Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 9. The Aztecs - A Clash of Worlds

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Beneath the busy streets of Mexico City, a buried god lies waiting to be discovered...This episode, we look back at the age of the Aztecs. Learn how this society grew from nothing to create one of the world's largest cities in the middle of a lake. Discover Aztec riddles, poetry and songs, as well as the bloody ritual of the flower wars. And hear the remarkable story of how this thriving empire collapsed all at once, in a matter of days.Credits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Jake Barrett-MillsRhy BrignellShem JacobsAnnie KellyLou MillingtonMusic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100209Artist: incompetech.com/

On the night of the 21st of February, 1978, on a residential street in Mexico City, a group of workmen were digging through the hard asphalt of the road. They worked for the Mexico City Electric Company, and their job was to run cables across the street and through the whole neighborhood. At first, it seemed like just another day at work, but then, just over two metres into the earth, their diggers struck something. It was an enormous piece of stone, and as they excavated further around it, they saw that this stone was carved in ornate and intricate patterns.

They quickly notified the archaeologists at Mexico's National Institute of History and Anthropology, and all construction work in the area was stopped. Flocks of archaeologists descended, and excavations began to discover what this remarkable stone was. The more they uncovered, the clearer the picture became. This was a carved stone disc, measuring over three meters in diameter. On its surface was the image of a woman, a goddess, naked and decapitated, surrounded by snakes and skulls. and wearing a crown of feathers. This was a depiction of a god named Koyl Shaoqui,

who was worshipped by the ancient indigenous people of Mexico, who today we call the Aztecs. The discovery of this stone sparked an outburst of interest in what else might lie beneath the surface of Mexico City. The president of Mexico issued a decree ordering the entire city block to be demolished and excavated. In all, 13 buildings in the neighborhood were torn down, and the more they uncovered, the more excited the archaeologists became.

They found that the stone disk had been placed at the base of an enormous set of stairs, which led up to a platform on which the ruins of a great pyramid once sat. This was the main temple of a city that had once stood beneath the streets of Mexico City and had been completely erased by time. This city was called Tenosh Titlan, and it was once the heart of a powerful empire. The excavations in Mexico City would go on for another four years, and every day its people would come and watch as the ruins of a buried civilization rose out of the familiar streets. As they watched, many of them must have wondered,

who were these people who once lived on the land beneath our feet? How had they built such phenomenal constructions of such incredible craftsmanship? And how could such a large and advanced society simply disappear beneath the earth? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall?

And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at one of history's most incredible stories. That's the rise and the dramatic fall. of the Aztec Empire. I want to explore how the Aztecs overcame the odds to create one of the America's largest indigenous empires. I want to explore how they reacted to one of the most astonishing and terrifying encounters that any society has ever experienced. And I want to tell the story of what happened to cause the dramatic and final end of their age.

Up until around 66 million years ago, the planet Earth was a very different place to the world we know today. In those days, its surface was home to enormous reptiles, known today as dinosaurs. If we could walk across the continent of North America in those days, we would see a landscape covered with ferns and swamps, dotted with enormous primevales. pine forests, small winged pterodactyls flitted in the air, and enormous dinosaurs like the horned triceratops traveled over the plains. In the forest, fearsome packs of velociraptors hunted for their prey, and huge carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus lumbered among the trees. But it's in the sky that perhaps the most impressive of these creatures could be seen. Quetzalcoatlas was the largest flying animal ever known. It had wingspans of over 15 meters,

larger than a modern fighter plane. Because of their enormous size, they rarely landed, and spent most of their lives soaring in the warm up currents rising off the sea, making migratory journeys back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, which was then only about half the distance across. And then one day, a new star appeared in the sky. It would have been dim at first, but as the days went by, it got brighter. Only a day or two would have passed before this light would look like a second sun. Then, a blinding flash would have lit the skies of the entire Western Hemisphere. In less than the time it takes to blink, an Asteroid measuring 11 kilometers across, or about the size of Mount Everest, impacted the Earth's

surface right on the coast of southern Mexico. The energy released was around 100 million megatons, or the equivalent of the entire world's nuclear arsenal, being detonated all at once about 15,000 times over. the Earth's surface around the impact would have rippled like water under a magnitude 10 earthquake. The asteroid itself was instantly vaporized and sublimed into a core of superheated plasma, over 10,000 degrees centigrade, or twice the surface temperature of the sun. Scorching winds of more than 1,000 kilometers an hour blasted out over the continent, and tsunamis of up to 200 metres high, thundered into the coasts and washed over the land for distances of 100 kilometres.

Wildfires burst into light around the world as burning debris began to rain down on the earth, and plumes of vaporized rock dust cloaked the planet in a dark shroud that blocked out the sun for years. In parts of the earth, pellets of glass began to rain from the sun. sky, much of the life on planet Earth would not survive this event. All large dinosaurs quickly fell into extinction, the Tyrannosaurs and the Triceratops, as well as that enormous flying creature, Quetzalcoatlas. Over half of the plant species in North America were wiped out, and for years afterwards only mushrooms and other fungi could grow, feeding on the decaying matter of the world's forests. Only small land animals, like snakes, lizards and snails, survived,

many of them by burrowing into the ground. Crawling among the dust and ash of the world's ruins were also the small rat-sized mammals, from which every person you know today is ultimately descended. Today, the enormous circle of the impact crater can still be detected around the town of Chick-Sulub in southern Mexico. The crater is 150 kilometers wide and gouged a hole several kilometers deep into the earth's crust. Over the next 66 million years or so, the earth would undergo some dramatic changes. The continents of the Americas had already been drifting away from the landmass of Europe and Africa for over 100 million years, as the earth's plates ground. and cracked around each other.

If you went far enough back, it would have been possible to walk from Nigeria to Brazil, from Morocco to New York, or from Spain to Canada. But now the world was split into two great land masses, one known as Afro-Eurasia, containing Africa, Europe and Asia, and the other known as the Americas,

driven by the powerful currents of multiple currents of molten rock that circulate in the planet's mantle, the Earth's crust tears apart in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, the North and South American continents move westwards. All at about the rate your fingernails grow. Since the time of the Chick-Sulub asteroid, the width of the Atlantic Ocean has grown by about 1,300 kilometers. The west coast of the Americas, from Alaska to California, down the coast of Mexico, through Colombia, Peru, and Chile are the cutting edge of their continental plates. As they forge west, they force the Pacific ocean floor down beneath them, crumpling as they go and forcing up huge ranges like the Rocky

mountains in North America and the Andes in the south. The Titanic forces involved in this process mean the whole length of the continental coast is a hotspot for earthquakes and for volcanoes. The landscape of what is today Mexico is dominated by these volcanoes. In the south of the country, a range known as the trans-Mexican volcanic belt has burst up over the last 20 million years, forming a dramatic range of snow-capped peaks. Between these mountains, a highland plateau has formed, where solidified lava flows have washed over one another. Today, this is known as the Valley of Mexico.

The Valley of Mexico is a dramatic landscape. It sits at an altitude of over 2,000 meters, while the active volcanoes that form its walls, can soar up to 6,000 metres. The land here is fertile, and water is plentiful. Rain and meltwater from the mountain snows flow down the sides of the valleys and into rivers, gathering in the floor of the basin in an enormous lake,

known as Lake Teshiko. Lake Teshiko was huge. It was about 40 kilometres in width, and about 80 kilometres in length, bordered by a marshland of reeds and rushes. In winter, migratory birds from as far as Canada also came here to enjoy the warmer weather. In the 66 million years since the Chick-Sulub asteroid, the small rat-like creatures that survived had also undergone a few changes. By this time, they had transformed, generation by generation, as gradually and unstoppably as the continents. They had now diverged into the huge variety

of mammals that we know today. Horses evolved in North America about three and a half million years ago, and in times of low sea levels they crossed over into eastern Russia, spreading from there across Asia and the rest of the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Other animals crossed. in the other direction. Giant Colombian mammoths, creatures weighing over 10 tons, walked from Asia into the Americas, and spread down as far as southern Mexico. The last time these sea levels dropped was during the last ice age that began around 33,000 years ago. During this time, a land bridge emerged between the continents of Asia and the Americas, and humans used this bridge to follow where the mammoths had gone before,

crossing from Asia into the Americas. They travelled south from there, setting up Stone Age cultures wherever they went, and they arrived in the Valley of Mexico probably around 12,000 years ago. Around this time, the horse went extinct in America. due to a combination of changing climate, collapsing ecosystems, and possibly human hunting for food. And then, around 10,000 years ago, the last ice age came to an end. Sea levels rose, and the land bridge between Asia and the Americas sank back beneath the waves forever.

Horses would never return by natural means to the Americas. The human populations of the two sides of the world were now separated. One day in the future, they would meet again, and this is the story of how that happened. The earliest humans in the Valley of Mexico were hunter-gatherers. They found vast herds of mammoths roaming the pine forests bordering Lake Teshko, and over the next millennia hunted them to extinction. Today, the earth of the valley is still littered with their bones. Agriculture began around the lake about 7,000 years ago,

with humans following the natural patterns of the lake's flood cycle. Various cultures made their home here over the millennia, coalescing into larger and larger settlements, and by the year 1200 BC, a number of large villages began to rise. around the valley. To the north, the lands were tough and arid. And if you traveled far enough, you'd reach the baking deserts of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Life in the desert was hard, and so over history, countless migrating tribes and nomadic groups traveled south into the valley of Mexico, where water was plentiful and food easier to find. So while young cities began to rise up,

up on the shores of Lake Teshko, wave after wave of newcoming people also arrived. The population of the valleys swelled, cultures intermingled, and more complicated forms of society began to take shape. In the early centuries of the first millennium, the valley began to be home to some of the first cities. And of these, one would soon rise to unprecedented presented size and power. This city was called Tiotiwakan. We've encountered Teotihuacan before in our third episode on the Mayans. Its people built towering pyramids and stately processional avenues in their capital,

monopolizing a kind of green obsidian that could be found nowhere else. Its influence spread far and wide, reaching down into Central America and interfering in the politics of Mayan kingdoms. This city had an enormous influence on the region, but we know virtually nothing about its people, who they were, what language they spoke, or even what happened to them. Archaeology shows that around the year 550 AD, the entire city, all its temples and palaces were burned. the city went into a sharp decline, and its towering pyramids fell into ruin, but its cultural influence would live on.

Teotihuacan played a similar role in Mexico, as the ancient Greeks did for Europeans. They inspired new cultures and left a mark on their religion, society, and art. But if Teotihuacan's people were the Greeks, then the Romans and the Romans and the Romans and of this region were the Toltecs. After the collapse of Teotihuacan and the fall of the Mayan cities in the south, the Toltec Empire was the dominant force in Central America, ruling from the city of Tula. Just as Rome openly admired the culture of the Greeks, the Toltecs modeled themselves on the great fallen empire of Teotihuacan. They spoke a language called Nahuatl. which would quickly become the predominant language of the region,

and it's clear they were outstanding craftsmen and artisans. Their artistic abilities were so famed that in Nawatil, the word Toltec would come to be used simply to mean artist. But before long, for reasons that we don't entirely understand, the city of Tula was also abandoned, and the Toltec Empire followed Teotihuacan into ruin. And this is where our story really begins. I think it's worth taking a moment here

to talk about the sources that we have about life in the time of the Aztecs. The word Aztec is not a word those people would have used about themselves. It's a later invention. They would have called themselves Meshika. and we actually have a wide variety of sources to draw from, many of them written by Mashika people who actually witnessed life before contact with Europeans.

But one problem for historians is that these eyewitness accounts were all written after contact, and most several decades after the events. One of the main sources for these years was the work of the Spanish churchman, Bernardo de Sahagun, who some have called the first anthropologist. He arrived in Mexico in the year 1529 and spent the next 50 years learning the language of Nawatel,

as well as studying the culture and history of its indigenous Meshika people. In the 1550s, 30 years after contact, he gathered together as many older Mashika people as he could find, who still remembered the age of the Aztecs. He wrote down their memories and collected them in an extraordinary book called A General History of the Things of New Spain, or the Historia General. The most famous section of the Historia General is known as the Florentine Codex. It's a manuscript consisting of 2,400 pages, or where you.

organized into 12 books and containing over 2,500 illustrations drawn by native artists. Bernardo de Sajogun recorded the text in both Spanish and Nahuatl. On this episode, we're joined by Jan Garcia, a native speaker of Huatiska Nahuatl from Mexico, who will help us to hear the sounds of the Florentine Codex in its original Nahuatl. The Florentine Codex is an incredible account of the culture, religion, society and history of the Aztec people. But it's important to remember that it was created under the supervision of a European priest who had his own set of agendas. The people he interviewed were remembering events and details from a distance of many years, and it's impossible to know how much they were telling

Sahagun what they thought he wanted to hear. This all complicates it as a reliable source. Another key character in recording the Mashika experience was a Dominican monk called Frey Diego Duran. Duran was rare among the Europeans, most of whom never learned the indigenous languages of Mexico. He was raised from an early age by servants who spoke Nawan. and grew up a fluent speaker. He wrote a book called The History of the Indies of New Spain, but he died without it ever being published, since he faced fierce criticism during his life for what other Spaniards saw as his excessive sympathy for the indigenous Mexicans. Towards the end of the 16th century, a handful of indigenous men also wrote down their histories.

Don Fernando de Alva Islil Shochital is one example. He was descended from the last king of the Aztec city of Teshkoko, and although far removed from the events described, he had access to some Aztec books that had been kept a secret from the Europeans. And so these are the sources we have to rely on. Each one of them potentially flawed and fragmentary. As a result, trying to find out the truth of this period can seem like navigating a hall of mirrors, reflections of reflections, leading us around in circles.

But combining these accounts with archaeological evidence does allow us to piece together some of the major events of the Aztecs rise to power. Our story begins around the year 1300 AD. And by this time, the Valley of Mexico looked like a very different place. The vast ruins of Tiotiwakan and Toltec civilization could be seen all around, crumbling into the earth. The dozens of small villages around the lake had by this time grown into powerful city-states in their own right. Each one had a set of tall pyramid-shaped temples at their hearts. A thick traffic of canoes, some of them holding up to 30 people, crisscrossed the lake,

bringing trade and goods to the markets in each of these cities. And the political situation had changed too. In the vacuum left by the Toltecs, a people known as the Tepernex had grown to exert power over the other cities of the valley. They ruled from the city of Ascapitonet, Salco, which rose on the western bank of the lake. This early form of empire had grown to an impressive size. At this point, at least 40 other cities paid tribute to them and sent soldiers to fight in their armies. It was at this time, around 1300 AD, that a new band of migrants

arrived in the valley. These were what the people here called Chichimecas. a word that in Narwatl means barbarian or savage, and it was usually applied to the groups of wandering nomads who often arrived in the valley from the northern deserts. This group claimed to have come from a land which they had been forced to flee, but which no one else had ever heard of. They called this mysterious place as Dlan. They said they had been wandering in the deserts for many years, searching for a new place. to call home. They called themselves the Meshika, but today we called them by a name derived from their mythical homeland, Aztlan. These were the people who would one day be called,

the Aztecs. We can imagine how these weary desert travelers must have felt when they crested the hills and saw the wide Green Valley of Mexico stretch out before them. They would have seen the cities scattered out around the lake glittering like jewels, and they must have thought that surely, somewhere in this bountiful place, they could find a place to call home. But they were soon to be disappointed. The steady flow of people migrating south into the valley had increased the population density. Virtually all of the land in the valley had already been claimed by one city or another, and wherever they went, the city dwellers sent them away. Part of the reason for this is that the meshika seem to have been a rough bunch.

They didn't wear the embroidered clothes of the city dwellers, or have any of their sophisticated manners, and their years of fighting to survive in the wilderness had made them tough. They worshipped a fierce god, a warlike deity known as Witsila-puched, whose name meant hummingbird of the south. While none of the valley's city dwellers would let the Meshika settle down in their lands, they did see one obvious use for them. Several cities offered to give the Meshika food in exchange for their services as mercenaries. And so this nomadic people wondered about the valley, agreeing to fight for whoever would pay the most, and and dying in other people's wars.

But they must have still yearned for a real place that they could call home. After 25 years or so of fighting for other people, the Mashika must have realized that no one was going to give them a home. They would have to build one for themselves. But there was only one last piece of uninhabited land left in the whole valley. It was a place so inhospitable that none of the other peoples had even bothered to claim it. It was nothing but a marshy strip of land, lying some way out in the water off the western shore of Lake Tashkoko. The Meshika built canoes and paddled out to this lonely stretch of land.

There they managed to build a number of small huts and a simple altar made of reeds to their god Witses La Pochley. It was an incredibly humble start, but it was theirs. And although they were not to know it then, this swampy village would grow in the space of only 200 years to become one of the world's greatest cities. The Meshika named this settlement after one of their legendary kings, who had led them wandering through the desert, a man who had been named Tenotch. and so this place would be called Tenotch Titlan. The city of Tenoch Titlan expanded gradually at first. From those original few huts, the meshika soon used up all the space on their island.

But with their population growing, they would need to come up with a solution. They began to build artificial islands out in the lake. They would paddle out into the water on canoes, and drive tall stakes into the shallow lake bed, then pile earth in around them until the ground rose out of the water. Over the years, these new islands spread out from the centre in a chaotic pattern, connected by bridges and canals. The island city of Tenochtitlan began to grow.

If you return to see Tenochtitlan a century later, in the early decades of the 1400s, the city would have been unrecognizable. It would have looked something like Venice. The city was now joined to the mainland by three great causeways, branching out to the north, south and west. These were broken in the middle by wooden drawbridges, which were raised at night for security. To the east, the great expanse of the lake,

stretched out, although on a clear day it was possible to just about see the other shore, and the city of Teshoko that rose there. Tenostitlan was surrounded by island gardens called Chinampas. The Mashika built these by weaving together sticks and reeds to make underwater fences, which were then filled in with fertile earth. They used these island gardens to grow all kinds of crops, from maize, beans and squashes to tomatoes, chili peppers, and all kinds of decorative flowers. The farmers paddled between these gardens in their canoes, carrying sprouted plants and tools, and bringing back the crops in baskets. Since a number of mountain springs fed into Lake Tashkoko, its water had an unusually high salt content, and so the production of salt was another key

industry of the area. One 16th century Spanish observer named Pedro Martyr described seeing the Mexica engage in this practice. They take the lake water, which is salty, and lead it through ditches into depressions where they thicken it. Once thickened, they boil it and then form it into balls and loaves, which they take to markets or fares to exchange for other things. Only the subject of the Aztec king have access to this salt, and never those who disobey his commands. As well as farming, the Mashika would have fished and hunted. Migratory birds like geese were particularly abundant in the winter months, as the Spanish visitor Ortizh de Mantelano recalls.

There are great multitudes of birds on the Mexican lagoon. There are so many that in many parts, it looked like a solid lake made of birds. This happens in winter and the Indians harvest many of them. The Mexica also supplemented their diet with other sources of protein. Among these were several species of insect, including one they called the Assyah cattle, a kind of marsh fly. Another Spanish writer, Hernando Fernandez, writing in the 16th century, describes how the Aztecs prepared this food.

Our cattle is a small fly, which in certain seasons is collected with nets from the lake in such great quantities that great numbers of them are cut up and mixed together to form little balls which are sold in the markets throughout the year. The Indians cook them in salty water, wrapped up in May's husks, and prepared in this way they comprise a good food, abundant and agreeable. Other sources of food include fish eggs, eaten as a kind of caviar, and even the eggs of the Assyar cattle fly itself, which were laid in enormous numbers on the mudflats and reed beds of the lake. In Narwatl, these eggs are known as Awautli,

which loosely translates to wheat of the water. The Meshika ground these eggs into a paste, baked them into cakes and flattened them out in tortillas. Both the Assyar catl fly and its eggs were made up of six, 60% pure protein, making them an exceptional dietary source. As a snack, the meshika also liked one species of aquatic worms, they called Oquilishtak, which they toasted with salt. With this abundance of available food and ingenious farming techniques, a population boom

took place in Tenochtitlan. It grew in the space of only a century, until it housed at least 200,000 people, larger than either London or Paris at the time. In fact, it was likely larger than any city in Europe. It soon covered a rough square of around three kilometers on each side, and this rapid growth had a transformative effect on the Mashika people. The rough bunch of Meshika warriors who had first arrived in the valley would have now been unrecognizable. They were a sophisticated and settled people. They successfully absorbed the old cultural traditions of the Toltecs and Teotihuacan, adopting their culture of pyramid building and stone carving.

They welcomed craftsmen and learned people from all the other cities of the valley, absorbing their customs and developing astonishing skills of engineering. In 1418, the Meshika began the construction of a vast series of stone. aqueducts, stretching for four kilometers across the lake over a series of artificial islands. These brought clean fresh water right into the heart of the city. The Mashika also built an enormous dam that helped protect the city from seasonal flooding. Tenochtitlan was divided into a number of key districts. In the north was Kwebopan, or the place where the flowers bloom.

and in the west, Moyotlan, the place of the Nats. To the east was Adzkoalco, the place of the herons, and I'll post a number of incredibly beautiful maps of the city on Patreon, so you can picture its exact layout for yourself. The humble reed shrine that the Mashika first built had now been replaced by an enormous pyramid, standing at the head of a courtyard measuring half a kilometre squared. Each new king had expanded this pyramid, building around and on top of the existing structure,

so that today you can still see the remains of its previous versions inside its ruins, looking something like a Russian doll. This is where the great stone disc with the image of the goddess Koyl Shaoqi lay, waiting to be discovered by those Mexico City electrical workers, 500 years in the future. That stone once formed the base of the steps leading up to this pyramid. The city of Tenochtitlan was a place of pleasure and luxury. It had a botanical garden and even a zoo where animals were kept,

two innovations that Spanish visitors later found remarkable, since they had seen nothing of the kind back in Europe. Drinking alcohol was strictly forbidden in Meshika society, Punishments for being found drunk in public were severe and could even result in death, although it's clear that many people did it anyway. They drank something called pulke, a particular kind of milky alcohol, brewed from the agave plant. If you walked the streets of Tenochtitlan in the 15th century, you might also see groups of people eating hallucinogenic mushrooms or drinking them in tea.

These mushrooms were used widely by the Mashika for recreation, and especially among the poets and priests, for whom they took on a religious significance. One piece of oral poetry recorded in the Florentine Codex is just one example in which the effects of these narcotics were mentioned. I have drunk fungus wine and my heart weeps. On earth I have only pain. It matters nothing. We are all precious jewels of the god strong on a thread.

We are all together jewels on his necklace. One of the city's most remarkable sites could be found in the northern part. Here in the district of Clatolco, a great market was held. This city in the lake had now become the great crossroads of all the trade in the region, with boats coming from all the lakeside cities to sell their produce. An enormous, colourful variety of food and other goods were brought from all over the valley and beyond. Coco and bright green quetzel feathers from the south,

obsidian blades for everyday use, paper made from bark, as well as gold and silver from the north. One extract from the Florentine Codex contains a list of all the foods eaten at just one Aztec feast, and it gives you a sense of the variety that they enjoyed. They ate white tortillas, grains of maize, turkey eggs, turkeys, and all the fruits, custard apple, mamay, yellow sapote, black sapote, sweet potato, manioc, white sweet potato,

Jekama, plum, jobo, guava, avocado, acacia, American cherry and tuna. Clothes and textiles were also sold in the great market of Clatolko, woven in all the different colourful patterns that the Aztecs made. They gave them all the different kinds of precious, cloaks they carried, like those mentioned here. The sun-covered style, the blue-knotted style, the style covered with jars, the one with painted eagles, the style with serpent faces, the style with windjules, the style with turkey blood, or with well-pools, the style with smoking mirrors.

The market was a social place, full of hustle and bustle. The Aztecs loved riddles, and while the canoe riders and market sellers mingled, they may have laughed and exchanged new ones they'd heard that week. Some examples of these Aztec riddles have survived, and we can listen to some of them now. I'll leave a small gap between the riddle and their answer, in case you want to pause, and try to figure it out for yourself. What thing, what thing? Ten stones with something on their backs. They are the nails on our fingers.

What thing, what thing, white stone from which green feathers are born. It is an onion. What thing, what thing? A warrior in a house made of pine branches. The eye with all its lashes. But amid the booming life of this city, there was also a darker side to Tenochtitlan, which would have been immediately apparent to anyone who visited it. If you were a tradesman arriving in the market of Tlatololco,

it would have been hard to ignore the vast pyramid rising from the district of Tiopan. One shrine painted blue and another a deep, dark red. The blue shrine was dedicated to the god Tla Lok, whose name meant wine of the earth. He was the god of rain and fertility, the god of life. Other gods the Aztecs worshipped include Tezcatlipoca, the god of night, and the famous Quetzalcoato, the feathered serpent, who is often depicted as a kind of flying dragon. But the great red temple was dedicated to a very different god.

And on the ornately carved steps, the stones would have been darkened, by a cascading stream of dried blood. The culture of the Meshika had changed dramatically over the last century, but they still held on to some aspects of their rough beginnings. Among these was the continued reverence for the fearsome hummingbird god, Huizilapuchli, the god of the sun, the god of war and sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that Witsilapoccily took the form of the sun and every day chased his siblings, the moon and stars across the sky. They believed that if he ran out of the energy he needed

to continue this chase, the world would end, and there was only one way to supply him with that energy. In the Aztec view, every living being had a fragment of the sun, long as well. lodged in their heart. They believed this is why the body gave off warmth and life. They believed that cutting out the heart of a sacrificial subject and burning it in offering to Weitzera Pochley gave him the energy he needed. For the purpose of these sacrifices, the Aztecs bred several animals, including dogs, eagles, jaguars, and deer. And of course, they are most infamous for the sacrifice of humans. Humans were sacrificed for religious purposes in various societies throughout American history. In Meshika society, this was done in a wide variety of ways,

depending on which festival was being celebrated. But the most common was for a sacrificial victim to be brought to the top of one of the pyramids in Tenochtitlan and held down on a stone. slab. A priest would then take a sharp dagger made of the black volcanic glass obsidian, which forms a cutting edge sharper than surgical steel. They would plunge this dagger into the victim's chest, cut through the diaphragm, and remove the heart. Human hearts are powered by their own sets of self-driving muscles, and so would continue to beat for as long as the supply of blood. remained inside them, sometimes for as much as ten minutes after being removed from the body. These still pulsating hearts were placed in a bowl and burned, allowing their energy to return to

the sun. Meanwhile, the lifeless body left behind on earth was thrown down the steps of the pyramid, where they were dismembered and fed to the animals in the city zoo. Some ceremonies also involved elements of cannibalism. It's impossible to know the full extent of this grisly practice before contact with Europeans. A number of factors complicate this question. The first is that the practice of human sacrifice was used by the Spanish as part of their justification for the colonization of the Americas. For this reason, they were inclined to exaggerate the number of people killed. The Meshika themselves may have also exaggerated the numbers in their historical documents, since boasting a large amount of sacrificial victims reflected well on their power and status,

and may have also served a propaganda purpose in frightening their enemies. For instance, the Mashika claimed to have sacrificed over 80,000 people in the year 1487 for the dedication of just one temple. While we have found some traces of sacrificial burial grounds around some Aztec temples, we've never found any evidence of the kinds of mass graves that this kind of slaughter would produce. And so we're left guessing as to how many people exactly may have died. And another factor complicates matters when comparing the Aztecs to other comparable societies from history. That's the fact that sacrifice victims were usually prisoners of war, captured during battle with rival states. Warfare in the Aztec world was a highly ritualized affair. Wars began with a number of ceremonies

and rituals, and would always take place in the half of the year when farmers weren't needed in the fields, and the battles themselves were very different to those fought in other parts of the world. Aztec soldiers were generally not aiming to kill their enemy on the battlefield. Their main goal was to capture the enemy soldiers and bring them back to Nochtitlan to be sacrificed. The incentives to capture rather than kill your opponents were huge. All lower-class boys were trained as soldiers from an early age, but they would not be considered a true man until they had captured their first enemy for sacrifice. After taking two prisoners, he would rise to the ranks.

He would be allowed to wear sandals into battle and would be rewarded with a feathered cloak. At four captives, the warrior would be promoted to the rank of Jaguar Warrior and would be given an actual Jaguar skin to wear into battle. Jaguar warriors held a similar position to European knights, and a commoner who rose to this rank had now entered the nobility. In fact, this was the only way any commoner could rise in social status. If a jaguar warrior truly excelled and captured even more, he would be promoted to the rank of eagle warrior. These were the military elite of the Meshika and would go into battle wearing a beaked helmet and resplendent feathers.

They were the most feared of all the Aztec warriors. Because of these incentives to capture rather than kill, some historians have argued that human sacrifice in Mexico actually did little more than change the location of the violence of war. While a European battle at any point in history might see tens of thousands of soldiers killed, all the violence usually took place out of sight of most of the population. Meanwhile, an Aztec battle would see relative. few casualties, but all the killing would be done where everyone in the city could see it. I think everyone should make up their own minds on how they feel about this. We shouldn't try to

minimize the day-to-day horror that this practice would have involved, but it's also important to remember that sacrifice is not something that makes the Aztecs particularly exceptional, when looked at in a wider historical perspective. An even more difficult question to answer is how the average Meshika person of the time felt about it all. It's likely that reactions to the practice were extremely varied and complex. Many ordinary people may have viewed it with a mixture of fear and fascination, as European peasants once felt about our own grisly, drawn-out public executions.

or perhaps they felt about it the way we feel about the more than a million people who die around the world in car accidents each year. A tragedy for the individuals, they may have thought, but not something that can be helped if we want the world as we know it to keep on going. Some certainly may have enjoyed the spectacle. Like the ritual slaughter of gladiators and unarmed prisoners in the Roman Colosseum, the Aztecs sacrifices would have been rourcous, and would have reminded anyone who watched them, of the fragility of their own lives, and of the power of the state. The sight would have served a purpose in terrifying people into obeying their king,

and of course they would probably have got a guilty rush of pleasure, as they thought, I'm glad that's not me up there. While all of these questions are still a matter for lively debate, one thing is for sure, the practice of human sacrifice was about to increase sharply. And part of the reason for that is a dramatic change in the political landscape in the Valley of Mexico. As the year 1400 passed by, the world of the valley was about to erupt into war, and one king would soon rise to power into Nochtitlan, who would embody the warlike spirit of the Mexica, like no other. He would turn this booming island city into the hub of a powerful empire,

and a military force that would eventually dominate the whole valley and beyond, and his name was Itsko'atl. Little is known about the early life of its coatl. His name meant obsidian serpent, and it would prove fitting to his character. Itzkoatl was a noble, in the court of the Mexican king Chimalpupoka. Chimalpupoka was his nephew, and had come to the throne at the age of 20. This young king had a kind heart, but he lacked a certain degree of strength and experience. At this time, the Tepernic people still ruled the Valley of Mexico, and Tenochtitlan, like the rest of the valley, was under their thumb. and for good reason, the Tepernex had a powerful army supplied with fighting men by over 40 cities, and their capital city of Azcapatsalco controlled the shore of the lake,

right where the three great causeways of Tenochtitlan met the land, and any time the aqueduct broke, its people needed the Tepernak's permission to bring in new materials to rebuild it. And so Tenoste Klan didn't cause any trouble. They paid a regular tribute to the Tepernex and agreed to send soldiers to fight in their wars. Part of why the Tepernex had been so successful in the last century was down to the astonishingly long reign of their current king. His name was Tzzo-Zomok, and if the Aztec records are correct, then by the year of 1420, he was already over 100 years old. King Tezozomok had ruled in Azcapazalco for over 50 years, as the historian Fernando Islil Shochito recalls.

He was so old that they carried him about like a child, swathed in feathers and soft skins. They always took him out into the sun to warm him up, and at night he slept between two great brazias, and he never withdrew from their glow. He was very temperate in his eating and drinking, and for this reason he lived so long. But the Tappaneks and their old king were not loved by the other people in the valley. They ruled with a regime of violence and terror. And King Tezo Zomok had a fearsomew, as Ishul Shochito recalls. He was the most cruel man who ever lived, proud, warlike, and domineering.

The Tepernacks kept the other cities of the valley in line with a regime of targeted assassinations and military force. Any king standing in their way was soon likely to find men sneaking into his palace with obsidian daggers, ready to cut his throat as he slapped. The invasion of a Tepernak army would usually follow soon after. When Izkoatl was just a young lord, he saw one stark example of this in the fate of the city of Teshko, which sat on the opposite shore of the lake to Tenochtitlan. Teshko was home to a young prince by the name of Nessawal-Koyotel, who was one of the most fascinating characters in this story.

Nesawal-Koyotl's name meant hungry coyote, but for most of his early life he would have lived in the lap of luxury, that is until his father, the king of Teshoko, got in the way of the ambitions of the Tepernak Empire. When Nassawal-Koyotl was 15 years old, Teppanek assassins burst into his palace and murdered his father. Nesawal-Koyotl hid from the assassins in the branches of a nearby tree and saw his father's death right before his eyes. When it was safe to come down, he fled the same. city. A Tepenek army soon marched on Teshkoko. The Tepenex demanded that the weak young king of Tenochtitlan, Chimalpoka, also send troops to help in their war, and so the armies of Tenochtitlan

helped the Tepeneks to burn down the city. The young prince Nessaluel Koyotl, still grieving for his father and his slaughtered people, was forced to flee. the only place he had ever called home. For four years, Nesawal-Koyotil hid in the mountains, disguised as a commoner. He must have been terrified that assassins would find him, and that he would soon meet the same fate as his father. But Chimalpapoka, the young king of Tenochtitlan, seems to have felt a pang of regret about the part that he played in the destruction of Teshoko. He traveled to the Tappanek capital to meet the old King Tezozomok and intervene on the young prince's behalf. I think it's an incredible image. King Chimalpapoka,

a young man of 20, entering the dim-lit chamber. The ancient king Tezozomok swaddled in his feathers and skins sitting beside his burning brazier for warmth. We can imagine Imagine Chimel Papoka's voice shaking a little as he asked this powerful emperor to spare the Prince Nesawal-Koyotl. He asked that the prince be allowed to come to Tenochtitlan to live in peace and to study at one of the city's schools. Amazingly, King Tezo Zomok agreed to their proposal, and so the young Nesawal-Koyotal was allowed to come down from his exile in the mountains and to live in Tenochtitlan. He studied in a kind of school called a Kalmerkak,

where the children of the nobility learned the crafts of high society, how to become military leaders, administrators and priests. It must have been a strange feeling for the young prince, to live just across the lake from the home that had been taken from him, and where a puppet king now ruled. He would have even been able to see his high, home of Teshkoko across the lake on a clear day. He may have sat at the tops of the tall pyramids, gazed out over the lake, and wondered if he would ever be able to return home. He spent 10 years

in Tenochtitlan, and he would always have an affinity for the city and its culture. And it's here that he met the noble Idzkoatl, the obsidian serpent. We don't know exactly exactly when they met, but I like to think it may have been during this time. Perhaps they wandered the markets of Clatolco, watched the canoes coming in with sheaths of maize, and ate fish-egg tortillas together. They may have walked around the great plaza of Teopan and spoken about their shared hatred for their Teppanek rulers. And perhaps it's here that they began to hatch their plan, to rest control of the valley, away from the cruel King Tezozomok. They couldn't have known it then, but the chance they were hoping for was just

around the corner. The reign of King Tezozomok had been a golden age for the Teppanex. But in the year 1426, the old king finally died, at the grand age of 106. And suddenly, the power of the Tepernak Empire began to falter. Tezozomok had a great number of sons. Upon his death, one son named Tayatsin took the Teppernak throne, but one of his brothers, a man called Mashla, fancied his chances. Mashlaa toppled his brother from the throne and seized the crown for himself. A full-blown succession crisis erupted, and civil war broke out across the Tepernak lands, and suddenly the city of Tenochtitlan found itself right at the center of it. The kindly young king Chimalpapoka had a strong sense of fairness. He backed what he saw as the rightful king, but the usurper

Mashla was of course enraged. He began to exchange insults with Chimalpapoka, and at one point even sent him a gift of women's clothing. Chimalpapoka was by this time around 30 years old, but he still had that strain of youthful naivety. In the year 1427, he was lying asleep in his palace when a band of trained killers crept over its walls. They snuck into the bedchamber of King Chimalpapaoka and killed him. The Tepernak usurper King Mashlah must have been delighted when he heard the news, but he didn't realize that he had scored something of an own goal. The death of the kindly king Chimopopoka made way for another much stronger king to rise in Tenochtitlan.

Now was the turn of Itskoatal, and he would spell the end of the Tepernak Empire. Itzkoatel partnered with the exile. Prince Nesawal-Koyotul, and together the two of them went from city to city around the valley, gathering people to their cause. And everywhere they went, they found people who had had enough of the Tepernick's rule. The Aztec chronicles record that they gathered an army of up to 100,000 men. And when the Tepernick's most loyal ally, the city of Clacopan, joined the war on Izkoatl's side, King Mashlaa must have known that his days were numbered, but he didn't give up without a fight.

The war raged on for two years. At first, the Tepanex besieged Tenochetlan. They knew that if they could take out the island city early on, the resistance to them would be destroyed. But the Lake City was exceptionally well-placed to withstand a siege, and so a steady stream of goods and reinforcements would have easily passed in and out of the city by canoe. Tenostitlan held out,

until King Itzkoatl arrived with his army and sent the besieging Tepernak's packing. Their retreat quickly turned into a route, and the combined forces of Izkoatel and Nesawal-Koyotl marched on the Tepernet capital of Azcapatsalco in the year 1428. They encircled it, broke down its walls, and burned it to the ground. The usurper king Mashlaa was dragged back to the city of Tenostitlan

and killed at the top of its great temple. The era of Tepernak rule was over, and now a new power ruled in the valley. Prince Nesawal-Koyotal returned to his home of Teshko, and ruled as its king, ten years after he had fled as a frightened child. its Coatl also ruled in Tenostitlan, and together with the smaller partner of Placopan, they formalised a treaty that would see them rule over the Valley of Mexico together.

These three cities divided up the former Tepernak lands, and their kings agreed to cooperate in future wars of conquest, dividing the tribute between them. This was a treaty known as the Triple Alliance, and it would form the foundations of a true empire in the region, a power that would one day come to be known as the Aztec Empire. Writing in the 1840s, the historian W.H. Prescott wrote that he believed there were two sides to the Aztec character, and he thought these two sides actually came from different sources.

Their high-minded and austere culture, their refined etiquette, mathematical skills and love of poetry must have been inherited from the refined ancient empire of the Toltecs, he wrote. But the other side of their character was also there, the side of blood sacrifice, the side that relished the thrill of battle and conquest. He suggested that this came from their nomadic tribal beginnings. This theory is pretty simplistic and impossible. to prove, but it does show you how much the two conflicting sides of the Aztecs have puzzled historians for almost as long as they have been studied. And during this period, these two sides were embodied in the characters of the two kings, Itzkoatal and Nesawal-Koyotul. When Nesawal-Koyotil

returned to rule in Teshkoko, he was a fair and relatively peaceful king. He built a temple there, where he banned the practice of human sacrifice, and even the sacrifice of animals. He was also a lover of literature. He built a great library in Teshoko, gathering together all the manuscripts that he could, ornately painted documents, written in pictographs on deer skin and bark paper. And he even wrote poetry himself, which was passed down by word of mouth, before being written down by the Spanish in the 16th century. This extract from one of his more famous songs shows that Nesawal-Koyotl believed that poetry helped to soothe the pain of living. Perhaps my friends will be lost. My companions will vanish when I lie down in that place.

Flowers are our only garments, only songs make our pain subside. But his partner king, Itzkoatl, was different. He had the ambition of a establishing this new triple alliance as an imperial power to surpass anything the Tepernex had achieved, and he was happy to use any ruthless methods to do it. Helping him in this task was a shadowy figure known only to history as Tlaqalel. Tlacolel had been the brother of the kindly King Chimelpapoka, killed in his bed by Tepernick assassins. but he had none of Chimal Papoka's softness.

Throughout the war with the Tepinex, he had acted as an advisor to Itskoato and rose through the ranks of the royal court to become his chief advisor. He would hold this position through the reign of three subsequent kings, and some have claimed that throughout this time, Tla Khalel was the true ruler of the Aztec Empire,

Although he was offered the crown multiple times, he always refused it, preferring to remain in the shadows, the power behind the throne. On one hand, Tlacolalel was a dedicated reformer. He was determined to turn the Aztec state into an efficient machine, improving and modernizing its administration and methods for collecting taxes. But the kind of state that Tlaucalel wanted to build, also had some remarkable and terrifying similarities to dictatorships that we might recognize from our more recent history. First of all, Tlaqalel understood the importance of controlling information.

As soon as Izkoathl took the throne into Nostitlan, Tlaqalel advised him to order an inspection of its library, and to destroy any historical texts that they found inconvenient to the land. their narrative. This act is remembered in the Aztec Chronicles. Once they used to keep a record of their history, but it was burned at the time when Itzcuatl reigned in Mexico. It was agreed and the nobles of Mexico said, it is not fitting that all the people should know the paintings. The common serfs will be led astray and the earth will be made crooked because in the documents are many lies and many heroes

have been taken for gods. Here, the division between the two sides of the Aztec character couldn't be more pronounced. On one side of the lake, King Nesawal-Koyotl was writing poetry and building a library, while on the other, Itzkoato was burning books in bonfires. And while Nesawal-Koyotl had banned human sacrifice, King Itzko-Atl would preside over a massive increase in the practice. And once again, Eliza Tlacalel seems to be behind it. I think Tlacalel understood all too well the power of the violent public spectacle as a means for controlling the masses. I think he wanted the people of the valley to truly fear the power of their state, and fear it they did. Alongside an increase in public brutality, Tlacalel also reformed the religion of the valley. The Meshika war god,

Witsila Pochli had before been one among several gods, like Tlalok and Quetzalcoatl. But he would now be raised to rule over all the others, elevating the Meshika to the status of God's chosen people. The power of the military was now paramount in Aztec society. Slakhalel claimed that only warriors who died in battle would go to serve Witsila Pochli in the afterlife. This was a new age of militarism, in which the warriors who died in battle were honoured as the supreme heroes. One hymn, meant to be sung by all the people of Tenochtatlan, embodies the new warlike spirit of this age. The bonfire smokes, shields thunder, god of the ringing bells, the flower of the enemy shudders, Eagles and tigers resound. The dust grows yellow. Red blossoms shall bud, unfold and open into flower.

Oh, God, eagle, in your house you rule. Your banner trembles and flames, and the bonfire crackles. Partly due to this new militaristic attitude, the Aztec Empire expanded with unstoppable speed. King Izkoato gathered a great army and marched on his neighbouring cities, conquering them one by one. At one point, Diego Duran writes that Clackalel gave this proclamation to the lords of the gathered cities. We are capable of conquering the entire world. And for a time, that's what it must have looked like. Soon all the other cities around Lake Tashkoko were subdued. Other states, alarmed by the rapid expansion of the Aztecs,

gave in to all their demands without a fight, and paid regular tribute. Soon, the Aztecs began to send their armies out beyond the valley, marching through the mountain passes cut between the volcanoes. When the king Izkoatel died in the year 1440, a new king, Moctezuma I, rose to power. He reformed the Aztec Empire and massively expanded it, turning Tenochtitlan into the dominant party in the former Triple Alliance. The war over the Aztec character was being won,

and it was the warlike, domineering side of Tenochtitlan that was coming out on top. When Moktizuma I died, he was followed by the king, kings Ashayakatel and Tezok, who both expanded the empire even further. And all these kings had the same shadowy figure Tlacalel advising them. Aztec armies marched into the lands to the north, bringing the desert peoples under their rule. They marched south and made inroads into the land of the Maya and on to the Pacific coast, and they went east and conquered lands on the Atlantic coast too. Tenochtitlan was never an empire in the way we might imagine it. It usually didn't occupy the lands it conquered,

and it rarely set up garisons or installed administrators, except in the most rebellious provinces. It was more like a network of tribute, which saw wealth flow in one direction to the city of Tenochtitlan. The historian Inga Klendinan describes it in the following. manner. Tanosh Titlan was a beautiful parasite, feeding on the lives and labour of other peoples, and casting its shadow over all of their arrangements. The administration of the empire was conducted along a remarkable communications network, made up of well-maintained roads,

heading to every town and village. There were no horses in the Americas, so messages were carried by runners stationed every four kilometres or so along the roads. Each messenger would run those four kilometers and then pass on the message to the next runner. In this way, messages could pass the whole length of the empire in only a matter of days. But the Aztecs didn't rule with kindness. In the villages they conquered, their soldiers and tax collectors were hated. They took the people's food and goods in taxation, took their people for sacrifice, and brutally put down any resistance.

There was one people who the Aztecs treated with an unmatched level of cruelty. These were called the Clashcalans, a people who spoke Nawatel, and who lived just over the mountains to the east of the Valley of Mexico. If you listen to the Clashcalans, they would tell you that the Aztecs had tried and failed many times to conquer them. But the Aztecs would claim that they could have conquered them at any time and simply chose not to. Either way, a strange kind of situation developed. The Tlashkalans remained independent, but they were at a constant state of war with the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs surrounded and blockaded them, stopping any luxury goods such as salt or fine textiles entering their lands. And the Tlashka lands were also forced to compete each year in an event known as the Flower Wars.

The name Flower War is a curious pairing of words, and the Nahuatl language is particularly fond of these kinds of pairs. In English we do this too. We talk about our bread and butter, our heart and soul, or sticks and stones. These are pairs of words that together means something else, and this was a big feature of Nahuatl. If they wanted to say that someone gave a speech, the Mashika would say he gave his word and breath. They described your village as your water and hill. When someone died, they passed into cold and silence. And if you did something in secret, you were doing it in clouds and mist. Their word for poetry was flower and song. In Nawatel, flower meant poetic and beautiful. beautiful. In Aztec poems, warriors are often said to die what they call a flowery death,

that is, a noble, poetic death. If a warrior died in battle, they were believed to be resurrected among what the Aztecs called flower and bird. That is, they may become part of the natural world around them, as this piece of Aztec oral poetry suggests. clamor. The chief is resplendent. He who makes the world live is full of delight. The flowers of the shield are opening their petals. Glory spreads. It revolves around the earth. Here is the intoxication of death in the midst of the plain. There, as war breaks out on the plain, the chieftain, spins, gyrates, with flowery death in war. Fear not, my heart.

On the plain I covet death by the obsidian knife. All that our heart's desire is death. The flower wars were highly theatrical and would have looked something like a Mardi Gras parade. The Meshika war bands dressed in their most extravagant and brightly coloured clothes, the jaguar warriors in their mottled skins, the eagle warriors in their bright feathers, all carrying brightly coloured shields hung with feathers, and embroidered with heraldic symbols,

the flapping of orange cloaks and red hats, some wearing masks, tassels and jangling bells. But all this colour shouldn't fool you. The stakes in the flower wars were still very real. Warriors would have carried spears, obsidian daggers, and a weapon known as a Makawietal, roughly equivalent to a sword. These looked something like a cricket bat, but with the edge ringed, with shards of obsidian glass. As with most Aztec warfare, the point wasn't to kill, but to capture prisoners for sacrifice. After a flower war, the skulls of executioners. prisoners were displayed as grisly trophies on enormous racks in the city of Tenoste Klan, some of which have been uncovered by archaeology. The largest ever found was discovered at the

main temple and contained over 650 skulls. The Klaishkalans led a pretty miserable existence. They were starved and impoverished and forced to participate in this ritual slaughter of their citizens. Unsurprisingly, this gave them a bitter hatred for the Aztecs, and this ultimately is where the seeds of the whole empire's collapse would be sown. The Aztecs had risen to power in the first place because the Tepernic Empire was so hated around the valley. The Tepernac's cruel regime meant that in the end no one was willing to fight alongside them, and their allies were easily convinced to turn against them. History would later show that the Aztecs should have learned this lesson. When the shadowy advisor Clackalel passed away peacefully at the age of 90, he died a happy man.

The year was 1487. The island city of Tenosteclan was now the beating heart of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It governed the lives of as many as six million people, and was on course to become the greatest empire that the continent had ever seen. But in little over 30 years, this whole society would come crashing down. That's because they would soon encounter another power, though would outmatch them in military force, in ruthlessness, and at times in cruelty. Only 30 years or so after the death of Tlacalel, the chronicles in the Florentine Codex record that once again over Mexico, a mysterious light appeared in the sky.

It was a comet of dazzling brilliance, and as the days went on, it grew brighter. Ten years before the arrival of the Spaniards, an omen first appeared in the sky. like a flame or tongue of fire, like the light of dawn. It appeared to be throwing off sparks and seemed to pierce the sky. It was wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. It looked as though it reached the very middle of the sky, its very heart and centre. It showed itself off to the east. When it came out at midnight, it appeared like the dawn.

Although no one, it was a pandla and neshia, cladwilyya, and pantla-wia, kinawiawaiiwa. one could have guessed it, this light in the sky was a harbinger of the end of the Aztec Age. As we saw earlier, during the low sea levels of the last ice age, a land bridge existed from Asia that Stone Age humans use to cross into the Americas. But as sea levels rose from about 16,000 years ago, that bridge was swallowed up by the waves. humanity was now separated into two vast populations, one on each of the world's two great landmasses. And although neither of them knew it, the separation of the continents was the starting pistol in a race for their very survival. At some point in the future, these two populations would meet.

And the developments they made during the intervening 16,000 years would determine which which of them would survive that encounter. For a number of reasons, the people who settled in the smaller landmass, the continents of the Americas, were at an inherent disadvantage. There are a lot of factors at play here. This is a hotly contested subject that people feel understandably emotional about. But for me, the most obvious and first point to make is that the people are the people who are of the Americas had simply arrived in their lands later than other humans.

We evolved as a species in Africa between 300 and 200,000 years ago, and in the last 60,000 years began to migrate out of Africa and on to the rest of the world. We reached Southern Asia by about 50,000 years ago, China by 40,000 years ago, and most of Europe by 30,000 years ago. This means that humans had already settled in virtually the whole Afro-Eurasian landmass for tens of thousands of years before they ever set foot in the Americas. All that time they spent growing their populations and steadily making the incredibly slow transition from hunter-gatherers to part-time farmers and then from part-time to full-time farmers.

Their settlements grew until the early cradles. of civilization, like the Indus Valley, Egypt and Mesopotamia, burst into the light of history around 7,000 years ago. As we saw in the last episode, a cradle of civilization takes a long time to form. And part of the reason for this is that virtually every food we eat today didn't exist until we came along and created it. Far from the bountiful Garden of Eden, the earth originally didn't provide that much to eat for its human inhabitants, and what little there was would have tasted pretty bad. From wheat and barley to bananas, peas and oranges, each delicious food we know today began as an ancestor that was much more unpalatable, much less nutritious,

and much more difficult to digest. The banana is just one of countless examples. It began in Southeast Asia as an unrecognizable wild species, with bluish-green skin and many large, hard seeds. They're virtually inedible to humans, but over millennia, desperate hunter-gatherers would have picked the ones that were most bearable to eat and taken them home. The seeds from these would have grown near to their settlements, and later these early humans would begin to cultivate them in a more purposeful way. Picking only the juiciest of their new crop to create the next generation. Incredibly slowly, so slowly that no one would have noticed the difference over their lifetime, the plant began to change. Its seeds got smaller,

its flesh got sweeter and creamier, and its skin turned that deep yellow we all recognize today. We owe so much to the work of those thousands of nameless generations who tirelessly domesticated these plants. It took many thousands of years for the people of Mesopotamia to change wild mountain grasses into the nutritious wheat and barley that we know today. This process began as early as 10,000 BC, and from there these cereals spread to the rest of Afro-Eurasia. Peas and pulses like lentils were another of the earliest domesticated crops. Wild peas were even eaten by Neanderthals, as the 46,000-year-old remains from the Shanada Cave in Kurdistan seemed to show. But modern peas were first domesticated in Iraq as early as 11,000 years ago.

This was nothing short of an agricultural revolution that fueled the growth of early societies. As the quality of these foods improved, they offered greater nutrition to our diets, higher calories and more protein, and it became possible to support larger populations. But the people of the Americas were much newer to their lands. The earliest people to ever live in the Valley of Mexico would have only just arrived around the year 12,000 BC, about the time that peas and wheat were already beginning to be cultivated in Mesopotamia. These earliest Mexicans found huge, herds of mammoths and other animals that could be hunted, it would have been several millennia before they began to feel the pressure to move away from their hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

Due to this, one of the most common foodstuffs in the Americas, maize or corn, only began to be domesticated around 7,000 years ago. At this time, the Ubaid culture in Mesopotamia was already a thriving agricultural society, as we saw in the previous episode. This meant that in the long, arduous work of domesticating crops, the people of the old world had something like a three or four millennia head start. Some have suggested that the nature of the plants themselves may have also been a factor. And once again, the people of the Americas suffered a stroke of bad luck.

One of the most common foodstuffs in Mexico was corn, which likely descended from a plant called Tio Sinti. This is an incredibly bitter kind of grass. It looks nothing like the rich yellow globes of corn we know today, and since such a drastic change had to be bred into this unappetizing plant, it may have taken longer for early people in the Americas to domesticate it than for the people in Mesopotamia to turn wild grass into wheat or wild peas into lentils, neither of which require such a dramatic transformation. And there are other factors too. In the Americas, a lower diversity of animals also acted as a

disadvantage. There were only two animals in the Aztec world that could be domesticated, turkeys and dogs. But in the old world, livestock like sheep, goats and pigs contributed greatly to the amount of protein available to the population. Cows were a rich source of meat and milk, and could also be used as pack animals to carry loads and pull plows. But above all, there was the horse. Although the horse had evolved in the Americas, it had been extinct there. since the last Ice Age. It's sometimes said that the indigenous American empires like the Aztecs never invented the wheel, but that's not actually true. We found numerous examples of clay toys made for Meshika children, which include perfectly engineered wheels. I'll put some examples of these

on Twitter and Patreon for you to see. But if the Aztecs ever experimented with wheels for larger vehicles, it's likely they would have quickly given up on the idea. Without any horses or oxen to pull a cart, the design of the wheel wouldn't have saved much labor. The Aztecs simply carried things from place to place using straps that attached to their forehead. This worked well enough for them, but it tied a large proportion of the population down in manual labor.

And compared to the horse-driven power of the old world, it was just another setback. The Afro-Eurasian landmass is just about exactly twice the size of the combined continents of the Americas. This larger habitable area, along with the extra tens of thousands of years that people had lived there, meant that the population in the old world was much higher. Estimates for the population of the Americas pre-contact vary wildly. Some historians have gone as low as 8 million, while others have gone as high as overrun.

a hundred million. But I find an estimate of about 60 million to be reasonable. But compared to the old world, the difference is stark. By contrast, China alone had surpassed 140 million by the year 1200, a century before the Aztecs had even arrived in the Valley of Mexico. This larger population meant simply that there were more human brains put to work on the business of inventing new things, and vast trade networks like the Silk Road meant that if something was invented in China or India, it would only be a matter of years before it would be available in Europe. Due to their three or four millennia head start in domesticating crops and all these other advantages, the timelines of the two sides of the world show a marked difference.

While the people of Mesopotamia developed pottery over 7,000 years ago, the first pottery in Mexico would not begin for another 2.5,000 years. While bronze making began in India and the near east, around 3,300 BC, and spread to Europe and East Asia in the following centuries, experimentation with bronze work was only just getting started in Mexico when Tenochtitlan was at its height in the 14th century. century. High carbon steel was invented in South India in the 6th century BC and exported around the old world. It would never be invented in the Americas. By the 5th century AD, Mexico's first empire of Teotihuacan had only just reached its height, but the old world had already seen

millennia pass that saw the rise and fall of the Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. When Teotihuacan fell around the year 550, China's Chen dynasty had invented matches, and Indian engineers had invented the spinning wheel. When the Toltec Empire fell in the valley of Mexico, around the beginning of the 12th century, the Chinese had already invented gunpowder and a magnetic compass for use at sea. When the Meshika people around the arrived in the Valley of Mexico around the year 1300 AD, Arab and European scientists had already described rules for the refraction of light, and Italian craftsmen had invented the first eyeglasses. By the time the Aztec emperors Izkoatl and Nesawal-Koyotl were born, the first handheld cannons

had been invented in China, and naval artillery had been used for the first time in Korea. While the The poet Nesawal-Koyotl built his personal library in Teshkoko, and Itzkoatel burned the books of Tenosh Titlan. The printing press was invented in Germany. And in the middle of the 15th century, the archibus, an early form of musket, was developed in Spain. All the people of the Americas were incredibly ingenious and inventive, and the Aztecs were no exception, but they could never make up that three or four millennia head start. The race that would determine the outcome of the coming war of the worlds had always been rigged against them. One technology above all others would prove to be the decisive factor in the coming collision of worlds, and that would be the ocean-going

ship. In the 14th to 15th centuries, developments in naval technology gave rise to a new kind of vessel, known as the Caravelle. Until then, Europeans have been restricted to only navigating around the coasts. But Portuguese craftsmen were soon able to develop larger and more powerful ships. Caravelles allowed them to explore along the coast of Africa, and by the end of the 1400s these had been upgraded to the much larger and more powerful Carracks. These These were large, durable ships, with as many as six sails, well suited for long ocean-going voyages, and they also weighed well over a thousand tons, large enough to carry huge amounts of supplies, suitable for voyages of many months.

The Karak meant that regular voyages could now take place between Europe and India, all around the coast of Africa and even on to China. While the Silk Road cities like Baghdad, Tashkent and Samarkand had once been the hubs of the world's trade, those centres began to move to Europe, along these newly opened trade routes. European cities swelled with incoming wealth, and in the final decades of the 15th centuries, the European countries that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean began to wonder if they could make even more ambitious voyages. In the year 1492, only five years after the death of that shadowy advisor Clackarlal in Tenochtitlan,

a carac called the Santa Maria was sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, accompanied by two smaller caravels. On board was the explorer Christopher Columbus. The Aztecs knew no more about those three ships than the enormous teradactal Quetzalcoatlus knew about the asteroid that had once sped steadily towards the Gulf of Mexico. But as a light once again appeared in the sky over Central America, that blazing blood-red comet, a new threat just as deadly was speeding their way, one that would take them completely by surprise and change their world forever. It's now finally time to introduce the two great actors.

in the drama that is about to unfold. And we'll check in with both of them in the year 1502. The first of these characters is the most wealthy and powerful man in the world, at least as far as he knows. He is the king of the Aztecs, a man named Moctezuma the second, and the year 1502 was the year of his coronation. Like most Meshika of his time, Moktizuma had dark, wavy hair and was of average height.

He had an aquiline nose and a large forehead. People who knew him recall that his voice was eloquent, courteous, and diplomatic, but he spoke with a kind of quiet force. Some say that he spoke so quietly that the movements of his lips could barely be seen. Moktizuma was 35 years old. He was the ninth king of Tenochtitlan, coming to power when the empire was at the height of its confidence. The people of the capital must have had high hopes that he would carry their young empire to even greater glory. A Meshika coronation was a drawn out and splendid affair. Moktizuma first went into spiritual retreat for a few days, fast.

and praying in the temples. Once that was done, there would have been a raucous ceremony, with music, dancing, festivals, feasts, and the arrival of visiting nobility from all over the Aztec lands. After the coronation, it was traditional to go to war, and bring back captives to be sacrificed. For this purpose, Moctezuma crushed a number of rebellions across the empire, and brought many captives back to Tenochtitlan. The blood would have run down the steps of the temple for days. Moktizuma would have overseen these sacrifices, wearing a headdress made of shimmering green quetzal feathers, and we can imagine the cheering of the crowds as the new emperor raised his hands, and all the lands of the Aztecs bowed down beneath him. The second

actor in this drama couldn't have been more different. To find him, we will have to travel nearly 9,000 kilometers to the east, across the wide expanse of the ocean. Eventually, we reach the limestone cliffs of Europe and fly over forests of cypresses and pines, until we land in the small village of Medellin in Spain. Medellin sits on the River Guadiana, dotted with conifers and olive trees, with the imposing shape of a 10th century castle sitting on a rocky outcrop over the village. Its houses are painted white with terracotta tiles, and in one of these houses, a 17-year-old boy is sitting alone and studying. He has a sickly, pale look about him. In fact, as a child, he was so frail that his parents expected him to die of sickness on several occasions.

At the age of 14, he had been sent to study Latin with an uncle in the city of Salamanca, and his parents had hoped this would set him up for a legal career. But the boy hated his time there, and after two years he returned home, much to the disappointment of his parents. Now it's 1502. On the other side of the ocean, the Emperor Moctezuma is climbing that tall pyramid to be crowned. and this teenager is stuck in his small Spanish hometown. The monotony of his life makes him irritable and unpleasant,

as the 16th century Spanish historian Francisco Lopez de Gamara recalls. He was a source of trouble to his parents as well as to himself, for he was restless, haughty, mischievous, and given to quarreling. This boy's name was Hernando Cortez, known to his friends as Hernan. If you looked in his eyes at the age of 17, you may not have imagined what lay in this boy's future, but perhaps you would have seen a little flicker in the center of those eyes,

and if you looked closer, it may have looked like the fluttering of flames. Cortez was a member of a class known as the Hidalgos. They had noble ancestry, but didn't own. any land, and with little by way of inheritance, being the son of a Hidalgo wasn't the most envious position. As Cortez approached the age of 18, he knew what path awaited him. He wanted to go to fight in Italy, where a number of wars were raging, and where there would always be demand for mercenaries. But the closer that day approached, the more he began to hear of discoveries that were happening on the other side of the world.

When Cortez was seven years old, Columbus had landed in the Caribbean, and by the time Cortez was 18, the explorer Amerigo Vespucci had published a work in Latin called Mundus Novus, or The New World. In this work, he suggested that the lands discovered by Columbus were not the edge of Asia, as had previously been thought, but an entirely new landmass. The relatively new technology of the printing press had spread this idea around all of Europe and beyond. A frenzy for exploration had begun.

Since then, stories had begun to flow back to Europe about the opportunity that might await on the other side of the sea, veritable mountains of gold. The more Cortez heard these stories, the more he lost his previous enthusiasm for Italy. He soon made up his mind, as recalled by the historian de Gomada. He considered which of the two routes would suit him best, and decided to cross over to the Indies, because it seemed to him a more profitable journey than the one to Naples, on account of the great quantity of gold which had come from there.

Cortez dallied around the port town of Valencia for two years, He loved to gamble, a habit that never left him, but despite this vice and others, he soon had enough money to buy passage on a ship across the Atlantic. He finally set sail in the year 1504 at the age of 19. Cortez wrote down no account of his roughly two-month journey across the sea, but one Dominican friar who wrote down his experience some years later gives us some sense of what it must have been like. The ship is a very strong, a narrow prison from which no one can flee. The heat, the stuffiness and the sense of confinement are sometimes overpowering.

The bed is ordinarily the floor. Most passengers go about as if out of their mind or in poor health. There is a terrible smell, especially below deck. It must have been a relief when he finally landed on the island of Hispanic. Nola, which is today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This was the island where Columbus had first landed in the new world, and where the first European settlements in the Americas began. Christopher Columbus actually went to his grave insisting that he had not discovered a new continent, an ironic detail considering this is the achievement we all remember him for. His goal had been to

reached the east coast of Asia, and he never admitted that he had failed. But this confusion didn't stop him from settling in Hispaniola, and enslaving as many indigenous people there as he could. He worked tens of thousands of them to death in his gold mines. The scale of his use of slave labor was shocking even for those at the time, and back in Spain, people started to refer to Columbus with the nickname Pharaoh. Perhaps as many as 200,000 indigenous people were killed under his regime, which ruled with terror and sadistic punishments over the native people. To save the faint of heart, I won't go into details here,

but the cruelty of Columbus's regime would have made even most Aztec kings look benign by comparison. In the year 1500, the rumors of Columbus' regime, brutality became too much for the Spanish king, who had him removed from power. But the situation hardly improved for Hispaniola's native people, and in 1513, the first African slaves were imported to make up the devastated population of the island. Hispaniola set the pattern for what the European settlement of the New World would look like. It was a steamroller that crushed all other forms of life beneath it. And this was a pattern that would be repeated countless times over the coming centuries. We don't know what Cortez thought of Hispaniola when he got

there. At the age of 18, he registered as a citizen, which meant he was given a plot of land to build a house and farm on, complete with a staff of enslaved locals. Since he had a couple of years legal training, he was given a job as a job as a house and farm on, complete with a staff of enslaved locals. Since he had a a notary in a small town for the next six years. He witnessed legal documents and learned the ins and outs of law right there at the edge of the known world. But that same boredom he'd felt as a child began to creep over him, and in 1511 he gave in to the siren call of more exciting prospects. A man named Diego de Velazquez, 20 years older than Cortez, and already a powerful man in the new world, planned to lead an expedition to conquer the neighboring

island of Cuba and repeat there what they had done in Hispaniola. Cortez signed up to go with him. He was one of only 300 men who landed in Cuba and began the process of crushing native resistance. It was a campaign marked by extreme cruelty and indiscriminate violence. Cortez wasn't a soldier. He was the clerk to the treasurer of the expedition, responsible for noting down all the profits acquired, and ensuring that the Spanish crown got a fifth of everything gained, as it did from all such expeditions. When the invasion of Cuba was complete, Velazquez was sufficiently impressed with Cortez's legal skill that he appointed him his personal secretary.

In Cuba, they set up the settlement of Santiago, and Cortez was appointed its municipal magistrate. As a reward, Velazquez gifted him a large estate, including gold mines, and even more enslaved people to work for him. Cortez's power grew, and it's clear that soon Governor Velazquez viewed him as a potential rival. Around this time, Cortez grew his beard thick and began to dress like a king, wearing an extravagant hat with a large plumed feather, a medallion of gold and a black velvet cloak. But no matter how much wealth he amassed, Cortez was never satisfied. Once again that boredom set in, and he began looking over the horizon and wondering what else

might be out there. His answer came in the following years, as a number of expeditions began making further advances to the mainland of the Americas itself. In 1517, an expedition led by one Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba explored the coast of Mexico for the first time. They met Mayan people living here on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and were impressed by their cities, which were larger than anything they'd seen in Hispaniola or Cuba. But the expedition was ill-fated. The Spaniards repeatedly ran out of water, and the Mayans, perhaps initially impressed at their guns and steel armour, quickly realized that this small group could be easily overwhelmed. They were attacked, and 50 Spaniards were killed,

with the expedition leader later dying of his wounds. At this time, no one was really sure what this landmass was. Most believed it was just another large island, while others continued to maintain that it was the mainland of Asia. All they knew was that a long coast stretched out on either side with an unknown amount of land behind it. The unlucky Cordova expedition was followed a year-longed. later in 1518 by another, led by the Spaniard Juan de Grealva.

This time, the Spanish took greater protection. They armed their ships with small cannons called culverins, capable of shooting a 10-kilogram cannonball around 400 meters. Cortez doesn't seem to have paid much attention to these expeditions, perhaps occupied with his work in Cuba. But when Huanda Grealva failed to return from his voyage, rumors and worries began to spread. Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba, put together a search and rescue party

with the intention of going after Grealva and finding out what had happened to him. For whatever reason, Cortez was chosen to lead this expedition. He wasn't the most obvious choice for it. He was relatively young, only 33 years old, and he had never led an army or commanded any kind of military post. I think it's possible Velazquez hoped that Cortez would be killed on this expedition. It might have seemed like an excellent way to get rid of this ambitious upstart. But despite his military inexperience, Cortez was a good diplomat and clearly had a way with words. In just one month, he had convinced 300 men to follow him and put together six ships,

ready for this rescue mission to the new world. There was only one problem. Before they could set off, Juan de Grealva, the lost Spaniard who they were setting out to find, sailed back into port. He had been delayed while exploring the coast of Mexico, but he brought back some incredible stories. He had seen cities built with tall pyramids and streets paved with stone. And he had met a delegation from a powerful king who was said to live there, and who called himself Moctazuma. Despite these enticing stories, this must have taken the wind out of Cortez's sails.

He now had a fully funded search party for someone who was no longer missing. And for Governor Velazquez, this was enough of a reason. to pull his support for the voyage. If Grealva had come back, perhaps it wasn't so dangerous over there at all, and the last thing he wanted was for Cortez to get the glory that came with making new discoveries. But that restless, mischievous boy had never really left Cortez, and perhaps his old love of gambling also played a part. He decided that he would go ahead with the mission anyway, that he would sail to this new land against the wishes of the governor and discover the truth about this king across the water. Cortez gave the order to depart as soon as

possible before Governor Velazquez could stop him. Velazquez had been supplying all the food for the journey and so they would depart with no supplies, but they set sail anyway, departing from Santiago on November the 18th, 1518. According to some sources, the governor heard of Cortez's plan at the last moment, and hurried down to the docks to find his six ships already pulling away from port. He said to have called out to him. Why, compadre, is this the way you leave? Is this a fine way to say farewell to me? On hearing this, Cortez called back this famous reply. Forgive me, your worship, for this and similar things have to be done rather than thought about.

Velazquez watched as Cortez and his men set sail, but he knew they wouldn't get far. They were still drastically short on food. They sailed around the coast of Cuba for weeks, but everywhere they went, they found that Governor Velazquez had already sent orders ahead of them, telling the people of Cuba not to give any supplies to this rogue expedition. But enough people were willing to barter with them. They brought up loaves of cassava bread, beef and pork pickled in brine, saltfish and salted biscuits, along with some live chickens. They even ran into 200 men who had been on Juan Grealva's expedition, and some assorted others who all agreed to join them. Their numbers swelled to around

630 men, and their number of ships to 11. They brought along 13 horses, which they hoisted onto the ships with a pulley and kept on deck throughout the crossing. They also brought several cannons, those same light culverins that the Grealva mission had used. They also brought dog, large powerful mastiffs that had been used on European battlefields for centuries. Among the men were 30 crossbowmen and 12 who carried archibuses, an early form of musket. After weeks of going from port to port, they had enough to make the voyage across the sapphire blue waters. The invasion of Mexico had begun.

of the main sources we have, for what happens next, are the so-called Cartas of Cortez. These are the letters that he wrote throughout his expedition, and sent back to King Charles the 5th of Spain. Sent to his sacred majesty the emperor, our sovereign by Don Fernando Cortez, Captain General of New Spain, in which he gives an account of the lands and provinces without number that he has newly discovered in Yucatan in the year 1519 and subjected to his majesty's royal craft. The letters are remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, they're the only set of documents that we know were written at the time of the invasion by someone who was definitely there,

and they also have a remarkable literary ambition, full of detail and color. But of course, they also have their problems as historical sources. Cortez was not classically educated, and he wouldn't have been familiar with the epics of Greek and Latin, but he did enjoy reading the romances that were popular in Spain at the time. Tales of Daring by adventurous knights fighting against foreign enemies. And there's something of that feeling to these documents. Cortez always casts himself in the best possible light in these letters. But his years as a notary and treasurer's clerk had also made him well-versed in Spanish law.

This meant that all of his accounts cast him in the best possible legal light too, usually taking pains to show that he had done everything exactly according to the law. For this reason, his letters have to be read very carefully, and with an acknowledgement that their relationship to the truth is often quite strained. On the Spanish side, we also have the memoirs of two of the soldiers who followed Cortez on his expedition, who wrote down their memories in the 1560s as they reached old age. One of them, Francisco de Aguilar, renounced earthly wealth and retired to a Dominican monastery, while the other Bernal Diaz del Castillo became a landholder in Guatemala.

Both are similarly flattering accounts of the expedition's heroics, and are also confused by the more than 40 years that had passed since the events. On the Meshika side, we have no indigenous accounts from the years of the invasion, and none written before a full 20 years afterwards. But the Florentine Codex, compiled by that Spanish priest Sahagun, does include one remarkable account of those years. This is known as Book 12, and it compiles the memories of the Mashika people who survived. Like Bernal Diaz and de Aguilar, they are looking back from a distance of several decades. This means that many details are questionable, and things like the

exact words of speeches, given by Moctezuma and Cortez, are likely not entirely reliable. But this book 12 of the Florentine Codex is an incredible source for how the Mashika people remembered their experience of those years and the fall of their civilization. The expedition of Juan de Grealva in the previous year had caused quite a stir in the court of the Aztec king Moctazuma. Lookouts guarding the coast had cited the tall ships of the Spanish off in the distance. These Mashika people would have seen the tall white sails emblazoned with Spanish crosses and must have known that they were looking at something they had never seen before.

The Mashika people are often portrayed as reacting with fear or disbelief at the sight of the Europeans. But we should be a little careful about these accounts. Europeans delighted in sharing stories of how the fearful Aztecs believed their ships to be floating mountains, or cities moving about on the waves. People in Europe especially loved stories of how the Aztecs believed the Europeans to be a kind of God, and the soldier Bernal Diaz, writing 40 years later, embellished his stories with the idea that the Aztecs believed Cortez to be the return of the god Quetzalcoatl. Over time, these stories became more and more specific, adding in details like the fact that Quetzalcoatl was supposed to have pale skin.

But honestly, there's no evidence that the Meshika ever thought that the Europeans were gods, and these stories are likely later inventions. If the Meshika ever did believe something of this sort, they quickly dispensed with the idea. They must have been astonished at the first sight of Spanish ships, and with their armor, their guns and their horse, forces, but they quickly assessed the reality of the situation, that these were men from a different place, whose ships were larger and whose weapons were more powerful than their own. And as their contact with the Europeans went on, it's clear that they began to see them not as a kind of God, but as a kind of devil.

At the sight of those tall white sails off the coast, the Meshika watchmen immediately paddled out on their canoes to investigate. They made a traditional sign of respect as they reached the Spanish ships, mimicking kissing the ground, and the Spanish called out to them, as the Florentine Codex recalls. Then they embarked, launched off, and went out on the water. The waterfolk paddled for them. When they approached the Spaniards, they made the earth-eating gesture at the prow of the boat. The Spaniards called to them, saying to them,

Who are you? Where have you come from? Where is your homeland? Immediately they said, it is from Mexico that we have come. They answered them back. If you are really, Mishika, what is the name of the ruler of Mexico? They told them, O our lords, Moktizuma is his name. The Meshika brought with them a collection of fine textiles as gifts, which they gave to the Spanish sailors. In return, the Spanish gave them some beaded jewelry, which the Meshika received politely, but would not have been particularly impressed by. The Spanish then left them, with a promise that they would soon return.

For all these things that they gave them, the Spaniards gave them things in return. They gave them green and yellow strings of beads, which one might imagine to be amber. And when they had taken them and looked at them, greatly did they marvel. And the Spaniards took leave of them, saying to them, go off, while we go to Spain,

we will not be long in getting to Mexico. in Meshiko. This small group of Meshika watchmen returned to the shore, obviously a little shaken by their encounter. They agreed that they would travel back to the capital of Tenochtitlan and report what they had seen. When they got there, the king himself called them into his presence. King Moctezuma would have made an imposing sight even to the Aztec nobility, and to these commoners, he must have been terrifying. Many years later in the 1560s, the Spanish friar Diego Duran interviewed an old Mexica man who had worked in the palace for most of his life.

Duran asked him what the Emperor Moctezuma had looked like, and the man replied that he didn't know. In all his years there, he had never dared to look. These lowly watchmen would have come before the emperor barefoot. and would have bowed their heads when they spoke to him. Meeting his eyes would have been strictly forbidden. They gave the king the beads that the Spanish had given them, and then, as clearly as they could,

they told the king what they had seen. Then they spoke to him, O our Lord, O Master, if you will, but here is what we have seen and done at the place where your subordinate stand guard for you beside the ocean. For we went to see our lords out on the water, we gave them all your cloaks, and here are the fine things belonging to them that they gave us. They said, if you have really come from Mexico, here is what you are to give to the ruler Moctezuma, whereby he will recognize us. They told him everything the Spaniards had told

them out on the water. Moctizuma was clearly troubled by this news. Strange rumours had been spreading across the region for several years now, whispers about terrifying things that had happened to the populations of Hispaniola and Cuba, which lay right at the edge of the Aztec world. In 1519, a canoe of native Jamaicans had landed in Moctezuma's lands, apparently refugees from some terrible destruction taking place there. A strange chest had even washed up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico

and was brought to Tenochtitlan for inspection. It contains several suits of bizarre clothes, the likes of which the Mexica had never seen before, as well as a number of jewels and a sword made of a hard grey metal. All of this troubled Moktazuma. He was a cautious and pragmatic ruler, and his first instinct was always to seek out more information before acting. He told the men to tell no one of what they had seen. He ordered them to return to the coast and establish a permanent watch.

in case the strangers in their large ships returned. Thereupon, Moktizuma, gave instructions to the man from Kwehtlash to Lan, and the rest telling them, give orders that watch be kept everywhere along the coast, at the places called Nawatlan, Tozatlan, and Miklan Kwatla, wherever they will come to land. Then the stewards left and gave orders for watch to be kept. After that, Moktazuma summoned all his lords and showed them the beads he had been given.

They all gathered round, and we can imagine the murmurs of concern passing around the group, as all of them wondered what it could mean. The days passed, and nothing more happened. The Aztec New Year soon came round, with all its sense, celebration and ceremony. And as the year wore on, Moktizuma may have almost forgotten about the strange encounter that happened on the eastern coast. One of his favorite palace women bore him a new son. He watched performances of jugglers and dancing dwarves, both of which he loved. He heard the poets from the city of Teshko

come to his palace and read poetry about all the Aztecs' favorites. subjects, the brevity of life, the valiant deaths of warriors, and the decaying of empires. Life in Tynostitlan went on, but then as the year drew to a close, another report came to him. More large ships had been sighted on the horizon, and more of them this time. He immediately gave orders for a delegation to go and meet these strangers. and to find out what they wanted. After that, King Moktazuma must have slumped down on the ornate mat that served as his throne and lost himself in troubled thoughts. Cortez and his 11 ships quickly made the short crossing from Cuba to Mexico and sailed for several

weeks along the coast. The ships glided over the sapphire blue waters, passed over grown sand bars and white sand beaches. He couldn't have known it, but in the early weeks of the year 1519, he sailed over the exact spot where, 66 million years earlier, the Chick-Shulub asteroid had impacted the Earth. Sailing at an average rate of four knots or about seven kilometers an hour, it would have taken the ships nearly an entire 24 hours to cross the vast ring of its crater, invisible beneath the waves. The weeks of sailing along the Mexican coast dragged by without incident. And then one day a watchman shouted that there was a canoe paddling out to meet them. There was a man inside it dressed in the style of a Mayan peasant. But when he got closer,

they were astonished to hear him shout out in Spanish, with tears in his voice. Gentlemen, Are you Christians? Whose subjects are you? This was a Spanish man by the name of Geronimo de Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked eight years earlier when trying to sail for Cuba. He was captured by the Mayans, along with 12 other survivors. The Mayan people intended to sacrifice them all, he said, but he and another man named Guerrero had managed to escape.

The two of them were soon given. captured by another Mayan king, who kept them as slaves. His companion Guerrero quickly grew to enjoy life with the Maya, and actually seemed to prefer it to his life back in Spain. He married a rich Mayan woman and had children with her, and the Mayan king quickly took him on as a war chief. Guerrero even got tattoos in the style of a Mayan warrior. But Aguilar ha'elah hated his life there. He missed Spain, and he kept his sanity by counting the nearly 3,000 days that had gone by, trying to keep track of which day of the week it was. He was always waiting for his chance to get away, and when he heard news that ships were sailing past, he slipped

away and ran to the coast. One of the first things he did when he met the Spanish was to ask what day of the week it was. He discovered that in eight years he had miscounted by only three. He thought it was Wednesday, when in fact it was Sunday. While living with the Maya, Aguilar had learned some of their language, and Cortez immediately saw how useful he could be as a translator. He enlisted him for the voyage, promising to take him back to Cuba when the mission was done. Soon, Cortez and his men needed to stock up on their water supply.

And so they stopped off at a large Mayan town named Pontochan, which sat at the mouth of a river, today known as the Rio Grealva, after the expedition that had come before Cortez. The locals had perhaps heard worrying rumors about the foreigners sneaking around their shores in their large ships, and they made an attempt to drive the Spanish away by force. What followed was a brief but bloody clash, Cortez's first battle in Mexico.

Although there were some experienced fighters among his troop, Cortez's men, for the most part, were not professional soldiers, and neither were they particularly well-trained. But they were at least capable of following orders, and they held their nerve in this first encounter. This was Cortez's first chance to try out his cannons and guns, and they had the desired effect. The Mayans soon panicked and fled. Four hundred of them were killed, and the Mayan chief surrendered.

He handed over large amounts of gold, and he also gave Cortez a gift of 20 enslaved women, who would follow his group for much of their journey. Among them, by a stroke of chance, was a woman that the shipwrecked sailor, Geronimo de Aguilar, had encountered during his time as a slave. Her name was Malin Sin, and she would be arguably one of the most crucial factors in the fall of the entire Aztec civilization. Malin Sin is one of the most enigmatic characters in this story. She was born sometime around the year 1500, somewhere in the region where the Aztec Empire met the Mayan heartlands. When she was young, her father died. and her mother remarried, meaning that Malin Sin became something of a surplus child.

She was sold into slavery to a group of Mayan slavers, and some sources suggest that her family even faked her death to avoid the stigma that might come with selling one of your children. The life of a slave, and especially as a woman, could be a horrific existence. When the Mayans and the Mashika went to war, Malinsin was exchanged as part of the spoils, and went from owner to owner over the years. This meant she picked up all the languages of the region, among them Mayan and the Mashika language of Nawatel. When she was finally given to Cortez and his men as a tribute by the chief of Potonchan,

she was a veritable dictionary of Central American languages. Cortez recognized her usefulness immediately. In his group, he now had Malinzin, who spoke Nawatel and Mayan, and Aguilar, who spoke Mayan and Spanish. This meant that the three of them were able to relay messages between them from virtually any language in the region. Malinsin is a complicated. character. We can never really know her motivations, or to what extent she freely chose to help

Cortez's expedition. But Cortez later said that it's possible that without her, none of his plans could have succeeded. And she did seem to help him with an enthusiasm that went beyond the services of a slave. Perhaps it's not hard to see why. Until now, her life had been an endless chain of indignities and abuses. But now, alongside Cortez, she commanded some degree of power and respect. She could now change her fortunes, but not only that. She could burn down the very society which had crushed her for so many years, and I think she would do so with a resolve that is only explained by a desire for vengeance. With his translators in tow, Cortez could now enter into the world of Aztec politics.

He could make the Mashika understand his demands, and, perhaps most crucially, he could lie. The work of destroying the empire of the Aztecs could now truly begin. Cortez sailed further up the coast of Mexico, and finally settled on a landing point to the north. He wasted no time in raiding a number of native villages for food and supplies and stole any gold he came across. From the very start, Cortez knew that he was on a potentially illegal mission. He had defied the orders of the governor of Cuba, Velazquez, and set out on his own, and he knew that there were elements among his men still loyal to Velazquez. He must have known that a mutiny was one of the biggest dangers out there in the unknown,

and so one of his first acts was to scuttle ten of his ships, ensuring that no one would be able to sneak away and inform Velazquez of his whereabouts. But he did leave one ship afloat. This he sent back to Spain, carrying a letter to King Charles V, along with a chest containing the gold artefacts he had found. Cortez knew that if he could go over the governor's head and get the blessing of the King of Spain himself,

then his expedition would be legitimate, but he would have to tread a narrow legal tightrope. To give himself some breathing room, Cortez immediately founded a new town on the bare sandbanks of Mexico's coast. He called it Veracruz, or the True Cross. It wasn't much of a town. It wasn't much of a town. town, likely a few tents and other temporary shelters, but Cortez furnished it with all the legal necessities, including a municipal council made up of several of his soldiers. In a legal sense, Cortez could now claim to be the governor of this town. As governor, he was empowered to act on behalf of the king, and without any orders from his majesty, he could now decide what needed to be done himself. Only a few days after the founding of Veracruz, a group of Meshika men, dressed in the finest feathers

and embroidered cloaks, arrived and announced themselves as the messengers of Moctezuma. They brought gifts of gold and incense, as well as some food. Some other Meshika men also sat among the trees overlooking the beach. These were Moctizuma's finest court painter. sent with their brushes and paints to record everything they saw. Cortez met Moctezuma's delegation and listened to their words with interest. These words passed down the chain of translation to Malinzin in Nawatel, who repeated them to Aguilar in Mayan, and then Aguilar translated them into Spanish.

When Cortez spoke, his words went back the other way. It must have taken a long time to hold these conversations, and perhaps it's fitting that the first words out of Cortez's mouth in Mexico were to be a distortion of the truth. He explained that he was an ambassador sent by his king, who ruled the greater part of the world. Cortez even told some more bare-faced lies. He even claimed that some of the world. He even claimed that some of the world. of his men was suffering from a disease of the heart, and that he had heard that the precious metal gold could be used as a treatment. He slylyly asked whether King Moktizuma could help him and his sick men by giving them some gold. The ambassador from Tenochtitlan, apparently not sensing the danger,

said that yes, Moktizuma had a lot more gold. Probably from that moment, the entire fate of the empire was sealed. Cortez decided then and there that he would march to Tenochtitlan and take the entire land for himself. In the palace of Moctezuma, the king's angry words were echoing down the halls. He had summoned his chief soothsayers and magicians and was taking out his frustrations on them. after all, part of their job was to predict the future, by all the means known to the Aztecs, by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms and gazing into obsidian mirrors, by casting grains of corn onto the pages of holy books, and with the mysterious tying and untying of knots.

But all these methods had failed to predict the astonishing arrival of these bizarre foreigners. The priest Diego Duran later wrote down the words that people remember Moctezuma shouting at these magicians. It is your position then to be deceivers, tricksters, to pretend to be men of science and forecast that which will take place in the future, deceiving everyone by saying that you know what will happen in the world, that you see what is within the hills in the center of the earth, underneath the waters, in the haze and in the earth's clefts in the springs and waterholes. But everything is a lie. It is all pretense. Although he punished some of his soothsayers, Moctezuma's rage does seem to have eventually abated. He must have sat and poured over the

images that his painters had brought back to him, the ships with their white sails, the men in their bizarre clothes, and perhaps most strangely, the creatures they had brought with them, whose backs they rode on, creatures that looked like some kind of deer with no horns. Perhaps most worryingly, the foreigners had also given his ambassadors a demonstration of their weapons, and the stories they brought back seemed almost unbelievable, as the Florentine Codex recalls. And when he heard what the messages reported, he was greatly afraid and taken aback, and he was amazed at their food. It especially made him faint when he heard how the guns went off at the Spaniards' command,

sounding like thunder, causing people actually to swoon, blocking the ears. And when it went off, something like a ball came out from inside, And fire went showering and spitting out. And the smoke that came from it had a very foul stench, striking one in the face. And if they shot at a hill, it seemed to crumble and come apart. And it turned a tree to dust. It seemed to make it vanish as though someone had conjured it away.

Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies and iron. They put iron on their heads. Their swords were iron. Their bows were iron. And their shields and lances were iron. And their deer that carried them were as tall as the roof. Many historians have caricatured Muktaxumma as a weak and indecisive king.

But I don't think that's entirely fair. In the coming days, he decided on a number of practical approaches to the situation. First of all, he needed information. He sent out messengers to all the cities of Mexico and beyond, to all the rulers and libraries of the continent, asking if they knew anything about these strangers who had appeared so suddenly on their shores. The messengers would come back one by one

and tell him that no one knew anything. Moktizuma also ordered spies to place them themselves in every town and village between Tenochtitlan and the coast, and to report back immediately if the Spanish tried to move inland. He also sent his disgraced magicians to try and redeem themselves by putting curses and spells on the foreigners. But despite all these measures, it's clear that the uncertainty of what was going on did begin to take its toll on the Aztec king. During this time,

Moktizuma neither slept nor touched food. Whatever he did, he was distracted. It seemed as though he was ill at ease, frequently sighing. He tired and felt weak. He no longer found anything tasteful, enjoyable or amusing.

When we come from, Compare what the Meshika and the Spanish knew about each other. It's easy to see why the Spanish advantage wasn't simply in guns, steel and horses. To Moktizuma, the Spanish were a complete mystery. They didn't have a city that could be conquered or wives and children that could be captured. They had no known weaknesses. He didn't know where they came from, why they were here, or what they wanted. and this made it very difficult for him to devise a strategy to deal with them.

On the Spanish side, things were very different. In the days after landing in Mexico, Cortez had already sent letters home, sending for reinforcements and providing information about the lands he had arrived in. His letters were immediately printed and distributed around European cities, and he even sent back some artifacts that he stole from Aztec temples. These were exhibited in town halls around Europe, little more than a year later. The German painter Albrecht Dura saw some examples of Aztec art on display in the year 1520, and he later wrote about the inspiration he drew from them.

All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart. so much as these things, for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle intellects of men in foreign parts. In fact, in only a few days, the Spanish had already found out everything they needed to know to bring down the empire. Cortez knew that there was a king called Moctezuma, who ruled in a city called Tenosh Teclan. He knew that he was the most powerful king in the region who possessed a great deal of gold, and he knew something much more important, that this Muctazuma had enemies. These three pieces of information were all Cortez needed to devise a strategy that would deliver a series of hammer blows right at the heart of Meshika society

and bring the whole edifice of the Aztec Empire crashing down. The first of these hammer blows would land on a people we've encountered in this story before, the people of Tlashkalan. For many years now, the Tlashkalans had despised the Aztecs. As we've seen, the Aztecs blockaded and starved them. They forced them to participate in the flower wars and killed their sons at the tops of their temples. Cortez knew that Moktizuma's army was vast and that his 600 men alone wouldn't be enough. This meant he would need to find allies, and the moment he found out about the Klashkalan's hatred for the Meshika, he knew they were just the opportunity he needed. Cortez set out on the road to Tenochtitlan on the 8th of August 1519. He knew that the road to

the coast would be his lifeline for supplies and reinforcements, and so he left almost half of his company behind in the town of Veracruz. He departed with 300 men, marching in their full armor, even sleeping in it at night, fearful of surprise attacks. Cortez himself hardly slept, as he recounted in one of his letters. I shall not sleep until I have seen Moctezuma and observed the quality of his land. The journey from the coast to the valley of Mexico was a distant of about 400 kilometers. The first stretch of the journey was flat, hot and tropical, with dense forests dotted with Aztec plantations of maize.

After that, the land rose sharply, and those great volcanoes began to soar on either side. Everywhere they went, villages gave them supplies of maize and gold, even some more slaves who they used to haul their guns. I burnt more than ten villages, in one of which there were more than 3,000 houses, where the inhabitants fought with us, although there was no one there to help them. As we were carrying the cross and were fighting for our faith, God gave us such a victory that we killed many of them without ourselves receiving any hurt. When they reached the Highlands, they would have passed through a cold, bleak salt flat, before the tall mountain range that walled from. the valley of Mexico, came into view on the horizon. In that harsh landscape, water became scarce,

and they soon ran out of food. But finally, they arrived at the lands of the Clashkalans. Cortez seems to have expected this to be easy. He thought he would only have to explain that he was here to topple Moctazuma, and the Clashcalans would welcome him with open arms. But years of fighting the Mashika had made the Klashkalans a little paranoid. In fact, when they saw the small band of Spaniards marching towards them, they sounded the alarm, believing this to be a raid by Moctezuma. They called up all their fighting men and marched out in full force to defend their lands. The Klaschalan warriors had their faces painted in black and white,

and their war cries would have echoed out over the mountainous slopes. The Slashkalans surrounded the Spanish and fell on their lines in wave after wave. They came very close to overwhelming them, but the glass blades of their macawaitals shattered against the steel armour of the Europeans. The Spanish steel swords cut through their own padded armor easily, while crossbow bolts and gunshots tore through their closely packed. ranks and spread terror, as Bernal Diaz recalls. I saw our company in such confusion that despite the shouts of Cortez and the other captains, they

could not hold together. The Indians were charging us in such numbers that only by a miracle of swordplay were we able to drive them back and reform our ranks. One thing alone saved our lives. The enemy was so massed and so numerous that every shock wrought havoc among them. The horsemen of the Spanish also managed to inflict a huge amount of damage, repeatedly swinging and charging into their ranks with their lances and spreading terror, as the Aztec source, the Florentine Codex recounts. The horses, the deer, neighed.

There was much neighing, and they would sweat a great deal. water seemed to fall from them and their flecks of foams splattered on the ground like stoepsuds splatting as they went they made a beating throbbing and hoof pounding like throwing stones their hooves made holes they dug holes in the ground

wherever they placed them The Clashkalans even managed to bring down two of the Spanish horses during this battle and Bernal Diaz claims that they even hacked off one of the horse's heads with their glass-edged swords. But eventually, they realized it was hopeless. The resolve of their fighters dissolved, and they retreated. Cortez and his men had won the battle, but he was still extremely demoralized by what had

happened. He thought the Clashkalans would welcome him with open arms, but instead they had put up an enormous resistance. Many of his men were injured and a few even killed, and if the Clashkalans were able to put up such a fight, how would they ever overcome the much more powerful Meshika? That night they camped beside a stream, still short on food. They abducted some baby dogs from a nearby village and roasted them over a fire. Cortez worried that the sight of the two dead horses would emboldened the Mexicans. and so he ordered them to be buried.

But he was still determined to get the Clashkalans on side. As the new day dawned, he sent out messengers to meet them, but it was no use. The Spaniards retreated to the top of a nearby volcano, called Sompatta Petal, where a small Meshika shrine had been built to the gods. They camped there, and over the next days fought off constant attacks by the Clashkalans, who refused all. offers of peace. Cortez's plan seemed to be in tatters, and many of his men must have begun to wonder if they would ever make it off that mountaintop. But finally, after three days and nights of repelling

attacks, the Clashkalans sent messengers to ask for peace, as Bernaldez recalls. Making their sign of peace, which was to bow the head, they came straight to the hut where Cortez lived, begging his forgiveness for their hostile actions and for the war they fought against us. They said they had certainly believed us to be friends of Moctezuma and his Mexicans, who had been their mortal enemies from the very ancient times. After this, luck finally began to turn in Cortez's favor. The events at Lashkala sent ripples through the Aztec world. Fewer than 300 Spanish soldiers had repelled the full force of one of the strongest armies in the region.

But Anald Diaz recalls the effects this had on the Mashika. Our fame spread throughout the surrounding country and reached the ears of the great Moctizuma. Terror spread throughout the whole land. Now Moctizuma, the great and powerful Prince of Mexico, in dread that we might come to his city, sent five chieftains of the highest rank to our camp in Tlashkala. To bid us welcome and congratulate us on our great victory. These chieftains praised the Spanish for their fighting skill. These messengers obviously sensed the danger of the situation

and told Cortez never to trust the Tlashkalans. These messengers told Cortez that Moktizuma would love to welcome him to his capital of Tenochtitlan, but unfortunately it was better if he didn't come. The roads are bad, they said, and supplies of food in Tenochtitlan had been very low recently. Moctuuma was only thinking of the Spanish and their comfort, and he didn't want them to suffer. Cortez listened to this speech, translated for him by Malinzinn, and he thanked mockedizuma for his thoughtful words, but he said he didn't have a choice. His king had ordered him to go to Tenocht de Klan, and so go he must. Cortez would later tell one of his soldiers

that he was delighted by this conversation. He'd learned that the Aztec lands were exactly as divided as he'd hoped. Cortez quoted a line from the Gospel of Mark 324. When I saw the discord and animosity between these two peoples, I was pleased, for it seemed to further my purpose considerably. I remembered the word of the Gospels. The kingdom divided cannot stand. Cortez and his men were soon welcomed into the city of Clashkala, where they stayed a few weeks, resting after their hard journey. Cortez wrote back to King Charles V that Clashkala was a beautiful city, larger than Granada. The city is much larger than Granada, and very much stronger with, as good buildings and many more people,

and very much better supplied with the produce of the land. But Cortez had never actually been to Granada, and this was probably another example of his tendency to manipulate the truth. In fact, Clashkala was likely a poor place. It had been blockaded by the Meshika and their economic isolation would have made their lives difficult. But Cortez knew that he had to gain the Clashkalans' trust. He ordered his men to be on their best behavior, not to take anything that wasn't offered to them, and he told them not to enter the temple district of the city for fear of offending their hosts. While they were there, the Clashkalans also showed them some of their most precious relics, as Berthelans.

Ronald Diaz later recalls. They said their ancestors had told them that very tall men and women with huge bones had once dwelt among them but had died off. And, to show us how big these giants had been, they brought us the leg bone of one, which was very thick and the height of an ordinary size man. And that was just a leg bone from the hip to the knee. I measured myself against it, and it was as tall as I am. We were all astonished by the sight of these bones and felt certain there must have been giants in that land.

These bones were likely the remains of the mammoths that had once roamed the valley of Mexico and which Neolithic peoples had hunted to extinction. And it's clear that the Clashcalans soon warmed to their guests, despite the thousands of their warriors that they had killed. or at least they saw in the Spanish an opportunity to change their fortune. They soon came up with a suggestion. They told Cortez that there was a great ally of Moctezuma nearby in the city of Cholula, as the Florentine Codex recalls.

They said to them, the Cholulans are very evil. are enemies. They are as strong as the Mashika, and they are the Mashika's friends. When the Spanias heard this, they went to Chalula. The Tlashkalans went with them, outfitted for war. In reality, the Cholulans weren't such close allies of the Meshika, and it's likely that Clashkalans were lying to the Spanish, hoping that they would help them get rid of another annoying rival. Now before this, there had been friction between the Talash clans and the Chilulans.

They viewed each other with anger, fury, hate and disgust. They could come together on nothing. Because of this, they put the Spaniards up to killing them treacherously. It's moments like this that really undermined the idea that the Aztecs thought that the Spaniards were gods. If you had a god in your presence, you probably wouldn't try to trick them like this. But, alarmed at the thought of the Cholululian threat, Cortez agreed. He and his men marched to Cholula, a wealthy city that once held the world's largest pyramid by volume.

It was a glorious place, with many tall towers. When the Spanish arrived, the Cholulans met them peacefully. But straight away, Cortez unleashed a tidal wave of violence. When they had all come together, the Spaniards and their friends blocked the entrances, all of the places where one entered. Thereupon, people were stabbed, struck and killed. No such thing was in the minds of the Chalulans. They did not meet the Spaniards with where they did not meet the Spaniards with where they were.

weapons of war. The massacre at Cholula went on for two days. The whole city burned and the Spaniards destroyed a temple to the god Quetzalcoatl, the flying feathered serpent that was the primary god of Cholula. If any Mexica had ever wondered whether Cortez was the return of Quetzalcoatl, it's like this act would have put a stop to that speculation. The priests of the city threw themselves from the high towers of their temples to escape the flames. Cortez later came up with a justification for this act. In his letters, he claims that he uncovered a plot hatched by the Cholulans to murder him and his men,

and that's why he unleashed his murderous rage on the city. But it's not clear whether this was actually the case. It seems more likely that this was simply an act of terror to instill fear in the heart of Moctezuma. The city of Tenochtitlan lay only 80 kilometers away, just behind that wall of soaring volcanoes. Cortez's final destination was drawing near. When Moctezuma heard of the sacking of the powerful city of Cholula and the destruction of the temple to Quetzal-Coatal, he was inconsolable, as the Florentine Codex remembers. And when the messengers got there, they told Moktizuma what had happened and what they had seen. When Moktizuma heard it, he just hung his head and sat there, not saying a word.

He sat like someone on the verge of death. For a long time, it was as though he had lost awareness. He answered them only by saying to them, What can be done, O men of unique valor? We have come to the end. We are resigned. Should we climb up the mountains? But should we run away?

We are Mishika. Will the Mishika State flourish in exile? Look at the sad conditions of the poor old men and women and the little children who know nothing yet. Where would they be taken? What answer is there? What can be done? whatever can be done.

Messengers were now flowing into his palace in a steady stream. Some arriving just as others were leaving. Moktizuma had a spy in every village, and since the Spanish gave the same religious sermon at every place they stopped, he eventually told his spies to stop repeating the same speech back to him. He'd heard it enough times already. With each report, the Spaniards were drawing closer. Marching behind them came thousands of native warriors of the Tlashkalans,

as well as other assorted people such as the Otomi. Then all those from the various cities on the other side of the mountains, The Tlashkalans, the people of Telilwikatepec, of Huayshotzinko, came following behind. They came outfitted for war, with their cotton upper armour, shields and bows, their quivers full and packed with feathered arrows, some barbed, some blunted, some with obsidian points. They went crouching, hitting their mouths with their hands and yelling, singing in Tocqueen style, whistling, shaking their heads. Moctezuma's messengers soon reported that the Spanish had reached the gates of the mountain passes and were preparing to cross over into the valley. They said that the Captain Cortez was looking for

Moctezuma. The king must have been terrified. He decided to send one of his servants, dressed up in royal clothes, and bearing as much gold as he could put together. He hoped that if he gave the Spanish what they wanted, a meeting with Moctezuma and the gold they seemed to crave, then they might finally leave him alone. The messenger went out and met Cortez in the high mountain passes, forested with pine trees. They gave the Spaniards golden banners, banners of precious feathers and golden necklaces, and golden necklaces. and when they had given the things to them, they seemed to smile, to rejoice and be very happy. Like monkeys, they grabbed the gold. It was as though their hearts were put to rest, brightened, freshened.

For gold was what they greatly thirsted for. They were gluttonous for it, starved for it, piggishly wanting it. They came lifting up the golden banners, waving them from side to side, showing them to each other. they seemed to babble. What they said to each other was in a babbling tongue. The messenger dressed as the king, introduced himself as Mokta Zuma, and he asked the Spanish what they wanted in the lands of the Meshika. But Cortez was not fooled.

His Clashkalan allies knew what Moktazuma looked like, and they tipped him off to the deception. Then they told him, go on with you. Why do you lie to us? What do you take us for? You can't lie to us, you can't fool us, turn our heads, flatter us, make faces at us, trick us, confuse our vision, distort things for us, blind us, dazzle us, throw mud in our eyes, put muddy hands on our faces. It is not you. Moctezuma exists. He will not be able to hide from us. He will not be able to find refuge.

The Spanish marched on through the mountain passes, with the volcanoes towering on either side, and their thousands of native allies following behind. The atmosphere among the Klashkalans must have been electric. How many of them had ever dreamed that they would one day march into the lands of the Meshika and bring vengeance on their most hated enemies. At the news that his disguised servant had failed, Moktizuma fell into despair. News of the Spanish advance had now spread throughout the land. People fled, and whole towns and villages were deserted.

And at this time, there was silence here in Mexico. No one went out anymore. Mothers no longer let their children go out. The roads were as if swept clean, wide open, as if at dawn, with no one crossing. People assembled in the houses and did nothing but grieve. Moctezuma even ordered the roads to be blocked. but the Spanish easily overcame these obstacles, and panic began to descend in Moctezuma's court. The magicians that Moctezuma had sent to slow down the Spanish also returned, and they reported

that their spells had had no effect. Even worse, some of them had experienced visions, in which they saw the whole of the Aztec Empire, all its temples and palaces, all its houses, and towers going up in flames. It was probably the last news that Moctezuma wanted to hear. We can imagine what Cortez and his men saw when they first crossed those mountains, and the wide expanse of the Valley of Mexico stretched out before them. It was the same site that the Mashika people would have seen 200 years before, when they first arrived in the valley from the other direction. About 15 kilometers away, the wide blue waters of Lake Teshkoko would have stretched out, with the white clutter of dozens of cities wringing its bank. The grasslands striated with fields of corn,

beans, chili peppers, and cotton, smoke rising from the villages and cities. And in the water of the lake, the glittering white jewel of Tenochtitlan sat. The closer the Spaniards marched, the more awe-inspiring the city looked. They were amazed at the sight, as the soldier Francisco de Aguilar later wrote. Its castellated fortresses, its splendid monuments, royal dwelling places, glorious heights, how marvellous it is to gaze on them, all, stuck-hoed, carved and crowned with different kinds of decoration, painted with animals, covered with stone figures. As they approached the great causeway of the city, they must have done so with an enormous

sense of trepidation. But there, out in the middle of the bridge, they saw a figure standing in a crown of green quetzel feathers, surrounded on either side by warriors wearing jaguar's skins and eagle feathers. The Emperor Moktazuma had finally come out to meet them. Moctizuma had watched the approach of the Spanish with horror, and to him they must have made an impressive and fearsome sight, as the Florentine Codex recounts. The Spaniards set off on their way to Mexico,

coming gathered and bunched, raising dust. Their iron lances and halberd seemed to sparkle, and their iron swords were curved like a stream of water. Their armour and iron helmet seemed to make a clattering sound. Some of them came wearing iron all over, turned into iron beings, gleaming, so that they aroused great fear, and were generally seen with fear and dread.

Their dogs came in front, coming ahead of them, keeping to the front, panting with their spittle hanging down. Tenochtitlan was guarded by a huge army of soldiers. Every man in the city had been trained for war since childhood and the entire vast army of the empire was based here. It's quite possible that they could have surrounded the Spanish and overwhelmed them, as the Clashkalans nearly had.

But Moktizuma was paralyzed by fear. Stories of the defeat of Clashkala and the sacking of Cholula would have resounded in his head, and he knew that if he tried to defeat the Spanish here and failed, in full view of every citizen, then his rule would be over. Even a costly victory would have been unacceptable. He decided to go out and meet this foreigner and see what he wanted.

Moktizuma must have been filled with fear as he was carried in a litter down to the causeway of Tenochtitlan, accompanied with his warriors and wearing his finest clothes, resplendent with shimmering feathers. When he finally dismounted, he saw the Spaniards beginning to cross the causeway to meet him. We can only imagine what it would have been like to see these two men finally come face to face. Neither of them were much given to flowery words. The following exchange is all they said at first. Are you not him? Are you not Moctezuma? Yes, I am him.

Moctezuma extended his courtesy to the Spaniards, and they were shown into the city. They were given lodgings in a palace that had once belonged to a former king and which Aguilar wrote about in high praise. The palace was a wonder to behold. There were innumerable rooms inside, antechambers, splendid halls,

mattresses of large cloaks, pillows of leather and tree fibre, good eider downs, and admirable white fur robes, as well as well-made wooden seats. When the Spanish arrived in the palace, they began firing off their guns in celebration and set off their cannons too. The sounds would have resounded around the city streets, and the ordinary Mashika hid in fear.

And when this had happened, then the various guns were fired. It seemed that everything became confused. People went this way and that, scattering and darting about. It was as though everyone's tongue were out. Everyone was preoccupied. Everyone had been taking mushrooms. As though who knows what had been shown to everyone. Fear reigned, as though everyone had swallowed his heart.

It was still this way at night. Everyone was terrified, taken aback, thunderstruck, stunned. As Cortez and his men went to sleep that night in the palace of the Aztec capital, lying on beds strewn with fragrant flowers, they would have heard the soft blowing of conch shells echoing from the temples at midnight. The beating of drums would have announced the arrival of the dawn. Cortez and his men spent the next few weeks in Tenochtitlan. They saw the sights of the great market of Tlatulolko, which made by the men of the next few weeks in Tenochtitlan.

Bernal Diaz remembers with astonishment. Among us there were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all of Italy and Rome. Never had they seen a square that compared so well, so orderly and wide, and so full of people as that one. They also visited the towering temples of Teopan, noting with distaste the blood running down their steps, and they lost no time in interrogating Moctezuma about the stores of gold he had. The Aztec king, increasingly feeling like he was losing control of the situation, gave up his treasury to the Spaniards. He gave them fine pieces of carved jade, but the Spanish weren't interested in those. They were interested in the ornately decorated

pieces of gold jewelry, headbands and chess plates, statues, and other work of incomparable art. The Spanish created a fire and melted it all down into gold bricks. The gold on the shields and on all the devices was taken off. And when all the gold had been detached,

right away they set on fire all the different precious things. They all burned. And the Spaniards made the gold into bricks, and they took as much of the green stone as it pleased them. As to the rest of the greenstone, the Talashkalans just snatched it up, and the Spaniards went everywhere, scratching about in the hiding places, storehouses, places of storage all around. They took everything they saw that pleased them.

It's likely that Cortez had always planned what was about to happen. But in the first weeks after his arrival in Tenochtitlan, something happened that would give him the perfect excuse to speed up his plans. News arrived from the coast that six of his men back in the town of Veracruz had been killed in a quarrel with some local Mexica. Cortez likely knew that it had been an accident, but he saw his opportunity and decided to use this as an excuse to move against the Emperor Moctezuma. The meeting started like any other. Cortez entered the throne room with his soldiers, and Moctezuma offered them more jewels and other gifts. But Cortez turned them down. He told Muctizuma that he suspected him of plotting to attack his men on the coast.

He ordered the king to go with the Spanish to their lodgings, and warned the king not to make any noise or cry out. The Aztec king realized immediately what was happening, and it must have sent a shiver down his spine. This was the thing he feared most, and he pleaded with the Spanish to reconsider. My person is not such as can be made a prisoner of. Even if I would like it, my people would not suffer it. But it was useless. Moctezuma spoke to his courtiers and told them that the great god Witsila Pochli had told him that he should go and live with the Spanish for some time. We can imagine the blank looks of these powerful men as they heard these words. Many chiefs came, and removing their garments they placed him under their arms,

and walking barefoot they brought a simple litter, and weeping carried him in it in great silence. Thus we proceeded to my quarters with no disturbance in the city. It would have been clear to everyone, even the common people in the street, that from this moment on, Moktizuma was emperor in name only. Cortez was now the true power in the Aztec Empire. That night, Cortez arrested 17 Meshika lords,

who he accused of plotting the attacks on his men in Veracruz. He had them burned alive in the courtyard of the great temple, using piles of the Aztec's wooden swords as kindling. Moktazuma was brought to watch, with chains on his feet, and it said that the Meshika people watched these executions in complete silence. Moktizuma, for the most part, seems to have borne his imprisonment with dignity but resignation. He went about his usual business, watched jugglers and poets as usual, continued to bathe and meet with his lords, but everywhere he went, Spanish guards went with him. And then one day, in April 1520, a messenger managed to slip

the Aztec king a secret note, painted on a piece of cloth. It showed 18 Spanish ships off the coast. To Moctezuma, the meaning was clear. Another group of Spaniards were arriving, and they were not the friends of Cortez. The governor of Cuba, de Diego de Velazquez had spent the last six months since Cortez's departure, stewing in his bitterness. He had confiscated much of Cortez's property and land in Cuba, but this had done little to sate his appetite for revenge. And when he heard what Cortez had done, sending news of his conquests and chests full of gold directly back to the Spanish king, he must have exploded with rage. He immediately summoned one of his

lieutenants, a man named Panfillo de Narvaez, and ordered him to set sail to Mexico with 900 men. His mission was to apprehend Cortez, put a stop to his illegal mission, and drag him back to Cuba in chains. Cortez knew nothing of this approaching danger, but for Moctezuma, this must have been an enormous revelation. Up until then, Cortez had used the divisions in Aztec society, to play the people of Mexico against one another, and bring an empire to its knees. But now Moctusuma saw that the foreigners were just as divided as they were. And with that simple fact, he saw a chance to rid himself of the ruthless Cortez. Through whispered messages, Moctezuma was actually able to communicate with Narvaez

as he sailed up the Mexican coast. Narvaez told Moktizuma that Cortez and his men had lied to him. They didn't have the support of the Spanish crown. In fact, they were little better than pirates. And Moktizuma sent messages back to Narvaez, pleading him to come quickly, telling him the best routes to Tenochtitlan, and even sending food and gold.

But as time went on, Moktizuma grew terrified that Cortez would find out what was happening, and perhaps he hoped that the news would scare Cortez away. He went to the Spanish captain and showed him the painting of the ships. He urged him to leave Tenochtitlan while there was still time. Cortez must have exploded. There he was, at the heart of the empire he had set out to conquer, with everything going his way. And now the bitter old governor of Cuba was going to ruin everything. Cortez knew he would have to march the whole 400 kilometers back to the coast and face Narvaez. But he would have to leave enough of his men behind

to continue to keep the Emperor Moctezuma as a prisoner. His force would be dangerously split, and all of his achievements seemed to be in danger, as Bernal Diaz recalls. When Cortez heard about the ships and saw the painting on the cloth, he became very thoughtful, for he knew quite well that the fleet had been sent against him by the governor, Diego Velazquez. Cortez set off at the beginning of May with 80 or so men, leaving just over a hundred behind into Nochtedlan. His men now marched in Aztec cotton armor, as it was lighter and more. easier to carry, and it was surprisingly effective at soaking up arrows. Cortes sent a messenger to the Tlachkalans, asking them for 4,000 men to help him fight Narvaez. But considering their recent experience,

the Tlashkalans were not enthusiastic about fighting any more Spaniards. Instead, they sent Cortez 20 turkeys as a gift. Narvaez landed and marched up the Mexican. coast, seeking to capture the town of Veracruz, where only a hundred of Cortez's men still remained. They camped at a place called Kempawala, camping at the top of one of the town's temples, and waiting for Cortez's army to arrive. They were supremely confident of success. Narvaez outnumbered Cortez three to one, and he expected his opponent to take much longer to cross the Mexican landscape. When one of his men told him that Cortez's army was only five kilometers away,

he refused to believe it. And either way, he was sure that Cortez would wait until dawn to mount an attack. He may even have been expecting Cortez to surrender. But Cortez had been in Mexico for over a year at that point. He had learned how to fight in that landscape, and how to turn the odds in his favor. That night, the rain came down in torrents. While Navarrez slept, Cortez and his men crept through the dark at midnight,

the rain covering the sound of their movements. They climbed the pyramid stealthily and quickly dispatched the guards outside Narvaez's chamber, setting the temple on fire as they went. Narvaez sounded the alarm. his men rushing from their beds and putting on their armour. We came with such stealth that when they observed us and sounded the alarm, I was already inside the courtyard of the camp. On the steps of the tower where Narvaez was quartered were some 19 guns.

But we climbed those steps so quickly, but they had time to fire only one gun. They fought up and down the steps of the pyramid, swords clashing and flashing in the and the fires of the burning temple, the rain still pouring down. One of Cortez's pikeman jabbed at Narvaez and took out his right eye. With blood gushing down his face and neck, Narvaez surrendered and was put in chains. His soldiers were mercenaries, who had been promised gold if they followed him and had no particular loyalty. They surrendered and when Cortez promised them vast mountains of gold in Tenosteclan, they agreed to join his company, as Bernal Diaz recalls. Cortez promised to make them rich. He was so persuasive, in fact, that every one of them offered to come

with us. But if they had known the Mexican strength, I believe not one of them would have volunteered. Far from defeating Cortez, the governor of Cuba had actually delivered fresh reinforcements right to him. He was now more powerful than ever, and set his sights on returning to the city of Tenochtitlan. But without his knowledge, events in the city had taken a dark turn. While Cortez dealt with Narvaez on the coast, in Tenochtitlan, he had left in charge a man named Pedro de Alvarado. Alvarado continued to control Moctazuma. as the emperor went about his daily business. But his situation was precarious. He had only a hundred or so men and some assorted Clashkalan allies, but they were ruling over a

city with a population of well over 200,000. One event would soon test the resolve of the Spanish to its utmost. This was the festival of Tosh Kettle. The Toshkattle ceremony was once intended to bring rain to the lands of the Mashika, but like most festivals in Tenochtitlan, it had been taken over during the time of Tlaqalel by the warlike god Witsila Pochtli. It now involved the sacrifice of a young man, chosen from among the people for his good looks and charm. He had lived the whole of that year as the god Teshkat Lipoka, being showered with every luxury, but now his day had come. He was dressed up like the gods, and his life was to be offered up to them in sacrifice.

Moktizuma had asked Cortez for permission to carry out the festival before he left for the coast, and Cortez had given it, on condition that there would be no human sacrifice. But now, Alvarado sensed growing signs of rebellion among the Meshika. With Cortez gone, they sensed weak They stopped providing the Spaniards with food, and one Mexica girl who had been doing their laundry was found murdered, presumably as a warning to the other Mexica not to work with the foreigners. Alvarado even heard rumors that the Mashika were preparing to scale the walls of the palace and rescue the captive Moktizuma, even tunneling through the walls to free him. No doubt the Spaniards Klashkalan allies, who hated the Mashika, were happy to stoke these rumours. Trouble was brewing in Tenochtitlan, and on the third night of the festival

of Toshkutal, it would all come to a head. The ceremony would have been vivid and full of colour and dancing. The Mashika sang sacred songs and dressed in feathered headdresses and bright embroidered clothes, as the Florentine Codex recalls. When things were already going on, when the festivity was being observed and there was dancing and singing, with voices raised in song,

the singing was like the noise of waves breaking against the rocks. But as the festival wisconsin, went on, it became increasingly clear that the Mashika were going to ignore the orders of Cortez and go ahead with the planned sacrifice. Alvarado was enraged at their disobedience and ordered his men to prepare to stop the ceremony. The Spaniards entered the sacred precinct dressed for war, while others in their bright armor guarded all the exits. It's not clear what drove Alvarado in these moments. Quite possibly he and his men were drunk. But as the festival reached its

climax and the drums and flutes crashed together, Alvarado let out a cold, clear command. Let them die. The Spanish fell upon all the gathered Meshika, and a slaughter began. The Meshika memories of this event, recorded in the Florentine Codex, are full of gruesome, specific details that read like the authentic memories of trauma. When this had been done, they went into the temple courtyard to kill people. Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just went on foot, each with his metal sword and his leather shield, some of them iron studded. Then they surrounded those who were dancing,

going among the cylindrical drums. They struck a drummer's arms. Both of his hands were severed. Then they struck his neck, his head landed far away. Then they stabbed everyone with iron lances and struck them with the iron swords. They struck some in the belly and their entrails came spilling out.

They split open the heads of some. They really cut their skulls to pieces their skulls were cut up into little bits, and some they hit on the shoulders, their bodies broke open and ripped. Some they hacked on the calves, some on the thighs, some on their bellies. And if someone still tried to run, it was useless. You just dragged his intestines along. There was a stench as if of sulphur. Those who tried to escape could go nowhere.

while Sicily. The Spaniards began to loot and burn the temples of the city, lost in a frenzy of destruction. This act had turned the whole city against them, and the Mashika of Tenochtitlan realized that this was their chance to regain their freedom. The drums at the top of the great temples began to beat, and an Aztec priest is said to have cried out this bellowing declaration. Meshika, are we not going to war? Have courage! Meshika commoners and soldiers alike grabbed their weapons and flooded the street. The Spanish were forced to retreat to the palace, where they locked themselves in with a number of their Clashkalan allies and the Emperor Moktizuma. The Meshika tried to burn down the palace

doors. Fearing that they would break through, Alvarado put his dagger to Moctezuma's chest and ordered him to tell his people to stop. Moctezuma climbed onto the roof of the palace and raised his hands, calling out to his people. Let the Mishika here. We are not their match. Please stop the fighting. They only pelted him with stones, and the Spanish had to step in to guard him with their shields. It was clear that Moctusuma's authority over the Meshika had ended, and with it the power the Spanish had over the city had gone too. Alvarado and his men settled down for a siege, trapped in the palace without food, fighting off constant attacks and waiting for Cortez to return. It would take 23 days before Cortez

once again arrived, back at the shores of Lake Teshoko. His forces now swelled by Narvaez's men. He now commanded about a thousand Spaniards and many thousands more Clashkalans soldiers who had joined him on his return journey. The Clashkalans had heard about the setbacks in Tenochtiklan, but by this point they had gambled everything on Cortez. If the Spanish were defeated, they knew that the vengeance of Tenochtitlan would be fearsome, and so their fates and the fate of the Spaniards were now intertwined. But Cortez had other problems. He had told wonderful tales to his new recruits

about a glittering golden city on the lake, where the markets held every luxury, and they would find plenty of food. But when he arrived back in Tenochtitlan, he found it a very different place. bodies were hanging from the gates and towers, apparently Mashika, who had been killed for collaborating with the Spanish. The streets were deserted, and the great markets were closed. There were disgruntled murmurings among his new soldiers.

Cortez found Alvarado and his men hold up in the palace, on the edge of starvation. The garrison in the fortress received us with such joy. It seemed we had given back to them their lives which they had deemed lost. And that day and night, we passed in rejoicing. These men were naturally delighted to see him. But the city was still in open revolt, and the crowds came out every day to batter on the palace doors and break through cracks in the walls.

Cortez ordered Moctezuma to once again go out and speak to his people. The emperor at first refused, remembering what had happened the first time he tried this, but he had no choice. He went out onto the terrace of the palace, and the crowd stretched out beneath him. Seventeen years ago, a similar crowd had watched his coronation, in glorious ceremony, but now their faces were set hard and unforgiving on their captive king. Instead of the cheers and raucous music that had once graced his coronation, sources say that the Meshika met the sight of their king with utter silence.

Moktizuma called out over the stony crowd, repeating his earlier words, that they were no match for the Spanish, and that it would be better to surrender. We are not their match. Let there be no more fighting. One source, known as the Codex Ramirez, includes an Aztec warrior in the crowd, shouting back to Moctezuma. What is being said by this scoundrel Moctezuma, whore of the Spaniards? Does he think he can call to us, with his woman-like soul to fight for the empire which he has abandoned out of fright? We do not want to obey him because he is no longer our king.

whether or not these words were actually said, this was certainly the spirit in which the king's words were received. It's not long before the first stones began to rain down on the helpless figure of the king. First one stone, then another, fell until the whole crowd was pelting him, and arrows began to fly too. Moktazuma was struck several times before the Spanish were able to rescue him and pull him back into the palace. Inside, he refused any treatment for his wounds. Moktizuma died on the morning of the 30th of June 1520. The Spanish burned the body as the Florentine Codex recalls. They hastened to take Moktizuma up in their arms

and brought him to the place called Kapolko Then they placed him on a pile of wood and set fire to it, ignited it Then the fire crackled and roared With many tongues of flame Tungs of flame like tassels rising up And Moktizuma's body lay sizzling And it let off a stench as it burns Cortez knew that they could not stay in the city.

Without Moctezuma, he had no power over the Mashika people, and the people of Tenochtatlan were beginning to learn how to fight the Spanish, using the geography of the city to their advantage, as Bernal Diaz recalls. If at times we were gaining a little ground, they would pretend to make a retreat in order to lure us into following them. We could not stand up to the rocks and stones which they hurled from the roofs in such numbers that many of our men were hurt or wounded. Cortez hatched a plan to leave the city under cover of darkness.

They would sneak through the streets while the Mexica slept and slip across the western causeway. But it wouldn't be easy. The city's series of interconnected islands were joined by drawbridges that the Meshika could raise at will, easily cutting off the Spanish and surrounding them. Cortez and his men packed all the gold they could carry into their bags, and muffled the hooves of their horses so they would make no noise on the stone streets. Then they prepared to leave.

It was midnight, and there was a moment. mist hanging over the lake. Everything went to plan at first. They snuck out of the palace and threw the dark streets of the silent city. But as they went, a woman by the docks spotted them and shouted out a warning. Mishika, come quickly. Our enemies are leaving. Now that it's night, they are running away as fugitives. The entire male population of Tenochtitlan burst out of their houses, taking up their spears and swords and jumping into their war canoes, as Bernal Diaz recalls. The shouts and cries and whistles of the Mexicans rang out. Then, all of a sudden, we saw many bands of warriors descending on us, and the whole lake so thick with canoes that we

could not defend ourselves. On open ground with their horses and cannons, the Spanish were unbeatable, But in the narrow streets, on the islands broken by bridges and canals, the Aztecs knew exactly how to fight. They massed around the Spanish in their canoes, pelting them with countless arrows, while warriors ran them down from the rear. The Meshika hatred of the Spanish was by this time so intense that they gave up their usual code of honor surrounding war. They no longer tried to capture the Europeans for sacrifice. and went straight in for the kill instead. One telling detail is that during this fight, the Mexica killed the Spaniards with a sharp blow to the back of their head, a punishment usually reserved for petty criminals. Chaos reigned. The bodies of dead Spaniards

and Meshika began to choke up the canals, and it said that the last of the Spanish were able to cross the waters by running across these bodies. horses fell into the lake too, and legend has it that some of the Spanish, who weighted themselves down with gold, also fell into the lake and sank to the bottom. The Spanish lost virtually all of their gold as they fled. Panic spread throughout their ranks, and for perhaps the first time since landing in Mexico, fear overcame them. Their retreat became a route. Many had perished, along with their horses, and all the gold had been lost together with the jewels' clothing, all the artillery, and many other things besides. God alone knows how dangerous and how difficult it was.

For each time I turned on the enemy, I came back full of arrows and bruised by stones. A reasonable estimate for the number of Spanish killed on this night is around 600. thousands of their Clashkalan allies were massacred. But just over 400 Spaniards, Cortez, among them, did manage to fight their way across the causeway to safety. Cortez was devastated. It said he sat beneath a tree and wept, but his determination only got stronger. I think there's a touch of madness to him at this point. and he resolved to retake the city of Tenochtitlan from what he called the Meshika Rebellion.

We can tell what was on his mind because he asked after only one person that night. He checked that the expedition's chief shipbuilder was still alive. The men answered that yes, he had survived. Cortez replied with only these words. Let's go then. We have everything. thing we need. The people of Tenochtitlan had delivered the most crushing defeat ever inflicted on European colonists in the new world. This event, known by the Spanish as the Noce Trisste, or the Knight of Sorrows, would remain that way for some time. The Meshika of Tenochtitlan gathered all the bodies of the hundreds of dead Spaniards and stripped them of their steel armor and

swords. They took a number of crossbows too, although without training, these were very difficult to use. They captured a number of guns, although these were of course useless without bullets and powder. And they took a Spanish cannon. Not knowing what to do with it, they wisely rolled it into the lake. The Mexica must have been overjoyed at their victory, but the damage done to their empire was already enormous. The emperor was dead, and multiple parts of the empire were now openly defying the authority of Tenochtitlan. The whole network of Aztec power was beginning to come apart. Cortez by this point was a man possessed. He retreated to his allies at Lashkala and spent the next six months readying himself to return to Tenocht de Klan in full force.

He gathered together an army of many thousands of native allies, perhaps as many as 100,000. And together with his remaining 100 cavalry, 900 Spanish infantry, and 16 cannons, he marched back to the city that had expelled him just after Christmas in the year 1520. I addressed the men and reminded them how, for no way. good reason. All the natives of Tenostitlan had not only rebelled against your majesty, but had killed many men who were our friends and kinsmen and had driven us from their land. I urged them to consider how much it would benefit the service of God and your majesty if we were to return and recover all of what had been lost.

Bernal Diaz recalls the tactical decision that Cortez made. Remembering our great defeat and expulsion, we vowed that, God willing, we would now adopt a different method of fighting and blockade the city. When the Spanish reached the lake, the shipbuilder who Cortez had asked for on the night of the Noce Treiste began his work. He directed Cortez's men to cut down the pine trees that grew on the slopes of the volcanoes and build 12 ships of a kind known as brigantines. These were small, two-masted ships that used a combination of sails and oars, and as they neared completion, Cortez loaded them with cannons and musketeers. He blockaded all the main causeways leading to Tenochtet-Lexecl.

just as the Tepernak forces of King Mashhtla had tried to do nearly a century before. But with the help of his powerful warships, Cortez's siege was much more effective. This siege would last for four months, and over that time, Cortez slowly choked the life out of Tenochtitlan. One factor that began to come into play around this time was the spread of smallpox among the Meshika people. This disease was brought from the old world by the Europeans and caused much devastation among the population that had no inbuilt immunity,

as the Florentine Codex records. Before the Spanias appeared to us, first an epidemic broke out, a sickness of pus. It began in Teppelweedle. Large bumps spread on people. Some were entirely covered. They spread everywhere. On the face, the head, the chest. The disease brought great desolation. A great many died of it. They could no longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer able to move or stir. After many weeks of the siege, Cortez finally gave the order to advance into the city across its three great causeways.

The fighting was bitter and relentless, going street to street, fighting for each house and bridge at a time, with heavy losses on both sides. Bernal Diaz recalls the terrifying noise of these battles. Mexican captains were yelling and shouting night and day calling to the men in the canoes. Then there was the unceasing sound of their accursed drums and trumpets, and their melancholy drums in the shrines and on their temple towers. Both day and night the din was so great that we could hardly hear one another speak. Around this time, the Mexica began to use sacrifice, as a truble. weapon of terror. Whenever they managed to capture Spanish soldiers, they took them to the top of

the temple to Witsila Puchli, in full view of the Spanish armies fighting in the streets. There, they tore out their hearts and dismembered them in full sight. This tactic had the effect of terrifying the Spanish troops, as Bernal Diaz recalls. I feared that one day or another they would do the same to me. When I remembered their hideous deaths, I came to fear death more than ever in the past. Before I went into battle, a sort of horror and gloom would seize my heart. The resilience and bravery of the Aztecs was incredible, and as a result, Cortez found himself resorting to extreme tactics.

As his men advanced through the city, he ordered that every district they passed through should be demolished entirely, with the rubble being used to fill in the canals and waterways so that the Aztec canoes could not manoeuvre. The Spanish army was a steamroller, slowly crushing the city of Tenochtitlan into dust. Cortez was frustrated and angry. He had wanted to hand the city of Tenochtitlan over to his king as a pristine jewel, but the battle was turning it into a blackened ruin. And while the Spanish adapted their tactics, the Mexica did too,

they learned to make evasive maneuvers in their canoes and take cover from gunfire, as mentioned in the Florentine Codex. In all world, kinemilike in I wetsit, like it isley. But when the Mishika had been able to see and judge how the guns hit or the iron bolts, they no longer went straight, but went back and forth, going from one side to the other, zigzagging. Also, when they saw that the big gun was about to go off, everyone hit the ground, spread out on the ground, crouched down, and the warriors quickly went in among the houses. The Aztecs even managed to lure Cortez's large ships onto some support.

merged sandbanks, stranding them and allowing them to kill their commanders. In total, five of these ships would be lost over the whole course of the battle. At night, the city's defenders would sneak out and clear the rubble that the Spanish had put in the canals, undoing their work. But as the months of grinding battle wore on, famine and disease weakened the Mexica. They began to eat wood and leather, even bricks crushed into powder, as remembered in the Florentine Codex. All the common people suffered greatly. There was famine, many died of hunger. They no longer drank good, pure water, but the water they drank was salty. Many people died of it, and because of it, many got dysentery and died. Everything was eaten, lizards, swallows, maize straw, grass that grows on salt flats.

And they chewed at wood, glue flowers, plaster, leather and deer skin, which they roasted, baked and toasted so that they could eat them. And they ground up medicinal herbs and adobe bricks. There has never been the light of such suffering. The siege was frightening and great numbers died of hunger. and bit by bit they came pressing us back against the wall, herding us together. When the Spanish reached the centre of the city, they found the well that the Mashika had been drinking from and destroyed it, forcing them to drink the salty lake water instead. So great was their suffering, but it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it. In the streets we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them.

The Aztecs fought bravely and inflicted huge casualties on the Spanish, but the pattern was now set in stone. They had no new supplies, no new soldiers and no relief. Meanwhile, a steady flow of supplies came to Cortez from the coast. many times his men nearly ran out of gunpowder or food, only to have it resupplied the next day, and soon the Aztecs were hemmed in and were forced to make their last stand in the market of Platalolco. The Florentine Codex recalls that on that final day, as the Meshika prepared for their last stand, a light once again appeared in the sky over Mexico. When night came, it rained and sprinkled off and on.

It was very dark. When a fire appeared, it looked and appeared as if it was coming from the sky, like a whirlwind. It went spinning, around and around, turning on itself. As it went, it seemed to explode into coals, some large, some small, some just like sparks. spluttered, crackled and snapped. It circled the walls at the water, heading towards Koyana Kasco. There it went into the midst of the water and disappeared there. No one struck his hand against his mouth. No one uttered a sound. In the great market that had once boomed with life, the Aztec forces were surrounded and utterly destroyed. The Meshika surrendered on the 13th

of August 1521. The king at this point was a man named Quatea Moktsin, and the sorrow that the Meshika felt at this moment is palpable in the Florentine Codex. Then they took Quartimeoxin in a boat. When they were about to take Quartimeoxin, all the people wept, saying, there goes the Lord Quartimexen. Moxin, going to give himself to the Spaniards. And when the weapons were laid down and we collapsed, the year count was three house, and the day count was one serpent. And when Quatei Moxin went to give himself up, they took him to Akachinanko.

It was already dark. The Aztec warriors marked their defeat with the single. of this bitter lament. Broken spears lie in the roads. We have torn our hair in grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are reddened with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are splattered with gore. The water has turned red as if it were died.

We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, that are in the intervie walls, that are inheritance, our city is lost and dead. The shields of our warriors were its defense, but they could not save it. The last Aztec emperor, Quate Moxin, was captured by the Spanish and tortured until he revealed the location of all the remaining gold in the city. There was hardly any left, since the Spanish had already taken most of it, and lost it in the lake during their retreat the previous year. This caused a great deal of anger among Cortez's soldiers, who he had promised vast hordes of gold for their troubles, as Bernal Diaz remembers. We captains and soldiers were all somewhat sad when we saw how little gold there was and how

poor and mean our shares would be. Cortez and his men stood victorious over the smoking ruins of Tenosh Titlan. In the battle, the city had been all but destroyed. Humiliated at his failure to take the city intact, Cortez wanted to erase all trace of the white city that had once stood here in the lake, and the culture that had once lived here. And over the next years, Cortez would ensure that anything left standing after the siege was gradually demolished. He had its houses pulled down and its canals filled in. He even declared that any Meshika who tried to move back into the ruined city would be executed, and he set up a gallows

in the main plaza for this purpose. In the years that followed, Cortez enslaved vast amounts of the surviving Mashika people, branding them with hot irons to show their status. He put them to work destroying their own city and building European-style buildings on their ruins, working thousands of them to death in dangerous conditions. He forced these workers to tear down the tall pyramids and temples of Tenochtitlan and build Catholic churches on their rubble. He told them tore down Moctezuma's palaces too, and built mansions for the Spaniards on their foundations. He even changed Tenochtitlan's name, renaming it Mexico, because it was an easier word for the Spanish to pronounce. The city expanded on a grid system, like the cities of Europe,

erasing the shape of the city that lay beneath. The Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benevante-Mottalini, who arrived in Mexico City four years later, witnessed this army of Mexica slaves, pulling apart their once great city, and described the hellish scenes he saw as a plague on all mankind. The seventh plague was the construction of the great city of Mexico, which during the early years used more people than in the construction of Jerusalem.

The crowds of laborers were so numerous that one could hardly move in the streets and causeways, although they are very wide. Many died from being crushed by beams, or falling from high places, or in tearing down old buildings for new ones. During the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish had destroyed the Aztec dams that protected the city from flooding, and in its early years, Mexico City was therefore prone to destructive floods. In the 1600s, over a century after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Mexico City grew to fill the footprint of the old Aztec capital, and efforts began to drain the lake that surrounded the island city.

It was hoped that by draining Lake Teshoko, fertile farmlands would be revealed underneath. But the lake bed was too salty to be any use, and only stagnant salt flats took its place. Still, Mexico City expanded across these salt flats at an enormous rate. Today, it's the largest city by population in North America, with over 20 million people living in its wider metropolitan area. The entire lake bed was paved over with cobbles and pave stones, which in modern times were covered in concrete and tarmac.

The entire enormous expanse of Lake Teshkoco has now quite simply ceased to exist. The Aztec Empire collapsed in its entirety with the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the Spanish did their best to eradicate the culture that it had fostered. Religious orders like the Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans, flooded into Mexico. They built large monasteries in Mexico City and converted the Mexica to their religion. Any Aztec books or codices discovered were burned in order to erase the people's memory of their own history. Today only 16 books, written by the pre-contact Aztecs, have survived. But the Spanish did find uses for some of the existing social structure.

that the Aztecs left behind. The systems of control, where lords ruled over many peasants, were kept more or less intact, and converted into a system of colonial control that allowed the Spanish Empire to extract taxes and labor from the population. Diseases like smallpox would ultimately kill up to 95% of indigenous Mexicans, and the people's will to resist was severely reduced. Today, the Aztec language of Nahuatl is still spoken by nearly two million people, mostly based in rural communities in Mexico. Several Nahuatl words also live on in the English language. These include avocado, chili, tomato, coyote, and chocolate. And the names of Aztecats also reads surface in some surprising places. We opened the episode with the enormous flying

teradactal Quetzalcoatlis, its wingspan larger than a fighter plane, soaring over the seas of the Cretaceous. When the enormous bones of this flying creature were first discovered in North America, paleologists saw no other option but to name it after the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of legend, God of the winds, of the planet Venus, and the dawn. Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba and Cortez's nemesis, was dismissed as governor in 1521, when his abuse of indigenous labor became too much for the Spanish crown. But his dismissal didn't last long, and he was restored to office two years later in 1523. He died one year later at the age of 59. On his death, he had amassed enough wealth to be called

the richest Spaniard in the Americas. He would never forgive Cortez. Panfillo de Narvaez, the captain who had been sent to arrest Cortez, was released from captivity after two years, and sent back to Spain missing one eye. After a short break, he returned to adventuring in the Americas several years later in 1527, and led an expedition to Florida. But this one met an even worse fate than his mission to Mexico. Hurricanes, shipwrecks, and disease meant that of the 600 men he set sail with, only four managed to make it home. Narvaez himself drowned somewhere off the coast of America. Malinsin, the slave girl that had accompanied Cortez on his conquest and acted as his translator,

would go on to give birth to Cortez's son. She later married one of his soldiers, who she followed to Spain. She was warmly received there at the Spanish court and became a Spanish lady of high society. But she never spoke about the early years of her life. Hernan Cortez had landed in Mexico with only a few hundred soldiers, and in the space of two years had destroyed an empire. He would spend the rest of his life forever chasing the feeling of glory he had felt on the fall of Tenochtitlan, and his tragedy is that he would never find it. He alternated between a life of adventuring, extending the colonies of Spain and putting down

native rebellions, and the settled life of a wealthy magnate, running silver mines in Mexico, but neither ever satisfied him. He returned to Spain a number of times, a celebrated conquistador, but his fame and popularity made him a dangerous person to those in power, and perhaps he was a dangerous person to those in power, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Spanish nobility didn't trust him. In 1541, 20 years after his conquest, he went back to Spain and found that not a single member of the aristocracy would talk to him. On one occasion, he even tried to talk to the king by pushing his way through a crowd and

jumping on board the royal carriage. The king didn't even recognize him. and asked him who he thought he was. Cortez replied with anger. I am a man who has given you more provinces than your ancestors left you cities. But it was all to no avail. The glory and recognition he had hoped for would never be his. Cortez virtually bankrupted himself with his insatiable appetite,

for expeditions and adventures, and in 1541, he requested a loan from the Spanish Crown to resolve his debts. He never received a reply. Cortez died in Seville three years later, on December 2, 1547, from a case of pleuracy, an inflammation of the tissue surrounding the chest. He died in pain and short of breath, clutching at the area around his heart. And I wonder if he thought back to those words he spoke to the messenger of Moktizuma that day on the beach of Veracruz, when he told him that he and his men had a disease of the heart, an insatiable desire for gold. When Cortez died, he was 62 years old, embittered and alone.

Perhaps fitting, for a man who had always been filled with a restless desire to move on to somewhere else, Cortez's bones were relocated eight times in the following decades, first around Spain and then over the sea to Mexico. In the 19th century, the rising swell of Mexican nationalism and a strengthening indigenous Mexican identity meant that Cortez became a figure of figure of hatred. He was no longer celebrated as a hero but vilified as a monster. The marker on his tomb was hidden for fear it would be destroyed or vandalized, and finally his bones were moved one last time, coming to rest in the church of Jesus Nazareno in Mexico

city, next to the Pino-Suarez subway station. This is about a 15-minute walk, from the street where this episode opened, the street where the base of Tenochtitlan's great temple would be discovered. There's heavy traffic here and a bustling outdoor market with red awnings. A jacarander bush with purple flowers bursts over the church wall, which is spattered with graffiti. The grave of Cortez is marked only by an orange plaque bearing only his name and the dates of his life. Today, he receives few visitors. I'd like to end this episode by reading out a piece of Meshika poetry, written down in the Florentine Codex in the decades following the fall of the great island city of Tenochtitlan. This poem gives you just a taste of the sorrow felt by the

Meshika people in that age. As you listen, imagine what it must have felt like, to see the great city of Tenochtitlan crushed beneath the iron will of the Spanish war machine. Imagine how it must have felt to see the bustling market of Klatelolko fall silent. To watch your people put in chains and forced to demolish the temples that their ancestors had built. Imagine what it would have been like to see your conquerors building mansions on the ruins of your city, watching them burn the books that contained your history, and seeing your entire way of life drain away, just like the waters of the lake you once called home, seeing the waves of concrete pave over the crumbling stones and ruined haunted palaces of the past.

Like emeralds, we gather the lovely songs. Sad is my heart, I am a singer. I sorrow because flowers are not gathered. Songs are not gathered, there where his home is. Only once shall they live upon the earth. Friends, let us still rejoice. O friends, be not sad. It is true the earth is nobody's possession.

None shall remain upon it. Feathers of Quetzel are torn. Paintings, they are destroyed. Flowers, they wither. Everything goes to his home. Only a brief moment we want. intoxicated beside you, at your side, O giver of life. Everything goes to his home.

Even flowers, even songs, Oh, what shall my heart do? In vain we have come to abide for a while upon the earth. The earth is only a place of forgetfulness. In the end, only our songs, our flowers, will be. be remembered. Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode,

Jake Barrett Mills, Lou Millington, Ree Bregnell, Annie Kelly, and Shem Jacobs. Extra special thanks go to Jan Garcia, a now-at-l speaker from Mexico, who allowed us to hear the language of the Florentine Codex in all its original glory. Yan is part of a project called Wikitongs, which is dedicated to preserving some of the world's most endangered languages. Here, Jan will tell you a little bit about this project.

Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. My name is Jan. I'm a contributor to this project called Wikitongs. Basically a global network of grassroots linguists who are trying to build like a seed bank of every language in the world. Just like the nowat language that you're listening to right now. For more, check out wikitongs.org. It's a nonprofit organization and they survive on donations. So if you can't contribute anything, go to wiketong.org slash donate, or you can also check them out at Patreon on patreon.com slash wiketongs. Please support wiket tongues if you can.

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