On my return to our quarters, I spoke with those captive lords, and asked them why they wished to kill me treacherously. They answered that it was not their fault, as those of Culua, who were vassals of Montezuma, had put them up to it, and that Montezuma had stationed in such and such a place, (which as we learned afterwards was a league and a half distant), a garrison of fifty thousand men to accomplish it. But they now had learned how they had been deceived, and if I would set one or two of them at liberty, they would gather the people of the city, and return to it with all the women, and children, and chattels; and they prayed me to pardon them the error they had committed, assuring me that, from henceforth, no one should deceive them, and that they would be faithful and loyal vassals of Your Highness and my friends. After having spoken at length to them about their error, I liberated two of them, and the next day the whole city was filled with men, women, and children, and as safe as if nothing of what had passed had ever happened. Immediately afterwards I liberated all the other chiefs and lords whom I had made prisoners, they promising that they would serve Your Majesty very loyally.
During the fifteen or twenty days I remained there, the city and country were completely pacified and re-
provoke a massacre of their Cholulan enemies; if this be true, Doña Marina was the only instrument for accomplishing their purpose. She told Cortes that a Cholulan woman of position, whose friendship she had cultivated, had warned her of the Spaniards' doom, and urged her to take shelter in her own house, and thus save herself. Granted that Cortes was, with reason, fearful of treachery, his only safety lay in forestalling the plotters, but this it seems might have been done by securing the chiefs, and Montezuma's envoys, who were the suspected instigators, and even making an example of them. Nothing can excuse the wholesale massacre of a defenceless population taken in a trap; such excessive measures overstepped by far the needs of the situation. If the commander's intention was as Las Casas describes, he succeeded, for the news of the tragedy quickly spread, and threw Montezuma into a panic of helpless fear.
