Title: The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico Author: Multiple Nahua authors, compiled and edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla Creation Date: Nahua accounts from 1528-1580s, compiled by Leon-Portilla in 1959 Location: Mesoamerica / Mexico
Summary
The Broken Spears assembles Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519-1521) drawn from multiple indigenous sources, including the Florentine Codex, the Annals of Tlatelolco, and the informants of Bernardino de Sahagun. These texts tell the story of the conquest from the perspective of the conquered: the strange omens that preceded Cortes's arrival, the terror of horses and cannons, the Massacre of the Templo Mayor, the devastating smallpox epidemic, the siege and fall of Tenochtitlan, and the aftermath of destruction. The accounts are raw with grief and disbelief. One of the most famous passages describes the survivors wandering the ruins: "We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead."
Why This Book Matters
For centuries, the conquest of Mexico was narrated exclusively through European sources — Cortes's letters, Bernal Diaz's chronicle. The Broken Spears shattered that monopoly by demonstrating that the conquered had their own literary accounts, composed in their own language, with their own interpretive frameworks. This is not a supplement to the European record but a fundamental challenge to it: where Cortes saw divine providence and martial glory, the Nahua sources see catastrophe, disease, betrayal, and the end of a world. The book is essential to any honest understanding of colonialism and its human cost. It also established the principle — now foundational in postcolonial studies — that history must include the voices of those who were defeated.
Historical Context
The Nahua sources compiled here were produced in the decades immediately following the conquest, a period of shattering demographic collapse (the indigenous population of central Mexico fell by perhaps 90% within a century, primarily due to epidemic disease). Some accounts were solicited by Spanish friars — particularly Sahagun, who trained Nahua scholars to record their own history in the Florentine Codex project. Others, like the Annals of Tlatelolco (c. 1528), appear to be independent indigenous records. Leon-Portilla, a Mexican scholar of Nahuatl language and literature, first compiled these sources in 1959, creating a coherent counter-narrative that became one of the most influential works of Latin American historiography.
Literary Significance
The power of these texts lies in their emotional directness and their use of Nahuatl literary conventions to describe unprecedented catastrophe. The omen narratives employ traditional prophetic forms to frame the conquest as cosmic rupture. The battle descriptions use the vocabulary of flower-war poetry turned tragic. The elegiac passages after the fall of Tenochtitlan achieve a searing intensity: they are among the great laments in world literature, comparable to the destruction poetry of the Hebrew Bible. The juxtaposition of multiple voices and perspectives — warriors, priests, common people — creates a polyphonic texture that no single-authored European account achieves.
Research Notes
The Broken Spears is an anthology, not a single indigenous text, and Leon-Portilla's editorial choices shape the narrative significantly. He selected, arranged, and framed the sources to produce a coherent counter-history, and some scholars argue he romanticised or simplified the indigenous perspective. The underlying Nahuatl texts were themselves produced under colonial conditions — Sahagun's informants were speaking to a Spanish friar — and reflect complex negotiations of power and memory. Nevertheless, the linguistic and cultural authenticity of the Nahuatl sources is not in serious doubt. The 2007 expanded edition includes additional sources and updated scholarship. This compilation remains the most accessible entry point into the indigenous literary record of the conquest, and its impact on how the conquest is taught and understood has been transformative.
The Reading
The Omens
Eight signs appeared before the strangers came.
The first was a tongue of fire in the night sky, a bleeding column of flame that pierced the heavens and appeared each midnight for a year. The people saw it and were afraid. The second was the temple of Huitzilopochtli bursting into flame for no reason -- water was thrown upon it, but the more water they poured, the higher the flames rose, until the temple was consumed. The third was a lightning bolt that struck the temple of Xiuhtecuhtli, but there was no thunder, only a fine rain, and the bolt came from nowhere. The fourth was a comet that streaked across the daytime sky, splitting into three parts as it fell. The fifth was the lake of Mexico boiling without wind or heat, flooding the houses at its edge. The sixth was a woman's voice heard weeping through the streets at night: "My children, we must flee far away from this city! My children, where shall I take you?"
The seventh was a strange bird, an ash-grey crane with a mirror in its crown. Fishermen caught it and brought it to Motecuhzoma. When the king looked into the mirror, he saw the night sky filled with stars. He looked again and saw armed men riding on the backs of deer, charging across a plain. He called his magicians, but when they came to look, the bird had vanished.
The eighth was monstrous beings -- men with two heads sharing one body -- who appeared in the streets and then dissolved when Motecuhzoma tried to examine them.
These omens, recorded by the Nahua informants of Sahagun, are the frame through which the indigenous witnesses understood what was about to happen to them. They knew something catastrophic was coming. Their world was telling them.
The Arrival
In the year One-Reed -- 1519 by the European calendar -- the strangers appeared on the coast. The messengers Motecuhzoma sent returned with descriptions that seemed to come from a dream or a nightmare: men with skin the colour of limestone, wrapped in iron, carrying thunder-sticks that shattered stone, riding on enormous deer. The messengers brought back detailed accounts of what they had seen: "Their bodies are completely covered, so that only their faces can be seen. Their skin is white, as if it were made of lime. They have yellow hair, though some of them have black. Their beards are long and yellow, and their mustaches are also yellow."
The strangers ate food that was "like human food" but white, "like dried maize stalks, and sweet to the taste." Their weapons made an unbearable noise: "A thing like a ball of stone comes out of its entrails; it comes out shooting sparks and raining fire. The smoke that comes out of it has a pestilent odour, like rotten mud. If the cannon is aimed against a mountain, the mountain splits and cracks open. If it is aimed against a tree, it shatters the tree into splinters."
And the deer they rode -- the horses -- "are as tall as the roof of a house." The dogs they brought "are enormous, with flat ears and long, dangling tongues. The colour of their eyes is a burning yellow; their eyes flash fire and shoot off sparks."
Motecuhzoma heard these reports and was paralysed. He consulted his magicians, his priests. He sent gifts of gold and precious feathers to the coast, hoping to satisfy the strangers and make them go away. It was the worst possible response: the gold inflamed the strangers' desire. They came closer.
Motecuhzoma's Torment
The accounts describe Motecuhzoma's psychological disintegration with devastating precision. He was the ruler of the greatest city in the Americas, a man whose word was law from coast to coast, who commanded armies of tens of thousands -- and he could not decide what to do. He tried to flee: "If only I could find a cave in which to hide!" He sent sorcerers to cast spells on the strangers; the sorcerers failed and returned in disgrace, saying the strangers' power was too great. He attempted to block the roads; the strangers pushed through. He sent more gold; it drew them faster.
Some accounts suggest Motecuhzoma believed the strangers might be the returning god Quetzalcoatl and his retinue, fulfilling a prophecy. Whether this was genuine belief or a later colonial-era rationalisation is debated, but the Nahua sources present a ruler trapped between interpretive frameworks -- unable to categorise the strangers as gods, humans, or demons, and therefore unable to act.
When Cortes finally reached Tenochtitlan, Motecuhzoma went out to meet him on the causeway. The account of their meeting is precise and painful: "He presented many gifts to the Captain and his commanders, those who had come to make war. He showered gifts upon them and hung flowers around their necks; he gave them necklaces of flowers and bands of flowers to adorn their breasts; he set garlands of flowers upon their heads. Then he hung the gold necklaces around their necks and gave them presents of every sort as gifts of welcome."
The stranger received the gifts and then seized Motecuhzoma himself.
The Massacre at the Templo Mayor
The accounts of what followed are told from the perspective of those who witnessed them and survived. The Spanish and their Tlaxcalan allies settled into the city as guests who were in fact occupiers. Motecuhzoma was held captive in his own palace. For a time, an uneasy coexistence held.
Then came the festival of Toxcatl, the great celebration in honour of Huitzilopochtli. The Mexica asked permission to hold their ceremonies. Permission was granted. The nobles, priests, and finest warriors gathered in the courtyard of the Templo Mayor. They were unarmed. They were dressed in their ceremonial regalia -- feathers, gold, turquoise, bells. They were dancing.
The Spanish attacked without warning. They sealed the exits and began killing.
"They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off his arms. Then they cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor. They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords. They attacked some of them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails."
The passage continues, unflinching. The floor became slippery with blood. The stench filled the air. The celebrants tried to climb the walls; they were struck down. Some played dead among the bodies; they were found and killed.
"The blood of the warriors flowed like water and gathered into pools. The pools widened, and the stench of blood and entrails filled the air."
This is the Noche Triste -- the night of sorrows -- but the Nahua accounts make clear that the true sorrow was not the Spanish losses that followed when the city rose in fury, but the unprovoked slaughter of unarmed celebrants in their own temple.
The Siege
After the massacre, Tenochtitlan erupted. The people drove the Spanish out of the city. Motecuhzoma was killed -- the Nahua accounts say the Spanish killed him; the Spanish say the Mexica stoned him. Either way, the ruler was dead. Cuitlahuac took command and then died of smallpox within eighty days. Cuauhtemoc, the last tlatoani, assumed leadership of a city that was already dying.
The smallpox had arrived first. The accounts describe it with the same precise horror as the massacre: "Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonising sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds like corpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. They could not lie face down or roll from one side to the other. If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain. A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds."
Cortes returned with reinforcements, with brigantines built to sail the lake, with tens of thousands of indigenous allies -- enemies of the Mexica who saw the Spanish as a weapon against Tenochtitlan's imperial dominance. The siege lasted eighty days. The Spanish destroyed the aqueducts that carried fresh water to the island city. They demolished the causeways. They shelled the city from the lake.
Inside the city, the people starved. They ate leather. They ate grass. They drank brackish water from the lake and became sicker. They fought from the rubble of their own buildings, retreating block by block, fighting without weapons when their weapons broke. The accounts describe warriors tearing stones from walls to throw at the attackers. Women fighting with whatever they could find. Children dying in the streets.
The Fall
The fall of Tenochtitlan is described with a grief that transcends the centuries.
"Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood. We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead. The shields of our warriors were its defence, but they could not save it."
Cuauhtemoc, the last ruler, was captured while trying to escape by canoe. The Nahua accounts describe his surrender without sentimentality and without the noble-savage romanticism that European writers would later impose. He was a young man who had fought with everything he had, and he had lost, and his city was in ruins, and his people were dying of plague and starvation, and there was nothing left to fight with.
"He was taken to Cortes, who received him with all courtesy. Cuauhtemoc said: 'I have done everything in my power to save my kingdom and defend my people, and everything that it was my duty to do has been done. Now I am being brought before you by force as a prisoner. Take the dagger that you are wearing in your belt and kill me with it at once.' He wept as he spoke."
The Aftermath
The final accounts describe the exodus from the ruined city. The survivors were searched by the Spanish as they left -- stripped of any gold or jade they carried. Women hid valuables in their clothing, in their hair, in their mouths. Some smeared mud on their faces to make themselves unattractive and avoid being taken as slaves.
"The people were worn and weary. They had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. Many of the women carried their small children on their backs. They slung them in the folds of their shawls, or in baskets that they wore on their heads."
The gold the Spanish found was melted down. The books -- the codices containing centuries of knowledge, history, astronomy, genealogy -- were burned. The temples were demolished, their stones used to build churches. The canals were filled in. The lake was drained. The city that had been one of the largest in the world was dismantled and a Spanish city built on its bones.
The Nahua poets composed their laments:
"How can we save our homes, my people? The Aztecs are deserting the city: the city is in flames, and all is darkness and destruction. Weep, my people: know that with these disasters we have lost the Mexican nation. The water has turned bitter, our food is bitter. These are the acts of the Giver of Life."
And:
"Nothing but flowers and songs of sorrow are left in Mexico and Tlatelolco, where once we saw warriors and wise men. We wander here and there in our desolate poverty. We are mortal men. We have seen bloodshed and pain where once we saw beauty and valour. We are crushed to the ground; we lie in ruins. There is nothing but grief and suffering in Mexico and Tlatelolco."
These words were written down close to the events they describe, by Nahua survivors and scholars working within the first colonial generations. They are not free of mediation: some passed through friars, some through later compilers, and all through the conditions of conquest itself. But they remain testimony of extraordinary directness -- the voice of the conquered telling the story of their own destruction in their own language, with their own literary forms, and with a grief that no passage of time has diminished.
The spears are broken. The city is gone. But the voices remain.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The standard edition is Miguel Leon-Portilla's expanded 2007 version (Beacon Press), translated by Lysander Kemp and others. The underlying Nahuatl sources — particularly the Florentine Codex — are among the most carefully documented colonial-era transcriptions of indigenous oral tradition. The 2007 edition includes a new postscript by Leon-Portilla reflecting on the reception and significance of the indigenous testimonies.
By Miguel Leon-Portilla. The standard expanded edition — the essential entry point into the indigenous literary record of the conquest.
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