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Part 6: New Blood
Guatemalan Highlands
August 12, 1528
The woman lost track of how many days had passed since she was forced to flee her home. Not that it mattered - all that mattered was that she had to continue onward, for dying here, in the middle of the nowhere, would be a better fate than the one in store for her if she dared to stop or slow down even just a little. For most of her life, her world was almost completely restricted to the little village she was born in, located on the outskirts of the great K'iche' city of Q'umarkaj, the only contacts said hamlet had with the outside being the tax collectors and merchants that showed up every now and then. The plagues which ravaged the land and killed untold amounts of people in the last few years did little to change that. It actually made her and her family even more isolated not only from the world at large, but from their own community - the disease was highly contagious, with those who were lucky enough to survive carrying scars at best or losing their eyesight in the worst cases.
Of course, even the drastic population decline (and, with it, the collapse of trade) that followed the first smallpox outbreak wasn't enough to keep word of what was going on in the west from reaching the K'iche' lands. As far as the woman knew at the time, these rumors were just that, rumors: the idea of men who wore clothing made of metal, carried weapons that created thunder and rode enormous beasts unlike anything the K'iche' had ever seen before was, to put it mildly, ridiculous.
Then the Mexica came.
From what her husband (not exactly a well informed man either, given he was also a peasant) told her, the demands made by the envoys they sent were so outrageous the only possible response to them was war. She never saw him again. Those few who survived the ensuing battle confirmed that every single bit of the information which had slowly seeped into the K'iche' lands in the last few years was true: the invaders' weapons cut through the warriors' armor with ease, while their own, so shiny it hurt the eyes of those who looked at it, was impenetrable. Though the woman didn't see the Mexica descending upon Q'umarkaj with her own eyes, she remembered how the city looked like an enormous fireball from afar, hours before the people who set it alight swooped into her village.
Once upon a time she was both a wife and a mother, now she was neither. But she still carried on - she had to, for the sake of everyone she lost. The K'iche' may have fallen, but perhaps she could still warn whoever could be kind enough to give her shelter.
Maybe they could even avenge her people someday.
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The first few years of Cuauhtémoc's reign were mostly peaceful, something almost unprecedented in the history of the Triple Alliance - a newly enthroned tlatoani usually had to face at least a few rebellions following his accession. The most likely reasons for this were, first and foremost, the brutal examples given by the repression of the Totonac rebellion and the conquest of Tlaxcala (one of the last states still capable of resisting the Mexica), still fresh in everyone's memory, and secondly the havoc wreaked by smallpox and other diseases, which forced the vassals who were powerful enough to revolt to instead focus their energies on saving as many of their own subjects as possible. The plagues didn't discriminate by class either, with many altepeme being decapitated politically once their rulers (and, after them, their relatives) fell ill.
The emperor used this period of peace to do two things: strengthen ties with his new Spanish allies and take advantage of his vassals' predicament. The former was easy enough a task to do, since the Europeans who began to pour in from Veracruz after formal diplomatic relations were established - merchants, craftsmen and soldiers (1) - were so eager to get their hands on some sweet precious metals they were ready to tell the Mexica everything they knew, from how to make steel, ride a horse or use a gun. Some even joined the Aztec army as mercenaries, advising their new superiors on how to use their new weapons as effectively as possible. Many offered their services only for a limited time and returned to whatever colony they came from once they got the money they wanted, but others chose instead to integrate themselves into Mexica society, learning Nahuatl and doing their best to tolerate their new countrymen's... unusual religious practices. The gold helped deal with that, of course.
Years before their infamous exploits in Florida, Francisco Pizarro (left) and Hernando de Soto (right) both served as mercenaries in the Triple Alliance's ranks (2).
The second task also seemed simple at first, but in the long term it shook the Triple Alliance's foundations to the core. With many cities and lordships losing their entire ruling bloodlines to disease, several power vacuums and succession disputes erupted all over the empire, disputes which could be (and were) exploited by the central government for its own benefit. Though Tenochtitlan's power had steadily risen for decades (its monarch was known as the Huey Tlatoani, a title which is basically the Nahuatl equivalent of King of Kings, since the reign of Ahuitzotl), Cuauhtémoc intervened in local politics in a way that was previously unknown in Mesoamerica outside of the Purépecha state. He did so by moderating the disputes between each altepetl's prominent families, and ensuring that the as many of them as possible were then taken over by candidates who owed their position entirely to his interference, turning what were once vassals who still retained a large degree of autonomy into mere provinces in all but name. While the tlatoani gained many allies through this, allies who depended on him alone, he also earned many enemies among the altepeme's local aristocracies (3).
And they weren't the only ones unhappy with the current state of affairs. With warfare being the main way through which the state acquired new prisoners to sacrifice, many in the nobility and especially the priesthood were anything but content with their monarch's 'hesitation' to subjugate new territories, as well as with his increasingly good relations with a group of foreigners who, as Cortés and his underlings showed years ago, had no respect for their traditions whatsoever (4). Cuauhtémoc was anything but a pacifist, of course, but mustering an army strong enough to embark on a campaign of conquest proved to be a bigger burden than it was during the old times, since hundreds of thousands of once able-bodied warriors were either killed or permanently incapacitated by smallpox. In the end, the tlatoani managed to painstakingly assemble a force of 100.000 men by early 1528. Of these, 4.000 were completely covered in the best armor available (and an unknown number carried at least a cuirass, a steel sword or a pike), roughly 2.500 or so were crossbowmen, 400 rode horses, and, finally, a handpicked contingent of 250 men wielded arquebuses. They were accompanied by 400 Spanish mercenaries and 11 cannons.
Cuauhtémoc was, at this point, four years into his reign, and he was more than ready to unleash his new weapons upon the land. The only thing left to decide was what direction the army should take: northwest, into the kingdom of the Purépecha, who defeated the Mexica many times in the past, or southeast, into the lands of the Maya. This topic was fiercely debated, and in the end the latter option came on top. Though the reasons for this choice are still discussed, since Guatemala is much further away from the Mexica heartland than Michoacán, it is likely that the tlatoani knew of the existence of Panama City and the Spaniards' gradual expansion into Costa Rica and Nicaragua. With this in mind, he may have intended to create a buffer zone in the south to keep the Triple Alliance from being completely surrounded by Spain, or perhaps he just wished to score an easier victory before moving on to the main course.
The territory controlled by the Triple Alliance in 1519, before the conquest of Tlaxcala and Cuauhtémoc's wars of expansion.
Here's the source.
The army, led by Cuauhtémoc himself (Tenochtitlan was left under the care of Tlacotzin, who held the post of cihuacoatl - an "esteemed advisor" of sorts (5)) began marching on February 1528. Their first target was the kingdom of Tlapan (known as Yopitzinco to the Mexica), a small enclave on the coast of the Pacific Ocean that was ignored by previous tlatoque due to its people's stubborn resistance to foreign occupation and the existence of juicier lands elsewhere. Weakened by disease and facing overwhelming odds, the Tlapanecs surrendered without a fight, handing over as much tribute as they could so as to not incur the invaders' wrath. Once this was done, the troops continued to march along the coast until they finally encountered the first polity which dared to resist them, the Mixtec kingdom of Tututepec. The "battle" that ensued was a massacre: already worn down by smallpox and the myriad of problems that came with it, like everyone in Mesoamerica, the Mixtecs were quickly and decisively routed thanks in no small part to the use of cavalry and firearms, and Tututepec was sacked, all at the expense of barely one hundred men.
This was the first major victory of the campaign, and the Mexica were nowhere near done. After spending several weeks in Tututepec, during which several garrisons were set up to consolidate the Triple Alliance's control over the land, the army departed sometime in May, stopping in the province of Xoconochco to rest and prepare for the final leg of their journey: the subjugation of the Mayan Highlands. The first section of it to be conquered was Chiappan (Chiapas), dominated by the cities of Tzinacantlan and Huitztlan. Chiappan proved to be a much harder nut to crack than Tututepec, however, since its rugged terrain and jungles were perfect for guerrilla warfare and almost nullified the invaders' crushing superiority in numbers and technology. Though the Mexica did win in the end, at the cost of thousands of lives (most from attrition), they were forced to leave a detach a sizable part of their army, since the Chiapanecs would revolt against their new overlords out at the first opportunity.
There was only one target worth conquering left now: the city-states of Guatemala, the most powerful among them being the kingdom of Q'umarkaj, ruled by the K'iche' Maya. Irritated by Chiappan's unexpected resistance and fully convinced of his invincibility at this point, Cuauhtémoc demanded that the K'iche' fully submit to Tenochtitlan's authority and pay enormous sums of tribute or be, according to contemporary historians, "wiped from existence". The message was so insulting that, supposedly, the recipients either thought the envoys were madmen or that it would be better to die fighting anyway because of how exorbitant the demands were.
The tlatoani kept his promise: after a battle all too similar to the one that ended Tututepec's independence, Q'umarkaj was not only sacked, but razed, with every building that wasn't a temple being torn to its foundations. A fire, whether on purpose or by accident, broke out and consumed all it could in the city for days on end, becoming the symbol for one of the most traumatic events of Mayan history, perhaps even more so than the collapse of the great metropolises of old. Those who could abandoned their homes and fled north, the final destination of most of them being the distant region of Petén, whose population swelled by many thousands even as smallpox took its toll (6).
Q'umarkaj's neighbors, such as Iximche and Xelaju, swore fealty to the Mexica immediately after this brutal display of power, and avoided its fate. Cuauhtémoc, laden with untold amounts of riches and having tens of thousands of prisoners (most estimates range from twenty to as many as fifty thousand) under his custody, returned to Tenochtitlan on October and was predictably given a hero's welcome. In just eight months, he had done the kind of work his predecessors could only complete after years of fighting, and expanded the Triple Alliance's borders beyond what anyone thought possible.
Little did he know that he was, in fact, sowing the seeds of its destruction, starting with how he thanked the gods for his victory.
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Notes:
(1) There's one very important group I intentionally left out, one whose effects will be analyzed in depth in a later chapter.
(2) Let's just say that "Florida" will look quite a bit different ITTL.
(3) Centralization rarely happens without a hitch, especially in a region full of city-states and petty kingdoms.
(4) It's inevitable that some people will resent the new arrivals and the changes they bring.
(5) This was the post Tlacaelel (the guy who kicked the 'human sacrifice' aspect of the Triple Alliance into overdrive) held IOTL.
(6) Petén was the last Maya kingdom to fall to the Spanish IOTL. It was only conquered in 1697.