Historically High - The Aztecs

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

We finish off the Big 3 of Ancient Meso/South American civilizations with The Aztecs. Originally hailing from what is now the southern United States, the Mexica would enter the Valley the Mexico to find the place pretty crowded already. The only real spot left was a swampy marshy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Through innovation and engineering they created floating gardens to grow crops and sustain their growing population. The island that was once their disadvantage had now help them to grow and become valley's dominant peoples, ruling from their city of Tenochtitlan . Grand palaces, magnificent temples of sacrifice and enormous outdoor markets had the newly arrived Spanish Conquistadors in shock and awe. Well it wasn't long before Hernan Cortez and his Spanish troops started trying to take over the place. Find out what happened to the civilization that Mexico was literally built on. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh boy. We're back into it again. And we are back in an area of the world and in a time of the world that honestly might be one of my favorite times and places. Because South America and Central America, I don't know why they fascinate me so much. I love the culture. I love the history. There's just so many interesting things about the way that somewhere that grew up isolated a world apart from powerhouses like Asia. India, all of Europe, the Vikings, anywhere like that, they just did their own thing and weren't really behind in a way that you would expect. That was, I think, my biggest takeaway is digging deep into this. The, it this encapsulates or not encapsulates. This caps off the essential big three of the South American, Mesoamerican civilizations. Cover the Incans, cover the Mayans. covering the Aztecs today. Yeah, from, I don't know if we text about this or not, but the thought that from a societal standpoint, a governance standpoint, a social interaction and intellectual standpoint, very, very

close to any other part of the world, they had their own type of like, you know, they had their own way of going about religion, of course, but they also knew about engineering and science and all of that stuff. Agriculture. Agriculture, the only thing that set them apart and what would lead to their eventual demise is going to be that they didn't have the, I'm trying to think of the term that I used. It was like advancement, technological advancement by, like, not collaboration, but by committee. Yeah. So in Europe, and this, we're not already going off topic on this. I'm going to bring this back around here before we start this episode. But in Europe, where everything was essentially connected by land, you had the Silk Road, you had stuff coming in from China over into

Europe, you had influences from the Middle East, Mediterranean, Northern Europe, you know, what would be Russia. If something got discovered in one place, it was only a matter of time before it got brought to another. Tips for making hardened steel would eventually make their way across Europe and then everyone would have it. Gunpowder. Gunpowder. Gunpowder. cannons, sailing vessels, things like that, it wasn't just one country coming up with this. It was a collaboration of all these countries picking and stealing from each other

and someone has a good idea, okay, I'm going to take that and integrate that, oh, they're stealing my good ideas. When you get to Central and South America, it was them figuring shit out on their own. They weren't borrowing from somebody else. There wasn't this huge influx of technology or technological advancement. what they had served them very well for the way that they lived, but that by no means

indicates that they had some type of lower societal, like, structure. Because as we discussed in the Inkins, the Mayans, they were very complex societies. And the Aztecs, while different from those societies, had a lot of similarities because they were from a similar region, at least the same continent, but then at the same time, so many differences despite being on that same continent. Yeah. And it's something too as simple as when you're growing a society, whatever you want to call it, a hunter-gatherer society will only work in a way that either follows the herd or follows the seasons.

And so if you are hunting in an area and you have a handful of seeds that you got somewhere else and you're like these were the most desirable of these seeds we're going to throw them down here by the time we come around next year next season whenever we show up back again this is all going to be grown and we should have something to eat when you finally get to be a society that can settle in one area and you put down roots and you're just hunting out of one main village you have people that have time to specialize in agriculture to the point to where and we'll talk about it with what the Aztecs did with corn, what the Macedonians did with wheat, where you take the most desirable fruits, the ones that you can eat, the one that your stomach can handle. Okay, we can't get into that.

We'll get into that because I have a lot to talk about on that. We're not going to keep you guys waiting anymore. Remember, rate review, subscribe, follow us wherever you guys get your podcast. Keep the feedback coming. We appreciate everything you guys are doing. Appreciate you guys enjoying listening to us bullshit for hours at a time. And let's get into the Aztex. All right. Well, while that seemed like only a brief moment of listening to the intro to you guys, that was a three-minute ordeal of trying to get a gigantic fucking fly out of the studio.

I'm pretty sure somebody definitely picked it up and heard it. So we vanquished the fly. And now we got to cut down on a few things that have changed over time about the Aztecs. and just to start out with the name they didn't call themselves the Aztecs. This was like a

I want to say it was like a 19th century adaption trying to figure out what to call these people. It comes because one of the regions that they were from was called ascu. The pronunciations are going to be rough. Please bear with us.

We're going to do our best. Asku Posalko. Ascaposalko. And out of the A-Z-C-A, we get Aztecs. What they were originally called was the Mexica people. That is M-E-X-I-C-A. Basically Mexico, but it's Mahika.

And that's where we get the name for the country of Mexico. The last of the Mexicas. Also, if you're wondering, that sounds like it could be a Native American tribe. And it's because they were. The Meika people arrived in the Valley of Mexico around like 1250. from the northwest where they kind of presumably their ancestors crossed this land bridge

that was... Technically they're all Native Americans, right? Yeah. Because anyone that's native within North Central or South America are Native Americans. These were North American, Native Americans.

But prior to the last Ice Age ending, we had this land bridge that connected Asia and our continent of North America. So these people traveled across there and as you would being a hunter-gatherer society you follow the food

you're also dealing with famines you're dealing with droughts in some areas to where you're going to keep pushing south because that's where the animals travel there's no wonder why birds fly south for the winter time you're trying to find some place you know your ideal place is where there is

no off season for either your hunting or your gathering and that's where you run into you know that's where you run into the separation of or the advancement from a hunter-gatherer society to a agricultural society. And so you have to find the right place where you can perform enough agriculture to actually support your, your populace. Should we just get into the food thing now?

Are we going to? Let's work our way down. Okay. We'll get into it when we start talking about the makeup proper. So all that was just to say, we're going to refer to. to them as Aztecs at some points. We're going to refer to them as Mexica at some point. Same people. There's going to be a lot of names that are very, very close for some of these different city-states. We're going to try to enunciate, pronunciate as well as possible. But if it gets too tough with

the Mexica and everything, we might just switch to Aztex, we got stone before this, spoiler alert that we always do. And suddenly the pronunciation seemed to get a little bit harder than they were to the sober mine. So if you're a stickler for good pronunciation, you're going to have a fun one. This is going to be a fun time for you. I completely forgot to introduce you. I was going to say you're the, and again, this comes down to the pronunciation. You are the Hutzelopochle to my Tlok. You are the Montezuma, the first to my Moktizuma the second.

You're sharper than an obsidian knife. And you're deadlier on the mic than smallpox. Oh, buddy. Professor Adam, Professor Chris. You guys already know that. That was great. Not going into the whole food thing, because that's going to lead to a whole fucking bag of rabbit holes. We want to set that right in the middle.

So when you are trying to develop as a civilization, you, when your hunter-gather society, you're small. your survivability has to be kept within like a balance of you have to be able to find enough food to support the numbers that you have. So you have to keep that in a smaller number group. When you get to a point where you can set down roots and start agriculturally growing your food, you can still go out and you know hunt and all that kind of stuff. You're able to support more people. And so the key to essentially growing a civilization is first finding a place where these guys can set down roots. And so as they're making their way south from North America, when they were talking about North America, did they mean that they were possibly from like, I would imagine, because you do have to funnel down through Central America and Mexico and everything, that you're coming from maybe even like the Texas region coming down kind of through that funnel? Yeah.

Well, the very interesting thing is Chris talked about the big three of Mesoamerica in the opening. you have your Inkins, you have your Aztecs, and you have your Mayans. The Aztecs came from the north. The Inkins and Mayans both came from the south. And you have this convergence where there was some kind of canoodling between the Mayans and the Aztecs. But the Aztecs were such a different people because they came from this hunter-gatherer society coming from the north, whereas you had the cradle of civilization for the Inkins and the Mayans coming from like the Andes Mountains. Yeah, and from a, from a timeframe perspective, you had the Aztecs essentially coming into power.

And this is a civilization that burned fast and then burnt out. Like, its advancement over the course of just a couple of centuries is one of the more, you know, kind of incredible things about this. So you have, they're the most well-known. That's exactly. Well, I think, and I was going to mention this to you, it's because I think they have the most. I don't want to say lineage, legacy, I think would be the most apt word. And we'll get to that when we talk about, you can obviously tell the Mexica. It's Mexico, is the name of it.

So you're already getting the name of these people, ends up becoming the name of Mexico. Their capital city that they had becomes the capital city of Mexico. Yeah, Mexico City. There, we're going to get to it, the flag. There's some very specific Aztec-inspired imagery that is directly related on the Mexican flag. And when you, from a time frame perspective, you have the Incan and the Aztecs, they actually overlap a little bit. But because they're separated, they never interact, you know, personally. The Maya and the Aztecs were much closer together. The Maya actually,

at the peak of their civilization was roughly like, I think, 800 to or 600 to 800 years prior to the Aztex peak of civilization. But there were still. remnants, you know, more so than there are today, but you still had like these areas where people still spoke Mayan. They simply had just been decimated by European diseases amongst Europeans as well. And they just were no longer that, you know, huge society that we discussed in that previous episode. Oh, yeah. And the fall of the Maya were really, I think as we talked about in that episode, it was kind of, they were victims of their own doing their cities, too big, it got overpopulated. You had these famines in these weather events that caused these

cities to fail because they were trying to feed too many mouths. So as that happened in the Mayan Empire declined, you see that there are like bands that break out and just go back to kind of like native living out in the bush, out in the jungle. And that's where you still see today that we're going to have some crossover with these Aztecs. And the whole entire thing I think too, potentially for why we know more about the Aztecs, I think, as far as like in popular culture than the Maya and then the Incas is probably because they were the closest. I mean, I think if you go down to South America, there's probably more Inca culture down there. Yeah, I definitely think so. Also, when we get into kind of the nitty and gritty of it, the things that we kind of project

onto the Maya and the Inkins, when we're talking about just viewing all of those South American Mesoamerican societies as a whole. Some did sacrifice. Some really didn't do a lot of sacrifice. The Aztecs fucking love them some sacrifice. And so I think that's also why they're well known too is because it's been sensationalized. Yeah. And so that's kind of where you make that connection.

At the time that they ended up, you know, migrating south, they came to a place called the, was it the valley? Was it the Mexico Valley? Yeah, it was the Valley of Mexico. Valley of Mexico is, it has earliest artifacts that have been found there are about 10,000 years old. So we're talking like 8,000 BCE. They're finding different places that were cooked in. They're finding fragments of rocks that had been sharded off for a knife, anything like that. And when you think of Mexico, I just always think desert. I always think hot and I always think desert.

This valley of Mexico was built kind of in an area where not built, but there were mountains all along there. And where these mountains were, there were also volcanoes. And this is a very volcanically earthquake active area, not necessarily the volcanoes as much. But like back in their time, they had a volcano that they called like smoking something or other. And if you're calling a volcano smoking something or other, it's probably because it's fairly active. And it's bubbling up. It's just constantly. But it gave them this very kind of special environment to where it was lush, it was green, there was a basin.

And within this basin, there was a lake. And it was Texcoco Lake or Tecoco Lake. Yeah. So we have the basin of Mexico. So you have the valley of Mexico, which the reason that this was kind of a more fertile area is because you would have, because it was surrounded by mountains, you'd have all the rain runoff and everything feeding into this and making kind of the valley floor more fertile. Also, it was fed by a river or anything like that. It did have this huge lake that was actually

fed by like springs. So it was almost like this self-filling lake. So within the basin of Mexico, which was 3,700 square miles, you had all of these different, kind of going back to like talking about Greece and everything. They had their own system of like city states. So all around this lake, which was, I think Lake Texcoco was, you know how they had the five interconnected lakes? So the name of the full scope of the lakes as a whole, I think was Lake Zampongo, which was like 580 square miles. And then think of kind of the great lakes how we have like on one side of it. Isn't it like Lake Michigan and Lake Lake Superior on the other, but they actually connect to each other. Kind of touches. It's kind of like that to where.

they were all, you know, connected, but you had these little separate names for these separate bodies of water. So Lake Texcoco is the one in which the Aztecs eventually find their capital of Technoclon. That's getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because we kind of have to explain how they eventually found themselves to this swampy island. Well, wouldn't you say that's the perfect explanation. They just sort of found this place to where they could settle. No one else wanted it. No, it's a situation where when they're traveling down into this valley of Mexico and they get down there because this is the most fertile area, because this is where all the game is to hunt, all of that kind of thing. You show up and just like you were talking about Greece, there's kind of these little city states of different people that had been there.

And we're talking about a time, we're probably going to mention them a few times, but there were previous empires that, lived there, the, uh, oh shit, what's the guy from Legends of the Hidden Temple? The Oleks. Olmex.

Yeah. And these were even further ancient civilizations that had sort of built in this area that left monuments. The Mayans weren't really that far. They were kind of to the east, further into the Yucatan Peninsula. But like you said,

as they, you know, when that civilization started to get hit and they had the conquistadors coming in, you're not, a head further east because that's where they're coming from. If you have to migrate, you're going to migrate to the west until you find this extremely fertile valley. And of course, you're not going to be the first people moving into this because it's the ideal spot to live. But it's

so crazy to think that like literally around this lake, and of course it's a huge basin, it's a huge lake, you have these different city states just at different points like along, you know, one's on the southern shore, one's on the northern shore. And you have almost these little just warring cities that will sometimes attack each other and sometimes they'll be in alliances with each other. And as a new society moving in there, you don't just get to go stake a plot of land and being like, oh, hey, we're the new guys, we're just shown up in the czars now. They end up coming in and settling this place called Chapel, Chapo-Tepek? Chupil-Tep. Oh, there you go. Chupil-Tepic. Now, this was on the western shore and it was

near some springs so they had a source of fresh water. Well, this is going to be something that hasn't already, or it was already discovered. It may not have been settled, but because they're essentially using all of these springs that these other civilizations or city states were probably utilizing as well, it didn't really take them long to get ousted out of that area. And it was this tribe called the Tempennecks that actually came in and they're like, hey, yeah, you can't be here. You need to leave. And as they got ousted out of this area, of Chupilatik, the Kula Khan ruler of this other city-state Kula Khan was like, hey, you know what, come over here. We'll go ahead and bring you guys in.

Didn't turn out to be such a good thing for the people of Kulakon because after settling in there for a little bit, and this is where we do actually have some dates for things. But in 1323, sometime around that, the ruler of Kulikon, am I pronouncing that? correctly. Cool you. It's tough because there is, there's a region now that is called Kulia Khan that's down in Mexico.

Yeah, Kulakon. So the leader of the Mexicans is like, hey, I would love to go and marry your daughter. We'll go ahead and kind of just like join our tribes and everything. So the ruler's daughter is to be married. And they come in,

they get her, they think they're, you know, they're taking her to the ceremony and everything like that. They literally take her over to a stone slab and fucking carve her heart out? We can tie that up a little bit better

because in doing so, it was a sacrifice to the gods and her being being sacrificed would then make her a goddess. Correct. They were ascending her to deity status by sacrificing her. That sounds way better than they took her over and cut her heart out.

Okay, so does this sound better as well? like the next night they're in you know the common area they're dancing and stuff like that and one of the priests from the Mexicans comes in this is kind of

legendy stuff but it was documented wearing her skin and this is not the first instance nor will be the last that we talk about flaying no on this so literally wearing her skin and at that point

Kulakan is just like Like, the city's like, get the fuck out of here. And not only that, probably chase them out of town with the priest running wearing the freaking daughter skin suit. Oh, awful. Pretty funny, just because it's in hindsight and it's awful. Well, you have to remember about the Aztecs, the MAKA when they come down, is these guys didn't come from the land of milk and honey. They had to fight for everything that they got. When they end up making it down into the Valley of Mexico, they're sort of used as mercenaries for these warring city states as kind of like special forces.

They're good fighters. Yeah. And a large part of that, too, is when you have these established villages, they're going to have men, women, and children. When the Mexica roll down, there's not a lot of women. It's a lot of young, young braves and all that kind of thing. the families ever come in. So you have them intermarrying into some of these city states. And it's almost like they're starting to put down roots,

but they're also putting down roots with certain villages or certain city states. And they're their own people still, though. So it's like they showed up and they sort of sponged off some of the women from the other city states. But at the same time, they had bonds now with these places to where they could kind of have not necessarily alliances, but better feelings. And then to go and fillet the princess seems like it would hurt those feelings. As a nomadic tribe that's constantly traveling, kind of, you know, of course you're living off the land,

kind of at the whims of weather, drought, things like that. This isn't just something new that they started when they moved in. They're like, hey, let's start sacrificing people. This was something that was already kind of embedded in their society. what I'm trying to backtrack here is with their gods, their belief essentially was that in order to keep the sun rising every day, the gods required a sacrifice of the most precious, you know, the most precious thing we had. And that was what they, and they ended up calling it like, what, human water? It was blood. Essentially, it was the life blood, is what they could sacrifice to the gods to ensure that the sun would rise every day. And they end up sacrificing a lot of people and the sun continued to rise, which, only would provide them with confirmation that what they were doing was correct. I'm just wondering, going back from a nomadic standpoint, that's got to have to do with, like, not harvest or anything like that, but just, like, coming upon a herd or making sure that the

herds were where they were supposed to be. And how do you find your way to the sacrifice point? Like, you're trying everything you can. Nothing's working. The herds are moving on. They're not where they're supposed to be. Then all of a sudden, someone's just like, we just got to kill something. fuck it somebody just we got to kill one of us and one of them is just like okay we'll go find the old person we kill them and then all of a sudden the next day the herd show up and they're like fuck okay so this is just what we're going to do from now on i think it's 100% accidental i think it's a situation where you're out hunting and somebody dies and then within the time of that person dying either they were enough bait that they left blood on the ground that the next morning

A herd showed up to see what was going on or another carnivore showed up. And then they killed that and they ate. And they're like, well, he died. He spilled his blood. It ate his heart when we were shooting him. That has to be a sign from the gods. Like God had to put that per or that animal here for us to kill because of that death. It's either that or it's some type of like hallucinogenic acid trip type situation of like a village elder being like tripping balls and being like, you know what?

we should probably kill somebody just to make sure that the gods are happy. Yeah, that sounds about right. They're just like, cool. You're in charge. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. We're just out one person. And then coincidentally, something positive happened. The rains came as soon as they did that.

And they're just like, guess we have to do this now. And they did it at harvest festivals. There's a certain belief in the numbers that back it up varies so much that there's a certain belief that they just killed everybody that they could. as they become more established, these traditions sort of change because before, if you want to be an effective leader of a bunch of people, pulling somebody's wife, daughter, son, father out, and sacrificing them probably isn't going to be good for your reign because the people are going to be like, well, that was one of us. Why'd you do that? You don't sacrifice your populace. You got to get into a situation where you're sacrificing people that aren't on your team. Mm-hmm.

So as the make of people grow, you start to see when they're, and again, we're getting ahead of ourselves because we still got to form them. But they start to branch out to where the sacrifices are like prisoners of war or a bunch of people that they rounded up and took prisoner slaves, essentially. They had slaves from varying other tribes or varying other villages that they would take after a fight and they would sacrifice them instead. of their own people. Well, before you're able to fight, you got to have a city. Yep. You got to have a home field. So after they're kicked out of Kulakon, they end up taking refuge and are basically

the only place to go is this area that's on the west side of the lake, and it's not even on the shore. It's this marshy, swampy island that's off the, you know, it's kind of, I mean, in the sense of like, distance-wise, it's not like out in the mess. middle of the lake, but it's a pretty decent distance away from shore. It's a boat trip. It's a canoe trip out there. It's, yeah. And so this is the only place where they're really allowed to go. So what they end up doing is, this is, I'm going to get into some real nerdy engineering stuff because this shit is

so fascinating about how they create this city. So the city ends up being the capital of their empire, Tanoke Chiklan. Tanok Chiklan. And the way in which they create this civil and this gigantic city out of basically this swamp island is bonkers. And this is what finally clicked to me just that they were, the only thing that they weren't advanced on was essentially their weaponry and like metallurgy. Other than that, they were masters of the resources that they had and they knew exactly what they were doing with it. So to Notochlan, the reason they picked this island as well is because, you know, it's not exactly desirable real estate is the current leader of the

Mahika, he said he had a vision and he saw something out on the island. It was an eagle perched on a cactus, maybe eating a snake, maybe not eating a steak. It had a snake in his talon. Had it being a snake in his talon, which, if that sounds familiar, this is where we get the imagery on the flag for Mexico. Yeah. If you have any questions, what it's supposed to look like, go look at the Mexican flag. Go look at the Mexican flag. So he sees this on the island, and he's like, this was a,

a vision from now was it a vision from Quetzal Caudle or was it a vision from the other dude the Quetzal Lepochli it was from one of their gods they had a couple different ones

Oh this one was actually the message from their main god which was the Witsilipocli So Witsi Lepochli So the second one that you said Okay So that's pretty much makes their decision form

that they're going to go ahead and take over the Swamp Island in order to basically make this thing livable, they need to find a way, they can't go grow their food on the shore. That's already territory taken up. So they have to be able to be sustainable on this island. So they create these things. And once it's finished, Tenochiklan is basically the way that it's described is like the Venice of Mesoamerica. It's a city full of canals, like structured though, like city blocks like Anglican, like, angular, like 90 degree angles, these canals that are going throughout the whole city. People were, you know, you could do two canoes.

I think they said they were wide enough that two canoes could go down each way. I imagine that there was one way, or it was two-way traffic. Probably. It was going one way, canoes go in the other. It was a Venice Canal. And they started to make these man-made islands to actually grow food on these things called Chinampas. And the way they created these is nuts.

So basically they would drive steaks into the the lake bed. And this lake, because it was this giant basin, it wasn't extremely deep. I think they said average depth of the lake was like 17 feet. But the area around this island and this swamp and everything was, of course, much shaller. But you also can't set up a civilization in two feet of standing water. Yeah.

It also was salt water. Well, it was brackish. Yeah. So you had water that was flowing, that was more fresh water that was being fed by a spring. The spring was actually on the side that, um, Tonechiklan was. And then you had this salty brackish water, which, probably asking, if it didn't connect to the ocean, how was this water getting in? There were thermal springs that would feed into other portions of the lake, and those thermal springs were bringing in saline and salt. So you had this water that was mixing and becoming brackish water, some of it fresh, some of it salty. So as they're developing these chenampas, basically what they're doing is they're driving these steaks. out into like a rectangle. I think they said that Chinapa's were 300 feet by, was it 30 feet? I just knew that they were floating islands. I didn't get the full dimensions. So I think 300 feet by 30 feet.

And they would stake them out. And then basically they would start to weave together a mat of like reeds and vegetation to where it would start kind of like floating on the water a little bit. And then they would take mud from underneath the water. They were just reaching down and taken handfuls of mud and throwing it on top of this thing. And eventually they were able to create these floating islands that were essentially holding soil that they could then plant crops on. And they said, I think, a group of like five or six of guys that were working on it could complete like one of these within a few days. All of that mud and all of that silt that they packed in there was just so mineral-laden that they were just planting this furtile. fertile soil,

that they could really grow anything that they needed. And a big part of this is exactly what Chris is talking about, exactly what we were talking about earlier with when you finally decide that you don't need to be a hunter gather society and you start working towards

agriculture, you can start creating a way to grow your own food and you start figuring out how to create enough protein without having meat that you can survive in a day. And one of the things that they grew, I think probably the biggest thing that they grew was

maize. And maize is corn. Maze didn't start out as corn. Maze didn't start out as maize. Maze started out as these very little, it almost looked like what you would think of as like an enlarged wheat stock. And what they would do over time through selective breeding, because this relates all the way back to the evolution episode of Darwin is you would select the most desirable.

Those would be the ones that you would eat. Those would be the maze kernels that you would keep to plant the next time. So if you had five plants and only one plant was edible, you sack the other five or you sack the other four and you just planted off of the one that was edible. You tried to use at least those ones that you weren't going to be able to consume. You tried to use those for other purposes. Maybe, you know, these people also do not have the wheel or beast of burden. So everything that they're doing, even up to building their temples and everything, is all going to be by hand without any type of like plow animals, wheels, anything like that.

Well, and those are kind of one and the same because if you had a beast of burden, you would create the wheel to make that easier. But since you don't have one to pull anything, creating a wheel is kind of moot because even though it's a wheel, you still have to pull it by human power. Well, what are you going to do with the ox or cows anywhere? You're out on this swampy mochia. Yeah, very true. You can get this thing to a beaver. I don't know. So as they're creating these genomes, they're starting to grow their own food sources.

And this whole selective breeding thing, breeding thing blows my mind because even going, you know, corn, you would find you get genetic anomalies. Like even now, like on a corn stalks, you'll get a larger ear. You'll get maybe an ear of corn that's actually like sweeter than the other ones that was just fed. differently or was closer to the stock or something like that. And so what they would determine is they're growing this corn is they would be harvesting it. All of a sudden, they would find one. They would try it. They're like, this tastes much better actually than the other ones. Okay, keep that one. And then all of them. Yeah, it's a developed enough carbohydrate that when we eat it, it can be digested in our stomachs. Yeah. We're not just trying to eat rocks.

Yeah. And so once you get that one, you're like, okay, we're going to just plant these types from now on. And then that one's a little bit more edible. Then out of that next harvest, you're starting to get ones that are even more edible and more edible. Same thing happened with bananas. The bananas that we know today are nothing even remotely like the bananas that were actually naturally grown when they first grew on trees. They actually had large seeds in them. They weren't the yellow color or anything like that. They were nowhere near a sweet.

But at some point in another, you got maybe a banana that was a rut banana or was it in large, banana, something that was a genetic offshoot, and someone took a bite of it and was like, this actually, I can eat this. They can digest this. I can digest this. Okay, we'll save the seeds out of it. We'll plant that one. You get another little genetic anomaly, a couple of harvest later, and you're like, this one's

even better than that one from a couple years ago. Okay, save the seeds out of that thing. We're going to plant that thing. And through generations of this selective breeding of crops that either create higher yields or better, you know, more edible or more nutritious things, we come to, you know, get a lot of the things we know today as just our staples that we thought they were always like that. And then kind of going along with what you said, once you're able to set up shop and start growing these crops that your society can eat, when your society is fed,

you're going to be able to spend more time when you know, you're worrying less about survivability. Now you have time for those other pursuits. You can start to develop, you know, structures and buildings and temples and public works and things like that. And so after being able to set up shops, start these chnambas, start growing this thing, they start to actually terraform this island into a livable area. They basically create these causeways that connect three different routes to the mainland. I think one of them was to the north, the south, and the west. And these causeways weren't just these little rickety floating bridges. They cut down trees, took the stakes and literally drove them into the bedrock about, I think they said maybe 20, it might

have been more than 20 feet apart because when the conquistroars came, they said you could ride on these causeways men on horses 10 wide. Yeah, 10 wide, that's right. So you would drive these stakes. So basically the stakes were there to kind of give you a structure. Yeah. And then you would thatch on the sides of them and then basically by hand with people carrying stuff on their backs with like carrying the straps around their foreheads.

They would start to bring out rocks and dirt, and you would basically just be dumping them into the water. And then it would build up and build up. And eventually they got these causeways that stretched for, I don't think they were miles necessarily, but some of them were really fairly long, like half mile. Yeah, it was, yeah, 500 meters, 600 meters, something like that. So you would have these causeways that you would then have to have strong enough that you could start bringing in larger stones and building materials that you were going to have to be bringing in from, you know, the shore. these causeways also had fucking draw bridges on them. The drawbridges were there to allow people in canoes to be able to travel through the causeways

because again they weren't just like suspension bridges or anything. They were solid. So you had to have these drawbridges where people could go underneath them and also just raise up the drawbridge and no one could invade your island. You'd hate to be out past curfew if you were living. You're running down the causeway and you hear the click, click, click of the drawbridge coming back up. All of a sudden you get home and you're just. So it was like, what happened? Like, I had to fucking swim.

They pulled the drawbridges up. So we were now have a way to protect ourselves on this island. We're developing this island. They were basically, you made the comparison of what they've been doing over in, like, Dubai. Yeah.

Where they've been basically creating these islands out in the Gulf and everything. They were bringing in all of this soil and all of these materials from the shore and just basically extending this island and making it solid to where they could start building on it. they ran into an issue where they were like, okay, we don't have a water source. You know, we have this fresh water that's coming in from these springs, but it's mixing with this brackish water really doesn't isn't conducive for growing these crops.

We need to find a way to separate and keep this brackish, this salt water, away from our island to where these crops will actually grow a little bit better. So they created a dike that was 10 miles long. It went north to south. and if you're thinking of the lake, just think of the lake as a clock, basically you would have kind of over in the nine o'clock position, that area between the center and the clock and nine o'clock would be where their city and their island was. So basically, in order to keep the brackish water out, they went from 11 o'clock down to like 7 o'clock and just draw a straight line down there. So they're separating the two portions of the lake from each other. When you don't have to separate it completely, you just have to separate it out enough to where there's enough fresh water that won't be mixing with all of the salt water.

To keep a current from coming in to keep the water mixing. So this dike is 10 miles long, north to south. The thing was 26 feet high, 11 feet wide. And it had a couple like slu skates in it to where they could during, they also built it to control flooding because floods would come down. It would flood into their side of the lake and then wash away a bunch of shit that they had. Don't want to be on an island. And especially one that's that low to the water. The water raises it all.

You're kind of fucked. So they built this not only to keep out the saline water, but they built this to basically serve as a dyke in which to prevent flooding the island. So this thing was also solid, too. It almost looked like, I'm trying to think of the comparison. Have you ever seen those fences where they do kind of the overlapping wood? Like some of it will go out to the outer post and then it dips into the inner post and goes out. Like lattice? It was a lattice work, yes.

So basically they had these huge lattice panels that would just kind of like go in and out of the support beams. They had to been fucking crazy to see. Oh, yeah. I don't imagine that I could really contextualize any of this stuff in my mind to like get a picture of it. Because it just there's so much of the impossible of these people being so old that they would have come up with some of just this. beautiful architecture. Well, I mean, it seems, I think that's the thing, too, that kind of, that I have to kind of remind myself of this is we're talking, like, this is really 13, there's civilization existed from 1,300 to 1521, 1520-ish. That's common era. It wasn't that

long ago, but they do have similarities to other ancient civilizations that we've talked about, which just lends to the thing we've said in multiple episodes. Everyone finds their way to the same thing at some point in their, in their development, not by outside influence or anything, but there are just certain things that civilizations figure out as far as, you know, agriculture or building structures, what the strongest structure that you can make is. And this is a civilization that's just kind of coming into its own at this point. Like with a lot of other modern civilizations, we've talked about, aqueducts were a big thing. We talked about it with the Nabatians. We've talked about it with the Romans. But the Aztecs, the Mexica, they actually created a system of aqueducts.

They would build these aqueducts. I think they said that they were about two and a half miles long. They would go up into the mountains. They were made a terracotta. And they were almost like dual channel. So you would basically have two of these channels running side by side. One of them, they said that they would meticulously keep. clean. This was the one that actually provided the drinking water and the bathing water and

everything like that for the city. The other one they really didn't care about. What it was there for was when they had to shut off the water to the other one to actually clean it out, which they were doing on like a weekly basis. They were hygiene freaks. These people liked to bathe. They said common bathing was like two times a day and the emperor was or the king was actually bathing four times a day. Doesn't save from smallpox eventually. I was going to say it's so tough to hear that know how they eventually go out. And that kind of like, you get some of these guys that rule until they're, don't die until they're 70.

And you're like, that's fucking nuts. But when you're thinking about it from a cleanliness standpoint and germs and stuff like that, you're like, it actually kind of makes sense that they would be living longer. Well, on the flip side of the coin, in the same vein that you started talking about to begin the episode, really the difference in this story and the difference in the, North American and South American continents. I guess you would call it the American continents and then the Eurasian continent is only like a couple centuries worth of this group think that's going on in Eurasia. Because you have, just like we were talking about with the corn in the maze, this wasn't something that the Aztecs had created.

This was something that the Aztecs continued to build upon from the time of the Olmex when they found this first kind of first generation corn. and then it went for hundreds of years, thousands of years, until it became something that was edible. Just like over in Macedonia when I was talking about the wheat. Wheat was just literally a grass that seeded on top.

And they got hungry enough that they ate it, realized that it didn't work. They found something that was a genetic anomaly, a little bit bigger, something that they could digest. And then through thousands of years, they adapted it into what we know now is wheat.

Wheat drove everything back then. Wheat was a staple in their diet it because it was something that they could grow pretty much everywhere and they had not genetically modified it enough but sort of evolved it enough to be able to be eaten and grown wherever they needed it yeah that happened a few thousand years before any of the real american continent stuff started out with maize and they're kind of one in the same as far as like base dietary structural things that they ate but because they were able to do it first and they were able to get it down more then they can start working on other things.

And once that starts to spread out, you can start working on weapons. You can start working on gunpowder that you would get from the Asians that would then be brought across in the Silk Road. You don't got to worry about creating that. It's already been created. All that is is just a little bit of money in the Chinese pocketbook for you to get a hold of that technology. There's also the requirement of necessity. Yeah. If they're living in a place, you know, in Eurasian everything, people seem to always constantly be at war.

there's only certain amount of territory that they can fight over there so you're constantly having to up your game from like a technological standpoint for warfare so there's almost a necessity to do it if you would just be left in peace you'd be like no we don't need to fucking develop weapons no one around here fights and while the Aztecs did you know the Mahika did fight with other tribes and everything these weren't other tribes that were coming at them with you know more advanced weaponry or anything like that. Everyone was on a level playing field as far as what they had to fight with. So there really wasn't a need

to search out a way to upgrade these weapons. It was just making your warriors better. Yeah. You don't need to create a sword because swords are, you have to go through the Bronze Age, Copper Age, all that stuff to get to the point of being in the metal age to create those

weapons. Whereas where they were in the Valley of Mexico and you have a lot of this volcanic activity, you have a volcanic glass known as obsidian. Now, obsidian can be sharper than surgical steel, which is really scary to think about that a rock can be sharpened to that point just through flint napping it to get it down to an edge that's that fine.

But at the same time, when you're dealing with a volcanic glass, there's a certain level of fragility that you can't create a sword out of. So what do you do? You grab yourself a stick. You try to attach as much volcanic glass in this obsidian as possible. flint nap that till it's sharp as shit and then you just go swinging at somebody yeah and the person is swinging

something similar as you and you haven't developed any type of armor aside from animal skins that can really stop that or if you go to jab someone if it's just poking into either flesh or animal skin or something like that it's much less likely to break

than if you're trying to poke into like a piece of armor which we're going to find out about here in just a little bit so you know this city is developing and as they start to develop and kind of like come into their own, these other city states around here are starting to kind of take notice. Now, it's not exactly like they're just being left to their own devices and everything. They're still considered, you know, although a city state in their own, they're still kind of considered underneath what, you know, the main ones that

kind of control the area are. Teppanek. Yeah. And when you have these certain rulers like Chris was talking about just growing into old old age. Before we get into that, the first known ruler that we have of the Aztec of the Mahika is a guy named Akamapitli. Akamipitjali was their first ruler. He was the one that grew up to know Chilin and created it as far as like the base of

this is our society, this is what's going to happen, this is where we're going to do all of our business from. Like we were just talking about they were still under this tepeneck rule now this tepeneck rule had a king and this is so crazy to me that I just I can't believe it it's impossible for me to believe um the tepeneck would require tribute to be paid from all of these city states because they were kind of the leaders well in a society like this where your king is the most powerful person and if your king dies you will always have a struggle for the crown because of the throne these weren't uh What were we talking about during the monarchy episodes? They're not hereditary monarchy. Yeah, it's... It's not my blood.

Fucking... Progenital or... Yeah. Premageniture. You're not... Like, your firstborn son doesn't just become the king because he's your firstborn son. You even can go outside the family to get new rulers.

And so this Teppanek king, his name was... To Zosomak, he was the Teppinac king. They said that he had made it to the ripe old age of 100. I'm not buying 100. But at the same time, even if he lived to 80, you're still banging for a good majority of those years. And as you stay king and you keep getting more children and more children and more children, there's always going to be a struggle for the crown as soon as,

is Tezozomok dies. So what ends up being happening or what ends up happening is Tezozomach is replaced by his son. Taitazan. Taitazin was then poisoned by his brother, Mark Salta. And you have the leading power structure in this whole valley is all of a sudden up for grabs.

Because these guys can't figure out how to fight their way into having their own king. So you're probably not sending troops out to collect tributes and do other things. As soon as you show weakness, you have the Aztec Empire that gets created out of something called the Triple Alliance between the

Tenochitlan, the Tzko, and the Talakopan. This ends up happening in 1428 and this Triple Alliance gets together. They basically become like,

I don't want to say World War II Triple Alliance type deal. No. But still. Yeah, it was, what do we call the... Axis? The Axis forces was us. No, no, the Allies were us.

The Allies, yeah, the Allies. That's what I was going for, not the Axis. The Tripartite is what we call it, one with the bad guys. And when you create this superpower, you have the people in Teno Cheatlin that are very good warriors, that are already very strong,

their own right. You have the, shit, what was the other one? So Tetskoko and then Tla Koppan. Yeah. And as part of this, you know, the triple alliance, you basically have Tenochiklan taking the lead on this. Even though they're kind of the new kid on the playground, they've already kind of established power. Their warriors were already good when they first came into this area.

And so they're kind of taken this, taking the lead in this, but they have the backing and the support of these other two cities. Well, there's chaos going on over in the Tepinac society. And so while there's this power vacuum and people fighting over this leadership, the time is right to strike. And so this Triple Alliance ends up taking down the Tepinac society. And out of that, because the Aztecs are the strongest, the Mhika are the strongest, they kind of then become the new de facto power. And eventually everything in that area kind of falls under the umbrella of what we know is the Aztec Empire.

So kind of in the same way that we talked about with the Inkins, Incan was just that you were under the umbrella of the Incan Empire. The Incan were a very, very small portion of that. Kind of the same deal here. You would be under the Aztec Empire, but you could be from these different villages, these different tribes, things like that, but technically you were all considered at one point or another Aztecs

until the Aztec Empire was no more. You also had a common language spoken among them. It was called Nawatol. And Navatol was spoken all over the valley. It was kind of specific to the Aztecs

as far as that went, but everybody just kind of understood it. Ten No Chitlan partnering with Tetskoko and Talakopan, those two weren't really pushovers either.

Those two were very, very good at what they did. And so when you bring three fairly strong empires like that together, you can create basically the power structure that you wanted to replace,

which at that point, once you take over, you start kind of doing the same thing that you were mad at the Tepinac's about. You start asking for tributes from these other city states, and they start paying you. You have the empire expanding, though. It formed large enough eventually to touch the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

That was how wide this empire was. The entirety of Mexico, west to east. And it's not the girtiest portion of Mexico or Central America, but still for this society and this empire to kind of basically just come out of this base and this valley in Mexico to encompass this entire area. Also, weird thing is, so they had this area

that was all kind of touching itself. It was spreading out from one location. And then they actually took over this one area that was more like southeastern. Yeah. Because it was it had a bunch of cacao. Yep. Which is huge because I think another reason that we hear a lot about the Aztecs is because of hot cocoa. It's just another kind of layer and fold into this. As they're expanding, their religion eventually starts to evolve to have this supreme god named Omatol, which was kind of like the creation god. It was a mix of two other gods.

And is that being built? Then you have... With Sula Pochli being almost like their patron god of like... Tenetchitlan. Yes. This, I believe, was the feathered serpent. Quetzalcottle was the feathered serpent? Okay.

It's hard to keep the names to say. They had gods and the gods had names. Kind of a unique thing also with the way the... That's right. Whitsopocily was... It translates to left-handed hummingbird. Yeah. Humber on the left or something like that.

Yeah. But it was, it carried a weapon and its left hand that was a fire serpent. Sounds pretty badass. I got to say, if you got to... If you're going to have a hummingbird that has a weapon on it, a fire serpent is going to be what you're going to want that hummingbird to have, I think. They were just trying to figure out the gods. They're like, what if it's a hummingbird? They're like, kind of a pussy.

And they're like, no, no, no, wait, but it has like a fire serpent. They're like, I like what I'm here and keep going. Kind of one of the unique things about the Aztec Empire as well is that although they had, this tribute system where these different cities would of course have to then, you know, pay their tithe and everything. They also had a lot of like, they kind of let them govern themselves. They still had people in leadership positions. I mean, of course, there was still like the supreme rule that was in Tenocht Glend, but you had these cities that were basically running themselves and that was good with them as long as they were paying their, you know, their tribute or

whatever it was. So as they're taking over this area, of course, is they're the top dog Now they have access to pretty much all the resources that they need. And they start to not so much expand, but they start to actually be able to kind of take on some of these larger building projects and try to spruce up their island a little bit. They end up creating. And if you guys haven't already, look up kind of an artist rendering. You okay there, buddy? Yeah. Is that a big one?

Yep. Long way. So it looks like, you know, it's this. When the Spanish Versaught, they didn't believe what they were saying. They thought they were in a dream. and I don't know what it would look like. If you look at the renderings of it, to see something like this coming over the hilltop

in the middle of like this jungle type area, it had to seem like what you would think of like as El Dorado. Oh yeah. Or just like a lost, a lost land. And they had these, from an engineering standpoint, like a civil engineering standpoint, they'd actually started to create like a city block type structure. So they had these four zones or,

what they called camps. And then in each camp, there were 20 districts called the Kapuli. Now, each Kapuli had like its own marketplace. So they were like the way that you kind of probably think about, if you're thinking about New York, you have like the East Village and you have Manhattan

and like Brooklyn, and all these different little districts or boroughs and things like that. You had these different little boroughs or districts or camps that were, you know, or built up in the city. And each one,

had kind of their own social class as well. Like the people that were higher up in the social structure were the ones that were closer to the center, which they were closer to like the temples and, you know, what's going to be the palace for the king and everything. So with these capulis that they had, they would have sometimes like with these big markets, like 20,000 people coming through here to trade like in the main markets like daily and during like feast days you could have as many as 40,000. they said by the time that the Spanish actually got there Tenocchiklan had one of the highest population concentrations at the time roughly about one million people

it could be in the valley in the valley not on the on the island they said it was about 50,000 they believe they said on the island it could have been up to 200 could have been but at the same time they were using metrics that and at the same time too fantastical yeah and you also have to think if it's someplace where they now have the ability to spread out because they're ruling the territory, I feel like the city would almost become a place where the higher-ups would all live. Yeah. So, like, instead of being like, well, we have these areas that are like, you know, the people

that are lower in the societal structure, they'd be like, well, why don't we just have all of like the main movers and shakers live on the island? Because this is the capital city. And then we can just move all those people out to the outer areas, like on the shore. Out to the burbs or out to the furbs or out to the. farm areas where they could actually do some farming outside of the city. But I mean, the way that this was set up in the city center itself, this is where it housed all of like the public buildings, where they had their ballgame courts. Those were kind of at the base of their main temple.

They had a thing called the Eagles House, which we'll actually touch base on here in just a little bit. We'll talk about the ballgame too. Yeah. They had this thing called the skull rack. Did you see the skull rack? Pretty disturbing. So, um, saw a Mayan one in person. It was very discered. It was very disturbing. Was it? Yeah. So a skull rack is basically like, you know those towel racks sometimes people have that are supposed to look like ladders, except they have just the dowels and you hang towels or blankets

on them in their house? Yeah, I think it's just drying racks, aren't they? Exactly. Imagine that, but really, really big, except instead of towels, it's just crammed with human fucking skulls. Like the whole, the dowel is jammed through one side of the skull, out the side of the other side of the skull. It's like a skull abacus is what it looks like.

I'm going to get you with something that may have been in your trial. hood. Definitely in mine. Doug Fony. Yeah. Remember Doug? Yeah. Do you remember the game that they used to play? Beatball?

They had the beatball racks? Yes. That's kind of what they look like to me. That is kind of what it looked like. So with, except with the dowels shoved through the human skulls. Uh-huh. No beat balls on this one, just human skulls. So they also had this thing called the Templo Mayor.

And the Templo Mayor was their main temple in the center of, um, Teno, Teno. Why can I keep not pronouncing this word? Tenotichschen. You have to say it like four very large syllables. Tenotichlan. Yeah, close enough. Good enough for two white guys. This temple was dedicated to Witslil.

Witszzilopochle. God, I feel like I had these down last night when I was trying to say these. Who was the god of war? He's basically the Aztec version of Cratos. And then you had Talak, which is the god of rain. Now on top of this temple, you actually, they each had a shrine. So you had these two mini temples on top of this one larger pyramid-esque type temple with these two staircases going up one to each of these little shrines at the top. It had a central spire in the middle that was dedicated to Quetzal Cottle, who was the feathered serpent god. And it was about 200 feet tall. The base, the base structure of it was, I think, 320 feet by 262 feet. And over the course of their civilization, which again was only what, like a a little over 200 years.

They rebuilt this thing six times. And when they rebuilt it, it's not like it got knocked down. They basically just started building on top of it in the same type of structure to just keep making it bigger and bigger. So it was a Russian nesting doll of these temples. They just basically had a smaller temple inside it

and then built on top of that, then built on top of that one when they were able to. Yeah. Also, you got the other fun fact about that, right? while they were doing road construction in Mexico City. Electric company. But they pulled up the road, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, and they were trying to run power lines.

They actually stumbled upon under the streets of Mexico City, 500 plus years, 600 plus years maybe since this was built. They found the base of the structure. There was a large circular stone disc. And it was, it's not, is it a relief? I think so. When you carve something out of one thing and you bring up the things you want them to see instead of recessing that. I think it's a relief. A relief of the one of their goddesses who was dismembered as I'm trying to say part of their lore or part of their creation story.

But this giant stone disc sat at the base of where these steps came down. And as they were doing these sacrifices on this temple, they would cut the heart out, which, did you hear about how the heart can still beat and how long it can beat for? As long as it still has some sort of blood flowing in it, it can still... To create the muscular constriction, everything like that. Disturbing. It's literally Indiana Jones show where he's holding up the beating heart, and it's still actually beating. I thought a dumb and dumber first.

Oh, yeah. So as these, the hearts were taken out, the bodies would then be in situations dismembered, and be thrown from the steps of these temples to fall down the steps to land on this stone disk. And so by finding this stone disk, it's not like it had been moved or relocated. They essentially found the location of where the templo mayor was actually sat. And so I think they called out like some of the heritage or whoever you would call out for like for probably a lot of professors and archaeologists and everything. and they've demolished like a sizable portion of the structures that were around. Of course, they probably, I hope they bought the tenants out.

We're like, hey, we need to do this. You have to. And they've done excavations, and they started to excavate the base of where this temple was, which is crazy because this place was essentially leveled and Mexico City was built on its ruins. So to find this is a huge deal. And they basically just paved over it. and then where they put the rocks over the top of it, they laid a layer of asphalt,

and then they laid another layer of asphalt. And eventually, when you get down to the center of it, you're going to be able to find some very cool stuff because nothing was ever taken out. It would take you so much longer to try to dig that base out than to just pour over the top of it. I know. They didn't have any care for it at that point.

They were just trying to move along. It was more work to dig the base out than just to pour over the top of it, and they were never thinking that it would ever be dug down or found again. This is New Spain, baby. Nobody's going to be digging down here. We don't need to dig. Not that big of a deal. All right.

Before we go any further, let's take a bathroom break. Okay. Oh my God, Adam. What is that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's socials! Oh my God.

It's faster than Instagram. That's historically high pod on Instagram. More powerful than X? It's historically high, historically H.I. on X? Able to leap tall threads. in a single bound. Back to historically high pod on thread. And, I mean, I guess there's still Gmail, right?

We got that too. That is historically high podcast at gmail.com. All right, guys, back to the show. All right. Now we get into somebody that most people will be familiar with. Sort of. Or the name. But to get into him, we have to talk about a little more sacrifice.

Okay. So there was a little something that they had. in Tino Cheatlan. I hope I got that right. I'm just going to call it Tilon. I haven't spotted it on the board, so I hope I said that right. Called the Red Temple. And the Red Temple was where the sacrifices took place.

As we talked about earlier, this was much less a sacrifice of your own people, which, I mean, the other thing is a lot of the estimates that are given about the amount of sacrifices they believe to have occurred. Just don't add up because the general. math of like the population that was in the valley, if you sacrifice 50,000 people, that's going to be a noticeable amount of people that are gone from the valley, right? It was, it was the temple mayor that they called the red temple as well, because the side that they would actually do the sacrifices on was the Witsila-Pochle and then the other one was the god of rain. Hers was painted, I think,

white and blue, the shrine at the top. His was painted red. And because they did so many sacrifices on that side to everything. I think that's why it's stained. Like fucking two-faced from Batman. Yeah. So when they would conduct these sacrifices, getting into a little sacrifice talk here, what Chris

referred to when he said that they would cut their hearts out and they would potentially still be beating, there was a belief that the sun was run by the power of life. The power of life they believed was the power of light. The power of light was in the heart. So in removing the

heart and offering that up to the god it would be placed in a separate bowl that would continue to power the sun then they'd cut your head off and then they would they dismember the rest of you dismember the rest of you sometimes the guy that captured you got to take part of the dismembering that actually when we start talking about the warriors they got part of that yeah but all the pieces would then be collected at the bottom of the temple and they would be taken to a zoo The zoo was in the Palace of Montezuma. And the Palace of Montezuma was a palace in every sense of the word. Being described by the Spanish, the temple or the palace had like somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 rooms, each with its own bath.

These are probably slight exaggerations, but even if we cut it in half and say that a Mesoamerican King's Temple or Palace had 50 rooms all with their own bath, that's still pretty fucking bonkers. Yeah, it's a lot of work. Dos zoos, two zoos, an aquarium, botanical gardens, which, speaking of gardens, I forgot to mention this, also a way that they made use of their land, the houses had rooftop gardens in which they would grow stuff in. It's brilliant. And they said walk in when they were riding their horses, because, I mean, the Spanish, because there weren't horses. Can we talk about the fucking horses? Finish it and then we'll get out of the horses. Okay.

When they were riding their horses down, just songbirds. Birds of Paradise and everything were just in the trees and like the rooftop gardens around them. They thought that they had just, they'd never seen anything or imagine anything like that. All right. Horses. Some people may know this. A lot of people may know this. I really hadn't thought about it too much because when we see pictures of the American West, like, you know, back in the good old days, you always see groups of wild horses, you know, running across the planes and everything.

of the Midwest. So there were horses here a very long, long, long, long, long time ago. They then went extinct here before, like, people were showing up. They were only over in, I think they stayed over in what, like, the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, like, like, it was like that. It wasn't until the Spanish came back or came in, the Conquist stores came in, the horses were reintroduced to the continent. That's, that's, that's, so these people are like, what the fuck are these.

people riding. They thought they were just some type of like mutant deer. They're giant deer. Giant deer. Without any horns on them or without any handlers. But just to think about that, I'm sure we talked about it. The Mayan episode, I'm sure we talked about it. I think we had alpacas for the Inca episode. But the Maya episode, I'm sure we talked about no horses. The fact that there were horses here and then they went extinct is just kind of nuts because we just got horses reintroduced. Like we got a second chance with horses and then they thrived.

That's the thing too. If they were only reintroduced back as far as what like 1400, let's just even say that, there's, they're just, you would never imagine this was a land without horses. Yeah. They were, there's so many of them and they

repopulated so fucking quick. Yeah, I don't know. You talk about the horses? Look, he had himself a zoo. Montezuma, the first, had himself a zoo. That to me is pretty incredible and sort of funny that he had a zoo and then Pablo Escobar had the zoo too. Matt Damon had a zoo. He bought a zoo. I think they were a little

different. A little bit different. Um, Markizuma did a lot of just kind of big things. Uh, interestingly enough, he was the son of a man named Wheatellewit. I'm going to go with that. Um, wheat man. But he was, um, he was. wasn't from their tribe on the island. He was actually from, I believe it was Tlacalan. But still an Aztec technically. Yeah, technically an Aztec. But you went outside the capital city to bring in Moktizuma.

That's the thing is it, like we were talking about, it wasn't a, what was the really technical term for it? Uh, primogeniture of heredity. That you could be put into the position. off your military accolades or off your, you know, political accolades or off your, how, just your skills. So they would find the best person they thought for this job. You would get people that were like, still were like, well, he's the grandson of this guy. So he must have that gene in him. So he's going to be a big name already. Like a Kennedy. Monizuma is going to be basically the Kennedys of the assets. Yes. That's pretty apt description. But this wasn't something where the king died and then his son just took over. They would actually

put someone in there that would be able to do the job. So yeah, when he first got in there, he led one of the bigger expansions of the area. And so he got in there and he's like, okay, things are going good at home. Let's start spreading our wings a little bit and just started kind of branching out, taking over different villages and towns. And guess what? As you're taking over those areas, you're having all of that stuff and all that trip you flow back into you. He started out in a pretty tough situation because they had actually had a famine. kind of right at the beginning of his rule. So he...

So things were not looking good there. No, but through it all, he reformed social structure. He reformed their political system. He put in different economic reforms just because he had so much new tribute flowing in that he had to figure out a different way to spend this money. He was also known for creating something called the Flower Wars. It sounds really nice, huh? They sound pretty great.

It was a mixture of sort of like a dance, a tribute, and then like a soft core war. It was a military resource fight gathering operation. It served two purposes. Someone was getting a little bit ballsy. You felt someone was getting a little bit too big in their bridges in your area. You could challenge them to a flower war. Now, they could technically refuse because this was a situation where it would be really hard to perform siege warfare on like an established place that had defenses. You'd lose a ton of your guys and like,

you know, T-Lon is not willing to go ahead to do that because then it weakens them and they want to meet these guys in kind of an even battle. So these flower wars essentially served as a flex, but at the same time, they needed to capture people to keep up, to keep the sun going through all these sacrifices. So they had to go to flow. Maybe that's why. Sun, flowers, flower war. Boom, figured it out. There was something about the way that they would speak of language, or the way that, like, they use their language was sort of, for lack of a better term, not trying to make a pun here, a flowery way of speaking.

So flower was like a term for like a, someone who has just sprung, of agile, virile, viral warrior, which to me, the word flower doesn't really describe in any sort of way, but they used. certain turns of phrase to make things sound better than they were. And this, I think it was definitely calling the Flower War something that ended up with sacrifice. It made it, it made it sound less bad. Like, oh, they're doing another Flower War. I guess it can't be that bad. So basically, what would happen is there were like arrangements to these fights. This wasn't just meeting two armies as many people as they could field out in combat.

You had rules. You could feel this many people. We can feel the same amount of people. If one of the cities is like, hey, like, we don't have, like, weapons or as good of weapons as you guys, this is going to be really unfair. T. Lon would be like, we will lend you the weapons so you will fight us because they were basking it off the strength of their warriors. And they needed those sweet, sweet sacrifices. So they would get into these battles. They would, at the same time, weaken these other territories.

so they weren't able to challenge them, and they would have this new influx of people that they could cut open and keep the lights on. One of these people, one of these villages, city-states that they did this too, and we're mentioning it now, we're going to swoop back around because they're going to be the pivotal kind of city-state

and this whole story, even more so than the Aztec Empire, because they're kind of the stumbling block. Telexcala, I believe is what it was. Tala-Kala. to laxcala, I'm going to go with that. T'cala. They were pretty strong.

And through all these flower wars that they just constantly kept finding themselves in, they had created enough of sort of like a reputation that they were openly hostile towards the Aztecs as far as they weren't paying tribute,

but at the same time, it would have been so much harder to go in and knock them in line that the Aztex were kind of like, all right, you know, unspoken agreement. You don't pay. You don't mess around.

We'll call it good. So they kind of bullied these people who were not necessarily the next in line and strength, but kind of the biggest pest. Yeah. The ones that were, it was going to be too costly to try to take care of. They played this game called Talachi. Oh, hold on. We got to talk about the Warriors. Okay.

Yeah. No, that's perfect. It's a good fit. So the purpose of this was not to kill the enemy. You wanted to capture them. Not like it wasn't a game of like capture the flag where if you get all the enemy out like you win and everything. This was like we're taking these guys.

We need these guys alive. We can't sacrifice corpses. So you as far as a soldier and a warrior, you would get promoted by the more people you actually captured. So if you were able to capture, once you captured your second person, You were given a, you were basically a Jaguar Warrior. You were given the skin of a Jaguar, which I don't imagine is just a skin.

I want to see it like with the head, with the like fangs on the forehead, like you see wearing like Hercules and shit would wear. Tropic Thunder style. Exactly. I want to, with the panda. Yep. Exactly. So you had your Jaguar warriors at two captures. If you got to four captures, you were made an Eagle Warrior.

That was fucking big dick. Like you could go from nothing. you could go from lowest in society. If you became an eagle warrior, it meant that you could find your way into nobility. That's how much emphasis they put on like this warrior culture. Political player for four people. So this is where the Eagle House that I mentioned earlier comes in.

It was like the headquarters where they would do like their initiations or their promotions. Now, you were asking how difficult you think it would be just to capture two guys. And the way you mentioned it, you kind of seemed like you thought it was two guys in one battle. Like if you could just go and capture two guys real quick, one battle, you can make Jaguar. Yeah. So I think it probably took a little bit more than that because you, the other guys know what you're trying to capture them for. So I don't think that while you're trying to keep someone alive, that other person is not trying to keep you alive.

They're trying to kill you. So it's much harder to capture them. Not only that, you can't just stab them and then pop back up to defend yourself from somebody else. You're having to wrestle them and get them down and tie them up and subdue them while all around you, all of their buddies and everything, are fighting for their lives and someone could just come and stab you in the back. I think it was like, that's why I think it was such a big deal to be even able to get to two, why it was so they were made Jaguar Warrior II because it would be insanely hard even to just do this with one guy. To be fair, in my assessment of that situation, I was picturing a large man like me against two little tribesmen. No. These guys were surviving off of Mays, and of course they were better fed, but...

I survive off a steak. These are still a people that were not... Man, I think the heighten for these guys was probably somewhere around, like, what, maybe tall would be 5'10. Yeah, so I got seven inches on the tallest guy. You do, but there weren't other, there weren't guys like you there fighting on, they might have been your, you know, your anomalies.

I think I could have been a Jaguar fairly quickly. I don't know, man. Someone trying to stab and cut at you and everything. You got to be fucking crazy to be, to get to Eagle, even. The other thing, too, is talking about, like, the weapons that they were using coming into play when the Kinkees stores show up.

So the obsidian, glass that we were talking about that you could get to a really honed edge. They would of course use that for like the sacrificial knives, but they were also using it on their weapons. And one of the weapons that just sounds so fucking cool, it was basically a baseball bat. And then the baseball bat basically had like strips or shards of obsidian just jammed into it. So it was like, what was off of Walking Dead? Negan, the dude that had the baseball bat with like the chain and the nails and everything like that. It was basically a giant club with a bunch of razors embedded in it. And then they would have like sword type and daggers and shit.

But you're trying to capture someone that's also trying to swat at you and stab at you at you with that kind of stuff. This is Mick Foley's Bar-Boyer baseball bat. Pretty much. Just swing that. I still think if I got one too, there's going to be a chance. Also, something that just blows me away, too, is they had bows and arrows. Yeah. That was something that, again, a world away, two separate continents.

I had no idea that either one of them existed. Columbus thought that it was Asia. And I'm not too certain to say, but I'm willing to say, they probably thought it was Asia too for a little while once they got over there. But they both created the same technology in a bow and arrow without seeing a copy of that in either way. Question for you. Oh, and now are related. So you know how there's that method of starting a fire where you can wrap it around the stick and you can back and forth kind of like seesaw?

bow method? Yes. Do you think that the bow, which one do you think came first? The bow method of starting a fire like that, because fire had been something that had been around forever. Mastered. Mastered. So there had to have been the quickest ways of trying to get this. Every way to start a fire had to have been explored.

Don't have a piece of steel. You might find one on the ground for a flint and steel. So if that came first, at one point did somebody just see playing around with that thing when that string was taught and they were trying to fire little sticks off at or launch little rocks or because you also had slings and slingshot. Yeah. So you were trying to figure out and you also had those, um, trying to think about that. At-little? No, no, no. Fuck, I just, the name just escaped me. It was the stick that you would lay the arrow along and then when you flung it, it would fling the, I'm trying to remember what those things were called. I think it's called an Atlattle. Oh, I didn't

hear you, I thought you said something else. Yes, it's an Adel-Lat-Lat- It sounds like gibberish when you say it. Yeah. I had my, I usually don't wear both my headsets so I can actually hear you talking. But yeah. But yeah, so not only are you having to try to capture someone, you have death projectiles raining from the sky as well. But very hard to capture too. I don't think they were using a lot of that during these flower wars. And I'm not trying to say that to bolster my own case.

But just like we talked about, their style of warfare wasn't really about trying to kill their enemy. Their style wasn't. The other guy's style was probably like. No, fucking kill these guys because they're going to try to capture you. I think it was a rules of engagement thing. I think both sides had to agree to the same thing. I don't think so. I just, I don't know.

But if you capture our guys, you have to kill them. I think I'm making Eagle Scout faster than I made. You have to kill them just so you know. Yeah, I think I. You guys have a temple? We'll build you a temple. So when you capture our guys, you can kill them. Along with that, before we get into the Talachli,

Just like you were talking about with the aqueduct, Montezuma I was the person that completed that. It was 7.5 miles. 12 kilometers. This aqueduct system that stretched from the hills to the shore. The territorial gains outside of the Valley of Mexico were huge because this brought all the exotic birds. It brought seashells into a landlocked area.

It also, as you pointed out earlier, brought the cacao seeds into the Aztec Empire, which is what was ground down and mixed with spices, and it is where you get hot chocolate from. Also cotton. Yeah. Not cotton from cacao. They also acquired cotton.

Very, very hard to grow cotton in the valley. It doesn't grow well in mountains for some reason. But as you stretched out and you were able to get, and I guess a more arid climate, you would be able to grow cotton a hell of a lot better. Rubber, which blows me away to think, I mean, I don't know where. I think I always thought that rubber trees just grew in like Asia.

Yeah. Because we talked about rubber for World War II. Yeah. I, as a resource to try to, yeah, for all the vehicles and stuff. Yeah. I want to see what raw rubber looks like. Is it?

Yep. Just the meat of the tree itself is just what, what's the consistency? Because this is, of course, what they would have access to. So I'm trying to figure out what type of uses they could use it for. Like a latex. Sort of like a sticky latex. ball. Really?

Yeah. It's very interesting. There's videos all over. Maybe it's just my algorithm that they come up in, but they take like a triangular knife and they cut basically like a circle around the tree. It's sloping down and then they put a like a duct or something into it. And as the tree just bleeds out the rubber, it rolls all the way down the tree and then down into the bucket like they collect.

And every time you need to do it, every time that dries out and stops producing. You just cut new couple rings around it. I have rubber questions after we're done reporting this. Okay. Tell me about the sport. Oh, okay. So Tlachli was this game that was played with a rubber ball. It was played with two hoops on either end.

And you would think, hey, we're headed towards basketball. Holy shit, the Aztecs invented basketball. Well, the rules were you could only touch the ball with your elbows, your knees, or your hips. So you couldn't use your hands in your feet. so you couldn't use your hands and your feet at any point in time. I don't know how they got it off the ground. I don't know how they sustained this rubber ball in the air. Maybe they figured out how to dribble with their elbows or their knees or something like that.

But then I'm assuming you would have to bump it off of a hip or an elbow to be able to put it in this goal. Yeah. And the deal was, was the winner won, and the loser would get decapitated. This game was also played by the Maya and the Eka. As you were talking about this, I was like, oh shit. Yeah. I'm like, we talked, did we get the Inca information wrong? Because this sounded so familiar.

How the fuck? Were they all playing the same game? I can't go down this right now. You did with what resources you had, or maybe the aliens taught them each of the game. Who knows? But yeah, playing to the death. Fucking high stakes, Totsley. This was mostly played by prisoners because obviously you don't want your warriors to lose a game and die.

gladiatorial shit. Yeah, a little bit for entertainment, I'm sure. Along with all that other stuff that he brought in, I don't know if he exported the game too as well. Fruits were huge in the empire. There's always something in my mind that kind of thinks that pineapple is mostly Polynesian food, which it's in a lot of Polynesian dishes

and that kind of thing. But I never really think about them being grown in South America. and to think about like when Columbus first got himself his pineapples and was shocked by how they tasted, the Spanish kind of did the same thing as they rolled in. They're like, oh, this is the land of pineapples too. They didn't have any of that stuff in the valley. All that stuff had to be exported from the areas where it was able to be grown. So you have this massive market where it was like in Marrakesh, it would be spices.

But here you would walk through a market. You would see seashells. You would see these beautiful feathers from these birds. you would see these exotic fruits that grow on your island. That's where you got the bird, the quetzel feathers. Yeah. The big green plumage that you would see, like if you're looking at Aztec headdresses and everything, they got these big plumage, you know, beautiful green feathers.

So that's where you also kind of get some of the decoration for like the feathered serpent. But these things I don't think were native to like the area, like the valley. You had to go out and get them. And I think we talked about that during the Maya episode that they kind of did something similar. But you have this. big open, sprawling market that was outside that, again, sounds so Venetian. Yeah. Yet it's...

Like a bizarre. It's something that the Spanish walk into. And they're like, oh, my God, you guys do it over here too. You might do it better. When they showed up with the population as big as it wasn't, maybe it was at the time when Cortez actually showed up that they'd expanded out to the 200,000. Because at its peak, the size of Tilan was, I think they said, five square miles. Pretty fucking big. They said the size of it was only rivaled at the time by Paris, Venice, and Constantinople could have rivaled it.

It was larger than England at the time. Pretty cool. This was like the fucking gem of the Americas. Yeah. Just to continue on with the story. His half-brother, Telectal-L, something along those lines. Yeah. He was kind of behind-the-scenes guy.

He was offered the kingship on more than one occasion, but he just wanted to stay as this advisor that was sort of heard and not seen. He pushed the belief that the Aztecs were the chosen people. He was kind of the one running the propaganda arm of the Aztecs to get them to believe that they were someone who came. to this valley a hundred years ago. I don't want to see gerpals, but. No, no, no, but that's all that I think of when I hear propaganda is that.

True. But he was kind of the one that was like, you know, we did only get here 100 years ago, but our God told us that we were supposed to be here. And if this is our land, all of the people that live within it should be our subjects. We are the chosen people. A hundred years. Yeah. It's a little bit arrogance, I think.

at that point it may not even have been 100 years. It might have been 50, 60 years. There was a general piece kind of in the valley that was a constant throughout the 15th century. Not to say that there weren't squabbles or anything like that, but so much of the war that was happening was outside

of the valley. There wasn't any change in management that would throw anything into chaos or anything like that. Precisely, yeah. As Magdazuma I first led a pretty, he had a pretty good rain. He ended up raining. I believe it was from 1440 to 1469.

1469, his son, Ashtalek, Ash tolectal, I don't know. Ashtelect took the throne from 1469 to 1481. He just kind of kept the status quo. Keep the ball rolling. Yeah, he did well. Kept the piece. His brother, Tizzoch, would reign shortly after that, or Astewat,

he would reign shortly because Ashtawaddle, his brother would take the title of Huey Tolot. Huey, Tolochoyne. Jesus Christ. I think it's Hwey. He would take the title of Supreme

Ruler, that's what it relates to. Sorry, guys, we're an hour and a half into this, and these words are all blended together. Yeah. There was some rumors that he may have poisoned his brother to get into this position. So he poisoned Tizak. Yeah. Okay.

He was a great military leader. He started to suppress these rebellions that were coming out of the Swatech region. He reigned from 1486 to 1502. There was also between Moktizuma, just to give a little throw in. We're going to do some sweet female empowerment stuff a little bit later on. But they had a, what's like a ruler in waiting or like a placeholder? Oh, a heir. Yeah, a regent.

Okay. Not in waiting. A regent is someone that would take over in the absence of the ruler. This was like a regent king that was actually a regent queen. They had a female that kind of sat at the head in between the transition of Moktizuma into his son. But 1502, we get to the star of the show. The reason that you would know, Moktizuma. Moktizuma the second, he was the great-grandson of Moktizuma the first.

We've gone back and forth between Montezuma and Moktizuma. I think it's really the Spanish called him Moktizuma. His name is actually something somehow even harder to say than Moktizuma. I think it probably was abbreviated because of the Spanish records. There's a lot of this stuff that kind of throws me off. because from every perspective, I always assume that the native language that they speak is English. So saying Moktizuma in our English dialect sounds pretty tough. I'm not sure how it would sound in a Spanish.

Probably so easy. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But he was actually Moktizuma's great-grandson through Moktizuma's daughter. So this wasn't even the lineage coming through the paternal or the paternal side. paternal is dead yes it was coming through the maternal side um so as soon as he gets in got a party at the coronation right they popped a lot of mushrooms at the coronation and they trip balls for a very very long time they liked to do this yeah this was a big part of the aztec culture um they said that prior to the

sacrifice of an adult they would give them some sort of psilocybin that they had had to kind of loosen them up and prepare them for the afterlife. Yeah, it was to keep them from freaking the fuck out while they were getting dragged up the temple steps and about ready to get their, they were just whispering to them. They're like, no, no, no, we're going on, we're going on a car ride. Just going on a car ride. They had a group, a choir, no, not a choir. They'd have to have some sort of like an ancient band that would play like fish.

Yeah. To get them in the zone. Bad trip. Bad trip. Playing the Grateful Dead just to try to keep them calm until they get them up there. How many do you think it took them to figure that out? They're like, these guys are thrashing a lot when we're trying to get them up. We've lost like three guys from us losing our grip and then like falling down the temple.

Yeah. We need to sedate these guys. The big thing that he did was he centralized the kingdom by setting up these 39 extra provincial divisions. He supplied these divisions with military garrows. and then bureaucrats to kind of run the daily governments of these places, military garrisons is huge. Because as you're setting up these military garrisons far enough away to where you can't resupply from your capital city, you're able to quell any sort of rebellions or fights or anything like that. And in any sort of disputes within the city states or the villages wherever you were garrisoned over,

you would be able to keep the peace and settle like squabbles and quarrels there. The biggest thing is you're not allowing anything to build any momentum. You're able to squash it immediately. You don't have to field any soldiers and then march them out there where the rebellion or something can start gaining steam. You have someone that can just quash it in there. Now we're going to go ahead and take a big ancient bird and we're going to fly back across the Atlantic and start out with Ernan Cortez. Ernan Cortez was born, I believe, in Seville. Had a pretty unremarkable childhood.

He was known as a Hildalgo, which is like your father had some sort of prestigious knighthood or something like that, but you didn't really get enough from him, so you're not really royalty. Like you're sort of royalty adjacent, but nobody talks to you. You don't really have any sway. Like one of those members of the royal family that no one knows who they are?

Yeah. There's one of the 18 Dukes or some shit. Mm-hmm. Yeah. situation. Obviously, we don't have a ton of great information on Cortez kind of over during that time. We didn't know that he had a lot of ambition to become somebody that was a man of fame. He could read, which is huge in those days just to be able to read. He ends up hopping a ship. What are your qualifications? I can read. Fucking hired.

Your name is Phil. How did you know that? I read your name tag. You're in. When do you start? He ends up hopping about arrives over in Cuba in 1511. So we're talking very, very shortly after our unfriend Christopher Columbus was over there doing his thing. Who was the ruler that took over after Columbus? Obando.

Oh, I can't remember. I think it was Obando. I've purged all Columbus information from my memory. The governor of Hispaniola was Obando. This is where he ends up landing first. Decides that there is going to be, Obando decides there's going to be a rating party to take over Cuba. That's when Cortez hops on the ship to go over to Cuba,

to liberate to take over Cuba in 1511. He aids in the conquering of the island. Very bloody, very terrible. I'm sure he saw a lot of atrocities that just maybe galvanized him into the guy that he was. Saw him, did him. Yeah.

Diego Velazquez or Velazquez, as the Spanish say. I'm not going to say as Mike Tyson says. That's how the Spanish speaks Spanish. I don't know. I'm going to go with Velasquez because it sounds better. He was appointed the governor of New Spain. He was the one that led the conquering of the island. New Spain, Cuba?

Yes. Okay. Cortez was named the clerk to the treasurer. Velazquez kind of saw that he was a little bit of a go-getter but they butted heads a lot. He saw he could read. Yeah, that reading again

probably helped pretty big. He named him the secretary to the governor and he still felt like he needed more. Like he wanted to go out and explore more. And as Velasquez was kind of

settling in Cuba and figuring some things out, he would be given something called the Captain general spot to assist a guy named Juan de la Garret oh shit I had this earlier Gravalla yeah

Gravalla was actually Velazquez is like nephew or something sorry Grijalva yes Grijalva's right he was Velazquez's like nephew and he was sent over to the Mexican mainland in 1518 once he gets over there

they're keeping close to the shore kind of mapping everything out he ends up making contact with a Maya tribe and as the Maya welcome them, he does the exact same ceremonial bullshit that they always do. He's like, we have green beads. Take these green beads. And they're all wearing fucking green beads. Like, yeah, we know the other guys brought green beads.

And the mire like. And fucking smallpox. All right. What else do we have to give these guys? Should we just give them some gold? Maybe some gold will make them happy. So they give them gold back. And Gravalla's like, do you have?

have more of this? Like, yeah, it's a diamond doesn't. His dick hits the inside of his arm. He's here the small tink. So he finds out that there's just gold a plenty. There's gold in there hills. And gold is so important because more than

anything, it's so easy to travel with. It can be divvied up very, very quickly. It's just a very important thing. You can buy a lot of lady favors with it. Yeah, their empire just runs on it. So he ends up hanging out over there for a while.

I don't know if I really believe a whole lot of this part because, again, this is Spanish history and I don't know how a Spaniard lands and runs into a Maya tribe and they're able to really communicate enough to make a whole lot of this happen. I think it was probably he saw some gold and they went over and took it. But regardless, he ends up sending back his, I guess you would call his assistant that was earlier, or that worked with him, that came back, who will again go out with Cortez, Alvarado, comes back, gives his reporting to Velasquez. Lasquez is like, this is great.

We need to figure out how to get more people over there because we need more of this gold. We need to go help Graval out. So this captain general spot that Cortez was given allowed him to basically take out an expeditionary force to go collect more gold. Before he can get out, Velazquez kind of starts to look at Cortez and realizes that he might be one of those guys that if he gets a little inside lane, inside track somewhere, he's just smart enough to be able to take it for himself. He's just watching him walk around the docks being like, so hey, just so it's clear, we will murder anyone for gold, right? Okay, just making sure you guys are all on the same team. Well, if he goes over and claims that land in the name of Velasquez, or Velasquez, then Velasquez is the best.

He has this new land and he gets, it's like one fifth or something like that of all of the proceeds that come from this new land. He doesn't want somebody going over there and trying to claim it for themselves and then sending word back to the king, which is pretty spot on for what ends up happening. but he goes ahead and says, now expedition off, not going to happen. Cortez is already ready to go. Cortez has got a bunch of men. He has gotten his boats assembled, and he goes ahead and he's like,

yeah, I think we're just going to go ahead and do this. Which is, this is crazy to me. I'm not sure how quickly these orders are issued and taken and what the process is for this, but he's sitting there and he's like, uh, Velazquez, I'm going to cancel this mission.

Okay, mission's canceled. At what point does this not get to a whole bunch of people? Like, there are still, you know, Cortez is just one guy on this expedition. Like, he's the leader of it. But does someone come down the docks? He's like, hey, sorry, party's over, shows off. And he's like, okay, we're going to start unpacking the boats. The guy turns around.

They wait for five minutes. They're like, fucking unhitch the, unhitch the fucking ropes. We're out of here. And just takes off anyway. Everyone's on board with it. I don't even think it got to that point. Because he had enough time. He gathered six ships, which seems like a lot.

300 men also seems like a lot. But as they were pushing off, Velazquez was trying to go down to stop them. So they ended up pushing off without really any supplies. Which as they're leaving and taking off, he's thinking, okay, we can stop somewhere else in Cuba. We can find somewhere else to where we can load up on a bunch of sea biscuits and not the horse, but actual sea biscuits. and some other things to have some provisions to make this trip. Well, Velasquez had put out word to everybody on the island. If Cortez shows up with a bunch of ships and starts trying to buy some things,

you are not to sell him anything. This is against my orders. He committed a treasonous act. Not going to happen. We're going to go two villages down and just try to get all our shit there. Yeah. He ends up landing in this place, Trinidad, Cuba. And he ends up going on shore.

be like, hey, you guys probably haven't heard about Gravalli yet. He found a bunch of gold over to where I'm headed. So maybe you guys could jump on board. We could see what goes on, bring some provisions with you, B-Y-O-B. Get in, bitch, we're going murdering. And they end up departing from Trinidad in Cuba with 11 ships and 500 men, 13 horses, a bunch of cannons, and then provisions for this trip. Somewhere along the way, and the reason I say somewhere along the way,

is I just did a ton of research and everything kept telling me that they end up meeting Geronimo Diagular in multiple different ways. If you're a very astute listener to this podcast and you listen to the My episode, we actually talk about Geronimo de Aguilar and his friend Guerrero, I believe was the other man. they were a part of a ship or a vessel that was bound for Cuba, ended up missing Cuba. They got shipwrecked on an island and ended up being able to paddle to the mainland where they had met a Maya tribe. The Maya tribe then took him, Guerrero and like 10 other people hostage and started eating them. And along that, they were trapped in these cages and before they were able to be eaten

and they were sold off of slaves. So Guerrero ends up embracing this life and becomes like a, not a general, but he worked with the king of this Maya tribe and ended up finding himself a wife, having kids, got the face tatted up, got the lips stretched out. He's like,

I'm fucking here. Yeah. I'm assimilating into the culture. And Aguilar was like, yeah, not me. So, uh,

I guess. they had made contact some way or another asking about if anybody there spoke their language or anything like that. Some way Daegular finds out that there are Spanish coming. I don't know whether it's a boat that he takes. I don't know if they find him on shore or whatever. He like paddled out in some like big shipwrapped. So when he runs into him, the first thing that he says is, are you man of faith?

Are you good men? And they're like, oh, I can speak Spanish for one, which is weird. Two, he has a beard, so he must be one of us. And three, he's asking about Jesus Christ. So, yeah, he's one of us. And Diagular, I'm just going to call him Aguilar, had been around these Mayan villages and had picked up being able to speak to Maya language, which is huge. Because a bunch of Spanish guys showing up to meet the Maya are probably going to have a very big language barrier to try to overcome. when you score a guy that can speak Spanish and can speak Maya,

everything is going to get a hell of a lot easier for you. So he ends up joining the expedition as a translator. There was a small skirmish that happened as they landed in Tabasco. He ended up winning the skirmish. And in winning the skirmish, he received 20 indigenous women. I'm sure the skirmish probably started over maybe some of his guys getting a little too handsy with the native women. I was going to ask you that,

and that it's kind of a dark question, but we've discussed it so much, just kind of in the last month with like the Columbus episode and then talking about this. Yeah. How much of a motivating factor do you think that was?

Like a selling point. Do you think Cortez was like, okay, we have a potential to get gold here and saying as there's not a really a ton of women around here and everything, there's also a bunch of Native women?

Like, do you think that that was it? It had to have been right. And I'm not saying that and like, hey, And I'm like, it's disgusting, but knowing what happens in almost all of these situations, it seems like, was it just an unspoken agreement that that was going to be something they would get? Or was it as, was it part of the pitch? Uh, I don't know.

I think it's a net benefit. I don't think it's a driving factor, but I think it's one of those things where it's like if you need one more little boost to push you over the edge to do something, if you're like, yeah, there's a bunch of naked native women there that you can. So it's like a cruise, like you have cruises that are non-smoking, cruises that they, allow you to smoke. It was like, this is a sex-free. We're not going to do that expedition. Yeah. This one is Rump Springer. Go crazy. And it's awful and it's terrible, but that's just, these guys, I'm not going to say that they were, they were bad guys. I will say that they were bad guys, but they weren't like criminals. But at the same time, this wasn't an army that he took with him. This is like blacksmith and tradesmen and

other things like that who aren't trained for war and who were just kind of taken off this island, which we know Española was pretty terrible for the Teanos that lived there. And those guys did a lot of bad things to the natives there. Then you just established Cuba where you just got done watching a bunch of those guys massacre the people that were living in Cuba. And so you're taking guys that are already pretty bloodthirsty and probably pretty horny at the time over to an area that doesn't know what's about to hit it. All that being said, we're hitting the female empowerment.

Part of this episode, I know that that's kind of scary to go into, and I just said that they got 20 indigenous women as hostages. I'm going to say you just made a leap there. I'm excited to see where you take this. But one of those women's name, we don't know. She would become known as La Malinche. La Malinche was a former slave. She fell into slavery because she had a,

family that was Nahuatl. I don't remember exactly where she was. Her mother ended up getting remarried after her father died. Some sort of an odd sign of toxic masculinity, we could say, just because we're doing a female empowerment, but we could throw that in there too. Where her mother had sold her into slavery, maybe. This is one of many ways that she could have ended up a slave, but this is something that I heard that I find interesting.

I put her into slavery. She sold her off because her new husband didn't want any remnants from the old husband. Is this a lion situation? Because that's what male lions do. If they come in and take over her pride or fight the other male lion, end up scaring him off. They'll kill all of the cubs that are of their bloodline. That's nuts. Yeah.

I didn't know that. Wow. Lama Lynch. Yeah. That kind of blew my mind. I didn't. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was animalistic.

Maybe it was just their male drive or whatever. But regardless, she ends up a slave for the Maya and ends up learning the Chantal Maya language, also knowing the Noahuatl language. So now we have a very special leak, Erlink, because we can translate from Aztec into Maya and then from Maya into Spanish via La Malinche and Aguilar. So it can go Lama Linche Aguilar Cortez. Yep. That's definitely where I want to plant that seed that there can be a lot that gets lost in that translation. And Lama Linche may be one of the most powerful women in the world that we don't really recognize because there are some theories that she may have had a little bit more to do with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs than the Spanish did. But the Spanish were the ones that wrote the history.

so they were the ones that credited themselves to it. Regardless. I mean, I think when it comes down to it, I think she could serve the purpose of escalating it sooner than it would have eventually escalated itself. Because I don't think it would have taken much eventually maybe, you know, another interaction. It could have been a year later when they were spreading out even more.

Knowing what the Spanish did to every other civilization and native tribes and everything, there was no reason that they weren't eventually just going to continue to go with the same playbook. But I think that, like you're saying, in kind of the theory where when you're translating something, it doesn't take much. You don't have to literally tell somebody something completely different. You change a term, a phrase here, or like you change the way someone stated something to where it seems threatening. Because there's so much that this has to go through for translation, you know, you have the people that are the actual Aztecs saying what they need to say. It goes through La Manche.

She can change it how she wants to. It goes to Aguilar. Aguilar can change it how he wants to before it even gets to Cortez. I'm not saying this at all to say like, oh, Cortez didn't want to do this. It would have eventually happened. There are just now more factors in here that there's more matches. It's not just Cortez holding the match up to being like, am I going to light it? There's other people that are grabbing his head being like, light it.

And I say this just to kind of plant this in your mind, though, maybe. La Malinche as far as like speaking to the Aztecs May not have been where she came into play Her speaking to the Talakins Okay May have been the reason And her knowing that they had already had

An ongoing feud with the Aztecs Knowing the history of the area Yes Yeah She would be able to provide Cortez With all of the tribes That wanted to see Okay that makes more sense

Yeah that makes more sense So after we get all through this, Cortez needs to take a jump. He needs to take a leap. This whole entire time, he's been keeping a diary. He worked as the secretary.

And before that, his job kind of gave him a look into the legal side of things to try and protect himself because he just committed this act of treason with Velasquez. I don't think it takes a lot of experience in the legal sense to say,

okay. So I literally just can, committed a crime and basically stole these ships and all these guys. And then I picked up more guys to come and do this. The only way I'm getting out of this is if I can bring back a whole bunch of valuable shit to where I can even go over Velazquez's head to the king and be like, look what I found. And then I'll essentially be immune to being punished for this. I'll be a fucking hero.

Yeah. And really to finally get around the Velasquez issue, he goes ahead. and he plants his flag on the Central American soil because he ends up landing on shore, what was it, 1519, in July 1519. Wait, Velasquez plants his flag or Cortez? Cortez. Cortez plants his flag and establishes the settlement of Veracruz. But when he does it, he goes ahead and claims it on orders. directly from King Charles all the way back in Spain.

So since he claimed it for King Charles, if he does it with that in mind, and he brings the Spanish crown back untold riches, he's the one that gets one fifth, and he gets governorship instead of doing it for Vera Cruz, who would then get the one fifth in governorship. Yeah, Velasquez. So many games.

A lot of V's. A lot of V's, a lot of Zs. So he's kind of realizing that, I got a shot at taking this over. I can govern this land. This can be all my land. He's going rogue. I'm going rogue.

Don't go rogue, Jackie. So what do you do to make sure that nobody can get back and tell Velasquez what your plan is? Well, I mean, it's the only way they can get back is by boat. I mean, you're not enough of a madman to literally destroy your boats. I mean, your way of getting back, right? Yeah. You don't scuttle 10 of the 11 ships that you bring with you. Well, I mean, if you're going to scuttle them, you don't,

scuttle all of them because if you need to get the fuck out of there you still have to have room for yourself oh i think it was more likely that he kept it around so they could load it with gold and then take it all the way back to spain to try to beat uh velasquez back there yeah that makes more sense because if you get that tribute back there to king charles before velasquez says anything all a sudden he knows no better he's like okay well you're doing this for me you got it you have my support i'm gonna throw it behind you there's gonna be something that pops up here when we talk about the actual conflict between Cortez and the Aztecs. When they're scuttling the ships,

I always think of it in terms of like World War II where you actually like sink the fucking thing so the end you can't use it. I think in this scenario, because of what's going to come into play, he just kind of hasn't really dismantle the fuck out of these ships to where like they're not saleable. You can't use them for anything.

They run them ashore. And if someone was trying to do anything, you would have plenty of time to discover them trying to put the ship back together. to be able to stop them. So I don't think they completely just destroy them and everything. They could still be used in certain circumstances. I think he just makes him unusable at that point.

Still an insane thing to do. Fucking bonkers. You could run into like a crazy amount of like natives coming to chase you off. You could start, you know, developing certain diseases and need to get the fuck out of there. Yeah. There's a litany of reasons why you could use every one of those ships. By this time, now that Veracru, has been established,

Moktizumas starts to hear rumblings that there are bearded men, bearded white, pale men that are on land. So they had a communication network and they had a system of runners to actually transmit messages and get things across the empire.

Very inkin too, right? Didn't they do it? So Roman? I think every seven miles, they would have a new runner and then they would pass off the message or whatever it was or the document and that they would keep going.

They said that they could pass messages and they could receive news from over 200 miles away within 24 hours. So knowing that and the distance that where they're landing, maybe in the Yucatan is running to Maya or even a little bit more into Central America, even if it took you three days, 600 miles to get back, you're still getting that information extremely quick about this new threat. Yeah. Yeah, and this new threat has made contact with the Maya people.

And they kind of did the exact same thing that happened to Columbus when he landed, where he landed, because when he asked about the gold, they'll like, yeah, we have a ton of it. But there's this big giant city in the middle of the land. They have more gold than you could ever imagine. And you got to know that La Mancée. If she had that information, she was like, these people don't have anything. I mean, we should still get rid of them because they also had me as a slave. But there's everything that you want if you just go a little bit further inland. There's a city on an island in the lake.

They thought she was fucking crazy the way these people were describing this. But at the same time, just so fucking rock hard for gold. Yeah, there's no, nobody can paint you a picture of what this is. I've heard this city described so many times and I still just can't quite get my mind around the splendor that it might have been. And I imagine that she's. doing a lot of the, you know, the pushing for Cortez to keep pushing in to get to the valley. She's whispering. Yeah.

So Montezuma would refuse to meet with the Spanish. He kind of felt that they were a suspicious bunch, but he was still pretty curious about kind of what their intentions were, who they were, what they were doing. I'm not going to come to you guys. Yeah. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to come out there. I think at one point, didn't he actually send? out like a body double.

Someone dressed up as Montezuma to actually kind of pretend he was his and his and is like, we can give you this and this and this, but that's going to be it. And then he was like, I don't think you're Montezuma. That comes in after they hook up with the Talakalans. Okay. But

he started to send, I guess you call them emissaries with gold and other gifts to just start kind of buttering them up. And Cortez didn't really understand this because they were sending him gifts, but at the same time just refused to ever want to meet him.

Yeah, take this shit and go away. So eventually, they have a run-in with the Tlaka people, and the Talaika people are not happy to see them. They end up engaging in a battle that would last for like weeks. And after days of this battle happening, Cortez realizes that they're out. numbered and they are not going to be able to end up defeating these guys. So they pull back into a defensive position.

And every single time they get the chance, they're trying to ask for peace. Hey, sorry, we'll put our weapons down. My bad. And I didn't really think about this until I heard it explained in a way. Because when you think about it, the three, kind of the three headed, the trident of attack for the Spanish going into the Aztec Empire and into the Americas. was going to be guns. I love the fucking name. The Archibus.

Yes. The Archibus was like it was one of the very, very early, like, modern rifles. Yeah. Basically. And I imagine, because I always think of like, was the one that almost had the flared.

It kind of had a little bit of a flared barrel, I think, a little bit to, like, discharge. Because you had a lot of, like, the black powder and, like, yeah, you had to get as much into the gun as far. So if you're trying to do it quickly, if you flare out that in like you would with like a record player speaker, you could kind of funnel. A funnel is actually.

They had guns. Yeah. They basically had guns. They had horses. Not just horses. Fucking war horses. And for those of you not familiar with war horses, basically they're horses that are bred. They're bigger. They're stronger. And they're bred and trained to actually just run fucking people over. They're not, they're not supposed to be scared of. noises, sounds, anything like that. If the guy is steering you into people, that's what the horse is going to fucking do. And so basically they're just, you know, mobile units to where one, you know, your

horses, you know, your head is up to a horse's bull, maybe not you. But like, you know, your shoulders, your head are up to a horse's back. And if this thing is just charging at you, if it fucking clips you, it's fucking dislocating his shoulder. And they would just run these and not only the factor of how strong they

and how dangerous they were. Again, these people had never seen horses. They'd never seen men on fucking horses, let alone men wearing shining metal fucking suits of armor and wielding fucking razor-sharp swords. Yeah. Everything about this was fucking intimidating.

Well, and kind of along the lines of the guns, we'll talk about the armor too, how it's... Whenever we talk about this stuff, you hear it, You're like, well, they definitely had an advantage. The guns were not an advantage because... It took so long to load. It took so long to load. The black powder would start to clump and have a very tough time in this humid climate

to be able to be poured into these rifles. And along with that, you run the risk of just being very, very inaccurate with them. Yeah, like if they would be great if you are in a position where you're fighting maybe, the same number of people where you can't get overrun by massive people. But if you're firing this and even if you hit someone and there's five guys behind them running at you, you don't have time. You know, even if you could reload at one time, you're only taken out another one of the five guys.

This is also where things like their mobile cannons come into play as well. But you've got to imagine like trying to get those things through the fucking jungle and shit. Can't do it. not very mobile. And that's another thing that they run into just like you were talking about with the armor. They ended up adopting this more Aztecian style of cotton armor because it was a breathable. So you weren't going to have a heat stroke in your metal armor and die.

But B, when you're trying to work through this jungle and you're in a big clanky metal suit that's not allowing you like full articulation to climb through the brush or the vines and everything, it's just not something that's going to help them. them out. So they end up shaking that off. They end up the best use for their rifles eventually just became clubs because you could fire off maybe once, but that would even be unlucky. Their boat would be another thing to where they could get them in, but they weren't small enough to be able to travel down like a tributary and get inland. And it doesn't matter because the basin doesn't have anything that you can get into to try to attack with. So once you get in there, You have to either build new boats, which, spoiler alert, we'll get to it, or you have to figure out how to travel this vast expanse of water to get out to this big main city. The third thing is the most effective thing.

And the first two we talked about, I guess more than two, we're less effective, but disease. I mean, disease is their number one weapon. And it takes a little while to set in. Biological warfare. I was very curious as to why this happened, but then once you realize that the amount of men that they had, I mean, the chances of wanting them having smallpox or carrying it in is so much lower because there was like 500 of them. Yeah. So it's going to take a certain case that carries the smallpox sickness into the area for it to really start spreading. So eventually this was all long and drawn out to get back to finally the Talakins realized.

these guys can't beat us, but they're pretty damn intimidating with their cannons and their armor and everything else. So maybe it would be better if we just went ahead and became friends. Yeah, if wiping them out really doesn't gain us a whole lot. But, and this might be where La Malachi comes in, if she's talking to them and she's like,

these guys are really impressive. These guys could be what would push you to be able to topple the Empire. You guys are pretty tired of losing people to the flower wars, right? Yeah. You're tired of getting bullied into trying to pay tribute. Yeah. There's a lot of you. Yeah. Okay. Well, maybe the Spanish will be able to help push you over the edge. What's the worst that's going to happen? You're going to lose again? Yeah. Yeah. You're either going to lose in the flower wars or you're going to lose this time. So they end up calling off this fight. They become these loyal allies in this. rally against Teno Chitlan, a few hundred of his men, 15 horses, 15 cannons, and about a thousand of the Tolteca warriors rolled into Chalula. I don't want to make any assumptions here, but I'm pretty sure that's where the hot sauce comes from. Got to be Chalula, right?

That's exactly what I thought. Yeah. And when they get to Chalula, this is kind of, of like a little run through. They end up just tearing apart Chalula. There were thousands of nobles that were killed in the city square.

They end up burning up the city. I don't know if this is more to get attention from Tener Chitlan and maybe sort of try to push Moktizuma's hand into wanting to meet with them. I think it's a little bit of prodding too.

You don't just go straight in an attack. You kind of soften them up a little bit. Find out what they're going to do. Maybe try to draw them out. to a little bit more. Yeah, I was going to say draw them out because, again, Causeways. Yeah.

They're completely defended on that island. But they also have zero clue. They have no understanding of how, or what Tino Cheatlan looks like. Because all they're getting is these descriptions and they're not getting the full story of everything. We end up getting to the 8th of November, 1519. In case you didn't know, the song that Bigger, and Rich did the 8th of November is actually about this

is it really no oh Jesus it's about uh World War II isn't it or it's about Veterans Day the 8th November the angel are crying it's the carrier brothers away it's a military song but just interesting that the 8th November pops up all the way back in 1519

What is the day of the year? Yeah one in 365 chance Yeah it's not great odds Cortez is men and the large group of Native warriors end up moving into Teno Chitlan Or march on it

Yeah Oh Prior to that It was I believe After the Chalula Massacre Is when they go ahead And they send the emissary That's dressed up

Like Moktizuma With the feathered headdress And the beautiful silk robe No no no I'm totally Montezuma Yeah And as soon as he gets there Uh

La Malinche La Malinche sees him and she's like that ain't him and the Talakins are like yeah that's not

Moktizuma I don't know who that is we know who Mocktizuma that ain't him We've been You guys are crazy I told him on a Zuma We've been threatened

by this guy enough To know exactly what he looks like So Cortez calls him out He goes You're not Moktizuma Right

He goes well I was sent here by Maktizuma You got me Yeah I'm Montezum I'm Montezuma adjacent.

I'm Mantizuma. This ends up leading to a meeting out actually on one of the causeways. So marching from one side, the shoreline side, you have Cortez leading the way, LaMalinche, his soldiers, some of the natives probably behind them. And again, this thing's only so wide. I think maybe 10 horses. So, you know, not enormous, but still pretty fucking big. The other side, you have this, you know, gallery of all of the nobles. and everything like that from Tilan.

And they come out, Montezuma's in the front, and they basically, this is the first time that they're meeting face to face. You got the translators there. Kind of, it's not really tense. There's not, you know, this intention. Well, there might be an intention on one side to take this place over.

But basically, there's nothing really threatening going on here. At one point, I think Cortez goes to try to, like, touch him to, like, shake his hand or do something like that. and one of Montezuma's boy steps, and he's like, no, no, no, no, you don't touch. He's like, no one touches this guy. And so I think there was maybe some offense taken by that. But I mean, not a lot came out of, this was the meeting where Montezuma was basically like, okay, yep, I, hey, I haven't, you know, that guy that I sent out, I didn't tell him to act like me. It is said to talk, you know, give the message from me.

but basically tries to just placate Cortez. I don't know if he is intimidated by seeing not only this hostile city state, this rival city state, but at the same time, if this is the first time again that they're seeing these Spanish troops, armor, because you know they re-put the armor back on and all that kind of stuff, the horses, all of that stuff, if he's looking at this saying, you know what, I don't know if we can stand up to this. so let's just invite the guy inside my fucking house part of the reason

boy I still believe that this may have been an architect of La Malinche is multiple times including this meeting as they're meeting Cortez they walk up and greet him as La Malinche they greet Cortez as La Malinche

they're getting him confused thinking that that's his name which is funny because whenever law is in front of something It's feminine. Yeah. So they think that this little pale face or this little pale bearded face man is named Lama Linche. But she was the translator.

So whenever they would get word from her and she would translate in, she might be or she might have been saying Lama Lince wants this after he was talking to her. So they may have just thought that that was Cortez's name. Which again, interesting, pretty funny that I'm sure it pissed him off quite a bit when they were doing greed. Cortez. Hernan Cortez. No Lamaninche. Want to hurt. Lamaninche here.

La Mellinche is upset. Yeah. So eventually we get back to them finally entering Tino Chitlan. As soon as they get there, they're showered in gold. Montezuma comes out, meets him. A normal greeting that you would think that you would really tell anybody that you're trying to make happy. You invite them into your home.

Mikaasa, a sous casa, I believe probably may have been the phrase that he said. But as far as the Spanish took it and wrote down on all their books, it was something along lines of, this is all my land, but now everything that you see belongs to you. Take whatever you'd like. Yes. Very different than what I think Mokhtizuma would have said to make yourself at home. Yeah. And an amount of men that there's no way in hell could have ever taken over the city once they were inside of it.

They could have been crushed. Especially a city that was so used to winning and had these vaunted warriors. Yeah, you had the talaka that you guys bully around every single time you have a flower wars. And then you have a few Spanish guys. Like there's no... They also made it sound, you know, we get these conflicting stories because for the longest time, all we had were the Spanish records of how this stuff went down. then you actually started to get the accounts of people that had ancestors or stories passed down that were actually from the Mahican people.

So when you start to kind of blend the two together, you can kind of sift out the bullshit and find out what the Spanish were elaborating on. You know, make yourself a home. To them, they just spit it into, no. He said, you know, make ourselves a home, take whatever we needed, anything like that, we can, you know, have that stuff taken care of. Well, and the other thing, too, I'm trying to look up what it was called. Do you have any notes on what the codex was called?

Oh, no. Which is so crazy that they used the term codex for it. Yeah. We see that in sci-fi games. Yeah, I believe it was the Florentine Codex. Okay. So this is where a lot of the Spanish information about the Aztecs come from. And when that was created, it was created like 50 or 60 years after the takeover.

it happened and it was a friar that was speaking to Aztecs that may have been around during that time. So a lot of it are these kind of secondhand stories to where there's details that could have been confused and then you get the Spanish punching it up in their favor. Then eventually you do hear, you know, the Aztec, the Mahican side of it. And you're like, oh yeah, that makes way more sense. Yeah, well, we were wondering why you guys were just like, hey, come in. And one of the unintended consequences of spreading Catholicism and spreading teaching them the Roman alphabet is the Spanish burned a ton of the books that the Aztec kept. And this is a massive difference between like the Incas and I believe the Mayans as well was they had never created, maybe not the Inkins.

I believe they had written text. It was the Mayans that did the knots and the ropes. Yeah. But their record wasn't ever written down in any sort of language that could have been translated. Yeah. So before they had gotten all the books burned, they taught these people the Roman alphabet. So they would get a hold of any books that they had that were any historical references

and they would start translating them into Roman. So we do have some accounts from them. Or their firsthand accounts. Yes. Once they were taken to slaves, taken somewhere else, they were. able to eventually some of them were able to write down these accounts of the actual you know what actually it occurred so we get a little bit but at the same time i'm calling 100% bullshit on mactezuma just handing over his kingdom to cortez regardless of that situation they end up putting

them up in the aforementioned by chris uh... mockedezuma the first grand palace yeah it was i'm trying to remember exactly i think uh... montezuma the second might have added on 200 and something. It was still a very, yeah, very posh building. Yeah. I'm sure any of the Talakins that they had brought with them were probably pushed. They weren't invited into the palace. No, I think it was literally just like the 20 or 30 guys that he had with him. The Spanish. Yeah. For sure. As he's there, Velazquez ends up, oh, I guess probably in the simultaneous fashion.

Cortez ends up hearing that there were some of his men back in Veracruz that had been killed by the Aztecs. I'm sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt of anything that we learned here, it certainly couldn't have been the Spanish that had incited the fact that they got killed, right? Not even that. It makes so much more sense if you just think of it this way. They get invited into the city. Cortez sees everything that they have and is like, I fucking want. want this. All I need is a little bit of a reason for this. You invent a reason. Why did the Aztecs, why were the Aztecs all the way trying to kill people back in Veracruz? It makes way more sense to

me and putting on tinfoil hat here that all Cortez needed was an excuse to go ahead and kick this thing off. They'd just been invited in. They had access to Montezuma. And he knew in order to actually take the city he needed more men. Makes sense to me that he is like, I'm going to go ahead and head back to Veracruz. I'm going to get some more guys. I'm going to come back here. We'll be able to actually take the city, sack this bitch and take all the gold. Or put these people under our thumb to where they'll go ahead and get the gold and bring it all to us.

Well, so somehow Cortez, not in his own city that he owns now, takes Montezuma prisoner. He slaps the chains on him. He imprisons him with the thought of now that he has the ruling. under his thumb, he can start to control the area. But at the same time, as this is happening, and he starts gaining a little bit of this control and trying to take Oratino Cheatlin, Velazquez ends up finding out somehow.

Maybe somebody stole that one boat back in Veracruz and headed back towards Cuba. I don't even think it's that he found out. He was never supposed to leave. So after fucking Cortez left, Alaskas had to been, like, at some degree, looking for this guy. Yeah, but you have to know where to find him.

That's what I mean. But yeah, to some degree, maybe word came back from Cuba, from somebody. And they're like, oh, no, he took more guys and this is where he was heading. I would assume that somebody hopped a ship and made it back. It was like, he's there. He's right. I can take your right to him. We'll go right there.

So, um, Mars Zuma's like, well, he's going to arrest you, right? You don't want to end up arrested like you just did to me. You should probably head back and deal with that. Don't worry about it. I'll be fine. I promise I won't leave the point. Palace. I'm not even upset. Yeah. I couldn't be that mad about it. And that's where I know that something else happened to hold Machta Zuma captive. Like there had to have been something else

to the story because it just doesn't make sense. This isn't the Aztec side of the story. No. He wouldn't just willingly let this happen in his own city. So Cortez takes a bunch of his men and he ends up heading back towards Verra Cruz. Velasquez had dispatched 1100, men led by this guy named Panfilo de Navarez. Ponfilo de Navarez ends up landing

I think it was in Maya territory. I'm not super positive. Pulls up. Have you guys seen someone that looks like me? Actually, yes, you're going to want to head about 10 miles down the coast and you should find a place called Veracruz. Right there, yeah.

I'm not positive where they met, but Navarez and his troops gone ahead and settled down for the night and because Cortez had a better lay of the land and he knew that he needed to get the jump on them. He also had like some of the natives with him. Yeah. So he ends up leaving like a skeleton crew or enough guys to basically just watch after Montezuma. He doesn't feel like the Aztecs or the Mexicans are going to try anything if he's basically

holding their figurehead hostage. Well, and he leaves Alvarado back there to. Yeah. So he leaves, he leaves Alvarado back there to basically hold down the fort and then takes off with, I think, leaves some of the native troops, but because they also know the jungle as well, he knows he's going to have even more of an advantage on this crew that was just dispatched by Vasquez to basically bring him back in chains. And he actually even said, didn't he say back, he's like dead or alive? He's like, I don't really care. He's like, just go back.

He's committed treason at this point. It's punishable by death. Yeah, whether you kill him there, you kill him here, as long as I can get. his head back or something to know. So he eventually marches these troops to where the other Spanish have actually kind of set up their camp and during a night raid ends up getting the jump and capturing their commander who was sent down to, or it was Navarrez, I think. Navarrez takes a pike to the eye. Tough, tough wound out of the jungle. But not fatal. No. Loses an eye, ends up being taken prisoner, and Cortez now has all these men there. He has

their leader and he's like, hey, you know what? You guys were sent down here to capture me. I'm just down here trying to find gold. And guess what? I found a lot of it. And you guys like, you know, you look like you like gold. Do I have any, anybody, do I have any gold lovers in the audience? And he ends up swaying most, if not all of these men, to joining Cortez's cause.

And now guess what? Velasquez just sent him his conquering force that he needs. Yeah. And that was really it. It doesn't take a whole lot of talking these guys into going and seeing Tino Chitlan for themselves because all you have to do is probably start talking about the causeways and that it looks like Venice and that it's the most beautiful city that they've ever seen. And, oh, by the way, there's gold everywhere.

And there's women there. Yeah. Oh, that was the other cool thing. We're going to rewind way far back. Tino Chitlan, one of the other things that they did that I've thought was absolutely, brilliant, especially back in these days, was they were able to harvest the salt. Yeah. And then.

Because of all the salt deposits that would be on the other side of the dike and all the mineral buildup and everything. Yeah, they were able to harvest the salt. They would figure out a harvest the salt, dry it out, package it. They would sell it in the market. And this was an area where if you didn't live along the coast, you probably didn't have a whole lot of salt. And even then, I don't know if it was a resource that they knew how to harvest out there. but they would then sell it all over their kingdom and everywhere else to, it was like the ultimate trade bait because you couldn't get it anywhere else,

just like you couldn't get cacao anywhere else, just like you couldn't get these feathers from anywhere else. Yeah. So fast forward all the way back to where we were. You got like 1,100 men that you're now resupplied with, plus you have the boats that aren't scuttled this time because you're eventually going to want to have. them. We go back to Tino Chitlan, where Pedro de Alvarado is still in charge of

Moctezuma. Before Cortez leaves, Magtizu was like, hey, we're having a festival. Can we still have the festival while you're going? He's like, yeah, sure, why not? He goes, okay, well, we've got some people we want to sacrifice, and then we'll probably move on to the dancing portion Cortez's like, oh, whoa, what was that? A couple people you want to sacrifice? Moktizum is like, yeah, we have to do it or else the sun doesn't shine. Cortez is like, you can do the festival, just don't kill anybody. Which is funny that the Spanish should be like, hey, don't sacrifice anybody. Yeah.

But Mocktizu is like, okay, scouts on her, I promise, I won't sacrifice anybody. He leaves, the festival comes, Moktizuma starts sacrificing people. You got to keep the fucking lights on, man. Yeah. Alvarado freaks out. Alvarado's like, no, no, no, no. Like stops them like in the middle of the ceremony. which is like insanely sacred.

Not only that, but they actually just start fucking killing people. And as this is happening, you know, shit's descending into chaos. Montezuma comes out and is basically like, you know, the Spanish,

because there's so few of them, they basically have to retreat back inside like the center of the city and kind of like the palace and everything. They basically tell Montezuma, get your ass out there and calm your fucking people down. So he goes out there and he's, like people, people, everyone calm down.

And at this point, the people are like, you let these fucking people into our city. They're interrupting our sacrifice. They just killed a whole bunch of us for just trying to do the thing that we've been, you know, used to doing. And now you're sitting here telling us to calm down when you should be kicking these guys out of the city and raising

up your warriors. And so they start chucking, not tomatoes, this isn't a bad comedy act. They just start chucking rocks at him. And whether it was someone that ended up throwing a rock that hit him or it was not yet that's not yet no the first time alvarado sends him up there to coil the people or to try to calm the people down they do start throwing rocks alvarado then sends his soldiers up there with their shields to try to shield him away from the rocks being thrown

and he ends up just not making any headway they're banging at the gates of the palace they're trying to break in. There's just, there's mass chaos everywhere. The city's burning. Everything is just very influx and very scary as Cortez shows up with all of these guys that he promised the most beautiful, peaceful city that they had ever seen with untold riches, that everything is going in their way. They have the king held hostage. Nothing could ever go wrong. This is just easy money. And they walk into this city that's burning. Cortez ends up smuggling all the guys into the palace and he's like, what happened? I've run out of those things.

They killed some guys. They sacrificed some guys. I got mad. Tried to bring Moktizuma up there to talk to him. They aren't going to listen to him. Cortez thinks to himself for a little bit. Again, I'm not sure this is how all this happens. This is just the way that we heard it. End up sending Moktizuma back on

top of the palace to try to talk to the people a second time. And this is where that happens. So the Spanish account of it is that he was killed by Zomai. people, someone threw a rock, hit him in the head, killed him. It's much more likely that since shit was going south anyway, they essentially tried to have Montezuma go out there, try to quell down what was going on.

It wasn't successful. As a last resort, they maybe just killed him to try to prove to the people that they were serious. I'm not sure. It makes more sense to me that he would have been probably killed by the Spanish more so than his own people. Regardless, he ends up dying. And now Spanish have to find a way to get the fuck out of there because they still don't have enough people to stop a rebellion of possibly up to 200,000 people that lived in this city.

Not only that, but now all of the people that would be coming in down from the shoreline from all these other cities. I still want to believe Maukta Zuma took a rock to the head. It doesn't. It could have been someone that threw it from the back. They're like, hey, when they're throwing stones, hit him in the back of the head with the big rock and then we'll blame it on them. you see some guy just creep up behind him and just smash him in the back of the head and be like oh my god did you see that you guys killed him

some guy holds up a rock he goes who threw this this one killed montezuma it's so big no one could possibly have thrown at that distance well so montezuma's dead shit's going down on the night of june 30th Cortez and the Spanish basically tried to make a run for it in the middle of the night

and straight through towns fast as they can to the causeway and get fuck out of dodge. Well, they load themselves up with as much treasure and gold and shit as they could possibly carry. Can't run fast with that much treasure in your pockets. And you probably have some horses and stuff that are carrying all that kind of

stuff. And it probably, to me, it just sounds like pots banging together, walking down. Oh, yeah. And then just someone walking in cargo shorts with just the pockets full of change. Just, shh, shh, shh. So as they're leaving, of course, there's people that are out in the streets and there are

warriors out there patrolling. One of the Jaguar Eagle Warriors end up spotting them raising the alarm and now the the chase is on so they're trying to haul ass with all this treasure out of town you have all of these warriors coming out to try to kill them and this ends up becoming to the Spanish the escape was known as the nocee trisde which was the night of sadness the night of sadness oh so sad and so as the night of tragedy which is so so sad Just the fact that they're doing what they're doing to these people and what they're going to do to these people, the fact that they lost probably quite a few Spanish guys, but definitely more the Talaka people. They said they lost, I think, close to like a thousand Talaka people. They ended up losing like 500.

870. 870 of the Spanish guys. Yeah, so quite a bit. But really, it was everybody in front that was able to get out of their fast enough, was able to escape. Of course, Cortez being like close, probably close enough to the front. The rear guard, though, in the back were the ones that really got beat up and knocked around. They said at one point they had brought planks of wood out with them to try to cross over one of the areas that they thought they could get out of, like one of the bridges. And they ended up getting massacred so badly that the dead bodies ended up filling the voids in the bridge that they were just running across their own people to try to keep.

were they getting attacked from the back. They were guys were coming out in these war canoes and basically like huck and spears and shit from the water. And guys and horses were literally just falling off into the water like left and right off of this causeway. They didn't lose a lot of treasure into the water. Oh yeah. And so as they end up. And the other thing too, really like you just tried to like take over, hostile takeover this native city. You probably had a hand, if not the hand, with a rock and killing.

the king of this city, and you have the fucking stones on you to call your escape attempt, the night of tragedy or night of sadness? Like, fuck you guy. I want to say it was fairly recently, Mexico went ahead and renamed it like the night of celebration. Good. Just to, or the night of some sort of party, yeah. Just like, this was actually a good thing for us.

We don't need to keep calling it the night of sadness because we were trying to save ourselves. So they end up returning to, how do you pronounce it? Talaka, I believe. Talauga, without 870 people total that he lost in the escape attempt. Basically over the next five months, he's not done. Cortez is done. He's like, nope, I'm heading back in. There's still shit I need to take over, and there's probably still more treasure there.

So over the next five months, he gets reinforced by more natives. He's able to drum up more support. Lama L'amice, I'm sure, is out there talking to every tribe. Oh, she's out there campaigning. more men from Veracruz and basically at this point Cortez is like okay we tried it their tactics were much more successful

now we're going to go and try it our way so during this five month period this motherfucker has his men disassemble like how many boats 10 that were scuttled and then if they took some from the

other boats they basically reassembled them into smaller boats that could still have men on them cannons on them sails and built them at this lake, took them apart in pieces, used natives and everything like that to travel across these mountains and stuff, and then put them together just to use in this lake to attack this city. And so he was able to essentially, once he was, you know, reinforced and built up enough strength, five months later, he basically starts the attack

and the siege and the blockade of T-Lay. Elon. And he was able to do it from all sides. He was able to monitor all the causeways because of these ships he had. These guys had no way to stand up to cannons or anything of that sort. And instead of just trying to attack this place head on, he's like, well, they're getting all their supplies from outside the city. They may have been able to initially when they built this that support themselves on what they were able to farm on the city. But now that they have all this other territory, that's also probably been converted to places where people are living now. And there's a much higher population. Populists, so they're not going to be able to feed all these people. If we destroy the aqueduct, how are they going to drink? Not only that, we're going to go ahead and block and destroy the aqueduct, so we're going to cut off their supply of fresh water. I mean, they'll still have a little bit slightly fresh water coming out of the springs and from the water there.

But at the same time, that city's on barred time. Yeah, you're not supporting tens of thousands of people on what you have. It got bad enough that said people inside the city were eating leather. they were eating parts of brick. A lot of the brick here because of the area and the brick that actually comprised the Templo Mayor and a lot of the other buildings was actually volcanic stone. So like kind of pumice stone, what you're thinking of.

And they said that architecturally this was perfect because being a porous stone, it was lightweight. It was still strong enough once you got it together with mortar and all that kind of stuff that they used. But because it was more lightweight, it allowed the temple to be built there without sinking into the softer ground. Pretty brilliant. Well, a lot of this stuff, too, once the city was actually taken over by Cortez and everything was destroyed and leveled, they used a ton of, like, the volcanic rock and the stone from the Templo Mayor to end up building a bunch of, like, the new buildings.

Dirty. Dirty, dirty Spanish. So eventually, I mean, once you're able to basically starve these people, out, it doesn't take long for the city to basically, you know, get into very desperate situation. Well, this whole entire time, too, once all of these other guys, once all these other Spanish guys get inside the city, the spread of smallpox is happening everywhere. And when you have an area that's blockaded, nothing's getting out and no resources are getting in. And somebody gets sick and you don't know what that is. you're trying to tend to them and help them as best possible.

You just came in there and you left for five months and you didn't know it, but you basically just planted a time bomb. Yeah. In that city and over the course of that five months, this thing, yeah, it just starts to spread. And it just absolutely wrecks them. It's impossible to try to keep fighting them the way that they were while they were sick. And that ground them down to the point towards Spanish forces were, starting to close in.

They were going through and rebuilding some of the causeways, but then at night, the Aztecs were sneaking out and basically destroying it. But when you're being attacked on all sides, you really can't keep fighting that fight. They end up getting pushed all the way back.

Ah, shit, or was it? It was to the city center, essentially where the temple and the palaces and everything are. They got pushed back block by block. I mean, it was technically, we talked about how Stalingrad was kind of the first instance of urban warfare. Yeah.

This kind of is even an earlier instance of urban warfare because they're literally fighting block by block through these city streets, through the canals, and they're just gaining ground. Like, they're trying to defend each of these little sections as they can. And finally, the Aztecs are forced back to basically the center of the city. To la la lo loco, which is the, like, the open air market that they had. And so it even got to the point where these warriors were fighting on the steps of the temple, trying to keep these guys from gaining ground, fucking wearing leopard skin, eagle feathers, and all that badass shit. But, I mean, launching one more successful assault on the Spanish forces, you know,

kind of like a last-ditch effort. Yeah. They just didn't disease had run rapid. Their strength wasn't there. They hadn't been able to go ahead and eat. I mean, it was just a basically. We'll basically throw ourselves into one more thing to see if we can try to change the tie to this. Just to talk about the importance of the Spaniards, which I don't know why they would put this in.

Maybe it's because they already written their history to a point where they had to say it. The attacking force, which this just blows me away, the attacking force, they said, was 508 Spaniards in between potentially 150,000 to 200,000 natives. So when I hear that, and I think that they make up less than 10% of the fighting force that shows up, I immediately think, well, was this really the Spanish taking over the Aztec Empire? Or was this everybody that wasn't a friend of the Aztecs, toppling the empire and then the Spanish taking credit for it? Well, here's the thing, too, is it's written by the victors.

because what also happens is you're marching into a city with all these other natives where smallpox has been rampant. And then those people are then taking it back to their city states. And without even meaning to, Cortez is basically just decimated this entire area, not just Tilon, but also all the other surrounding area. Just by having these people in this area where the smallpox is and then spreading it to everywhere else. So, I mean, he, and I wonder if it was one of those. situations where as people saw the city, you know, fall into, you know, dire straits and, you know, become weakened, they kind of saw the writing on the wall of who was going to win this thing. And so they threw their support behind Cortez.

And, you know, that's why I was able to field such a large amount of soldiers. Well, and if you don't like how the Aztec Empire, Tino Cheatlan's conducting business, and you don't really know a lot about the Spaniards, but they seem to be cool so far. and they're helping you topple the empire that you don't like. Eventually, even if the Spanish come to rule, could it be as bad as he has to... They're telling us that they have no interest in controlling us. Yeah, it just wants to go.

Yeah. And once that happens, once the city's finally taken, they raise it to the ground. Everything is flattened. And the reconstruction starts in more of a Spanish theme in the downtown area. Of course, to rebuild everything else. Cortez tells them that all Aztecs are forbidden from the city.

Can't really do that with a place that's that big. You don't have the controlling forces to be able to really make that happen. But they rebuild the city center and more of this Spanish style. Everywhere else around there, though, these suburbs and everything like that, just basically get rebuilt the way that they were before. And eventually this city that gets rebuilt on the ashes of Tino-Chitlon or on the foundation of Dino Chitlan becomes the most populated city in North America or in the Americas. Yeah.

Mexico City, man. Absolutely incredible. Which is crazy because he still names it for the Mexican, Mexican city, Mexico City, which is still kind of weird. Like he didn't try to name it like Cortezland or. That is odd, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, small victory, I guess, in regards to that.

But, yeah, at this point, now that they have control over that, it's kind of the, aside from the Inkins, this is, like we said, they burned fast, they burned bright, and then they went out in a very short amount of time. This was kind of the last gas of these larger civilizations of native civilizations in Mesoamerica. after this happened, this is basically when it was just completely, would you say, Spanishized? Yeah, conquested. Yeah. But to kind of put a bow on the end of the Aztec Empire, August 13th, 1521, Quoteimok was the newest king of the Aztec. Of course, he flees because he sees writing on the wall that something bad's going to happen. He was captured.

He, for all intents and purposes, ceremonially hands the Aztec Empire over to Cortez. He wouldn't end up getting killed until 1525. He was killed in 1525 for, quote, unquote, conspiring to kill Cortez and other high-ranking members of the Spanish. I'm guessing this came along right at a time because, of course, he handed over the keys. So there was an official transfer power. But around this time, I'm guessing there was probably a lot of grumbling after.

for four years of life under Cortez about like, is that guy still alive? We need to put him back on the throne. He's like, ooh, people are talking about this guy. We should probably just get rid of him. Well,

and yeah, so much he, he outlived his usage for him. There was really no reason to keep him around. Like Chris said, Tino Chitlan would be renamed Mexico City and rebuilt. Cortez would end up governing all of Mexico, uh,

from 1521 to 1524. So, I mean, it's to really get down to what these other tribes got. Basically, the only thing that the Spaniards promise was the Talakins were to be in an alliance with the Spaniards. They wouldn't have to pay any tribute.

There wouldn't be a tribute system from them. And as the Spanish have a way of doing, they end up breaking that treaty or breaking that alliance and the Talakins. That stuff is promised before. Yeah. Well, now that we have more Spaniards here, then you can handle, we're just going to go head and call off that alliance not that big of a deal well not only that but now you get to you know where most of the lives were lost you get between 150 and 200 thousand people that were

that's is that what the spanish had total or is that how many died from smallpox oh smallpox had wrecked more than that that was basically the forces that helped them take over tino chitlan oh got so yeah i see allies plus smallpox. Well, yeah, smallpox also ended up decimating these other, like I said, these other city-states. So, yeah, you, like you just said, you unintentionally weakened all of these warriors that came and fought for you. So along with not getting a deal, having to, again, pay a fee to the Spanish who just took everything over, they decimated your population, they killed all of your people indirectly through smallpox. What, I mean, that's worse than anything that the Aztecs had ever done to them. At that point, Cortez goes back and brings back more Spaniards,

and he's just like, oh, shit, I guess I didn't need you guys. I could, like, everyone here's fucking dead. Why don't you start heading south? I think there's some other people that I came in contact with. Yeah, they'll be happy to see you. Well, Cortez ends up dying on December 2nd, 1547, around 61, 62 age. What was it? Like, hard issues. Yeah, which is so interesting, because there's a story that the Spanish put in their history. One of the first times that they'd ever had contact with one of Moktizuma's guys, he, Cortez had asked about gold, and he said, yeah, we have plenty of gold, why? And Cortez had claimed, and again, this is certainly written in after,

but it's sort of ironic that the Spanish had a disease of the heart that could only be cured by gold. and then Cortez ends up dying from inflammation around his heart. God damn, I was going to make a South Park joke. Go ahead. Nope. Pretty poetic. Go ahead. Nope.

All right. Well. You know the one I was going to make, don't you? Oh, yeah. Money can cure a lot of diseases. In very Columbus-esque form, Cortez's remains end up getting moved 16 different times. No one wants that shit. No.

what's the point of heaven his remains he was I'm sure the people in Cuba weren't too pleased with him yeah they go back to Spain at some point I'm trying to remember I can't track it all 16 times but it like goes back to Spain to Seville I think to Seville then it gets transferred over to Cuba uh-huh and then it goes to Mexico and then finally they're just like we don't fucking want it here and so it gets transferred somewhere else but it ends up again moving around 16 times where did it end up in Spain right I think so I think they don't don't know. Yeah. Or it's a very like simple area or something like that. With literally just- Oh, no, no, no. He's in a monastery somewhere in an unmarked grave in Mexico City. I think a plaque literally just says Cortez.

Hernane Cortez. Her name Cortez on it. There's no, it's very simple. And it's not a monastery. I think it's a Catholic church in Mexico City. Do you think it's more so for the fact now that it's like, we got you fucker? Like, that's why they kept it. Yeah.

It's like, we want a reminder that, you know what? Eventually, Mexico did kill you. We did get our revenge. Yep, you're ours. I wish they would string them up like one of those science skeletons. On the rack. And just put them in a museum, just Hernan Cortez right above it. But, you know, for a culture and a civilization that only existed for like 220 years as the empire itself,

it's crazy to think how much modern Mexico, you know, in a prideful way to which they should, because that's their heritage and everything with the flag, Mexico City, the Mexicans, the whole country, Mexico. I mean, it doesn't change, of course, anything that happened. But there's also always that question, too, like, what if the Spanish had never arrived? Because the human sacrifice thing would have eventually gone out. Yeah, they're not going to still be doing human sacrifices, you know, 150, 200 years later. But at the same time, once a little bit more advancement comes their way, like they're already a civilized advanced society when they have a few more tools at their disposal. What does that look like today?

I don't know. Just like every other fucking society, I guess. I think they were going to be taken over eventually. And I think it just was a matter of times who found it because they had so many natural resources that the rest of the world wanted that somebody would have gotten it. They had what people wanted and they were at a disadvantage. Yeah. Yeah. And Portugal kind of made, I think we talked about it during the Columbus episode, they had a habit of finding a place and then creating a port city.

And they didn't really go inland too much. Yeah. But eventually they would have figured it out just hanging around the port city and seeing all the gold that all the other tribes had that came to see it. They would probably want some. You know that the French would have done it. For sure, the British would have done it. Yeah, because the French were already in the Caribbean. Yeah.

It just, it would have been a matter of time before somebody else did it. Oh my God, can you imagine what that would have been like had they like met the French? Oh, that would sound so bad. Yeah. Everybody down there speaking French would be awful. But I have kind of a maybe an unpopular opinion when it comes to their sacrifice. And it's just something that I sort of came to. Sacrifice is bad.

I'm not trying to cave for sacrifice or anything like that. But as far as sacrifice goes, sacrifice can mean a million different things. Yeah. If you send a group of troops into a war that you know is unwinnable and you know that they're all going to be killed, that's a sacrifice. When somebody dies in war, you say that they made the ultimate sacrifice. Not to try to equate that to taking somebody on top of a temple and bleeding them out and cutting their heart out is nearly the same thing because one of them is very, very sadistic. One of them is really, really bad. But at the same time, the Spanish were always willing to sacrifice their men in situations.

they knew were the unknown. Much more willing to sacrifice people that were already there that they could use. Yes. And then if it came down to it, their own people, but only as a last resort. So while sacrifice is bad, you can't really say that the Spanish were against sacrifice. They were just sacrifice on their terms. Yeah, but what it comes down to is they were Christians. So there was somehow a loophole or some type of immunity to what they were doing. It was a different type of sacrifice. It was sacrifice in the name of, you know, of God and everything. And since these people did not believe in it, it's the whole thing with that manifest destiny kind of bullshit or, you know, a people not being recognized as a people that couldn't be conquered or enslaved unless they believed in God. The one Christian God that they determined.

Yeah, it's so much of a matter of doing something for the glory of God as opposed to doing something to satisfy God. It's sort of the defining line. Oh, you got anything else? No, I'm really happy that we got to do another one. I was kind of itching. I know that we said these were the big three. I would like to find another one of these. If we could figure out enough on the Olmex or something like that, it would be...

We'll just keep working our way up. Yeah. We started with the Inkins down in South America. We moved up to, like, the Yucatan with the Mayans. We moved up a little further into Mexico with the Aztecs. We'll just keep going up. We'll start exploring, like, other Native American tribes and everything that we can start talking about. Kind of got the Apache in there, too, with the last Thanksgiving or with the last Thanksgiving episode.

So, yeah, it's endlessly interesting. For as fun as the Middle East is, for as fun as Europe is to talk about ancient times, Egypt was a blast. We're going to have plenty more of those. But there's just something about South America that I love. Something about Central America that's so cool. Yeah. All right, guys. Thanks for joining us on another episode.

Catch the next week. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media.

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Thanks again. Peace.