2019 marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés. Cortés displayed tremendous daring, resilience, and skill in the overthrow of a powerful civilization in such a short time with but a relative handful of men, but his legacy is ambiguous. He broke the Aztecs’ despotic hold over their subject peoples and cast down their gory gods, ending a system of ritualized slaughter scarcely to be rivaled by the mechanized murder of the modern age. But those achievements are littered with the corpses of the slain.  At his feet is also often laid the dreadful death toll of subsequent decades from European-introduced disease as well as the injustices of the Spanish Empire in the New World.  Whether one views him as an admirable soldier, a deliverer, or a grasping and bloody-handed destroyer of worlds, the daring actions of Cortés inspire a desire to understand their motive force. What called him forth to the frontier of a new world to launch into wild adventure beyond the boundaries of what he had known? 

No motivation could be supplied by ancient quarrel or past injury; no claim to be fighting for the liberation of oppressed or injured peoples could be used as initial justification. Higher motives and justification were supplied by the exciting, world-altering discoveries of the Age of Exploration and the religious sanction covering the appropriation and conversion of new lands.  As in any human endeavor, these motives were intermingled with more self-interested purposes. When attempting to formulate the motives of the conquistadors, the phrase that is usually employed is “God, glory, and gold,” and is often understood to be ranked in ascending rather than descending importance.  Certainly all of these motives were present and mixed in varying proportions among the conquistadors, but there is reason to believe that, for Cortés himself, the list order conforms closely to his actual priorities.

Gold

The pursuit of gold forms a crucial and central part of the conquest of Mexico, and Cortés was not unmoved by the desire for wealth whose siren call had already lured so many of his countrymen across the perilous sea. What is more, in his youth, he was very impatient to have it, receiving with scorn the offer of land and laborers upon his arrival in Hispaniola. The slow increases of husbandry were not for him. It was only with time and the plodding realities of a life which, though by no means uneventful, was constrained by surrounding circumstances, that his impetuous spirit began to be tempered with farsightedness; and gold became less of an end than a means. Gold there must be, gold to entice adventurous men, gold to move the levers of imperial bureaucracy, gold to justify himself to the crown, and gold to win status and position.

Upon the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, Cortés  heard rumors of the vast wealth lying in the interior. In Tenochtitlan, he stood in the presence of riches enough to make him a king in his own right. Yet most of this treasure was reinvested in the conquest; he seized it so that he might use it to resupply the wellsprings of his larger purpose. That he was indifferent to the promise of wealth is not to be believed, but he pursued it through a long-term strategy that accepted the constraints and channels that regulated its attainment. Immediately upon his arrival, Cortés began to inquire about gold, for it was only upon a road of gold that he could proceed. The justification he provided, that the Spaniards needed gold as medicine for their hearts, is usually viewed as unscrupulous trickery. But we may also, if we are willing, hear notes of a melancholy moral reflection: “Send me some of it, because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can only be cured with gold.”^[1]

Glory

Closely paralleling the craving for wealth was the dream of recognition and fame, which was foundational to the romantic and chivalric conquistador mind. This motivation burned particularly hot among the members of the minor nobility, the hidalgos, whose avenues to advancement were limited in Europe. Cortés himself was among these, and he shared the desire. Perhaps in him it even reached dimensions far greater than in his comrades; certainly he pursued it with more craft, intelligence, purpose, and determination than any of the men around him; and certainly he achieved a fame to dwarf that of all but a few fellow conquistadors.

The imaginations of the men who conquered the New World were shaped and fired by ballads and stories that recounted the deeds of heroes, from Spanish champions in the long war against Islam back to Charlemagne and even further back into antiquity, to Caesar and Alexander.^[2] The desire to emulate their deeds and thereby earn the notice of the crown and posterity worked powerfully upon them. It is from the well of this common mind that Cortés draws when he speaks to his men before their final departure from Cuba:

Certain it is, my friends and companions, that every good man of spirit desires and strives, by his own effort, to make himself the equal of the excellent men of his day and even those of the past. And so it is that I am embarking upon a great and beautiful enterprise, which will be famous in times to come, because I know in my heart that we shall take vast and wealthy lands, peoples such as have never before been seen, and kingdoms greater than those of our monarchs.

Yet here again we may detect an awareness of the ultimate futility of the pursuit of both glory and possessions, which excites a thirst nothing can slake:  “Certain it is also that the lust for glory extends beyond this mortal life, and that taking a whole world will hardly satisfy it, much less one or two kingdoms.”^[3]

God

Finally, the desire to serve God shaped the religious component of the conquest, and its importance should not be underrated. Concern for the conversion of the natives was a constant theme of the instructions of the Spanish government to its servants, and was while it was, in the spirit of the times, unapologetically linked with the acquisition of territory and wealth, its sincerity is not thereby disproved. 

The Castilian knight considered himself in no way inferior in chivalry or in piety to those champions of the faith who had reclaimed Jerusalem in the 11^th century. The conquistadors, rough, violent, and greedy though they often were, thought of themselves as crusaders and soldiers of the Cross. Cortés was no exception to this; indeed, he furnishes proof of its truth. Whatever other burdens were laid upon him or dangers he faced, he never forgot the religious mission and often delivered theological exhortations himself.  But the faith of 16^th century Spain had a hard edge: what could not be accomplished through persuasion would be accomplished by the sword. Let the body be burnt so long as the soul was saved. Violence and conversion, faith and self-interest were all features of the accounts of the conquistadors and were recorded with no feeling of disjunction.   

Cortés proclaimed his devotion to the religious element of the conquest from the beginning. Díaz records that he had two standards made in preparation for the expedition, “worked in gold with the royal arms and a cross on each side with a legend which said, ‘Comrades, let us follow the sign of the holy Cross with true faith, and through it we shall conquer.’”^[4] These Constantinian symbols were bolstered in speech, and reminders of the religious mission formed a common theme of Cortés’ exhortations to his men. As they prepared to return to Tenochtitlan, he elevated it above all other motives:

The principal reason for our coming to these parts is to glorify and preach the Faith of Jesus Christ, even though at the same time it brings us honor and profit, which infrequently come in the same package. We cast down their idols, put a stop to their sacrificing and eating of men, and began to convert the Indians during the few days we were in Mexico. It is not fitting that we abandon all the good that we began, rather, we should go wherever our Faith and the sins of our enemies call us.^[5]

The religious mission was also emphasized in the letters to Charles V. “The First Letter,” in whose authorship Cortés probably played a part, repeatedly points out that this element of the exploration was not being neglected: “Be it known to Your Majesties that the captain urged the chieftains of that island to renounce their heathen religion; and when they asked him to give them instead a precept by which they might henceforth live, he instructed them the best he could in the Catholic Faith.”^[6] In his “Second Letter,” Cortés elaborated upon the instruction he provided, providing an outline of the sermon he delivered upon viewing the temples in Tenochtitlan:

I made them understand through the interpreters how deceived they were in placing their trust in these idols which they had made with their hands from unclean things. They must know that there was only one God, Lord of all things, who had created heaven and earth and all else and who made all of us; and he was without beginning or end, and they must adore and worship only Him, not any other creature or thing. And I told them all I knew about this to dissuade them from their idolatry and bring them to the knowledge of God our Savior.^[7]

Cortés requested that clergy be sent to the New World to aid in the instruction and conversion of the natives, thus demonstrating his concern with their spiritual future.[8] Yet a determined cynicism could still view all of these manifestations of religiosity as insincere manipulations of a propaganda cause. Cortés did, after all, have to operate within an operational framework not entirely of his own making—one in which a concern for religion and spiritual mission was simply a necessity. 

To view Cortés as a Machiavellian manipulator of religion, however, does him injustice. Machiavelli, after all, counseled maintaining an appearance of faith, not an actual adherence to faith pursued to the point of endangering success.[9] Yet Cortés repeatedly put both his success and his survival in jeopardy to preach his faith. The awful nature of native religious rites pressed upon him, and he was prepared to fight, to die, and to fail to see them brought to an end. “How can we ever accomplish anything worth doing if for the honor of God we do not first abolish these sacrifices made to idols?” Díaz reports him asking. He then ordered his men to be ready for a fight “should the Indians try to prevent us; but even if it cost us our lives the idols must come to the ground that very day.”[10] Nor was this the only such instance of his theological determination. Again and again he denounced the native gods and their forms of worship in no subtle terms, prompting both accompanying clergy and his nervous captains to attempt to moderate his zeal for the sake of prudential considerations.

*These reflections are drawn from Justin D. Lyons, Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés: Ambiguous Legacies of Leadership (Lexington Books, 2015).

[1] Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conquistador by His Secretary. Trans. and ed. by Lesley Byrd Simpson. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 58.

[2] Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 60.

[3] Gómara, 24.

[4] Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Trans by A.P. Maudslay. Introduction by Hugh Thomas. (Da Capo Press, 2003), 33.

[5] Gómara 241

[6] Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico. Translated, edited, and with a new introduction by Anthony Pagden. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986),18.

[7] Letters from Mexico, 106.

[8] See, for example, Letters from Mexico, 332.

[9] See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. Translated, Introduction and Notes by Leo Paul S. de Alvarez (Waveland Press, Inc., 1980), Ch. XVII.

[10] Díaz, 103.