Montezuma II

Aztec emperor (r. 1502-1520)

• Born: 1467
• Birthplace: Tenochtitlán, Aztec Empire (now in Mexico)
• Died: June 30, 1520
• Place of death: Tenochtitlán, Aztec Empire (now in Mexico)

Montezuma II expanded the Aztec Empire to its greatest size but died as his empire crumbled under the pressures of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Early Life

Axayácatl named his fourth son Montezuma (mawn-tay-SEW-mah), the Younger, after the child’s great-grandfather. Montezuma I was the Mexica Uei Tlatoani (great speaker, or emperor) of the Aztec Empire, centered in Anahuac, an intermontane valley in central Mexico. At Montezuma the Younger’s naming ceremony, held four days after his birth in 1467, the priests dedicated the infant to Quetzalcóatl, that year’s patron deity, and prophesied that he would earn greatness as both ruler and priest.

The prophecy was not a guarantee. Young Montezuma was born into an oligarchy called the Pipiltin (sons of lords) that was composed of the putative descendants of Acamapichtli, founder of the Mexica state, and a princess of the fading Culhuacán dynasty. The office of emperor was not hereditary. A council of Pipiltin elders elected a successor on the basis of merit rather than on degrees of kinship to the deceased emperor. For Montezuma to become emperor when his generation came of age, his accomplishments would have to set him apart from his brothers and cousins.

After spending five years in the Calmécac, an elite preparatory school, twelve-year-old Montezuma moved into the barracks for a two-year apprenticeship before joining the warriors in combat. He soon excelled in battle and captured enough enemies to be inducted into the exclusive Order of the Eagle. In 1483, at age sixteen, he resumed religious studies and became a priest of the war god Huitzilopochtli (Blue Hummingbird). The next year, Montezuma had to decide whether to take an oath of celibacy and devote his entire life to the priesthood or to marry and continue his military career.

He chose the middle route and became a warrior-priest. He had, eventually, four legitimate wives and participated in most of the major military campaigns until his installation as emperor in 1503. Through his first wife, he inherited the title tlatoani (speaker, or ruler) of the city-state Ehecatepec. Prowess in war made him an army commander at age thirty, and later he became Tlacochcalcatl (prince of the house), one of the four closest advisers to the emperor. He also retained his priestly office and rose through clerical ranks to become high priest of Huitzilopochtli.

Life’s Work

This warrior-priest bore the markings of both professions on his body. Among warriors, he was a Tequihua (master of cuts) and had the sides of his head shaved, leaving on top a stiff tuft bound with a red thong. A sizable plug through his lower lip and large studs through extended ear lobes identified him as an aristocrat. A band of black paint across his face signified his priestly status, as did the streaks of cuts and scars on his ears, arms, and thighs. Montezuma had made these cuts with cactus thorns as he propitiated the deities with his own blood. He was of average height, slight but of wiry build; he had little wisps of hair on his upper lip and chin and a yellowish-brown skin color. In demeanor, he was grave, reserved, almost aloof. To his reputation of bravery was added respect for his soft-spoken advice on political and religious affairs of state.

The Aztec Empire was relatively young. The Mexica themselves were the last branch of the Aztec tribe to leave the ancestral home of Aztlán. They had arrived in Anahuac in 1258. Called Chichimeca (sons of dogs) by the remnants of the disintegrating Toltec-Culhuacán civilization, the Mexica had been treated as outcasts for a century. In 1375, Acamapichtli had secured recognition as a fellow tlatoani from the rulers of the city-states around Lake Texcoco. Having risen from abasement to parity, Acamapichtli and his three successors had forged alliances and waged wars until the Mexica dominated Anahuac.

Montezuma I, the fifth tlatoani, had sent conquering armies down the slopes of the central valley in all directions and built an empire that reached the oceans to the east and west, the deserts to the north, and the tropical forests to the south. His next three successors, his grandsons the father and uncles of Montezuma II had inherited the title uei tlatoani and continued the policy of constant expansion.

The Aztec Empire was built by war and sustained by blood. Conquered nations paid annual tributes of young men and women who were sacrificed to gods that consumed human hearts. The victims’ beating hearts were ripped out of their chests, heads severed then stacked in enormous pyramids, and bodies butchered for consumption by the victorious Mexica.

When Emperor Ahuitzotl died in 1502, Montezuma’s piety and prowess convinced the council of elders that he was preferable to his elder brother Macuilmalinaltzin. Following his election, Montezuma II spent a brief time in prayer and meditation, then led an invasion of two neighboring provinces. He brought back fifty-one hundred prisoners to be sacrificed and eaten as part of the enthronement festivities the following year. As emperor, Montezuma had to let his hair grow to shoulder length, wear a thin gold tube through his nose, and exchange his copper lip and ear plugs for larger, golden plugs. He wore a half-miter crown and gold sandals. Once installed, he launched a series of startling actions.

He purged from all government positions Pipiltin supporters of his brother and dissolved the council of elders. He then directed the massacre of Macuilmalinaltzin, two younger brothers, and twenty-eight hundred Texcoco warriors. With his power consolidated, Montezuma turned his attention to the empire’s subject states. He required all conquered nations to send their nobles to Tenochtitlán, where they replaced the commoners in Montezuma’s palace as servants. Tribute payments were increased, and each nation had to erect its own temples to Huitzilopochtli. He then sent armies to the south to add new territories to the empire and to bring more oblations to Huitzilopochtli. By 1519, Montezuma’s empire encompassed about 200,000 square miles and contained more than twenty million people. Montezuma had created a chasm between himself and commoners by surrounding himself with only nobles. He had elevated Huitzilopochtli in importance throughout the empire and had identified himself more closely with Huitzilopochtli. Soon, however, his patron god Quetzalcóatl overtook the war god in importance for Montezuma and his empire.

The principal deities of the primitive Mexica had been their tribal goddess Mexitli and Huitzilopochtli. When the Mexica arrived in Anahuac, the principal Toltec deity was Quetzalcóatl, the god of divine wisdom who had taught humans agriculture and all the other arts of civilization. The Toltecs had an elaborate cosmogony that included a cyclical theory of time and a conviction that quarrelsome gods had created and destroyed the world four times. At a reconciliation, some of the gods had created a fifth world by immolating themselves. Quetzalcóatl traveled to the netherworld and collected the bones of humans who had lived in the previous worlds. He then ground the bones into powder and re-created humanity by mixing his own divine blood into the powder.

In the ninth century, three hundred years before the Mexica began their trek, the Toltecs were ruled by a high priest who had taken Quetzalcóatl as his own name. This Quetzalcóatl introduced radical religious reforms. He ended human sacrifice, took a vow of celibacy, and sought spiritual unity with his divine namesake through prayer, meditation, and penance. When the priest was an old man, three sorcerers gave an intoxicant, which they called a medicine, to Quetzalcóatl. When the priest was inebriated, the sorcerers put him in bed with a princess, who successfully tempted him to break his vow of chastity. On awakening, Quetzalcóatl felt his disgrace so keenly that he fled the Toltec nation, which promptly restored human sacrifice. When Quetzalcóatl reached the Gulf of Mexico, he sailed eastward on a magic raft and vowed to return once he found the place of perfect wisdom.

In their cyclical reckoning of time, the Toltecs and their successors calculated the possible return of Quetzalcóatl and the possible destruction of the fifth world. In the third year of Montezuma’s reign, 1506, a fifty-two-year cycle of time was completed. A campaign to Oaxaca garnered twenty-three hundred captives, who were sacrificed en masse in a petition for fifty-two more years of life. If Quetzalcóatl were to return in this new cycle, the light-skinned, bearded priest would return from the east on a magic raft in 1519.

While Hernán Cortés and his five hundred Spaniards sailed up the Yucatán coast in early 1519, Montezuma received regular reports of their activities. After consulting with his priests, Montezuma concluded that the Spaniards were either Quetzalcóatl himself and his entourage or emissaries of the fabled priest. The return of Quetzalcóatl not only was predicted by the calendar but also explained the series of fantastic events that had baffled the Mexica since 1489. There had been earthquakes, a solar eclipse, a flood, and comets that appeared both in the day and at night. Grotesque people and wondrous animals mysteriously appeared and magically disappeared. Huitzilopochtli’s temple burst spontaneously into flames, and its replacement was struck by lightning. A woman rose from the dead and told Montezuma that he was the last emperor, and a disembodied woman’s voice frightened residents of Anahuac by wailing in lament at night. To Montezuma, the arrival of Cortés gave meaning to these bizarre events; they foretold the return of Quetzalcóatl, who would reclaim the empire he had left years ago.

Reluctant to face the religious reformer who had ended human sacrifice, the high priest of Huitzilopochtli tried to hold onto the throne without defying Quetzalcóatl. Montezuma sent Cortés rich gifts, pledged his fealty, exaggerated the difficulties of the journey from the coast to Anahuac, and asked the Spaniards to return east. When Cortés led his Spaniards and six thousand Mexican Indian allies across the mountains, Montezuma desperately tried to have Cortés ambushed. When all efforts failed, Montezuma accepted his fate and on November 8, 1519, greeted Cortés with these words:

Thou hast arrived on earth; thou hast come to thy noble city of Mexico. Thou hast come to occupy thy noble mat and seat, which for a little time I have guarded and watched for thee. . . . [N]ow it is fulfilled: thou hast returned.

Montezuma’s advisers were appalled at their emperor’s behavior. They regarded the Spaniards as dangerous aliens who should be repulsed rather than welcomed. The Spaniards’ Indian allies were the rebellious Cempoalans and the intransigent Tlaxcalans who already had encouraged the subject states to renounce their loyalty to the empire. Sensing danger, Cortés arrested Montezuma and hoped that his royal hostage would guarantee the Spaniards’ safety. When the Spaniards massacred the priests of Huitzilopochtli and placed crucifixes in the temples, Montezuma tried to secure his freedom through intrigue, but it was too late. The Pipiltin deposed Montezuma, replaced him with his brother Cuitláhuac, and assaulted the Spaniards. When Cortés had Montezuma taken to the rooftop to restore calm, the infuriated warriors threw stones at their former Uei Tlatoani and wounded him seriously in the head. Montezuma died three days later, on June 30, 1520. That night, the Spaniards fought their way out of the city and vowed to return. When the Pipiltin found Montezuma’s body, they first threw it into a sewage canal and then burned it in a trash heap.

Significance

Since the time of the Spanish Conquest and the destruction of the Aztec culture, Montezuma II has entered the world of symbolism. For centuries, he was seen as the embodiment of barbarism, cruelty, and evil. His image was rehabilitated by indigenistas (admirers of Mexican Indian culture) during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and he has been portrayed as the epitome of an innocent America violated by a corrupt, greedy, ruthless Spain. With the waning of indigenista fervor by the mid-twentieth century, the name Montezuma has come to be associated with the concept of an “authentic” Mexico.

Bibliography

Brundage, Burr Cartwright. A Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. A careful chronicle of the Aztecs, based on intensive study of the codices. Brundage concludes that Montezuma was insecure, bloodthirsty, and morbidly religious.

Burland, C. A. Montezuma: Lord of the Aztecs. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. This biography, richly illustrated with photographs of Mexico and the Aztec codices, is somewhat melodramatic and error prone.

Collis, Maurice. Cortés and Montezuma. New York: New Directions, 1999. Extensively researched and highly accessible account of the meeting between Cortés and Montezuma provides many details to make the points of view of both men, and their followers, come to life. Includes illustrations, map, and index.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Translated by A. P. Maudslay. Introduction by Hugh Thomas. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. First written in the 1560’s and first published in 1632, Díaz documented in this work his vivid memories of the conquest of Mexico and his observations of the Aztecs and of Montezuma.

Fagan, Brian M. The Aztecs. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1984. This copiously illustrated work is a topical examination of Aztec society that updates older studies by George C. Vaillant, Jacques Soustelle, and Nigel Davies.

Madariaga, Salvador de. Hernán Cortés: Conqueror of Mexico. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. A lively work that is much more than a biography of the Spanish conqueror. Gives extensive, sympathetic treatment to Montezuma.

Padden, R. C. The Hummingbird and the Hawk: Conquest and Sovereignty in the Valley of Mexico, 1503-1541. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1967. One of the narratives of the conquest of Mexico. Padden concludes that Montezuma was reaching for divinity and lost his grip on humanity and reality.

Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Simultaneous intimate study of Montezuma and Cortés, sociological analysis of their two cultures, and dramatic retelling of the clashes between both personalities and empires. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

White, Jon Manchip. Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire. 2d ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1996. A psychological and analytical portrait of Cortés and Montezuma that places both leaders in their religious and cultural milieus.