Gone Medieval - Aztecs

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Camilla Townsend to delve into the story of the Mexica, commonly known as the Aztecs. They unpack the true history behind the label 'Aztecs' and reveal how there's so much more to this civilisation than the outdated misconception of blood-thirsty primitives obsessed with human sacrifice.Professor Townsend shares original Nahuatl sources to show who the Mexica really were, about their humour and humanity through their own voices and how the Spanish conquest affected their society.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world. to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. People and voices that we often think of as lost. Sometimes we're right. Other times, we're wrong. When those voices reach out across the centuries, it can reveal to us just how wrong a picture we've painted in our broad strokes. It can unveil a world we've forgotten to remember. recite stories we've ceased to listen to, and in doing so deepen our understanding of their world, which can only serve to help us comprehend our own a little bit better. Don Medieval tries to reach into all corners of the world

throughout the millennium we're lucky enough to span. There are places we're yet to reach and stories we're yet to tell. One such place, it's people and their stories, are those we remember as the Aztecs. They never called themselves that. they were the Meshika, but we know them by a name others gave to them later in time. They famously encountered Europeans who bought guns, disease and shackles to a once proud people. But who were the Meshika? What can we learn about them, their traditions, their culture,

their history, and how do we begin to tune our ears in to voices we might not have heard before? To help answer those questions and plenty more, I'm delighted to welcome Professor Camilla Townshend from Rutgers University, whose book Fifth Sun, A New History of the Aztecs, returns to the memories set down of what had gone before by a conquered people. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Camilla. Thank you so much for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be here, thank you. I can't wait to get into this with you because it's a subject we haven't really covered before on Gone Medieval, so I'm new to this. I'm keen to learn as much as I possibly can. So I guess my first question, just to orient us a little bit, when and where in the world are we roughly talking when we think about the Aztecs and also from reading your book, why is Aztec the wrong word? Well, when we say Aztec, we're really talking about the 1500s in central Mexico. So you might think, well, what does that have to do with medieval

times? But in truth, by the standards of the new world, that really constitutes medieval times. that is to say, you know, before any aspect of modernity started, we often talk about the Aztecs as being ancient peoples over here in the United States when in fact they reached their peak in the early 1500s. So we're just going to have to stretch our sense of what century matches with what. I say, and many scholars say that the Aztecs really is the wrong word for them. No people ever called themselves Aztecs. That word was made up by European scholars in the 18th and early 19th century. They had a problem because the people called themselves. the Mexica, spelled like Mexico or Mexico. And of course, by the time they were talking about these

people in a scholarly sense, that word had become the name of a country. To talk about the Mexicans or the Mexica, as they pronounced it, would honestly have been confusing. So they picked this term up from one of the old texts that we have. It really was used by the Mexica to refer to their ancestors from long, long ago, people who had once lived in what we think of as the United States. They were the Azteca, the people from up there in Aspland. So the scholars used it and we still use it to talk about the Michica, the people who ruled Mexico when the Spaniards arrived with Cortez. It's sometimes a difficult balance between that convenience and using something that makes sense,

which is also slightly off and can be a little bit lazy. So I guess we have to walk that line a little bit, don't we? Exactly. It can be a bit lazy and it's a bit wrong, but it works. It's effective. You know who I'm talking about when I say the people that Cortez met in central Mexico in the early 1500s. And if I were always talking about the Mashika or the Nawaz, the people who spoke the Nawat language, everyone would have to do a double take and think twice. So it really isn't worth it sometimes.

Yeah. As you say, we walk the balance between accuracy and getting on with it. And when sort of, I guess, you know, Western historians have tried to tell the history of the Mashika, the Aztecs, what kind of written and archaeological sources have they tended to use? and why are those problematic? Well, traditionally, Aztec history has been written almost entirely

from sources penned by the Spaniards, mixing in a few sources that were written by indigenous people, but in Spanish and in response to questions put to them by the Spaniards. So very much within a European framework about European interests

and often the indigenous informants, if you will, or the sources, the people answering the questions, we're trying to please the Spanish friars or the Spanish court officials with whom they were working. So as you can imagine, this is quite problematic because from very early

days, the Spaniards were understandably very motivated to paint the Aztecs, the old regime, as being profoundly evil and in need of being conquered by them, by the Spaniards. It makes sense that they would want to put these people down whose regime they had toppled. Later, it grew a bit more complex. I mean, in very recent times, of course, modern scholars have been aware of the fact that These people were motivated to put things in a certain way. But then we had the problem of the language blockage. That is, that many people who were scholars actually themselves did not speak or read Nowhats, the Aztec language. So it has been quite problematic. We've also relied on archaeology, on what has been dug up, of course, from the earth and that kind of mute testimony. The problem with that is that most of the digging has been done around the Templum Mayor, the great temple in Mexico City, because most of the other sites are completely covered over by Mexico City itself.

And there the difficulty is that we are looking at the peak of their religion at the time, you know, right before they were conquered, as maintained by the priests, a professional class of people who were, you know, motivated to develop this sacrificial religious culture to a high art. And we've unfortunately had the tendency to conclude, ah, this is what all the Aztecs were like. You know, they spent all their time performing these sacrifices because that's all the archaeologists have been able to show us, because that's what they were digging up. So even archaeology has been a bit problematic, and I think it's been a great relief to many of us now that we're working more with the Nawat language or Aztec language sources to find that the situation is more complicated than we had thought. It's tricky to think the image that we've got of them comes largely from, as you say, this focus on a religious center that is one aspect of a culture but is rarely all of it.

And then you tie that to those European-leaning sources. And it's interesting when you're the Spanish you're going in. And they might be asking questions, but they're asking questions that Spaniards want the answers to. You don't know if they're asking the right questions. That's exactly right. Because they simply don't understand the culture that they're interacting with. Exactly. A great instance would be they liked to ask repeatedly.

Different men asked, different Spanish men asked. Wasn't it true that you used to love to dig the hearts out of people and eat them for breakfast, that sort of thing? And then the people would say, well, yes, I guess it's true. I mean, often this was a generation or two later. They didn't even know. They certainly didn't know about motivations or how often it happened. or what people were thinking when it happened. But what we end up with is a text, which tells us, you know, in the words of an indigenous person,

oh, yes, yes, we used to like to carve the hearts out and eat them for breakfast because it had been sort of the question put to them by a Spanish imagination with Spanish curiosity. So you're absolutely right that it may be a true dialogue in a certain sense, but they didn't oppose what you call the right questions, ones that would be more illuminating of what people then were really thinking. Yeah, and I guess it's clearer to see the Spanish motivation, in wanting to justify a conquest of these people, as you said before, you know, they needed to be conquered. So you need to portray them as somehow barbaric so that your conquest is almost doing them a service.

Exactly. So there is a leaning in what the Spanish are asking and writing and recording to justify what they've done. Absolutely. They needed to believe that this conquest by Christians had been all in all an excellent thing. So it was very important to them to paint the people who had come before as being monsters, in fact. And how does then using the Nahuat sources, how does that help us rethink the history of the Aztecs, the Mishika? Right. Well, in some ways it actually teaches us more of facts, more about where they had come from, why they were there, what they were thinking. But perhaps more importantly, I would argue in line with what we were just talking about, it helps us understand them better. For instance, in the Nalwat sources, it says very clearly that, I mean, we learn from them that the Aztecs, the Mishis,

had then, among the latest arrivals in the Central Valley of Mexico, they had had no land and were very vulnerable and were often taken prisoner themselves. You know, they would lose battles as newcomers who didn't have land of their own. And they became more and more determined to try to rise up and gain some control over the lives. You know, at the end of this sort of 200-year period, close to when the Spaniards arrived, when they really had taken control, they wanted to make sure they didn't lose it. I don't know if over there you play the same game we do here in the States, but King of the Mountain where a kid gets up on the desk and tries to kick everybody else off who tries to climb onto the desk because that kid is the King of the Mountain. Well, they didn't want to lose their position as King of the Mountain.

And so in the Now What Source is it says very explicitly, we used to bring people from the areas that we were trying to incorporate into the empire, terrify them by showing them terrible heart sacrifice ceremonies, and then send them home so that they would tell their people, that it wasn't worth fighting with us, that it was too dangerous. If they lost the war, you know, the sacrifice summons would be too brutal and be better to just join us voluntarily. And in that way, we became rich and powerful. This is not the kind of thing that we would learn from the Spaniards who just simply painted them as people who needed to eat hearts for breakfast,

otherwise they couldn't feel a deep soul's satisfaction. There certainly were people, the priests especially, who really had come to believe over the decades that they needed to sacrifice lots of of people in order to please the gods. But it was a relatively new belief because, as I said, when they first arrived in the valley, they had no power. They had no ability to sacrifice dozens of people as they could at the very end. And so it certainly wasn't a central part of their belief system. I will say that all indigenous people in the Americas occasionally sacrificed a prisoner of war. That's where the idea came from. And in fact, archaeologists have taught us that on almost all continents except Antarctica and possibly,

Australia, ancient humans did the same thing. That is, we are all the sentent of people who occasionally sacrificed enemy prisoners of war. But that was a part of Native American sort of ritual belief structure, if you will, and that's where they got the idea. But they didn't develop it into as kind of a terror tactic in a political sense until towards the end. And we only know that this is why they were doing it from reading their own sources. So we do learn some very concrete things. We also just gain some sympathy for them. They become more real. You know, or they tell jokes and we laugh and we think, ah, this is a person, not a monster. Yes, I guess, you know, we can peel back that bloodthirsty, barbaric label that has been placed over them

and we can see kind of more layers, more depth, more reasons for them doing the things that they were doing and why the things that we think they did weren't quite what we thought they were. That's exactly right, exactly right. And so if we take a step back to sort of the beginning of the Meshika arriving where they did, where did they originally come from and how did they establish themselves eventually in the Valley of Mexico? Right. So their ancestors came from the area that today we would call the southwestern United States. We don't know exactly where. In myth, the region is described sometimes as desert, sometimes as a lush island. We really don't know. Undoubtedly, there were many homelands because the indigenous people in the Americas were migrating from north to south, largely over many millennia.

You probably know, your listeners probably know, humans migrated from Asia across Beringia, a sort of a land bridge that had formed between today's Siberia and Alaska. Remember that the sea level was lower and the ice caps were larger at the time. So they had walked here, and some few may have come in canoes down the very edge of the continent also. And over time, people migrated towards the south, largely so that they could find more land, more space, more areas to hunt where they wouldn't be bothered by neighbors. And some of this migration took on a particularly intense form from what I'll call the American Southwest down into Mexico after the 900s. And that is because a great civilization that we know as Teotihuacan. If your listeners have been to Mexico, they may have taken a tour to Teotihuacan. It's a short bus ride by Mexico City, an extraordinary world heritage site. And it's collapsed in a political sense in the 900s. So after that point, in the 10, 11, 12-hundreds, many tribal groups from the north began to migrate downward because people

were aware of a power vacuum. And central Mexico was very lush farming land. So the idea that there was a power vacuum in this place where plants and food grew easily, you know, was very interesting news to a lot of people. The Mexica or Aztecs seem to have been from various oral histories that were passed down and from some archaeological evidence, they seem to have been among the very last people to have arrived. And so at first, as I was saying, they were quite vulnerable. They took various steps. They were very clever in lots of ways. They used intermarriage as a political strategy so that they could ally with different groups who were already there. They learned to rein in the problems that are caused by polygamy. Polygamy is wonderful for men

in many senses, and it's wonderful for cultures in the sense that you have many heirs. You don't have the problem that was so common in medieval Christian history of not having an heir by your legitimate wife. So it's great. But the problem is that it sometimes causes the birth of too many heirs. You know, when you have 10 or 20 women and each of them has a son or two or more, it can lead to civil war later. And the Aztecs grew very adept at reining that problem in by strategizing. They kind of played a card game together. I'm kidding, of course. I'm speaking metaphorically, but the young men by different mothers learn to negotiate. Okay, you folks can rule, but you have to give us land,

or you have to make us the priestly class. You have to give us something. And they got good at braiding the lines together. Okay, I won't give the throne. I'm the chief. I won't give the throne to my son. Let your son inherit. But he better marry my granddaughter,

so that my great-grandson is, in fact, the next ruler. So they got very good at using intermarriage. They were also very good warriors, but so were many other people in the area. Perhaps their greatest advantages that they were located on an island in the middle of a great lake. Most of Mexico's city today was once underwater.

That is, it was a great lake, a great basin, an inland sea like the Great Lakes in the United States today. And it became a sort of Mediterranean-like world in the sense that from an island in the center of that lake, you could trade easily with people all around the perimeter. And in that sense, it became sort of the center of the world, And there the Aztecs were sitting pretty on their island, governing, controlling all of that trade.

So for all these reasons, they rose to be the top dog. And by the time the Spaniards got there, they, in partnership with two other city states, together they were called the Triple Alliance, they really ruled the roost, as we say over here. They really were in charge of the political domain that we think of as Central Mexico. It's quite striking, isn't it? that as relative latecomers into this region, they would go on to set themselves up as the major power. You know, they don't seem to have come in with any new technology or any astounding techniques that led to them essentially founding an empire there. But through these methods of intermarriage and politicking and lots of making alliances, I guess they gradually get to this position of authority.

That's exactly right. Now, partly, they were lucky. There were a couple of key junctures where they had the sort of the right leader at the right time with the right ideas about how this was going to be done. Partly they were very clever at absorbing what they were seeing and using the techniques that others had pioneered but perhaps not brought up to sort of their greatest fruition. So others, for example, had used intermarriage politically, but they got very good at it. And it may have been, this is counterfactual, we can't be sure, but it may have been because they were quite vulnerable as among the latest arrivals that they were. good at observing and learning from what they had seen and figuring out how they might take these techniques and use them to their advantage. But luck had something to do with it too. And do we see throughout this period of them rising, do we see those alliances that they're

making kind of waxing and waning? And are they good at sort of jockeying for position amidst the other powers in the region? Yes. The Aztecs were very good at jockeying for position. And it's absolutely true that their alliances, as you put it, waxed and waned. So, for instance, very early on, to get their foot in the door, to be allowed even to establish that they had a royal line, they had to bargain with form a relationship with people called the Tepaneck people or the Tepaneca, who were based in Ascapotsalco and Slakopan. Later, that city state, that group of people, the Tepanke, had their own political crisis and, in effect, imploded, largely because of poor governance of the problems that are engendered by polygamy,

that is different groups of sons began to fight each other. And the Aztecs took advantage of that and, in fact, brought down the Tepanaca and then themselves became the top dog and had to learn to make other friends because they couldn't do this alone. No group, no matter how talented or how lucky, could rule all of Central Mexico alone. Because as you said, nobody had nukes, nobody had a special weapon that nobody else had. So they were very good at this, at sort of riding those waves and gradually emerging as the top dog. Frankly, they probably would have eventually fallen, even without the Spaniards arriving, that might have happened in the long run. It wasn't about to happen anytime soon, but there were other players.

The people of Michua Khan, the Taraskan, over towards the west, were also quite powerful. The Mayans were no longer superpowers as they had been. In the post-classic era, the Mayan people had fallen into sort of small city-states. The Thraschkalans, who also spoke Nawat and lived quite close to Tenerchit-Land, were really holding their own and might conceivably have risen. So this was a constantly moving, how shall we put it, moving game board, a game board that was in flux. In that sense, I suppose you could argue quite similar to medieval Europe and other places and times in world history. Yeah, and I guess from the Aztec point of view, they have to be aware that someone else could

do to them what they had come in and done, you know, at any given time. They could fall. It could be around the corner. They always have to be prepared for that. That is very insightful. And I think that explains why enough people followed the priests and saying, yes, we better terrorize people by a growing human sacrifice from a sort of small religious ritual to something much bigger, something much more central that will loom over people's lives. Because by the time you have been the king of the mountain for a generation or two, you've made a lot of enemies. You know, to ride those waves, you've had to play your cards just right, sometimes selling out friends in order to make other friends in order to stay on top. It puts you in a sense of ever-increasing position of vulnerability, even as your power rises.

So they were motivated to think about how they could terrify other people. And I say this not only because they actually say that in their sources, but other sources like stories that they told and poems really bemoving. moan the need for so much death, for so much war, for so much sacrifice on the killing fields, as they called it. And there's even one story where a group of women participate in sacrificing some men who are tied and bound with their heads covered and then later find that they were their own husbands. It's a long story, how that happened and how they hadn't known. And this is a great tragedy. So even in the way they talk about it in their stories, you can tell that they weren't saying, yeah, yeah, let's go, let's kill some more. But they did have political

motivation to keep that system going. Yeah. They didn't want to be the ones to be vulnerable again. Yeah. You mentioned a couple of times, Tenokitlin, so the island in the middle of this huge lake on which they were based, which kind of played into their ability to project their power around the whole region. How much of a sense do we have of what ordinary everyday life might have been like in

Tenokitlin? Right. We do have quite a good sense of it. Not so much from archaeology, which tells us more just about the high, highest form of their religion, because as I mentioned, much of Mexico City now covers any other possible archaeological sites. The reason we know quite a bit is that the Spaniards describe what they saw, and they described it even in the moment. Enando Cortez actually wrote letters back to Europe at that time that described it, and then some other Spanans wrote about it not long after.

And in this case, they were not motivated to lie and to distort, because they were simply recording with some awe, if you will, what they saw. So we know, for instance, that they had a market that went on for a couple of miles that was highly organized on different goods sold in different places with different marketing officials that helped prevent cheating and fights from breaking out, etc. If you wanted to buy jewels, it was in this part. If you wanted to buy feathered goods or wooden products or ceramics, it was in the other part of the market, etc.

There were even food stalls, kind of ancient-style restaurants. if you will, where you could go and buy food by lunch rather than having to go all the way home, which is quite remarkable when you think about it. It was certainly something that grew in Europe as well, but it is not a universal aspect of human life to be able to eat lunch in a restaurant. So we know about this aspect. We know about their houses because the descriptions tell us that the homes of ordinary folks were very much like the homes of ordinary folks in rural areas, which have been excavated.

So, that is, archaeologists have been able to do digs because they're not covered over. So we have a patio, each household would have a patio around which there were Adobe rooms, you know, looking out into this common outdoor area. Sometimes, you know, each woman would have her own hearth. And sometimes the various Adobe rooms that looked at on the patio were the rooms of different wives. Sometimes if you were just an ordinary man who didn't have multiple wives, because it was only the rich, the nobility or the super successful warriors who did, If you were an ordinary guy, the different rooms looking out on the central patio would be those of your adult children, for example, because people liked to live together. But each woman was understood had to have her own hearth. The rooms were dark, but they did all look out into these brightly lit Mexican courtyards and patio so that people would work together.

The women would do their weaving and sewing. Remember, they were constant weavers. They were always making cloth. And they would do this out in the bright light of the patios working together. The men in Tenarchitelem were all artisans, almost all of them. A few were merchants and a few were priests. They all had a trade, whether that was carpenter or lapidary or goldsmith. They were also all warriors.

That is, every boy in his teenage years went to train to be a warrior. They didn't have a separate standing army. On the contrary, every Meshika guy knew that when it came time to try to conquer others, he would be part of that. and they all understood this and they all trained for it, but they also all had these lives as merchants. I think their lives as sort of being the perennial merchants had probably grown up because they ran at this extraordinary market in the center of the lake, and they didn't have much farmlands because they lived on this swampy island. So it made sense that they became people who processed and sold goods rather than farmers.

And then, of course, their successful careers as warriors, as military agents only made it easier and easier for them to maintain. that role of artisan slash warrior and not to have to farm much themselves because they were getting food as tribute from outside areas that they'd conquered and they could buy food in this market that they ran. So it was really very urban even by modern standards of how we define urban. Sounds like a fairly cool modern city to live in, doesn't it? Yes, exactly. Now granted, women and children, especially were often taken prisoner and brought to this city at the end of successful military engagements. In that sense, it was very much like ancient Greece or Rome, or a sizable, you know, percentage of population where women taken in war

and their children. But they were treated quite well. I don't mean to make light of it. There are surviving poems talking about their misery, but those very poems talk about also their attempts to try to make new lives. And the children were treated just like any other Aztec person. In other words, if your mother was an enslaved girl from, say, Tla Shkala, that did not mean that you, the child, were treated like the slave. On the contrary, you were an aspect just like anybody else. So they weren't constantly growing an ever larger number of discontented, miserable, angry outsiders who lived among them. It was a rather stable number of young women who had been taken prisoner. But other than that group, most people felt themselves, as you say, to be part of a

great urban metropolis that they were proud of being part of. And in that sense was very modern. Yeah. You mentioned poetry there, and I was struck in the book of how you talk about this lively tradition of poetry, of oral history telling, of treating history, like hopefully we do here on this podcast, treating history as a great story that deserves to be told, rather than just the relating of facts. It seems like there was quite a lot of culture and literature and structure to that society too, as well as having this thriving city, this metropolis that relied a bit on trade and a bit on their military ability. There was an extensive amount of culture going on around, as well. Absolutely. The people would gather in the evenings, some in very formal ways, in front of the palace or in the courtyard of the High King, the Clatawani, but other people just in their own courtyards around the city. And they would sing. And in the songs, they would be, in a sense, speaking poetry, but also telling about history. And then other times, they would hold up great sort of victorials that were in effect, pneumonic devices. So some talented history teller would look at this and point, say, to a temple

burning and say that was the year we went to war against, say, Quotidlan, and we would tell the story. And often the point of the story was not to put down the people of Quotitlan, but to tell that this was the moment in which we became friends and allies in which their princess came to marry our prince, et cetera. So they were always making a point, making history exciting and entertaining, but also making a political point. This is when we became friends with, or this is when we put those people who tried to kill us in their place, go us. You know, the stories were different depending on what point they wanted to make. There was a lot of gluing together of different subgroups, if you will,

that were sort of gradually becoming part of the Tenogtitlan. In a sense, I would argue, we're seeing sort of the very early stages of how a state is made. Different groups of people choose to live with each other. And then they have to start to believe that this is a good idea rather than nursing grudges amongst each other. And so you can do that often through telling stories. And some of the stories would be about the tragedy of prior breakups with other groups that they used to be friends with. And those stories were told as tragedies.

So they weren't happy about having to fight with others. They were usually trying to glue different people together, if you will. Yeah, but I guess we do have to remain aware that in juxtaposition to all of that flourishing culture at the center, there is kind of violence on the margins that is protecting that vibrancy at the center. Yes, I would say you just nailed it on the head, as we say over here. That is, like many other cities, I grew up in New York City and you wander the streets of New York at night. You can see inside people's windows, all those books, all the art. It's an incredible, beautiful city. But it also, in many ways for its functioning, depends almost on the poverty of certain other places where those goods are made for pennies rather than dollars. And so like many other great urban societies, I guess we could make the same case about London, you know, at some point at its peak actually relying for that wealth on the slave trade. So like many great urban places that rose from nothing, other people are in some ways paying that price. I would argue perhaps less so there than in some parts of the old world, but certainly

it is true that there was a violence at the heart of it that guaranteed peace on that island. And it's a sobering thought. But it isn't one that I want to allow us to sort of dismiss the Aztecs or encourage us to decide that they were bad people because I don't think it was any more true there than it has been in the case of certain other great cities. Yeah, I was going to say, in the case of most, you know, most empires rely on violence at their edges, which they may be trying to expand, to bring wealth, stability, and allow culture to flourish at the very center, see that Rome was no different. And you mentioned, you know, London then, pretty much, you know, the whole of the British Isles or Great Britain was insulated from the violence and the nastier aspects

of empire because it was so far away, but it allowed the centre to flourish. That's exactly right. That's indeed how I see that island in the middle of the lake that belong to the Aztecs in very similar terms. Fascinating. We've talked a little bit about Aztec religion and our later understanding of what that may or may not have been. I wonder if you could just explain to us a little bit what the core religious beliefs of the Meshika, the Aztecs were. How did they view the cosmos? Right. So all of the cosmos is in effect divine,

a sort of living, shimmering, beautiful, if you can only see it, world that is constantly changing. And life and death as part of that. For them, the central idea is that you must appreciate it, notice it, be part of it, love it. So, for instance, the closest that you're going to get to heaven is right here, right now. Love those people in your lives. Notice the beauty around you because it's not going to get any better. It's not like you should, I mean, that's sort of the opposite or the

inverse, I guess you could say, of certain Christian beliefs where you sort of hang on now because it'll be better later. On the contrary, you are to make it this life as wonderful as you can, be as honorable as you can because this is it, folks, this is heaven. There's a bit of an exception for warriors or young women who die in childbirth, warriors who die or women who die in childbirth. That is young people who give their lives for their people. There's some debate. Some sources say they got four more years of literally living almost like a soul near the gods. And other people say it went on longer than four years. But the majority say, and in four years, even they would completely disappear. So you celebrate and you remember those that have gone

before you. If they lived well, if they noticed the beauty, if they fought for their people, you would try to remember them because that is their way of living on. That is the afterlife. Likewise, the whole universe, but the world itself has come and gone. The book is called The Fifth Sun because they believed that they were living under the fifth Sun and that someday the world itself would implode and the universe would change and a new sun might emerge with new life forms, perhaps. In this, they were probably more accurate in their understanding of the universe, the Christians have been.

It's something that they were well aware of and they wanted to keep, if they could, what we have here going, just as they wanted people to be good and behave well and be remembered. Likewise, they wanted to keep this world, this universe going if they could. And you need to thank the gods for what you have. As I mentioned, there was this old belief common among many Native Americans and probably archaeologists say around the world that it wouldn't hurt to thank the gods with the greatest gift of all, the gift of human life, of human blood. And of course, the best and easiest way to do that is by sacrificing an enemy who has lost in war. So the old way was to sacrifice an occasional warrior, usually a prince. And you would give him honor. And if he didn't cry out and didn't show fear,

it was his last chance to show that even though he'd been taken prisoner, he was a great man. So the point wasn't to disparage him, but with him to give honor to the gods. Now, I will admit, it's cheating a bit. You're sacrificing an enemy rather than one of your own kids, but this is, again, very much a part of human nature. So unfortunately, I would argue, by the end of the period of political power, this central religious belief had been distorted and the priests had started to argue. And again, remember many of the priests were related to the royal family had started to argue that, oh, we don't need to sacrifice an occasional person. We need to sacrifice many people in order to keep the cosmos in balance, in order to keep this world going longer, to please the gods,

to thank them. So there'll be no big shakeups anytime soon. But, In a sense, it was kind of counter to other beliefs that they had. You know, so much death and destruction to keep life going, when in fact many of their songs and poems, as I have said, were really about trying not to kill too much, trying to love life in that sense. So I would argue that their political needs were in some ways, not so much trumping as changing, adjusting,

causing to be altered some of their older religious beliefs. Yeah, there's a danger that we always, tend to think of some of these societies being frozen in amber for all of time. They were conceived and began this way in the same way that they ended. And we don't allow for development over time. And as you say, priests arguing about how important human sacrifice was amongst themselves. And I guess the problem is for Western historians is that the Spaniards encountered them at a time when human sacrifice was becoming more and more what they did.

So it's easy to think, well, these people were always like this. That's exactly right. And I think we do have a tendency to do that. to sort of a centralize or say, okay, we observe this once, let's assume that's the way these people always were and always will be. The further we go in time or space, you know, the more likely we are to say that. I mean, I think most of us, you know, who are European-descended, if not living in Europe now, would not be likely to say that someone who behaved in a certain way, in, say, what is now France in the ninth century, illustrates what all Europeans were always like and always would be.

We have a greater tendency to do that when we are talking about people who are very far away from us, spatially or temporarily, it becomes easier to believe, oh, they were always like that. They had to be like that. And as you say, we shouldn't freeze anyone in Amber because no human group is really like that. We all change. We would always hope that no one does it to us. So we ought to do them the dignity of not doing it to them either. I wondered as well from the book, if you could give us a sense of how much you think the Spanish conquest, when it does arrive in the early 16th century, has been kind of overstated as this cataclysm, this end point of Aztec society,

that it came to an abrupt end with the arrival of Cortez and the conquistadors. Right. I think that's a great question. So my book places the conquest, the arrival of the Spanish, right in the middle, not the beginning, not the end, as most books do. I will say, in doing that,

I was following the lead of many historians who hadn't actually placed it in the middle of their books, but who have come to believe, and that is I'm far from the only one who has come to believe that in many ways, indigenous life continued the next day, much as it always had. For your listeners, a good example might be the outbreak of COVID. I mean, we all remember the spring of 2020 now, and it felt earth-shattering, and it was, and our lives did change, but life did go on, right? I mean, in April of 2020, we still had to figure out what we were going to buy at the grocery store

and how we were going to cook it, right, even though we were all living in theater. because there were no vaccines. So we should remember that with all these great cataclysms, life does go on. And the arrival of the Spaniards, and they're giving a few sermons and telling people that they should change their entire religion in some language that most of the people didn't even understand, did not, in fact, cause all people to just change their religion. You know, it took at least a century before we can even say that most Mexicans had ever even heard of Christianity. So we should temper our sense of things. Now, I will say we should probably separate out the cultural, the social, the psychological from the political and

economic. That is, the Spaniards did set up a world that they gradually expanded in which they had the military power to extract tribute or taxes from these people, and they had the military power to arrest and kill the Tlatawani or the chief who refused to obey them. That did change within 20 to 40 years. Well, it changed Tendorchtitlan by 1521. And And the rest of Mexico, 20 and then sort of the outside 40 years. But we must remember that the people's daily lives, the way they thought about things, the jokes they told, the languages they were speaking, what they wanted for their sons and daughters, largely didn't change right away.

It was very gradual. And to this day, many would argue that the Catholicism that you see in Mexico has very little to do with the Catholicism you might find in France or Spain, for instance, that they are continuing to do things the indigenous way. The Nahuat or Aztec language is still spoken by over a million people. As native speakers, it's spoken by more than that if you count everybody who studies it. So we have to keep in mind that our image of sort of a world-ending apocalypse is exaggerated. It gives too much power to the Spaniards. It's a flattering notion for people who are of European descent, but it's not really very realistic. Yeah. But having said that, when the Spaniards arrive, they do overpower the Aztecs remarkably quickly.

given that they were such a dominant power in the region in previous decades and centuries. Would you say that that was because of the precarious nature of the power of the Aztecs, as we mentioned before, you know, they could fall at any time? Or is it simply that the Spanish come with guns, and there's simply no way to resist that? I would say both. It has recently become fashionable among my peers to argue, and it's partially true, that the only reason the Aztecs fell is that so many indigenous people joined with the Spanish. Now, that is true. So the argument that they're making is that the Spaniards weren't really that powerful. It was other indigenous people who were. That is true. The problem from my point of view is it begs the

question, well, why did so many indigenous people join them? And the answer that has been too quick to come is, oh, that's because everybody else absolutely hated the Aztecs. Well, frankly, that just reflects a very old, unconscious acceptance of the prior beliefs that all the Aztecs were monsters because, in fact, most of central Mexico was tightly allied to the Aztecs. There were resentments, but there was a lot of intermarriage. There were people from other areas living in Tenochtitland, people Tenochtitland living elsewhere. It was not an easy decision at all for most of these people to decide to turn against the Aztecs. Very few of us would. I mean, let us say, well, yes, to bring it home. Would any of us immediately side with, say, a foreign invader? Would

American side with invasion from Europe or Russia or Asia, just because we have always hated the party in power? I don't think so. No. So it doesn't really make sense to think all of Mexico immediately ran to join the Europeans when they arrived because they all hated the Aztecs so much. And when I look at the now what sources, that's just not borne out. They were really arguing amongst themselves about what to do.

the factor that caused people to say, I think we better decide with the outsiders, was their weaponry. They were winning the battles. So there was the pre-existing tension around the Aztec empire, and that was part of it. But there was also a sense after a while, and this grew over the course of the time that the Europeans were there. Oh, this metal clothing that they wear, these cannons that they can shoot from far away, the lances, the horses that they can ride into our village, you know, setting fire to every house and galloping out without anyone of theirs even being wounded. All of this is adding up to a big problem. Maybe we should ally with those people. Actually, now that I think about it, we have reason to resent the Aztecs. So let's go with that.

So it was a long drawn-out problem. Sometimes they even fought each other about what to do about this, you know, external problem. And we can see that in other times in places, too. Civil wars breaking out amongst people who don't know how to handle an outside of. invader in the best possible way. So I would say all of the above in terms of what you listed as possible explanations. And that's perfect. And I think it's really good to look at those things as a kind of a sliding scale that will eventually reach a tipping point because all of those people, they may have had some long-held resentment about the power of the Aztecs, but also they were tied to them politically and by marriage. And if they traded with them, their prosperity relied on that empire.

So they would be risking losing all of that. So it must have been, you know, we'll resist, resist, resist until it becomes irresistable. And then we best go with it before we get swept away by it. You got it. Right, right. There were a few groups who very early on decided to side with the Spaniards. They were the ones who had been open enemies of the Aztecs like the Slashkallans. But the others really had to think about it, shall we say. And do we see any kind of long-term resistance by the Machika? After the conquest, do they continue to try to force the Spanish back out? You know, to force them out, no, but it's very interesting. On one hand, during those early decades, the city seemed quiescent, but they weren't being asked to pay the tribute that everybody else was. They had to help the Spaniards build the city, but they were okay with that. They liked the grand new city too. Then in the 1560s, the Spaniards decided that they had enough power to tell even the Mashika, even the Aztecs, you also are going to pay the same taxes to us as everybody else.

And very interestingly, all hell broke loose, public rioting in the streets, raging speeches were made in Nahuat. We only know about this in detail because of records of these events that were kept in Nahuat. A young man named Souso Mendoza, an American, is writing about this now based on these sources. So they were still ready to try to fight to exclude the Spaniards. And some of their elders in the 1560s who remembered in their childhoods, you know, 1519 to 1521, had to make great speeches saying, guys, you don't understand. They really have defeated us and can again. Are we not conquered people? Do you not get that? What part of that do you not understand? We cannot kick these people out. So let's get with the program and figure out how we're going to minimize the damages. And there was real argument on the part of young men who really wanted to fight. So just as I was about to say, no, there was. no open rebellion, because there really wasn't. I was remembering these troubled days in the 1560s that we're now learning more about in these now what sources. It just shows that the Spaniards were clever too. They knew better than to try to impose a head tax right away, on the Aztecs

themselves, right away in the 1521, because then maybe the war wouldn't have ended so quickly. Maybe somewhere, somehow more guys would have shown up to fight. So the Spaniards also had to play a game of Realpolitik and sort of acknowledge what they could and couldn't do by when. They didn't have all the power. They had most of it, but not all. Yeah. So the sources that you've used for the books, the NARWAT sources, how do we come to have those recorded for us now?

Right. Right. So it's fascinating. The Aztecs had their own writing, but this writing was mostly what I would call mnemonic device type writing, logographs, images that very highly trained specialists, history tellers and priests could look at

and use to remember what was there. That the materials that they kept to keep track of tribute were a little bit more specific. It wasn't just a reminder that, say, Kotitlan was to pay tribute. It was specific symbols detailing what Kotitlan was to pay. But it was not phonetic writing. It wasn't sort of full-on representation of speech. Well, the Spaniards come and they teach some of the boys, mostly the nobility's boys, how to read and write the Roman alphabet, because they wanted them to help them spread the word of Christ. And they did that. They worked with the Spaniards to create all sorts of texts, dictionaries and confessions and all sorts of texts, writing down sermons and

et cetera. But they went home and they would ask their elders, mostly fathers, but sometimes mothers and grandmothers too, you know, tell me the prayer, tell me the history, tell me what you used to say. How was it then? And they would write this down in Nawat, using the Roman alphabet to transcribe what was being uttered in Nawat. So today, if you learn to read and write Nahuat, you can read all of these sources, things that were uttered by indigenous elders who had been born before the conquest, many of them, about what life was like, how they prayed, and mostly what their history was. So we have hundreds of these documents. Some would argue thousands, but many of them are copies of each other. So it's hard to distinguish exactly how many there are. And these sources had been used in the past, but not so much. People have preferred to use the sources that were written hand in hand with the friars, or, or, you know, and these sources. And or with the Spanish court system, because they're easier for us to understand. You have to have more patience and read more of these sources that were written in private because they weren't written for us. They weren't written for you and me, or even for modern people of any ethnicity. So you have to

be more patient. But I think that patience is bearing fruit now as we begin to learn more about how they talk to each other, what they thought, what they said amongst themselves. I think it's also a fascinating strand of, we've said there was no real military resistance to the conquest, but this is almost a cultural resistance, isn't it? we're going to use the tools that you're giving us to preserve what you're trying to erase. Very much so. I think that argument absolutely can be made. That is that they used tools that they learned from the old world. Mostly the phonetic alphabet, that was their favorite. They learned it quickly and put it to all sorts of uses. And people who hadn't even learned it from the friars,

but who learned it from someone else in the community used it too. We know this because some of the wild and wacky spelling that we see. Clearly this was not someone who had a European teacher. They used it in very creative, even brilliant ways. And they used other things, too. They used certain farming tools to do their old style farming even better than they had. They loved candles. They had had torches before, pine resin torches, but they burn out quickly. So they used candles also to sort of continue their cultural ceremonies and writings on into the evening.

They were very good at taking from other cultures what they could use to further their own world. They had done that before, one could argue, in conquering others and then bringing them into the fold. That's why Mexican cuisine is so extraordinary because the Aztecs worked hard to bring in all sorts of techniques. But they certainly did the same when they met with European culture. I think that's very astute of you to see that. Fascinating. I think what the book really does is allow us to get closer to the voices of the Meshika people themselves that we haven't really heard. We've heard them through a filter or we've heard them through a of prejudices, and it's sort of stripping that away and allowing us to hear them speak for

themselves much more clearly than we have before. So I just wondered if we could end on, is there one thing that you think the indigenous sources teach us or that we can learn from them about the Machika that we miss from a European overview from the Chronicles? I guess if I had to choose one element, it would be humor. These now what sources are full of jokes. And of course, we don't think of the Aztecs as people who are funny guys, far from it. But the sources do show how much they loved to laugh. I mean, even the names, the nicknames they gave each other. One little girl was called, she's not a fish, because she hated being bathed so much. We've all met a baby or a toddler that hates their bath, right? We just don't think of

the Aztecs, people who like to nickname their little toddler girls. Ah, she's not a fish. Achmichin. And that became her name for a few years. So I guess if there was one thing I would like to leave your listeners with, it would be that the Aztecs loved a good joke just as much as anybody else. Brilliant. That's wonderful. I've really, really enjoyed this, commit. I could keep you talking about this all day because it's absolutely fascinating. So thank you so much for joining us and giving us a bit more of an overview.

And hopefully people will go and grab the book and find out even more about this fascinating topic. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much. It's been a joy. Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Gone Medieval. If there's a place or a time you'd like to see us cover on the podcast, you can drop us an email at gone medieval at historyhit.com to let us know. You can find an episode in our vaults on How the Weather-shaped medieval North America

with Dr Timothy Porcitat, if you'd like more from this continent. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hits to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free. Sign up now at history hit.com forward slash subscribe. Well, what are you waiting for? Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've

just gone medieval with history hit.