The Ransom
How Spaniards took two rulers of the Americas, what became of the gold and silver, and what has been asked of Spain since
In November 1519 Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlan. In November 1532 Francisco Pizarro took the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca. Within a year of each capture the ruler was dead, and the Crown of Castile had claimed its fifth of what was taken, though much of Cortés’s first gold was lost on the retreat.
The words here are those of Cortés, of Bernal Díaz, who marched with him and wrote in old age, of Pizarro’s secretary and his cousin, and of Nahua and Andean writers who put down the story decades later: the Florentine Codex under a Franciscan friar, Salcamayhua about 1620, Guaman Poma about 1615. Each is named when it speaks, and where the accounts disagree the story gives each its say and does not pick one. The popular tale that the Aztecs took Cortés for a god is told with its history.
Not read: the account of Titu Cusi, Betanzos, and anything written by a Tlaxcalan or Texcocan. Matthew Restall is quoted through a lesson sheet, and Melissa Dell through an abstract; the books and article behind them were not read.
8 Nov 1519
A city on a lake. Cortés dates his stay in Tenochtitlan from 8 November 1519, and in his second letter to Charles V he has Moctezuma call the Spanish king his rightful sovereign. The tale that Moctezuma took the Spaniards for gods is in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex too, which was put down decades later under a Franciscan friar. Matthew Restall writes that Franciscan writers appear to have invented the Cortés-Quetzalcoatl link after the conquest, and that Moctezuma’s welcome was a courtesy not to be read literally. The story read Restall only in an excerpt on a lesson sheet, and read no scholar who disputes him.
1519
The ones who joined him. Before Tenochtitlan came Tlaxcala. Bernal Díaz writes that its lords fought the Spaniards because they thought them Moctezuma’s men, and that they went without salt, which he says Moctezuma would not let them fetch. Book 12 says that in Cholula “the Tlaxcallans had incited” the Spaniards against its people. Cortés later wrote that he had more than twenty-five thousand Tlaxcalan warriors in one division at the siege, and men of Texcoco beside them; no account written by a Tlaxcalan was read.
1519
Taken in his own city. Soon after arriving, Cortés had Moctezuma carried to the Spanish quarters, and writes that it was to settle the killing of Spaniards on the coast. The Nahua account in Book 12 says the Spaniards seized him in the palace and kept him under watch, and that the people were stunned. Cortés also writes of “the time I kept Montezuma prisoner”.
1520
Gold. Cortés writes that he asked Moctezuma to have the lords of the provinces send gold, and that what he set aside for the king came to “one hundred thousand ducats and more”. Bernal Díaz counts the gold alone at above 600,000 pesos before the king’s fifth, and says soldiers claimed a third had already vanished. Book 12 says the Spaniards stripped the gold from the shields, burned the other precious things and made the gold into bars, and that the Tlaxcalans “just stole” the rest of the green stone. Charles V was the same ruler who faced Luther at Worms in 1521.
May 1520
Toxcatl. In May 1520 Cortés went to the coast to face another Spanish force and left Pedro de Alvarado in command. At the feast of Toxcatl, says Book 12, the Spaniards “surrounded the dancers” and killed them, and Bernal Díaz says Moctezuma’s envoys told Cortés Alvarado attacked “without any provocation”. Alvarado later said there was talk of a plot to crush his garrison, and MacNutt adds that the Tlaxcalans had stirred his suspicions. Cortés’s own letter says only that the Native attackers assaulted the fort.
Jun 1520
Who killed Moctezuma? Cortés writes that one of Moctezuma’s own subjects hit him with a stone and that he died within three days, and Bernal Díaz writes of an arrow and three stones. Book 12 says the Spaniards threw out the bodies of Moctezuma and another lord, who had died, and does not say by whose hand. MacNutt reports the tradition from the Mexican side: that “the Mexicans” asserted Cortés had him put to death, that the Codex Ramírez says the Spaniards stabbed him, and that Durán wrote they found him dead with chains on his feet and five dagger wounds in his breast. The story does not choose.
1520
The retreat, and the sickness. Cortés counts over 150 Spaniards and more than 2,000 allies dead, and writes that all the gold they carried was lost; Bernal Díaz counts above 860 Spaniards dead, and says Moctezuma’s treasure sent to the emperor was later taken by a French pirate. Smallpox spread about the same time. Bernal Díaz says a sick man in Narváez’s party brought it, Book 12 records “a great sickness” and many dead, and Cortés writes that the Tlaxcalan lord Maxixcatzin died of it. None of the three says anyone meant to spread it.
13 Aug 1521
Seventy-five days. Cortés counts the siege from 30 May to 13 August 1521, when Cuauhtémoc was taken prisoner. He writes that on one day the dead and the prisoners together passed forty thousand and the cries of women and children broke every heart, and that his allies, more than 150,000 against about 900 Spaniards, were harder to hold back from killing than the defenders were to fight. That puts the killing on the allies, and it is Cortés’s claim. Of the gold melted afterwards, 130,000 castellanos in his count, one fifth went to the king.
1521
The hidden gold. Book 12 has the Captain demand more gold of the rulers after the fall. Bernal Díaz says the crown officials pressed to torture Cuauhtémoc and another ruler, that Cortés at last consented, and that “boiling hot oil was then applied to their feet”. Cortés writes that on a later expedition an informer reported a plot and that Cuauhtémoc and the ruler of Tacuba “were hanged”; MacNutt reports a Mexican version, copied by Torquemada, and Bernal Díaz’s statement that both men protested their innocence.
1531
Two brothers at war. To the south the Inca realm was already at war with itself: Atahualpa at Quito against his brother Huascar at Cuzco. Pedro Pizarro, writing in 1571 from what he was told, says smallpox, never seen there before, killed many, and that their father Huayna Capac fell ill with it and died. Salcamayhua, an Andean writer who by his translator’s reckoning wrote about 1620, says Huascar was taken prisoner and that within days the news came that the Spaniards had landed.
16 Nov 1532
Cajamarca. Pizarro’s party reached the town on Friday 15 November 1532. Xerez, Pizarro’s secretary, writes that on the next day Pizarro “seized him by the arm, crying out Santiago. Then the guns were fired off”, that no Indian raised his arms against a Spaniard, and that two thousand were killed besides the wounded; Salcamayhua says twelve thousand. Guaman Poma, born about 1550, also has the Spaniards open fire. The accounts differ on the provocation, which Xerez gives as arms reported hidden under the clothes of those in front, and Guaman Poma as Atahualpa throwing down the priest’s book.
Nov 1532
The room. Xerez writes that Atahualpa, fearing the Spaniards would kill him, offered a room full of gold to a white line half way up the wall, and silver to fill it twice over, within two months. Pizarro told him to send for it, and, by Xerez’s account, that once it came he need have no fear. Atahualpa ordered his captains in Cuzco to send two thousand people laden with gold and silver. The room was filled, and he was killed anyway.
Jul 1533
Weighed. By Xerez’s account the metal was melted and weighed by the day of Santiago, in July 1533: a royal fifth of 262,259 pesos of gold and 10,121 marks of silver, from 51,610 marks in all, and 8,880 pesos of gold and 362 marks of silver to each horseman. The 1872 English prints the total as 326,539 pesos, but five times that fifth is 1,311,295, and the shares alone run past a million, so the first digit is lost; Prescott gives 1,326,539. A later writer, Garcilaso de la Vega, is said in an editor’s note to give a larger fifth, 546,250 pesos, and the story sets that beside the record of the melting, not above it.
Jul 1533
The sentence. Xerez writes that Pizarro sentenced Atahualpa for treason, to burn unless he became a Christian, for the security of the Christians. Pedro Pizarro, Pizarro’s cousin, puts the blame on Almagro, the royal officials and an interpreter, Felipillo, and says Pizarro sentenced him against his will; he writes that Atahualpa was baptised and strangled before Soto came back to say he had found no army. Pedro Pizarro and Salcamayhua both say Atahualpa had Huascar killed while a prisoner, and Pedro Pizarro adds that he sent the order only once Pizarro had assured him of his own life.
1550
Valladolid, 1550. In Spain the Emperor had a council hear whether wars of conquest against the Indians could be just. MacNutt, a biographer who admires Las Casas, lists Sepúlveda’s reasons: the gravity of the Indians’ sins, their “rudeness”, the spread of the faith, and the harm they did one another. In MacNutt’s summary Las Casas read the pope’s bull as a duty to convert, and his thirty propositions call the conquests “tyrannical”. MacNutt calls the debate a moral victory for Las Casas; the account he gives reports no ruling.
1549
The mountain. Cieza de León, who saw Potosí in 1549, dates its first working to 1546 in Markham’s English and 1547 in a modern Spanish edition; Markham’s footnote, citing Acosta, says an Indian named Hualpa found the vein and a Spaniard, Villaroel, began to work it in April 1545. Cieza values the king’s fifths from 1548 to 1551 at more than three million ducats, more than the Spaniards got from Atahualpa. He also writes, in Spanish, that the Indians who went into a mine gave its holder a mark of silver, or two if it was rich, each week; Markham’s English has it the other way round.
1573–1812
The mita. A forced mining labour system called the mita ran in Peru and Bolivia from 1573 to 1812. A reference entry says Viceroy Francisco de Toledo set up the colonial mita, without the Crown’s approval, drafting over 11,000 Indians a year for Potosí, and that it coerced reluctant Indians and subsidised production through low wages. Melissa Dell, in a 2010 study read here only as an abstract, finds a mita effect of about 25 per cent lower household consumption and about 6 percentage points more stunted growth in children in subjected districts today.
1519
Borrowed money. In the imperial election of 1519, Fugger money of Augsburg was used to pay bribes to the electors, says an exhibition on the Habsburgs. It adds that in the middle of the century the Spanish kingdoms and the New World brought Charles V about five million gulden, without saying how much came from the Americas. Philip II halted payments on his bankers’ contracts in 1557-60, 1575-77 and 1596-97. Two economic historians argue the stop of 1575 was aimed at the cities of Castile, not at the bankers.
1520–1650
The price of silver. Earl J. Hamilton’s 1934 book set Spanish prices beside American bullion, and argued that the silver was chiefly, if not entirely, responsible for the inflation of much of the Price Revolution era, from about 1520 to 1650, but principally only for about 1540 to 1600. John Munro, who defends a modified version of Hamilton’s thesis, warns that many economic historians, himself included, have misread Hamilton on this. Munro adds that only a minority now hold a basically monetary explanation, and that none can be purely monetary.
Mar 2019
An apology asked. In March 2019 Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, wrote to the King of Spain and Pope Francis asking for apologies to indigenous peoples, and Spain’s government answered that the arrival of the Spanish 500 years ago cannot be judged by today’s standards. Pope Francis had asked forgiveness in Bolivia in 2015, “not only for the offenses of the Church herself” but for crimes against native peoples in the conquest, while recalling the priests and bishops who opposed “the logic of the sword”. In March 2026 King Felipe VI told Mexico’s ambassador, in an informal talk, that the laws of protection had not been kept and that there had been much abuse, and warned against “excessive moral presentism”. President Claudia Sheinbaum called it a gesture of approach, not all she had wanted.
Pictures, from Wikimedia Commons: Catholic Church, Jebulon, CC0.
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