Cortes as Governor and the Spanish Base at Panama

From Conqueror to Governor

Tenochtitlan had fallen on 13 August 1521. Two years later, in 1523, Emperor Charles V appointed Hernan Cortes as Captain-General and Governor of New Spain. The appointment confirmed Cortes’s victory at the expense of his old rival Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba who had originally tried to recall the expedition. For the next five years, Cortes governed an enormous, half-conquered territory at almost ten thousand kilometres from Spain — a distance that gave him real local power, but that also made the crown deeply nervous.

Rebuilding Mexico City

Cortes’s first project as governor was to rebuild the ruined Aztec capital. The siege of 1521 had levelled Tenochtitlan; surviving Indigenous labourers were now forced to clear the rubble of their own city and build a Spanish capital on top. Mexico City rose on the same lake island grid — the cathedral was placed on the site of the Templo Mayor, the viceregal palace on the ruins of Montezuma’s palace, and the Plaza Mayor over the old Aztec ceremonial square. The geography of central Mexico City today is the geography of Tenochtitlan with Spanish stone laid over Mexica foundations.

Encomiendas and the New Aristocracy

Cortes also rewarded his men. He granted encomiendas — rights to Indigenous tribute and labour — to his Spanish soldiers, in many cases recycling the Aztec tribute lists wholesale. The maize, cotton and labour that had once flowed to Tenochtitlan now flowed to Spanish encomenderos instead. Crucially, the people doing the carrying did not change. The encomienda was not a new economy; it was the old Aztec tribute economy with new owners on top. Franciscan and Dominican friars arrived from 1524 onwards to convert the Indigenous population — the Twelve Apostles of Mexico, Franciscans who landed in May 1524, are the most famous group — and missions began alongside the encomiendas.

Why Cortes Was Recalled

By 1526 Cortes had marched south on a long, costly expedition to Honduras (1524–26) hunting down a rebellious lieutenant; the journey took him out of the capital for almost two years and his enemies used the absence well. Rivals at the Spanish court accused him of corruption, of withholding the king’s share of treasure, of executing the captured Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc on the Honduras march in 1525, and — most damaging of all — of behaving like an independent prince. Charles V had a simple rule: a conquistador who built a kingdom of his own was a problem. In 1528 Cortes was recalled to Spain. He was given titles and estates (the marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca) but stripped of the governorship. Royal power in New Spain was handed to the first audiencia in 1528, and from 1535 to a Viceroy.

Consequences for the Aztecs

For the Mexica and the wider Nahua world, the consequences of conquest unfolded on several timescales. The immediate consequences were the most visible: the demolition of Tenochtitlan, the execution of priests and rulers, the burning of codices, the systematic dismantling of the temple priesthood. The medium-term consequences were demographic. Central Mexico’s population is estimated to have fallen from somewhere between 15 and 25 million people in 1519 to perhaps 1 to 2 million by 1600 — among the deadliest collapses in recorded human history, though the starting figures are estimates and historians dispute them. Smallpox in 1520, measles in 1531, typhus in 1545 and again in 1576: each wave killed a generation of people who had no immunity, while forced labour, malnutrition and the loss of land made survivors easier to kill the next time.

But the long-term picture also shows survival. The Nahuatl language continued to be spoken by millions and was written down in alphabetic script by Indigenous scribes (often working with Franciscans). Nahua codex-painting traditions adapted to Catholic subjects rather than disappearing. Local cabildos — town councils — preserved a layer of Indigenous self-government under the Spanish empire. Catholic worship absorbed Indigenous symbolism: the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe (from 1531) drew on the older shrine of Tonantzin at the same hilltop. The conquest was catastrophic, but it did not erase Indigenous Mexico.

Panama: A Pacific Gateway

While Cortes was reorganising New Spain, a second front was opening on the Pacific. In 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa had crossed the isthmus and become the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the Americas. The settlement at Darien was rough and unhealthy, but the strategic prize was huge: a base from which Spanish ships could push south down the Pacific coast of South America. In 1519 Pedrarias Davila — the same governor who had Balboa beheaded that year — founded Panama City on the Pacific side of the isthmus. Goods and treasure crossed the narrow neck of land overland by mule train; ships unloaded on one ocean and reloaded on the other.

The significance of Panama was that it gave Spain a continental Pacific port two thousand kilometres south of Mexico. From Panama, Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro and the priest Hernando de Luque organised the expeditions of 1524, 1526 and finally 1530–32 that would bring down the Inca empire. Without Panama, the conquest of Peru — and the silver economy that would underwrite Spanish power for the rest of the century — could not have happened on the timetable that it did.