Setting the Story Straight, the Complicated Conquest of Spain and Her Invisible Allies

Setting the Story Straight, the Complicated Conquest of

Spain and Her Invisible Allies, by David Thomas

It’s as clear now as ever, people love a good story. This innocuous fact of human nature informs our ways of thinking about ourselves and each other, and can often even motivate our actions. It can also, however, lead us down paths of oversimplification, remembering the facts that dramatize a narrative, leaving out details that muddy the water, or imagining entirely new scenarios to give us our feel-good fix. In this same fashion, history remembers the conquest of South and Central America as a fantastic story of outrageously outnumbered Iberians handily conquering the indigenous peoples using their uniquely European guile and guns.

The truth, as usual, resists the romantic simplicity of this victory for the underdogs up against overwhelming odds. The conquest of the native South and Mesoamericans was carried out in no small part by a veritable legion of non-Spanish allies, in addition to superior technology and the spread of European disease. Spanish accounts of this period, consciously or otherwise, tend to sweep under the rug the support and sheer numbers that their allies provided them with, but careful reading reveals the true nature of “Iberian” conquest involved an image of the conquistadores that’s more diverse than those pictured in the minds of students and teachers of history throughout time. It takes a little more time to tell and a little more thought to understand, but the story of the Spanish Conquest, through modern historical research, is changing from history’s tale of the glorious underdog to one of alliances of necessity, subjugation of servants, and civil war.

In Central America, perhaps the primary and most powerful civilization on the Spanish’s to-conquer list was the titanic Aztec Empire. At the time they arrived in the new world, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was among the largest cities that many of the Spaniards would have ever seen, larger than Spain’s capital of Seville (Lecture). It was surely obvious that an assault on this massive city by Hernan Cortes’s hundreds of explorers alone would have been an exercise in futility. But the Aztec Empire was just that, an empire. Its rule over the land was won in a way familiar to Europeans, by political and military conquest over a wide range of cultures and civilizations, supported by tributes from those taken over. Naturally, and luckily for Cortes, these peoples living under and around Aztec rule were far from always of Aztec heritage themselves, and far from always happy with their subjugation into the empire. In an instrumental political strategy, many of these native rivals to Aztec control were brought into the Spanish fold as allies, providing them with the numbers necessary to topple such a large seat of power.

Perhaps the most instrumental of the native allies in this campaign were called the Tlaxcalan, long-time enemies of the Aztec engaged with them in near constant war (Lecture). The state had maintained its independence from the empire and in a way staved off the Spanish from Tenochtitlan after initial violent contact. But after witnessing the Europeans’ destructive power, The Tlaxcalan saw Spanish conquest as an opportunity to overthrow the Mexica (Restall 47). In the coming together of these two threats to the empire, each saved themselves from being repelled separately, as well as gained a lacking edge necessary for their success (Restall 48). Ultimately, historians now estimate that around 200,000 natives assisted the Spanish in the siege of Tenochtitlan (Restall 47). Cortes reckoned that the tables were turned against the Aztec by his own clever exploitation of the situation he came upon, but native enemies of the Mexica, including the Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo and others, were also beneficiaries in this alliance (Restall 48).