Cortez conquered, but, perhaps, will present the student with some national characteristics of a race that still inhabits Mexico jointly with the Spanish emigrants, and which is the lawful descendant of the wandering tribes who founded the city of Tenochtitlan.
The Aztec government was a monarchy, but the right to the throne did not fall by the accident of descent upon a lineal relative of the last king, whose age would have entitled him, by European rule, to the royal succession. The brothers of the deceased prince, or his nephews, if he had no nearer kin, were the individuals from whom the new sovereign was chosen by four nobles who had been selected as electors by their own aristocratic body during the preceding reign. These electors, together with the two royal allies of Tezcoco and Tlacopan, who were united in the college as merely honorary personages, decided the question as to the candidate, whose warlike and intellectual qualities were always closely scanned by these severe judges.
The elevation of the new monarch to the throne was pompous: yet, republican and just as was the rite of selection, the ceremony of coronation was not performed until the new king had procured, by conquest in war, a crowd of victims to grace his assumption of the crown with their sacrifice at the altar. The palaces of these princes and their nobles were of the most sumptuous character, according to the description that has been left us by the conquerors themselves.
The royal state and style of these people may be best described in the artless language of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier of the conquest, whose simple narrative, though sometimes colored with the superstitions of his age, is one of the most valuable and veritable relics of that great event that has been handed down to posterity.
In describing the entrance of the Spaniards into the city—Diaz declares, with characteristic energy, that the whole of what he saw on that occasion appeared to him as if he had beheld it but yesterday;—and he fervently exclaims: "Glory be to our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave us courage to venture on such dangers and brought us safely through them!"
The Spaniards, as we have already said in a preceding chapter, were lodged and entertained at the expense of Montezuma, who welcomed them as his guests, and unwisely attempted to convince them of his power by exhibiting his wealth and state. Two hundred of his nobility stood as guards in his ante-chamber.
