Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/277

Rh to-day stand the great Franciscan cloister of San Gabriel and the capilla real. At present not 10,000 people dwell in the city and in San Andrés, but the whole district contains at least as many Indians as inhabited it before the conquest, except that they live scattered over the land, and not, as formerly, together in an extensive pueblo.

The tribe of Cholula was tributary to no one; it belonged to the large number of settled groups which, wholly independent of one another, comprised the native population of old Mexico. Among these groups, which were all military democracies with elective officers, never hereditary monarchies or despotisms, three had joined in a confederation and had become very dangerous to all the others. They were the tribes of the Mexican Valley: Mexico, Tezcuco, and Tlacopan. Mexico took the lead in warlike affairs: Montezuma was simply the commander-in-chief of the soldiers of the three tribes, and not a crowned head. The allies were the most dangerous enemies of Cholula. Yet when the Spaniards had forced themselves into the present Mexico, Cholula had approached them, or rather the Confederation had approached the Cholulans, in order to obtain a support against Tlascala and against the powerful strangers who had just concluded an alliance with the Tlascalans.

Not much regard was felt in the neighborhood for the shrine of the holy Quetzal-cohuatl, but its people were generally looked upon as cowards and knaves, and its idol as a "bad medicine"; and every appeal was made to Cortés to induce him not to go by way