Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/55

Rh Spanish quarters; an undertaking so stupefying in its conception and so incredible in its execution that only the multitude and unanimity of testimony serve to remove it from the sphere of fable into that of history. This, however, was not an act of mere daring, but as he explains to the Emperor in his second letter, a measure of carefully pondered policy. We are now accustomed to see "political agents," or financial and military "advisers," near the persons of nominal rulers, to whom the controlling foreign power concedes sufficient semblance of independence to mask their essential servitude, but the system of ruling a nation through the person of its enslaved sovereign originated with the seizure of Montezuma by Cortes. He was a man of unfeigned piety, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, nor did his conviction that he was leading a holy crusade to win lost souls to salvation ever waver. He says in his Ordenanzas at Tlascala, that, were the war carried on for any other motive than to overthrow idolatry and to secure the salvation of so many souls by converting the Indians to the holy faith, it would be unjust and obnoxious, nor would the Emperor be justified in rewarding those who took part in it.

Among other ordinances governing the moral and religious welfare of the people in Mexico after the conquest, was one which prescribed attendance at the instructions in Christian doctrine, given on Sundays and feast days under pain of stripes. The Jesuit historian Cavo (Los Tres Siglos de Mexico, tom. i., p. 151) says that on one occasion when Cortes had himself been absent, he was reprimanded from the pulpit on the following Sunday, and, to the stupefaction of the Indians, submitted to the prescribed flogging in public. Cortes resembled the publican who struck his breast and invoked mercy for his sins, rather than the Pharisee who found his chief cause for thankfulness in the contemplation