Morzillo

Morzillo is a black horse that belonged to the conquistador Hernán Cortés from 1519 to 1525, and was deified after his death by the Itza of the Tayasal region under the name of Tziminchác.

Acquired by Cortés in 1519, this elegant horse was used by him during his expedition to Mexico, notably during the siege of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (1521). Cortés then took Morzillo on the expedition to Honduras. After suffering a hoof injury, the horse was offered by Cortés to the Itza of the Tayasal region, but died shortly afterwards for lack of proper care.

After his death, Morzillo became the object of a cult among the Itza that lasted for a hundred years. They saw him as a thunder god, probably due to the use of arquebuses by the Spaniards. His statue was found in the town of Flores by two Franciscan missionaries, 95 years after the passage of Cortés. It was definitively destroyed in 1697, during Martín de Ursúa's campaign.

The cult of Tziminchác is still remembered locally.

Documents from the colonial era
Sources relating to Cortés' horses come in part from the letters (relaciones) he himself wrote and sent to Charles V. These were translated into French by Désiré Charnay, Lettres de Fernand Cortès à Charles-Quint sur la découverte et la conquête du Mexique, 1896.

The main other source is the chronicle by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496-1584), Historia verdadera de la conquista de la nueva España. He gives numerous comments on the individual qualities of the horses of Cortés' troops and their coat color.

Spanish historian Juan de Villagutierre (1650-1700) mentions the veneration of Tziminchác in his Historia de la conquista de la provincia de el Itza, and Diego Lopez de Cogolludo in his Histoire du Yucatan.

Charnay may have taken some of his information on Cortés' horse from Antonio de Solís y Ribadeneyra (Historia de la conquista de México, población y progresos de la América septentrional, conocida por el nombre de Nueva España).

Recent historical studies
Among those who have written recently about Morzillo (references in the "Bibliography" section) are:


 * Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936), politician, writer and adventurer, who devoted an article to him entitled Hippomorphous in 1914;
 * Robert Denhardt (1912-1989), historian, professor at Texas A&M University, in an article published in 1937 about Cortés' horses, and who devoted an entire article to Morzillo in 1938;
 * Ángel Cabrera (1879-1960), zoologist, in his 1945 work translated into French in 2004 as Chevaux d'Amérique;
 * Pierre Ivanoff (1924-1974), explorer and filmmaker, who devoted a chapter to the subject in his 1968 book Découvertes chez les Maya;
 * Paleontologist Deb Bennett writes about horses in the New World in her book Conquerors (1998).

Spanish names
Robert M. Denhardt claims the horse is called "Morzillo". Désiré Charnay uses the name "Morcillo".

Deb Bennett (1998) translated Morzillo as "the tuft". She explained this by the fact that this horse had a spike of hair on its neck, a hair whorl, seen as a sign of good fortune in Arab traditions.

Argentine zoologist Ángel Cabrera, on the other hand, calls it Morcillo, an adjective used in Spain at the time to designate a black horse with reddish highlights (seal brown). The color adjectives used by Spaniards in 16th-century sources can be difficult to translate, as they don't always have the same meaning in modern Spanish.

Désiré Charnay (1908) also referred to this horse as "Marzillo".

Mayan name
The divine name given to this horse in Maya Itza is Tziminchác, also spelled Tziminchác by French ethnologist Jacques Soustelle and anthropologist James D. Nations, Tizimin Chac by historian John Henderson, or Tziunchán by Bennett.

Soustelle proposes the translation "horse of thunder", while anthropologist Grant D. Jones translates it as "horse of thunder". Jones translates it as "horse of thunder and lightning", while James D. Nations translates it as "tapir of thunder", from "Tzimin", the Itza name for a tapir. Nations explains this choice of translation by the fact that the tapir is the rainforest animal that most resembles a horse.

Religious historian Michel Graulich does not endorse either etymology, but points out the kinship of the Mayan word "Tzimin" with the Nahuatl word "Tzitzimitl".

Descriptions
Based on Bernal Diaz, Bennett describes the animal as elegant, with a dark bay or black coat.

History
Morzillo's destiny is unique in the annals that mention horses: "His black horse, too, was about to play the most extraordinary role a horse has ever played in all human history."

- Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Hippomorphous Although he remains the most famous, if Bernal Díaz's comments are anything to go by, Morzillo was probably not the best horse in Hernán Cortés' troops.

Cortés' acquisition of Morzillo
Bernal Díaz describes Cortés' first mount on leaving Cuba (February 1519) as follows: "a brown zain horse that died at San Juan de Ulúa (off the coast of Mexico)", where the squadron arrived on 21 April; it is not possible to know whether this horse died of battle wounds or disease. Cortés then mounted a horse named "El Arriero", followed by a third called "Romo", which arrived on the same ship as Morzillo.

Three months after the creation of the colony of Veracruz (now Mexico), on 9 July 1519, Hernán Cortés captured a ship sent by the governor of Cuba, Diego Velasquez, with whom he was on bad terms, and appropriated its cargo - a dozen Jamaican horses.

Morzillo remained in Veracruz for the time being, and was not ridden during La Noche Triste episode (30 June 1520), but according to Diaz, Cortés rode Morzillo during the siege of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (March–August 1521).

Stopover in the Tayasal
As the conquest of Mexico drew to a close, on 13 March 1525, Cortés' conquistadores stopped, on foot and on horseback, in the Tayasal valley. There, they hunted deer for meat. The hunt was easy, as the deer could be approached and shot, but the conquistador's horse, Palacio Rubias, died from the heat. The Tayasal valley lies in the territory of the Itza people, who (according to Bernal Díaz) worship various animals, including deer. After the hunt, the party crossed stony hills, named el Paso del Alabastro and La Sierra de los Pedernales by Villagutierre, where Cortés' black horse received "a splinter in his foot" from a "sharp stick", and cannot be treated. According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, while Cortés and his troops were resting after their hunt, they were approached by Itza canoes, and invited to their village, located in the center of Lake Petén Itza. Cortés went there with 20 men and his horse Morzillo.

In the fifth letter Cortés sent, the cause of Morzillo's gift to the Itza is attributed to his foot injury ("I was obliged to leave my black horse (mi caballo morzillo) with a splinter in his foot" ) and the episode of the deer hunt came afterwards. However, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote his chronicle later, attributed the cause of the gift to this deer hunt on a hot day, claiming that Morzillo had lost all the fat in his body and could no longer stand. Cabrera believes Cortés' version to be more credible, as it was written very shortly after the events in question. Villagutierre, writing on the basis of these two sources, considers the real reason for Morzillo's gift to the Itza to be of little importance, the following facts (the veneration of the horse) being irrefutable.

Morzillo's gift to the Itza
Cortés, who probably held Morzillo in high esteem, refused to slaughter or sacrifice him. Cortés initially thought of coming back for Morzillo via the Tayasal. So Cortés left Morzillo with the Itza cacique, Canek, who promised to look after him. Cortés recounted this episode in the fifth letter sent to Charles V, quoting the cacique's promise. The cacique of the village of Tayasal thus inherited Morzillo.

The Itza, who had never seen horses before, took Cortés' mission of care seriously. They probably equate Morzillo with a thunder god, having seen from afar the arquebuses firing on the game hunted by Cortés' mounted troops, but unable to learn their operation at close quarters. Unable to care for a horse, the Itza renamed him "Tziminchác", decorated him with flower necklaces and tried to feed him game and poultry meat, to curry his favor. Charnay mentions that he was given the flesh of sacrificial victims.

The horse died from lack of proper care.

Temple and statue of Tziminchác
Soon enough, the horse died. The Itza turned him into a thunder deity, Tziminchác, erected a temple in his honor and carved a statue in his likeness, in stone according to most sources, in wood according to the Historia municipal del Reino de Yucatan.

Several explanations are offered for this veneration.

For filmmaker and lecturer Pierre Ivanoff, the Indians feared the return of Cortés and the vengeance of the spirit of the horse who has just died.

For Charnay, quoting Cogolludo, the Itza believed that the horse is responsible for the firing of the arquebuses, following the hunting party they observed. Juan de Villagutierre believes that this new divinity takes an important place in their pantheon. Henderson, on the other hand, believes it was a "minor divinity" linked to lightning.

Franciscan missionaries visit
Cortés never came back for Morzillo, so 95 years passed before another European visit.

There are, however, differences in date interpretation. Most sources date these events to 1618, 95 years after Cortés' departure and around a century after the conquest of Alvarado (this is the date cited by archaeologist Éric Taladoire), while Cunninghame Graham places them in 1697, during the military campaign of General Martín de Ursúa.

In any case, two Franciscan missionaries came to convert the inhabitants of the Petén to Christianity. They both spoke the Itza language. The two religious visited the local temples and found a statue of Tziminchác, a stone horse sitting on his hips, in the largest of them. They were astonished, as there are no horses in this region, and the locals had never seen one other than through the statue of Tziminchác. They learn the origin of the horse, as well as the nature of the diet offered to Morzillo during his lifetime.

Friar Bartolomé Fuensalida tells them that Morzillo is the idol of an "irrational beast", comparable to the deer Itza hunt to eat (figura de béstia irracional, como son los venados y otros animales que flechais para comer).

According to Juan de Villagutierre, Father Juan de Orbita (or Orbitiera) attempted to destroy the statue. This desecration aroused the wrath of the people, and the missionaries narrowly escaped being stoned to death.

Destruction of the Tziminchác temple (1697)
In 1697, General Martín de Ursúa's campaign to subdue the Itza led to the destruction of all the Tayasal temples, with Juan de Villagutierre present.

According to Ivanoff, this led to the definitive loss of the bones in the temple of Tziminchác. The statue of the horse was also definitively lost.

According to Taladoire, European interest in the Maya ruins and cults sank into a long period of oblivion.

Perpetuation of the legend
The Itza seemed to have recognized that their horse statue does not represent a god, but the legend of Tziminchác has continued to be passed down.

According to sources of popular oral tradition consulted by Ivanoff, the Itza created a new statue at a place called Nic-Tun, which they transported on a pirogue to the island of Tayasal in order to hide it, but the boat capsized and sank due to its weight. Ivanoff searched unsuccessfully for such a statue in the waters of Lake Tayasal.

In his architecture thesis defended in 2007, Arturo Alejandro Sazo Lopez cites a "dance of the little horse" (Baile del caballito), which is said to be "a remembrance or emulation of the Horse of Cortez that cannot be destroyed" (una remembranza o emulación al Caballo de Cortés que no puede ser destruido). This dance has its own music and lyrics. It seems to have been first performed by a local gentleman from Flores, named Vicente.

In one of his literary criticism, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire invented a novel entitled Tzimin-Chac, which he attributed to a certain "Louis Bréon", a fictitious name inspired by that of the philosopher Morvan Bréon. French-Belgian author Diane Ducret cites the Tziminchác legend in her Corpus Equi (2013).