ENCOUNTERING THE INHOSPITABLE WORLD

When the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes arrived in the capital he described how the Aztec ruler Moctezuma greeted him with great ceremony.^[576] Moctezuma gave Cortes ‘various treasures of gold and silver and featherwork, and as many as five or six thousand cotton garments, all very rich and woven and embroidered in various ways'.^[577] According to Cortes, Moctezuma also gave him the gift of power to rule, bidding him to take his position upon ‘a very rich throne'.^[578] Moctezuma then assured Cortes that ‘here you will be provided with all that you and your people require, and you shall receive no hurt, for you are in your own land and your own house'.^[579] Not long after this Cortes's troops captured Moctezuma, executed an Amerindian who had reportedly killed some Spanish soldiers, and demanded to be shown where the gold mines were.^[580] The available descriptions of the conquest of Mexico depict a scene of betrayed hospitality, with the imprisoned Moctezuma the archetypical wronged host.

Cortes's account of the conquest of Mexico portrays a host betrayed, but in the events leading up to this he narrates a story of the conquistadores as guests betrayed. In his ‘First Letter' Cortes reports that as he arrived with his troops on the shores of the Yucatan Peninsula ‘certain Indians came to us in a canoe bringing some chickens and a little maize, which was barely enough for a single meal, and told us to take it and leave their land'.^[582] Cortes subsequently engaged in battle and captured the city.^[583] Cortes then reported that the chieftains brought gold ornaments ‘which were thin and of little value'.

Cortes wrote his second letter while preparing for the siege and re-conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1520. This letter was also a narration of events and a plea for authorisation. He continued to describe how the contours of hospitality defined his journey to the Aztec capital. As he arrived in the kingdom of Cempoal he wrote that he was ‘very well received and accommodated by all the natives' who ‘provided the provisions I needed for the journey'.^[586] But as he moved on he crossed an ‘uninhabitable' desert, where his ‘people suffered from thirst and hunger'.^[587] He reports the limited hospitality, writing that in Tascalteca they were received with fanfare and received food ‘though not sufficient'.^[588] Cortes framed the events leading up to their next battle with the Amerindians in terms of wronged hospitality again: ‘during the three days I remained in that city they fed us worse each day, and the lords and principal persons of the city came only rarely to see and speak with me'.^[589] For Cortes, this decline in hospitality was an indicator of deteriorating relations and a warning of conflict.

Cortes's account of the final events of the conquest of Moctezuma's Aztec empire may seem like a case of host betrayed but Cortes's narration of events contains more nuance than this. According to Cortes, when Moctezuma handed him the goods, and power (symbolised by the throne) of the Aztec empire he also reorientated the landscape of host and guest. Moctezuma admits that they are guests like the Spanish: ‘for a long time we have known from the writings of our ancestors that neither I, nor any of us who dwell in this land, are natives of it, but foreigners, who came from distant parts; and likewise we know that a chieftain, of whom we are all vassals, brought our people to this region'. Cortes's account of Moctezuma's admission that the Amerindians knew themselves to be guests narrates the start of the reorien­tation of the guest-host coordinates.

Within three years Cortes, approximately three hundred Castilians (most of whom had never engaged in warfare before), and ‘a few thousand untrained and unpredictable allies' had taken over a population estimated to contain at least 50,000 adults and an empire estimated to have been about 125,000 square miles.^[591] This extraordinary occurrence was, in part, facilitated by manipula­tions of hospitality, the norms of which also helped fashion the veneer of legitimacy.

In the years after the conquest of the Caribbean and Mexico, the Spanish developed an extractive regime of resources and labour, organised through the encomienda and mita systems. Many of the New World's natural resources were appropriated into the stream of commerce flowing across the Atlantic. Cortes's raid on Moctezuma's treasure chest paled in comparison. In the case of silver, it is estimated that between 1503 and 1660 some 250,000 tons of New World silver poured into the Andalusian city of Seville,^[592] where the Casa de Contratacion was established to manage this unprecedented extraction of resources. As Europeans told themselves a story of how this was legitimate, they once again tapped the benevolent resource of hospitality.

9.3