The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico

Overview

About two hundred and twenty pages, an anthology of Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, compiled and edited by the Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla and first published in Spanish in 1959, drawing chiefly on sixteenth-century sources gathered by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún from Nahuatl-speaking informants who had themselves lived through, or heard directly from those who lived through, the conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519 to 1521. Sahagún, working within a few decades of the conquest, trained young Nahua men in an indigenous college to write their own language in the Roman alphabet the Spanish had introduced, and used this capacity to systematically record testimony from elders and other informants about pre-conquest life and, crucially, about the conquest itself, material that became the core of his massive General History of the Things of New Spain and that also survives in related, independently significant sources León-Portilla draws on here.

The book’s stated purpose, and its genuine historical achievement, is to give voice to a perspective almost entirely absent from the standard historical record of the conquest, which for centuries rested overwhelmingly on Spanish sources: Hernán Cortés’s own official letters to the Spanish crown, and the vivid, extensively detailed soldier’s memoir of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, written decades later. León-Portilla’s anthology assembles, translates and arranges the surviving Nahuatl testimony into a continuous narrative covering the same events from the other side, giving readers direct access, however mediated by translation and by the passage of a generation or more between the events and their recording, to how the conquered themselves experienced and later remembered the destruction of their civilization.

What happens

Omens before the conquest. The narrative opens with a sequence of ill omens the Nahuatl sources describe as having appeared in the years before the Spanish arrival: a great column of fire in the night sky, a temple bursting into flame without apparent cause and impossible to extinguish, a comet, the sound of a woman’s voice crying in the night for her lost children, strange birds and other portents. Reported and arranged after the catastrophe they supposedly predicted, these omens function within the Nahuatl account as a way of making sense of an otherwise incomprehensible disaster, reading the conquest backward as something the cosmos itself had already signaled and, in some sense, already sanctioned before it occurred.

Moctezuma and the Spaniards’ arrival. The accounts describe Moctezuma’s reaction to reports of the Spanish landing with real psychological complexity, a ruler caught between sending gifts and diplomatic embassies to the newcomers and a deep, paralyzing dread, compounded, some of the sources suggest, by uncertainty about whether Cortés might be the returning god Quetzalcoatl, whose eventual return from the east certain traditions had prophesied. The Spaniards’ first arrival in Tenochtitlan, their horses, their steel weapons and armor, their firearms, is described by the Nahuatl witnesses with an astonishment that conveys, more vividly than any Spanish source could, how genuinely alien and overwhelming this technology and this military capability appeared to people encountering it for the first time, including detailed, sometimes almost comic descriptions of Aztec observers assuming the Spanish horses might be intelligent creatures capable of understanding speech.

The massacre at the festival of Toxcatl. One of the book’s most consequential episodes describes an event the Spanish sources treat far more briefly: while Cortés was away from the city dealing with a rival Spanish force, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado, left in command of the Spanish garrison in Tenochtitlan, ordered an attack on Aztec nobles who had gathered, unarmed, to celebrate the religious festival of Toxcatl with traditional dancing. The Nahuatl accounts describe the massacre in visceral, close detail, the dancers cut down where they stood, and present this event as the decisive rupture that turned uneasy coexistence into open, general war between the Aztecs and the Spanish forces occupying their city.

The Night of Sorrows and the siege. The accounts narrate the Spanish forces’ desperate, costly retreat from Tenochtitlan following the Aztec uprising that the Toxcatl massacre provoked, an episode Spanish sources call La Noche Triste, the Night of Sorrows, in which many Spanish soldiers drowned in the city’s canals weighed down by looted gold as they attempted to flee. The Nahuatl sources then describe the subsequent Spanish return with a much larger force, reinforced by indigenous allies who had their own grievances against Aztec rule, and the extended siege of Tenochtitlan that followed, marked by starvation, disease, most devastatingly a smallpox epidemic that decimated the city’s population and that the Spanish forces were largely immune to, and street-by-street, increasingly desperate fighting as the city’s defenders were pushed back canal by canal.

The fall of Tenochtitlan. The narrative’s climax describes the city’s final fall in August 1521, the capture of the last Aztec ruler, Cuauhtémoc, and the systematic destruction of the city’s temples, palaces and population, narrated by the Nahuatl sources with an unflinching, cumulative horror: the dead piled in the streets and canals, the survivors starving and diseased, the deliberate razing of the sacred precincts, an account that gives readers direct, first-person testimony of a civilization’s military and physical destruction from the perspective of the people who lived through and did not survive it.

Elegies. The book’s closing section, and its most purely literary and, for many readers, most affecting material, collects Nahuatl poetry composed by survivors in the years after the conquest, formal elegies mourning the fall of Tenochtitlan in the sophisticated poetic tradition Nahuatl already possessed before the conquest, poems that mourn not merely military defeat but the permanent end of a whole world, its gods, its order, its beauty, understood by their own authors, writing within a generation of the events, as genuinely and irrecoverably finished.

How to read it

Read the omens section as the Nahuatl accounts’ own way of processing an incomprehensible catastrophe after the fact, rather than as literal prediction; the pattern of reading disaster backward into prior signs is a common feature of how traumatized communities narrate catastrophic historical rupture, and understanding this helps make sense of material that might otherwise read as simply supernatural.

Read this book alongside, or against, Bernal Díaz’s Spanish soldier’s account of the same events if you can, since the contrast between the two perspectives on the identical episodes, the Toxcatl massacre, the Night of Sorrows, the final siege, is where the book’s real historical value becomes most vivid, showing how radically the same events could be experienced and later narrated from opposite sides.

Pay close attention to the translation history: the original Nahuatl testimony was first rendered into Spanish by Ángel María Garibay, and then translated from that Spanish version into English by Lysander Kemp for this edition, a double translation whose layers are worth keeping in mind when weighing the precision of any individual quoted passage.

Read the closing elegies slowly and as poetry in their own right, not merely as a historical coda. Their formal, sophisticated grief, composed within a generation of the conquest by people who understood exactly what had been lost, is among the most powerful surviving literary testimony from any conquered indigenous civilization, and reading them as deliberate literary art rather than only as historical document does them fuller justice.

Approach the whole collection with appropriate awareness of its own mediated history: these are accounts recorded decades after the events by informants remembering or having heard about a catastrophe, transcribed by young Nahua scholars trained by a Spanish friar for his own scholarly and evangelizing purposes, and then translated twice more before reaching an English reader. This layered mediation does not make the testimony less valuable, but it is a different kind of historical evidence than a contemporary eyewitness account, and reading it with that awareness sharpens rather than undermines its significance.

Questions it raises

• What does it mean that the fullest surviving indigenous account of the conquest was recorded decades later, by a Spanish friar’s own students, for his own scholarly and religious purposes? Does this context compromise the testimony’s value, or is it simply the condition under which such testimony could survive at all?
• How does reading the Toxcatl massacre or the Night of Sorrows from the Nahuatl perspective change your understanding of these events compared to a Spanish account, and which details does each perspective include or omit?
• Why does the book read the pre-conquest omens as historically significant material rather than dismissing them as superstition? What does taking them seriously, as the people who recorded them clearly did, add to understanding how the conquest was actually experienced?
• What is the effect of ending the collection with poetry rather than narrative prose? Does the elegiac form capture something about loss and catastrophe that historical narrative cannot?
• Given the layered mediation, oral testimony recorded decades later, transcribed by trained scribes, translated first into Spanish and then into English, what can and cannot be claimed about the reliability of specific details in these accounts?
• How does having access to this material change the standard narrative of the conquest that most readers encounter first through Spanish sources, and what responsibility do historians bear for how long that imbalance persisted before this material was widely available?