I’ve been reading the book When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall and he makes a number of interesting arguments, some of which I find a bit confusing. I was wondering if any experts on this time period could clear it up for me.

In his book, Restall goes to great lengths to argue that the Spaniards played a much smaller role in the ‘conquest’ of the Aztec empire than did Tlaxcala and other allied Indigenous nations. He points out that the Spanish comprised a small percentage of the troops present at the siege of Tenochtitlan and even argues that the Spanish were being manipulated by Tlaxcala, not the other way around.

On the other hand, he argues that Spanish war tactics and ideology was responsible for making the war far more brutal, even genocidal. He writes:

“Furthermore, the Spanish tendency to engage in a kind of total war (ideologically justified, aimed at unconditional surrender, with civilians as legitimate targets) destroyed the second factor of pre-Colombian restraint.”

And:

“In other words, the lesson of conquistador practices was that the rules no longer applied; the Spaniards let the genie of total warfare out of the bottle.”

He also describes how the Spanish justified atrocities against Indigenous people with a racist ideology. He concludes:

“The sum of all this so resoundingly makes the case that the “Conquest of Mexico” should be seen as a war—not a conquest war, not a short war, and certainly not a surprisingly short war, but fully and categorically a war—that it in fact does more than that. It suggests that we might do better to understand it as a genocidal war.”

I find these arguments a bit difficult to reconcile. If the Spanish were as marginal to the fight as Restall suggests and were being manipulated by the Tlaxcalans then why was their total war ideology so readily adopted? Who orchestrated the siege of Tenochtitlan? And who ultimately was in ‘control’ of the battle and bears the most responsibility for the carnage that occurred?