How many indians did cortez kill

The enraged Aztec forces eventually drove his forces from the city. During the Spanish retreat , Montezuma was killed and much of the plunder the Spanish had taken was lost. His forces defeated the Aztecs in Battle of Otumba on July 7, , and he regained control of Tenochtitlan by August 13, The Aztec Empire had fallen. He sent more expeditions out into new areas, including what is present-day Honduras.

He died in Spain in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

The story of North American exploration spans an entire millennium and involves a wide array of European powers and uniquely American characters. In , while leading an expedition in search of gold, he sighted The 16th-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto c. The son of a Spanish immigrant who had made a fortune building rail systems to transport sugar cane, Fidel attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba.

He became involved in In fact, the story of the song Shortly after midnight on August 13, , East German soldiers begin laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between Soviet-controlled East Berlin and the democratic western section of the city.

Mantle was born in Spavinaw, Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. On August 13, , Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, dies of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, after a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly and the resulting epidemic emptied the city. Yellow fever, which is carried by Cary Stayner, the serial killer convicted in the grisly murders of four women near Yosemite National Park, is born on August 13, He showed them his temples, the enormous markets where goods from all over his empire were sold, his zoo, and his palaces.

The mural was completed by , nearly 40 years after the Spanish conquest. Some Native Americans from Tlateloloco later encouraged the belief that omens predicting the destruction of his empire, including an eclipse, a comet, and a terrible storm, had frightened Montezuma. Yet this was an attempt to show Montezuma as a weak, indecisive, and superstitious leader who was to blame for the fall of Tenochtitlan.

Instead, he was strong and decisive, and he knew what he wanted from the Spanish. In April , they reported that approximately Spaniards had arrived on the coast with 13 ships. With a Spanish fleet approaching, however, Montezuma saw his chance to get rid of his increasingly bothersome guest and prepared his people for war. He defeated the Spanish force, the remnants of which decided to join him.

In his absence, however, his men had massacred a group of Native Americans gathered to celebrate a religious festival. Desperate and fighting for their lives, the Spaniards fled the city after suffering massive casualties as did their Native American allies , but they killed Montezuma before they left.

It was reasonable for him to assume that the potential benefit of an alliance with the Spaniards was worth the risk, but in the end it was a misjudgment. Montezuma failed to achieve the outcome he desired, because his empire was overwhelmed by a technologically superior foe bent on conquest and wealth.

Groups seeking to discredit the idea that Montezuma made a rational decision to invite the Spanish into Tenochtitlan would use which of the following to support their argument? I also know that they have told you the walls of my houses are, made of gold, and that the floor mats in my rooms and other things in my household are likewise of gold, and that I was, and claimed to be, a god; and many other things besides.

The houses as you see are of stone and lime and clay. See how they have lied to you? Are you the king? Is it true that you are the king Motecuhzoma? I must tell how in this town of Tlaxcala we found wooden houses furnished with gratings, full of Indian men and women imprisoned in them, being fed up until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten … These prisons are common throughout the land p.

The city [Choula] is situated on a plain, in a locality where there were many neighboring towns, and it is a land fruitful in maize and other vegetables, and much chili pepper, and the land is full of magueys from which they make their wine … I think that the curious reader must be already satiated hearing this story about Choula and I wish that I had finished writing about it, but I cannot avoid calling to mind the prisons of thick wooden beans which we found in the city, which were full of Indians and boys being fattened so that they could be sacrificed and their flesh eaten.

They promised not to do so, but what use were such promises as they never kept them pp. During the morning, we arrived at a broad causeway [land that separated the lake of Chalco from the lake of Xochimilco] and continued our march towards Iztapalapa … we were amazed…on account of the great towers and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry.

And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream … we arrived near Iztapalapa … and then when we entered the city … how spacious and well built [were the buildings] of beautiful stone work and cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet scented trees … When we had looked well at all of this, we went to the orchard and garden…I was never tired of looking at the diversity of the trees … and the paths full of roses and flowers, and the many fruit trees and native roses, and the pond of fresh water..

The Great Montezuma was about forty years old, of good height and well proportioned, slender and spare of flesh, not very swarthy, but of the natural color and shade of an Indian … He was very neat and clean and bathed once every day in the afternoon p. For each meal [eaten by Montezuma], over thirty different dishes were prepared by his cooks according to their ways and usage, and they placed small pottery braziers beneath the dishes so that they should not get cold.

They prepared more than three hundred plates of the food that Montezuma was going to eat, and more than a thousand for the guard. When he was going to eat, Montezuma would sometimes go out with his chiefs and stewards, and they would point out to him which dish was best, and of what birds and other things it was composed, and as they advised him, so he would eat, but it was not often that he would go out to see the food, and then merely as a pass time p.

I have heard it said that they were wont to cook for him [Montezuma] the flesh of young boys, but as he had such a variety of dishes, made of so many things, we could not succeed in seeing if they were of human flesh or of other things, for they daily cooked fowls, turkeys, pheasants, native partridges, quail, tame and wild ducks, venison, wild boar, reed birds, pigeons, hares and rabbits, and many sorts of birds and other things which are bred in this country, and they are so numerous that I cannot finish naming them in a hurry; so we had no insight into it, but I know for certain that after our Captain censured the sacrifice of human beings, and the eating of their flesh, he [Montezuma] ordered that such food should not be prepared for him thenceforth p.

Let us cease speaking of this and return to the way things were served to him [Montezuma] at meal times. It was in this way: if it was cold they made up a large fire of live coals of a firewood made from the bark of trees which did not give off any smoke, and the scent of the bark from which the fire was made was very fragrant, and so that it should not give off more heat than he required, they placed in front of it a sort of screen adorned with figures of idols worked in gold.

He was seated on a low stool, soft and richly worked, and the table, which was also low, was made in the same style as the seats, and on it they placed the table cloths of white cloth and some rather long napkins of the same material.

Four very beautiful cleanly women brought water for his hands in a sort of deep basin which they call xicales [gourds], and they held others like plates below to catch the water, and they brought him towels. And two other women brought him tortilla bread, and as so as he began to eat they placed before him a sort of wooden screen painted over with gold, so that no one should watch him eating. Then the four women stood aside, and four great chieftains who were old men came and stood beside them, and with these Montezuma now and then conversed, and asked them questions, and as a great favour he would give to each of these elders a dish of what to him tasted best.

They say that these elders were his near relations, and were his counselors and judges of law suits, and the dishes and food which Montezuma gave them they ate standing up with much reverence and without looking at his face. He was served on Cholula earthenware either red or black. While he was at his meal the men of his guard who were in the rooms near to that of Montezuma, never dreamed of making any noise or speaking aloud.

They brought him fruit of all the different kinds that the land produced, but he ate very little of it. From time to time they brought him, in cup-shaped vessels of pure gold, a certain drink made from cacao, and the women served this drink to him with great reverence pp. Sometimes at meal-times there were present some very ugly humpbacks, very small of stature and their bodies almost broken in half, who are their jesters, and other Indians, who must have been buffoons, who told him witty sayings, and others who sang and danced, for Montezuma was fond of pleasure and song, and to these he ordered to be given what was left of the food and the jugs of cacao.

Then the same four women removed the table clothes, and with much ceremony they brought water for his hands p. As soon as the Great Montezuma had dined, all the men of the Guard had their meal and as many more of the other house servants, and it seems to me that they brought out over a thousand dishes of food of which I have spoken, and then over two thousand jugs of cacao all frothed up, as they make it in Mexico, and a limitless quantity of fruit, so that with his women and female servants and bread makers and cacao makers his expenses must have been very great p.

Let us speak of the Stewards and the Treasures and the stores and pantries and of those who had charge of the house where the maize was stored … while Montezuma was at table eating, as I have described, there were waiting on him two other graceful women to bring him tortillas, kneaded with eggs and other sustaining ingredients, and these tortillas were very white, and they were brought on plates covered with clean napkins, and they also brought him another kind of bread, like long balls kneaded with other kinds of sustaining food, and pan pachol, for so they call it in this country, which is a sort of wafer.

There were also placed on the table three tubes much painted and gilded, which held liquidambar mixed with certain herbs which they call tobacco, and when he had finished eating, after they had danced before him and sung and the table was removed, he inhaled the smoke from one of those tubes, but he took very little of it and with that he fell asleep p.

When we arrived at the great market place, called Tlaltelolco, we were astounded at the number of people and the quantity of merchandise that it contained, and at the good order and control that was maintained, for we had never seen such a thing before … There were … Indian slaves both men and women … traders who sold great pieces of cloth and cotton … and there were cacahuateros who sold cacao…There were those who sold …s weet cooked roots, and other tubers which they get from this plant, all were kept in one part of the market in the place assigned to them.

In another part there were skins of tigers and lions, of otters and jackals, deer and other animals and badgers and mountain cats, some tanned and other untanned pp. Let us go on and speak of those who sold beans and sage and other vegetables and herbs in another part [of the great Tlaltelolco market], and to those who sold fowls, cocks with wattles, rabbits, hares, deer, mallards, young dogs and other things of that sort in their part of the market, and let us also mention the fruiterers, and the women who sold cooked food, dough and tripe in their own part of the market; and then every sort of pottery made in a thousand different forms … then those who sold honey and honey paste and other dainties like nut paste, and those who sold lumber, boards, cradles, beams, blocks and benches … But why do I waste so many words in recounting what they sell in that great market — for I shall never finish if I tell it all in detail.

Paper, which in this country is called amal, and reeds scented with liquidambar, and full of tobacco … and much cochineal … and there are many vendors of herbs and other sorts of trades … I am forgetting those who sell salt, and those who make the stone knives, and how they split them off the stone itself; and the fisherwomen and others who sell some small cakes made from a sort of ooze which they get out of the great lake, which curdles, and from this they make a bread having a flavour something like cheese.

There are for sale axes of brass and copper and tin, and gourds and gaily painted jars made of wood pp. A little way apart from the great Cue [temple] there was another small tower which was also an idol house, or a true hell … for it was here that they cooked the flesh of the unfortunate Indians who were sacrificed, which was eaten by the priests. Forentine Codex. The War of Conquest.

Nutritional Geography. Search for:. Hernando Cortes. There is a market in this city in which more than thirty thousand people daily are occupied in buying and selling … There is earthenware of many kinds and excellent quality … Wood, charcoal, medicinal and sweet smelling herbs are sold in large quantities…there are also public baths…they behave as people of sense and reason pp.

Moreover he built [for your Majesty] several very fine dwellings [and in one] he constructed a large tank of water, and placed some five hundred ducks there … he added also as many as fifteen hundred head of chicken p. Certain foods they abstain from and more so at certain periods of the year than at others pp.

Moreover, they [the Indians] knew well that we had but slight store of food and drinking water so that we could not hold out long without dying of hunger, even if they should not kill us themselves. And in truth they were perfectly right: for had we no other foes than hunger and general shortness of provisions, we were like to die in a short time p.

Maize takes the place of bread and food in these parts and is much superior to that found in the Islands pp. This the Spaniards under Albarado could plainly see from where they were fighting, and from the whiteness of the naked bodies they knew that they were Christians who were being sacrificed p.

On the morrow we took the road again … and came upon three or four towns, deserted alike of people and provisions, save for certain stores of wine such as they are wont to make which was contained in a considerable number of earthen jars … [We] slept the night following in the open, for we came upon some maize fields where both men and horses broke their fast … We were finally so much in need of provisions, for during this time there were not more than fifty pounds of bread between the lot of us…Now that the land was at peace I sent persons to visit every part of it and bring back news of its towns and people pp.

It looked like a garden with luxuriant vegetation … we gave thanks to God at having discovered such a country p.

We slept near a stream and with the grease from a fat Indian who we had killed and cut open, we dressed our wounds, for we had no oil, and we supped very well on some dogs which the Indians breed for food for all the houses were abandoned and the provisions carried off, and they had even taken the dogs with them, but these came back to their homes in the night, and there we captured them, and they proved food enough food p.

It was cold comfort to be even without salt or oil with which to cure the wounded p. They had not even given us food to eat, and as a mockery had brought us firewood and water, and said that there was no maize … So in return for our having come to treat them like brothers and to tell them what Our Lord God and the King have ordained, they wished to kill us and eat our flesh, and had already prepared the pots with salt and peppers and tomatoes … Not two hours had passed before our allies, the Tlaxcalans, arrived … The Tlaxcalans went about the city, plundering and making prisoners and we could not stop them pp.

So this was our lucky and daring entry into the great city of Tenochtitlan Mexico on the 8th day of November the year of our Savior Jesus Christ, pp. Some of the soldiers among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a market place … so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before pp. Indeed, when we least expected it, they [Spanish guards] came to say that he was dead.

It was stated that he had reigned for seventeen years and that he was the best king there had ever been in Mexico pp. The hearts and blood were offered to idols p.