Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/369

 

statement is obviously inaccurate; Cortes has just said that fifty steps led to the summit of the chief teocalli which would allow for a very modest elevation, whereas the Giralda Tower of Seville Cathedral was built 300 years before Mexico was discovered and was then 185 feet high. Neither was it during this first visit to the temple of Tlatelolco in Montezuma's company that the idols were overthrown; that event happened in the teocalli of the great temple on another occasion when Montezuma was not present. Most writers—including Prescott—misled by Cortes, have confused the two visits and the two different temples, but Bernal Diaz makes it perfectly clear that the first visit was to the temple adjoining the market place in the Tlatelolco quarter of the city. This temple was even loftier than the principal one, and the arrangements in both were essentially the same (Orozco y Berra, lib. ii., cap. iv.; Icazbalceta, Dialogos de Cervantes, p. 201). The great teocalli of the chief temple was completed in the form in which the Spaniards beheld it by Montezuma's grandfather, Ahuitzotl, in 1487, when the solemn dedication was celebrated by the sacrifice of a vast number of human victims, estimated by Torquemada at 72,344 (Monarchia Indiana, lib. ii., cap. Ixiii.), by Ixtlilxochitl at 80,000 Historia Chicimeca), but more credibly fixed by the Tellerian and Vatican Codices at the still respectable figure of 20,000. Pretexts for wars with various tribes were invented in order to procure the victims for this ghastly hecatomb, and the ceremony of incessant slaughter occupied two days.

The exact form and dimensions of the temple are not positively known, but it is probable that the pyramid was an oblong, measuring something over three hundred feet in length at its base and rising in graduated terraces to a height of something less than one hundred feet. Bernal Diaz (Hist. Verdad., cap. viii.,) says that he counted the steps, which numbered one hundred and fourteen, and this tallies almost exactly with the statement of Andres Tapia (Relacion, p. 582,) that he counted one hundred and thirteen steps. Bernal Diaz also measured the pyramids at Cholula and Texcoco in the same way, and counted one hundred and twenty steps on the former, and one hundred and seventeen on the latter, hence, if he was accurate, the great pyramid of Mexico was not the loftiest in the empire. Not one of the Spaniards who saw this