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We will just have to disagree. Miguel Leon Portilla, the top Mexican scholar on the Aztecs, supports my position in his book Broken Spears. My mentor, Charles Dibble, the translator of the Florentine Codex and a pre-eminent Aztec scholar published The Conquest through Spanish eyes Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (1978){the 41st Annual Frederick William Reynolds Lecture}. As far as I'm concerned, his evidence, consisting of many direct quotes from the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex, is clear and convincing. The Mexica (the ones that count) did not try to kill the Spanish before the "Noche Triste incident." The Spanish did fight and slaughter a number of different ethnic groups such as the inhabitants of Cempoala.

I have read the Florentine Codex codex also and in it I read a lot that could be read has thinking the spanish were "gods", and a lot of post conquest rationlization, esspecially the "mind reading" of Montazuma. I frankly find the notion very hard to take. I suppose the Mexica would not have noticed, the spanish break wind, go to the washroom, spit etc., fornicate and engage in all sorts of rather mundane ordinary behavior and most esspecially why wouild a "god" need translators? I suspect the Mexica could observe these things and draw certain conclusions. That some of the Mexica may have thought the spanish were "gods" for a time is a possibility that they all did so is remote. I further allow the possibility that the Spanish were thought to have "supernatural powers", which did not require belief that they were "gods".

Regarding the "Noche Triste", I am a little aghast that you seem to have forgotten the fighting in Tenotichlan that preceeded that night in which Spaniards were killed. I frankly suspect at least some of the Mexica would have known about the horse and human deaths among the spanish when they fought the Talaxans.

Sorry I just can't take the idea that all or most of the Mexica were both unobservent and not particularily bright.

I frankly think the Indians of Mexico were to a large extent taken aback by the arrival of the spanish and didn't know quite what to make of them. But the idea that they universaily took them to be gods in just sere hokum and a particular legend that became very popular in Europe in the 19th century when it became a standard fantasy that the natives (of whatever stripe) would take Europeans for "gods".

Regarding Cempoala I think you mean Cholua.

Pierre

P.S. Montazuma's alleged involvement with a plot to capture / kill cortez and his men in Cholua is rather a problem if you he really took them to be gods.