Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs: Primary Source Analysis

Introduction: The Aztec Account of First Contact

The Aztec chronicler who wrote the account of the Spanish conquest notes that, from the start, the Spaniards had come to make war, but does not give much account of Motecuhzoma's psychological motivations for approaching them. He describes in great detail how Motecuhzoma greeted the Spanish while adorned in all his finery and presented them with gifts both lavish and delicate: necklaces of gold and garlands of flowers (Graebner 24). It is possible that this was a diplomatic attempt to forestall bloodshed, but more likely that Aztec warfare involved a ritualized and formal gesture before it commenced.

Certainly, the description here sounds more like the ritual described later, in which two captives are "painted with chalk" and then have their hearts ripped out ritually while Motecuhzoma watches, and their blood is then sprinkled on the messengers who have brought Motecuhzoma an account of the Spanish armaments and cavalry. The Aztec description of the Spanish overall is focused on the absolute strangeness of their appearance by Mesoamerican standards: their hair and beards were shaggy and blond, their dogs were larger and spotted, and their clothes and hats were made of iron. The horses were thought to be deer; the cannon is mostly described through the fearful evidence of what it does, but there is no description of gunpowder or of how the cannon operates.

The 1505 engraved illustration (reprinted by Brinkey on page 1) depicts the natives as naked savages feasting on human flesh. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word "cannibal" finds its original etymology in a corruption of "Carib" — the same tribe that gave its name to the Caribbean. In terms of the Spaniards' initial impressions, it is possible that they saw the natives largely in religious terms: the ritual feasting of the Aztecs seemed to the Spanish like a grotesque, even demonic, parody of the Christian Eucharist. But the Spanish were ultimately less interested in the natives than in their wealth.

Ritualized Warfare and Cultural Misreading

Both sides, in their own way, fundamentally misread the other. The Spaniards projected European religious and moral frameworks onto Aztec ritual practice, while the Aztec chronicler struggled to describe technologies — gunpowder, cannon, horse — for which his culture had no existing frame of reference. This mutual incomprehension is itself one of the most revealing features of the primary source: it demonstrates how deeply each civilization's perception of the encounter was shaped by its own prior categories of meaning. The Aztecs, for their part, appear to have interpreted the Spanish arrival through the lens of their own ceremonial and military traditions, which is why Motecuhzoma's initial response looks so much like a ritual prelude to combat.

Spanish Atrocities and the Anticlimax of Conquest

The description of Spanish atrocities in the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico might sound overstated, as though it were part of a ritual accounting of warfare. Long before the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs — or Mexica — had already built a society in which warfare was the central engine: their society was built on enslaving, and in many cases consuming, neighboring Mesoamerican tribes that they had first subdued by force. In such societies, warfare can take on a highly ritualized character — such as garlanding your enemy before meeting him in combat, or recording his wickedness in a way that accounts for eventual defeat (that is, the conquered Aztecs arguing the fight was not fair, which in many ways it was not).

But the main shock of reading the Aztec account of the Spanish conquest is the absolute anticlimax of its ending. After besieging and taking Tenochtitlan, all the Spaniards are interested in is the gold in Motecuhzoma's treasure-house. The account mentions the rich adornments of quetzal feathers and other rarities, only to note that the Spaniards simply burned anything that was not gold when melting the metal down into ingots (Graebner 26). The Aztec chronicler seems to indicate that he cannot understand the Spaniards' worship of gold — a detail that reveals, with striking economy, just how irreconcilable the two civilizations' systems of value were. Where the Aztecs assigned prestige to rare feathers, elaborate ritual objects, and the performance of sacrifice, the Spanish reduced all wealth to a single, exportable metal. Spanish colonialism was, at its core, an extractive enterprise, and the burning of the featherwork makes that brutally plain.