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All the Spanish conquerors were cruel; but Cortes was not so cruel as many others. He was not to be compared to the ruthless Pizarro for instance. Save in daring and personal courage, he vastly surpassed the Lord of Peru in every quality which goes to make a man. Cortes was treacherous in his dealings with Montezuma and others, but the man of his age regarded very lightly the obligation of his word toward a savage. Indeed, it was a well-known principle that no faith was necessarily to be kept with either heretics or heathen and no oath was binding against the interests of the state. Cortes, of course, had all the contempt for the Aztecs that Caucasians usually have for inferior races, although in his letters, he tried his very best to be fair, to be just, even to be generous to these people he overcame; and no one can doubt the sincerity with which he desired to promote the spreading of the Christian religion.

They did things differently in those days. Not only did they believe that the religion of the heathen should be changed by force, but they believed that in some way they could constrain all people to accept Christianity. More blood has been shed in promoting the idea that the outsider should be compelled to come into the fold than from the misinterpretation of any other text in the sacred scriptures. If any civilized power in the world to-day should send an expeditionary force into a heathen country, which should signalize its arrival therein by the desecration of its temples and the destruction of its idols, the commander would be recalled at once. We have learned other methods, methods of persuasion, of reason, of love. The age of Cortes knew nothing of these methods, and he was only following out the common practice when he smashed with his battle-axe the hideous gods of the Mexicans, and washed and purified with clean water, the reeking, gory, ill-smelling slaughter-houses which were the Aztec Holy of Holies, and adorned them with crosses and images of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When Charles the IX. offered Henry of Navarre a choice of death, mass, or the Bastille on the night of Saint Bartholomew, he gave him one more chance than the early steel-clad militant missionary gave to the aborigines of the new world–for them there was no Bastille.

Making friends with the Tabascans, and leaving one hundred and fifty men to guard his base of supplies at Vera Cruz and to watch the coast, Cortes began his march toward Mexico on the sixteenth day of August, 1519. He proceeded with the greatest caution. Bernal Diaz, an old soldier, who afterward wrote a most vivid and graphic account of the conquest, of which he was no small part, says that they marched forward “with their beards on their shoulders,” that is, looking from side to side, constantly. There was no hurry and there was no need to tire out the force which was thus facing the danger of a long, hard and rash adventure.

By the aid of Marina and Aguilar, Cortes speedily learned of places like Cempoalla, which were hostile to Montezuma and he took in as many of these places on his march as possible, always with incidents instructive and valuable. At Cempoalla, for instance, he met the tax-gatherers of Montezuma. He persuaded the Cempoallans to refuse payment of the tax–an action which would ordinarily have brought down upon them the fury of the Aztec monarch and would have resulted in their complete and utter extermination. He did more. He caused the Cacique of Cempoalla–a man so fat and gross, that, like “the little round belly” of Santa Claus, he “shook like a jelly” so that the Spaniards called him “The Trembler”–actually to raise his hand against the tax-gatherers and imprison them. They would undoubtedly have been sacrificed and eaten had not Cortes, secretly and by night released three of them and allowed them to go back to their royal master, after he had sent two into a safe ward at Vera Cruz.