16th century Archives - Not Even Past

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, by Matthew Restall (2018)

Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by Hernán Cortés, who is described by Wikipedia as a “Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile.” These accounts represent Cortés as willingly deciding to enter Tenochtitlan in the hopes of capturing Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, expecting to rule Mexico via a proxy ruler, and seeing himself as Julius Cesar in Gaul. Although Clendinnen shows that there was no Machiavellian logic in any of this Cortesian strategy, she keeps the trope of Cortés as the central protagonist of a tragic-comedy.

Montezuma’s reasoning for allowing Cortés and his 250 surviving conquistadors to enter Tenochtitlan is, after Cortés’s overblown heroics, the second leg of all histories of the conquest. Montezuma’s actions have been cast as a surrender to prophecy, implying imperium translatio (willingly bestowing sovereignty upon superior returning deities), idiotic cowardice, or simply unfathomable, unintelligible reaction. Either way, Montezuma always comes across as a diminished ruler, even a puppet. Cortés captured, imprisoned, killed, and desecrated Montezuma’s remains.

The third leg of the stool organizing narratives of the conquest of Mexico is the brutality of Aztec rule and the extent of the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. The alleged industrialization of Aztec ritual sacrifice has allowed some traditional accounts to justify the conquest.

Restall knocks down all three legs. He demonstrates that the numbers of sacrificed captives that are thrown around make absolutely no sense. The proposed numbers do not match basic arithmetic, demography, or the archeological findings at templo mayor, where the sacrifices were supposed to have taken place.

The leg that sustains Cortés as protagonist tumbles down just as easily. Restall demonstrates that Cortés was a mediocrity before landing in Yucatan and after the conquest. Cortés arrived in Hispaniola in 1504 and participated in the conquest of Cuba in 1511, playing the role of follower not leader throughout. After Tenochtitlan, Cortés led the conquest of Honduras and California where his incompetence shined through, not his greatness. Restall shows that leaders of the many Spanish factions, namely, the captains, bosses of family/town share-holding companies, who in Mexico made all key decisions, not Cortés.

Finally, the leg in the stool that portrays Montezuma as fool, is demolished by Restall in showing that Montezuma made fools of Cortés and his captains. He led them down a path that would secure attrition and observation. The envoys of Montezuma in Yucatan encouraged a path to Tenochtitlan via an enemy route. Cortés and his captains encountered first the Totonec and then the Tlaxcalan, before crossing the mountains to get to the valley that nestled Tenochtitlan in the middle. Restall demonstrates that when the weakened conquistadors stopped fighting with the Tlaxcalan, it was the latter,, not Cortes, who chose the path to get to the Aztec capital to visit Montezuma, including a detour to the city of Cholula.

This detour has always puzzled historians because it was out of the way and because the “conquistadors” staged a massacre of Cholulan lords for no apparent reason whatsoever. In his letters to Charles V, Cortés sought to explain the massacre as preventive violence to clamp down on the simmering rise of treasonous behavior among allies. Restall shows, however, that the massacre was a Tlaxcalan initiative and that the Spaniards had no role in its planning.. Tlaxcalan elites massacred the Cholulan for having recently broken the Tlaxcala Triple Alliance (that also included Huejotzingo) in order to embrace the Aztec. Even in their massacres, Cortés and his captains were puppets.

A 17th century CE oil painting depicting the meeting of Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes and Aztec ruler Montezuma (Motecuhzoma II) in 1519 CE (via Ancient History Encyclopedia)

Restall dwells on Montezuma’s zoos and collections to provide an answer to another puzzling decision of Cortés and his captains: they disassembled their fleet in Veracruz and crossed Central Mexico to dwell in Tenochtitlan for nine months. What would 250 badly injured and poorly provisioned conquistadors expect? To rule an empire of millions from the capital by holding the emperor hostage? Ever since Cortés penned his letters to Charles V, chroniclers and historians, (including indigenous ones trained by the Franciscans who wrote accounts of the conquest in the 1550s for the great multi-volume encyclopedia of Aztec lore, the Florentine Codex) have accepted this as a plausible strategy, even a brilliant Machiavellian one that took Montezuma unaware. Restall, however, proves that the Spaniards remained nine months walled in Montezuma’s palaces near the monarch’s zoo and gardens.

Restall proves that Montezuma’s majesty resided in his collection: zoos, gardens, and pharmacopeias. Montezuma collected women, wolves, and dwarfs. He led Cortés and his bosses to Tenochtitlan to add the pale Spaniards to his menageries and palaces. The Spanish factions had no choice. Montezuma was no one’s puppet. He used the Spaniards as curiosities to reinforce his majesty and power. Montezuma was no one’s prisoner; he was murdered. His body never desecrated by his own people. After the murder, the Spaniards were slaughtered and the few survivors fled the capital in the middle of the night, humiliated and beaten. The historiography has called the night when the Aztecs routed the Spaniards the Noche Triste.

Cortés and his surviving captains reassembled after the rout in Tlaxcala, from where they allegedly led a year long assault on Tenochtitlan. Restall shows that this protracted, final battle over the capital and the surrounding towns was not a campaign Cortés; captains controlled, any more than they controlled the first visit to Tenochtitlan. The final siege of Tenochtitlan was a war among noble Nahua factions as well as the reshuffling of altepetl (Nahua city) alliances. Elite families of Texcoco realigned to create a new alliance with Tlaxcala.

Restall introduces a new category to replace conquest: war. He equates the violence unleashed by the arrival of conquistadors with the violence of the two World Wars in the twentieth century. There was untold suffering and civilian casualties, systematic cruelty by ordinary people, rape and sexual exploitation as tools of warfare.

He is right. Yet this shift, paradoxically, infantilizes the natives and concedes all agency, again, to Europeans. In the political economy of malice, Spaniards had no monopoly. Restall demonstrates that Tlaxcalan and Texcocan lords led the massive massacres in Cholula and Texcoco. It is clear, also, that lords used the war to transact women like cattle and to amplify the well-entrenched Mesoamerican system of captivity and slavery. Why then does Restall concede to the Spaniards all the monopoly of cruelty? War made monsters not just out of ordinary vecinos from Extremadura and Andalucia. War also made monsters of plenty of local lords.

[1] Inga Clendinnen “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico, Representations 33 (1991): 65-100

Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted “English” freedoms at home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical departure. Moreover by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of transition. Although the English might have praised themselves for their freedoms, slavery was an institution deeply entrenched in England and in English America well before the 1620s. When it came to slavery there never was a divide between an English metropolitan core and a colonial periphery. Slavery was constitutive of the English Atlantic from its very inception in the mid sixteenth century.

Purchase of Christian captives from the Barbary States in the 17th century

Guasco presents a gamut of events and institutions that rendered slavery familiar to the English within and without. Penal slavery, forms of inherited agrarian servitude, and impressment of captured Irish rebels thoroughly acquainted the English with domestic forms of servitude. The Old Testament, patristic Christian sources, and the Greek and Roman classics helped reinforce the deeply rooted naturalness of the institution. English travelers painstakingly reported the near universality of servitude in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, and Africa. Moreover, tens of thousands of English sailors became themselves slaves, captured and held hostage for a ransom by Barbary corsairs.

Five Englishmen escaping slavery from Algiers, Barbary Coast, 1684, by Jan Luyken

It was the imperial rivalry with Portugal and Spain that familiarized the English to the institutions associated with African slavery. The English followed the Spanish and the Portuguese everywhere and learned from them how and where to obtain slaves in West Africa. Many of the so-called Iberian slave traders were themselves English rooted in Iberian soil, operating from Seville or the Canary Islands. Moreover, inter-imperial rivalry provided the English with an excuse to raid Spanish vessels and ports, hijacking hundreds of slaves who were later resold back to the Iberians or retailed in England and its emergent colonies.

For Guasco the English connection to Iberian empires created a smug rhetoric of liberty that cast the English as liberators and the Spanish as brutal overlords. Indians and Africans appeared as allies of the English, battling a Spanish slaving antichrist. While “liberating” the Africans, the English also learnt from Spaniards how to integrate them into households through conversion and miscegenation. Like their Spanish teachers, the English provided some legal protections for African slaves, including safeguards for slave property and married couples and families, as well as the right to self-purchase. There were plenty of freed blacks in the early English Atlantic. Guasco does not mythologize these institutions as they slowly went away while the plantation regime of racial slavery came of age. For Guasco there were no sudden transitions from one slave regime to the next. Slavery of whites or Native Americans (either through penal institutions or captivity in “just war) always had a “moral” dimension to it. Pre-capitalist slavery sought to uplift morally the captive rather than to resolve labor shortages. In the early English Atlantic, African slaves were from the very beginning commodities purchased to solve labor needs.

British Slave Traders load a ship off the coast of West Africa. Image courtesy of Discover Liverpool

This is a stimulating book but for a reader not acquainted with the narrative of English freedoms and sharp slave-regime transitions not very surprising. What is surprising is that this vast world of forced labor regimes would have remained hidden to the historiography. Early-modern polities traded in slavery and forced labor systems promiscuously. The English were no different, for all their alleged freedoms. Given the overwhelming number of galley slaves, Irish captives, pirates, apprentices, indentured labor, agrarian servants, child laborers, and late medieval oblates, how could it have ever been possible to imagine the English world as singularly “free”? The English constructed a fiction of English freedoms that was no different from that built by, say, the Spaniards. In fact, Spanish Old Christians enjoyed even more “freedoms” than did the English. Old Christians, who battled invading Islamic overloads by retreating to their Cantabrian strongholds, not only were entitled to their freedoms but also to the fueros of hidalgos, that is, to the right to have others work for them. They went one better than the English by clearly articulating the paradox of early modern freedoms: there were institutions of forced labor and slavery so that a handful could be free.

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, by Michael Guasco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

This review was first published in the Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXI, no. 2, May 2015

Notes from the field: Retracing Sixteenth-Century Steps in Seville

Sitting in the archive, thumbing through delicate sixteenth-century documents and trying to decipher centuries old paleography, it is easy to forget that the city outside breathes history too. Sources are mesmerizing and reading them is addictive and satisfying. But the life of a researcher can begin to feel like scurrying through tunnels made of words, dates, and images spread across paper, or on the screen. Occasionally, when one comes up for air and walks through the streets of a city, the mind wonders in creatively productive ways and the subjects of research can appear in unusual places far away from the archive. These moments remind us that real people walked the same ground centuries before. That is what happened to me during my first research trip to Seville while researching at the General Archive of the Indies, the enormous bureaucratic repository of documents related to Spain’s overseas kingdoms.

General Archive of the Indies, Seville. Via Wikipedia.

It was a boiling hot day and I decided to take a break from my work. Offering a lazy “ciao” to the security guard on the way out, I walked into the wall of heat that surrounds this beautiful Andalus city in the summer. Strolling around the magnificent cathedral that integrates Moorish and Catholic elements, scurrying between the shadows provided by palm trees, I headed up one of the gaudy shopping streets that act as tributaries from the city’s historic center. Undistracted by the pulsating music and new flowery patterned shirts on display, my mind remained fixed on the sixteenth-century English merchant and botanist, John Frampton, who had lived in the city, nearly five centuries previously and was the subject of my research.

Frampton’s life in Seville had been eventful. He traded with the cosmopolitan merchant community, established friendships with the English expats of Southern Iberia (much like myself), and was tried by the Inquisition for having a copy of a forbidden book (luckily, not much like myself). Allegedly his English friends had watched him carried into the city for his trial hanging from the underbelly of a donkey. Frampton was also the great translator of six important Spanish works on the New World, most notably the huge compendium of medical discoveries collected by the famous Spanish botanist Dr Nicolás Bautista Monardes, resident of this city.

Nicolas Monardes at the age of 57. Via Wikipedia.

Dr Monardes was curious by nature. A Genoese physician by training, he became fascinated by the medical potential of the plants and herbs used by indigenous people across the Atlantic in the New World. As ships returning from their lengthy voyages sailed up the Guadalquivir River from the Atlantic and settled on its banks, Dr Monardes would purchase the natural products and seeds they brought back and begin experimenting. He sent reports of his discoveries to King Phillip II and he published them in multiple editions. By doing so, he brought the extraordinary pharmacopeia and medical knowledge of the people of South America to the reading public in Europe. Yet, as always seems to be the case, the indigenous groups received little credit as Monardes and others with connections to notables and access to publishers took all the plaudits. As a result of this all-too-common maneuvering, Monardes has come down to us as a key player in the sixteenth-century Iberian scientific revolution.

Boats in the Puerto de Indias on the river Guadalquivir in the 16th century. Via Wikipedia.

As I walked, my mind moved into a new gear as I considered how the lives of these historical subjects intersected with the sixteenth-century scientific revolutions I had read about. A recent pair of studies focused on London and Seville came to mind. Commonly associated with the intellectual communities of Northern Europe, studies by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Antonio Barrera-Osorio have reconsidered the scientific revolution in terms of place, period, and the scope of historical actors and disciplines. These books questioned the importance of “Great Men” such as Galileo by expanding definitions of science from math and physics to human approaches to nature. They highlighted the roles played by artisans and merchants during European overseas expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As merchants brought natural products and knowledge to European ports, new systems of organization, experimentation, and proof developed. In their accounts, Seville was the bustling laboratory of Europe’s first scientific revolution, and it was here that the English expat merchant Frampton discovered and most likely met the Genoese expat naturalist Monardes.

A page from Frampton's Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library — A page from Frampton’s Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

Frampton’s Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World, his translation of Monardes’ treatise became a best seller in Elizabethan London, testament to the ways the scientific culture of Iberian cities like Seville sparked a fascination with the New World in England. The book formed part of a larger corpus of English language translations of Spanish scientific texts completed by merchants who had spent most of their lives in Iberian port cities. These men learned Spanish, married locally, and integrated into local societies, until the reformation and heightening imperial rivalries sent them home to England. Back in Albion knowledge became their new commodity and their language skills offered them a chance to rebuild a life as translators in the service of the English crown. But it was on the bustling streets of Seville that he learned Spanish and discovered the works of Monardes.

Many years later, the streets still bustled as I walked past a delicious looking ice-cream shop and remembered that Frampton’s translation had also been cited in Deborah Harkness’ recent study of a vibrant scientific community in London between 1550 and 1610. Harkness discovered nearly two thousand artisans and “middling-sorts” conducting experiments in London’s streets during this period. Fascinated by the natural world and commercial opportunities, this community formed the backbone of London’s Elizabethan Scientific Revolution. These early men of science disappeared from history only because they failed to publish their discoveries. Instead, now well-known figures like the herbalist John Gerald and Francis Bacon claimed ownership of their ideas through publications; reminiscent of the fate of indigenous medical knowledge at the hands of Monardes. Harkness introduces us to a number of fascinating individuals such as the naturalists of Lime Street and one Clement Draper whose “Prison Notebooks” demonstrate the existence of a cosmopolitan laboratory of scientific exchange and discovery in the King’s Bench Prison. Harkness downplays the significance of individuals, instead emphasizing the importance of London’s “urban sensibility” – its spirit of collaboration and exchange – in providing the conditions for the emergence of scientific culture. But was London’s “urban sensibility” so unique in this period?

I rolled this question around, turned a corner, and came to the end of the long shopping street. I paused for a moment to look at the faces staring out of a clock shop and thought about the precise scientific method that developed on these streets. I stepped back to take a photo and I happened to look up. Mounted there, above the ticking clocks, a small blue sign marked the botanical garden of none other than Dr Monardes. I tried to imagine what the site must have looked like as the doctor worked among his tropical plants. I thought of the magnificent gardens I had seen a few weeks before in the Alcazar, just around the corner. It was refreshing and exciting to stand so close to the place that Dr Monardes had conducted his experiments, and where John Frampton would no doubt have stood when admiring the work of the great scientist. It was in this moment, trying to imagine the life of these two individuals, that they came alive again, in my mind, as humans living in a dynamic world.

Monardes Plaque marking the site of his botanical gardens. Image courtesy of the author.

And now I found myself wondering how individuals like Frampton connected the sixteenth-century scientific revolutions of Seville and London. Frampton, like myself, lived between the English and Spanish worlds, happily content in either. Given the continuous movement of such merchants between the Anglo and Iberian worlds in this period, I began to consider how separate these worlds were, and whether the scientific revolution should be understood in relation to national or imperial frameworks. And with this new set of questions in mind, I retraced my steps back to the archive.

Sometimes it is best to give your eyes a break from the sources and go searching for history in the streets. When the city walls show you where it really happened, ideas spark and our connections with historical subjects are re-made.

You may also like:

Ernesto Mercado Montero discusses Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reviews Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (W.W. Norton Company, 2014)

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott.

Further Reading:

Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007)

Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2006)

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006)

“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: The New Archive (No. 16)

By Charley S. Binkow

Has any single author had as massive an impact on history as William Shakespeare? For over four centuries, the works of the Bard have been read, analyzed, and performed all around the world. Keeping track of that massive history, let alone the history of Elizabethan/Jacobian England, is a monumental ambition. Luckily, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has taken up the task. And even better: they’ve digitized their collection for the world to see.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, with copper engraving of the author by Martin Droeshout. Image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, 1623.

This extensive online collection has over 80,000 digital images. There are manuscripts, flyers, posters, books, papers, costumes, theater memorabilia, art pieces and a lot more. The behemoth archive is broken up easily into three sections: What, When, Where, and Who. Historians interested in letters of Francis Bacon or religious ceremonies of the 17^th century (like these marriage sermons), only have to click a few buttons to find what they’re looking for. Just browsing the topics will intrigue most anyone. Some fascinating things I stumbled upon include a picture of a Japanese Hamlet from 1905, Edwin Booth’s Iago and Richard III costumes, and a German graphic of The Merchant Venice from the 19^th century.

Photographic full-length portrait of Edwin Booth as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, c. 1870 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Historians, theater enthusiasts, and Shakespeare lovers will get a lot out of this collection. Historians can get primary documents showing Shakespeare’s influence all over the globe, they can read the documents of his time, and peruse four centuries of art in high definition (seriously, zoom all the way in and get up close to the cross-hatches). Any one studying anything even tangentially related to Shakespeare’s age can find something useful in this collection, like this early map of Cuba from the 16^th century or this Italy travel guide.

This is an amazing collection of historical images. Follow our links, or just jump into it and get lost among the artifacts. The love of Shakespeare is infectious; seeing the thousands of items associated with Shakespeare, compiled by people who love him and his era, will make you want to open a new tab in the Folger site and start reading the complete works.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

And Charley Binkow perused some incredible photographs of Egypt snapped by European travelers

First image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Recent Posts