Alarming news reached Moctezuma's ears. The heavy tlatoani waited impatiently for the news, which soon arrived:
Alarming news reached Moctezuma's ears. The heavy tlatoani waited impatiently for the news, which soon arrived:
Lord and our King, it is true that I do not know what people have come and have reached the shores of the great sea ... and their flesh is very white, more than our flesh, except that most of them have long beards and hair even the ear gives them. Moctecuhzoma was crestfallen, he did not speak anything.
These words that have come down to us can be read in the Mexican Chronicle of Alvarado Tezozomoc. Much has been said about the return of Quetzalcóatl, who had headed east, where he became the morning star. However, it is striking that the return of such an important lord and god was not taken with rejoicing by Moctezuma. Perhaps the explanation for this is found in the Matritense Codex, where reference is made to another return with which times would end. Says so:
Now our Lord, Tloque Nahuaque, is slowly going further. And now we are also leaving because we accompany him wherever he goes, to the Lord Night Wind, because he is leaving, but he will return, he will reappear, he will come to visit us when the Earth is to finish its journey.
Soon the lord of Mexico realizes that the Spanish are not the expected god. Moctezuma tries to drive them away and sends presents that, on the contrary, arouse even more the greed of the conquerors. These arrive in Tenochtitlan and subdue the tlatoani. The war does not wait and we know the story well: everything ends on August 13, 1521, when Tlatelolco, the last Mexican stronghold, falls into the hands of the Spanish and their indigenous allies.
From that moment on, a new order was imposed. On the ruins of Tenochtitlan the new colonial city will be born. The materials taken from the temples destroyed during the fighting and even afterwards come in handy for this purpose. Fray Toribio de Benavente, Motolinía, reminds us of those unfortunate moments in which the natives were forced to demolish their own temples to, in turn, build the first colonial buildings. Thus says the Franciscan:
The seventh plague [was] the building of the great city of Mexico, in which the first years more people walked than in the building of the temple of Jerusalem in Solomon's time, because so many people were walking in the works, or coming with materials and to bring tributes and maintenance to the Spaniards and for those who worked in the works, which could hardly be broken by some streets and roads, although they are very wide; and in the works, some took the beams, and others fell from high, on others the buildings fell that they unmade in one part to do in others ...
Terrible must have been those moments for the friar to compare them to the plagues of Egypt!
As for the Templo Mayor, several chroniclers of the 16th century refer to its destruction, which was to be expected, since we do not doubt that Cortés was informed of the symbolism that the building had as the center of the worldview of the Aztec people. So what the Spaniards considered the work of the devil had to be destroyed. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who participated in the fighting, tells how they took and destroyed the Templo Mayor of Tlatelolco:
Here it was well to say in what danger we saw each other in winning those fortresses, which I have said many other times that it was very high, and in that battle they hurt us all very badly. We still set fire to them, and idols were burned ...
After the fighting was over, the indigenous resistance did not wait. We have reliable evidence that the conquerors commissioned the natives to choose sculptures of their gods to make the columns of temples and convents with them. On this matter, Motolinía continues to tell us:
to make the churches they began to use their teocallis to remove stone and wood from them, and in this way they were flayed and demolished; and stone idols, of which there was infinite, not only escaped broken and shattered, but came to serve as foundations for churches; And since there were some very great, the best in the world came to the foundation of such a great and holy work.
As it turns out that one of these "very large" idols were the sculptures of Tlaltecuhtli, lord of the earth, whose effigy was always placed face down and was not in sight. The indigenous person chose it and began to carve the colonial column, taking care that the image of the god was well preserved in the lower part, and in this way the cult of the deity was preserved ... ingenuity of the subjugated peoples to keep their own beliefs ...
Little by little the old city was covered by the new colonial layout. The indigenous temples were replaced by the Christian temples. The current city of Mexico encloses under its concrete floor many pre-Hispanic cities that await the moment when archeology reaches them. It is well worth remembering the words that were engraved in marble on one side of the Templo Mayor of Tlatelolco and that are a memory of what happened there:
On August 13, 1521, heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, Tlatelolco fell into the power of Hernán Cortés. It was neither victory nor defeat, it was the painful birth of the mestizo people, which is Mexico today ...
Source: Passages of History No. 10 El Templo Mayor / March 2003
