I Left My Heart in Tenochtitlan ( BONUS INFO: PLAN de AZTLAN)

Liberty Review:
Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico
by Hugh Thomas. Simon and Schuster, 1993, 834 pp., $30.00.
reviewed by Stephen Cox in the November 1995 issue.

On November 8, 1519, Hernan Cortes and his Spanish expeditionary force arrived at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. They were greeted by the Aztec nobility at a place on the outskirts of the city called Malcuitlapilco, which means “the end of the file of prisoners.” In 1487, when the Aztecs inaugurated the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, a line of prisoners waiting to be sacrificed on the city’s pyramids had reached this point. It was two miles to the Great Temple, and there were four such lines of victims.
You can see them there, young men standing in the sunlight in the great city built on an island in the great lake of Mexico, a name that means “in the navel of the moon.” The sky was blue above them, and the two lofty volcanoes, Iztaccihautl and Popocatepetl, rose in the distance. Throughout the day, the young men waited in line for the blood-caked priests of Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and the chase, to rip their hearts out and roll their bodies down the sides of the pyramid so that they could be dismembered and eaten. At the foot of the Great Temple, a carved stone was set in the pavement; this stone was called “Huitzilopochtli’s dining table.”

The interest of the Aztecs can never fade; the story of their conquest by the incredible strangers who came from beyond the sea can never lose its romantic power. The highest recommendation of Hugh Thomas, author of the latest recounting of this story, is that he understands this power and communicates it vividly, never letting the main features of the story be obscured by his exhaustive research, his judicious weighing and balancing of rival interpretations, or his knowledge of how the story might be viewed from the standpoint of modern moralists.

It’s not that Thomas relaxes into amorality. He leaves no doubt that both the Aztecs and their Spanish conquerors were morally vile beyond the vilest imagination. He spends no time trying to make a relativistic “case” for any of them. But he succeeds, somehow, in preserving whatever was beautiful, courageous, or simply curious about them. Even after the Emperor Montezuma had been taken into custody by the Spanish, Thomas explains, the captive

continued to seem to rule. He had his baths, his elaborate meals, the constant presence of his superior chiefs, his discreet meetings with his special women. He as usual rose at midnight to observe from the roof of the palace the North Star and the Great Bear, the Pleiades and other constellations, and to offer his blood to them. He saw innumerable suitors, and nominated judges, taking care that ‘they were not drunkards, nor likely to be bribed, nor to be influenced by personal considerations, nor impassioned in their judgements.’ . . . Jesters continued to tell Montezuma jokes, ‘laugh-giving and marvellous jugglers’ made logs dance on the soles of their feet, maimed dwarfs leapt and danced, while singers performed to the accompaniment of flutes, drums, rattles and bells. Sometimes Montezuma would visit his zoo, and see the jaguars, the ocelots, and the deformed humans. (pp. 310-11)

Thomas loves the Aztec poetry, which is one of the world’s artistic treasures. “Ponder this, eagle and jaguar knights,” wrote King Nezahualcoyotl:

Though you are carved in jade, you will break;
Though you are made of gold, you will crack;
Even though you are a quetzal feather, you will wither.
We are not forever on this earth;
Only for a time are we here.(30)

The Spanish, greedy and cruel, dirty and stinking in every respect, are not nearly so picturesque as the Aztecs. But Thomas lets them live, too. He sees the Spanish both from the Aztecs’ perspective and from their own, conditioned as it was by strange legends and legalisms, complex family and community relationships, odd results of Spain’s recent assimilation to something called the Holy Roman Empire, memories of Spain’s recent struggles against Islam. Thomas also illustrates some effects of the weird and imperfect merging of the Aztec world with the Spanish.
Tecuichpo, a daughter of the sixth Aztec emperor, married in succession the seventh and eighth emperors and three Spaniards. Of her a sarcastic poet sang,

Who are you, sitting beside the captain-general?
Ah, it is Doña Isabel, my little niece!
Ah, it is true, the kings are captives. (542)

It is interesting to reflect on the fact that noble descendants of Montezuma ended up in Spain, where “the family of the counts of Moctezuma survived many generations” (594). In Mexico, pork became a favorite dish of the former Aztec nobility, “since it had a slight taste of human flesh” (578). Thus Thomas twitches the curtain and allows a glimpse of the conquest’s strange afterlife in the two countries that before 1519 had never dreamed of each other’s existence. Speculative fiction could hardly improve on history.
Even more interesting are the glimpses that Thomas provides of the history that preceded the conquest. One wishes, indeed, that he had provided more than glimpses of the formative period of the mighty yet strangely brittle Aztec empire, which was not nearly so old and venerable as one usually imagines an “empire” to be. Only as recently as 1428 had the Aztecs become independent of the Tepanecs, one of those nearly indistinguishable neighboring peoples who never achieved a rendezvous with destiny. Having won independence, the Aztecs conceived the idea, as Thomas puts it, that they were “‘a chosen people,’ with a mission, whose purpose was to give to all humanity the benefits of their own victory” (10). In other respects besides their cruelty, the Aztecs were not so different from the Spanish.

Chief among the benefits that the Aztecs wished to confer on humanity was the imperial religion, centering on Huitzilopochtli, “Hummingbird on the Left” (or south, where the sun is). Human sacrifices were traditional in Mexico, but mass human sacrifice seems to have been an Aztec innovation. In fact, it may have been the invention of one man, the evil genius of Aztec history, Tlacaelel, a general and member of the royal house. For five decades (c. 1430-c. 1480) Tlacaelel was the chief political force in Mexico. When a movement arose to elect him emperor, he responded contemptuously, “I am the ruler and you have regarded me as such. How can I be still more of a ruler?” One of Tlacaelel’s methods of consolidating his rule was to take the Aztecs’ pliable history into his own hands. He ordered the destruction of all their records, so that henceforth he could make things up to suit himself.

After the Aztecs had subjugated or terrorized almost all their neighbors, opportunities of acquiring prisoners of war to be used for sacrifice greatly diminished. With his characteristic directness, Tlacaelel therefore arranged the so-called Wars of Flowers, mock battles in which the Aztec army “fought” neighboring states for the sole purpose of taking captives to be sacrificed. This strategy had the effect of rationalizing what Tlacaelel pictured as a market for sacrifice, a market in which prices had ordinarily been high:

Just as men go to the market to find their warm tortillas . . . our god come[s] to market with his army, to buy sacrifices and human beings, which he can eat; our people and our armies must reach this market in order to buy with their blood, their hearts, their heads and lives the jewellery, the precious stones, and the beautiful feathers required for the service of Humming-bird on the Left the wonderful.

The Wars of Flowers made it possible for Hummingbird on the Left to get “warm food which has only just left the oven” and to get it “whenever [he] might desire to eat and to enjoy himself.” …..more