Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/186

 The name Cuāuhtémōc which literally means 'Eagle which descended (landed)' (Nahuatl cuāuh(-tli) 'Eagle', temō-'descend', - c past). The honorific form of Cuāuhtémōc is Cuāuhtémōctzīn (the suffix - tzīn is used to designate a dignity similar to "Don" or "Lord" in Spanish).

Cuāuhtémōc was Moctezuma Xocoyotzin nephew and as Cuitláhuac, should have been the husband of his daughter Tecuichpo (Nahuatl, 'cotton snowflake') when she became of age. When he assumed power, the conquerors had already been expelled from Tenochtitlan, but the city was devastated by hunger, smallpox, and the lack of fresh water. Cuauhtémoc reached this post having been tlacochcálcatl (head of arms) of resistance to the conquerors, given that since the death of Moctezuma prior to the Sad Night (Noche Triste), he is identified as the mexica military leader.

Finally is taken prisoner and his feet were burned, so he told the spaniards where was the aztec treasure, driven by gold greed: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in his true history of the new Spain conquest recounts in detail how mistrust spread among the spaniards, while stubbornly denying the reality of their dream wealth. The gold they had obtained altogether (83,200 castellanos) was not sufficient to satisfactorily distribute among all the spanish troops, so assumptions began by commanders get more gold. Some spaniards figured that after the Toltec channel battle, the aztecs had recovered the booty and had dumped it to the lagoon or had been stolen by the Tlaxcalans or by the own spanish soldiers. That is why they were officers of the Royal Treasury, and especially the treasurer Julian de Alderete, and not Cortés, who limited to consent to it, those who ordered -Bernal Díaz and López de Gómara as it is argued- the torment of Cuauhtémoc and Tetlepanquetzaltzin. According to the Díaz del Castillo books, López de Gómara and subsequent accusations by Cortés during his “residence trials” agree in that they were tortured by wetting their feet and hands with oil and burning them. According to Bernal, Cuauhtémoc confessed four days before "they caught him they