{*} [The “massacre” at Cholula _was_ a military necessity to one warring as Cortés was. Having discovered the existence of a plot to exterminate his forces, he simply struck first. The Cholulans had taken measures to annihilate the invaders, which must have proved successful against ordinary foes. Not only the Spanish historians but the native chroniclers testify to this fact. The Mexican story is told in the Indian paintings still preserved at San Juan Cuauhtlautzinco. The Cholulans did not regard the Spaniards as gods. They went to work to trap them and starve them like ordinary human beings. They cut off their supplies. They shut them up in the great Tecpan. The Tlascalans knew all the while that treachery was planned. They knew also (what the Spaniards did not know, because of their ignorance of Indian governmental institutions) that any oaths the Cholulan chiefs might take would be binding upon the tribe only if the tribe had commissioned its representatives to take them. The embassy was only a decoy. The Spaniards thought that the perfuming with incense indicated submission to themselves. They did not know that prisoners of war, destined for sacrifice, were perfumed in the same way. But the slaughter could not have been by any means as great as is ordinarily supposed. In the first place, there were not as many inhabitants in the city as Cortés imagined; and, in the second place, three of the wards of the city were not involved either in the plot or the killing. The great crowd which attended the Spaniards as they passed through the streets was always the same crowd. It made a prodigious noise, and the invaders naturally imagined it to betoken an immense population. But Bandelier’s estimate of 30,000 inhabitants is probably correct. Cortés, in his first report, writes, with apparent complacency, that “3000 muriéron en dos horas.” This would imply a most astounding killing capacity on the part of the less than 500 Spaniards and their allies. The fire-arms of course made awful havoc, yet we must remember that it was a matter of time to load and fire the muskets and cannons of that age. No women and children were killed, not only because the soldiers were ordered to spare all women and children, but also because all non-combatants had been sent away some time before. Armed men fought and killed armed men. Moreover, the Tlascalan allies were more eager to plunder and to capture prisoners than to kill. Bandelier, recalling the fact that the battle was fought on a space not a quarter of a mile in length, questions whether more than five hundred men fell. His estimate is probably too small. The killing was stopped by Cortés five hours after the first shot was fired. Andrés de Tápia, who wrote some time after the affair, says the pillaging, etc., went on for two days. Bernal Diaz, writing fifty years afterward, says it ended the second «lay. But Cortés, writing the next year, says the place was full of women and children the next day. The