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The Mexica Didn’t Believe

the Conquistadors Were
Gods
The indigenous Mexica (Aztec) people were overwhelmed by a superior
technological force ruthlessly used against them.

Hernan Cortes, Spanish Conquistador meeting Moctezuma II, Aztec Emperor Getty

By: Matthew Wills (https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/matthew-wills/) | January 17, 2020

3 minutes

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The legend can be dated to 1552: Francisco López de Gómara was the first
person to say that the Spaniards conquered Mexico because the
conquistadors had been seen as gods by the indigenous people. López de
Gómara had never been to Mexico, but he was chaplain and secretary to
the retired Hernando Cortés, who had led the conquistadors.

Cortés own letters during the conquest make no mention of being

mistaken for or interpreted as a god. Nonetheless, López de Gómara’s
version quickly became the accepted story, writes the historian Camila
Townsend, even among the post-conquest indigenous peoples . The
fleshed-out version of the story had it that “a god named Quetzalcoatl,
who long ago had disappeared in the east,” had promised to return on a
certain date. By extraordinary coincidence, Cortés appeared out of the east
in that very year. Seduced by their religious credulity, the Mexica—“Aztec”
was a post-conquest term—were ripe for conquest by their “white gods.”
As Townsend writes:

Today, most educated people in the United States, Europe, and

Latin America are fully versed in this account[…]. In fact,
however, these is little evidence that indigenous people ever
seriously believed the newcomers were gods, and there is no
meaningful evidence that any story about Quetzalcoatl’s
returning from the east ever existed before the conquest.

Historians of early Mexico have buried the myth of the “white gods,” but
this news hasn’t filtered into general knowledge. The story is clearly potent.
After all, how else could just a few hundred Spaniards bring down a state
with a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time?

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 e “white gods” story is essentially political
pornography, a dehumanizing narrative that
equates technological with intellectual and
moral superiority.

Townsend argues that the “white gods” story is essentially political

pornography, a dehumanizing narrative that equates technological with
intellectual and moral superiority. Obviously, the “relatively powerful
conquistadors and their cultural heirs should prefer to dwell on the
Indians’ adulation for them rather than on their pain, rage, or attempted
military defense.”

Superior technology, including the diseases that came with it, should be
front and center in the history of the conquest. “The Mexicans themselves
immediately became aware of the technology gap and responded to it with
intelligence and savvy rather than wide-eyed talk of gods,” writes
Townsend. “They knew before we did, it seems, that technology was the
crux.”

Townsend says that two facts, seemingly counterintuitive, need to be

considered about the conquest. One is that it was “much more difficult
than is commonly imagined for the Spanish to vanquish the Aztecs.” The
second is that the conquest was “inevitable,” either by Cortés, or by “some
soon-to-follow expedition.” The Europeans “had the technological
advantage,” as they did with Pizzaro against the Inca, de Soto against the
Alabama, the English against the Algonkian, and “much later between
Europeans and Africans.”

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What were those technologies? Armor, crossbows, harquebuses, certainly
—but also horses, which impressed the Mexica much more than the
Spaniards did. The Spaniards had ships, which brought reinforcements and
more disease. Cortés even had ship-builders who made boats used in the
battle for Tenochtitlan. He had the printing press, indicative of a relatively
rapid global communications system. By 1520, a year before the conquest
was complete, Europeans were already looking at Aztec art, shipped over
the Atlantic.

Townsend, who has recently published Fifth Sun: A New History of the
Aztecs (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/fifth-sun-
9780190673062?cc=us&lang=en&), and other historians of what we now
call the Aztec Empire have deepened and complicated the history of the
conquest. It’s not the just-so story we used to tell about it. The Mexica, led
by the canny Moctezuma, were far from hapless, fatalistic, or omen-
obsessed. But they were overwhelmed by the superior technological force
ruthlessly used against them.

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Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR

Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free
on JSTOR.

Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529592?mag=the-mexica-didnt-
believe-the-conquistadors-were-gods)
By: Camilla Townsend
The American Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 659-687
Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

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