When Montezuma Met Cortes
Page 12
Aztec Mexico was organized “so as to be able to sustain, and thereby mollify, the unseen powers with as many human hearts as it was possible to give them” (1955). The two cornerstones of rule by the Aztec nobility were “human sacrifice and a methodical exaction of tribute” (1966). Aztec nobles developed a “rule of terror” in which “death was lurking everywhere,” and by Montezuma’s reign “the sacrificial engine was forging ahead at frantic speed”; tens of thousands of infants every year were “wrenched” from the breasts of “sobbing mothers,” and “the epitome of dehumanization was achieved when the lords could with good appetite sit down and eat the flesh of the plebeian” (1967). Aztec priests were butchers, literally, as they “can legitimately be described as ritual slaughterers in a state-sponsored system geared to the production and redistribution of substantial amounts of animal protein in the form of human flesh” (1977). Early in their history the Aztecs developed “an evil reputation for savagery among their more civilized neighbors,” their warriors being Mexico’s “most bloodthirsty” (1984). The “one activity for which the Aztecs were notorious” was “the large-scale killing of humans in ritual sacrifices” (1991). “Lines of despondent captives must have been a familiar sight” in Tenochtitlan, as “human sacrifice was central to Aztec religion” (2008)—“potentially the fate of all, the linchpin that held the indigenous system together,” the “bloody keystone of religious beliefs”; “violence, and the threat of its use, was endemic in Indo-Mexico,” so that at Montezuma’s coronation, the parade of prisoners progressed up the pyramid steps to the sacrificial altar, “blood, the food of the gods, dripped down and pooled on the steps as the celebratory orgy of death and political elevation continued” (2015).25
NO WONDER THAT “no topic has caused more controversy and confusion about Aztec life than human sacrifice,” as leading Aztec scholar Davíd Carrasco has deftly put it. Carrasco is among those who have sought to offer a less prejudicial and more objective view of Aztec civilization. Such efforts might be summed up as taking three lines of argument.26
The first I have implied earlier in this chapter: the supposed evidence for characterizing Aztec life as built around rituals of slaughter and cannibalism is another example of confirmation bias. Like the story of the Meeting as the Surrender, the original lie or exaggeration became truth by its repetition as fact, buoyed by the bias of Aztec stereotypes. Conquistadors and Franciscans, theologians and chroniclers, all seeking to justify some aspect or another of the Spanish invasions, conquests, colonization, and campaigns of conversion, repeated the same denunciations of the Aztecs so many times that they became fact. After several generations, the distortions and lies were widely believed; there was nobody to argue against them. Even the indigenous elite, based on their contributions to Sahagún’s great Historia (the Florentine Codex), seemed to believe them (after all, they were now Christians too). When Bernal Díaz’s account of the invasion was finally published in 1632, with its lurid descriptions of such rituals based on alleged eyewitness observation, the lies seemed truer still. Their repetition in the bestselling histories by Solís, Robertson, and Prescott carried them across the centuries and to readers worldwide. When, in the modern era, Sahagún’s Historia was discovered and began to be published, its inclusion of the same distortions, highly detailed and in Nahuatl, helped give sixteenth-century prejudice a whole new veneer of authenticity.
A second way to view the Aztecs more objectively is to adopt a comparative perspective—a persuasive line of argument, to my mind. For is there not a glaring irony to denunciations of Aztec violence written during “the century of genocide,” the era when 187 million people perished in political violence, “more killing than at any other time in history”? We do not even need to turn to the violent twentieth century to compare Aztec and Western civilizations; European practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will do the job just as well (including the atrocities of the Spanish-Aztec War, to which we shall return in later chapters). Thus modern judgments, based on sixteenth-century Spanish sources, reflect two layers of irony, hypocrisy, and ethnocentrism. These comparisons are obvious, and have thus for long been periodically made; in 1955, for example, the French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle noted:
At the height of their career the Romans shed more blood in their circuses and for their amusement than ever the Aztecs did before their idols. The Spaniards, so sincerely moved by the cruelty of the native priests, nevertheless massacred, burnt, mutilated, and tortured with a perfectly clear conscience. We, who shudder at the tale of the bloody rites of ancient Mexico, have seen with our own eyes and in our own days civilized nations proceed systematically to the extermination of millions of human beings and to the perfection of weapons capable of annihilating in one second a hundred times more victims than the Aztecs ever sacrificed.27
But such damning comparisons have, for centuries, tended to be dismissed, using various dubious argumentative techniques. One is the use of categories, embedded deeply in how we talk about the Aztecs: we wage religious wars and execute prisoners; the Aztecs practiced “human sacrifice” before “idols.” As Montaigne famously remarked in his essay “On Cannibals,” “everyone calls barbarian what is not his own usage.” In the same centuries that Aztec prisoners were executed at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, Christians burned other Christians alive at the stake; in both cases, men and women were ritually killed in public for political and religious reasons. That commonality must have been starkly clear to the Aztecs themselves, when in 1539 the Christianized indigenous ruler of Tetzcoco, don Carlos Ometochtzin, was condemned of clandestine “idolatry” by Zumárraga (former witch-hunter in Spain and Mexico’s first bishop), then burned alive at the stake in the plaza where the Great Temple had stood. But of course nobody then, or since, called Ometochtzin’s killing a “human sacrifice.” For by deploying different categories, that commonality is buried, allowing us to emphasize the many differences that also existed in practice and meaning; from there it is a short step to the slippery slope of dismissal.28
Take examples from two very different studies of the Aztecs. The North American anthropologist Marvin Harris absorbed uncritically the negative depictions of the Aztec past by sixteenth-century Spaniards like Díaz, Durán, and Sahagún, calling the empire a “cannibal kingdom.” He dealt with the Spanish-Aztec comparison of cultures of violence by dismissing it on the opening page of his discussion (in a widely read 1977 book): the conquistadors were not surprised to discover that “the Aztecs methodically sacrificed human beings,” because they themselves “broke people’s bones on the rack, pulled people’s arms and legs off in tugs of war between horses, and disposed of women accused of witchcraft by burning them at the stake.” Yet, according to Harris, they were unprepared for “what they found in Mexico” not just because Aztec practices were different, but also because they were categorically worse. “Nowhere else in the world had there developed a state-sponsored religion whose art, architecture, and ritual were so thoroughly dominated by violence, decay, death, and disease.”29
The echo of sixteenth-century Spanish rhetoric is not surprising. When Spanish critics of conquistador practices denounced “the unheard-of cruelties and tortures inflicted” upon indigenous people (the judge Alonso de Zorita), “the devastations and cruelties, the slaughters and destructions” by Spanish invaders (Las Casas), Conquest apologists simply flipped the comparison; “it is my opinion and that of many,” wrote the conquistador-author Vargas Machuca, “that to paint cruelty in its full colors, there is no need to do more than portray an Indian.” The rhetorical trick is simple and transparent, yet it has been successfully repeated for centuries.30
Far more sympathetic to the Aztecs was Inga Clendinnen, whose beautifully written exploration of Aztec culture based on Sahagún’s Historia is one of the last century’s most sophisticated and widely read studies on the topic. She too noted that in Europe, for many centuries, large crowds watched the “judicious tortures and exemplary maimings” o
f public executions. But, then, by a quick sleight of hand, she dismissed the relevance of such comparisons, on the grounds that public executions “were relatively infrequent, certainly peripheral to daily life,” with the victims “seen as culpable to some degree”; by contrast, “Mexica victims were purely victims.” Clendinnen’s goal was to show that Aztec executions were not more horrific than Western ones, just couched in a different cultural context. Yet the dismissal of the comparative context, and the devotion of many pages to “sacrificial” rituals, meant that her influential study struggled to escape the revulsion for Aztec religion that suffused her book’s source, Sahagún’s Historia.31
The story of Aztec public executions may be one “which chills” (as Clendinnen asserts). But is there any story of state-sponsored violence and public executions that does not chill? Even the most sensationalist Franciscan or Dominican account of Aztec killings is no harder to read than the records of Inquisition tortures, than accounts of protracted public executions in colonial Spanish America, or even than Las Casas’s Destruction of the Indies. Regardless of how one seeks to mute or dismiss the comparison, the fact remains that Western traditions of ritualized public killing for political and religious purposes have been as extensive and deadly, if not more so, than Aztec practices. As Carrasco puts it: “Even though the Aztec image in Western thought ranks them as the biggest sacrificers in the world, there is no substantial archaeological or documentary proof that they ritually killed more people than other civilizations.”32
THIS TAKES US BACK to issues of evidence and the context of Aztec civilization, and thereby to yet another way of seeing through negative Aztec stereotypes. The two lines of argument above do not claim that the Aztecs did not publicly execute prisoners at all. Carrasco again: “That the Aztecs practiced ritual human sacrifice is beyond doubt, but it is also clear that Spanish chroniclers exaggerated the numbers and purposes of these sacrifices as a strategy to justify their own conquests and prodigious violence against” indigenous peoples. Maya archaeologist Elizabeth Graham goes further, rightly arguing that neither Aztecs nor Mayas had a term that translates as “sacrifice,” that Spaniards introduced the concept to Mesoamerica, and that executions took place “as part of warfare” and not “on the basis of gods’ needs.” Warfare in Mesoamerica mixed “goals of economic gain with cosmic justification,” just as it does today (consider the complex economic and ideological justifications behind our own century’s long wars waged by the West in the Middle East).33
So how can we go through or around the distorting filters of Spanish accounts to see Aztec rituals of execution more clearly—to see human sacrifice (a loaded phrase that arguably should only be applied to the Aztecs with quotation marks) as wartime killing, without judgmental hyperbole?
One illuminating and fascinating new source of evidence is the Great Temple itself. No records survived of its destruction in the 1520s, and it remained buried for centuries; yet the Great Temple was precisely where almost all the executions, most notably the alleged mass sacrifices, took place. However, in 1978 Mexican archaeologists began to excavate the foundations of the Great Temple—that is, the pyramid upon which the twin temples stood, and its surrounding structures. Directed for four decades by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, the project has gradually revealed that the Great Temple was rebuilt seven times, helping to preserve more than 126 caches of ritual offerings buried by generations of Aztec priests. The objects in these caches are a kind of unintended time capsule, and we shall return to look at them in detail in the next chapter. For now, what of the bones of the hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of Aztec brutality? Or, if we believe that the empire was “a cannibal kingdom” and those victims were all taken off to be eaten in Aztec homes, what of the human skulls “too numerous to count” that Díaz later claimed he had seen in the square facing the Great Temple?34
The archaeologists did indeed uncover two large carved stones, which more or less match conquistador descriptions as those upon which prisoners were executed. They also found ritual knives, most of flint, finely carved and decorated, deposited over many years. In addition, the floors of some buildings, and remnants of some altars and statues, contained traces of human blood. Human remains were also found, those of 126 people; forty-two were children. The children all suffered from disease, and their throats had been cut. Forty-seven adult heads were found, spread through various offerings from different time periods.
But none of those adults had been decapitated. Of Díaz’s skulls, perforated to fit onto skull racks, only three were found prior to 2015 (three skulls from almost four decades of excavations). More than ten times that many decorated facial skull masks were found under the Great Temple floors. Even when archaeologists found the larger of the two skull racks, the huey tzompantli, in 2015, it revealed scores—but not hundreds, let alone thousands—of human skulls, with those outnumbered by two-dimensional carved stone skulls. Furthermore, the ritual knives do not appear to have been used; they were symbolic offerings. Archaeologists have found more human remains at Teotihuacan than in Tenochtitlan (Teotihuacan is the spectacular site north of Tenochtitlan whose heyday was a millennium before that of the Aztecs). Of the eighty thousand prisoners supposedly sacrificed over four days in 1486, “no evidence approaching one-hundredth of that number has been found in the excavations”; put another way, compared to Zumárraga’s imaginary 2 million children executed during the century before Spaniards invaded, the Great Temple yielded evidence of 0.0021 percent that many.35
Thus when Prescott declared that the unequaled scale of Aztec human sacrifice was incredible (“The amount of victims immolated on its accursed altars would stagger the faith of the least scrupulous believer”), he had no idea that his rhetoric was literally accurate: it is not to be believed because it is a monstrous lie. If we allow the centuries-old monolithic image of the Aztecs as bloodthirsty cannibals, devotees of monstrous ritual, to pixelate and crumble, a very different picture becomes visible behind it.36
Just as a clearer picture of early modern Spanish culture might balance Zumárraga with Cervantes, Cortés with Las Casas, traditions of Inquisition torture with achievements in poetry and oil painting, so would a clearer picture of Aztec civilization include an appreciation of Aztec poetry and xochicuicatl, or “flower-song”; the extraordinary beauty of Aztec featherwork; the sophistication of Aztec aesthetic sensibilities; the system of education for both girls and boys; the literary and legal culture that supported historians, judges, ministers, and clerks; the orderly accomplishment of cities like Tenochtitlan and Tetzcoco—masterpieces of urban engineering, architectural harmony, and organizational ingenuity. One of the conquistador legacies is that we tend to see Aztec cities through the distorting lens of their obsession with human sacrifice and cannibalism. But Tenochtitlan was not a dark locus of doom and death; it was a place of festivals and families.
The Aztecs were heirs to the larger civilizational tradition of Mesoamerica. In their achievements in sculpture and painting, in the language arts, and in urban design, they are no less an impressive manifestation of that tradition than the Mayas, Mixtecs, and other Mesoamerican cultures. In the island-capital and in towns across the steadily expanding empire, kings and merchants, warriors and slaves, shamans and corn farmers, featherworkers and birdkeepers, priests and scribes interacted peacefully within “a highly stratified, intensely ritualized, wealthy urban society.” The Spanish invasion may have prevented the Aztecs from “attaining new levels of material, social, and intellectual greatness.” But the levels attained by 1520 were extraordinary and will inspire marvel and study for centuries to come.37
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By way of further developing a clearer, less prejudicial picture of Aztec civilization, let us linger for a moment on a pair of Aztec deities. One of them, Huitzilopochtli, helps us to see how the Western view of the Aztecs became distorted, and the other, Quetzalcoatl, leads us back to Montezuma and the Meeting.
Huitzilopochtli has variously been call
ed the war god, the patron god, and the principal god of the Aztecs (pronounced “wheat-sealopotch-tlee,” the conquistadors instantly changed the name to Huichilobos, Ochilobos, and Orchilobos). Over the centuries since the fall of the Aztec Empire, the deity “came to epitomize Aztec religion and, to a broader extent, Aztec culture.” Frequently depicted in text and engraving as the grim and gruesome deity to whom human hearts were offered, Huitzilopochtli became the Aztec icon in the Western mind; to this day popular notions of the Aztecs, even in the minds of those who cannot name Huitzilopochtli or describe any Aztec deity, are essentially based on that deity’s imagery and mythology. Where did such a god originate?38
In short, Europeans invented him. The seed of the invention seems to have been planted by Cortés in his Second Letter to the king. There he remarked that Aztec idols in temples were larger than a man and made of dough from seeds mixed with human blood. Peter Martyr, who was the Spanish Crown’s Chronicler of the Indies when Cortés’s Second Letter was published in Spain, repeated the description, inventing the detail that the blood was from children. The conquistador Andrés de Tapia, whose eyewitness but fanciful account of the war of invasion was written in the 1540s, added that the blood was that “of virgin boys and girls.” Not a single piece of evidence has ever emerged to support the idea that human blood, let alone children’s blood, was mixed into this dough (we shall explain the dough’s nature and purpose shortly), yet it was repeated as fact in dozens of books for centuries; by the turn of the seventeenth century the story had evolved into another invention—that the bread the Aztecs gave to Cortés and the other Spaniards in Tenochtitlan had secretly been mixed with human blood.39