Dan Snow's History Hit - A New History of the Aztecs

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

In November 1519, Hernando Cortés approached the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with its ruler, Moctezuma. The story which follows has been told countless times following a Spanish narrative. A key part of the story has been overlooked - until now. After being taught the Roman alphabet, the Native Americans used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Camilla Townsend is a Professor of History at Rutgers University. For the first time, she has given these sources proper attention, providing a fresh take on our understanding of native Mexicans. She showed me how Moctezuma and his people were not just the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes and how the Mexica people did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization but realigned political allegiances, held new obligations and adopted unfamiliar technologies. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Such an interesting story on this podcast. I'm talking to Camilla Townsend. She's an American historian, distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University. Now she specialises in the early history of the Native Americans in the USA as well as in Central and Latin America. She's written a superb book, A New History of the Aztecs, and she has found that rarest of things. A new body of evidence, a new archive, if you like, which a lot of previous generations of scholars haven't really been able to access. And that is accounts of Aztec civilisation, religious practice, worship, history, life from the Aztecs themselves

in the years following the Spanish conquest. It's such a fascinating story. Until recently, these sources have been quite obscure, only partially translated, overlooked by scholars, but now a new generation of scholars, and Camilla Townsend in particular, is looking at them, and we're learning a huge amount. It's a really, really great pleasure to have her on the podcast talking about this. We've got lots of other Aztec podcasts and some TV shows that are available on History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history, digital history channel. You can also join our weekly Zoom live podcast records. Let me just say this week didn't go totally smoothly. So thank you to the patients for all the subscribers who joined.

And by totally smoothly, let's just say it was a complete and utter disaster. But you know what? It's been a learning experience. Next week's will be much better. So please subscribe to History Hit TV and then join us on those weekly podcasts. They're great fun. If you want to become a subscriber,

it would be a great honour to have you on the system. You go to historyhit.tv. You sign up using the code POD1. Don't tell anyone this. POD1. P-O-D-1. And then you get, because you're a podcast listener, a month for free, and then your first month just one pound euro or dollar that's a lot of history

for just one pound euro dollar wow that's a great offer anyway so you can go over there and do that but in the meantime first of all here's camilla townsend enjoy camilla thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. Are we still learning really significant new things about the Aztecs? Absolutely we are. We have spent so many years learning from the rather frightening objects like sacrificial flint knives and other scary pictures of objects that they've dug up that it's become almost impossible, unheard of, to learn about the Aztecs by reading everything that they said. And to try

to read the things that the stories that they used to tell even before the Spaniards came on the scene is something that has only begun very, very recently. So yes, there's still plenty to learn. Okay, so we're sort of looking beyond now the archaeology. When you say written down, are these inscriptions, parchment, what form does this writing take? Great question. They wrote with glyphs, but that's not what I'm talking about. Almost none of those glyphic histories survive. In any event, they were just sort of mnemonic devices. These were pictures that were designed to elicit from trained reciters the stories or prayers that they

were to tell. So even if more of them survived, it wouldn't help us that much to really hear everything they had to say. But what happened is that after the Spaniards arrived, they taught boys and young men, a lot of them, the Roman alphabet, so they could study the Bible. And the indigenous kids did that. They studied the Bible dutifully, but they also took that alphabet home. They had figured out that they could use it to transcribe sound. They didn't just have to use it to write in Spanish. So if, for example, someone said in their own language,

So if, for example, someone said in their own language, No kichli, I am a man. They could write, let's see, ni, en, ai, o kichli, o. So they used it to transcribe their own language. They would ask their uncles, their fathers, their grandfathers, maybe their mothers, but probably not, how did you used to pray? What history did you used to tell?

What did you used to say on such and such an event? And the elders would start to talk and these young people would write it down, transcribing sound almost like a tape recorder. And we still have these things. We don't have all of them, but we have a lot of them. But not too much has been done with them because they're hard to read. That's amazing. So there's a sort of 60-year golden period where, with the coming of literacy, before the generations that remembered pre-contact Aztec Mexican life died out, there's this sort of extraordinary time. Wow. I would stretch it even to 80 years, from the 1520s when they first began to learn, then the 1530s and 40s when they really began to write a lot, up to about 1600, they themselves began to

say around 1600, oh my god, the last people who remember the old days are dying. Some of them, however, in about 1600 still had the papers and the writings of their fathers and uncles. So up to about 1600, they could still piece together some pretty real histories. After that, not so much, right? The stories that they wrote got more and more terse, more and more disconnected from what we know reality was, until by the end of the colonial period, the papers that they wrote claiming to be indigenous were not true to the earlier era. There were actually workshops that produced such things, sort of fake histories for a price, and you could take those fake histories to court to try to claim title to land.

But between 1520 and about 1600, there was, as you say, this golden era when there were still people alive who remembered, and they knew how to transcribe sound, and they went to town. Thank goodness they did, because because of them, they saved their past. Because of that, we now can piece together their history. But these have been overlooked because they were presumably not of interest to historians of the early modern period. And then because they've just now they just seem very old and inaccessible. So there is material here that is totally fresh. It's quite fresh. Now, they haven't been 100% overlooked. There was a period when European scholars first discovered them, that they used them to determine things like when such and such a king was crowned, when such and such a king died.

But then they became aware that there were sometimes discrepancies between different towns' stories of that matter. And so they decided there was a long period about a generation when we just thought, well, you can't trust them as history. It's almost like they're folk tales, okay? The other problem was even when they didn't seem like folk tales, when they seemed like histories, we could tell that they were very hard to understand. So, for example, after a battle, they'll describe where all the different women prisoners were taken and who they went to, and it just seems like mind-numbing detail. What are we supposed to do with that? Well, if you read enough of them, you begin to realize how one city state's women were treated by another city state is very revealing of the political arrangements. If they were taken there as sex slaves, as concubines, it was indicative of complete conquest.

Your city state was now going to be a tribute payer par excellence. If they were taken there to live as secondary wives, then maybe there was some room for negotiation. And if a princess got pulled out to be an actual wife, ah, then maybe some political points had been scored. So when these histories would go into great detail describing which women were taken where and under what circumstances, it wasn't just mind-numbing detail to them. To them, it was a way of explaining what the new political arrangement was between these city states. But it's taken us a while to figure that sort of thing out. So first we had to get past a belief that, oh, it's all just folk tales. There's nothing real there. Then when we realized, no, there is some real stuff there, we had to figure out what they're talking about. But I think we've

made some progress recently. So we've got the golden period of transcription. What is the historical period they're describing? I find, as I read these texts closely, that we can get a pretty good understanding of what really happened for two to three generations prior to conquest. So from, say, the early 1400s to the early 1500s. The texts begin by referring to much more distant, deeper paths.

But there I do think we are dealing with what I'll call myth history, folk tales, legends. I wouldn't presume to say that what they say happened in the year 1200 actually happened. But it is still interesting in terms of revealing the frame of mind of the storytellers. So part of it is myth history, but I would say they're telling us real historical details for about two generations prior to, and then they continue during the colonial era. Some of these go right on into the 1600s and give us a good sense of what life was like for ordinary conquered indigenous people under the

Spaniards. Extraordinary resource. What does it tell us then about the 15th century, the pre-contact Mexican world, the Aztec world? How has it changed our understanding of that? Or just basically, what has it taught us about that? Well, you know, the word Aztec is not one that they would have used. It was invented by European scholars in the 18th century as a way of talking about all those people over there in Mesoamerica. But we've adopted it without thinking about it critically. In fact, there was no one people called Aztecs. There was a particular tribe, they called themselves the Mexica, who rose to power, but there were in fact dozens of separate city-states. You can think of ancient Greece for a sort of comparable example. And what these texts,

these complicated histories reveal, is that they were constantly fighting with each other, creating alliances, breaking those alliances. As I worked, I thought of medieval Europe, young people who've read the history as I've written it say, oh, it's more than that. It's like Game of Thrones, right? Minus the magic. Or one could think of Renaissance years, that is, I often thought of actually Henry VIII and his struggles. I don't mean in terms of the brutal way in which he treated his wives, although that too, what I'm getting at is the way he would change wives with a shift in the political arena, the ways it was connected with who was going to be his heir. So likewise, much of the fighting had to do with the political arena, the shifting political arena, who was going to be the heir of which kingdom, etc. So they are revealed to be rather normal people with normal political agendas,

sort of constantly trying to maximize their bets, as opposed to being one group of people who are very fatalistic and always do things a certain way because their culture tells them to. They were complicated. They're certainly not an empire as we'd understand it in early modern sense, this Aztec empire stretching what became the Sea of Cortez to the Caribbean. It's a far more fragmented scene. That's exactly right. In fact, I even hesitated to use the word empire about the Aztecs. Many scholars refuse to, because at no point did Montezuma really have the kind of power that, say, the Holy Roman Emperor did. that, say, the Holy Roman Emperor did. However, it is absolutely the case that the high chief of the Mexica had more power than anyone else in central Mexico did. They were the patron state,

the one that other states had to get in good with if they didn't want to have trouble. So I would say empire is about as good a word as we have. We don't have an ideal world. They were the most powerful state, the paramount state. I think anthropologists would tell me to say they were a paramount sea. So they're a paramount sea and that obviously plays out as these, if subordinates the right word, I'm not sure, these client states often side with a recent myth in a way this book is sort of revising the revisionism. The recent myth has been that all the indigenous just flocked to Cortez and that was really the secret of his victory. And many did, but many did not because it was such a complicated political terrain. because some of the ruling family wanted to go with these outsiders and some of them wanted to stick with the Mexica because they couldn't tell at first what exactly was going to happen. Within about a year, it became very clear that European,

or at least the foreign technology was going to win. The ships, the navigation equipment became clear that Europeans, the outsiders could continuously bring more people to this same spot, continuously more cannons, more horses, etc. So over time, more and more people did flock to the Spaniards because they were the winners. And so what other myths have you managed to puncture or refine during the publication of the research into this book? I mean, what about the nature of religion, religious practices and sacrifice and all that kind of stuff? and sacrifice and all that kind of stuff.

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and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Right, the Aztecs are imagined as these inherently violent beings whose culture sort of wedded them to violence, caused them to be fascinated by violence. There really isn't evidence for that. As with all stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth, right? It is true that they practiced human sacrifice. But about that, I want to say this. It seems to archaeologists now that probably all ancient

human cultures practiced some human sacrifice. I'm sure you know there's been some discussion of that in ancient Britain, all over the world, if you go back far enough. There are even hints of it in the Bible. And certainly all Native Americans were interested in human sacrifice. After a battle, young men, the bravest of the brave, would often face sacrifice. The young women and children were more likely to be adopted, but the young men most often faced sacrifice. What the Aztecs did was kind of turn that into, I was going to say high art, but that sounds too cruel and is unfair. They made political use of this very common religious act. They had been the last people to arrive in the valley and had to fight very hard to carve out some space. As they began

to win and conquer other city-states in alliance with certain friends of theirs, they began to realize we could put vulnerability behind us forever if we try hard enough. And so they actually began to use human sacrifice as a terror tactic. Towards the end, they even brought people from territories that they planned to conquer or hoped to conquer to Mexico City to show them the sort of gladiatorial human sacrifice and then release them, no harm done, so that they would go home and tell their people, we should take whatever peace deal these people offer. And they offered good peace deals. You had two choices. You could join the Aztec Empire and be their friends and partake in the wealth, or you could fight them and then risk these brutal human sacrifice ceremonies. They were no longer killing just one person once in a while. By the end, they were killing dozens of people every month. never killed hundreds and thousands at a time, as has been said. That was wild speculation. There is zero proof of it. But they did practice this human sacrifice. And I suppose that because of

this, that has become their reputation. It made it very easy for the Spaniards to sell an image of them as horrifying human beings who had it coming, who needed to be conquered by Christian Spain. But the people that I have come to know through their writings were not all these sort of right-wing thug political leaders. A lot of them were artists, poets. Some of them actually decried violence. They were very funny in some of the stories that they told. The average person was an average person, much like our world today.

And do the histories have a similarity with, for example, European histories written at the time? Do they tend to focus on elites, on religious and aristocratic warrior elites? Or is there a more egalitarian sense to them? Some scholars are very worried that even in telling these new histories, or these histories based on these newly available sources, we'll still be stuck in the same old trap of writing about elites. And there is some truth to that. The people who were the singers of the tales, the people who were educated in the Roman alphabet

and could then become the nephews and grandsons to write down the tales, all tended to be from the higher classes, the noble classes. On the other hand, these histories do often refer to the masehualtin, the commoners, and often give voice to their complaints. So it is not impossible to tell what ordinary people were thinking. One example is as the Mexica became more and more powerful, the very successful warriors and the high nobles took more and more wives, more and more prisoner wives. As a result, these rich families tended to have dozens and dozens of children. Now, many wives means many children. So then they were looking at a situation where the ordinary class of people, the Masseywaltin, were supposed to

support through tribute payments these ever-growing noble families. It was becoming more and more difficult. So the histories tell us that they complained about that. They began to refuse. And some of the high chiefs said, you know, I'm not willing to give up my multiple wives, but I will admit some of my sons are going to have to work for a living. They can't all be nobles. They can't all collect tribute. So there's a story that's told from the point of view of the elites, but still lets us know something about what ordinary people were thinking. We don't have a story told from the point of view of a prisoner wife, but we have a song that such a woman, such a figure would have sung. And it's very tragic and very interesting to me that the ordinary audience member in Tenochtitlan, in the capital city, clearly would have understood how sad a situation a prisoner wife was in,

because they wouldn't have performed this song if they didn't think people would like it. and her wife was in, because they wouldn't have performed this song if they didn't think people would like it. So you can read between the lines and get some sense of the commoners. But I will admit, like so many cultures, it was the elites who were singing the songs, telling the histories. And what about our perception of the Aztecs as crucially, technologically disadvantaged compared to Europeans? Is there any sense that Mexican society was on its own technological trajectory? My very ignorant sense is that it was the indigenous Americans were all kind of frozen with their techniques that they may have had in war and farming and building. But of course, that's almost certainly not true, right? I think had there been

no conquest, there's no question that the Aztecs and the Mayas were, as you put it on their own trajectory, the Mayas you probably know had come up with the principle of zero much sooner relative to the origin of their culture than anybody else. The Aztecs were beginning to mine and make things out of copper and gold. They had wheels in their toys and in their funerary objects, so it was only a matter of time before they began, you know, to have wheeled carts. There is no question that this was happening. They were the heirs of a culture in central Mexico that had been farming for a couple of thousand years. All that said, the Europeans, like the Asians, were the heirs of a culture that had been farming

for about 10,000 years. And most scholars now think that that is the key variable. That is, when a culture settles down to full-time farming, they take on a sedentary lifestyle, then there is more division of labor and more variety in inventions. Brilliant hunter-gatherers come up with fishing weirs and brilliant spear throwers and everything that they need. But when you're a sedentary society, then you can have blacksmithy shops, someone can make an alphabet, you can have calendars, all sorts of things that can only happen when your people live in the same place year round, and you are dividing up the labor in all sorts of ways. So there's no question that

the old world had a many thousand year advantage relative to the new world relative to sub-Saharan Africa. And we see this play out over and over again. But we mustn't confuse that with a difference in ability. I think because these days we tend to admire tech-savvy people and think they're very smart, it's easy to elide the two things and sort of slide right into a belief that, oh, well, if these people were very technologically astute, that meant they were very smart. And of course, Europeans were smart, but so were indigenous people, right? And so were sub-Saharan Africans. In fact, as I read the indigenous sources and watch their descriptions of their interactions with the Spaniards, they were sometimes puzzled by what they perceived

as the stupidity of the Europeans, because they didn't understand the New World way of doing things. So as long as we don't confuse technological development for intelligence, I think we're right to simply acknowledge that the old world had a technological advantage. There was nothing that Montezuma could have done differently that would have won him that war. He behaved in a very savvy way, as did his generals, and they did fight for two years. But it's a little bit as though we pitted ancient Sumeria against the Holy Roman Emperor. I think we all learned in school to respect ancient Mesopotamia, their architecture, their writing, counting, everything,

but they wouldn't have won a war against Charles V. It's not so much Indians versus white people as it is, how long have you been farming? That will determine what happens in those wars. We're going to learn more and more about the Aztecs. Obviously, we've got the archaeology, we'll park that for a second. I mean, these written sources are so exciting, glyphs, more things emerging. Are you optimistic about your field? I am, very. A number of grad students right now are working with sources that very little has been done with. Among them are the songs that I've mentioned. Very little has been done because they're so hard to translate. And we have some translations into European languages that simply aren't very good, but they keep being used. So I think once they're

re-translated, we'll have a much more direct access to their imagination, their hopes, their fears. Likewise, I would say that people now are beginning to put bits and pieces of different genres of sources together. So, for example, one student came to me about a decade ago and said she wanted to look at the great die-off, you know, 90% of Indigenous people died of various diseases and malnutrition in the first century. She wanted to look at the great die-off from an Indigenous point of view. And I said, can't be done, my dear, there aren't sources. But lo and behold, she has looked in every crevice and has found sources in indigenous languages. And these sources, when put together, do give a very powerful perspective on what it felt like to be part of the die off.

Worth pointing out, we live in these pandemic disease times and people keep comparing it to the Black Death, which they describe as the worst ever. Surely the worst ever series of pandemics were the ones that struck the indigenous people of the Americas in the 100, 200 years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. During this same golden age, as we've talked about it, in that same period, about 90% of indigenous people disappeared. Now, it wasn't all because of the disease. Some of it was because of warfare, depression, malnutrition, but the disease was at the heart of it. and malnutrition, but the disease was at the heart of it. Smallpox takes between 20 and 30 percent of people when it's virgin soil, and of course none of the indigenous people had any resistance to it. So yes, we do see people dying in great numbers in these texts. One man's set of annals written at the end of the 1500s is particularly sad because he did live through about five of these epidemics, but he lost his family over and over again. Very hard to watch. If we had more such sources written by

indigenous people, I think we would have been more aware of the emotional tragedy of what these epidemics did to their world before now. Astonishing. Well, thank you very much, committee. Your book is very highly regarded and it is called? Fifth Son, A New History of the Aztecs. It's received rave reviews everywhere, everyone, so make sure you go and get yourself a copy. Thank you. I hope you enjoy it.

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