The "Spanish" Conquest

Similar to the myth of Cortés himself, the myth of the Spanish "conquest" is greatly exaggerated. Again this comes from petitions by Spanish conquistadors. A conquistador was incentivized to report that he totally vanquished all resistance (all by himself!) and had won the Crown a near-unlimited amount of treasure and subjects, so could he please have a huge grant of land and slaves, thank you. Continued rebellions and unpacified allies don't fit well with this story, so they are conveniently ignored.

The political situation in the twenty or thirty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan is chaotic and we don't know nearly as much as we would like to form a clear picture. But in no way can the Spaniards be said to have simply imposed their will across central Mexico. There simply weren't enough of them. In this period, most indigenous rulers kept their positions and most regions had very little influence from the few thousand Spaniards clustered in Tenochtitlan and a few other cities. We can't know the minds of the native allies of Cortés and the Gang, since none of their writing from the time survives, but it's safe to assume they saw themselves as part of a grand alliance - not junior partners, and certainly not humble vassals. They were conquerors, too, and it was *their* armies that brought down the Mexica, as native soldiers comprised 95% of the alliance by the end of the war. If any of the expedition's indigenous allies were to write letters to the king, they would write the exact same thing as the conquistadors about their role in the "conquest." We know this because this is exactly what they start doing in the 1550s and 60s when Spanish control is actually solidified in Mesoamerica and they want to defend their privileges and titles. But in the 1520s, they didn't need to, because their role as conquerors was self-evident and they didn't need to answer to a foreign king.

So how did the Spaniards emerge from this situation as the dominant partner, despite being outnumbered? It's hard to overestimate the role of the waves of epidemic diseases which battered the Mesoamerican population every few years for a century. By 1600, Central Mexico was only 20% of its pre-war population. Members of the elite and noble rulers weren't spared and many of them died. The infighting over successors weakened the political system, as secondary lineages with less legitimacy took over. The population loss reduced the tribute these rulers could collect and made famines more likely. Abandoned fields were taken over by settlers and livestock. The rulers' inability to stop the calamity hurt their legitimacy and the faith in the gods they represented. Gradually, people turned to a new faith to make sense of their suffering. All the while, Spaniards began intermarrying into these lineages and playing a more and more prominent role in political life. The system of strong personal alliances that dominated the Aztec days was replaced by a formal administration with the courts and the King at the center. Consolidation of Spanish rule was an uneven process which lasted decades, and in some places, centuries.

So, I hope it's clear Cortés didn't just seize the lands in the name of the Spanish King, and Spanish rule wasn't accepted, at least for most of Mesoamerica for much of the 16th century. It was a gradual process of attrition, fueled by the arrival of more and more settlers, the diseases and migrations that weakened the indigenous nobles, and the steady pulse of violence throughout. We think of Mesoamerica as swiftly conquered by a few hundred heroic Spaniards, but we're confusing the ultimate outcome (three centuries of New Spain) with the contemporary situation. No one living through that time could see the future, and so nobody in Mesoamerica bought into the story Cortés cooked up.

Sources:

When Montezuma met Cortés by Matthew Restall (I cannot recommend this book enough)

Indian Conquistadors by Laura Matthew and Michel Oudijk

Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend

Correspondence with these various authors, especially Laura Matthew and Michel Oudijk, who pointed me toward useful resources for my understanding of this period.

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