After three months of furious fighting, the Spanish invaders and their Indian allies reduced Tenochtitlán to rubble.. His ability to perceive and exploit preexisting divisions within the
Trang 1under his command now more than 1,000 strong,
Cortés learned to his chagrin that Pedro de Alvarado
had slaughtered hundreds of Mexican nobility during
a religious celebration
Trapped for several days, the Spanish force barely
escaped the city in its withdrawal of La Noche Triste
(The Sorrowful Night) of July 1, 1520, in which an
estimated 400–600 Spaniards were killed During the
fighting, the emperor Moctezuma was slain, by which
side remaining a matter of debate Regrouping his
forces near the coast, Cortés decided to lay siege to the
great city In an audacious and monumental
undertak-ing, he supervised the construction of 13 brigantines,
which were then carried in sections over the
moun-tains, assembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco By
this time, his forces numbered some 900 well-armed
Spaniards, 86 horses, and thousands of Indian allies
The siege of the island city of Tenochtitlán began
in May 1521 Meanwhile an epidemic, probably of
smallpox, was laying waste to the Aztec capital Even
before the siege had begun, an estimated one-third of
the city’s inhabitants had succumbed to European
dis-eases against which they had no immunity
After three months of furious fighting, the Spanish
invaders and their Indian allies reduced Tenochtitlán
to rubble Leading the city’s defense was
Cuauhte-moc, Moctezuma’s cousin, whom much Indian lore
later came to memorialize as a hero The city fell on
August 13, 1521—some two and a half years after the
invaders’ first landfall at Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz
Scholars have emphasized various factors that made
possible the defeat of the mighty and war-hardened
Aztecs by a few hundred Spanish invaders Near the top
of all such lists is Cortés’s political brilliance, combined
with his unshakable will to conquer, acquire riches, and
spread the Christian faith His ability to perceive and
exploit preexisting divisions within the Aztec polity,
and success in gaining thousands of loyal Indian allies,
are often cited as sine qua non of the conquest Also
emphasized in this vein is that no native inhabitants
could have known that Cortés was but the advance
guard of an aggressive and expanding kingdom,
accus-tomed to campaigns of conquest, inspired by an
exclu-sive and highly militarized religion, determined to
cre-ate an overseas empire
Other major factors most often cited in making
the conquest possible include Spanish superiority in
the technologies of warfare, especially their horses,
swords, and armor; the invaders’ skills in the arts of
war, steely resolve, unity of purpose, and loyalty to
each other and their leader; the adversaries’ very
dif-ferent cultural conceptions of warfare, with the Span-iards focused on killing the enemy, and the Aztecs more concerned with capturing prisoners for later sac-rifice; the Spaniards’ advantage of language, thanks to Jerónimo de Aguilar and La Malinche; the weak and indecisive leadership of Moctezuma; the role of myth, legend, and fatalism in weakening Aztec resolve; and the role of disease in weakening the Aztec capacity to resist once the final siege had begun
Atop the smoldering ruins of Tenochtitlán the Spaniards built a new capital city—Mexico City— often using the same blocks of stone they had just top-pled, and foundations already in place, using the labor
of the vanquished Indians to realize their vision of the Spanish Christian kingdom spread to the New World For the next 300 years, New Spain would be Spain’s most important colony Soon many of the victorious conquistadores and their countrymen began looking beyond Mexico, as New Spain served as a launching point for further campaigns of conquest
See also Central America, conquest of; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal; epidemics in the Americas; North-western South America, conquest of; Peru, conquest of; Yucatán, conquest of
Further reading: Cortés, Hernándo Five Letters of Cortés to
the Emperor New York: W W Norton, 1969; Díaz del Cas-tillo, Bernal The Conquest of New Spain Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1963; León-Portilla, Miguel The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico Bos-ton: Beacon Press, 1992; Thomas, Hugh Conquest: Mont-ezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico New York: Si-mon & Schuster, 1993; Todorov, Tzvetan The Conquest of America New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Michael J Schroeder
Ming, Southern
When a frontier people, the Manchus, took over con-trol of China in 1644, Ming dynasty loyalists fled to southern China, where they held out for many years; they became known as the Southern Ming
Over several centuries, descendants of the Ming emperor surnamed Zhu (Chu) were settled throughout the Chinese empire As a result when the last Ming emperor committed suicide there were members of the imperial family throughout China, especially in the south, and it was natural that anti-Manchu forces would use them to legitimize their rebellions