Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1/Appendix 5 of the Second Letter
APPENDIX V.
THE TEMPLE
This statement is obviously inaccurate; Cortes has just said that fifty steps led to the summit of the chief teocalli which would allow for a very modest elevation, whereas the Giralda Tower of Seville Cathedral was built 300 years before Mexico was discovered and was then 185 feet high. Neither was it during this first visit to the temple of Tlatelolco in Montezuma's company that the idols were overthrown; that event happened in the teocalli of the great temple on another occasion when Montezuma was not present. Most writers—including Prescott—misled by Cortes, have confused the two visits and the two different temples, but Bernal Diaz makes it perfectly clear that the first visit was to the temple adjoining the market place in the Tlatelolco quarter of the city. This temple was even loftier than the principal one, and the arrangements in both were essentially the same (Orozco y Berra, lib. ii., cap. iv.; Icazbalceta, Dialogos de Cervantes, p. 201). The great teocalli of the chief temple was completed in the form in which the Spaniards beheld it by Montezuma's grandfather, Ahuitzotl, in 1487, when the solemn dedication was celebrated by the sacrifice of a vast number of human victims, estimated by Torquemada at 72,344 (Monarchia Indiana, lib. ii., cap. Ixiii.), by Ixtlilxochitl at 80,000 Historia Chicimeca), but more credibly fixed by the Tellerian and Vatican Codices at the still respectable figure of 20,000. Pretexts for wars with various tribes were invented in order to procure the victims for this ghastly hecatomb, and the ceremony of incessant slaughter occupied two days.
The exact form and dimensions of the temple are not positively known, but it is probable that the pyramid was an oblong, measuring something over three hundred feet in length at its base and rising in graduated terraces to a height of something less than one hundred feet. Bernal Diaz (Hist. Verdad., cap. viii.,) says that he counted the steps, which numbered one hundred and fourteen, and this tallies almost exactly with the statement of Andres Tapia (Relacion, p. 582,) that he counted one hundred and thirteen steps. Bernal Diaz also measured the pyramids at Cholula and Texcoco in the same way, and counted one hundred and twenty steps on the former, and one hundred and seventeen on the latter, hence, if he was accurate, the great pyramid of Mexico was not the loftiest in the empire. Not one of the Spaniards who saw this edifice seems to have observed it critically, or to have left a complete architectural description of it to posterity. They were all more impressed with the horrors they witnessed in it and their dreadful significance than with the architectural details; all agree that it was a most awesome place, in which dark, gruesome chambers, smelling like a slaughter house, contained hideous idols, smeared with human blood. In these dim recesses, demoniacal priests, clad in black robes, with grotesquely painted faces, framed in blood-clotted locks, celebrated their inhuman rites, and offered smoking hearts on golden salvers to the monstrous deities there enthroned. The presiding figure of this theocratic charnel house was that of the god of war Huitzilopochtli—the humming bird to the left—and of his image Bernal Diaz gives a careful description. Its face was distorted and had terrible eyes; the body was covered with gold and jewels, and was wound about with the coils of golden serpents; in the right hand was held a bow, and in the left a bundle of arrows. Suspended from the idol's neck was a necklace of human heads and hearts made of gold and silver with precious stones set in them, and by its side stood the figure of a page, called Huitziton, bearing a lance and shield richly jewelled. This little statue of the page was carried by the priests in battle, and was also on certain occasions borne with much pomp through the streets. The honours of these altars were shared by Tezcatlipoca—Shining Mirror—who was called "the soul of the world." He was a god of law and severe judgment and was much dreaded. His statue was of black obsidian, and suspended from his plaited hair, which was confined in a golden net, was an ear made of gold, towards which mounted tongues of smoke symbolising ascending prayers. On the summit of the teocalli stood a great cylindrical drum tlapanhuehuetl), made of serpents' skins, which was beaten on certain solemn occasions, and as an alarum. It is said to have given forth a most sinister sound, which could be heard for miles. During the siege, the Spaniards had sad cause to shudder at its fearsome roll which announced the sacrifice of their captive comrades, whose white, naked bodies were even discernible in the dusky procession which moved, in the glare of torches and the sacred fires, up the terraces of the pyramid on its way to the stone of sacrifice. The area of the courtyard, some twelve hundred feet square, was paved with flat polished stones, which were so slippery the Spaniards' horses could hardly keep their footing. Four gates in the surrounding wall, called coatepantli, gave entrance to the courtyard, one facing each of the cardinal points, and over each gate there was kept a store of arms in readiness for attack or defence. Sahagun (Hist. Nueva España, tom i., p. 197) enumerates seventy-eight different buildings inside the wall surrounding the courtyard; they comprised chapels, cells for priests, fountains for ablutions, quarters for students and attendants, and a number of smaller teocalli. This tallies with the description of Cortes and Bernal Diaz, and makes it evident that the entire group of buildings somewhat resembled the Kremlin at Moscow, or a vast cathedral close. In one of the temples the Spaniards estimated that a symmetrical pyramid of bones contained one hundred and thirty-six thousand human skulls. Amongst these temples there was one dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, circular in form and having its entrance built in imitation of a serpent's open mouth. Bernal Diaz says that this was a veritable hell, or abode of demons, in which they saw frightful idols, cauldrons of water in which to prepare the flesh of the victims, which the priests ate, and furnishings like those of a butcher's stall; so that he never called the place other than "hell."
Human sacrifices and cannibalism were practised even in honour of the beneficent deity of the Toltecs, whose mild teachings, pure life, and aversion to war, persuade us that he must have been a Christian bishop. Nothing more conclusively proves that, in spite of their material prosperity, their extended empire, and a certain refinement in their social life, the Aztecs occupied a much lower moral and intellectual level than did their Toltec predecessors in Anáhuac. From the Toltecs they had received the foundations of their civilisation; all that was good in their religion or true in their philosophy, all that was known amongst them of science, they received from that mysterious race whose only records are a few neglected and almost unknown ruins.
After the conquest, the great temple was razed to the ground. In its foundations were found a quantity of treasures, which had been placed there as offerings when the pyramid was first begun. The stone idols and carvings were for the most part built into the foundations of the Christian cathedral which stands upon its site.
Montezuma had readily assented, very soon after the arrival of the Spaniards, to the installation of a chapel in the Spanish quarters, and a room was consequently prepared, in which mass was said daily, as long as the supply of wine held out. The soldiers said their daily prayers before the cross and the sacred images, especially at the hour of the Ave Maria.
While seeking for the best place to erect the altar in this room, Alonso Yañez discovered a concealed door, which Cortes, who was informed of the discovery, ordered to be forced open. Beyond was a vast chamber containing the treasure of Axayacatl and other Aztec kings, forming a great heap of gold and jewels in the centre of the room, while all the walls were covered with splendid stuffs, thick feather-work, shields, and other objects of precious metals. After inspecting the fabulous collection, Cortes had the door sealed up again, and cautioned his followers not to betray their knowledge of its existence to the Mexicans (Bernal Diaz, cap. xciii.). Andres de Tapia's account (Incazbalceta, Doc. Ined., tom, ii., p. 580) says that Cortes told Montezuma of his discovery, and that the emperor presented him with all the gold and jewels in that treasury.
After repeated conversations with Montezuma on religious subjects, none of which seemed to advance his conversion, the patience of Cortes gave out. and it was when the Spaniards had been about five months in the city that the destruction of the idols in the great teocalli took place. The scene in the temple is characteristic of the times and the man.
Human life was cheap in Cortes's eyes, and the cruelties inflicted on the natives in the furtherance of his designs show that it was not the inhumanity of the sacrifices which filled him with the most abhorrence. It was the sight of idolatry, of people given over to devil worship, that inflamed his Catholic blood, and there seems, on this occasion, to have been no friar Olmedo at hand to restrain him, as in Cholula. He first called the priests together and delivered a pious exhortation, explaining the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and other Christian beliefs, conjuring them to abandon the superstitions which imperilled their immortal souls, to purify the altars, and dedicate them to the true God and the saints. As the priests defended their own, the controversy enraged Cortes beyond control, and seizing an instrument he began smashing the idols right and left with such magnificent fury that Andres de Tapia declared that he seemed like a supernatural being. Montezuma was notified, and entreated him for prudence's sake to desist, as such profanation would provoke an uprising of the people. Cortes, however, was deaf to remonstrance, and the idols were cast out, the temple washed and put in order, two altars being set up, one to Our Lady and the other to Saint Christopher, with their respective statues upon them. Mass was thenceforth said there, and some of the Indians came to the ceremony, as they wanted rain and, their own gods being overthrown, they were willing to invoke the Spaniards' God. Cortes declared they should have rain, and, with the most confident faith, ordered prayers and a procession to obtain this blessing; although the procession set forth under a cloudless sky, it returned after Mass in such a downpour that the people waded ankle deep in the streets. Malintzin's religion was vindicated (Andres de Tapia Relacion, p. 584-6).