unseaworthy,
deliberately to run them aground.
Henceforth, whatever happened,
there could be no retreat.
As he wrote later to Charles V,
"That way, I felt safer."
Few other commanders
could have said the same.
And so, in August 1519,
with less than 500 men, 13 horses,
a few pieces of light artillery
and a troop of native porters,
this extraordinary man of 34 set off,
without maps, into an unknown country
against an empire of apparently
unlimited power and wealth,
never knowing what lay beyond
the next corner,
except that it would be many times
stronger than himself,
and almost certainly hostile.
And what a march it was.
Striking west from Cempoala,
they found the flat
coastal plain at its worst.
Unbearably hot,
periodically lashed with summer rains
that reduced the paths to quagmires,
bringing malaria and yellow fever
in their wake.
On and on they trudged,
in constant fear of ambush,
knowing that the enemy,
unseen and unheard, was never far away.
Then the climb began,
4,000 feet in some 30 miles,
sun and rain alternately beating down
on the armour they dared not remove
for a moment.
Up and up they went, cocoa and banana
giving way to scrub and cactus.
Up still further, 7,000 feet now,
higher perhaps than any of them
had been before,
with the new disquieting sensations
of breathlessness and lassitude.
MAN: "In this uninhabited country
we could find nothing to eat
"and the wind blew off the snowy heights
and we shivered with cold."
NARRATOR: At last, they emerged
onto the high plateau.
But, as the Spaniards were marching,
the Aztecs were watching and running.
Montezuma's messengers, their relay
system so well-organised that messages
could get the 300 miles from capital to
coast in 24 hours,
were keeping their anxious master
constantly posted with
the invaders' progress.
MAN: "There were times when our thirst
was such that we would chew thistles
"to make our lips bleed
and so moisten our mouths.
"At others,
"the only way we could in some measure
refresh our parched tongues
"was to hold the cold edge of our axes
between our lips."
And there was hard fighting ahead
of them, against the people of Tlaxcala.
It was only after three weeks of
bloodshed that the Tlaxcalans
admitted themselves beaten
and received Cortes in their capital.
They offered him their friendship
and they were as good as their word.
Henceforth, they were
his staunchest allies
and a large number of them accompanied
him on the next stage of his journey
to Cholula.
Cholula was an ancient and sacred city.
Here, the god Quetzalcoatl
had lived for 20 years,
teaching its people
the arts of civilisation
before he disappeared over the sea.
To him, too, was dedicated
its great pyramid,
now overgrown but still recognisable.
Originally it covered over 40 acres,
making it, in terms of cubic content,
the largest man-made structure
in the world.
Its walls were held fast
by a special cement
made from lime
mixed with the blood of children.
Almost as soon as they entered the city,
the Spaniards grew suspicious.
Some of the streets had been recently
barricaded, huge piles of stones
were visible on the flat roofs of
the houses at strategic points.
Most ominous of all, perhaps,
Cholula seemed almost devoid
of women and children.
And now the faithful Marina
came to Cortes
with a story that confirmed
his worst fears.
The wife of one of the Cholulan captains
had warned her of a plot
to seize all the Spaniards
the following morning
and take them off
to Montezuma for sacrifice.
The next morning, Cortes gathered
all the Cholulans he could muster
within the Spanish camp
and told them that he knew everything
that was in their hearts.
Then he pronounced sentence.
(GUNSHOT)
From a nearby rooftop came the
blast of a Spanish musket,
the agreed signal for slaughter.
The Spanish artillery opened fire
and, as Cortes later wrote to Charles V,
in two hours, more than 3,000 men died.
It was a massacre and Cortes has been
bitterly blamed for it.
Yet he was not normally
a bloodthirsty man.
Never once in the whole campaign
did he resort to force
unless his peace overtures
had been rejected.
The Cholulans were armed, the Spaniards
overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Cortes' first duty was to his men,
and he discharged it
in the only way he could.
And now all was ready for
the last stage of the march.
There was to be no more bloodshed.
The final challenge was
purely geographical.
From Cholula, Cortes had often looked at
the two great volcanoes
Popocatepetl and
the white woman, Iztaccihuatl,
that guarded the approach
to the capital,
and he had known that his route
would take him between them.
He had no wish to linger in Cholula.
Off he marched once more,
over that high saddle of rock.
The final barrier.
Physically, for himself and his men,
those last 50 miles must have been
the most gruelling of all.
The route wound upward
through thick pine forests
to the top of the 12,000-foot pass.
Dragging their artillery behind them,
Cortes and his allies
found themselves at last
at the highest point of their journey,
immediately below the great peak
of Popocatepetl itself.
They'd been marching over two months
and had fought at least six battles.
When they reached the watershed,
they were near the limits
of physical exhaustion.
But in that cold,
there could be no rest.
Finally, the road began to descend.
It turned a sharp corner
and suddenly, through the pines,
the Spaniards were gazing down
on the vision
they'd looked forward to for so long,
a huge lake sparkling in the sun
and in the midst of that lake,
linked to its shores by
three slender causeways,
Montezuma's capital, Tenochtitlan.
Now the lake is gone
and the Aztec city,
but this must have been something like
the view on which the Spaniards gazed
that November morning.
MAN: "We were struck with wonder
and admiration.
"It seemed to us like one of those
enchanted fables
"from the book of Amatus.
"Those big towers, the temples
"and buildings all made of stone,
rising from the water.
"Indeed, some of us asked whether
it was not all a dream."
NARRATOR: It was on November 8, 1519,
that Hernan Cortes led his 400
tired and bedraggled Spaniards
along the wide causeway
that connected the southern suburbs
with the capital itself.
They crossed a bridge
and found themselves
on what he later described as
"a wide, straight, beautiful avenue"
to see another procession
approaching to meet them.
It was the emperor, riding out
in a golden palanquin,
to meet his god and his destiny.
MAN: "And the great Montezuma
descended from his litter,
"and the other great chieftains
"supported him beneath
a marvellously rich canopy
"of green feathers, decorated
with gold and silver and pearls.
"The great Montezuma
was magnificently clad,
"wearing sandals, the soles of which
were of gold
"and the upper parts
ornamented with precious stones.
"And there were other great lords who
walked before the great Montezuma,
"laying down cloaks so that his feet
should not touch the earth.
"Not one dared to raise his eyes
towards him."
NARRATOR: But Cortes did.
Dismounting from his horse, he strode,
smiling, towards the emperor.
The old world and the new,
at last, stood face to face.
This first sight of Montezuma
in all his glory
made a deep impression on the Spaniards.
But his address of welcome,
faithfully rendered by Marina,
must have left them dumbfounded.
This man, whom they knew to have done
everything in his power
to prevent their coming, now greeted
their leader like a king and a god,
spoke of promises and prophecies,
and virtually seemed to offer him
the throne of Mexico.
Cortes in turn made
a suitably polite reply,
after which Montezuma
personally led his guests
to the palace he had had prepared
for them next to his own.
But Cortes remained on his guard.
He was being treated
as an honoured guest,
but the truth was that he was
on an island fortress
in the middle of
a strange and distant land,
with only a handful of men
and virtually no lines of communication
with the outside world.
He placed his artillery carefully
and ordered his soldiers
to remain inside the palace
and ready for action.
Then he settled down to diplomacy.
Montezuma was now 52.
MAN: "He was a good height, slender,
and not very dark,
"in fact the usual Indian complexion.
"His hair was short,
his face long, but somehow cheerful.
"He had fine eyes,
"and his expression was tender
and grave.
"He was very neat and clean
and took a bath every afternoon."
In the weeks that followed, the Spanish
soldiery came to love and respect him,
not so much for
the prodigious generosity
with which he loaded them with presents,
as for his extraordinary
natural grace and dignity.
Before long, he was to know them all
by name, and they, in their turn,
treated him as the emperor he was.
Cortes, meanwhile, had come
straight to the point.
He told him first of his own
sovereign, Charles V,
who he explained must henceforth
be Montezuma's sovereign, too.
And then he finally broached the
delicate subject of Christianity.
Here he was less successful.
On the fourth day, he asked his host's
permission to visit the great temple
at Tlatelolco,
in the northern part of the city.
Montezuma agreed, and when Cortes
reached the top of the 1 14 steps
that led to the sanctuary,
was waiting there to receive him.
MAN: "Then Montezuma took him
by the hand
"and told him to look at his great city
"and all the other cities
standing in the water.
"And we saw the three causeways
and the bridges and the canoes,
"some coming with provisions,
others returning with merchandise.
"We saw temples
and shrines in these cities
"that looked like
gleaming white towers and castles."
NARRATOR: But inside the sanctuary,
the scene changed.
Before the idols lay five human hearts,
still warm and steaming.
MAN: "The walls of the shrines
were so caked with blood
"and the floor so bathed in it
that the stench was worse
"than that of
any slaughterhouse in Spain."
NARRATOR: And around stood the priests,
ready to eat the limbs of the victims.
MAN: "They wore their hair very long,
down to their waists,
"and it was all so clotted
and matted with blood
"that it could not be pulled apart.
"And they smelled of sulphur. But they
also smelled of something worse,
"of decaying flesh."
Yet through all this nightmare
of carnage and butchery,
Montezuma remained
gentle and dignified as ever,
seemingly unable to understand
his guests' horror.
Only at the end did his jaw tighten,
when Cortes was rash enough to express
his revulsion at this
loathsome religion,
and suggest the setting up
of a Christian altar.
And even when he asked
his guests to leave,
Montezuma's natural courtesy
did not desert him.
They, for their part,
were only too delighted to obey.
Gratefully they hurried past the
skull-racks and the kitchens
where the human meat was prepared,
back to the whitewashed freshness
of their own quarters.
And even there, there must have been
many who wondered how long it would be
before those grim altars reeked, not
with Indian, but with Spanish blood.
And so Cortes hit on his next
spectacular decision.
He would make Montezuma his hostage.
He would simply be moved
to the Spanish quarters.
There he could choose
any apartments he liked,
bring his wives and servants
and carry on all the day-to-day
business of government.
It would be nothing more than
a change of residence.
Montezuma tried to argue,
but he couldn't go against what he
still believed was a divine will.
That evening, he was installed
in Cortes' palace.
The Spaniards continued to treat him
with as much respect as ever,
but henceforth, both Montezuma and his
subjects knew where the real power lay.
And, when a few days later they ratified
their formal submission to Charles V,
they were only confirming
an established fact.
MAN: "They showed much emotion
in doing so,
"and the great Montezuma could not
restrain his tears.
"He was so dear to us,
and we were so much affected
"at seeing him weep
that our own eyes grew tender.
"Some of our soldiers even wept
as openly as Montezuma,
"such was our love for him."
NARRATOR: Back to Spain went the
first fruits of the victory,
the emperor Charles' share
of the Mexican tribute.
Another fifth was kept by Cortes
for expenses.
The rest was divided among the soldiers.
None of it now remains.
Nearly all the gold and jewellery
was melted down into ingots,
crudely stamped with the arms of Spain.
Two pieces only have come down to us,
not of gold,
but of their exquisite feather work,
which the Aztecs made their own.
One is this shield.
The other is Montezuma's own
ceremonial headdress.
Seeing them for the first time,
the German artist
Albrecht Durer exclaimed,
"Never before have I set eyes on
anything that has so rejoiced my heart,
"for I have been shown the things
which were brought to the king
"from the new golden land,
and the subtle ingenuity of the people
"in these distant regions
has left me spellbound."
By the beginning of the year 1520,
the Spanish conquest of Mexico
might have seemed over,
but now Cortes' luck changed,
thanks to the foolishness of one of his
captains, Pedro de Alvarado,
whom Cortes had left behind in the
capital when he had to dash to the coast
to defeat a punitive expedition sent by
the jealous authorities in Cuba.
Though this new expedition was larger
and better-equipped,
it was no match for Cortes.
It was soundly defeated at Cempoala.
Most of the soldiers transferred their
allegiance, and when, in June,
Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, it was
at the head of well over 1,000 men,
with a hundred horses.
A month before, there had been held
the annual festival of Tezcatlipoca,
the smoking mirror, during which
a ritual dance was traditionally held
in the courtyard of the great temple.
Suspecting a plot, Alvarado had charged
into the temple precinct,
killing the dancers and
as many other Indians as he could,
up to 1,000 of them, including all the
flower of the Aztec nobility.
Within the hour, the whole city
was up in arms, and before long
the Spaniards found themselves virtually
blockaded in their palace.
Thanks to Montezuma's intervention,
there was no more bloodshed,
but Montezuma's influence was waning.
The story of Quetzalcoatl's return
was forgotten,
a new opposition party
had grown up in the capital,
determined to rid Mexico,
immediately and by force,
of Cortes and all his men.
And on the very evening
that Cortes returned to the capital,
a specially-convened Aztec
council of state had dethroned him
and relieved him of all his powers.
By the next morning,
the atmosphere had changed
from passive discontent
to active opposition,
and now the battle began in earnest.
MAN: "Their tenacity was
beyond description.
"Three or four soldiers of our company
"who had served in Italy
swore to God many times
"that they had never seen such fighting.
"Not in the Christian wars or against
the French king's artillery
"or the great Turk.
"Nor had they ever
seen men so courageous
"at charging with closed ranks."
(HORSE NEIGHING)
On the fifth day, Cortes saw that
the odds were impossible,
and sent to Montezuma to ask him
to negotiate a truce.
The Spanish messengers
found him sunk in despair.
There was nothing more
he could do, he said.
Thanks to Cortes,
he had lost his throne.
His people would
no longer listen to him.
But, at last, he agreed to try.
The great square in front of the palace
was thronged with Aztec warriors,
but when they saw their former monarch
slowly climb the steps to the terrace,
they grew still.
He pleaded with them, and implored them
to call off the attack,
giving them his word that
the Spaniards would leave the city
just as soon as
they were permitted to do so.
For a moment, a great wave of sympathy
seemed to well up from the crowd
to their sad ex-emperor.
Then, suddenly, came a volley of stones.
One of them hit Montezuma on the head.
He fell to the ground and was carried
to his apartments by the Spaniards.
Cortes himself hurried to his side.
The wound did not seem
particularly grave.
But Montezuma had lost the will to live.
He refused all treatment
and turned his face to the wall.
MAN: "When we least expected it,
they came to say that he was dead.
"Cortes wept for him,
and all of us captains and soldiers.
"There was not one among us
who did not mourn him like a father,
"which was not to be wondered at
"for he was a good man."
NARRATOR: But Montezuma was
more than that.
He was a noble, tragic figure.
From the outset, he had seen
as Cortes himself never saw,
the full dimensions of the cataclysm
that was to overtake his empire.
And he had known that it was inevitable.
He may have been mistaken
in seeing Cortes as a god
or even as the instrument of one,
but he could no more have
prevented the Spanish conquest
than if it had in fact been
divinely ordained.
His friendship with his conqueror,
for whom ultimately he gave both
his throne and his life,
was founded not on cowardice,
but on wisdom.
For he had know that
violence would not prevail.
And for more than a year
after his death,
he was to be proved right.
As Montezuma's body was
handed over to his people
and borne away down the canals
to its ritual cremation,
Cortes knew that with it
had gone the last of his hopes
of remaining in the city.
He must retreat, and quickly.
And so he deliberately selected
the western causeway
not the southern one
by which he had come.
It was shorter and would probably
be less well-guarded.
Outside, the night was dark.
A mist had risen from the lake
and a light rain had begun to fall.
Softly, the Spanish column set off
through the deserted streets,
and began their march
along the causeway.
(TRUMPET BLOWING)
Suddenly came the noise
of a conch shell trumpet.
From all the temple tops of the city,
the Aztec war drums began
to throb out their summons.
In a moment,
the water was alive with canoes,
all loaded with warriors shouting
and showering arrows
on the retreating column.
Cortes had devised portable bridges
to be laid across the gaps
in the causeway.
In the chaos and confusion
they were virtually useless.
But before long, the gaps were choked
with fallen men and horses
and the Spaniards were
able to fight their way
across a bridge of dead bodies.
Many of them had died
not from wounds but from drowning,
weighed down by the gold that
they had refused to leave behind.
Hours later, what remained of the column
limped into the little village
of Tacuba.
And there, under a great cypress tree
that still stands today,
flung themselves down to rest.
MAN: "I have forgotten to record
how glad we were to see
"our Donnamarina still alive.
"Some Tlaxcalans had rescued her
at the bridge.
"But out of the 24 horses that remained
to us, not one was able to run,
"not a horseman able to raise an arm,
not a foot soldier able to move."
NARRATOR: This was indeed
the Noche Triste,
the night of sorrow.
After a long and painful
retreat round the lake,
the shattered force met an Aztec army
of far superior strength at Otumba
and, unbelievably, routed it.
Then at last, five days later,
they reached Tlaxcala and safety.
Few other commanders
after so hideous a debacle
would have dreamt of
continuing the campaign.
But Cortes' resolution
was as firm as ever.
The Battle of Otumba had showed him
that he wasn't beaten
and he knew that he could never rest
until he returned to Tenochtitlan
in triumph.
Immediately he set about
his preparations.
Rebuilding the health
and morale of his men,
restoring their confidence
in themselves and in him,
begging, borrowing,
stealing reinforcements.
And because he knew
since the Noche Triste
that he could never again
trust those causeways,
there in Tlaxcala,
200 miles from the sea
and 7,000 feet above it,
he set about building a fleet.
And so he ordered
his carpenters to construct
13 shallow draft brigantines,
then to dismantle them into
carefully numbered sections
so that they could be quickly
reassembled on the lake's shore.
Even the mighty Popocatepetl
was forced into service.
Needing more gunpowder,
Cortes sent a party to fetch sulphur
from the very crater itself.
By Christmas, all was ready.
Cortes had at his command
some 550 Spaniards,
roughly the same number
as on his first expedition,
about 10,000 Indian allies
and 40 horses.
On the 28th of December, less
than six months after their retreat,
they began the march back round
the lake to Tenochtitlan.
As the Spanish strength
had been growing,
so the Aztecs had declined,
for their capital had been struck
by a new and dreadful scourge,
smallpox.
Previously unknown on the
American continent,
it was probably introduced by
one of the Spanish soldiers.
The Indians, who had no hereditary
resistance to it,
had perished in their thousands.
In April 152 1, the brigantines
arrived from Tlaxcala,
were reassembled and then
sailed slowly across the lake.
A message was sent to the new
young Emperor, Cuauhtemoc,
calling on him to surrender.
But there was no reply.
The army marched south along the lake
to take up its position
for the final assault.
(GUNS FIRING)
It proved far harder than he expected.
The brigantines could not
be everywhere at once.
(GUNS FIRING)
(HORSES NEIGHING)
As soon as one causeway was repaired,
the Aztecs destroyed it again.
Every attempted raid was driven back.
Clearly there was only one solution,
the annihilation of the city.
Destroying the houses
and the streets one by one,
using the rubble to fill the canals
where the bridges had been.
Four weeks later, the southern
half of the city was a pile of ruins
and the southern and western spearheads
under Cortes and Alvarado respectively
met in the great marketplace
of Tlatelolco.
MAN: "On the way we passed through
a small square
"where there were wooden poles on which
they had impaled the heads
"of many of our Spaniards
whom they had killed
"and sacrificed during
the recent battles.
"Their hair and beards had grown
much longer than they were in life,
"which I would never have believed
if I had not seen it."
NARRATOR: Next to the marketplace
was the great temple
from which Cortes and Montezuma,
with Bernal Diaz at their side,
had looked down over the city.
MAN: "We climbed to the top,
set their shrines on fire,
"burnt the idols
and planted our banners there.
"Then we fought on the ground
till nightfall."
NARRATOR: When the Aztecs saw
the eagles of Spain fluttering
from their highest pyramid,
they knew they had lost.
Yet even now, young Cuauhtemoc
refused to surrender.
With his wife, who was
Montezuma's daughter, and his court,
he boarded a fleet of canoes
with the intention of
carrying on resistance
from the mainland.
It was only after the fastest
of the Spanish brigantines
had overtaken him
that he finally gave himself up.
He was taken at once to Cortes
who embraced him and
congratulated him on his courage.
But young Cuauhtemoc drew back.
Tears streaming down his face,
he pointed to the dagger
Cortes had in his belt
and implored his conqueror to stab him.
But Cortes smiled and shook his head.
The young man who was
standing before him,
who was only 26 years old,
was the last of the Aztec emperors.
His empire lay in ruins around him
but he himself had never surrendered.
He had shown and was
still showing the courage
of which even a Spaniard might be proud.
Thus on the evening
of the 13th of August, 152 1,
Tenochtitlan fell.
And with it, the Aztec Empire.
MAN: "During the whole 93 days
of the siege,
"there was the unceasing noise of
their accursed drums and trumpets
"and the melancholy battle drums
in the shrines and on the temple towers.
"But after Cuauhtemoc's capture,
all of our soldiers became deaf,
"as if all the bells in a belfry
had been ringing together
"and then suddenly stopped."
NARRATOR: It is Cuauhtemoc's statue
that stands in Mexico City today,
for Montezuma has never quite
been forgiven for his surrender.
Where his palace once stood,
a great cathedral now rises
to the glory of the God that
Hernan Cortes brought to Mexico.
Cortes' name, too, is seldom spoken,
except perhaps in the Hospital of Jesus,
which he built
and which still functions.
There is little else
he would recognise here.
Even the great lake itself
is drained and dry,
surviving only in a few
overgrown canals.
But 50 miles away over the mountains,
he might feel more at home.
For here stands the palace that
he built for himself on his retirement,
in the little town of Cuernavaca.
And here, from the cool balconies,
he could look out
at the twin volcanoes
between which he had passed
on his way to victory.
It is for their Indian past
that most Mexicans of today
show their greatest affection.
They have not forgotten the
beginnings of the Aztec Empire
and the building that now enshrines
the treasures of ancient Mexico
is architecturally one of the
most exciting museums in the world.
For them, this was the glory.
What followed was destruction and ruin.
What remains is regret.
(NATIVE DRUMS PLAYING)
But the Indians are only one element.
There's a marble plaque in the Square
of the Three Cultures in Mexico City
where modern buildings confront
those of the Spanish
and the Aztec past.
Marking the place where
Cuauhtemoc acknowledged
the end of his empire,
it bears these words:
"It was neither a victory nor a defeat.
"It was the painful birth of
the co-mingled people
"that is the Mexico of today."
The Great Continent itself.
Uncharted and unexplored.
America.
A few Europeans had already set foot
on its shores,
driven onward by their hunger for the
legendary gold of the Indies.
They had raided and traded, but though
they had brought back enough
gold and jewellery to whet the appetites
of their compatriots,
politically they had achieved nothing.
Then, in February 1519, there appeared
off these jungle shores 1 1 ships,
commanded by a man of a different stamp
to any who had gone before him.
The first and greatest of
the conquistadors, Hernan Cortes.
His story is the story of the conquest
of the Mexican empire,
and of its emperor, Montezuma.
But it is also something more,
the first direct confrontation
in all their power and might
of the old world and the new.
This is Tulum, on the windswept east
coast of the peninsula of Yucatan.
When the Spanish sailors saw it for the
first time, they were amazed,
comparing it in size and beauty to
their own great city of Seville.
Tulum is smaller now, but its temples
and watchtowers still keep their vigil
over the Caribbean, just as they did
300 years before Cortes was born.
It was built, and in 1519 still
occupied, by the Mayas,
perhaps the most gifted of all the
peoples of ancient Mexico.
By the 6th century AD,
while England was still groping
through the darkest of the Dark Ages,
the Mayas were already
erecting their temples
in the dense rain-forests
of southern Yucatan.
Palenque. Almost a thousand years ago
it was abandoned by its inhabitants
and engulfed by the jungle.
In the last century, soon after its
rediscovery, it was so overgrown
that according to one account,
"The sighing of the night wind
"through the taut roots of the trees
sang like a deep Aeolian harp."
The Indians wouldn't go near it.
No one yet knows
how far Palenque extends,
or what other marvels still lie
hidden in the forest.
From temples to a palace.
Here, at Uxmal, is Maya architecture
at its most glorious,
buildings that would do credit,
in their grandeur and proportions,
to any city in the world.
Their upper walls are a honeycomb
of decoration in high relief,
black shadows stabbing
across the sun-baked stone.
But Hernan Cortes
knew nothing of all this.
He was now 34 years old, the son of
a poor Spanish landowner
from Extremadura in southern Spain,
who had left home when he was 16
to seek his fortune and arrived three
years later at Hispaniola, now Haiti,
the first of the Spanish colonies
in the West Indies.
Later he had moved to Cuba
and there he had lived until, in 1518,
he talked, intrigued and bribed
his way to the command
of a new expedition to the west.
One of the men who knew him best
describes him like this.
MAN: "He was tall and sturdy
and his face was grey.
"Had it been longer,
he would have been more handsome.
"He had a deep chest and broad shoulders
and was slightly bowlegged.
"He was a splendid horseman
and skilled with every kind of weapon.
"He said his prayers every morning
and attended mass with devotion.
"He was fond of cards and dice
and excessively fond of women."
NARRATOR: That was
an old soldier speaking,
Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
He had fought
at Cortes' side throughout.
Years after, he'd record every detail,
and his story is the most vivid
that has come down to us.
The expedition sailed
on the 10th of February, 1519.
It had two main objectives,
one material, the other spiritual.
The material one, as always, was gold,
a subject never very far
from the minds of the conquistadors.
But it's all too easy
in our cynical modern way
to forget that to them, the spiritual
one was every bit as important.
They were not only conquerors,
they were missionaries.
Heathen lands were legitimate prey,
which was why the Borgia pope,
Alexander VI, had,
in a sudden burst of generosity,
recently granted the whole
Western hemisphere to Spain.
But the right of conquest carried
with it the obligation to convert,
and here, too, the Spaniards
did their work well.
Westward the expedition sailed,
then hugging close inshore,
rounded the northern coast of Yucatan,
to Tabasco.
Cortes' resources were small.
His 1 1 ships carried only about
550 soldiers and 100 sailors.
But they also had three secret weapons:
muskets, a few cannon and 16 horses.
Such things were unknown
on the American continent.
At their initial encounter, the Indians,
terrified as they were,
had bravely stood their ground
against the cannon,
but the horses were too much for them.
At first, they took horse and rider
to be one single animal,
some monstrous centaur
bearing down to destroy them.
And they fled.
All these drawings are the work
of the Indians themselves,
produced to illustrate
the Spanish histories
a few years after the conquest.
Like the Bayeux Tapestry, they give us
a complete contemporary pictorial record
of the campaign.
On Monday morning they sailed away,
loaded with gifts from the Tabascans,
among which was perhaps the greatest
godsend that Cortes was ever to receive.
Her name was Marina.
Bernal Diaz tells us
that she was good-looking,
intelligent and self-assured.
Most important of all,
she spoke both Aztec and Maya.
From the moment she came on board,
Cortes' language problems
were effectively at an end.
Later, Marina was also to become his
mistress and the mother of his child.
But it was as her lover's
interpreter and advisor
that she was to play
so important a part in the conquest,
and to take her place in history.
Sailing slowly up the coast, the fleet
at last came to a long sandy beach
sheltered by a little island.
It offered a good temporary anchorage,
and the day, Good Friday, seemed an
auspicious one to make a landing.
The natives proved friendly,
and presents were exchanged.
But, as the Spaniards soon learned,
they were now within the borders
of the Mexican empire.
Montezuma's spies were watching them.
His people, the Aztecs, were
comparatively new arrivals in Mexico.
Harsh, warlike, friendless, they had
drifted down from the north
guided only by a prophecy that, one day,
they would see an eagle perched
on a cactus with a snake in its talons
and that where they saw it,
they would make their home.
In 1325, the prophecy was fulfilled
on an island in the great mountain lake
of Texcoco, 7,000 feet above the sea.
Once here, they set about
civilising themselves,
adopting the skills, traditions
and customs
from the people whom they had conquered,
and from all those who had
inhabited the valley before them.
Particularly, perhaps, from
the peoples of Teotihuacan,
this immense, sacred city
that had grown and flourished
a thousand years before they arrived,
in the days when Europe still bowed
before the might of Imperial Rome.
Away to the south,
on the man-made island,
they built their own capital.
Later, their descendants
were to call it Mexico City.
They called it Tenochtitlan.
They, too, had no knowledge
of horses or beasts of burden.
They had no wheel, plough, arch,
scales or weights.
Yet they were superb craftsmen,
whose works of art still have
the power to astonish
and to terrify.
And as astronomers, they were superb.
This is the famous Aztec calendar,
a votive monument to the sun.
At its centre, the face of the sun god.
Often, they identified their gods
with the animals they hunted.
The jaguar, whose flayed skin
they would wear in battle,
or the eagle, the symbol of
their bravest warriors.
But above all, the Aztecs were fighters.
They had to be.
For just as thoroughly as they
understood the movements
of the heavenly bodies across the sky,
they were equally thoroughly convinced
that these bodies could be maintained
in their courses only for as long
as the responsible gods
were kept propitiated,
and this in turn meant keeping them
perpetually gorged
on the most precious food available,
human hearts and human blood.
When an Aztec went to war, he went
not to kill but to take prisoners,
countless prisoners, for the sacrifice.
And the Aztecs could never
get enough of them.
For the great consecration
of the temple at Tenochtitlan,
in four days, no less than
80,000 victims
met their deaths
on the sacrificial altars,
each in the same way.
The officiating priest would rip open
his breast with an obsidian knife,
reach into the cavity and rip out
the still-palpitating heart
to offer to the gods.
Among these gods were
Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird wizard,
god of the sun and of war, and
beneficiary of most of the sacrifices.
Then there was
the earth goddess, Coatlicue,
her head made up
of two confronted snakes.
But there was also another god,
gentler than these,
yet still formidable.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
These are the remains
of one of his temples.
Long ago, so the legend ran, he had
descended to Earth in human shape,
white-skinned and black-bearded,
and after 20 years teaching in Mexico,
had sailed away to the east.
One day he would return, dressed in
black, and re-establish his rule.
His homecoming would be in a one reed
year, and would usher in a time
of great suffering and tribulation
for the Mexican people.
Now, one reed year,
according to the Aztec calendar,
fell only once in every 52 of our years.
There had been one in 1415,
another in 1467,
and it fell again in 1519.
And so, even before Cortes' arrival,
Montezuma was worried.
High priest as well as emperor,
no one knew the prophecies
better than he.
Among other portents,
for a whole year a tongue of fire
had appeared in the heavens, and now
the messengers arrived on foot,
for there was no other means of travel,
the 300-odd miles from the coast.
They told of how they had seen these
mysterious strangers fishing from a boat
and then climbing back onto two big
towers standing in the midst of the sea.
When he heard that they had white faces,
black beards,
and that their leader
was dressed in black,
Montezuma's worst fears were confirmed.
He couldn't possibly know
the reason for this last phenomenon,
that it was Good Friday.
For him, it was the nine wind day,
by another incredible coincidence
the one day of the year
sacred to Quetzalcoatl.
No further doubt was left in his mind.
The plumed serpent had come back
to claim his due.
There was still just a faint chance
that he might be headed off,
and bribed not to come to the capital.
Montezuma now ordered ambassadors
to hurry down to the coast
with presents for the strangers.
Virtually every gift they brought
was of gold,
including a huge golden sun disc
the size of a cartwheel.
But Cortes kept his head, giving them,
not perhaps entirely by way
of entertainment,
a demonstration of his
firepower that left them terrified.
Finally, he offered them food
and asked them to return to their master
with his greetings,
which, he added, he intended to
deliver personally before long.
The ambassadors instructed their scribes
to make careful drawings
of all they saw.
This picture is one of the results.
Cortes on his horse,
drawn at the time, on the spot.
But Cortes had already made up his mind.
The gold he had been given,
together with everything
he had heard from Marina,
had convinced him that he was indeed
on the threshold of El Dorado,
and here, at this moment, he resolved,
with a puny force under his command,
to march against Montezuma
and all his huge empire.
Naturally, the authorities in Cuba
would never allow him
to undertake such a task.
Before going any further, he would
have to shake himself free of them.
But how?
Only by establishing a new colony,
equal in status with Cuba itself.
And so, just a few miles up the coast,
he founded, 450 years ago,
the first democratically constituted
municipality in the Americas,
which, in honour of
the Good Friday landings,
he named Villa Rica de Vera Cruz,
"the rich town of the true cross",
thus neatly reflecting the two interests
predominant in the Spanish minds,
gold and the gospel.
Henceforth, it was to the emperor
Charles V, his own sovereign,
that he would be directly responsible.
Now Vera Cruz lay only a short march
from Cempoala,
an important city of the Totonacs.
MAN: "As we came among the houses
and saw how large a town it was,
"larger than any we'd yet seen,
we were filled with admiration.
"It was so green with vegetation
that it looked like a garden,
"and its streets were so full of men
and women who'd come out to see us
"that we gave thanks to God
for the discovery of such a country."
This is the great temple area
of Cempoala as it stands today,
perhaps even greener now
than it was then.
From what we know of them, the Totonacs
seem to have been a gay,
cheerful sort of people,
as is borne out by all these lovely,
laughing little statuettes
that they left in such quantities
behind them.
But as they explained to Cortes,
they were sorely oppressed
by the immense tributes exacted from
them by their Aztec overlords.
They saw in the Spaniards
a possible means of
freeing themselves from this oppression.
And that's why Cortes found them
not only friendly
but actively eager to help him.
Once he had made sure of his alliance
with the Totonacs,
Cortes felt free to tackle
his missionary duties.
Though the Totonacs were perhaps
one degree less addicted to sacrifice
than the Aztecs,
450 years ago, these walls and steps
were running red with human blood.
So Cortes insisted that there should be
no more sacrifices.
The Cempoalans pleaded,
but he was adamant.
The blood was scraped from the temple
walls, and several of the Cempoalans,
including eight noble maidens
for the Spanish captains,
received a Christian baptism.
And now, before leaving
for the interior,
Cortes performed what was,
for sheer cold-blooded courage,
one of the most remarkable
acts of his life.
He bribed a few of his sailors to riddle
the hulls of his ships with holes,
and then, on the pretext that they were
worm-eaten and unseaworthy,
deliberately to run them aground.
Henceforth, whatever happened,
there could be no retreat.
As he wrote later to Charles V,
"That way, I felt safer."
Few other commanders
could have said the same.
And so, in August 1519,
with less than 500 men, 13 horses,
a few pieces of light artillery
and a troop of native porters,
this extraordinary man of 34 set off,
without maps, into an unknown country
against an empire of apparently
unlimited power and wealth,
never knowing what lay beyond
the next corner,
except that it would be many times
stronger than himself,
and almost certainly hostile.
And what a march it was.
Striking west from Cempoala,
they found the flat
coastal plain at its worst.
Unbearably hot,
periodically lashed with summer rains
that reduced the paths to quagmires,
bringing malaria and yellow fever
in their wake.
On and on they trudged,
in constant fear of ambush,
knowing that the enemy,
unseen and unheard, was never far away.
Then the climb began,
4,000 feet in some 30 miles,
sun and rain alternately beating down
on the armour they dared not remove
for a moment.
Up and up they went, cocoa and banana
giving way to scrub and cactus.
Up still further, 7,000 feet now,
higher perhaps than any of them
had been before,
with the new disquieting sensations
of breathlessness and lassitude.
MAN: "In this uninhabited country
we could find nothing to eat
"and the wind blew off the snowy heights
and we shivered with cold."
NARRATOR: At last, they emerged
onto the high plateau.
But, as the Spaniards were marching,
the Aztecs were watching and running.
Montezuma's messengers, their relay
system so well-organised that messages
could get the 300 miles from capital to
coast in 24 hours,
were keeping their anxious master
constantly posted with
the invaders' progress.
MAN: "There were times when our thirst
was such that we would chew thistles
"to make our lips bleed
and so moisten our mouths.
"At others,
"the only way we could in some measure
refresh our parched tongues
"was to hold the cold edge of our axes
between our lips."
And there was hard fighting ahead
of them, against the people of Tlaxcala.
It was only after three weeks of
bloodshed that the Tlaxcalans
admitted themselves beaten
and received Cortes in their capital.
They offered him their friendship
and they were as good as their word.
Henceforth, they were
his staunchest allies
and a large number of them accompanied
him on the next stage of his journey
to Cholula.
Cholula was an ancient and sacred city.
Here, the god Quetzalcoatl
had lived for 20 years,
teaching its people
the arts of civilisation
before he disappeared over the sea.
To him, too, was dedicated
its great pyramid,
now overgrown but still recognisable.
Originally it covered over 40 acres,
making it, in terms of cubic content,
the largest man-made structure
in the world.
Its walls were held fast
by a special cement
made from lime
mixed with the blood of children.
Almost as soon as they entered the city,
the Spaniards grew suspicious.
Some of the streets had been recently
barricaded, huge piles of stones
were visible on the flat roofs of
the houses at strategic points.
Most ominous of all, perhaps,
Cholula seemed almost devoid
of women and children.
And now the faithful Marina
came to Cortes
with a story that confirmed
his worst fears.
The wife of one of the Cholulan captains
had warned her of a plot
to seize all the Spaniards
the following morning
and take them off
to Montezuma for sacrifice.
The next morning, Cortes gathered
all the Cholulans he could muster
within the Spanish camp
and told them that he knew everything
that was in their hearts.
Then he pronounced sentence.
(GUNSHOT)
From a nearby rooftop came the
blast of a Spanish musket,
the agreed signal for slaughter.
The Spanish artillery opened fire
and, as Cortes later wrote to Charles V,
in two hours, more than 3,000 men died.
It was a massacre and Cortes has been
bitterly blamed for it.
Yet he was not normally
a bloodthirsty man.
Never once in the whole campaign
did he resort to force
unless his peace overtures
had been rejected.
The Cholulans were armed, the Spaniards
overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Cortes' first duty was to his men,
and he discharged it
in the only way he could.
And now all was ready for
the last stage of the march.
There was to be no more bloodshed.
The final challenge was
purely geographical.
From Cholula, Cortes had often looked at
the two great volcanoes
Popocatepetl and
the white woman, Iztaccihuatl,
that guarded the approach
to the capital,
and he had known that his route
would take him between them.
He had no wish to linger in Cholula.
Off he marched once more,
over that high saddle of rock.
The final barrier.
Physically, for himself and his men,
those last 50 miles must have been
the most gruelling of all.
The route wound upward
through thick pine forests
to the top of the 12,000-foot pass.
Dragging their artillery behind them,
Cortes and his allies
found themselves at last
at the highest point of their journey,
immediately below the great peak
of Popocatepetl itself.
They'd been marching over two months
and had fought at least six battles.
When they reached the watershed,
they were near the limits
of physical exhaustion.
But in that cold,
there could be no rest.
Finally, the road began to descend.
It turned a sharp corner
and suddenly, through the pines,
the Spaniards were gazing down
on the vision
they'd looked forward to for so long,
a huge lake sparkling in the sun
and in the midst of that lake,
linked to its shores by
three slender causeways,
Montezuma's capital, Tenochtitlan.
Now the lake is gone
and the Aztec city,
but this must have been something like
the view on which the Spaniards gazed
that November morning.
MAN: "We were struck with wonder
and admiration.
"It seemed to us like one of those
enchanted fables
"from the book of Amatus.
"Those big towers, the temples
"and buildings all made of stone,
rising from the water.
"Indeed, some of us asked whether
it was not all a dream."
NARRATOR: It was on November 8, 1519,
that Hernan Cortes led his 400
tired and bedraggled Spaniards
along the wide causeway
that connected the southern suburbs
with the capital itself.
They crossed a bridge
and found themselves
on what he later described as
"a wide, straight, beautiful avenue"
to see another procession
approaching to meet them.
It was the emperor, riding out
in a golden palanquin,
to meet his god and his destiny.
MAN: "And the great Montezuma
descended from his litter,
"and the other great chieftains
"supported him beneath
a marvellously rich canopy
"of green feathers, decorated
with gold and silver and pearls.
"The great Montezuma
was magnificently clad,
"wearing sandals, the soles of which
were of gold
"and the upper parts
ornamented with precious stones.
"And there were other great lords who
walked before the great Montezuma,
"laying down cloaks so that his feet
should not touch the earth.
"Not one dared to raise his eyes
towards him."
NARRATOR: But Cortes did.
Dismounting from his horse, he strode,
smiling, towards the emperor.
The old world and the new,
at last, stood face to face.
This first sight of Montezuma
in all his glory
made a deep impression on the Spaniards.
But his address of welcome,
faithfully rendered by Marina,
must have left them dumbfounded.
This man, whom they knew to have done
everything in his power
to prevent their coming, now greeted
their leader like a king and a god,
spoke of promises and prophecies,
and virtually seemed to offer him
the throne of Mexico.
Cortes in turn made
a suitably polite reply,
after which Montezuma
personally led his guests
to the palace he had had prepared
for them next to his own.
But Cortes remained on his guard.
He was being treated
as an honoured guest,
but the truth was that he was
on an island fortress
in the middle of
a strange and distant land,
with only a handful of men
and virtually no lines of communication
with the outside world.
He placed his artillery carefully
and ordered his soldiers
to remain inside the palace
and ready for action.
Then he settled down to diplomacy.
Montezuma was now 52.
MAN: "He was a good height, slender,
and not very dark,
"in fact the usual Indian complexion.
"His hair was short,
his face long, but somehow cheerful.
"He had fine eyes,
"and his expression was tender
and grave.
"He was very neat and clean
and took a bath every afternoon."
In the weeks that followed, the Spanish
soldiery came to love and respect him,
not so much for
the prodigious generosity
with which he loaded them with presents,
as for his extraordinary
natural grace and dignity.
Before long, he was to know them all
by name, and they, in their turn,
treated him as the emperor he was.
Cortes, meanwhile, had come
straight to the point.
He told him first of his own
sovereign, Charles V,
who he explained must henceforth
be Montezuma's sovereign, too.
And then he finally broached the
delicate subject of Christianity.
Here he was less successful.
On the fourth day, he asked his host's
permission to visit the great temple
at Tlatelolco,
in the northern part of the city.
Montezuma agreed, and when Cortes
reached the top of the 1 14 steps
that led to the sanctuary,
was waiting there to receive him.
MAN: "Then Montezuma took him
by the hand
"and told him to look at his great city
"and all the other cities
standing in the water.
"And we saw the three causeways
and the bridges and the canoes,
"some coming with provisions,
others returning with merchandise.
"We saw temples
and shrines in these cities
"that looked like
gleaming white towers and castles."
NARRATOR: But inside the sanctuary,
the scene changed.
Before the idols lay five human hearts,
still warm and steaming.
MAN: "The walls of the shrines
were so caked with blood
"and the floor so bathed in it
that the stench was worse
"than that of
any slaughterhouse in Spain."
NARRATOR: And around stood the priests,
ready to eat the limbs of the victims.
MAN: "They wore their hair very long,
down to their waists,
"and it was all so clotted
and matted with blood
"that it could not be pulled apart.
"And they smelled of sulphur. But they
also smelled of something worse,
"of decaying flesh."
Yet through all this nightmare
of carnage and butchery,
Montezuma remained
gentle and dignified as ever,
seemingly unable to understand
his guests' horror.
Only at the end did his jaw tighten,
when Cortes was rash enough to express
his revulsion at this
loathsome religion,
and suggest the setting up
of a Christian altar.
And even when he asked
his guests to leave,
Montezuma's natural courtesy
did not desert him.
They, for their part,
were only too delighted to obey.
Gratefully they hurried past the
skull-racks and the kitchens
where the human meat was prepared,
back to the whitewashed freshness
of their own quarters.
And even there, there must have been
many who wondered how long it would be
before those grim altars reeked, not
with Indian, but with Spanish blood.
And so Cortes hit on his next
spectacular decision.
He would make Montezuma his hostage.
He would simply be moved
to the Spanish quarters.
There he could choose
any apartments he liked,
bring his wives and servants
and carry on all the day-to-day
business of government.
It would be nothing more than
a change of residence.
Montezuma tried to argue,
but he couldn't go against what he
still believed was a divine will.
That evening, he was installed
in Cortes' palace.
The Spaniards continued to treat him
with as much respect as ever,
but henceforth, both Montezuma and his
subjects knew where the real power lay.
And, when a few days later they ratified
their formal submission to Charles V,
they were only confirming
an established fact.
MAN: "They showed much emotion
in doing so,
"and the great Montezuma could not
restrain his tears.
"He was so dear to us,
and we were so much affected
"at seeing him weep
that our own eyes grew tender.
"Some of our soldiers even wept
as openly as Montezuma,
"such was our love for him."
NARRATOR: Back to Spain went the
first fruits of the victory,
the emperor Charles' share
of the Mexican tribute.
Another fifth was kept by Cortes
for expenses.
The rest was divided among the soldiers.
None of it now remains.
Nearly all the gold and jewellery
was melted down into ingots,
crudely stamped with the arms of Spain.
Two pieces only have come down to us,
not of gold,
but of their exquisite feather work,
which the Aztecs made their own.
One is this shield.
The other is Montezuma's own
ceremonial headdress.
Seeing them for the first time,
the German artist
Albrecht Durer exclaimed,
"Never before have I set eyes on
anything that has so rejoiced my heart,
"for I have been shown the things
which were brought to the king
"from the new golden land,
and the subtle ingenuity of the people
"in these distant regions
has left me spellbound."
By the beginning of the year 1520,
the Spanish conquest of Mexico
might have seemed over,
but now Cortes' luck changed,
thanks to the foolishness of one of his
captains, Pedro de Alvarado,
whom Cortes had left behind in the
capital when he had to dash to the coast
to defeat a punitive expedition sent by
the jealous authorities in Cuba.
Though this new expedition was larger
and better-equipped,
it was no match for Cortes.
It was soundly defeated at Cempoala.
Most of the soldiers transferred their
allegiance, and when, in June,
Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, it was
at the head of well over 1,000 men,
with a hundred horses.
A month before, there had been held
the annual festival of Tezcatlipoca,
the smoking mirror, during which
a ritual dance was traditionally held
in the courtyard of the great temple.
Suspecting a plot, Alvarado had charged
into the temple precinct,
killing the dancers and
as many other Indians as he could,
up to 1,000 of them, including all the
flower of the Aztec nobility.
Within the hour, the whole city
was up in arms, and before long
the Spaniards found themselves virtually
blockaded in their palace.
Thanks to Montezuma's intervention,
there was no more bloodshed,
but Montezuma's influence was waning.
The story of Quetzalcoatl's return
was forgotten,
a new opposition party
had grown up in the capital,
determined to rid Mexico,
immediately and by force,
of Cortes and all his men.
And on the very evening
that Cortes returned to the capital,
a specially-convened Aztec
council of state had dethroned him
and relieved him of all his powers.
By the next morning,
the atmosphere had changed
from passive discontent
to active opposition,
and now the battle began in earnest.
MAN: "Their tenacity was
beyond description.
"Three or four soldiers of our company
"who had served in Italy
swore to God many times
"that they had never seen such fighting.
"Not in the Christian wars or against
the French king's artillery
"or the great Turk.
"Nor had they ever
seen men so courageous
"at charging with closed ranks."
(HORSE NEIGHING)
On the fifth day, Cortes saw that
the odds were impossible,
and sent to Montezuma to ask him
to negotiate a truce.
The Spanish messengers
found him sunk in despair.
There was nothing more
he could do, he said.
Thanks to Cortes,
he had lost his throne.
His people would
no longer listen to him.
But, at last, he agreed to try.
The great square in front of the palace
was thronged with Aztec warriors,
but when they saw their former monarch
slowly climb the steps to the terrace,
they grew still.
He pleaded with them, and implored them
to call off the attack,
giving them his word that
the Spaniards would leave the city
just as soon as
they were permitted to do so.
For a moment, a great wave of sympathy
seemed to well up from the crowd
to their sad ex-emperor.
Then, suddenly, came a volley of stones.
One of them hit Montezuma on the head.
He fell to the ground and was carried
to his apartments by the Spaniards.
Cortes himself hurried to his side.
The wound did not seem
particularly grave.
But Montezuma had lost the will to live.
He refused all treatment
and turned his face to the wall.
MAN: "When we least expected it,
they came to say that he was dead.
"Cortes wept for him,
and all of us captains and soldiers.
"There was not one among us
who did not mourn him like a father,
"which was not to be wondered at
"for he was a good man."
NARRATOR: But Montezuma was
more than that.
He was a noble, tragic figure.
From the outset, he had seen
as Cortes himself never saw,
the full dimensions of the cataclysm
that was to overtake his empire.
And he had known that it was inevitable.
He may have been mistaken
in seeing Cortes as a god
or even as the instrument of one,
but he could no more have
prevented the Spanish conquest
than if it had in fact been
divinely ordained.
His friendship with his conqueror,
for whom ultimately he gave both
his throne and his life,
was founded not on cowardice,
but on wisdom.
For he had know that
violence would not prevail.
And for more than a year
after his death,
he was to be proved right.
As Montezuma's body was
handed over to his people
and borne away down the canals
to its ritual cremation,
Cortes knew that with it
had gone the last of his hopes
of remaining in the city.
He must retreat, and quickly.
And so he deliberately selected
the western causeway
not the southern one
by which he had come.
It was shorter and would probably
be less well-guarded.
Outside, the night was dark.
A mist had risen from the lake
and a light rain had begun to fall.
Softly, the Spanish column set off
through the deserted streets,
and began their march
along the causeway.
(TRUMPET BLOWING)
Suddenly came the noise
of a conch shell trumpet.
From all the temple tops of the city,
the Aztec war drums began
to throb out their summons.
In a moment,
the water was alive with canoes,
all loaded with warriors shouting
and showering arrows
on the retreating column.
Cortes had devised portable bridges
to be laid across the gaps
in the causeway.
In the chaos and confusion
they were virtually useless.
But before long, the gaps were choked
with fallen men and horses
and the Spaniards were
able to fight their way
across a bridge of dead bodies.
Many of them had died
not from wounds but from drowning,
weighed down by the gold that
they had refused to leave behind.
Hours later, what remained of the column
limped into the little village
of Tacuba.
And there, under a great cypress tree
that still stands today,
flung themselves down to rest.
MAN: "I have forgotten to record
how glad we were to see
"our Donnamarina still alive.
"Some Tlaxcalans had rescued her
at the bridge.
"But out of the 24 horses that remained
to us, not one was able to run,
"not a horseman able to raise an arm,
not a foot soldier able to move."
NARRATOR: This was indeed
the Noche Triste,
the night of sorrow.
After a long and painful
retreat round the lake,
the shattered force met an Aztec army
of far superior strength at Otumba
and, unbelievably, routed it.
Then at last, five days later,
they reached Tlaxcala and safety.
Few other commanders
after so hideous a debacle
would have dreamt of
continuing the campaign.
But Cortes' resolution
was as firm as ever.
The Battle of Otumba had showed him
that he wasn't beaten
and he knew that he could never rest
until he returned to Tenochtitlan
in triumph.
Immediately he set about
his preparations.
Rebuilding the health
and morale of his men,
restoring their confidence
in themselves and in him,
begging, borrowing,
stealing reinforcements.
And because he knew
since the Noche Triste
that he could never again
trust those causeways,
there in Tlaxcala,
200 miles from the sea
and 7,000 feet above it,
he set about building a fleet.
And so he ordered
his carpenters to construct
13 shallow draft brigantines,
then to dismantle them into
carefully numbered sections
so that they could be quickly
reassembled on the lake's shore.
Even the mighty Popocatepetl
was forced into service.
Needing more gunpowder,
Cortes sent a party to fetch sulphur
from the very crater itself.
By Christmas, all was ready.
Cortes had at his command
some 550 Spaniards,
roughly the same number
as on his first expedition,
about 10,000 Indian allies
and 40 horses.
On the 28th of December, less
than six months after their retreat,
they began the march back round
the lake to Tenochtitlan.
As the Spanish strength
had been growing,
so the Aztecs had declined,
for their capital had been struck
by a new and dreadful scourge,
smallpox.
Previously unknown on the
American continent,
it was probably introduced by
one of the Spanish soldiers.
The Indians, who had no hereditary
resistance to it,
had perished in their thousands.
In April 152 1, the brigantines
arrived from Tlaxcala,
were reassembled and then
sailed slowly across the lake.
A message was sent to the new
young Emperor, Cuauhtemoc,
calling on him to surrender.
But there was no reply.
The army marched south along the lake
to take up its position
for the final assault.
(GUNS FIRING)
It proved far harder than he expected.
The brigantines could not
be everywhere at once.
(GUNS FIRING)
(HORSES NEIGHING)
As soon as one causeway was repaired,
the Aztecs destroyed it again.
Every attempted raid was driven back.
Clearly there was only one solution,
the annihilation of the city.
Destroying the houses
and the streets one by one,
using the rubble to fill the canals
where the bridges had been.
Four weeks later, the southern
half of the city was a pile of ruins
and the southern and western spearheads
under Cortes and Alvarado respectively
met in the great marketplace
of Tlatelolco.
MAN: "On the way we passed through
a small square
"where there were wooden poles on which
they had impaled the heads
"of many of our Spaniards
whom they had killed
"and sacrificed during
the recent battles.
"Their hair and beards had grown
much longer than they were in life,
"which I would never have believed
if I had not seen it."
NARRATOR: Next to the marketplace
was the great temple
from which Cortes and Montezuma,
with Bernal Diaz at their side,
had looked down over the city.
MAN: "We climbed to the top,
set their shrines on fire,
"burnt the idols
and planted our banners there.
"Then we fought on the ground
till nightfall."
NARRATOR: When the Aztecs saw
the eagles of Spain fluttering
from their highest pyramid,
they knew they had lost.
Yet even now, young Cuauhtemoc
refused to surrender.
With his wife, who was
Montezuma's daughter, and his court,
he boarded a fleet of canoes
with the intention of
carrying on resistance
from the mainland.
It was only after the fastest
of the Spanish brigantines
had overtaken him
that he finally gave himself up.
He was taken at once to Cortes
who embraced him and
congratulated him on his courage.
But young Cuauhtemoc drew back.
Tears streaming down his face,
he pointed to the dagger
Cortes had in his belt
and implored his conqueror to stab him.
But Cortes smiled and shook his head.
The young man who was
standing before him,
who was only 26 years old,
was the last of the Aztec emperors.
His empire lay in ruins around him
but he himself had never surrendered.
He had shown and was
still showing the courage
of which even a Spaniard might be proud.
Thus on the evening
of the 13th of August, 152 1,
Tenochtitlan fell.
And with it, the Aztec Empire.
MAN: "During the whole 93 days
of the siege,
"there was the unceasing noise of
their accursed drums and trumpets
"and the melancholy battle drums
in the shrines and on the temple towers.
"But after Cuauhtemoc's capture,
all of our soldiers became deaf,
"as if all the bells in a belfry
had been ringing together
"and then suddenly stopped."
NARRATOR: It is Cuauhtemoc's statue
that stands in Mexico City today,
for Montezuma has never quite
been forgiven for his surrender.
Where his palace once stood,
a great cathedral now rises
to the glory of the God that
Hernan Cortes brought to Mexico.
Cortes' name, too, is seldom spoken,
except perhaps in the Hospital of Jesus,
which he built
and which still functions.
There is little else
he would recognise here.
Even the great lake itself
is drained and dry,
surviving only in a few
overgrown canals.
But 50 miles away over the mountains,
he might feel more at home.
For here stands the palace that
he built for himself on his retirement,
in the little town of Cuernavaca.
And here, from the cool balconies,
he could look out
at the twin volcanoes
between which he had passed
on his way to victory.
It is for their Indian past
that most Mexicans of today
show their greatest affection.
They have not forgotten the
beginnings of the Aztec Empire
and the building that now enshrines
the treasures of ancient Mexico
is architecturally one of the
most exciting museums in the world.
For them, this was the glory.
What followed was destruction and ruin.
What remains is regret.
(NATIVE DRUMS PLAYING)
But the Indians are only one element.
There's a marble plaque in the Square
of the Three Cultures in Mexico City
where modern buildings confront
those of the Spanish
and the Aztec past.
Marking the place where
Cuauhtemoc acknowledged
the end of his empire,
it bears these words:
"It was neither a victory nor a defeat.
"It was the painful birth of
the co-mingled people
"that is the Mexico of today."