Clendinnen, I: “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of México"
In her article, Clendinnen approaches the Spanish conquest of Mexico departing from traditional notions of Spanish superiority as present in the work of historians such as Prescott and Todorov. In it, she revisits the grounds on which claims of the unquestioned triumph of the Spaniards are made in order to suggest a different account on the encounter of between indigenous peoples and Spaniards. The questions that Clendinnen poses in this article address how was it that the Spaniards, with their small numbers and in a foreign land, were able to defeat indigenous forces within the span of two years. Also, she asks what were the factors on both the indigenous and the Spanish sides that accounted for the so-called victory of the Spaniards. In order to answer these questions, Clendinnen presents an overview of the major events of the conquest by dividing them into two phases: the first one beginning with the Spanish arrival to the coast in 1519 up until June of 1520 on the so-called “Noche Triste” and Moctezuma’s death. The second phase, she points out, begins with the retreat of the Spaniards into Tlaxcala to recover followed by the recruitment of allies (voluntary and not) and the siege of Tenochtitlan in May of 1521. The phase ends in mid-August of 1521 with the fall of the Tenochca city. She then goes on to analyzing the narrative strategies used by the Spaniards in order to craft their history of triumph.
Clendinnen delivers a very compelling argument of why is it that the conquest should be revisited once again. For her, the prevailing notions of Spanish superiority advanced by older historians are mainly the end-result of the manipulation of conquest narratives by the Spaniards who wrote them, and the people who analyze them. Given that her article was written at a time when the New Philology (the study of the colonial period using native-language texts) was still developing, she does not seem to focus on the indigenous perceptive, much less in examining their primary sources in-depth. While she does reference the Florentine Codex, and the Cantares Mexicos – along with a very brief mention of the Anales de Tlatelolco – she does not delve as much in the narrative aspects of indigenous testimonies of the conquest. Perhaps her argument could have been even stronger by presenting native views on the events, and how these demonstrate that the conquest as whole was not a homogenous experience.
Nonetheless, her work is significant in its theoretical approach. She utilizes Paul Veyne’s critical view on historical research, which poses the question: “I believe that this document teaches me this: may I trust it to do that?” (Clendinnen, 67). She supports her argument by questioning what the historical documents (mostly Spanish in her analysis) tell, highlighting the importance of challenging the factual truth that the authors of these sources are trying to convey. Most importantly she reminds us of the power of the narrative in these types of texts, which is not to be undermined, but taken as a window to the less obvious strategies and purposes of their production.
“Conscious manipulation, while it might well be present, is not the most interesting issue here, but rather the subtle, powerful, insidious human desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story out of fragmentary and ambiguous experience, or (the historian’s temptation) out of the fragmentary and ambiguous ‘evidence’ we happen to have to work with [...] The document may tell us most readily about story-making proclivities, and so take us into the cultural world of the story maker. It may also tell us about actions, so holding the promise of establishing the patterns of conduct and from them inferring the conventional assumptions of the people whose interactions we are seeking to understand” (67-68).