PART 4

The people of Tenochtitlan were starting to feel the effects of a virus that had only recently been introduced to the population. And it has to be considered one of the major contributing factors that led to the fall of the city. Here, I’ll quote from Miguel Leon Portilla’s translation of an Aztec account of Tenochtitlan suffering smallpox:

“It lasted for seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing a vast number of our people. Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies. No one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move, they screamed with pain.”

At first they cremated the bodies. Later on, so many people died that they gave up and just dumped them in the lake. When women contracted the disease, they got too sick to grind corn and cook, resulting in a severe food shortage. The emperor, Cuitlahuac, also grew ill.

The Aztecs had no knowledge of smallpox and, unlike the Spanish, no immunity against it. Their desperate remedies did nothing to stop the spread of what they called The Great Rash. They covered the wounds with obsidian powder and wrapped them in casts. To stop nosebleeds they put stones into nostrils. One remedy actually made things much worse. Steam baths, usually a treatment for sickness, were the perfect medium for passing the disease. I mean think about it: a dark, hot, wet environment. If you wanted to engineer the perfect smallpox-spreading weapon, you would just put people inside a big sauna for a couple minutes.

The virus made people so weak that they couldn’t get up to look for food, so they died of hunger in their beds. Many of those who survived were left paralyzed and blinded. The emperor Cuitlahuac died of smallpox on December 4, 1520.

Some estimates claim that half the city died. In the 16TH century alone (according to an estimate in Charles C Mann’s book 1491) as many as 100 million natives in the Americas may have died, from disease alone. To put that in other terms, it was roughly one in every five people on Earth.

Remember that Tenochtitlan at that time (as well as today) was one of the largest cities in the world. And activity there ground to a halt with so many infected. And that was just inside the metropolis. It also brought down the kings of nearby regions called Chalco, Cholula, and Tacuba. The Spanish, meanwhile, were all but immune to it, most of them were exposed to it as kids.

CORTES ON THE THRONE Enjoying his new found position of power over a mostly leaderless region, Cortes took time to write new legal documents solidifying his authority over Mexico (at least according to Spanish law). He wrote letters to King Carlos of Spain in an effort to preempt any legal actions against him (by, for example, Diego Velazquez, his direct superior).

Cortes even suggested a name for the landmass. He called it, redundantly, New Spain of the Ocean Sea. (Maybe “New Spain of the Ocean” was already taken.) He sent ships to procure supplies from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. He sent one of his captains, Sandoval, to crush the towns of Jalacingo and Zauta in the same way they had done in Tepeaca.