Killing a Spaniard
A decade after her son's brutal murder, Ines de Paz was still consumed with grief and anger. In a series of petitions to the Spanish king, and in lawsuits that dragged on for years before the Council of the Indies, dona Ines lamented how her son Rodrigo had been seized, racked, waterboarded, burned and - barely still alive after weeks of torment - hanged.
As her lawyer put it, he was ‘subjected to many kinds of tortures, with cords, garrotte, water, and hot bricks'. Then ‘he was hanged, despite his innocence, and was robbed of more than twenty thousand castellanos'.1The hanging took place in 1525 in the central plaza of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city captured only four years earlier - supposedly destroyed and rebuilt as Mexico City, but in reality reoccupied and rebuilt by Nahuas, with only the very centre inhabited by a small, fractious group of Spaniards, who still called the city ‘Temistitan'. The larger context to the killing of Rodrigo de Paz was therefore the war of the Spanish invasion (traditionally termed the Conquest of Mexico), begun in 1519 and dragging on across Mesoamerica into the 1540s (but usually given a terminal date of 1521). Considering the astonishing mortality of that war - discussed in parallel chapters in this volume[654] [655] - it may be surprising to find in the archives expressions of indignation over the murder of a single Spaniard, repeatedly expressed in a legal dossier over a thousand pages long.
On the surface of things, we could dismiss such outrage as originating with Rodrigo's anguished mother and two brothers (who also appear in these records); after all, high infant mortality rates and mass death from plague and warfare do little to soften the blow of losing a child or sibling. Similarly, we might be tempted to assign little meaning to the killing of a Spaniard in Mexico in 1525 beyond that larger context of it being an exceptionally violent place and time.
But to better understand violence in Spanish America in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries we need to dig deeper than that. What were the lawsuits over the killing of Rodrigo de Paz really about? What made his demise either emblematic or different from the violent deaths of thousands of other Spaniards, thousands of people of African descent and millions of indigenous peoples in the Mesoamerica of the era? What clues might we follow in order to grasp how violence was categorised and perceived at the time - and what categories of our own might potentially be relevant?