A REBELLION IN THE KING'S IMAGE

Looking back with the clarity of hindsight decades after the cases against Martín Cortés and Alonso de Ávila had been closed, apologetic chroniclers attributed the convictions to the settlers’ excessive pomp and ceremony. They admit, in lamenting tones, that the fiestas honoring Cortés made him into the mirror image of a king. The festivities held in and around 1565, they claim, were fit for royalty. “Better suited for a king than a marquis,” Juan de Torquemada (ca. 1557–1624) stated succinctly in his Monarquía indiana (Indian monarchy, 1615).Footnote ¹³ In his Tratado del descubrimiento de las Indias y su conquista (Treatise on the discovery of the Indies and their conquest, 1589), Juan Suárez de Peralta (1541–1613) recalled that the royal treatment began the day Martín Cortés stepped foot in New Spain. When the marquis arrived with his wife, Doña Ana Ramírez de Arellano, in Coyoacán, “he was received in the same way that the royal person could have been received,” Suárez de Peralta writes.Footnote ¹⁴ Such descriptions echo and naturalize the royal judges’ conclusions, decades earlier, that Cortés usurped the king's power by enacting rituals that were the exclusive domain of royalty.

The trial records reveal a far more ambiguous situation. The royal judges’ verdicts were anything but natural, instead resulting from a prolonged investigation detailing how Cortés imitated royalty. The royal judges turned a suspicious eye to the pomp and circumstance surrounding Martín Cortés's person. For instance, they drew up a questionnaire that addressed the symbolic infractions that Cortés allegedly committed. By scrutinizing Cortés's every action, royal officials emphasized that the descendants of conquistadores could not become viceroys, likely with an eye toward suppressing those encomenderos who argued that they should be made nobles.

In a written request to the king to pursue this line of investigation, the main prosecutor portrayed the daily life of Martín Cortés as the illicit wielding of royal authority. He explained that Cortés “came to these regions of the Indies for the purpose of rebelling, denying to your royal person the obedience and fidelity which he owes you as a loyal vassal”—and that, in order to better carry it off, he “attempted to attribute to himself many preeminences of the kind that pertain to your royal person, and he endeavored that his vassals and servants should observe them and treat him as though he were in effect the universal lord of this land, being esteemed as a very powerful person, trying to enforce obedience by fear, and doing other things which only the kings and lords are accustomed to do in their own realms and lands.”Footnote ¹⁵ What chroniclers later described as festivities worthy of a king, the royal judges presented as evidence of the crime of laesae majestatis—literally, injured sovereignty—that is, offense and disloyalty to the king of Spain and conspiracy to rebel against him.Footnote ¹⁶

Martín Cortés was the proprietor of a massive marquisate known as the Valle de Oaxaca, a rare, entailed estate or mayorazgo—exactly the kind of seignorial, inheritable domain the encomenderos wished they had—in a land where most descendants of conquistadores had been rewarded with the ephemeral and unassured encomienda.Footnote ¹⁷ Cortés's exceptional landholding was one of the last remnants of the great powers his father held after the fall of Mexica Tenochtitlan in 1521. Initially, Hernán Cortés was recognized as the king's representative in the capacity of governor and captain general of New Spain. Yet after a few years, the Crown began judiciously tightening its grip on the territory. They parceled out Cortés's enormous powers, first by introducing the audiencia to take over his judicial duties in 1527. In 1529, an angered Cortés appeared before the king, who tried to placate him with the title of marquis, a coat of arms, and his mayorazgo. Nevertheless, the king stripped Cortés of his governorship and installed a viceroy in New Spain just a few years later, in 1535. No longer the most powerful man in the land he had conquered, despite his titles of marquis and captain general—the latter a primarily honorific post at this point—a bitter Hernán Cortés remained convinced that he should still be governor. Despite his resentment, Hernán Cortés's hereditary privileges were greater than those bestowed upon his conquistador counterparts. Still, the mayorazgo had only been awarded to the Cortés family on the condition of their loyalty to the Crown, and Martín Cortés would push that condition to its limit.Footnote ¹⁸

With the king's approval of the additional questions, the royal judges proceeded to interrogate Martín Cortés and other witnesses about the former's alleged adoption of royal symbols and rituals. The royal judges asked witnesses and Cortés himself “whether they know that every time the Marqués left his house he took along a page on horseback with a tall lance raised … and with the butt end of it placed in a leather sheath which was hanging from the saddlebow and on the bare part of it there appeared to be a royal standard.”Footnote ¹⁹ The judges further alleged that, bearing what “appeared to be a royal standard,” he comported himself like the king's representative in New Spain, daring to overtake the actual viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco (1511–64), to greet the royal inspector Jerónimo de Valderrama as he traveled to Mexico City after arriving from Spain: “Thus he went out to receive the inspector, Licentiate Valderrama, at the time when he entered this city”; “the Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco sent him a command that he should remove said standard in consideration of the fact that the Viceroy was carrying the standard of His Majesty.”Footnote ²⁰

During his examination, Cortés excused himself, claiming that he either did not perform the acts mentioned or that he did so for practical rather than symbolic motivations. In response to this particular accusation, he made a partial confession: yes, when he left his home he typically brought with him a page who carried a lance. But, he insisted, he did so in the same manner that he did in Castile, to no scandal. He firmly denied that his lance bore a royal standard, or any other standard for that matter, and insisted that there was merely a cover on its iron head similar to a sack, the closure of which had silk tassels. He did not deny, however, that he had overtaken Viceroy Velasco's entourage and welcomed the royal inspector Valderrama first—a move that many, not least the viceroy himself, interpreted as a direct challenge to the viceroy's precedence over him in New Spain. At other times, however, Cortés vehemently defended himself and declared that his rivals were falsely accusing him of comporting himself like a king. Regarding his so-called bearing of a royal standard, he retorted: “It is understood how different a royal standard is from a sack and that no man, no matter how ignorant, could have confused the two unless he was blinded by enmity.”Footnote ²¹

Cortés could not get off so easily, however. When Cortés was not busy appropriating “preeminences” of the kind that pertained to kings and lords—like bearing the royal standard and welcoming official visitors on behalf of the viceroyalty—witnesses said he touted his own coat of arms in excessive fashion. That is, how he displayed his royally sanctioned heraldic symbols problematically resembled “the things which only the kings and lords are accustomed to do in their own realm and lands.”Footnote ²² In that light, the royal judges scrutinized the fanfare of the baptismal ceremonies that Cortés hosted for his twin sons, implying that they resembled the baptisms of princes. They asked witnesses and Cortés himself “whether they know that for the baptism of his son the said Marqués had a scaffold built from the door of his house to the cathedral, higher than a man, so that one had to go up on it by stairs and to descend by others in the church … and [that the scaffold] was completely surrounded with banners and standards of his [the Marqués's] coat of arms and of his towns from his house to the cathedral.”Footnote ²³ Cortés admitted that, yes, some platforms had been constructed, but in his defense, this was intended to prevent the ladies from having to walk through the mud. He explained that the baptism occurred during Mexico City's rainy season, when torrential downpours fell on the city. Other platforms, he confessed, were erected so that the Indigenous inhabitants of his marquisate could watch the apparently spectacular baptismal procession, but these were not decorated with banners of his coat of arms as others claimed.Footnote ²⁴

Over and over, the royal judges sought to confirm through their questioning that Cortés was as the main prosecutors had already depicted him: a son of a conquistador who carried himself as “kings and lords” do and forcefully coerced the inhabitants of New Spain into treating him as their king. Did he bring a seat of honor with velvet canopies and cushions, “in the same way that royal persons and their Viceroys are accustomed to do,” when he and his wife, the marchioness, went to Mass?Footnote ²⁵ Did he threaten to beat and kill anyone who did not accompany him in a procession when they met him in the street? Was it true that he traveled with servants who carried clubs beneath their capes? Cortés denied it all.

Still, there was one accusation that led to a great admission on Cortés's behalf. The judges asked Cortés and other witnesses: “Whether they know, and it is thus public, that the said Marqués had a silver seal made of the same size as that of His Majesty, with his arms and a Crown engraved on it, and in the inscription which was placed around the said coat of arms he entitled himself duke although he was not such, and he made it in order to seal and send with his affairs; and he would have done so if … the Viceroy at that time had not commanded that it be kept back from him and His Majesty by his royal decree commanded that he should not use it.”Footnote ²⁶ Cortés acknowledged that the seal in question had been confiscated from the silversmith who was making it for him, but affirmed that he never used it, and that officials had already delivered it to the Royal Council of the Indies in Seville.Footnote ²⁷

Cortés's rivals—including the son of the deceased viceroy, Don Luis Velasco—testified that the marquis offended the king with his seal. Velasco declared that “it was excessive and contemptible for him [Cortés] to want to use a seal of that size and fashioned in the same manner as the king's.”Footnote ²⁸ The only seal of the same size and fashion as the king's was the viceroy's. As an extension of the king's body, that seal was received from Spain—from the seat of royal power—with great ritual and ceremony. Alejandro Cañeque, focusing on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, explains that the viceroy's seal in New Spain was treated “in the same way as the king”—mounted on its own horse and accompanied in procession to the capital.Footnote ²⁹ The viceregal seal made the king present in New Spain, not unlike the Eucharist made the body of Christ present during Mass, and reactivated his powers in the viceroy, who ruled New Spain as the mirror image of the king.Footnote ³⁰

Worse still for his defense, Cortés's seal contained irrefutable evidence that he had attempted to bestow upon himself privileges that were only within the king's power to grant. The oversized seal had a large crown on it, and, around the crown, a motto in Latin. Velasco testified that it read: “martinus cortesus primus hujus nominis Dux marchio secundus” (Martín Cortés, the first duke of this name and second marquis).Footnote ³¹ Arguably, “Dux” could have referred to Martín Cortés's actual post as captain general.Footnote ³² Yet the specification that he was the “first” of his family ruled out this interpretation, since his father had been captain general as well. This left hard proof that Martín Cortés had in fact claimed to be a duke when the king had not given him this hereditary title. This was particularly audacious, as the title of duke was often reserved for members of the royal family.

Martín Cortés's seal was the smoking gun, seeming proof that the disgruntled settlers intended to rebel, declare their independence from Spain, and take Martín Cortés as their king. Whatever Cortés's true intentions, the manufacture of the seal lent credibility to some witnesses’ claims that he intended to grant his coconspirators nobiliary titles, naming them dukes and marquis in his future capacity as king of New Spain.Footnote ³³

The royal judges interpreted the decorative program of the fiestas through this paradigm of armorial bearings, whose origin dated back to the European nobility's adoption of seals in the twelfth century. If coats of arms initially served as self-markers of identification and achievement on the battlefield and in tournaments, by the sixteenth century they were highly regulated symbols expected to accurately identify one's titles and family pedigree. The king's bestowal of titles on his subjects often coincided with the conferral of new heraldry as well. Martín Cortés's own coat of arms dated back to 1529, when King Charles V (1500–58) granted them to Hernán Cortés along with the title of marquis and his mayorazgo. The granting of these heraldic symbols to the Cortésian patrilineal line coincided with the bestowal of royal privileges, demonstrating that the usurpation of the former was fair game for prosecution.

But what of the ornamental trappings of a rowdy masquerade and banquet among the settlers of Mexico City, thousands of miles from the king? Could the sixteenth-century equivalent of what one might purchase today at a party store really be scrutinized with the same intensity as coats of arms, standards or banners, and seals? The royal judges put this possibility to the test. They approached the 1565 fiestas through the paradigm of a symbolic regime of power, asking witnesses and Martín Cortés: “Whether they know that after the said business of rebellion had been discussed between the said Marqués del Valle and the said Alonso de Ávila, on a day of fiesta there was a party in the house of the said Marqués after nightfall, and the said Alonso de Ávila was the one who principally organized the said fiesta … and the whole fiesta was dedicated to the fact that the said Marqués was to be the king of this land.”Footnote ³⁴ If the fiesta was indeed dedicated to the crowning of the marquis, it was not irrational to scrutinize every element of that celebration for hints of rebellion. In ways that might seem ridiculous to the modern reader, each aspect of the celebration became overdetermined and suspect—even the tableware.

The evidence cited by royal judges included the clay pitchers used in the banquet following the masquerade. One witness claimed that the pitchers bore a figure containing the enigmatic text “REIAS.” According to him, two accent marks indicated that it should be read “Reinarás” (“you will reign”) and, in a nod to Cortés's future kingship, it was adorned with a crown on top. A scribe drew it in the margin of the recorded testimony, labeling it “las letras de la jarra” (“the writing on the pitchers”) (fig. 1). The royal judges examined this figure as if it were on par with the incriminating motto on Cortés's seal. If Cortés had already proclaimed himself duke, did not texts and images such as this one prove that he had plans to make himself king? The prosecution would read the designs on the banquet's dinnerware as if they were heraldry.

Figure 1. Sketch of the symbol on the pitchers. Seville, Archivo General de Indias, Patronato 203, Ramo 6, fol. 197^v (imágen 48) (detail). Courtesy of España, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, Archivo General de Indias.

For the skeptical chroniclers who reflected on the whole affair decades after the fact, the judges exaggerated the meaning of symbols that had been incorporated into the banquet in jest. In his Tratado, Suárez de Peralta insisted that Ávila ordered the image of a crown painted on the dinnerware to playfully honor the marchioness—not to announce the impending coronation of Martín Cortés.Footnote ³⁵ It was painted “for show,” he wrote.Footnote ³⁶ Suárez de Peralta hardly considered the fiestas and their playful decorative program as hard evidence of an impending rebellion.Footnote ³⁷

Further, Suárez de Peralta insinuated that the royal judges framed the settlers. According to him, paranoid royal judges infiltrated the banquet, searching for any possible sign of a political disturbance. “I don't think the food had even been served when one of the judges had a pitcher in his hand and said that the figure meant, ‘you will reign’ and confiscated it,” he stated flatly.Footnote ³⁸ For Suárez de Peralta, the judges’ desire to catch the settlers red-handed led them to deny the farcical flattery behind the image. Such an interpretation is not surprising coming from a settler who, according to one scholar, wrote at the time of great “nostalgia” for the encomienda among those who had been denied one under the restrictive policies that followed the convictions of Martín Cortés, Ávila, and their so-called coconspirators.Footnote ³⁹

Suárez de Peralta described a simpler figure than the one that appeared in the testimony above. According to him, the pitchers were adorned with “an ‘R’ with a crown on top of it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He included a different drawing in the margin of his treatise (fig. 2). The royal judges’ and Suárez de Peralta's divergent figures result from their desires either to affirm its meaning as immanent or to dramatize the royal judges’ misguided interpretations. Whereas the first figure is incriminatingly explicit, the second drawing is more open to interpretation. The first supports the argument that the settlers appropriated the king's visual repertoire to “better carry off [their rebellion].”Footnote ⁴¹ The second promotes the theory, echoed by scholars today, that royal officials used the powerful settlers’ carefree carousing to frame them for conspiring to rebel and thereby strip them of their privileges. Even more sardonically, the chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo (1529–99), son of a conquistador and a Tlaxcalan woman, openly doubted the very existence of the rebellion in his Historia de Tlaxcala (History of Tlaxcala, ca. 1592), writing, “It was at this time that they say a rebellion took place in Mexico.”Footnote ⁴²

Figure 2. Drawing from the margins of the manuscript of Suárez de Peralta, Tratado del descubrimiento. Toledo, Biblioteca de Castilla-La Mancha / Biblioteca Pública del Estado, Toledo, MS 302, fol. 121^v (detail).

Yet Cortés may have been aware of the danger of wielding such symbols, farcical or not. According to witnesses, when the marquis discovered that the flower garland placed on his head had a wax sign (letrero) that was inscribed, “Do not fear the fall, for you shall rise to greater heights,” he had it immediately destroyed.Footnote ⁴³ He would have done well to have also destroyed the dinnerware. The debates over the pitchers’ meaning stemmed from different conceptions of the semiotics of power. The fight for control over the viceroy's symbols of power, and by extension Martín Cortés's fate, would drag on for years.

The royal judges’ initial accusations, which Cortés completely denied, date to July 1566. They included a call for Cortés's execution and the confiscation of his property. In March of the following year, the judges launched their investigation into his symbolic infractions. Shortly thereafter, he was obliged to pledge an oath of loyalty (pleito de homenaje) to proceed to Spain and present himself before the king.Footnote ⁴⁴ There, he was held prisoner in the Castillo de Terrojón de Velasco in Madrid. In September of 1571, he was sentenced to perpetual exile from New Spain, armed service, and the embargo of his property. Cortés's appeal was denied in 1572, but his punishment was revised numerous times until a royal order confirmed it shortly before his release in April 1573.

That final punishment and its implementation were strikingly lenient, especially compared with the fate of his encomendero coconspirators. Even though he was found guilty of the crime of laesae majestatis and conspiracy to rebel, Cortés ultimately retained his title of marquis and recovered his mayorazgo from embargo. He was forced to lease out the administration of his domains in New Spain, but he continued to benefit financially from them.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like so much of his trial, his punishment was more of a symbolic than a material nature. It is possible that the Crown was more inclined to recognize and even respect Cortés’ power than the royal judges in Mexico City were, since, after all, the king had given Cortés's father the title of marquis, and the Crown knew firsthand the panic that unseating nobles could unleash.

Of particular symbolic importance was keeping Cortés away from New Spain. On numerous occasions, royal officials forced him to promise to never return. It was as if the Crown believed that Cortés's mere presence there would inspire the encomenderos to aspire to similar heights. From the Crown's perspective, the encomenderos, especially those of low stock, were lucky to have inherited encomiendas from their conquistador forebears at all. They could not expect the institution to be made perpetual, putting it on par with Cortés's mayorazgo, which he had gained along with his nobiliary title.

The drawn-out discussions regarding Cortés's appropriation of royal symbols differed greatly from the trials of many of these encomenderos who were present at the 1565 fiestas. After a two-week-long investigation, Ávila—who was accused of dressing as an “Indian cacique” at the masquerade—and his brother Gil (d. 1566) were sentenced to death in August 1566.Footnote ⁴⁶ On that very day, they were publicly beheaded in the central plaza of Mexico City; afterward, their heads were displayed on pikes. Alonso de Ávila's symbolic infractions were not litigated in detail, stopping the modern researcher short and throwing into sharp relief the thousands upon thousands of pages specifying precisely how Cortés rebelled in the king's image.

The disparate treatment of Ávila and Cortés, and the different symbols of power they had appropriated, extended to their properties. The Crown confiscated the Ávilas’ vast wealth. Almost as dramatic as Alonso de Ávila's beheading, his houses were razed to the ground and the land on which they stood was salted. Officials were killing two birds with one stone: his residences stood on top of the former Templo Mayor, the ceremonial center of the Mexica Empire prior to the conquest.Footnote ⁴⁷ The simultaneous destruction of both echoed the new tendency in New Spain to suppress the memory of Mexica dominion (and so-called pre-Hispanic superstitions), in contrast with the earlier settlers’ proclivity for modeling their newly acquired powers on it. Nearby, officials erected a plaque that still stands today. It declares: “These houses were the property of Alonso de Ávila Alvarado, vecino of Mexico City, who was sentenced to death as a traitor” (fig. 3).Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 3. Plaque raised at the site of Alonso de Ávila's former residence. The inscription reads, “Estas casas eran de Al[onso] de Avila Alvarado, vezino desta ciudad de Mexico, el qual fue condenado a muerte por traidor; fue secutado [ejecutada] en su persona la sentencia en la plaza pública desta ciudad; le mandaron deribar estas casas, que fueron las principales de su morada. Año de 15[66].” Photo by Nicole T. Hughes.

This plaque is within a stone's throw of the viceregal palace (now the Palacio nacional [National Palace]), the seat of viceregal power that was originally the residence of Hernán Cortés. Although Martín Cortés inherited it from his father, the Spanish Crown bought it in 1562. If the judges used Martín Cortés's trial to affirm the exclusive privileges of the viceroy, those who knew the history of this building also knew that royal officials took cues from the Cortés family. If officially Cortés was accused of imitating the king, unofficially the viceroy had imitated Martín and his father.

The disparate sentences of Martín Cortés and the Ávila brothers show that by prosecuting Cortés for acting like a king, the Crown was also codifying a particular symbolic regime. Over the course of a scandalous amount of paperwork, the royal judges underlined how the Crown understood viceregal power in New Spain as embodied only by Spanish signs, symbols, and ceremonies. By equating Cortés's subversion of royal symbols to rebellion, they were also showing local officials how to consolidate viceregal power under the symbolic aegis of Spanish royalty. That is, they were codifying the viceregal position as the mirror image of the king at the time that they needed to consolidate power under one semiotic visual regime. Through their prosecution, the judges defined what the trappings of legitimate power in New Spain would look like for the foreseeable future. Without a doubt, they would not look like the “Indian king,” Alonso de Ávila.

IMITATING THE WRONG KING

Years earlier, the royal judges launched an investigation into Ávila's symbolic infractions that began similarly to the later investigations of Martín Cortés. During Ávila's trial, they sought evidence that his late-night soirées were actually clandestine meetings in which he and his coconspirators planned the uprising.Footnote ⁴⁹ “They asked [Ávila … whether he] communicated with different persons … that His Majesty does not have a legitimate claim to this land and that they could justly take it away from him and take it for themselves.”Footnote ⁵⁰ They then questioned his motives for organizing the fiesta during which Cortés had been fêted as king of New Spain. They asked whether, after having disseminated his seditious plans, Ávila “ordered that a masquerade be arranged in this city at the house of the Marquis del Valle,” to which he arrived “in the habit of an Indian cacique with many other people on horseback in the same costume carrying Indian masks.”Footnote ⁵¹ Where Cortés imitated the king of Spain, Ávila imitated an Indigenous sovereign. The judges took the former as evidence of Cortés's intent to declare himself king of New Spain and began investigating the latter in connection with Ávila's so-called plot to steal the land from the Spanish Crown.

The initial symmetry of these two cases, each involving the accused having imitated a different sovereign, soon ceased. All things being equal, it would have been logical for the royal judges to take Ávila's imitation of an “Indian cacique” as evidence of his intention to declare himself king of New Spain, albeit in a different mold. Yet the royal judges quickly turned their focus away from Ávila's symbolic infractions and toward material evidence like firearms and gunpowder, in contrast with their juridical obsession with Cortés's adoption of the royal trappings of power.

By the end of Ávila's trial, the royal judges had made his costume at the banquet a parenthetical in his conviction for plotting to rebel. They focused on the fact that several settlers who participated in the masquerade—those who dressed as Europeans—were equipped with harquebuses. They argued that festivities like the masquerade were rehearsals for a planned rebellion that would take place during a future commemoration of St. Hippolytus's feast day, the day that marked the anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. In the middle of the festivities, the royal judges concluded, the encomenderos and other settlers would turn on the royal officials and kill them with their firearms.

The available evidence suggests two complementary explanations for the judges’ actions: first, when the judges sidestepped Ávila's imitation of an Indigenous sovereign, they (knowingly or unknowingly) took part in a larger, long-term strategy to downplay and infantilize Indigenous power, while simultaneously cracking down on the encomenderos. Second, by all appearances, the royal judges did not convict Ávila for his imitation of an “Indian cacique,” even as extant historical evidence suggests that this imitation was by no means nonthreatening.

What the royal judges paid attention to limns the limits of what might be called the Spanish Crown's juridical imagination. That is, the royal judges were constricted by the laws and codes of Spain, and all symbolic authority within those laws stemmed from the Spanish monarch. It stands to reason that the judges could not prosecute symbolic infractions that the legal system they were tasked to enforce was not capable of naming. In a legal system designed to trace all authority back to the body of the king, only illicit imitation of the Spanish monarch could animate costumes with deadly political significance.

This explains why the royal judges tried their hand at translating attributes of Indigenous insignia of rank into Spanish terms. Witnesses reported the suspicious incorporation into the masquerade of what they called suchiles (the Hispanicized plural of xochitl, which means flower in Nahuatl), which were powerful symbols associated with the tlatoani (ruler; literally, he who speaks) and upper echelons of Nahua society. In response, the judges inquired if they somehow featured heraldry. They asked Ávila whether the settlers who carried the suchiles also carried standards with Ávila's coat of arms, or if they carried such a standard in another moment of the masquerade, and if the standard bore the motto “Do not fear the fall, for you shall rise to greater heights,” or any other suspicious phrase.Footnote ⁵² The royal judges would only interpret the flowers as legitimate threats if they were combined with Spanish heraldic symbols or otherwise made legible through mottos attached to them, revealing that their meaning needed to be put into Peninsular terms in order to be prosecuted.

Ávila took full advantage of this blind spot in the Spanish legal system and defended himself by highlighting his imitation of the “Indian cacique” as a simple costume, emptied of symbolic meaning. He claimed that he and his party all “wore Indian garb as costumes and masks imitating their faces.”Footnote ⁵³ Ávila's description of his own costume is threadbare, yet the royal judges accused him of playing the role of an Indigenous sovereign. Later accounts, like that contained in Torquemada's Monarquía indiana, imagined that Ávila, one of the wealthiest encomenderos, donned sumptuous attire. Torquemada wrote that Ávila had dressed “in the style of the Indians and pretended to be the person of the Indian king, with a string of flowers with many valuable treasures (joyas) in it.”Footnote ⁵⁴ During the actual trials, the royal judges expressed limited concern about Ávila's role, instead asking him repeatedly about the “person who was to be elected the new king of the kingdom of New Spain,” as if it could not possibly have been him.Footnote ⁵⁵

Even if the royal judges’ primary goal was to incriminate Cortés, who was presumably the “person” in question, they made little of Ávila's testimony that the powerful Cortés had shared in his adoption of Indigenous regalia. The royal judges asked Ávila if he had placed a “crown in the manner of a garland” on the head of the marchioness—Martín Cortés's wife—and if a rowdy conspirator who was present had publicly said, “Take this crown.”Footnote ⁵⁶ As if anticipating the royal judges’ own biases, Ávila deflected by claiming that he merely fêted the marchioness in the manner of the “Indians”—the “crown” was merely dress-up to amuse the ladies, empty of any symbolic danger. He confessed, “It was true that that night he had put a garland of feathers on the marchioness's head, but he did it in the way of the Indians and denies that it was a crown.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Ávila cleverly insinuated that adorning the marchioness with a garland of feathers was harmless and did not injure the sovereignty of the Spanish king and his overseas representation. But the fact that this was an effective excuse to use with the royal judges did not mean his costume carried no serious implications in its local context, nor that Ávila himself believed it innocent fun.

Feather headdresses were among the most prestigious insignia worn by the upper ranks of Nahua society. The range of feather hair-binders known as tlalpiloni were noted in the pictographic codices as the defining head adornment of rulers, in addition to being royal gifts to Nahua nobles and status symbols awarded to accomplished warriors. In his Nahuatl dictionary, Friar Alonso de Molina (1513/14–79/85) used language like Ávila's when he defined as a “feather garland for the head” the icpacxochitl, which he also describes as the dance attire of rulers. Those made with valuable quetzal feathers, such as the quetzalquacuahuitl (quetzal feather horn insignia; fig. 4) worn by rulers in dances, often contained gold baubles as well, recalling Torquemada's claim that there were “treasures” in the string of flowers worn by Ávila.Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 4. Quetzalquacuahuitl. Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 9-5524 [1], “Historia Universal de las cosas de la Nueva España: repartida en doze libros: en lengua mexica y espaçola,” fol. 73^v (detail).

Ávila need not have been deeply versed in Indigenous customs to know that feather headpieces were symbols of Nahua political power. The quetzalquacuahuitl would appear in a section of Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's (ca. 1499–1590) Primeros memoriales (First memorials, 1559–61) dedicated to warrior costumes next to another, the quetzalquatlamoyaoalli (the quetzal [feather] bestrewn head [insignia]; fig. 5), and matches other accounts of the war regalia of rulers and insignia of noble warriors.Footnote ⁵⁹ The feather garland worn as a headpiece in Ávila's fiesta and vaguely described in his testimony may not have been a crown in the fashion of those worn by the kings of Spain, but it was nonetheless a powerful garment associated with Indigenous rulership and nobility.Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 5. Quetzalquatlamoyaoalli. Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 9-5524 [1], “Historia Universal de las cosas de la Nueva España: repartida en doze libros: en lengua mexica y espaçola,” fol. 73^v (detail).

There was more to this ambiguous crowning than feathers: Ávila also reportedly gifted the marquis and the marchioness flowers. Ávila's brother Gil, who was put on trial along with him, confessed that he saw Alonso bring garlands and “suchiles” to the masquerade. He said that Alonso “gave the said flowers to the marques and the marchioness.”Footnote ⁶¹ Alonso de Ávila had also testified that the settlers who dressed “in Indian garb” carried roses that the native population called “suchiles.”Footnote ⁶² Flowers, which the Florentine Codex refers to as “exclusively the ruler's,” historically functioned as attributes of rank among lords and tlatoque (pl. tlatoani).Footnote ⁶³ They appear in numerous pictographic codices alongside nobles and rulers, and are cited as gifts of greeting among the upper ranks.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the royal judges, who likely understood Indigenous customs less than the average encomendero and Franciscan, dismissed such trappings of the Nahua nobility as mere props in a costume party.

For those who were familiar with local Indigenous customs, flowers were associated with nobility and rulership. Decades later, Torquemada would take vague references to an exchange of flowers between Ávila and the Cortéses as an indicator that these men were imitating powerful figures. Torquemada understood the “string of flowers with many valuable jewels in it” as a central component of Ávila's “Indian king” regalia.Footnote ⁶⁵ He imagined that when Ávila placed the garland around the marquis's neck he referenced what “happened before between Indians and Castilians.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This meant that Ávila did not play a generic “rey indio” but rather Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin (ca. 1467–1520), tlatoani of Tenochtitlan and huei tlatoani (great ruler) of the Mexica Empire, and Martín Cortés played his father, Hernán. Torquemada concluded, “They performed a sarao [soirée] in which they represented the reception that the emperor Moteuczoma, with his entire court, made for his [Martín Cortés's] father, the captain don Fernando.”Footnote ⁶⁷

However much an act of creative license it might have been, Torquemada's account serves as a reminder that anyone who had read Hernán Cortés's wildly popular second letter to Charles V would recall the claim that Moteuczoma “gave” the Mexica Empire to the conquistador by placing a necklace around his neck. Hernán Cortés reported that one of Moteuczoma's servants had placed a necklace, this time made from red snail shells and gold shrimp instead of flowers, around Cortés's neck at the time that he supposedly submitted to the king, with Cortés as his representative.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hernán Cortés reported that Moteuczoma told his subjects, “From now on you should obey this great king, for he is your rightful lord, and as his representative acknowledge this his captain [Cortés].”Footnote ⁶⁹

Torquemada claimed that the sarao referenced this well-known episode. For him, Ávila, dressed as Moteuczoma, removed the string of flowers from his own neck and placed them around the neck of Martín Cortés in the role of his father, signifying the transfer of power. For Torquemada, the donning and gifting of a flower necklace was an unmistakable reference to the courtly rituals of the former Mexica Empire. His assumptions around flower garlands, nobility, and the transfer of power support the conclusion that while the royal judges might have been unable to name this vernacular language of sovereignty, grounded in a conquest merely four decades old, those more familiar with New Spain would have been able to decode the message. Ávila deployed these Indigenous symbols as part of the language of power in New Spain.

One might object that the real reason the Crown prolonged their investigation of Martín Cortés by focusing on his symbolic appropriations, on the one hand, and summarily executed the Ávila brothers in exemplary fashion, on the other, stemmed solely from realpolitik. Alonso and Gil Ávila were the nephews and not the sons of Alonso de Ávila, a conquistador of middling importance. Martín Cortés was the son of the conquistador of the great Mexica Empire, not to mention a nobleman who had married a powerful count's daughter and been the childhood friend of King Philip II.Footnote ⁷⁰ If the repressive power of the royal judges was exerted without mercy on the Ávila brothers but spared Martín Cortés, it was likely not because the judges thought that Cortés was not guilty, but because they did not dare execute him. This certainly would not have been an expedient strategy to dispel unrest. By sending Cortés back to Spain, they left that decision to the king himself, who, as it turned out, did not execute him either. While focusing on the symbolic realm allowed the judges to prolong Cortés's trials, and leave him intact, focusing on the harquebuses allowed them to swiftly execute the Ávila brothers. The likelihood that such practical considerations tipped the balance suggests that Nahua symbols of power were not central to the conspiracy.

Broader consideration of the symbolic lives and afterlives of non-Iberian sovereignty in the Americas tells a different story, however. Over and over, royal officials persecuted and suppressed the festive display of other symbols of sovereign power. Crackdowns were particularly severe in the tumultuous period that preceded the independence movements. One famous example is the massive uprising led by José Gabriel Condorcanqui (1738–81), better known as Tupac Amaru II, against the tax known as the alcabala and other abuses in Peru in the late 1780s. According to the royal inspector (visitador) José Antonio de Areche in his sentencing, Condorcanqui manipulated the Indigenous masses by claiming to be “from the principal line of the Incas … and therefore absolute and natural ruler of these dominions and their vassals.”Footnote ⁷¹ He adopted the name of Tupac Amaru II after the last Sapa Inka (only Inka, or ruler), whom the Spanish executed in 1572, and had a portrait painted of himself with “the royal insignias.”Footnote ⁷² Though the royal inspector calls his pretensions “dubious,” he readily admits that “[the Indians] believe him” and address him “with the utmost submission and respect, treating him as their Lord, Excellency, Royal Highness or Majesty.”Footnote ⁷³

In order to prevent future uprisings, the royal inspector announced a series of prohibitions, which included banning attire associated with the Inka nobility. It should be forbidden, he wrote, “that the Indians wear pagan clothes, especially those who belong to the nobility, since it only serves to represent those worn by their Inca ancestors, reminding them of memories which serve no other end than to reconcile them more and more in their hatred toward the dominant nation [i.e., Spaniards]; outside their looking ridiculous and not in keeping with the purity of our religion.”Footnote ⁷⁴ He added that it was especially important to eliminate all clothing that “directly represent the clothing of their pagan kings through insignia.”Footnote ⁷⁵ By implying that noble attire was idolatrous, the royal inspector justified taking steps to stamp out any trace of Inka rulership, which had proven to be a threat to viceregal control.Footnote ⁷⁶

In Brazil, festive coronation ceremonies were banned after they reportedly disturbed the codification of social hierarchy in daily life. Enslaved and free Black members of the Black Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary regularly practiced the festive coronation and procession of African sovereigns. The ceremonies were sometimes deliberately performed in a monarchically benevolent fashion and, in some cases, the Jesuits deemed them “honest.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Lisa Voigt argues that the distance between signifier and signified, “between mock African king[s] and real black sovereignty,” determined the perceived level of threat.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the centers of power, Lisbon and Bahia, the Crown and viceroy prohibited its performance; in Minas Gerais, priests petitioned governors to outlaw it as well.

The latter complained that the festivals’ kings and queens were perceived as, and comported themselves as, actual kings and queens. One priest wrote, “The blacks recognize the reelected king as the true king […] [they] treat him as their king even outside of the church.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In the words of another, “All that feigned ostentation did not produce any effect other than persuading the same blacks and some of the populace that the one who was called king was a real king.”Footnote ⁸⁰ As Voigt uncovers, these petitions reported disturbances such as demands that whites remove their hats in the presence of the king and his court, and orders for “distinguished men” to give up their seats in church for the Black king and his officials.Footnote ⁸¹ This raises the question, at issue in the sentence against Tupac Amaru II and so relevant to the Martín Cortés trials, of how festivals perceived to mimic royal ceremony actually produced power.

The repressive measures taken in the above examples illuminate how the Spanish Crown took a different approach in New Spain: they surreptitiously suppressed pre-Hispanic symbols of power under the pretext of eradicating idolatry while they executed encomenderos. The underrepresentation of Nahua symbols of power in the encomenderos’ convictions anticipated King Philip II's decision to put an end to the collection and circulation of certain kinds of Indigenous knowledge. In 1577, he issued a royal edict prohibiting the circulation and publication of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia universal de las cosas de la Nueva España, described as “a very copious computation of all the rites, and ceremonies, and idolatries that the Indians used in their infidelity, divided into twelve books and in the Mexican language.”Footnote ⁸²

In addition to calling for the seizure of Sahagún's work and its remittance to the Council of Indies, the edict unequivocally proscribed any further investigation: “You are warned absolutely not to allow any person to write concerning the superstitions and ways of life of these Indians in any language, for this is not proper to God's service and to ours.”Footnote ⁸³ For many contemporary historians, this was the beginning of a silent war waged by the Crown against native religion and society.Footnote ⁸⁴ It coincided with arguments that persuasion was more effective than force in evangelizing native peoples; by contrast, force had been deemed the only way to deal with the encomendero class.

The royal judges’ asymmetrical convictions in the trials of the 1560s foreshadowed the separation of native and nonnative peoples into different jurisdictions, and the official reservation of violent repression for the latter, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Crown separated Indigenous and non-Indigenous people into different Inquisitorial jurisdictions in 1570, under the pretext that total orthodoxy could only be expected from Europeans. Special knowledge was needed to prosecute Indigenous peoples and—from the Crown's perspective—their harsh punishment produced more harm than good. The native population, increasingly referred to by patronizing epithets such as “gentle saplings,” was considered too new to the faith for inquisitorial methods.Footnote ⁸⁵ Undoubtedly, the Crown recalled that the Apostolic Inquisition had caused rioting and unrest when they burned a prominent Tetzcoca noble at the stake in 1539. The separation of jurisdictions would be further cemented in 1590, when the viceroy came to preside over a newly created General Indian Court, where he acted as an independent counterpart to the audiencia. The harsh repression of non-Indigenous peoples brought on by the Inquisition echoed the reign of terror unleashed by the royal judges and, later, royal commissioners, against the encomenderos—publicly executing and exiling them and confiscating and destroying their property.

On another front, royal officials increasingly painted a picture for the king of the native population as weak, obedient, and submissive. In this way, they dissipated the specter of Indigenous revolt that, as will be seen, the encomenderos touted to justify their political power. The encomenderos’ and royal officials’ struggle to influence the Crown turned on their respective claims about the credibility of Indigenous revolt. Following a riot in Mexico City in 1564, royal inspector Valderrama insisted to King Philip II that the native peoples must have been incited to riot because, as he wrote, “they are naturally so obedient.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Claims of Indigenous submissiveness benefited royal officials like him.

Such claims suggested that the Indigenous population was easy for them to govern and pacify. At the same time, they attributed the greatest risk of an Indigenous revolt to the presence of those who could lead them astray—the encomenderos, and to some extent the Franciscans, who should therefore be restrained. A highly paternalistic attitude toward native peoples proliferated, as seen in the case of the Inquisition. The consolidation of viceregal power thus entailed not only politically undermining the Indigenous nobility through the suppression of alleged idolatry, but also peddling propagandistic portrayals of supposedly weak and malleable Indians in a new phase of what Serge Gruzinski called a “war of images.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The Crown undermined the Nahua nobles in a veiled manner while they very publicly executed the encomenderos. Soon, those who were denied inheritance of encomiendas were portraying themselves as poor souls abandoned by their motherland, in an evolution of the conquered conquistador trope.Footnote ⁸⁸

The Crown's master plan to transfer the encomiendas from the conquistadores’ heirs back to the king would also strengthen its symbolic power over Indigenous commoners. The anonymous author (tlacuilo, or native scribe/painter) of the Anales de Juan Bautista (Annals of Juan Bautista) documents how the embargo of Martín Cortés's property, and the temporary transfer of his Indigenous subjects to the Crown, was communicated by means of replacing the marquis's coat of arms with those of the Spanish monarch, writing: “On this day, Tuesday, November 18 of the year 1567 … they took down the coats of arms of the marquis, which were in all locations where his macehuales [Indigenous subjects; literally, commoners] lived, Coyohuacan, Atlacuihuayan, etc. This is the time when they became macehuales of the tlatoani, emperor of the whole world [king of Spain]. And in all parts it was done thus, his arms were destroyed and from then on the marquis left his macehuales, etc.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Phasing out the institution by transferring individual encomiendas to the Crown ended the encomenderos’ dream of becoming feudal lords with economic as well as symbolic power over their Indigenous subjects—precisely the kind of power that had produced Ávila's fiesta.

IMAGINED LEGACIES OF MEXICA POWER

The trials that began with the rapid sentencing and execution of the Ávila brothers, and dragged on for years in the meticulous litigation of Martín Cortés, ensnared many of New Spain's most powerful and wealthy encomenderos. This is the group that scholars have argued the Crown sought to strip of their outsized power, using the conspiracy accusations as a pretext.Footnote ⁹⁰ In his late retelling, Torquemada imagined that the men who accompanied Ávila in “Indian garb” and masks imitating their faces represented the “entire court” of the “Indian king.”Footnote ⁹¹ But these costumes reflected the encomenderos’ claim to be the only legitimate governing class because of their ties—closer than those of Peninsular bureaucrats—to the Indigenous population. According to witness testimonies, their costumes were also intended to envision a different future for New Spain. In this imagined polity, the encomenderos would ally with the aggrieved Mexica nobility and no longer draw their legitimacy from Spain, where the king had refused to raise them to the stature of nobles, but rather from Mexica dominion.

The process by which Spaniards imprecisely appropriated Mexica symbols of rank, and then claimed native informant status and rights to those symbols, I call Indianizing. This is a term with a modern lineage: scholars have used the term Indianism to describe how intellectuals in the late colonial period looked to the pre-Hispanic past for an alternative foundation to Spain, making it possible to argue that Mexican independence was a form of political restitution.Footnote ⁹² This explains why a tradition of scholarship sees the Martín Cortés rebellion as an early precursor to Mexican independence movements.Footnote ⁹³

The encomenderos’ festivities in the mid-sixteenth century undoubtedly echo in how two priests plotting to establish a so-called mestizo monarchy in the early nineteenth century sought out the twelve closest descendants of Moteuczoma to form a council and elect a new emperor.Footnote ⁹⁴ The encomenderos, following their conquistador forefathers, saw in their proximity to the Indigenous population, and especially to the Nahua nobles, an alternative source of power to that of the Spanish king. By loosely adopting Mexica noble attire in their fiestas, they were defending their political privileges and imagining how they might Indianize themselves even further.

Dressing and acting as Mexica nobles in Mexico City at the time of the masquerade was highly charged. After the conquest, the conquistadores and their Franciscan collaborators, followed even more fervently by their heirs and disciples, argued that an Indigenous revolt would result if they were removed from power. They claimed that their knowledge of Indigenous customs, and especially pre-Hispanic tribute practices, was crucial to effectively evangelize and govern the native population. Shortly before the masquerade, the Crown implemented a new tribute policy in México-Tenochtitlán that broke with pre-Hispanic precedents and, as if proving the encomenderos’ and Franciscans’ warnings true, a revolt broke out.

The encomenderos’ costumes must be read in the context of this conflict, which affected the Mexica nobility. In July of 1564, after learning that they would soon have to pay tribute like most of the Indigenous peoples of central Mexico, Mexica commoners poured into the streets of Mexico City, wreaking havoc. Based on pre-Hispanic precedent, the altepetl (city-state) of México-Tenochtitlán had thus far collectively paid tribute to the Crown in the form of public works and goods. In the 1560s, royal officials individualized taxes and reduced acceptable forms of tribute to cash and maize.Footnote ⁹⁵ The new tax policy was draconian, and Mexica commoners rebelled against the governor-judge then presiding over the Indigenous cabildo, Don Luis Santa María Cipac (Nanacacipactzin) (r. 1563–65), for not negotiating a better policy.

Since the reign of Viceroy Antonio Mendoza, Mexica nobles had served on the Indigenous cabildo and were presided over by a governor-judge who belonged to the Mexica Tenochca dynastic line, providing some continuity with the pre-Hispanic Mexica Empire. The new tribute policy spelled the loss of Mexica commoners’ subordination to their authority.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indigenous dependents would likely no longer be able to afford to pay tribute to Mexica nobles on top of taxes they now owed to the Spanish Crown. By design, the new policy would erode the Mexica nobles’ political power and re-channel their traditional economic privileges to the Spanish treasury. Thus, when, on top of all of this, Don Luis Cipac's subjects rebelled against him for not negotiating a better tribute policy, the legacy of the Mexica polity in New Spain was at stake.Footnote ⁹⁷

The sudden eruption of violence caught viceregal authorities off guard, alarming the Crown. Royal inspector Valderrama, who had implemented the new tax, was flabbergasted and tried to downplay the unrest to King Philip II: “One can't believe that this riot by a few Indians could have happened if they hadn't been incited to it, because … the tax has been of great benefit to them … I have made a great effort to understand them, and the situation has not become clear.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Others disagreed: Valderrama earned the nickname of “Afflicter of the Indians,” a play on the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas's title as their “protector.”Footnote ⁹⁹ As more reports of the riots reached the king, Valderrama increasingly found himself on the defensive, looking for someone to blame: “I have told the truth in everything that I have written. Your majesty had been badly served here before I came.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Viceregal authorities took in some fifty rioters and jailed several Mexica nobles, including the governor-judge Don Luis Santa María Cipac, for failing to keep the peace and to effectively collect the tribute.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Without a doubt, the riots gave an edge to the encomenderos’ argument that they deserved special status due to their own expertise in Indigenous populations and concerns.

Numerous scholars, most notably Camilla Townsend and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, have argued that some of the aggrieved Mexica nobility were involved in the encomenderos’ plot to rebel.Footnote ¹⁰² For Townsend, judges went after the encomenderos at least in part because they wanted to suppress potential allies with whom Mexica nobles could again rebel and successfully resist the new tribute policy. While building compelling cases, both scholars admit the difficulty of confirming the existence of collaboration between the Mexica nobility and the encomenderos. For Townsend, there is no “genuine evidence” of collaboration, only accusations that amount to “rumors.”Footnote ¹⁰³ For Ruiz Medrano, the existing evidence merely establishes “a probable link” between the besieged Mexica nobility and the disgruntled encomenderos.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet again, the question of who exactly conspired to separate from Spain and how they planned to govern remains unknowable. What is clear, as Townsend puts it, is that “what the Spaniards were afraid of was, ironically, the Indians.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

This fear makes the symbolic realm, and the encomenderos’ decision to dress as Mexica nobles, all the more valuable. In light of the Mexica riots of 1564, two possible interpretations of their attire emerge. In a first possibility, the encomenderos were yet again brandishing their supposed knowledge of Indigenous customs to further argue that they were the only ones knowledgeable enough to properly govern New Spain and prevent large-scale Indigenous revolts. In a second possibility, the encomenderos, as witnesses claimed, were courting the besieged Mexica nobles and planning to rebel against Spain and form a new Indianized government, in which they would both govern. These interpretations are not mutually exclusive: unlike Spanish symbols of royal power, Nahua attire as coopted by encomenderos was unpinned from a single source of symbolic authority. Thus, it became subject to overlapping, overdetermined readings.

The first possibility is plausible given that familiarity with Indigenous practices was one of the encomenderos’ favorite arguments in favor of deserving great political rewards from the king. As seen above, this was the case made by the aldermen of the municipal council (several of whom, including Ávila, were encomenderos) when they petitioned the king of Spain not to send another viceroy after the sitting one died in 1564. They explained that it was inconvenient for the king to send viceroys from Spain because they brought large entourages of relatives and dependents who then filled local governing positions, foreshadowing Torquemada's claim that the encomenderos dressed as Mexica nobles were Ávila's (the “Indian king's”) court. The governance of these Peninsular bureaucrats had “drawbacks,” the aldermen argued, because they did not know the land and its people like the conquistadores, longtime settlers (antiguos pobladores), and their children did.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Only those who were born in New Spain and had greater contacts with the Indigenous population, their argument went, could govern effectively.

Similar arguments appear in other, later writings, including those that defended the encomenderos and cast doubt on the existence of a conspiracy to rebel. Suárez de Peralta went so far as to claim that the Indigenous populations considered those of European descent who were born in New Spain “natives.” He wrote, “Among the Indians there are very great secrets that they would not reveal to any Spaniard even if he tore them to pieces; they [the Indians] consider those who were born [in New Spain] the children and natives (naturales) of the land and they communicate many things to us. What's more, since we know their language, they have communion and friendship with us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In light of this, boisterous claims of Indigenous knowledge such as the masquerade can be read as encomendero propaganda, supporting their claims to superior entitlement over Peninsular bureaucrats who were ignorant of Indigenous customs and languages.

In the trial records, Ávila admitted that, in addition to ornamentation and entertainment, the participants in the masquerade wanted to initiate the Cortéses, and particularly the marchioness, to the local culture. In testimony, he even explained that “at the time the marchioness had only recently arrived to New Spain, and since she was an important lady, he wanted to show her the customs that the Indians had of holding fiestas.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The marchioness, of course, was not the only one who may have been unfamiliar with Indigenous customs. Although born in New Spain, Martín Cortés had traveled to Spain with his father in 1540 and spent much of his life in the Old World before returning to claim his inheritance in 1563. If the encomenderos were eager to remake themselves in his image, as a descendant of a conquistador who had risen to the ranks of the nobility, they in turn also wanted to remake him in theirs: a political constituency whose unique qualification was their self-proclaimed knowledge of Indigenous ways.

The encomenderos who dressed, however imprecisely, as the upper ranks of Mexica society likely did so to stage a defense of their political and economic standing. In this reading, the encomenderos’ costumes were symbolic not merely of Mexica rulership but also of the political legitimacy that the encomenderos, like the Franciscans, claimed to have over men arriving from the Peninsula because they were more Indianized. Such reasoning complemented the encomenderos’ defense that they deserved their political privileges because their conquistador forefathers had done all the work of conquering the Mexica Empire for Charles V. That generation touted their military triumph by adopting Mexica symbols as well, as when the encomendero and relation of the Cortés family Juan Gutiérrez de Altamirano unearthed a sculpture of the Mexica deity Quetzalcoatl from the Templo Mayor and attached it to one corner of his palace.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

A far more damning interpretation of the encomenderos’ roles as Mexica nobles in the masquerade also surfaced. One key informer, Baltasar de Quesada, testified that, “for conspirators like him, that fiesta was a representation of what they would do in the said uprising.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ He urged the judges to open their eyes, because the participants in the masquerade had shown how their planned rebellion would play out. Quesada's claim implied that two powerful but threatened groups—the encomenderos and the Mexica nobility—would rise up together, which was why they had organized themselves into these two character groups.Footnote ¹¹¹ Other witnesses corroborated his testimony when they claimed that following a successful uprising, the conspirators planned to form a new royal council from which encomenderos and Indigenous nobles would jointly assist the new king.

The encomenderos were accused of using the masquerade to court the Indigenous nobility to this end. Several testimonies confirm that members of the Nahua nobility were present at the festivities. According to one witness, a certain Pedro Ruíz gave a speech during the masquerade in which he detailed Alonso de Ávila's plan to rebel. He gave this speech first in “the language of the Indians” before a soldier then delivered its translation in Castilian.Footnote ¹¹² Such claims opened up the possibility that the encomenderos imitated the Mexica nobles as a way of inviting them to join their planned rebellion and showing them how such collaboration might unfold. In Quesada's wording, they were representing “what they would do” in the proposed takeover.Footnote ¹¹³

Despite these accusations, the royal judges did not scrutinize the ways in which the encomenderos imitated the Mexica nobility, even as they condemned Martín Cortés for presenting himself as a duke when he was merely a marquis. There is limited evidence that this was deliberate. In the aftermath of the Mexica riot, these same judges, as Townsend has shown in detail, helped Indigenous commoners accuse the governor-judge and the Mexica nobles of ruling in ways that were insufficiently Hispanized.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Two commoners issued statements that the current governor-judge and Indigenous cabildo should not be allowed to rule because, among other reasons, they “were not literate in Spanish letters” and “loved to celebrate feast days with old-style dancing and even the wearing of feathers,” implying that they were idolatrous.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Whereas the royal judges accepted such claims in the drummed-up case against the governor-judge and the Mexica nobles, they acted as if the encomenderos who put feathers on their heads and donned Indigenous habits and masks were merely “playing Indian,” as it were.

It is nevertheless hard to imagine that the encomenderos’ imitation of the Mexica nobility was considered entirely harmless. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474/84–1566) had recently waged notorious campaigns in defense of native sovereignty. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Las Casas rejected the theory that after Christ's resurrection, “infidel” kings and lords lost all legitimate claims to sovereignty.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the Americas, he instead argued that Indigenous and Castilian sovereignty should coexist without the latter supplanting the former.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Las Casas's vision of Christian empire, the Castilian monarchs served as universal lords over the “ancient kings and lords of the Indians,” whom neither they nor the pope could dispossess of their “lordship, royal preeminence, jurisdiction, and public or private properties without legitimate cause.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Like the free cities of Europe who recognized the Spanish king as their universal lord, the kingdoms of the Americas must freely consent to Spanish jurisdiction and could not be forced to do so.

In contrast with Indigenous lords, conquistadores, colonizers, encomenderos, and, to an extent, royal officials in the Americas were considered illegitimate middlemen according to Las Casas. Whereas native sovereignty was “primary and natural” in Las Casas's opinion, and Spanish lordship, “natural and divine,” the conquering and dividing up of land thus far was “violent and unnatural” and had “no value or force of law.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ By his account, this class of men should be removed from the Americas since Indigenous peoples were free vassals over whom the Crown should hold direct jurisdiction. As always, Las Casas did not mince his words: “The other and third lordship, the one that the Spaniards demand and enforce, is so unbearable and hard that it surpasses all the tyrannies of the world and is like that of the devils.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Not surprisingly, Las Casas's opponents—especially those who stood to lose encomiendas—misconstrued his arguments to more easily refute them. The chroniclers Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and the author of the anonymous Parecer de Yucay (Yucay opinion) enthusiastically participated in a targeted anti-Las Casas campaign.Footnote ¹²¹ They argued that Las Casas had called for the complete restoration of Indigenous political dominion and total abandonment of the Indies by the Spanish monarch, which would have returned these lands to the hands of Indigenous sovereigns they alleged were tyrants. It helped their case that Las Casas had defended the Taíno cacique Enriquillo for declaring war against Spanish colonizers and argued for a certain restoration of Inka sovereignty in the wake of the Inka Atahualpa's murder. Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to uncritically adopt the interpretations of Las Casas's opponents as his own.Footnote ¹²²

Complex political sparring aside, the case had been made for the complete restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. The encomenderos who vociferously attacked Las Casas's proposals knew them well and could have found in them reason to consider cutting out a different middleman. Witnesses in the 1560s trials accused the conspirators of enlisting the Franciscan Luis Cal to identify theological grounds for disavowing the Spanish king, who, they argued, had acted like a tyrant by denying them their just rewards. Cal was accused of seeking the pope's approval to appoint their own king.

If the encomenderos were losing all hope that they could one day become Spanish nobles, perhaps they imagined themselves as Indianized nobles in a polity separate from Spain. This would have been compatible with their alleged plan to form a council of encomenderos and Indigenous nobles to govern alongside their new king. The frustrated descendants of the conquistadores must have noticed in years past that the very few recipients of encomiendas in perpetuity that they so desired, in addition to Cortés's heirs, were Moteuczoma's heirs, whom royal officials granted this exceptional privilege in recognition of their dynastic lineage. If Las Casas's opponents imagined that he was advocating for the full political restoration of Indigenous empires, couldn't the encomenderos have pictured how they might benefit from such a new social order, perhaps even as part of a new nobility?

PURIFYING THE BODY POLITIC IN NEW SPAIN

More than the Ávilas' heads tumbled when the Spanish viceroyalty decided to decapitate the brothers less than two weeks after their arrest. The systematic disempowerment of the Mexica nobility already underway was the key backdrop to the royal judges’ decision to dismiss the Indigenous symbols espoused by Ávila and other encomenderos as what today might be called folkloric—as if they were empty, even quaint signifiers. The Ávilas' execution coincided with the severing of the Mexica royal dynasty from the body politic.

The masquerade was also not the first festive occasion on which Mexica nobles and powerful encomenderos brought together Spanish and Mexica symbols into new, potentially threatening constellations. The anonymous author (tlacuilo) of the Anales de Juan Bautista describes how men came from the four quarters of Tenochtitlan, gathered together with their “chimalli” (shields that indicated their users’ rank and status, meaning they were Mexica nobles), in order to “receive the marchioness.”Footnote ¹²³ Even more damning, he wrote that when Martín Cortés and his wife returned from a stay in Toluca, they were received “ynic quinamique yhuin reyme” (“as they usually receive kings”), using the Spanish loan word rey with the Nahuatl plural suffix meh.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Mexica nobility and the encomenderos were both starting to run out of options. Festive gatherings and symbolic exchanges between the two groups could have signaled a budding collaboration.

Other Indigenous groups also took interest in the encomenderos’ revolt. Numerous witnesses testified that prominent Tetzcoca and Tlaxcalans had recently communicated with the implicated encomenderos; furthermore, native subjects of encomiendas had prepared the festival.Footnote ¹²⁵ Scholars have pored over the records from individual towns to investigate claims of Indigenous involvement. Ávila's trial records, unfortunately, often only vaguely allude to groups of “Indians.”

Although further research remains to be done, several xiuhpohualli (roughly, annals) that adopt Mexica and Tetzcoca perspectives indicate that the trials caught the attention of Indigenous towns. Camilla Townsend and others have maintained that the xiuhpohualli is one of the rare genres of extant codices that was created for Indigenous audiences and not viceregal officials, the Crown, or the pope.Footnote ¹²⁶ The inclusion of the Ávila brothers’ executions likely indicates that they were deemed in some way relevant to these communities. Indeed, the anonymous author of the Anales of Juan Bautista details the brothers’ arrests and executions. The entry for 16 July 1566 states that “Martín Cortés, Don Luis Cortés, Don Luis de Castilla, Bernardino Bocanegra, Alonso [and Gil] Davila were arrested because they were talking of taking arms and they were remitted to the Court.”Footnote ¹²⁷ On 3 August 1566, he reports, “they decapitated Alonso Dávila, and his younger brother Gil González Dávila, and at the exact time of the Ave María they were put to death,” adding that the encomenderos' heads remained on top of lances for six days.Footnote ¹²⁸

A handful of xiuhpohualli even feature pictograms of the Ávila brothers’ severed heads. These include the Codex Aubin (ca. 1576; fig. 6), the Codex Mexicanus (ca. 1578–83; figs. 7 and 8), and the Tira de Tepechpan (painted tira, a narrow strip of amate [bark] paper, of Tepechpan, ca. 1596; fig. 9).Footnote ¹²⁹ In particular, it is remarkable that the Tira de Tepechpan, otherwise tightly focused on the local affairs of Tepechpan, a minor altepetl in Central Mexico, chooses to depict the execution of these two powerful encomenderos.Footnote ¹³⁰ In each of these manuscripts, the Ávila brothers’ heads are shown severed or covered in blood, in contrast to Cortés, whose head is shown whole and intact.Footnote ¹³¹ If the judges hoped to send a message to Indigenous leaders who considered collaborating with the encomenderos by harshly punishing the Ávila brothers, the entries in these annals indicate that they were successful.

Figure 6. Alonso and Gil de Ávila's bloody heads next to Martín Cortés's clean head, London, Am2006, Drg.31219, Codex Aubin, ca. 1576, fol. 55^r. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 7. Alonso and Gil de Ávila's bloody heads next to Martín Cortés's clean head, Paris, Mexicain 23–25, Codex Mexicanus, ca. 1578–83, plate 43, page 85. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 8. Alonso and Gil de Ávila's bloody heads next to Martín Cortés's clean head, Paris, Mexicain 23–25, Codex Mexicanus, ca. 1578–83, plate 43, page 85 (detail). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 9. Alonso and Gil de Ávila's bloody heads, Paris, Mexicain 13–14, Tira de Tepechpan, ca. 1596, screenfold. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

This was around the time that Don Luis Cipac, of the Mexica Tenochca dynastic line that dated back to Acamapichtli, died after his subjects, with viceregal support, turned on him.Footnote ¹³² Thereafter, the viceroyalty would choose outsiders to lead the Indigenous cabildo as governor-judge, and even commoners to serve on the cabildo, ending their previous policy of providing continuity with the Mexica royal lineage and nobility. In the second half of the sixteenth century, outsiders and commoners, equipped with pre-Hispanic documents, the Spanish court system, and the economic means acquired in the new colonial economy, increasingly found their way into governing posts in a pattern that Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra argues formed a new ancien régime.Footnote ¹³³ With the death of Don Luis Cipac, the Chalca historian Chimalpahin wrote, “It came to an end that descendants of the Mexica and Tenochca rulers should govern in Tenochtitlan anymore,” dramatically declaring that “their governing as rulers was cut off forever.”Footnote ¹³⁴

While in Peru the encomenderos cut off the head of the viceroy, in New Spain, the Crown decapitated Ávila, who had dressed as the Mexica figurehead and allegedly tried to tempt the Mexica nobles to rebel. Camilla Townsend has suggested that the Real Audiencia came down so hard on the encomenderos precisely because they feared that the latter would provoke and support another Indigenous uprising. Just because the royal judges, who represented the Crown's interests, ignored possible Indigenous involvement either in the conspiracy to rebel or in the plan to found an independent New Spain, this does not mean that scholars should follow suit and effectively cut them out of the story.

The downfall of the last of the Mexica tlatoani was entangled with the spectacular crackdown on the encomenderos. These repressive acts simultaneously squashed the encomenderos’ bid to become nobles or feudal lords, and shut the door on the possibility, clearly articulated by Las Casas and his critics, of the restitution of the Mexica Empire. Royal officials had underhandedly helped turn Don Luis Cipac's subjects against him, slowly stripped the Nahua nobility of their privileges, and publicly beheaded the encomenderos who felt entitled to retain their encomiendas in perpetuity. Officials were aware, as the encomenderos had been telling them all along, that the power of the conquistadores and their descendants depended on their influence over the Indigenous population. They had reason to believe that the besieged Mexica tlatoani and nobles might be tempted to take up an invitation from the encomenderos to try and form a new polity where they could both retain their privileges. The suppression of each group undermined the other's potential to successfully rebel.

In the 1560s, some urged the king to strengthen the viceroy's power just as the encomendero aldermen of Mexico City implored Philip II not to send another viceroy. In 1565, the Franciscan friar Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) wrote that New Spain is “a divided kingdom with many heads.” Mendieta wrote that the threat of rebellion lay with the Indigenous population. The nature of the “Indians,” he argued, requires that they be led by “a supreme and absolute ruler.” To effectively govern them, he wrote, New Spain must have “only one and not many heads.”Footnote ¹³⁵

In contrast to this assessment, the royal judges who investigated the conspiracy to rebel focused their efforts on prosecuting the encomenderos. Scholars have largely followed suit and interpreted the unrest of the 1560s as the result of the encomenderos’ desire for more power and resentment toward Spanish nobles and Peninsular bureaucrats, on the one hand, and the Crown's desire to undercut them, on the other. For Mendieta, they were only part of the problem. He told the king that “in a world like this,” the royal person “can only be represented properly by an illustrious person”—that is, Spanish nobles and not encomenderos whose conquistador forebears had only tenuously earned their way into higher ranks.

Mendieta had expressed such ideas three years earlier in even stronger terms when he wrote to the Franciscan commissary general. He insisted then that the king's absence was provoking unrest and that this lack could only be solved by installing a viceroy who truly represented him: “Since His Majesty is absent [from New Spain], which is what causes its agitation, he should at least have here a person representing him.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Mendieta implored Philip II to restore the earlier balance of powers by strengthening the viceroy's mandate. He clarified his position: “What I mean is that his viceroy must become a de facto viceroy, for this name and title denote that he is the king's image.”Footnote ¹³⁷

The trials for conspiracy in the 1560s, and the investigations of the encomenderos’ symbolic appropriations, belonged to a larger social transformation aimed at strengthening the viceroy's power.Footnote ¹³⁸ In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, viceroys came to be living images of the king of Spain, as Alejandro Cañeque has shown.Footnote ¹³⁹ King Philip II of Spain sent Martín Enríquez (1508/11–83, r. 1568–80) to New Spain and Francisco de Toledo (1515–82) to Peru with the explicit mission of strengthening royal authority in his American viceroyalties and defining once and for all their political, administrative, and ecclesiastic structure.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The consolidation of viceregal power as the mirror image of royal power was a direct response to the supposed conspiracy to rebel in New Spain and the outright rebellion in Peru that culminated in the beheading of the viceroy.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Enriquez was installed directly after the viceroyalty repressed the encomenderos and undermined Nahua nobles, and Toledo assumed the position of viceroy just a few years before Tupac Amaru I (1545–72) was executed. On a symbolic level, royal officials in New Spain also cut off the Mexica nobility from the body politic in the 1560s. In doing so, they recalled how Hernán Cortés consolidated his own power during an expedition to Las Hibueras (Honduras) when he assassinated Cuahtemoc, former tlatoani of Tenochtitlan and huei tlatoani of the Mexica Empire, along with several other Indigenous nobles, under the pretext of discovering their plot to rebel.Footnote ¹⁴² The viceregal position was noticeably different after Enríquez's reign. Torquemada wrote that Enríquez “had raised much the dignity of the office of viceroy, which up to his time had been a bit more informal.”Footnote ¹⁴³

Strengthening the position of the viceroy entailed codifying Spanish symbols as the only symbolic power in New Spain, and the king of Spain as the viceroy's source of power. The enthusiasm that Martín Cortés's arrival in New Spain awakened spurred royal officials to divorce the encomenderos and more gradually remove the Indigenous nobility from the body politic, thus making room for greatly empowering the viceroy. Their treatment of Ávila's masquerade and banquet was part of this longer process. Indeed, the absence of Nahua symbols from Ávila's conviction is not an indicator that they had no power at the time, but rather, quite the opposite. If witness testimonies provide some indication of actual unrest, modern scholars should in turn take seriously the multiple forms of power wielded by the encomenderos in their fiestas, as well as the future that they, at the very least, imagined.

RESTORING THE KING'S BODY

The Cortés family, the encomenderos, the dynastic Mexica nobility, and the Franciscans represented the ghosts of sovereignty past by the 1560s, and the Crown now wanted to secure the king's presence, as if to restore his body, to New Spain. Hernán Cortés had drawn his power from a different source than the line of viceroys that began with Enríquez, who closely reflected the king of Spain. Cortés rose within the ranks of nobility by claiming that the Mexica huei tlatoani Moteuczoma recognized him as the king's legitimate representative.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Remarkably, Charles V accepted Cortés as governor and captain general of New Spain, for a time.

When the Crown subsequently decided to strip Cortés of his powers, royal representation overseas splintered. First, a high court was established and took over Cortés's judicial powers. Then a viceroy was installed to take over his governing powers. Cortés was left with the symbolic title of captain general in largely pacified lands. The king's body in the form of viceregal governance was left in fragments, a condition that worsened as viceregal officials—not to mention the regular and secular clergy—came into conflict. Meanwhile, Cortés and his descendants, along with their allies, were cut off from the body politic yet still hanging around, like a phantom limb.

The Indigenous customs woven into Ávila's masquerade were subject to overlapping, overdetermined interpretations. For Ávila and the encomenderos, they displayed the tendency of prominent individuals in New Spain to claim to be more familiar with some Indigenous customs and Nahuatl than recently arrived Spanish bureaucrats. For Quesada and others, the masquerade and ensuing banquet revealed the encomenderos’ devious plan to align with the aggrieved Mexica nobles, rebel against Spain, and form a joint council to govern an independent New Spain. Las Casas's contemporaneous arguments even raised the possibility that what looked like rebellion could have been the desire to return to the not-so-distant past of Mexica dominion. For Torquemada, Ávila imitated Moteuczoma in the moment that he recognized Cortés's father as the king's representative in a piece of harmless political theater. The royal judges examined, and to some extent tolerated, the multiple interpretations of the Nahua elements of the masquerade in the trials.

In contrast, they insisted, against many dissenters, that there was only one way to interpret the symbolic language of the king of Spain. If the viceroyalty's stability depended on making the viceroys into de facto viceroys, the latter's power must emanate exclusively from the king of Spain and be modeled after him, without any mediation through the Mexica tlatoani. In this context, the royal judges told the king that Martín Cortés had “attempted to attribute to himself many preeminences of the kind that pertain to your royal person” and did things that “only the kings and lords are accustomed to do in their own realms and lands.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The royal judges demonstrated that there was no room for irony when it came to the king's image, no room for imitating him without appropriating his power. From then on, the viceroy was the king's living image.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

With cynicism and regret, sympathetic chroniclers acknowledged that to dress and act like the king of Spain could only amount to an attack on his sovereignty. Martín Cortés's and the others’ intentions in the masquerade were irrelevant—even though modern scholarship has obsessively tried to resolve them. Torquemada wrote that Cortés, Ávila, and the encomenderos “sinned like boys, who in their tender age choose to play kings, but they paid as men for the daring words they spoke and that outraged the king.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Suárez de Peralta also defends two settlers who were convicted of conspiring to rebel in the 1540s in ways that defend Martín Cortés, Alonso de Ávila, and the revelers who faced similar charges in the 1560s: “Their drinking caused them to say certain words, that it would be good to rise up against the land, that they should kill the viceroy and royal judges, and that that would put an end to the poverty that persecuted them so much. But this was very much [said] in rejoicing and laughter.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ He laments, “There was no shortage of those who heard these words, who did not hesitate to denounce them and give notice to the viceroy, who did not take it as a joke but rather admitted the complaint … They paid for their jokes with utmost severity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The consolidation of royal power in New Spain entailed the affirmation that the viceroy's power—and his alone—was iconic. Only others’ signs of sovereign power could be taken as unclear, or even empty, signifiers.

Yet, the encomenderos’ accusers and Mendieta's own claims suggest that the Crown had more reason to worry about the references to Mexica power than they wanted to let on. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Crown reassured itself that the memory of Mexica dominion was gone—revealing that this had previously been a major concern. In Spain in 1598, the arbitrista (reformist concerned with Spain's ailing economy) Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos (1555–1640) assured the recently proclaimed King Philip III (1578–1621) of New Spain: “There is little to fear from the native Indians because they have neither weapons nor leaders … they do not have any determination, nor any memory of their former state and dominion.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ By the end of the sixteenth century, Enríquez's long reign as viceroy had supposedly erased the threat posed by the encomenderos and Mexica nobles in the 1560s. In fact, at the end of his reign, Enríquez told his successor that that mulattos, free and enslaved Black people, and mestizos were now the populations most at risk of sedition in New Spain, and not the Indigenous peoples, nor the remaining conquistadores’ heirs.Footnote ¹⁵¹

In perfect contrast with Mendieta's characterization of New Spain as “a divided kingdom with many heads,” Enríquez wrote to his successor in 1580 that the position of viceroy now entailed acting as single head over two bodies. The Indigenous body remained, albeit in the “sorry state” Alamos de Barrientos described, and the viceroyalty treated it with paternalism.Footnote ¹⁵² Enríquez continued: “In this land there are two republics to govern, one of Indians, and one of Spaniards. And his majesty sent us here mainly [to take care of] all that concerns the Indians and their protection.”Footnote ¹⁵³ When the Crown made a public example of punishing the encomenderos, they squashed a symbolic language of power that incorporated Nahua customs, languages, and peoples while simultaneously suppressing the memory of Mexica dominion. The trials of Martín Cortés and Alonso de Ávila were part of the Crown's strategy to unify the viceroyalty under one symbolic head, that of the king of Spain, whose living image would be found in the figure of the viceroy for more than two hundred years thereafter.