La Noche Triste

La Noche Triste, "the Sad Night", is the name the Spaniards gave to their disastrous escape from Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztec Empire, at the turn of June and July 1520. Driven out by a Mexica uprising, Hernán Cortés and his army fought their way along a causeway across Lake Texcoco in the dark and lost a large part of their men, their native allies and their treasure. In Mexico the episode is officially remembered from the other side, as the Victorious Night.

Cortés's expedition entered Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519 and was lodged in a compound in the city. Soon afterwards, suspecting treachery, the Spaniards made the ruler, Moctezuma II, their hostage. Moctezuma assured his people that he had moved in with the Spaniards willingly and by the will of the gods, but the population turned against both the strangers and their ruler, and the Spaniards and their Tlaxcaltec allies grew steadily less welcome.

In May 1520 Cortés learned that a larger Spanish force under Pánfilo de Narváez had landed on the Gulf coast, sent by the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, to arrest him for insubordination. Leaving Pedro de Alvarado in charge of the capital, Cortés marched to the coast, defeated Narváez and persuaded his soldiers to join him with tales of Aztec wealth. Meanwhile, fearing a revolt, Alvarado and his men massacred Aztec nobles and priests during a festival at the main temple. The city rose and besieged the Spanish compound, and by the time Cortés returned in late June the Aztecs had chosen a new ruler, Cuitláhuac.

Cortés made Moctezuma speak from a terrace to calm the crowds, but he was jeered and struck with stones and darts. Spanish accounts say these wounds killed him; Aztec accounts say the Spaniards killed him. Short of powder, food and water and under constant attack, Cortés decided to break out at night. To lull the Aztecs, he asked for a ceasefire, had a portable bridge built to cross the gaps where causeway bridges had been broken, and let his soldiers load themselves with as much of the remaining gold as they wished. He chose the western causeway to Tlacopan, the shortest way out of the city.

Under cover of rain the column slipped out through the sleeping city, but before it reached the causeway the alarm was raised; according to one account, first by a woman fetching water and then by a priest on top of the Templo Mayor. Warriors poured out of their houses and hundreds of canoes closed in on the causeway, attacking with obsidian-edged swords, spears, arrows and sling stones. Many soldiers weighed down with gold and gear slipped into the lake and drowned. Cortés pushed ahead with a vanguard of horsemen to Tacuba on the shore, then rode back to find Alvarado, badly wounded, with a handful of survivors. The chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo says Cortés wept at the scale of the disaster, which is how the night got its name. All the artillery and most of the horses were lost.

The sources disagree sharply. Cortés claimed 154 Spaniards and more than 2,000 allies were lost; the eyewitness Thoan Cano said 1,170 Spaniards died, probably more than took part; Francisco López de Gómara gave 450 Spaniards and 4,000 allies; and Díaz del Castillo spoke of about 450 Spaniards and 1,000 allies. Among the dead were Moctezuma's son Chimalpopoca and other members of Aztec ruling families held by the Spaniards.

The survivors retreated around the northern lakes, and about a week later defeated a pursuing Aztec army at Otumba, near Teotihuacan. They then reached Tlaxcala, where Cortés planned the campaign that ended in the fall of Tenochtitlan the following year.

Our 1500 map shows the Aztec Empire in central Mexico before the Spanish arrived, and the 1530 map shows the region under Spanish rule as New Spain.