Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  What differentiated Aztec from European warfare were its far greater cultural and geographical constraints. Without horses or oxen, or even the wheel, the operational range of Aztec armies was limited by the amount of food and supplies their human porters could carry along. As Tenochtitlán expanded its influence in Mesoamerica, as the size of the city grew, and as war became even more predictable, the political organization of the entire Mexican subcontinent grew more vulnerable to attack: Europeans might topple the entire imperial structure by decapitating a tiny elite on an island city, which needed thousands of tons of food shipped in daily for its very survival.

  Wars ceased for brief periods between October and April—precisely the time Cortés entered Tenochtitlán in November 1519—to allow agricultural laborers to work the harvests. Fighting was rare altogether in the rainy period between May and September, while battle at night was also discouraged. In contrast, the Spaniards, as a maritime people in a temperate climate, and as veterans of the murderous wars in Europe and on the Mediterranean, were willing and able to fight year round, day or night, at home and abroad, on land and sea, with few natural or human restrictions.

  Many confrontations between the Aztecs and their neighbors began as “flower wars” (xochiyaoyotl). These staged contests, without much killing between elite warriors of either side, revealed Aztec superiority— through the greater training, zeal, and battle experience of its warriors— hence the futility of real armed insurrection. Should the enemy persist in resistance, flower wars might escalate into full-fledged battles of conquest designed to defeat an enemy outright and annex its territory. In that regard, we should assume that the creation of the Aztec empire had resulted in hundreds of thousands of Mesoamericans killed in wars during the fifteenth century alone.

  Whereas Mesoamerican warriors were adept at handling weapons, there were two further factors that inhibited their ability to slay enemy soldiers in vast numbers outright. In all wars the taking of captives for human sacrifices was important proof of individual battle excellence and social status and was deemed critical to the religious health of the community at large. More often still, sacrifices were shrewd occasions for nightmarish intimidation, spectacles of bloodletting to warn potential adversaries of the consequences of resistance. For example, the Aztec king Ahuitzotl purportedly organized the butchery of 80,400 prisoners during a four-day blood sacrifice at the 1487 inauguration of the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán—an enormous challenge in industrialized murder in its own right. Ahuitzotl’s killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau. The presence of four convex killing tables—so arranged that the victims could be easily kicked down the pyramid—turned human sacrifice into an assembly-line process. Companies of fresh executioners periodically replaced those exhausted from the repeated obsidian-blade strokes, to ensure that the entire train of victims could be dispatched during the festival. We do not know the number of victims otherwise sacrificed under normal conditions, but surely it was in the thousands. Ixtlilxochitl believed that one of every five children of Mexica tributaries was killed each year, though Bishop Don Carlos Zumárraga’s lower estimate of 20,000 a year is more plausible. Oddly, few scholars have ever likened the Aztec propensity to wipe out thousands of their neighbors through carefully organized killing to the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and other eastern Europeans.

  Although under dire circumstances Aztecs could fight to the death, the warrior’s training in the methods of stunning, binding, and passing back captives through the ranks would prove an impediment against the Spanish. Scholars who argue that the Aztecs quickly dropped their notions of ritual fighting against Cortés are correct, but they must concede that years of such military training were hard for many warriors to discard in a few months—especially when pitted against Spanish swordsmen and pikemen who had drilled since adolescence in the art of killing with a single stroke.

  To what degree such rituals were predicated on technological constraints we cannot be sure, but the tools of Aztec warfare—oak, stone, flint, obsidian, hide, and cotton—were incapable in themselves of killing warriors in any great numbers. Broadswords (machuahuitl) and spears (tepoztopilli) were wooden, with flakes of obsidian embedded along their double cutting edges. Both could match the sharpness of metal, but only for a few strokes before chipping or losing their edge. Aztec swords were without points, while the stone heads of lances likewise made them poor thrusting weapons.

  Since the aristocratic infantry arm of the Aztec military was singularly inefficient against Spanish foot soldiers and cavalry, native commanders depended upon an array of missile weapons that might penetrate the unprotected arms, legs, necks, and faces of Cortés’s men. A peculiar type of spear-thrower (atlatl) was made from a wooden stick about two feet in length, with grooves and hook at one end in which to place the projectile. Fire-hardened darts (tlacochti) were occasionally flint-tipped; when used with the atlatl these missiles could achieve accurate ranges of 150 feet. But they were essentially useless against metal armor and at great distances incapable of tearing even through layered cotton. The Aztecs used simple, rather than composite, bows (tlahuitolli). While they could achieve a rapid rate of fire with more than twenty arrows (yaomitl) per quiver, such weapons lacked the penetrating power and distance of European models that since classical antiquity had been fabricated from glued horn, hide, and wood.

  Many accounts testify to the danger of Aztec stone missiles; and while native slingers were without metal bullets and sophisticated slings, nevertheless they were able to wound unprotected flesh at ranges approaching a hundred yards. The Aztecs’ wood, hide, and feathered shields, like cotton war suits, might ward off Mesoamerican stone blades but were of no value against Toledo steel, metal crossbow bolts, or harquebus shot. It is an accurate generalization that Montezuma’s arms were of an inferior caliber to the artillery, missile weapons, body armor, and offensive armament of Alexander the Great’s army some eighteen centuries prior.

  Mexico had all the natural resources necessary for a sophisticated arms industry. There was no shortage of plentiful iron ores at Taxco. Copper was in abundance in Michoacán. The volcano Popocatépetl furnished supplies of sulfur. Indeed, within a year of the conquest Cortés himself, against the edicts of the crown, was producing gunpowder and casting muskets and even large cannon in the former domains of the Aztecs. Why amid such a cornucopia of ingredients for munitions did the Mexicas produce only clubs, blades of obsidian chips, and javelins and bows and arrows? The most popular explanations suggest need. Because Aztec warfare was designed largely to capture rather than kill, stone blades were sufficient against similarly armed Mesoamericans. The implication is that the Aztecs could have fabricated weapons comparable to the Europeans’, but saw no need for such additional expense in their brand of ritually crafted warfare whose aim was to stun rather than cause death. Yet such claims of latent technological know-how are preposterous for a culture without a sophisticated rational tradition of natural inquiry. The opposite is more likely to be true: the Aztecs had no ability to craft metals or firearms and so were forced to fight ritual wars with weapons that would largely wound and not easily kill. Against a large and fierce army such as the Tlaxcalans, it is hard to envision how the Aztecs, despite vast numerical superiority, might have waged a war of annihilation with nonmetallic weapons—explaining why Tlaxcala was largely autonomous, and settled its disputes with the Aztecs through quasi-ceremonial flower wars.

  Aztec battle, like Zulu fighting or the attacks of Germanic tribes, was one of envelopment. Swarms of warriors systematically attempted to surround the enemy, the front lines mobbing and stunning their adversaries, before passing them through the rear ranks to be bound and led off. The ensuing need to march prisoners back with the army also contributed to the Aztecs’ inability to campaign at large distances, since the combined throng of victors and defeated only increased logistical requ
irements. While there was a national Aztec army, in fact local contingents thronged around their own captains and might exit the field altogether should their leaders or standards go down. Francisco de Aguilar relates the desperate fighting at Otumba, after the Noche Triste:

  As Cortés battled his way among the Indians, performing marvels in singling out and killing their captains who were distinguishable by their gold shields, and disregarding the common warriors, he was able to reach their captain general and kill him with a thrust of a lance. . . . While this was going on, we foot soldiers under Diego de Ordaz were completely surrounded by Indians, who almost had their hands on us, but when Captain Hernándo Cortés killed their captain general they began to retreat and give way to us, so that few of them pursued us. (P. de Fuentes, Conquistadors, 156)

  Relays of soldiers might enter the fray every fifteen minutes or so, as there was no concept of decisive shock battle in which heavily armed foot soldiers sought to collide head-on with the enemy at the first encounter. Ranks and files were nonexistent; warriors failed to charge and retreat in step or on command; missiles and arrows were not launched in volleys. Nor were missile troops used in concert with infantry charges. Without horses, Aztec battle doctrine was largely a one-dimensional affair, in which the greater training and numbers of the emperor’s warriors, together with the pomp and circumstance of feathered warriors and standards, were enough to collapse or scare off resistance.

  Finally, Aztec society was far more ranked than even aristocratic sixteenth-century Spain. The weapons, training, armor, and position in battle of most Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence—and then led again to even more privilege. The Spanish were a class-bound society as well, but during the invasion, a variety of lowly conquistadors mounted horses as the military situation demanded. Harquebuses, crossbows, and steel blades were distributed freely throughout the army. The fuel that drove Cortés’s army was not so much aristocratic privilege as a desperate desire by both hidalgos and the impoverished to acquire enough money and fame to advance upward in Castilian society. On the battlefield itself, the result was that in matters of weapons, tactics, recruitment, and leadership the Spanish army operated on meritocratic principles of sheer killing: men and tools were trained and designed to dismember people first and provide social advancement, prestige, and religious rewards second. Killing was more likely to result in status than status was in killing.

  THE MIND OF THE CONQUISTADORS

  The brutal conquistadors (“the conquerors”) who followed Hernán Cortés into the valley of Tenochtitlán seem at first glance a poor representation of the Western rationalist tradition. Many of the most notorious were fanatical Castilian Christians who lived in a Manichean world of absolute good versus evil. Sixteenth-century Spain under Charles V was in the midst of the Inquisition (begun officially in 1481), and witch burning, torture, and secret tribunals terrorized the countryside. Jews, Moors, and Protestants were fair game, in addition to Catholics of dubious faith who were accused of anything from bathing daily to reading imported literature. Unwavering adherence to a beleaguered orthodox Catholicism was expected of all in royal service, and was the ideology of almost every conquistador who sailed westward—sometimes to the detriment of military and political logic.

  Cortés and his followers, when surrounded by an enemy of some 200,000 Mexicas in the middle of Tenochtitlán, insanely demanded of Montezuma that he cast down Aztec idols so that his subjects might convert en masse to Christianity. Catholic priests were ubiquitous in the New World; various Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jeronymite friars were given imperial powers of audit to ensure that the Indians were converted to Christianity, rather than gratuitously slaughtered. What they saw—the tearing out of beating hearts from sacrificial victims, rooms smeared with human blood, racks of skulls, priests with flayed human skins on their backs—terrified the Spanish priests. They were convinced that the Aztecs and their neighbors were satanic, their rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism the work of the Antichrist. An anonymous conquistador summed up the Spanish revulsion:

  All the people of this province of New Spain, and even those of the neighboring provinces, eat human flesh and value it more highly than any other food in the world; so much so, that they often go off to war and risk their lives just to kill people to eat. The majority of them, as I have said, are sodomites and they drink to excess. (P. de Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 181)

  To protect the tiny forces of Christendom from the contamination of these purported legions of darkness, mass, confession, and absolution were prerequisites of the Spanish before battle. Throughout the vicious two-year campaigning the conquistadors were convinced that a series of supernatural beings hovered in protection over their heads. Shrines soon dotted the Mexican landscape to thank the Virgin and various saints for victories and salvation from Aztec infidels. The conquest was as much to convert souls as to gain gold and ground, the church’s de facto attitude often being that the conquistadors’ killing was wrong and counterproductive, but that Mexicas were better off dead than as live practicing agents of the devil.

  Martin Luther was excommunicated in the year Cortés first occupied Tenochtitlán, yet nascent Protestantism and its accompanying debate about religious doctrine would find no receptive audience back in contemporary Castile. A mere three decades before Cortés set foot in Mexico Ferdinand and Isabella had at last finished the four-century-long Reconquista, by uniting Aragon and Castile and expelling the Moors from Granada in 1492, establishing in the struggle the modern nation-state of Spain. For much of the subsequent century the crown was busy putting down insurrection in southern Spain among the Moriscos, who agitated for a return of Islamic rule. Moreover, due to its presence near Italy and North Africa, Spain also found itself a frontline state in the European resistance to the Ottoman onslaught, as well as bogged down in its periodic fighting against the Italian city-states and the rebellious Dutch. Thus, the grim veterans who landed at Vera Cruz were a world away from the farmers and religious exiles who landed off Plymouth Rock.

  Christian fanaticism and strict Catholicism were the bedrock defenses of southern Mediterranean cultures besieged by Islamic enemies to the south and east, and the newer Protestant adversaries of northern Europe. Protestant Europeans were far from the front lines of Islamic attack; and, without the strong traditions of adherence to a centralized autocrat in Rome, they might find religious reform an indulgence that beleaguered Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks could not afford. In the era of the conquest of Mexico, Spain increasingly felt itself besieged on all sides. Powerful Jews, through economic might and commercial influence, might exploit and dominate the Catholic peasantry; Protestant fanatics might scour the Spanish countryside, undermining local churches and papal estates; Moors and Ottomans might conspire to return Spain to the Islamic world and thereby overturn the new national creation of Ferdinand and Isabella. In the paranoid Spanish mind the Inquisition and the Reconquista alone had saved Spain, yet the new nation’s continued survival depended on a class of knights who might spread Catholicism to the New World before it, too, was colonized by northern Europeans and its treasures used to further religious strife in the Old World.

  With real and perceived enemies such as these, no wonder that as the sixteenth century wore on, Spain would become even more repressive— foreign study sometimes discouraged, northern European scholarship often ignored, and research increasingly nonsecular. As Cortés set out for the New World, the old Mediterranean cosmos of the Roman Empire was soon to embrace a vast revolutionary shift. The exploitation of Atlantic trade routes, North American exploration, Protestantism, and radical economic changes would insidiously transfer economic power away from the Mediterranean world to the northern European Atlantic nations of England, Holland, France, and the German states.

  Befo
re the Castilians set foot in the New World there was already established a sense of missionary zeal and military audacity unknown to the same degree in the rest of Europe. Spain saw itself as the continuance of the Holy Roman Empire. The Hapsburg Charles V was not merely the emperor of the new nation of Spain but the proper inheritor of the domains of the old Roman imperators. The most gifted of the latter—Trajan and Hadrian come first to mind—had been born in Iberia. The courage of the ancient Iberians was legendary, both before and after the Roman conquest. Hannibal’s slaughter at Cannae, for example, would have been impossible without the audacity of his Iberian mercenaries. No more deadly and romantic figure exists in Roman literature than the renegade Sertorius and his army of Iberian rebels, which devoured Roman legions for nearly a decade in their Spanish redoubt (83–73 B.C.). Thus, it was particularly unfortunate for the indigenous peoples of Mexico that they experienced not merely European interlopers or religious pilgrims per se, but the most audacious, deadly, and zealous warriors of the sixteenth-century European world, the most vicious men Spain had to offer in its greatest century of imperial grandeur.

  What drove on Cortés and his men were the quest for status back in Spain and the hope of material betterment in the New World: free land and vast estates in Mexico, of course, and, for the more idealistic, the spiritual rewards of converting millions to Christianity. But, above all, gold beckoned. Gold was the first topic of interrogation with the natives. Worthless trinkets, iron knives, and glass were traded for gold. Only gold, not the precious feathers, intricate cotton clothes, or even the elaborate silver plate of the Mexicas, satisfied the Castilians. Gold might make a man a noble in Spain; gold might ensure the bankrupt Spanish crown that it could keep up with the more efficient economies in England and Holland, and so maintain the Hapsburg empire in Europe. Eventually, a quarter of all imperial Spanish revenues would be bullion from Mexico and Peru: 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver were to reach Spanish shores from the New World between 1500 and 1650.