Doctor Who - Documentary s01e11 Episode Script
Chronicle - The Realms of Gold
NARRATOR: The New World.
The Great Continent itself.
Uncharted and unexplored.
America.
A few Europeans had already set foot on its shores, driven onward by their hunger for the legendary gold of the Indies.
They had raided and traded, but though they had brought back enough gold and jewellery to whet the appetites of their compatriots, politically they had achieved nothing.
Then, in February 1519, there appeared off these jungle shores 11 ships, commanded by a man of a different stamp to any who had gone before him.
The first and greatest of the conquistadors, Hernan Cortes.
His story is the story of the conquest of the Mexican empire, and of its emperor, Montezuma.
But it is also something more, the first direct confrontation in all their power and might of the old world and the new.
This is Tulum, on the windswept east coast of the peninsula of Yucatan.
When the Spanish sailors saw it for the first time, they were amazed, comparing it in size and beauty to their own great city of Seville.
Tulum is smaller now, but its temples and watchtowers still keep their vigil over the Caribbean, just as they did 300 years before Cortes was born.
It was built, and in 1519 still occupied, by the Mayas, perhaps the most gifted of all the peoples of ancient Mexico.
By the 6th century AD, while England was still groping through the darkest of the Dark Ages, the Mayas were already erecting their temples in the dense rainforests of southern Yucatan.
Palenque.
Almost a thousand years ago it was abandoned by its inhabitants and engulfed by the jungle.
In the last century, soon after its rediscovery, it was so overgrown that according to one account, "The sighing of the night wind "through the taut roots of the trees sang like a deep Aeolian harp.
" The Indians wouldn't go near it.
No one yet knows how far Palenque extends, or what other marvels still lie hidden in the forest.
From temples to a palace.
Here, at Uxmal, is Maya architecture at its most glorious, buildings that would do credit, in their grandeur and proportions, to any city in the world.
Their upper walls are a honeycomb of decoration in high relief, black shadows stabbing across the sun-baked stone.
But Hernan Cortes knew nothing of all this.
He was now 34 years old, the son of a poor Spanish landowner from Extremadura in southern Spain, who had left home when he was 16 to seek his fortune and arrived three years later at Hispaniola, now Haiti, the first of the Spanish colonies in the West Indies.
Later he had moved to Cuba and there he had lived until, in 1518, he talked, intrigued and bribed his way to the command of a new expedition to the west.
One of the men who knew him best describes him like this.
MAN: "He was tall and sturdy and his face was grey.
"Had it been longer, he would have been more handsome.
"He had a deep chest and broad shoulders and was slightly bowlegged.
"He was a splendid horseman and skilled with every kind of weapon.
"He said his prayers every morning and attended mass with devotion.
"He was fond of cards and dice and excessively fond of women.
" NARRATOR: That was an old soldier speaking, Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
He had fought at Cortes' side throughout.
Years after, he'd record every detail, and his story is the most vivid that has come down to us.
The expedition sailed on the 10th of February, 1519.
It had two main objectives, one material, the other spiritual.
The material one, as always, was gold, a subject never very far from the minds of the conquistadors.
But it's all too easy in our cynical modern way to forget that to them, the spiritual one was every bit as important.
They were not only conquerors, they were missionaries.
Heathen lands were legitimate prey, which was why the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, had, in a sudden burst of generosity, recently granted the whole Western hemisphere to Spain.
But the right of conquest carried with it the obligation to convert, and here, too, the Spaniards did their work well.
Westward the expedition sailed, then hugging close inshore, rounded the northern coast of Yucatan, to Tabasco.
Cortes' resources were small.
His 11 ships carried only about 550 soldiers and 100 sailors.
But they also had three secret weapons: muskets, a few cannon and 16 horses.
Such things were unknown on the American continent.
At their initial encounter, the Indians, terrified as they were, had bravely stood their ground against the cannon, but the horses were too much for them.
At first, they took horse and rider to be one single animal, some monstrous centaur bearing down to destroy them.
And they fled.
All these drawings are the work of the Indians themselves, produced to illustrate the Spanish histories a few years after the conquest.
Like the Bayeux Tapestry, they give us a complete contemporary pictorial record of the campaign.
On Monday morning they sailed away, loaded with gifts from the Tabascans, among which was perhaps the greatest godsend that Cortes was ever to receive.
Her name was Marina.
Bernal Diaz tells us that she was good-looking, intelligent and self-assured.
Most important of all, she spoke both Aztec and Maya.
From the moment she came on board, Cortes' language problems were effectively at an end.
Later, Marina was also to become his mistress and the mother of his child.
But it was as her lover's interpreter and advisor that she was to play so important a part in the conquest, and to take her place in history.
Sailing slowly up the coast, the fleet at last came to a long sandy beach sheltered by a little island.
It offered a good temporary anchorage, and the day, Good Friday, seemed an auspicious one to make a landing.
The natives proved friendly, and presents were exchanged.
But, as the Spaniards soon learned, they were now within the borders of the Mexican empire.
Montezuma's spies were watching them.
His people, the Aztecs, were comparatively new arrivals in Mexico.
Harsh, warlike, friendless, they had drifted down from the north guided only by a prophecy that, one day, they would see an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its talons and that where they saw it, they would make their home.
In 1325, the prophecy was fulfilled on an island in the great mountain lake of Texcoco, 7,000 feet above the sea.
Once here, they set about civilising themselves, adopting the skills, traditions and customs from the people whom they had conquered, and from all those who had inhabited the valley before them.
Particularly, perhaps, from the peoples of Teotihuacan, this immense, sacred city that had grown and flourished a thousand years before they arrived, in the days when Europe still bowed before the might of Imperial Rome.
Away to the south, on the man-made island, they built their own capital.
Later, their descendants were to call it Mexico City.
They called it Tenochtitlan.
They, too, had no knowledge of horses or beasts of burden.
They had no wheel, plough, arch, scales or weights.
Yet they were superb craftsmen, whose works of art still have the power to astonish and to terrify.
And as astronomers, they were superb.
This is the famous Aztec calendar, a votive monument to the sun.
At its centre, the face of the sun god.
Often, they identified their gods with the animals they hunted.
The jaguar, whose flayed skin they would wear in battle, or the eagle, the symbol of their bravest warriors.
But above all, the Aztecs were fighters.
They had to be.
For just as thoroughly as they understood the movements of the heavenly bodies across the sky, they were equally thoroughly convinced that these bodies could be maintained in their courses only for as long as the responsible gods were kept propitiated, and this in turn meant keeping them perpetually gorged on the most precious food available, human hearts and human blood.
When an Aztec went to war, he went not to kill but to take prisoners, countless prisoners, for the sacrifice.
And the Aztecs could never get enough of them.
For the great consecration of the temple at Tenochtitlan, in four days, no less than 80,000 victims met their deaths on the sacrificial altars, each in the same way.
The officiating priest would rip open his breast with an obsidian knife, reach into the cavity and rip out the still-palpitating heart to offer to the gods.
Among these gods were Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird wizard, god of the sun and of war, and beneficiary of most of the sacrifices.
Then there was the earth goddess, Coatlicue, her head made up of two confronted snakes.
But there was also another god, gentler than these, yet still formidable.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
These are the remains of one of his temples.
Long ago, so the legend ran, he had descended to Earth in human shape, white-skinned and black-bearded, and after 20 years teaching in Mexico, had sailed away to the east.
One day he would return, dressed in black, and re-establish his rule.
His homecoming would be in a one reed year, and would usher in a time of great suffering and tribulation for the Mexican people.
Now, one reed year, according to the Aztec calendar, fell only once in every 52 of our years.
There had been one in 1415, another in 1467, and it fell again in 1519.
And so, even before Cortes' arrival, Montezuma was worried.
High priest as well as emperor, no one knew the prophecies better than he.
Among other portents, for a whole year a tongue of fire had appeared in the heavens, and now the messengers arrived on foot, for there was no other means of travel, the 300-odd miles from the coast.
They told of how they had seen these mysterious strangers fishing from a boat and then climbing back onto two big towers standing in the midst of the sea.
When he heard that they had white faces, black beards, and that their leader was dressed in black, Montezuma's worst fears were confirmed.
He couldn't possibly know the reason for this last phenomenon, that it was Good Friday.
For him, it was the nine wind day, by another incredible coincidence the one day of the year sacred to Quetzalcoatl.
No further doubt was left in his mind.
The plumed serpent had come back to claim his due.
There was still just a faint chance that he might be headed off, and bribed not to come to the capital.
Montezuma now ordered ambassadors to hurry down to the coast with presents for the strangers.
Virtually every gift they brought was of gold, including a huge golden sun disc the size of a cartwheel.
But Cortes kept his head, giving them, not perhaps entirely by way of entertainment, a demonstration of his firepower that left them terrified.
Finally, he offered them food and asked them to return to their master with his greetings, which, he added, he intended to deliver personally before long.
The ambassadors instructed their scribes to make careful drawings of all they saw.
This picture is one of the results.
Cortes on his horse, drawn at the time, on the spot.
But Cortes had already made up his mind.
The gold he had been given, together with everything he had heard from Marina, had convinced him that he was indeed on the threshold of El Dorado, and here, at this moment, he resolved, with a puny force under his command, to march against Montezuma and all his huge empire.
Naturally, the authorities in Cuba would never allow him to undertake such a task.
Before going any further, he would have to shake himself free of them.
But how? Only by establishing a new colony, equal in status with Cuba itself.
And so, just a few miles up the coast, he founded, 450 years ago, the first democratically constituted municipality in the Americas, which, in honour of the Good Friday landings, he named Villa Rica de Vera Cruz, "the rich town of the true cross", thus neatly reflecting the two interests predominant in the Spanish minds, gold and the gospel.
Henceforth, it was to the emperor Charles V, his own sovereign, that he would be directly responsible.
Now Vera Cruz lay only a short march from Cempoala, an important city of the Totonacs.
MAN: "As we came among the houses and saw how large a town it was, "larger than any we'd yet seen, we were filled with admiration.
"It was so green with vegetation that it looked like a garden, "and its streets were so full of men and women who'd come out to see us "that we gave thanks to God for the discovery of such a country.
" This is the great temple area of Cempoala as it stands today, perhaps even greener now than it was then.
From what we know of them, the Totonacs seem to have been a gay, cheerful sort of people, as is borne out by all these lovely, laughing little statuettes that they left in such quantities behind them.
But as they explained to Cortes, they were sorely oppressed by the immense tributes exacted from them by their Aztec overlords.
They saw in the Spaniards a possible means of freeing themselves from this oppression.
And that's why Cortes found them not only friendly but actively eager to help him.
Once he had made sure of his alliance with the Totonacs, Cortes felt free to tackle his missionary duties.
Though the Totonacs were perhaps one degree less addicted to sacrifice than the Aztecs, 450 years ago, these walls and steps were running red with human blood.
So Cortes insisted that there should be no more sacrifices.
The Cempoalans pleaded, but he was adamant.
The blood was scraped from the temple walls, and several of the Cempoalans, including eight noble maidens for the Spanish captains, received a Christian baptism.
And now, before leaving for the interior, Cortes performed what was, for sheer cold-blooded courage, one of the most remarkable acts of his life.
He bribed a few of his sailors to riddle the hulls of his ships with holes, and then, on the pretext that they were worm-eaten and unseaworthy, deliberately to run them aground.
Henceforth, whatever happened, there could be no retreat.
As he wrote later to Charles V, "That way, I felt safer.
" Few other commanders could have said the same.
And so, in August 1519, with less than 500 men, 13 horses, a few pieces of light artillery and a troop of native porters, this extraordinary man of 34 set off, without maps, into an unknown country against an empire of apparently unlimited power and wealth, never knowing what lay beyond the next corner, except that it would be many times stronger than himself, and almost certainly hostile.
And what a march it was.
Striking west from Cempoala, they found the flat coastal plain at its worst.
Unbearably hot, periodically lashed with summer rains that reduced the paths to quagmires, bringing malaria and yellow fever in their wake.
On and on they trudged, in constant fear of ambush, knowing that the enemy, unseen and unheard, was never far away.
Then the climb began, 4,000 feet in some 30 miles, sun and rain alternately beating down on the armour they dared not remove for a moment.
Up and up they went, cocoa and banana giving way to scrub and cactus.
Up still further, 7,000 feet now, higher perhaps than any of them had been before, with the new disquieting sensations of breathlessness and lassitude.
MAN: "In this uninhabited country we could find nothing to eat "and the wind blew off the snowy heights and we shivered with cold.
" NARRATOR: At last, they emerged onto the high plateau.
But, as the Spaniards were marching, the Aztecs were watching and running.
Montezuma's messengers, their relay system so well-organised that messages could get the 300 miles from capital to coast in 24 hours, were keeping their anxious master constantly posted with the invaders'progress.
MAN: "There were times when our thirst was such that we would chew thistles "to make our lips bleed and so moisten our mouths.
"At others, "the only way we could in some measure refresh our parched tongues "was to hold the cold edge of our axes between our lips.
" And there was hard fighting ahead of them, against the people of Tlaxcala.
It was only after three weeks of bloodshed that the Tlaxcalans admitted themselves beaten and received Cortes in their capital.
They offered him their friendship and they were as good as their word.
Henceforth, they were his staunchest allies and a large number of them accompanied him on the next stage of his journey to Cholula.
Cholula was an ancient and sacred city.
Here, the god Quetzalcoatl had lived for 20 years, teaching its people the arts of civilisation before he disappeared over the sea.
To him, too, was dedicated its great pyramid, now overgrown but still recognisable.
Originally it covered over 40 acres, making it, in terms of cubic content, the largest man-made structure in the world.
Its walls were held fast by a special cement made from lime mixed with the blood of children.
Almost as soon as they entered the city, the Spaniards grew suspicious.
Some of the streets had been recently barricaded, huge piles of stones were visible on the flat roofs of the houses at strategic points.
Most ominous of all, perhaps, Cholula seemed almost devoid of women and children.
And now the faithful Marina came to Cortes with a story that confirmed his worst fears.
The wife of one of the Cholulan captains had warned her of a plot to seize all the Spaniards the following morning and take them off to Montezuma for sacrifice.
The next morning, Cortes gathered all the Cholulans he could muster within the Spanish camp and told them that he knew everything that was in their hearts.
Then he pronounced sentence.
(GUNSHOT) From a nearby rooftop came the blast of a Spanish musket, the agreed signal for slaughter.
The Spanish artillery opened fire and, as Cortes later wrote to Charles V, in two hours, more than 3,000 men died.
It was a massacre and Cortes has been bitterly blamed for it.
Yet he was not normally a bloodthirsty man.
Never once in the whole campaign did he resort to force unless his peace overtures had been rejected.
The Cholulans were armed, the Spaniards overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Cortes' first duty was to his men, and he discharged it in the only way he could.
And now all was ready for the last stage of the march.
There was to be no more bloodshed.
The final challenge was purely geographical.
From Cholula, Cortes had often looked at the two great volcanoes Popocatepetl and the white woman, Iztaccihuatl, that guarded the approach to the capital, and he had known that his route would take him between them.
He had no wish to linger in Cholula.
Off he marched once more, over that high saddle of rock.
The final barrier.
Physically, for himself and his men, those last 50 miles must have been the most gruelling of all.
The route wound upward through thick pine forests to the top of the 12,000-foot pass.
Dragging their artillery behind them, Cortes and his allies found themselves at last at the highest point of their journey, immediately below the great peak of Popocatepetl itself.
They'd been marching over two months and had fought at least six battles.
When they reached the watershed, they were near the limits of physical exhaustion.
But in that cold, there could be no rest.
Finally, the road began to descend.
It turned a sharp corner and suddenly, through the pines, the Spaniards were gazing down on the vision they'd looked forward to for so long, a huge lake sparkling in the sun and in the midst of that lake, linked to its shores by three slender causeways, Montezuma's capital, Tenochtitlan.
Now the lake is gone and the Aztec city, but this must have been something like the view on which the Spaniards gazed that November morning.
MAN: "We were struck with wonder and admiration.
"It seemed to us like one of those enchanted fables "from the book of Amatus.
"Those big towers, the temples "and buildings all made of stone, rising from the water.
"Indeed, some of us asked whether it was not all a dream.
" NARRATOR: It was on November 8, 1519, that Hernan Cortes led his 400 tired and bedraggled Spaniards along the wide causeway that connected the southern suburbs with the capital itself.
They crossed a bridge and found themselves on what he later described as "a wide, straight, beautiful avenue" to see another procession approaching to meet them.
It was the emperor, riding out in a golden palanquin, to meet his god and his destiny.
MAN: "And the great Montezuma descended from his litter, "and the other great chieftains "supported him beneath a marvellously rich canopy "of green feathers, decorated with gold and silver and pearls.
"The great Montezuma was magnificently clad, "wearing sandals, the soles of which were of gold "and the upper parts ornamented with precious stones.
"And there were other great lords who walked before the great Montezuma, "laying down cloaks so that his feet should not touch the earth.
"Not one dared to raise his eyes towards him.
" NARRATOR: But Cortes did.
Dismounting from his horse, he strode, smiling, towards the emperor.
The old world and the new, at last, stood face to face.
This first sight of Montezuma in all his glory made a deep impression on the Spaniards.
But his address of welcome, faithfully rendered by Marina, must have left them dumbfounded.
This man, whom they knew to have done everything in his power to prevent their coming, now greeted their leader like a king and a god, spoke of promises and prophecies, and virtually seemed to offer him the throne of Mexico.
Cortes in turn made a suitably polite reply, after which Montezuma personally led his guests to the palace he had had prepared for them next to his own.
But Cortes remained on his guard.
He was being treated as an honoured guest, but the truth was that he was on an island fortress in the middle of a strange and distant land, with only a handful of men and virtually no lines of communication with the outside world.
He placed his artillery carefully and ordered his soldiers to remain inside the palace and ready for action.
Then he settled down to diplomacy.
Montezuma was now 52.
MAN: "He was a good height, slender, and not very dark, "in fact the usual Indian complexion.
"His hair was short, his face long, but somehow cheerful.
"He had fine eyes, "and his expression was tender and grave.
"He was very neat and clean and took a bath every afternoon.
" In the weeks that followed, the Spanish soldiery came to love and respect him, not so much for the prodigious generosity with which he loaded them with presents, as for his extraordinary natural grace and dignity.
Before long, he was to know them all by name, and they, in their turn, treated him as the emperor he was.
Cortes, meanwhile, had come straight to the point.
He told him first of his own sovereign, Charles V, who he explained must henceforth be Montezuma's sovereign, too.
And then he finally broached the delicate subject of Christianity.
Here he was less successful.
On the fourth day, he asked his host's permission to visit the great temple at Tlatelolco, in the northern part of the city.
Montezuma agreed, and when Cortes reached the top of the 114 steps that led to the sanctuary, was waiting there to receive him.
MAN: "Then Montezuma took him by the hand "and told him to look at his great city "and all the other cities standing in the water.
"And we saw the three causeways and the bridges and the canoes, "some coming with provisions, others returning with merchandise.
"We saw temples and shrines in these cities "that looked like gleaming white towers and castles.
" NARRATOR: But inside the sanctuary, the scene changed.
Before the idols lay five human hearts, still warm and steaming.
MAN: "The walls of the shrines were so caked with blood "and the floor so bathed in it that the stench was worse "than that of any slaughterhouse in Spain.
" NARRATOR: And around stood the priests, ready to eat the limbs of the victims.
MAN: "They wore their hair very long, down to their waists, "and it was all so clotted and matted with blood "that it could not be pulled apart.
"And they smelled of sulphur.
But they also smelled of something worse, "of decaying flesh.
" Yet through all this nightmare of carnage and butchery, Montezuma remained gentle and dignified as ever, seemingly unable to understand his guests' horror.
Only at the end did his jaw tighten, when Cortes was rash enough to express his revulsion at this loathsome religion, and suggest the setting up of a Christian altar.
And even when he asked his guests to leave, Montezuma's natural courtesy did not desert him.
They, for their part, were only too delighted to obey.
Gratefully they hurried past the skull-racks and the kitchens where the human meat was prepared, back to the whitewashed freshness of their own quarters.
And even there, there must have been many who wondered how long it would be before those grim altars reeked, not with Indian, but with Spanish blood.
And so Cortes hit on his next spectacular decision.
He would make Montezuma his hostage.
He would simply be moved to the Spanish quarters.
There he could choose any apartments he liked, bring his wives and servants and carry on all the day-to-day business of government.
It would be nothing more than a change of residence.
Montezuma tried to argue, but he couldn't go against what he still believed was a divine will.
That evening, he was installed in Cortes' palace.
The Spaniards continued to treat him with as much respect as ever, but henceforth, both Montezuma and his subjects knew where the real power lay.
And, when a few days later they ratified their formal submission to Charles V, they were only confirming an established fact.
MAN: "They showed much emotion in doing so, "and the great Montezuma could not restrain his tears.
"He was so dear to us, and we were so much affected "at seeing him weep that our own eyes grew tender.
"Some of our soldiers even wept as openly as Montezuma, "such was our love for him.
" NARRATOR: Back to Spain went the first fruits of the victory, the emperor Charles' share of the Mexican tribute.
Another fifth was kept by Cortes for expenses.
The rest was divided among the soldiers.
None of it now remains.
Nearly all the gold and jewellery was melted down into ingots, crudely stamped with the arms of Spain.
Two pieces only have come down to us, not of gold, but of their exquisite feather work, which the Aztecs made their own.
One is this shield.
The other is Montezuma's own ceremonial headdress.
Seeing them for the first time, the German artist Albrecht Durer exclaimed, "Never before have I set eyes on anything that has so rejoiced my heart, "for I have been shown the things which were brought to the king "from the new golden land, and the subtle ingenuity of the people "in these distant regions has left me spellbound.
" By the beginning of the year 1520, the Spanish conquest of Mexico might have seemed over, but now Cortes' luck changed, thanks to the foolishness of one of his captains, Pedro de Alvarado, whom Cortes had left behind in the capital when he had to dash to the coast to defeat a punitive expedition sent by the jealous authorities in Cuba.
Though this new expedition was larger and better-equipped, it was no match for Cortes.
It was soundly defeated at Cempoala.
Most of the soldiers transferred their allegiance, and when, in June, Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, it was at the head of well over 1,000 men, with a hundred horses.
A month before, there had been held the annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, during which a ritual dance was traditionally held in the courtyard of the great temple.
Suspecting a plot, Alvarado had charged into the temple precinct, killing the dancers and as many other Indians as he could, up to 1,000 of them, including all the flower of the Aztec nobility.
Within the hour, the whole city was up in arms, and before long the Spaniards found themselves virtually blockaded in their palace.
Thanks to Montezuma's intervention, there was no more bloodshed, but Montezuma's influence was waning.
The story of Quetzalcoatl's return was forgotten, a new opposition party had grown up in the capital, determined to rid Mexico, immediately and by force, of Cortes and all his men.
And on the very evening that Cortes returned to the capital, a specially-convened Aztec council of state had dethroned him and relieved him of all his powers.
By the next morning, the atmosphere had changed from passive discontent to active opposition, and now the battle began in earnest.
MAN: "Their tenacity was beyond description.
"Three or four soldiers of our company "who had served in Italy swore to God many times "that they had never seen such fighting.
"Not in the Christian wars or against the French king's artillery "or the great Turk.
"Nor had they ever seen men so courageous "at charging with closed ranks.
" (HORSE NEIGHING) On the fifth day, Cortes saw that the odds were impossible, and sent to Montezuma to ask him to negotiate a truce.
The Spanish messengers found him sunk in despair.
There was nothing more he could do, he said.
Thanks to Cortes, he had lost his throne.
His people would no longer listen to him.
But, at last, he agreed to try.
The great square in front of the palace was thronged with Aztec warriors, but when they saw their former monarch slowly climb the steps to the terrace, they grew still.
He pleaded with them, and implored them to call off the attack, giving them his word that the Spaniards would leave the city just as soon as they were permitted to do so.
For a moment, a great wave of sympathy seemed to well up from the crowd to their sad ex-emperor.
Then, suddenly, came a volley of stones.
One of them hit Montezuma on the head.
He fell to the ground and was carried to his apartments by the Spaniards.
Cortes himself hurried to his side.
The wound did not seem particularly grave.
But Montezuma had lost the will to live.
He refused all treatment and turned his face to the wall.
MAN: "When we least expected it, they came to say that he was dead.
"Cortes wept for him, and all of us captains and soldiers.
"There was not one among us who did not mourn him like a father, "which was not to be wondered at "for he was a good man.
" NARRATOR: But Montezuma was more than that.
He was a noble, tragic figure.
From the outset, he had seen as Cortes himself never saw, the full dimensions of the cataclysm that was to overtake his empire.
And he had known that it was inevitable.
He may have been mistaken in seeing Cortes as a god or even as the instrument of one, but he could no more have prevented the Spanish conquest than if it had in fact been divinely ordained.
His friendship with his conqueror, for whom ultimately he gave both his throne and his life, was founded not on cowardice, but on wisdom.
For he had know that violence would not prevail.
And for more than a year after his death, he was to be proved right.
As Montezuma's body was handed over to his people and borne away down the canals to its ritual cremation, Cortes knew that with it had gone the last of his hopes of remaining in the city.
He must retreat, and quickly.
And so he deliberately selected the western causeway not the southern one by which he had come.
It was shorter and would probably be less well-guarded.
Outside, the night was dark.
A mist had risen from the lake and a light rain had begun to fall.
Softly, the Spanish column set off through the deserted streets, and began their march along the causeway.
(TRUMPET BLOWING) Suddenly came the noise of a conch shell trumpet.
From all the temple tops of the city, the Aztec war drums began to throb out their summons.
In a moment, the water was alive with canoes, all loaded with warriors shouting and showering arrows on the retreating column.
Cortes had devised portable bridges to be laid across the gaps in the causeway.
In the chaos and confusion they were virtually useless.
But before long, the gaps were choked with fallen men and horses and the Spaniards were able to fight their way across a bridge of dead bodies.
Many of them had died not from wounds but from drowning, weighed down by the gold that they had refused to leave behind.
Hours later, what remained of the column limped into the little village of Tacuba.
And there, under a great cypress tree that still stands today, flung themselves down to rest.
MAN: "I have forgotten to record how glad we were to see "our Donnamarina still alive.
"Some Tlaxcalans had rescued her at the bridge.
"But out of the 24 horses that remained to us, not one was able to run, "not a horseman able to raise an arm, not a foot soldier able to move.
" NARRATOR: This was indeed the Noche Triste, the night of sorrow.
After a long and painful retreat round the lake, the shattered force met an Aztec army of far superior strength at Otumba and, unbelievably, routed it.
Then at last, five days later, they reached Tlaxcala and safety.
Few other commanders after so hideous a debacle would have dreamt of continuing the campaign.
But Cortes' resolution was as firm as ever.
The Battle of Otumba had showed him that he wasn't beaten and he knew that he could never rest until he returned to Tenochtitlan in triumph.
Immediately he set about his preparations.
Rebuilding the health and morale of his men, restoring their confidence in themselves and in him, begging, borrowing, stealing reinforcements.
And because he knew since the Noche Triste that he could never again trust those causeways, there in Tlaxcala, 200 miles from the sea and 7,000 feet above it, he set about building a fleet.
And so he ordered his carpenters to construct 13 shallow draft brigantines, then to dismantle them into carefully numbered sections so that they could be quickly reassembled on the lake's shore.
Even the mighty Popocatepetl was forced into service.
Needing more gunpowder, Cortes sent a party to fetch sulphur from the very crater itself.
By Christmas, all was ready.
Cortes had at his command some 550 Spaniards, roughly the same number as on his first expedition, about 10,000 Indian allies and 40 horses.
On the 28th of December, less than six months after their retreat, they began the march back round the lake to Tenochtitlan.
As the Spanish strength had been growing, so the Aztecs had declined, for their capital had been struck by a new and dreadful scourge, smallpox.
Previously unknown on the American continent, it was probably introduced by one of the Spanish soldiers.
The Indians, who had no hereditary resistance to it, had perished in their thousands.
In April 1521, the brigantines arrived from Tlaxcala, were reassembled and then sailed slowly across the lake.
A message was sent to the new young Emperor, Cuauhtemoc, calling on him to surrender.
But there was no reply.
The army marched south along the lake to take up its position for the final assault.
(GUNS FIRING) It proved far harder than he expected.
The brigantines could not be everywhere at once.
(GUNS FIRING) (HORSES NEIGHING) As soon as one causeway was repaired, the Aztecs destroyed it again.
Every attempted raid was driven back.
Clearly there was only one solution, the annihilation of the city.
Destroying the houses and the streets one by one, using the rubble to fill the canals where the bridges had been.
Four weeks later, the southern half of the city was a pile of ruins and the southern and western spearheads under Cortes and Alvarado respectively met in the great marketplace of Tlatelolco.
MAN: "On the way we passed through a small square "where there were wooden poles on which they had impaled the heads "of many of our Spaniards whom they had killed "and sacrificed during the recent battles.
"Their hair and beards had grown much longer than they were in life, "which I would never have believed if I had not seen it.
" NARRATOR: Next to the marketplace was the great temple from which Cortes and Montezuma, with Bernal Diaz at their side, had looked down over the city.
MAN: "We climbed to the top, set their shrines on fire, "burnt the idols and planted our banners there.
"Then we fought on the ground till nightfall.
" NARRATOR: When the Aztecs saw the eagles of Spain fluttering from their highest pyramid, they knew they had lost.
Yet even now, young Cuauhtemoc refused to surrender.
With his wife, who was Montezuma's daughter, and his court, he boarded a fleet of canoes with the intention of carrying on resistance from the mainland.
It was only after the fastest of the Spanish brigantines had overtaken him that he finally gave himself up.
He was taken at once to Cortes who embraced him and congratulated him on his courage.
But young Cuauhtemoc drew back.
Tears streaming down his face, he pointed to the dagger Cortes had in his belt and implored his conqueror to stab him.
But Cortes smiled and shook his head.
The young man who was standing before him, who was only 26 years old, was the last of the Aztec emperors.
His empire lay in ruins around him but he himself had never surrendered.
He had shown and was still showing the courage of which even a Spaniard might be proud.
Thus on the evening of the 13th of August, 1521, Tenochtitlan fell.
And with it, the Aztec Empire.
MAN: "During the whole 93 days of the siege, "there was the unceasing noise of their accursed drums and trumpets "and the melancholy battle drums in the shrines and on the temple towers.
"But after Cuauhtemoc's capture, all of our soldiers became deaf, "as if all the bells in a belfry had been ringing together "and then suddenly stopped.
" NARRATOR: It is Cuauhtemoc's statue that stands in Mexico City today, for Montezuma has never quite been forgiven for his surrender.
Where his palace once stood, a great cathedral now rises to the glory of the God that Hernan Cortes brought to Mexico.
Cortes' name, too, is seldom spoken, except perhaps in the Hospital of Jesus, which he built and which still functions.
There is little else he would recognise here.
Even the great lake itself is drained and dry, surviving only in a few overgrown canals.
But 50 miles away over the mountains, he might feel more at home.
For here stands the palace that he built for himself on his retirement, in the little town of Cuernavaca.
And here, from the cool balconies, he could look out at the twin volcanoes between which he had passed on his way to victory.
It is for their Indian past that most Mexicans of today show their greatest affection.
They have not forgotten the beginnings of the Aztec Empire and the building that now enshrines the treasures of ancient Mexico is architecturally one of the most exciting museums in the world.
For them, this was the glory.
What followed was destruction and ruin.
What remains is regret.
(NATIVE DRUMS PLAYING) But the Indians are only one element.
There's a marble plaque in the Square of the Three Cultures in Mexico City where modern buildings confront those of the Spanish and the Aztec past.
Marking the place where Cuauhtemoc acknowledged the end of his empire, it bears these words: "It was neither a victory nor a defeat.
"It was the painful birth of the comingled people "that is the Mexico of today.
"
The Great Continent itself.
Uncharted and unexplored.
America.
A few Europeans had already set foot on its shores, driven onward by their hunger for the legendary gold of the Indies.
They had raided and traded, but though they had brought back enough gold and jewellery to whet the appetites of their compatriots, politically they had achieved nothing.
Then, in February 1519, there appeared off these jungle shores 11 ships, commanded by a man of a different stamp to any who had gone before him.
The first and greatest of the conquistadors, Hernan Cortes.
His story is the story of the conquest of the Mexican empire, and of its emperor, Montezuma.
But it is also something more, the first direct confrontation in all their power and might of the old world and the new.
This is Tulum, on the windswept east coast of the peninsula of Yucatan.
When the Spanish sailors saw it for the first time, they were amazed, comparing it in size and beauty to their own great city of Seville.
Tulum is smaller now, but its temples and watchtowers still keep their vigil over the Caribbean, just as they did 300 years before Cortes was born.
It was built, and in 1519 still occupied, by the Mayas, perhaps the most gifted of all the peoples of ancient Mexico.
By the 6th century AD, while England was still groping through the darkest of the Dark Ages, the Mayas were already erecting their temples in the dense rainforests of southern Yucatan.
Palenque.
Almost a thousand years ago it was abandoned by its inhabitants and engulfed by the jungle.
In the last century, soon after its rediscovery, it was so overgrown that according to one account, "The sighing of the night wind "through the taut roots of the trees sang like a deep Aeolian harp.
" The Indians wouldn't go near it.
No one yet knows how far Palenque extends, or what other marvels still lie hidden in the forest.
From temples to a palace.
Here, at Uxmal, is Maya architecture at its most glorious, buildings that would do credit, in their grandeur and proportions, to any city in the world.
Their upper walls are a honeycomb of decoration in high relief, black shadows stabbing across the sun-baked stone.
But Hernan Cortes knew nothing of all this.
He was now 34 years old, the son of a poor Spanish landowner from Extremadura in southern Spain, who had left home when he was 16 to seek his fortune and arrived three years later at Hispaniola, now Haiti, the first of the Spanish colonies in the West Indies.
Later he had moved to Cuba and there he had lived until, in 1518, he talked, intrigued and bribed his way to the command of a new expedition to the west.
One of the men who knew him best describes him like this.
MAN: "He was tall and sturdy and his face was grey.
"Had it been longer, he would have been more handsome.
"He had a deep chest and broad shoulders and was slightly bowlegged.
"He was a splendid horseman and skilled with every kind of weapon.
"He said his prayers every morning and attended mass with devotion.
"He was fond of cards and dice and excessively fond of women.
" NARRATOR: That was an old soldier speaking, Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
He had fought at Cortes' side throughout.
Years after, he'd record every detail, and his story is the most vivid that has come down to us.
The expedition sailed on the 10th of February, 1519.
It had two main objectives, one material, the other spiritual.
The material one, as always, was gold, a subject never very far from the minds of the conquistadors.
But it's all too easy in our cynical modern way to forget that to them, the spiritual one was every bit as important.
They were not only conquerors, they were missionaries.
Heathen lands were legitimate prey, which was why the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, had, in a sudden burst of generosity, recently granted the whole Western hemisphere to Spain.
But the right of conquest carried with it the obligation to convert, and here, too, the Spaniards did their work well.
Westward the expedition sailed, then hugging close inshore, rounded the northern coast of Yucatan, to Tabasco.
Cortes' resources were small.
His 11 ships carried only about 550 soldiers and 100 sailors.
But they also had three secret weapons: muskets, a few cannon and 16 horses.
Such things were unknown on the American continent.
At their initial encounter, the Indians, terrified as they were, had bravely stood their ground against the cannon, but the horses were too much for them.
At first, they took horse and rider to be one single animal, some monstrous centaur bearing down to destroy them.
And they fled.
All these drawings are the work of the Indians themselves, produced to illustrate the Spanish histories a few years after the conquest.
Like the Bayeux Tapestry, they give us a complete contemporary pictorial record of the campaign.
On Monday morning they sailed away, loaded with gifts from the Tabascans, among which was perhaps the greatest godsend that Cortes was ever to receive.
Her name was Marina.
Bernal Diaz tells us that she was good-looking, intelligent and self-assured.
Most important of all, she spoke both Aztec and Maya.
From the moment she came on board, Cortes' language problems were effectively at an end.
Later, Marina was also to become his mistress and the mother of his child.
But it was as her lover's interpreter and advisor that she was to play so important a part in the conquest, and to take her place in history.
Sailing slowly up the coast, the fleet at last came to a long sandy beach sheltered by a little island.
It offered a good temporary anchorage, and the day, Good Friday, seemed an auspicious one to make a landing.
The natives proved friendly, and presents were exchanged.
But, as the Spaniards soon learned, they were now within the borders of the Mexican empire.
Montezuma's spies were watching them.
His people, the Aztecs, were comparatively new arrivals in Mexico.
Harsh, warlike, friendless, they had drifted down from the north guided only by a prophecy that, one day, they would see an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its talons and that where they saw it, they would make their home.
In 1325, the prophecy was fulfilled on an island in the great mountain lake of Texcoco, 7,000 feet above the sea.
Once here, they set about civilising themselves, adopting the skills, traditions and customs from the people whom they had conquered, and from all those who had inhabited the valley before them.
Particularly, perhaps, from the peoples of Teotihuacan, this immense, sacred city that had grown and flourished a thousand years before they arrived, in the days when Europe still bowed before the might of Imperial Rome.
Away to the south, on the man-made island, they built their own capital.
Later, their descendants were to call it Mexico City.
They called it Tenochtitlan.
They, too, had no knowledge of horses or beasts of burden.
They had no wheel, plough, arch, scales or weights.
Yet they were superb craftsmen, whose works of art still have the power to astonish and to terrify.
And as astronomers, they were superb.
This is the famous Aztec calendar, a votive monument to the sun.
At its centre, the face of the sun god.
Often, they identified their gods with the animals they hunted.
The jaguar, whose flayed skin they would wear in battle, or the eagle, the symbol of their bravest warriors.
But above all, the Aztecs were fighters.
They had to be.
For just as thoroughly as they understood the movements of the heavenly bodies across the sky, they were equally thoroughly convinced that these bodies could be maintained in their courses only for as long as the responsible gods were kept propitiated, and this in turn meant keeping them perpetually gorged on the most precious food available, human hearts and human blood.
When an Aztec went to war, he went not to kill but to take prisoners, countless prisoners, for the sacrifice.
And the Aztecs could never get enough of them.
For the great consecration of the temple at Tenochtitlan, in four days, no less than 80,000 victims met their deaths on the sacrificial altars, each in the same way.
The officiating priest would rip open his breast with an obsidian knife, reach into the cavity and rip out the still-palpitating heart to offer to the gods.
Among these gods were Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird wizard, god of the sun and of war, and beneficiary of most of the sacrifices.
Then there was the earth goddess, Coatlicue, her head made up of two confronted snakes.
But there was also another god, gentler than these, yet still formidable.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
These are the remains of one of his temples.
Long ago, so the legend ran, he had descended to Earth in human shape, white-skinned and black-bearded, and after 20 years teaching in Mexico, had sailed away to the east.
One day he would return, dressed in black, and re-establish his rule.
His homecoming would be in a one reed year, and would usher in a time of great suffering and tribulation for the Mexican people.
Now, one reed year, according to the Aztec calendar, fell only once in every 52 of our years.
There had been one in 1415, another in 1467, and it fell again in 1519.
And so, even before Cortes' arrival, Montezuma was worried.
High priest as well as emperor, no one knew the prophecies better than he.
Among other portents, for a whole year a tongue of fire had appeared in the heavens, and now the messengers arrived on foot, for there was no other means of travel, the 300-odd miles from the coast.
They told of how they had seen these mysterious strangers fishing from a boat and then climbing back onto two big towers standing in the midst of the sea.
When he heard that they had white faces, black beards, and that their leader was dressed in black, Montezuma's worst fears were confirmed.
He couldn't possibly know the reason for this last phenomenon, that it was Good Friday.
For him, it was the nine wind day, by another incredible coincidence the one day of the year sacred to Quetzalcoatl.
No further doubt was left in his mind.
The plumed serpent had come back to claim his due.
There was still just a faint chance that he might be headed off, and bribed not to come to the capital.
Montezuma now ordered ambassadors to hurry down to the coast with presents for the strangers.
Virtually every gift they brought was of gold, including a huge golden sun disc the size of a cartwheel.
But Cortes kept his head, giving them, not perhaps entirely by way of entertainment, a demonstration of his firepower that left them terrified.
Finally, he offered them food and asked them to return to their master with his greetings, which, he added, he intended to deliver personally before long.
The ambassadors instructed their scribes to make careful drawings of all they saw.
This picture is one of the results.
Cortes on his horse, drawn at the time, on the spot.
But Cortes had already made up his mind.
The gold he had been given, together with everything he had heard from Marina, had convinced him that he was indeed on the threshold of El Dorado, and here, at this moment, he resolved, with a puny force under his command, to march against Montezuma and all his huge empire.
Naturally, the authorities in Cuba would never allow him to undertake such a task.
Before going any further, he would have to shake himself free of them.
But how? Only by establishing a new colony, equal in status with Cuba itself.
And so, just a few miles up the coast, he founded, 450 years ago, the first democratically constituted municipality in the Americas, which, in honour of the Good Friday landings, he named Villa Rica de Vera Cruz, "the rich town of the true cross", thus neatly reflecting the two interests predominant in the Spanish minds, gold and the gospel.
Henceforth, it was to the emperor Charles V, his own sovereign, that he would be directly responsible.
Now Vera Cruz lay only a short march from Cempoala, an important city of the Totonacs.
MAN: "As we came among the houses and saw how large a town it was, "larger than any we'd yet seen, we were filled with admiration.
"It was so green with vegetation that it looked like a garden, "and its streets were so full of men and women who'd come out to see us "that we gave thanks to God for the discovery of such a country.
" This is the great temple area of Cempoala as it stands today, perhaps even greener now than it was then.
From what we know of them, the Totonacs seem to have been a gay, cheerful sort of people, as is borne out by all these lovely, laughing little statuettes that they left in such quantities behind them.
But as they explained to Cortes, they were sorely oppressed by the immense tributes exacted from them by their Aztec overlords.
They saw in the Spaniards a possible means of freeing themselves from this oppression.
And that's why Cortes found them not only friendly but actively eager to help him.
Once he had made sure of his alliance with the Totonacs, Cortes felt free to tackle his missionary duties.
Though the Totonacs were perhaps one degree less addicted to sacrifice than the Aztecs, 450 years ago, these walls and steps were running red with human blood.
So Cortes insisted that there should be no more sacrifices.
The Cempoalans pleaded, but he was adamant.
The blood was scraped from the temple walls, and several of the Cempoalans, including eight noble maidens for the Spanish captains, received a Christian baptism.
And now, before leaving for the interior, Cortes performed what was, for sheer cold-blooded courage, one of the most remarkable acts of his life.
He bribed a few of his sailors to riddle the hulls of his ships with holes, and then, on the pretext that they were worm-eaten and unseaworthy, deliberately to run them aground.
Henceforth, whatever happened, there could be no retreat.
As he wrote later to Charles V, "That way, I felt safer.
" Few other commanders could have said the same.
And so, in August 1519, with less than 500 men, 13 horses, a few pieces of light artillery and a troop of native porters, this extraordinary man of 34 set off, without maps, into an unknown country against an empire of apparently unlimited power and wealth, never knowing what lay beyond the next corner, except that it would be many times stronger than himself, and almost certainly hostile.
And what a march it was.
Striking west from Cempoala, they found the flat coastal plain at its worst.
Unbearably hot, periodically lashed with summer rains that reduced the paths to quagmires, bringing malaria and yellow fever in their wake.
On and on they trudged, in constant fear of ambush, knowing that the enemy, unseen and unheard, was never far away.
Then the climb began, 4,000 feet in some 30 miles, sun and rain alternately beating down on the armour they dared not remove for a moment.
Up and up they went, cocoa and banana giving way to scrub and cactus.
Up still further, 7,000 feet now, higher perhaps than any of them had been before, with the new disquieting sensations of breathlessness and lassitude.
MAN: "In this uninhabited country we could find nothing to eat "and the wind blew off the snowy heights and we shivered with cold.
" NARRATOR: At last, they emerged onto the high plateau.
But, as the Spaniards were marching, the Aztecs were watching and running.
Montezuma's messengers, their relay system so well-organised that messages could get the 300 miles from capital to coast in 24 hours, were keeping their anxious master constantly posted with the invaders'progress.
MAN: "There were times when our thirst was such that we would chew thistles "to make our lips bleed and so moisten our mouths.
"At others, "the only way we could in some measure refresh our parched tongues "was to hold the cold edge of our axes between our lips.
" And there was hard fighting ahead of them, against the people of Tlaxcala.
It was only after three weeks of bloodshed that the Tlaxcalans admitted themselves beaten and received Cortes in their capital.
They offered him their friendship and they were as good as their word.
Henceforth, they were his staunchest allies and a large number of them accompanied him on the next stage of his journey to Cholula.
Cholula was an ancient and sacred city.
Here, the god Quetzalcoatl had lived for 20 years, teaching its people the arts of civilisation before he disappeared over the sea.
To him, too, was dedicated its great pyramid, now overgrown but still recognisable.
Originally it covered over 40 acres, making it, in terms of cubic content, the largest man-made structure in the world.
Its walls were held fast by a special cement made from lime mixed with the blood of children.
Almost as soon as they entered the city, the Spaniards grew suspicious.
Some of the streets had been recently barricaded, huge piles of stones were visible on the flat roofs of the houses at strategic points.
Most ominous of all, perhaps, Cholula seemed almost devoid of women and children.
And now the faithful Marina came to Cortes with a story that confirmed his worst fears.
The wife of one of the Cholulan captains had warned her of a plot to seize all the Spaniards the following morning and take them off to Montezuma for sacrifice.
The next morning, Cortes gathered all the Cholulans he could muster within the Spanish camp and told them that he knew everything that was in their hearts.
Then he pronounced sentence.
(GUNSHOT) From a nearby rooftop came the blast of a Spanish musket, the agreed signal for slaughter.
The Spanish artillery opened fire and, as Cortes later wrote to Charles V, in two hours, more than 3,000 men died.
It was a massacre and Cortes has been bitterly blamed for it.
Yet he was not normally a bloodthirsty man.
Never once in the whole campaign did he resort to force unless his peace overtures had been rejected.
The Cholulans were armed, the Spaniards overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Cortes' first duty was to his men, and he discharged it in the only way he could.
And now all was ready for the last stage of the march.
There was to be no more bloodshed.
The final challenge was purely geographical.
From Cholula, Cortes had often looked at the two great volcanoes Popocatepetl and the white woman, Iztaccihuatl, that guarded the approach to the capital, and he had known that his route would take him between them.
He had no wish to linger in Cholula.
Off he marched once more, over that high saddle of rock.
The final barrier.
Physically, for himself and his men, those last 50 miles must have been the most gruelling of all.
The route wound upward through thick pine forests to the top of the 12,000-foot pass.
Dragging their artillery behind them, Cortes and his allies found themselves at last at the highest point of their journey, immediately below the great peak of Popocatepetl itself.
They'd been marching over two months and had fought at least six battles.
When they reached the watershed, they were near the limits of physical exhaustion.
But in that cold, there could be no rest.
Finally, the road began to descend.
It turned a sharp corner and suddenly, through the pines, the Spaniards were gazing down on the vision they'd looked forward to for so long, a huge lake sparkling in the sun and in the midst of that lake, linked to its shores by three slender causeways, Montezuma's capital, Tenochtitlan.
Now the lake is gone and the Aztec city, but this must have been something like the view on which the Spaniards gazed that November morning.
MAN: "We were struck with wonder and admiration.
"It seemed to us like one of those enchanted fables "from the book of Amatus.
"Those big towers, the temples "and buildings all made of stone, rising from the water.
"Indeed, some of us asked whether it was not all a dream.
" NARRATOR: It was on November 8, 1519, that Hernan Cortes led his 400 tired and bedraggled Spaniards along the wide causeway that connected the southern suburbs with the capital itself.
They crossed a bridge and found themselves on what he later described as "a wide, straight, beautiful avenue" to see another procession approaching to meet them.
It was the emperor, riding out in a golden palanquin, to meet his god and his destiny.
MAN: "And the great Montezuma descended from his litter, "and the other great chieftains "supported him beneath a marvellously rich canopy "of green feathers, decorated with gold and silver and pearls.
"The great Montezuma was magnificently clad, "wearing sandals, the soles of which were of gold "and the upper parts ornamented with precious stones.
"And there were other great lords who walked before the great Montezuma, "laying down cloaks so that his feet should not touch the earth.
"Not one dared to raise his eyes towards him.
" NARRATOR: But Cortes did.
Dismounting from his horse, he strode, smiling, towards the emperor.
The old world and the new, at last, stood face to face.
This first sight of Montezuma in all his glory made a deep impression on the Spaniards.
But his address of welcome, faithfully rendered by Marina, must have left them dumbfounded.
This man, whom they knew to have done everything in his power to prevent their coming, now greeted their leader like a king and a god, spoke of promises and prophecies, and virtually seemed to offer him the throne of Mexico.
Cortes in turn made a suitably polite reply, after which Montezuma personally led his guests to the palace he had had prepared for them next to his own.
But Cortes remained on his guard.
He was being treated as an honoured guest, but the truth was that he was on an island fortress in the middle of a strange and distant land, with only a handful of men and virtually no lines of communication with the outside world.
He placed his artillery carefully and ordered his soldiers to remain inside the palace and ready for action.
Then he settled down to diplomacy.
Montezuma was now 52.
MAN: "He was a good height, slender, and not very dark, "in fact the usual Indian complexion.
"His hair was short, his face long, but somehow cheerful.
"He had fine eyes, "and his expression was tender and grave.
"He was very neat and clean and took a bath every afternoon.
" In the weeks that followed, the Spanish soldiery came to love and respect him, not so much for the prodigious generosity with which he loaded them with presents, as for his extraordinary natural grace and dignity.
Before long, he was to know them all by name, and they, in their turn, treated him as the emperor he was.
Cortes, meanwhile, had come straight to the point.
He told him first of his own sovereign, Charles V, who he explained must henceforth be Montezuma's sovereign, too.
And then he finally broached the delicate subject of Christianity.
Here he was less successful.
On the fourth day, he asked his host's permission to visit the great temple at Tlatelolco, in the northern part of the city.
Montezuma agreed, and when Cortes reached the top of the 114 steps that led to the sanctuary, was waiting there to receive him.
MAN: "Then Montezuma took him by the hand "and told him to look at his great city "and all the other cities standing in the water.
"And we saw the three causeways and the bridges and the canoes, "some coming with provisions, others returning with merchandise.
"We saw temples and shrines in these cities "that looked like gleaming white towers and castles.
" NARRATOR: But inside the sanctuary, the scene changed.
Before the idols lay five human hearts, still warm and steaming.
MAN: "The walls of the shrines were so caked with blood "and the floor so bathed in it that the stench was worse "than that of any slaughterhouse in Spain.
" NARRATOR: And around stood the priests, ready to eat the limbs of the victims.
MAN: "They wore their hair very long, down to their waists, "and it was all so clotted and matted with blood "that it could not be pulled apart.
"And they smelled of sulphur.
But they also smelled of something worse, "of decaying flesh.
" Yet through all this nightmare of carnage and butchery, Montezuma remained gentle and dignified as ever, seemingly unable to understand his guests' horror.
Only at the end did his jaw tighten, when Cortes was rash enough to express his revulsion at this loathsome religion, and suggest the setting up of a Christian altar.
And even when he asked his guests to leave, Montezuma's natural courtesy did not desert him.
They, for their part, were only too delighted to obey.
Gratefully they hurried past the skull-racks and the kitchens where the human meat was prepared, back to the whitewashed freshness of their own quarters.
And even there, there must have been many who wondered how long it would be before those grim altars reeked, not with Indian, but with Spanish blood.
And so Cortes hit on his next spectacular decision.
He would make Montezuma his hostage.
He would simply be moved to the Spanish quarters.
There he could choose any apartments he liked, bring his wives and servants and carry on all the day-to-day business of government.
It would be nothing more than a change of residence.
Montezuma tried to argue, but he couldn't go against what he still believed was a divine will.
That evening, he was installed in Cortes' palace.
The Spaniards continued to treat him with as much respect as ever, but henceforth, both Montezuma and his subjects knew where the real power lay.
And, when a few days later they ratified their formal submission to Charles V, they were only confirming an established fact.
MAN: "They showed much emotion in doing so, "and the great Montezuma could not restrain his tears.
"He was so dear to us, and we were so much affected "at seeing him weep that our own eyes grew tender.
"Some of our soldiers even wept as openly as Montezuma, "such was our love for him.
" NARRATOR: Back to Spain went the first fruits of the victory, the emperor Charles' share of the Mexican tribute.
Another fifth was kept by Cortes for expenses.
The rest was divided among the soldiers.
None of it now remains.
Nearly all the gold and jewellery was melted down into ingots, crudely stamped with the arms of Spain.
Two pieces only have come down to us, not of gold, but of their exquisite feather work, which the Aztecs made their own.
One is this shield.
The other is Montezuma's own ceremonial headdress.
Seeing them for the first time, the German artist Albrecht Durer exclaimed, "Never before have I set eyes on anything that has so rejoiced my heart, "for I have been shown the things which were brought to the king "from the new golden land, and the subtle ingenuity of the people "in these distant regions has left me spellbound.
" By the beginning of the year 1520, the Spanish conquest of Mexico might have seemed over, but now Cortes' luck changed, thanks to the foolishness of one of his captains, Pedro de Alvarado, whom Cortes had left behind in the capital when he had to dash to the coast to defeat a punitive expedition sent by the jealous authorities in Cuba.
Though this new expedition was larger and better-equipped, it was no match for Cortes.
It was soundly defeated at Cempoala.
Most of the soldiers transferred their allegiance, and when, in June, Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, it was at the head of well over 1,000 men, with a hundred horses.
A month before, there had been held the annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, during which a ritual dance was traditionally held in the courtyard of the great temple.
Suspecting a plot, Alvarado had charged into the temple precinct, killing the dancers and as many other Indians as he could, up to 1,000 of them, including all the flower of the Aztec nobility.
Within the hour, the whole city was up in arms, and before long the Spaniards found themselves virtually blockaded in their palace.
Thanks to Montezuma's intervention, there was no more bloodshed, but Montezuma's influence was waning.
The story of Quetzalcoatl's return was forgotten, a new opposition party had grown up in the capital, determined to rid Mexico, immediately and by force, of Cortes and all his men.
And on the very evening that Cortes returned to the capital, a specially-convened Aztec council of state had dethroned him and relieved him of all his powers.
By the next morning, the atmosphere had changed from passive discontent to active opposition, and now the battle began in earnest.
MAN: "Their tenacity was beyond description.
"Three or four soldiers of our company "who had served in Italy swore to God many times "that they had never seen such fighting.
"Not in the Christian wars or against the French king's artillery "or the great Turk.
"Nor had they ever seen men so courageous "at charging with closed ranks.
" (HORSE NEIGHING) On the fifth day, Cortes saw that the odds were impossible, and sent to Montezuma to ask him to negotiate a truce.
The Spanish messengers found him sunk in despair.
There was nothing more he could do, he said.
Thanks to Cortes, he had lost his throne.
His people would no longer listen to him.
But, at last, he agreed to try.
The great square in front of the palace was thronged with Aztec warriors, but when they saw their former monarch slowly climb the steps to the terrace, they grew still.
He pleaded with them, and implored them to call off the attack, giving them his word that the Spaniards would leave the city just as soon as they were permitted to do so.
For a moment, a great wave of sympathy seemed to well up from the crowd to their sad ex-emperor.
Then, suddenly, came a volley of stones.
One of them hit Montezuma on the head.
He fell to the ground and was carried to his apartments by the Spaniards.
Cortes himself hurried to his side.
The wound did not seem particularly grave.
But Montezuma had lost the will to live.
He refused all treatment and turned his face to the wall.
MAN: "When we least expected it, they came to say that he was dead.
"Cortes wept for him, and all of us captains and soldiers.
"There was not one among us who did not mourn him like a father, "which was not to be wondered at "for he was a good man.
" NARRATOR: But Montezuma was more than that.
He was a noble, tragic figure.
From the outset, he had seen as Cortes himself never saw, the full dimensions of the cataclysm that was to overtake his empire.
And he had known that it was inevitable.
He may have been mistaken in seeing Cortes as a god or even as the instrument of one, but he could no more have prevented the Spanish conquest than if it had in fact been divinely ordained.
His friendship with his conqueror, for whom ultimately he gave both his throne and his life, was founded not on cowardice, but on wisdom.
For he had know that violence would not prevail.
And for more than a year after his death, he was to be proved right.
As Montezuma's body was handed over to his people and borne away down the canals to its ritual cremation, Cortes knew that with it had gone the last of his hopes of remaining in the city.
He must retreat, and quickly.
And so he deliberately selected the western causeway not the southern one by which he had come.
It was shorter and would probably be less well-guarded.
Outside, the night was dark.
A mist had risen from the lake and a light rain had begun to fall.
Softly, the Spanish column set off through the deserted streets, and began their march along the causeway.
(TRUMPET BLOWING) Suddenly came the noise of a conch shell trumpet.
From all the temple tops of the city, the Aztec war drums began to throb out their summons.
In a moment, the water was alive with canoes, all loaded with warriors shouting and showering arrows on the retreating column.
Cortes had devised portable bridges to be laid across the gaps in the causeway.
In the chaos and confusion they were virtually useless.
But before long, the gaps were choked with fallen men and horses and the Spaniards were able to fight their way across a bridge of dead bodies.
Many of them had died not from wounds but from drowning, weighed down by the gold that they had refused to leave behind.
Hours later, what remained of the column limped into the little village of Tacuba.
And there, under a great cypress tree that still stands today, flung themselves down to rest.
MAN: "I have forgotten to record how glad we were to see "our Donnamarina still alive.
"Some Tlaxcalans had rescued her at the bridge.
"But out of the 24 horses that remained to us, not one was able to run, "not a horseman able to raise an arm, not a foot soldier able to move.
" NARRATOR: This was indeed the Noche Triste, the night of sorrow.
After a long and painful retreat round the lake, the shattered force met an Aztec army of far superior strength at Otumba and, unbelievably, routed it.
Then at last, five days later, they reached Tlaxcala and safety.
Few other commanders after so hideous a debacle would have dreamt of continuing the campaign.
But Cortes' resolution was as firm as ever.
The Battle of Otumba had showed him that he wasn't beaten and he knew that he could never rest until he returned to Tenochtitlan in triumph.
Immediately he set about his preparations.
Rebuilding the health and morale of his men, restoring their confidence in themselves and in him, begging, borrowing, stealing reinforcements.
And because he knew since the Noche Triste that he could never again trust those causeways, there in Tlaxcala, 200 miles from the sea and 7,000 feet above it, he set about building a fleet.
And so he ordered his carpenters to construct 13 shallow draft brigantines, then to dismantle them into carefully numbered sections so that they could be quickly reassembled on the lake's shore.
Even the mighty Popocatepetl was forced into service.
Needing more gunpowder, Cortes sent a party to fetch sulphur from the very crater itself.
By Christmas, all was ready.
Cortes had at his command some 550 Spaniards, roughly the same number as on his first expedition, about 10,000 Indian allies and 40 horses.
On the 28th of December, less than six months after their retreat, they began the march back round the lake to Tenochtitlan.
As the Spanish strength had been growing, so the Aztecs had declined, for their capital had been struck by a new and dreadful scourge, smallpox.
Previously unknown on the American continent, it was probably introduced by one of the Spanish soldiers.
The Indians, who had no hereditary resistance to it, had perished in their thousands.
In April 1521, the brigantines arrived from Tlaxcala, were reassembled and then sailed slowly across the lake.
A message was sent to the new young Emperor, Cuauhtemoc, calling on him to surrender.
But there was no reply.
The army marched south along the lake to take up its position for the final assault.
(GUNS FIRING) It proved far harder than he expected.
The brigantines could not be everywhere at once.
(GUNS FIRING) (HORSES NEIGHING) As soon as one causeway was repaired, the Aztecs destroyed it again.
Every attempted raid was driven back.
Clearly there was only one solution, the annihilation of the city.
Destroying the houses and the streets one by one, using the rubble to fill the canals where the bridges had been.
Four weeks later, the southern half of the city was a pile of ruins and the southern and western spearheads under Cortes and Alvarado respectively met in the great marketplace of Tlatelolco.
MAN: "On the way we passed through a small square "where there were wooden poles on which they had impaled the heads "of many of our Spaniards whom they had killed "and sacrificed during the recent battles.
"Their hair and beards had grown much longer than they were in life, "which I would never have believed if I had not seen it.
" NARRATOR: Next to the marketplace was the great temple from which Cortes and Montezuma, with Bernal Diaz at their side, had looked down over the city.
MAN: "We climbed to the top, set their shrines on fire, "burnt the idols and planted our banners there.
"Then we fought on the ground till nightfall.
" NARRATOR: When the Aztecs saw the eagles of Spain fluttering from their highest pyramid, they knew they had lost.
Yet even now, young Cuauhtemoc refused to surrender.
With his wife, who was Montezuma's daughter, and his court, he boarded a fleet of canoes with the intention of carrying on resistance from the mainland.
It was only after the fastest of the Spanish brigantines had overtaken him that he finally gave himself up.
He was taken at once to Cortes who embraced him and congratulated him on his courage.
But young Cuauhtemoc drew back.
Tears streaming down his face, he pointed to the dagger Cortes had in his belt and implored his conqueror to stab him.
But Cortes smiled and shook his head.
The young man who was standing before him, who was only 26 years old, was the last of the Aztec emperors.
His empire lay in ruins around him but he himself had never surrendered.
He had shown and was still showing the courage of which even a Spaniard might be proud.
Thus on the evening of the 13th of August, 1521, Tenochtitlan fell.
And with it, the Aztec Empire.
MAN: "During the whole 93 days of the siege, "there was the unceasing noise of their accursed drums and trumpets "and the melancholy battle drums in the shrines and on the temple towers.
"But after Cuauhtemoc's capture, all of our soldiers became deaf, "as if all the bells in a belfry had been ringing together "and then suddenly stopped.
" NARRATOR: It is Cuauhtemoc's statue that stands in Mexico City today, for Montezuma has never quite been forgiven for his surrender.
Where his palace once stood, a great cathedral now rises to the glory of the God that Hernan Cortes brought to Mexico.
Cortes' name, too, is seldom spoken, except perhaps in the Hospital of Jesus, which he built and which still functions.
There is little else he would recognise here.
Even the great lake itself is drained and dry, surviving only in a few overgrown canals.
But 50 miles away over the mountains, he might feel more at home.
For here stands the palace that he built for himself on his retirement, in the little town of Cuernavaca.
And here, from the cool balconies, he could look out at the twin volcanoes between which he had passed on his way to victory.
It is for their Indian past that most Mexicans of today show their greatest affection.
They have not forgotten the beginnings of the Aztec Empire and the building that now enshrines the treasures of ancient Mexico is architecturally one of the most exciting museums in the world.
For them, this was the glory.
What followed was destruction and ruin.
What remains is regret.
(NATIVE DRUMS PLAYING) But the Indians are only one element.
There's a marble plaque in the Square of the Three Cultures in Mexico City where modern buildings confront those of the Spanish and the Aztec past.
Marking the place where Cuauhtemoc acknowledged the end of his empire, it bears these words: "It was neither a victory nor a defeat.
"It was the painful birth of the comingled people "that is the Mexico of today.
"