I was in the Hall of Judgment when the second messenger arrived. The first had come three days earlier — a runner from the coast with painted figures on bark paper showing the strangers' ships, their appearance, their weapons. I had been summoned to help interpret the report. I had looked at the drawings and had no adequate framework for them.
This is the problem with strangers who are truly strange: the mind tries to fit them into existing categories because existing categories are all the mind has. We had the stories of gods and the stories of men. The strangers were clearly men — they bled when they were wounded, they ate, they slept, they had women with them who served as translators. But they came from where no men had come from before, from the direction of the rising water, in structures that moved on the sea by means of wind and cloth.
We called them teules. The word has been translated as "gods" but this is too simple. Teule means something closer to "those whose nature is not yet determined." We were waiting to determine their nature.
The City They Were Walking Toward
Tenochtitlan was, at the time of the strangers' arrival, perhaps the greatest city in the world. I know this will seem like pride, and it is — but it is also arithmetic. Our city was built in the middle of a lake and connected to land by four great causeways. It had canals where other cities had streets, and floating gardens that could feed hundreds of thousands of people. Its market at Tlatelolco was a place where you could buy anything produced in the world we knew: jade from the south, turquoise from the north, cloth that came in every color the dyes of a continent could produce, food in quantities that the Spanish, when they finally saw it, compared to the largest markets in Spain and found ours larger.
The Huei Tlatoani — Moctezuma Xocoyotzin — ruled this city. He ruled it as the representative on earth of the gods, as the keeper of the calendar that counted the cycles of time, as the military ruler of an empire that stretched from sea to sea and paid us tribute in the form of goods and labor and, yes, captives for the sacred sacrifices. I was of the noble class — not a ruler, but a man of education and position, a keeper of the records, a reader of the painted books that contained our history and our calendar and our knowledge.
I tell you this because the strangers are often described as conquerors of a primitive people, and I want you to understand what they were walking toward.
The Meeting on the Causeway
Moctezuma went out to meet Cortés on the great southern causeway on the eighth day of the eleventh month. I was in the procession — not close to Moctezuma, but present, one of hundreds of nobles and attendants. The causeway was long: several miles from the city to the shore, and the strangers were walking toward us as we walked toward them.
I will describe what I saw when the two processions met, without the interpretation that was applied afterward.
I saw: men in metal covering, moving awkwardly in armor that was not made for the climate. Animals of a size I had never seen — deer-like, but vastly larger, with the strangers sitting on top of them. Dogs of a kind different from our own, lean and aggressive. Men who were not the strangers, men of other peoples — Tlaxcalans, Totonacs — walking with them as allies.
Moctezuma and Cortés exchanged gifts through the woman called Malinche, who had been given to Cortés as a captive and who now served as his translator into both our language and the language of the Maya. She was from our world. She explained us to him and him to us, and in doing so she held a power that I did not fully understand at the time.
What We Misread
I will tell you what we got wrong, because this is the useful part.
We thought the strangers could be managed. Moctezuma brought them into the city and housed them in the palace of Axayacatl and treated them with the hospitality that protocol required for guests of importance. We thought — the Tlatoani thought — that this was a situation that could be controlled through proper ritual management: gifts, ceremonies, the demonstration of our power and our courtesy.
The strangers were not interested in being managed. Within weeks of arriving in Tenochtitlan, they had taken Moctezuma hostage in his own palace. This was not something we had a ritual response to. We had protocols for war, for negotiation, for the reception of tributaries and the management of captives. We had no protocol for guests who held the Tlatoani at knifepoint in his own hall and demanded gold in the name of a ruler they had never seen, in a country we had never heard of, to support wars we knew nothing about.
What Followed
I left Tenochtitlan before the worst of it. I will not claim I foresaw what was coming — I did not, not fully. What I saw was that the city had become something it had not been: a place where two kinds of authority existed in the same space, and where the older, larger authority was the one that was becoming subordinate.
Tenochtitlan burned in 1521. The city I described — the canals, the causeways, the market that amazed everyone who saw it — was systematically destroyed and rebuilt as a Spanish colonial capital. The books that contained our history, our calendar, our knowledge, were burned by the priests who came with the soldiers. What I know of what we were, and what we had built, and what we had understood about the world — it exists now in fragments, in the paintings that survived the fires, in the memories of the old people who were not yet born when the strangers arrived.
The strangers came from the sea and we gave them a name before we understood what they were. By the time we understood, the understanding had cost us everything.
Narrator's note: Tlacaelel is fictional. The account of the meeting on the causeway draws from the Florentine Codex (compiled by Sahagún from indigenous informants, c.1545–1576), Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia Verdadera (c.1568), and Matthew Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018).