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Montezuma's Anguish

Cortés identified with Quetzalcóatl,
We think we know the story, but don’t know it all.
In writing stories of the people whom we vanquish,
how can we understand king Montezuma’s anguish?
It’s only with unconscionable audacity
that we consider science and sagacity
enable us to understand those we defeat
like open books to which we are the exegete.

Inspired by an article in the TLS, July 31,2009, by J. H. Elliott on the Boston gentleman-scholar William Hickling Prescott, the author of History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) . Criticizing Prescott’s approach, Elliott, former Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, writes:

As part of this process of re-evaluation, historians try to recover “the vision of the vanquished” and to reconstruct the history of “peoples without history”, victims not only of imperial domination but also the lack of written records....

Montezuma’s assumed identification of Cortés with Quetzalcóatl has been a staple element of the story from Prescott’s day to our own, but it has also come to be contested as a post-conquest fabrication. Equally the omens have been shown to have suspicious affinities with the omens and prodigies recorded by classical authors like Plutarch, Lucan and Josephus. If the Quetzalcóatl myth and the story of the omens are no more than retrospective attempts to make sense of the extraordinary succession of events, Prescott’s doom-laden interpretation of Montezuma’s behaviour loses much of its credibility….Was he killed by stones thrown by his own rebellious subjects, as the account commonly goes, or was he put to death by the Spaniards, as one or two alternative sources suggest? Or did he perhaps die “as much under the anguish of a wounded spirit, as under disease”, as Prescott ws inclined to believe?


8/15/09

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