They resumed their wandering till they reached two vacant, swampy islands off the southwest shore of Lake Texcoco. In this seemingly hopeless site these able people settled down and built a city. They named it Tenochtitlán, “beside the prickly pear cactus.” They built giant causeways to link the islands to the mainland, and they dug canals across the islands that would serve as streets for their canoes. From the bottom of the lake they scooped the soil and shoveled it on rafts and man-made islands where they grew their crops. They built houses, palaces, and temples, and an aqueduct to bring them drinkable water from the hills. Before long, Tenochtitlán was one of the largest cities in the world.
When the Aztecs settled on their islands, nearby kings were always making war on one another. This belligerence proved helpful to the hungry new arrivals. At first they fought as mercenaries for their neighbors, but later on they turned against their bosses, one by one. They fell upon them suddenly, burned their temples, and divided up the prisoners, the booty, and the women.
Sometimes they used milder methods. Once they marched to a nearby state and “invited” the ruler to bring his lords to their capital and adore their god, Hummingbird on the Left. The ruler swore he’d never even let his whores dance before the god, but when he saw he had no choice, he groveled in the dirt and pleaded for his life.
It wasn’t long before the Aztecs held a rich and ample empire. At its peak it stretched across what now is Mexico from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and it held perhaps five million people. In size and population it was roughly equal to a Western European country of its time. Every year the Aztecs forced their subject towns to send them porters bearing gold; and also corn, tomatoes, beans, and squash, turkey, deer, and dogs; and humans they could kill to please their gods.
Yes, human sacrifices. Like many other Indian peoples then, the Aztecs held that they must give their gods the food they wanted: human hearts and blood. If they failed to carry out this sacred task, their victories would cease, the sun would die, and life would end. It was partly from this need to feed the gods that Aztecs always sought new lands to conquer, since these would bring new pools of victims for their knives. They claimed it was an honor to be slaughtered for a god.
Every year they prodded about 15,000 naked prisoners up the steps of temples. As each captive reached the top the clerics forced them down on slabs of stone, split their chests, ripped out their beating hearts, and fed their blood to idols of their gods. Later on the priests and other dignitaries sometimes made a dinner of a victim.
Bloodstained though they were, these former nomads turned into a civilized people. That is, they learned the arts and skills the Maya once had known and which many peoples of the “Old World” also knew. True, they never learned the art of smelting metals (they edged their swords with volcanic glass), and they didn’t know the use of wheels. But they had a government that worked, handsome buildings, painters, poets, astronomers — even historians. By farming with intelligence and squeezing tribute from the folk they ruled, the Aztecs lived quite well. Or at least their noble families did, richly housed, brightly clad in cotton cloth and feathers, fed on dogs and chocolate, and certain of an afterlife as gemstones, clouds, or many-colored birds.
And yet the Aztecs tore the hearts from living humans. Can we argue that in the Aztecs’ case human sacrifices were themselves a proof of their attainments? Something other Indians also did, the new-rich Aztecs did much more, as if to prove how well they’d learned what was expected of a people who were civilized.
IT WAS WHILE the Aztecs were at their peak, conquering and sacrificing others, that Columbus reached the New World’s eastern edge. After he had sailed home and reported his findings, others got on ships and journeyed to the new-found lands. Many of these men were Spaniards who had fought in Europe’s wars; they were restless seekers of adventure, ravenous for treasure, land, and humans they could rule.
Among them was Hernán Cortés, whose most daring deed until he sailed from Spain had been his nearly fatal leap from a balcony when his lover’s husband came home early. In the New World young Cortés took part in the Spanish conquest of Cuba. (His reward was land and Indian slaves.) He was clever, brave, often decent, sometimes cruel and greedy.
In 1519 Cuba’s Spanish governor chose Cortés to lead an expedition to the central American mainland. He gathered ships and troops and sailed to the eastern coast of Mexico, where the Aztecs’ lands began. His forces were 508 soldiers, about 100 sailors, 16 horses, several little cannons, and 13 muskets. When they reached the mainland, Cortés burned the little ships. Without the ships there could be no return to Cuba, so his soldiers hadn’t any choice but to conquer or be killed.
From the steamy jungles near the shore Cortés led his army up and through the rugged hills, toward Tenochtitlán. Many Indians on their way abhorred the Aztecs, so they joined the Spaniards, fed them, hauled their guns, and fought beside them. Other Indians tried to drive them back, but the Spaniards had an edge: the skills and weapons they’d acquired in European wars.
Whereas the Indians charged in yelling mobs, Spaniards fought in ordered ranks. Whereas Indians fought with lances, swords of hard volcanic glass, and bows and arrows, Spaniards fought with horses, crossbows, pikes, and swords of steel. They had weapons that not only killed but terrified the Indians: sticks that barked and killed, logs that roared and killed by scores, and, worst of all, terrifying beasts that had two heads and many legs. What’s more, the Spaniards had the will to win. They never doubted that they fought for God against Satanists, sadists, and sodomites (Aztec priests), or that the Aztec ruler’s treasures might as well be theirs as his.
When they reached Tenochtitlán, Cortés so charmed the Aztec ruler, Montezuma, that he invited the Spaniards to stay there as his guests. Then they took him prisoner and divvied up his gold and silver, pearls and jewels. They invited themselves to a festival, and when the drums were beating and the chanting reached its peak and six hundred Aztec nobles were dancing, the Spaniards struck. They lopped the drummers’ hands and heads off, and they killed the noblemen and stripped their bodies of their gold.
However, when the Spaniards, pious Christians, started to destroy their temples, the outraged Aztecs rose against them. A bloody battle followed, in the course of which the Aztecs wounded their submissive king with rocks and arrows. Montezuma died soon after, hastened on his way perhaps by Spanish knives. To escape, the Spaniards fought their way along the causeway from the islands to the mainland, losing a third of their number.
But nothing would deter the Spaniards, who, remember, had no ships in which to sail home. Two weeks after they had fled Tenochtitlán, the Spaniards crushed an Aztec army. Then Cortés collected reinforcements, built some boats (for island fighting), and began a battle for Tenochtitlán.
By now the Spaniards had some silent allies fighting by their side, more destructive than their guns. In their bodies they had brought from Europe germs of smallpox, measles, and dysentery. Even for the Europeans these diseases could be deadly. How much more lethal were they for the Indians, so isolated from the Old World and its epidemics. Unlike the Spaniards, they had no immunity at all to Old World microbes, and their bodies served as splendid hosts.
Smallpox, whose virus one could spread by simply breathing, was the worst. At the start of 1519 it had swept through Hispaniola Island, killing most of its Indians. It had reached the mainland shortly after Cortés, by no coincidence of course, and raged across the Aztec Empire, often killing from half to all the people in a town. And now, while the Spaniards struck Tenochtitlán, smallpox also hit the city. It largely spared the Spaniards, who were probably immune, but it wiped out nearly half the city’s defenders.
As the Spaniards and their Indian allies took the city street by street, they razed it house by house and dumped the rubble in canals. They raped the women, killed the Indians by the hundreds of thousands, and probed their bodies searching for their hidden gold. When they stopped, the earth was drenched with gore and stre
wn with maggot-covered limbs and bodies.
The stench was so atrocious that the gagging victors moved outside the ruined city to a place along the shore. At just this moment wine from Spain arrived, and pigs from Cuba, and the Spaniards held a victory party. Next day they climbed a hill that overlooked the lake. A priest conducted mass, and they gazed down on the wound they’d made when they ripped out the Aztecs’ heart.
BACK WHEN THE Aztecs had won their empire in the north, the Incas to the south had built their equally ill fated one. The Incas’ heartland perched high up in the Andes Mountains, on the western side of South America.
The Incas left no written records, so we know their story chiefly from the tales their “memorizers” or tradition-tellers had passed on. Before they started on their conquests the Incas had been much like other Andes peoples. But under two extraordinary kings they overwhelmed their nearest neighbors. Then they conquered farther tribes and stationed troops among them. They added conquered soldiers to their army.
Soon the Incas held almost all of the Andes Mountains and the western coastal desert. Their empire stretched 2,500 miles from the Equator down to what is now south-central Chile. They ruled perhaps as few as six or as many as 12 million people. These included llama herders high up in the mountains, where the air was thin and visitors could only gasp for breath; potato farmers in the valleys; naked hunters in the jungles, whom the Incas rarely glimpsed; and fishermen in towns along the coastal desert.
The Incas brooked no protests and they wanted no revolts. They often broke up tribes they conquered, forcing many of these tribesmen to resettle elsewhere, far from home. Then they brought in loyal Indians to take the places of the tribes they’d moved.
But what a contrast with the Aztecs! The Incas could be harsh but they were also decent, or at least prudent, and they wanted all their subjects clothed and fed. They required the “have” areas in their empire, which produced ample potatoes and llama wool, to send their surpluses, even herds of llamas, to “have-not” areas. They resettled many Indians from the highlands in the valleys so that they could grow sufficient corn (or maize) and coca (a beloved drug) for the people of the lands they came from. In ways like these the Incas built a state, turned their former enemies into loyal subjects, and made them prosper.
The Incas knew what the Persians and Romans had known before them: that an empire must have first-rate communications. So they built no fewer than 19,000 miles of roads linking the provinces to Cuzco, their capital. Incan roads ran through swamps and deserts, up the sheerest cliffs, through tunnels in the mountains, and over bridges made of interwoven vines that the Incas slung across the deepest gorges. Over these roads and bridges relays of messengers ran 150 miles a day, bringing messages they memorized.
AMONG THE FORTUNE-SEEKERS arriving in the Americas was Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish soldier’s bastard son. Unlike Cortés, who in his teens had studied law, Pizarro as a boy had tended pigs. He had probably fought for Spain in Italy, and he may have been a bandit for a time. After he reached the New World, Pizarro went to Panama, and he was with Balboa when the discoverer crossed the isthmus and saw the Pacific. For several years Pizarro was the mayor of Panama, and he made a modest fortune.
When he heard that somewhere south of Panama was a wealthy empire, Pizarro scented treasure. In the 1520s he led two expeditions down the coast. They learned that they were indeed on the edge of a great empire, rich in gold and silver, which they named Peru (see Inca Empire on map, page 148). Peru is probably a corruption of Virú, the name of a river.
Before he struck the Incas, Pizarro returned to Spain and convinced King Charles to authorize his plan. Charles, who now was Holy Roman Emperor as well as king of Spain, made Pizarro governor of the yet-to-be-conquered lands. Pizarro returned to Panama with four of his brothers, and in 1531 he sailed to Peru with 180 men and 37 horses. Two hundred more soldiers led by Pizarro’s partner, Diego de Almagro, joined him later. Even then Pizarro’s forces were smaller than those Cortés had had in Mexico.
Without knowing it, however, he had picked the perfect moment to attack. Five years earlier, smallpox had spread from Central America down to Peru. Just as it had helped Cortés in Mexico, it would help Pizarro in Peru by cutting down the Incas. What’s more, Peru’s late emperor, before he died, had divided the empire between the rightful heir and his favorite son, Atahualpa. The two half-brothers then fought each other and Atahualpa had won, but events would show that he had weakened the regime.
When the Spaniards reached Peru, they headed inland. They climbed the pleasant foothills and the dark forests of evergreens at the base of the Andes. Then they ascended the steep slopes of the mighty mountains, all the way to Atahualpa’s headquarters. Pizarro sent a message to the emperor, proposing that they meet on the town’s big central square. He hid his soldiers and his cannons near the square, where Atahualpa couldn’t see them. Soon the emperor arrived in splendor, with an escort of several thousand men, lightly armed. Not far away he had another 25,000.
“Where are the strangers?” Atahualpa asked. A Spanish priest advanced alone, a Bible in his hands. Using an interpreter he explained the Christian creed and the power of King Charles. He urged the Incan to agree to Jesus as his god and Charles his master, but Atahualpa flatly told him he would not. “Your god, you say, was put to death by the very people he created. But mine,” he said, and pointed to the sun, “my god still lives in the heavens and looks down on his children.” When the priest offered him the Bible, he threw it to the ground.
At once Pizarro waved a scarf, the signal that the Spaniards had agreed on. Cannons roared and gunsmoke billowed on the square, and the handful of Spaniards sprinted out and slaughtered most of the bewildered Indians. Pizarro and some horsemen seized the emperor.
The Spaniards held him hostage, just as Cortés had done with Montezuma. The Incas couldn’t help him. Like Cortés the Spaniards wanted treasure, so Atahualpa promised he would fill the room where he was held with gold as high as he could reach. He did this, but the treasure didn’t save his life. With astounding chutzpah the Spaniards told him he was guilty of the murder of his own half-brother and that he had schemed against them. They offered him a choice: remain a heathen and be burned or become a Christian and be strangled. He chose the latter.
When they heard about his death, the Incan army near the city panicked and retreated. Pizarro marched to Cuzco, the Incan capital, and captured it without a fight. The Spaniards seized a huge amount of royal treasure, and they added this to what they’d squeezed from Atahualpa. They melted down the precious metals, sent a fifth to Charles in Spain, and divided up the rest. Later, they allotted every soldier an estate of land, with Indians to work it for him. Every soldier now was rich, though few would live for long to enjoy their wealth.
The beginning was the easy part. Now the Spaniards had to win the rest of the Incan empire, two thousand miles of desert, forests, and the Andes. The Indians outnumbered the Spaniards a hundred to one, and the odds would have been much worse if new diseases hadn’t scythed so many down. Just as with Cortés’s invasion, the Spaniards’ battle skills and swords of steel triumphed over poorly commanded Indians armed with weapons made of stone and copper. Just the same, it took the Spaniards years not only to defeat the Indians but to crush revolts in distant mountain valleys.
The Spaniards’ biggest enemy was themselves. Apparently Pizarro cheated Almagro when the Spaniards shared the Incan loot. When Almagro rebelled, a brother of Pizarro caught and killed him. Almagro’s son and some friends suspected that Pizarro planned to slaughter them as well, so they moved first. They surprised Pizarro as he ate his dinner and stabbed him to death. King Charles sent an agent to Peru, and this man caught the young Almagro and had him put to death. Charles then sent a governor to Peru, but another brother of Pizarro killed him. Of Pizarro’s four brothers, three were killed and the other died in a Spanish prison. Most of the ordinary Spanish soldiers became as rich as they had dreamed they might but suffered
violent deaths.
The Spaniards couldn’t govern what they greedily had grabbed and plundered. All the things the Incas had constructed — order, sharing, roads and bridges, just to name a few — fell apart.
PIZARRO AND CORTÉS began a long and dismal story. The Spaniards took the finest land, made slaves of many Indians who had somehow stayed alive through wars and epidemics, sweated them to death in silver mines, tried to crush their religions, and made their lives so wretched that for generations many of them chose to have few children or none at all.
Half a century after Spaniards conquered Mexico, an Aztec matron visited a friend not far from flattened Tenochtitlán. She wanted to congratulate the younger woman on the birth of her two sons. A document survives that tells about the visit. The older woman calls the children “precious jewels and emeralds.” And precious they were just then, when many Indian women had no children, and babies were miscarried or died in infancy. “Hardly anyone who is born grows up; they all just die,” she says. She thinks back to her youth, before the Spaniards and the worship of the new god Jesus, when the Aztecs were as many as the ants. “But now everywhere our Lord is destroying and reducing the land, and we are coming to an end and disappearing. Why? For what reason?”1
The Human Story Page 19