The Rest Is History - 51. Aztecs

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk to award-winning writer Camilla Townsend, author of the revelatory Fifth Sun. Professor Townsend used Nahuatl language sources to write an engaging history offering a new interpretation of events in Mexico centuries ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amardis, on account of the great towers and the temples and the buildings rising from the water, and all of it built of masonry. And some of our soldiers asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. That was the conquistador Bernal Díaz, remembering the initial site of the great Aztec city, Tenochtitlan, on the 8th of November 1519, the date on which the Spanish first saw the great Aztec capital. And Dominic, it's one of the kind of the most romantic and dramatic moments in the whole world history, isn't it?

Are you a fan of the drama of this great story? Tom, that's exactly the word I was going to use, romantic. I remember having this book as a, I don't know, about a seven or eight year old, as a seven or eight year old boy. And this, the men with feathered headdresses, bloody knives, human sacrifice, the sort of Spanish storming in the Aztecs thinking they were gods. You know, all the sort of stereotypes of the Aztec story as we've read them, as we read about it in Britain. And the Aztecs thinking that the end of the world was coming. Yeah, it's that apocalypto, isn't it? Okay. I imagine this book was probably written by Mel gibson in a sort of as a very young man maybe um i'm not sure he knows the difference between

the aztecs and the mayas but that's a whole different issue well it is one of the the great stories but it is also a story that we perhaps particularly in europe tend to see through the eyes of the spanish and of course the the aztecs are one of the most remarkable, one of the most creative civilizations that ever existed. But it's hard for us, I think, to see them as they saw themselves. And so that's why I'm massively excited that our very first transatlantic guest, our first American guest on the show, we have Camilla Townsend, whose book came out last year, Fifth Son, A New History of the Aztecs, was absolutely the best book that I read last year. I read it kind of just before Christmas.

And I was kind of doing my best books of the year list. And honestly, if I'd read it by the time I was doing the list, I would have, it would have been number one across it. And the thing that's brilliant about it is that it gives you a history of the Aztecs through Aztec eyes insofar as that is possible. So Camilla, thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely delighted that you've agreed to come and join us and talk to us about the Aztecs. Oh, thank you so much. The honour really is mine. I'm delighted to be here. So Dominic and I gave a perhaps not entirely accurate account of the Spanish conquest there. Just very briefly, I mean, in your book, you cover the whole span of Aztec history, but there were two myths there that I think we hit on. One is that the Aztecs thought that the

Spanish were gods, and the other was that they thought that with the Spanish conquest, the end of the world was happening. And you demonstrate pretty conclusively that neither of those were true. Right. You have hit very much on the sort of stereotypical view of their history, as it's told not only in Europe, but here in the United States, and to some extent, even in Mexico as well. The truth was, I would say, both more mundane and more spectacular. They were originally people from what is today the American Southwest. They share common ancestors with people that are famous here, like the Hopi. And they came down over the course of a couple hundred years, a little bit like Genghis Khan coming down into China.

And gradually, these Nahuatl-speaking people, Aztec-language-speaking people, took over the central valley of Mexico. There had been great high civilizations farming peoples there before, but these guys were conquerors, and they took over the valley. They had been the rulers par excellence, the most powerful guys in Mexico, for about 100 years when the Spaniards arrived. And they put up a fight. There is no evidence that they actually thought Cortes or anyone with him was a god. There was quite a war. It was a really tough urban combat. Well, the whole war took a couple of years, but within the city, a couple of months.

Many died. The diseases that the Europeans brought with them helped, although they were not the defining factor. And then after this conquest, the Spaniards continued to rely on the Aztecs. They ruled through them, in effect. The famous Spanish Empire that we hear so much about and its home base in Mexico depended very much on their ability to work with the Aztecs and have the Aztec leaders help them to establish control. So the Aztecs, the people that Tom and I know as the Aztecs, but you would call it the Mexica, they've come from somewhere else. So they've come from what is now the United States, right? So when we

talk about them as indigenous, I mean, that's quite a slippery term because they're migrants, invaders themselves, as the Spanish were. They were migrant invaders, although it was their ancestors. That is, the people that Cortés and his fellows met had been living there then. They'd been living on the island where they were for 100 years, and they had been in that area for a couple hundred years. But their ancestors, their immediate ancestors, were migrants from what is today the United States. And those people were migrants from further north.

That is, it was Asian peoples who came across the Bering Strait. There was a land bridge at the time during the Ice Ages. They came in at least three major waves. So there has been some political discussion of that here in the United States. Well, we say these people are indigenous, but in fact, they originally came from Asia. But I think when people have been present for at least 10,000 years longer than any Europeans who have ever touched foot on the land, we can say that they are indigenous. And Camilla, the story of how the Aztecs and Mexica come to what is now Central Mexico, we know this because the descendants of the Aztecs wrote this down? I mean...

Yes. Well, we know it in three ways. Archaeologists look at pottery, etc., styles of remnants of their civilization, and they can tell which culture went where by roughly when. We know it because the linguists help us, people who study historical linguistics. They're the ones who have shown how many waves of migrants came. And then we mostly know it in the details that we know it, because the Nawaz or the people who spoke Nawat, the Aztecs, they did write down their histories. They wrote them down in pictoglyphs before the Europeans arrived. And after the Europeans arrived, they took the Roman alphabet that they had been taught so that they could read the Bible. And they went home, these young scholars, young students went home and spoke to their uncles and grandfathers and grandmothers and said, please tell me the history or tell me the prayer, tell me the story that you used to tell. And they wrote it, they sounded it out, they transcribed it, they wrote it down using the Roman alphabet, but in their own language.

So if we study Nahuatl, and I have studied Nahuatl for more than 20 years now, we can read these full-throated expressions, complex stories, poems, even some religious utterings, etc. revelatory, but also so moving. Because if you study Roman history, basically what you know about the Gauls or the Germans comes from Roman writers, and you can match it up perhaps with archaeology or whatever, but you don't have Gallic accounts of Caesar's conquest. You don't have the Germans saying where they thought they came from. But kind of with this, suddenly, people who've been conquered and who essentially, you know, their identity has long been suppressed, are being given a voice in your book. And it's incredibly moving and powerful to hear them speak. You know, I think what has grabbed you, what you have found compelling is really the same element that grabbed me or that I found compelling. That is, it's almost as if

we're parachuting in to some remarkable situation that, as you say, has existed in other times and places, but usually is so buried over in the layers of time and writing that we don't have direct access or a direct window to it. But these people who had not been sedentary for very long, who were farmers, but still were also partly hunters, who were still living in some very ancient ways, were there in the 1500s, learned to write and wrote all sorts of things about how, you know, all sorts of stories that we now can read and hence listen to in a way that, as you say, we can't do for the Gauls or even for the ancient Britons.

It's really quite remarkable, the clash of difference that one is able to see, and yet the commonalities too, between people who have been sedentary for millennia and those who haven't. So it's fascinating, yes. Camilla, before we come back to the conquest and their reactions to the conquest, I just wanted to ask a question because we've had tons of questions from listeners about their own sense of their past. So they've made this journey and they've come to the Central Valley in Mexico. And one of our listeners, Joshua Terry, has asked how much are they aware of preceding cultures like

the Olmec or the Maya. A list called Pharaoh Man has asked about the Toltecs. So how much do they have a sense of themselves as the, how much are they a break? And how much are they the heirs to previous sort of Mesoamerican civilizations? The Aztecs are fascinating because they see themselves both as chichimeca, meaning sort of savage people, wild people, people with bows and arrows, tough guys, okay, who came down from the north, but also the heirs of the people who have been living as high culture, civilized farmers in central Mexico for centuries. And that is because they intermarried with them. These were mostly male or even in some cases,

all male groups that were on the move rapidly, making war, moving to the south. And everywhere they went, they intermarried with and became acculturated with the people who lived where they were arriving. So they felt themselves to be the heirs of both. And in their writings, you see them take great pride in being Toltecs, artists, people of the valley, and also Chichimecs, savage warriors. They like both halves of themselves. Is it a bit like Anglo-Saxons or Franks going to Rome and feeling both they are barbarians, but they are also the heirs of this remarkable city? I do think so. I think that's a very good analogy, right, and feeling truly proud of both sides. Because the Aztec kings would go on pilgrimage, wouldn't they, to Teotihuacan,

which is this kind of, I mean, it was built at the same time as ancient Rome, isn't it? It's first millennium AD. I mean, this kind of astonishing pyramids and then abandoned for mysterious reasons. The most remarkable preceding culture was definitely Teotihuacan, which is actually a Nahuatl, Aztec word, sort of place where gods come into being, in effect. And we still know it by the Aztec word, because we don't know what language the people who actually lived there even spoke. It may have been a related language. That is, they too may have spoken a language that had come from what is now the American Southwest, but we can't be certain. And so the Aztecs clearly were very much aware of this place. It had fallen into decline mysteriously, as Tom has said, before they arrived, but the archaeological remains were still so large and so impressive that it was almost a tourist site, if you can use that word anachronistically. I guess pilgrimage, your word is better, Tom. They would make pilgrimages.

Because it's holy. I guess it's kind of holy, isn't it? Yes. Oh, absolutely. Kind of ghost haunted. And they placed their own origin myth right there. That is, they said this is where it all began. They also knew that they came as humans down from the north. Those real stories, real histories were still present in their minds. But when they told the story of the beginning of this fifth age, the

fifth son, my book title is The Fifth Son, they felt that we were living under the fifth son, and they felt that that son had been born at this incredibly miraculous place in the heart of the Valley of Mexico. And what do the guys, what do the people who live roundabout think of them? Do they think of them as intruders, as bullies, as what? You know, it's complicated. On one level, yes, the Aztecs were intruders and bullies. And, you know, the indigenous people in Mexico are famous for having allied with Cortes when he arrived. On the other hand, the Aztecs were very good at sort of working with the people that they were conquering and intermixing with. And they intermarried with the royal houses, the noble lineages of many different surrounding communities. So the people in the very heart of the Central

Valley who lived around the Great Lake, the Aztecs lived on an island in the middle of this Great Lake. Many of them felt that they were part and parcel of a sort of a state, we might say, of a great government, and many of them had voices in the council. So it really isn't true that all indigenous people all around hated the Aztecs. But the further away you got, the more conquered people felt. And there's no question that some of them were only too happy to ally with the Spaniards. You mentioned about the myth of how the Fifth Age begins. So we've got a question from EKG. What does their cosmos look like? How do they think of the sun, moon, and stars? But also broadening that out. I mean, you need to kind of understand how they see the cosmos, I guess,

to understand their civilization. So what is the myth that they identify with this kind of great abandoned city? What is it that happens there? They felt that their direct ancestor was a guy named Nanahuatzin. And that the fourth age, the fourth son had imploded rather disastrously. And people and all beings, divine human animals, those few that survived were living in utter darkness. And the gods came and said, we need a brave and great being to jump into a fire. And from that will emerge a new sun. From thatcio, a guy with a lot of self-love stepped forward and said, I will do it. And the gods said, okay, is there anybody else? And nobody else wanted to volunteer for such a terrible task. But eventually, one of the gods said, well, we need backup. So, they chose Nanahuatzin, a rather humble guy who didn't want to do it. He didn't want to die, but he thought to himself,

well, the gods have been good to me. After all, I've survived horrible times. Here I am. I need to respond to the call. I need to do what needs doing. So he agreed. And they gave a great costume to the vainglorious guy, and they gave just a little paper crown to the understudy that they had handpicked. Well, then, of course, as you might imagine, when the time came, the great hero could not find it in himself to jump into the fire and burn himself to death. He tried, he tried, he couldn't do it. So, the gods turned and stared at Nanahuatzin, the Aztec's ancestor, and he didn't want to do it. But he closed his eyes and did what he had to do. He was brave. And of course, from that,

you know, he's immolated, but the son is born and the people live forever after. So that really is quite emblematic of the way that they thought about themselves. That is, they thought of themselves as rather humble folk who had lived through desperate times and found the courage to do what needed to be done. They were the last arrivals, actually. All those streams of people who came down from what will later be the United States, they were the last to arrive, almost like the last group of immigrants to arrive in a crowded area. And so they saw themselves as having been through tough times, having had to be the scrappy guys. And they had survived.

They were proud of that. And they create this incredible city. I mean, I read the Spanish account, your one, a gloriously beautiful city filled with citizens who had the leisure time and energy to write poetry, create aromatic chocolate drinks, and sometimes debate morality. They grew in power. They had started on that island because nobody else wanted it. It was marshy ground. You couldn't plant corn and beans. But they coaxed some crops from that island, from the earth, and then they took part in wars. They were very clever, very strategic about the alliances that they formed,

very good about not allowing different branches of the royal family born of different women, different wives, to start fighting with each other. And so little by little, they took over the whole valley. It helped, actually, it turned out that they were on an island because they could set up a big marketplace there and through canoe traffic could tie together villages scattered all around the edge. It's a bit comparable to ancient Mediterranean history. We all know that the Mediterranean helped merchant aid grow. Or Venice, I guess. I mean, Spanish do compare it to Venice, don't they? Exactly. Right. So you can reach more territory when you're on the edge of some sort of a sea.

So they, with their central location and then their clever politicking, rose to be extremely powerful. And like other powerful, rich civilizations, they started to do both great and terrible things. You know, they wrote poetry, they invented hot chocolate, but they also beat up little people around the edges of their empire and brought losers in these wars home for sacrifice. If invented hot chocolate, you can get away with it. I suppose that is indeed the case. But can I ask a question about the city? So if, I mean, we obviously must have a sense from the Spanish accounts, but if we looked at Tenochtitlan and we, what would we see?

Or what would we hear or smell? Or what would be the most striking things, do you think? Well, from the centre, if you're looking down or looking at the city from across the water, from the shore of the mainland, you would see two great temples, pyramids rising in the centre, and they would have been painted white with lime, like whitewash, and then covered with beautiful woven banderas, flags, tapestries, and then in some places painted bright colors as well. The neighborhoods were divided very clearly all around this temple precinct. And the temple precinct is also where the royals lived. But around it, there were very clearly marked neighborhoods that were actually descended from clan or kin-based groups that had migrated there. They had remained aware of a certain lineage. And they each had

their own temples. And they were organized, very highly organized so that tribute or tax was collected in a certain way. And each group worked on cleaning the main temples or cleaning the aqueducts or the lakeshore and building the docks in different months of the year. Very centralized government, if you will. And then you would have each household would be built, each house built of a do adobe and around a square courtyard, there would be multiple buildings. And then some of them had second floors, especially so that they could grow gardens so that you would walk down these very orderly streets. Remember, this had all been built within the past century. So it really was very orderly. It didn't grow organically and sort of

in a disorderly way, the way ancient European cities did. They had planned this on the island. So you walked down these orderly streets, seeing two-story adobe buildings with beautiful flowers sort of cascading over the edges. And they were already in the habit of keeping songbirds. Today, Mexico and Central America are famous for the most ordinary of households keep songbirds. But that had already started at that time. Moctezuma likewise had a sort of a zoo and an aviary where different creatures from the territories were collected so that he could show off. Yeah. And he kept people who were kind of physically deformed. Yes. We don't know to what extent, but it is true that in these gardens, I shouldn't call them public gardens because we don't know that they were necessarily open to tourists, so to speak. But in these royal gardens, there is evidence that some people were kept against their will because they had some remarkable feature, perhaps a door or something like this.

But we don't know much about it. It's a kind of human zoo kind of thing. Yeah, a little bit. I don't want to exaggerate that too much, though, because we don't know much about it. It's a kind of human zoo kind of thing. Yeah, a little bit. I don't want to exaggerate that too much, though, because we don't know the extent of it. But this stupefying city that I think I read was five times the size of London under Henry VIII. Is that not true? Is that another of the myths? That turns out to be a myth. Now, that is one that was spread by otherwise reputable historians

in the past few decades, but recently an archaeologist, this was based on numbers that were pure guesswork that the Spaniards had put together and then the demographers put together. But recently, an archaeologist did the math and realized, you know, this island they were living on was five square miles. We were imputing a density of population that rivals that of Manhattan today, which is patently ridiculous. Right. Right. OK. However, it was very big. a population that rivals that of Manhattan today, which is patently ridiculous, right? However, it was very big. We do think there were probably 50,000 people on the island. And if you count all the people in the Central Valley who considered themselves sort of part of this, or connected to that city, we might approach sizes like they have talked about. You see, this is what I wanted you on, because I've got so many kind of garbled facts that I want you to-

We all do, and historians have helped with that, I'm sorry to say. Tom, I think we should get into the human sacrifice, because that is- I think we should do that after the break. Okay, fair enough. Don't you? I mean- No, no, fair enough. Because of course, yes.

I mean, I would say about a third of the questions we've been asked are about the sacrifice. And I know that it's obviously incredibly important to emphasize the beauty, the sophistication of this civilization. But unfortunately, this is what people do want to know about. And we need to talk about both. We'd be in denial if we didn't talk about sacrifice. So let's go and have a quick break. Go and make yourself a cup of chocolate. And then when we come back, we will talk human sacrifice. and on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. I've had a relaxing cup of hot chocolate. Tom Holland has been off to conduct a human sacrifice, as I believe is normal behavior in Brixton. And Camilla Townsend probably hasn't conducted a human sacrifice, but is going to talk to us about human sacrifice, which obviously

is the one thing that certainly all British readers associate with the Aztecs. So Camilla, we've had tons of questions. So here's a good one to kick off with. It's Stefan Jensen, and he says, human sacrifice aside, as if you can put it aside, how different from us were the Aztecs really? Now, the interesting thing about that is that human sacrifice is often the thing that people have used to show that the Aztecs were different, that they were lesser or that they were some sinister or whatever. So what's the truth?

I mean, are they these sort of bloodthirsty characters with this depraved practice, or are they just like us? I would argue strongly that at heart, these people were just like us. Now, it is true. Human sacrifice was a part of their culture, and that must be acknowledged. In recent decades, many of us historians have tried to not deny the fact of that, but avoid talking about it because we've been focused on trying to draw attention to other aspects of these people and of their culture. But it must be addressed.

It was real. The problem is that we, in the public, we have in general focused only on that aspect of the Aztec culture and thus have distorted it. At heart, at the center of their religion was a notion common to many human cultures, that is that humans owe the gods a great deal. You ought to thank the gods, show your gratitude, give sacrifice to them. It would be hard-pressed to find a religion that didn't have some element of that. And the greatest sacrifice was considered to be human life, especially the life of a beautiful, strong, young warrior. Again, the idea of a young man, a young person giving up his life for his people, for the greater good, this is very common across human

civilization. And which originates from that myth that you were telling us about. Yes, or that myth originates from the belief or the belief from the myth, but they're tightly tied together, right? So what happened, and I think this, well, scholars, archaeologists believe this happened actually in many parts of the world in ancient times. It's just that we don't have a clear view of it now, was that people gradually began to prefer to sacrifice a prisoner of war, someone taken, you know, an enemy that had been taken instead of one of their own children, right? I mean, that is rather normal.

Okay, we maintain the belief that we must give the gods a great gift, but it doesn't have to be my Maryb children, right? I mean, that is rather normal. Okay, we maintain the belief that we must give the gods a great gift, but it doesn't have to be my Marybeth, right? It'll be these people who attacked us and we defeated. And that went on, again, it's thought that this happened in all ancient or most ancient civilizations. There are hints about that all across the globe. We know that it went on across the New World. That is, that almost all Native Americans ritually sacrificed an occasional prisoner of war. Young women and children were almost always adopted if they were taken in war, but young warriors or chiefs faced the knife or faced the burning. And it was done with all great honor.

If a guy died without screaming, he was given the highest honor. So it wasn't intended necessarily to denigrate the enemy. It was part of war and it had to do with honoring the gods. Well, it is true that that custom that sort of in full context is tragically normal for human beings, took on a new angle under the Aztecs. They were the last migrants to arrive in the valley, as I've mentioned, and they fought for their position. And towards the end of that century, they had become so powerful that they really needed to try to maintain power over a far-flung empire. And this was a world without machine guns, right? They didn't have weaponry that was profoundly different from their neighbors

or their enemies. So they really needed to sort of dig in and find ways to terrorize people. And they began to commit human sacrifice on a scale that had never been done before by them and their people. I don't know about other regions in the world. And in fact, in one of the annals that I have read, they actually talk about this, that they sometimes liked to go, at the very end of their reign, when this power was peaking

and their paranoia, one could argue, was peaking, they would go and take young people from the area they were trying to conquer, bring them to the city, have them watch these horrible sacrifices in which dozens of people were killed, not just one. And then send them home, let them go. And they explicitly said this was with the idea of having them go home and tell their people, we better join this empire while we can and not fight them because we don't want our young people to have to be sacrificed like that. So it was purposeful. It does not seem to me that

this happened because all the Aztecs truly believed that if they didn't sacrifice thousands of people in the course of a year, the gods would be angry and the sun would disappear, that sort of stereotype. But there's a kernel of that in their religion. But then the reality was political, as it so often is. I mean, we can look at the government of my own beloved country, right? Horrible things were done in the 1970s and 80s by my government in our name to maintain power in Latin America. So I think it isn't much of a stretch to say that in many ways, they are or were very much like we are now. I've got a whole load of things that I thought that I knew about the Aztecs and their gods. And I'm fairly sure that I just want to basically stress test them.

So tell me if these are right or wrong. Did the Aztecs think that warriors who were sacrificed and women who died in childbirth turned into hummingbirds? Yes and no. So like ancient Greece, like the classical world, there was some division, some debate about what happened after you died. It wasn't universally agreed upon. Think about some people in the ancient world believed in the Orpheus cult and others did not. So likewise, in ancient Mexico, different areas had somewhat different views of this. But in general, life was the golden period and in death, you were a shade, a shadow who would soon be forgotten and then no longer exist. Except if you died as a warrior or as a sacrifice victim in war or a woman who died in childbirth.

Then you fed the gods and especially the sun. You lived for, it's debatable, probably four more years in a golden world where you were feeding the sun. And symbolically, metaphorically, you did this as a bird or a butterfly. That's beautiful. But it's not, we don't think that they thought, oh, look at that hummingbird. It's probably Uncle Joe, right? I mean, it wasn't a sort of literal thing like that,

but a more beautiful and metaphorical. But there's a kind of poetry there that's authentic. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes yes yes okay so from hummingbirds to something slightly bloodier is it true that aztec priests were in the habit of stabbing their penises with sharp thorns yes the listeners want to know this i mean you you told me you were gonna i mean tom has been saying he's going to ask this. So it's clearly playing on his mind. God knows, Camilla, what's going on in their subconscious.

I think I read that when I was about eight and it's haunted me ever since. It was. It's very true. It's in the histories. It's in the poems. And in fact, that was probably. Well, it was more common than human sacrifice. That is one thing that all young men did growing up in order to become tough was take part in ritual ceremonies in which you bled yourself, you bled your penis a little bit. The idea was not to do lasting damage, but just to show

how tough you were. And to thank the gods. Just to show how tough you are, basically. It's a resilience test. Yes. And thank the gods. I mean, again, your blood is feeding the earth and hence the divinity but i would absolutely argue that you're showing how strong you are how impressive you are i don't think it's something we should bring in on this show tom teenage pics all through the night um okay the most terrifying god is he the most terrifying god so there was a fabulous exhibition um at the royal academy here in london about 20 years ago and there was a statue of a god that looked to be wearing bubble wrap and you'll know immediately i'm talking about and i thought oh how it looks like a children's

character and then i read the sign and said this is a flayed skin turned inside out and this is the fat of the inside the skin that has formed little bubbles. And this god is Chipitotec, our lord, the flayed one. And the priests went around wearing flayed skins. Is that true? Yes. And in fact, at first, early on in their culture, there would have been some element of this. That is, a priest would have done something like that. The idea of taking on the persona of the sacrifice victim, which was a very holy and revered. I mean, they were part of the ones pushing this, a bit like military generals pushing a particular war.

It was good for their professional identity for there to be more of this human sacrifice. And clearly some of them, well, they were not the kind of guy you'd want to bring home for dinner. They must have stunk. No, I was about to say, not if they're wearing someone else's skin. Now, again, keep in mind that at the same time as this was going on, Aztec poets, some of them were singing about the tragic nature of war and the tragedy of life ending and the great beauty of life. So all Aztecs were not the same. I mean, that sounds silly, but my point is some of these priests were real dastardly dudes, but all Aztecs

weren't like that. Dominic, can I just read Denver Brito's question? Because he says, do we know of sentiment against sacrifice among the Aztecs? That's exactly what I was going to ask. Oh, sorry, Dominic. Is there a debate? Do we have evidence, textual

evidence of an actual debate within us? I guess I wouldn't go so far as to say that there was any sort of formalised debate. But just that within these songs that are a bit different from the histories, the songs are the poems, but they were sung aloud. There's clearly there are multiple different and competing threads. Some of them celebrate war, but actually very few. That's rather rare in the songs. A more dominant thread would be the tragic nature of violence. Because life was heaven. This life on earth was the best that there was. They really felt strongly, even for the warriors who get to live as hummingbirds for four years. Life was what they continuously spoke with reverence and joy about. Life was what you were supposed to be. Be the best human that you can because this is it, folks. And there's no question that part of that sort of dialogue or discourse was just a love of life, a joy in life.

All sorts of metaphors were used comparing to flowers, etc. So the idea that it was good to have to kill the enemy, I don't think I've ever come across that. You do find it's good that we won. But in terms of all the death and human sacrifice, the songs talk about it as a sad thing. I would argue that most likely the priests who were by now living on their own in these temple pyramids, they probably were not singing those songs. They had, I think, a different view. And I say that based on their actions. We don't have their words. Okay, so Camilla, one last question about gods.

And in some ways, I mean, this is the detail that has haunted me most of all. The god Tlaloc, who is the god of the rain. And is it true that children were particularly sacrificed to him and that if they cried, then the sacrifice was more efficacious? It is true. That is, the myth is that Aztecs ran around killing a lot of women and children. They did not. It was almost always prisoners of war, male prisoners of war, young warriors.

However, there were certain ceremonies. I mean, there was festival days, religious days went throughout the calendar. And there were certain ones where women died, and there was this one, the ceremony dedicated to Tlaloc, where a handful of children were sacrificed. And there is debate about who these children were. Some scholars have argued that they were their own children. However, there's no textual evidence of that. And in fact, archaeologists have found that these were always malnourished children. So I would argue strongly that these were undoubtedly also prisoners of war from impoverished areas. It was of ceremonial importance in many ceremonies, many festivals, and even on political occasions. If a chief cried as he uttered a certain statement, that meant he would not break his word.

So public tears were important. And yes, when the children cried, it was considered a good sign. There is some evidence that sometimes the children were drugged so that they didn't suffer. But given that there was some hope that the children would cry, I suspect not enough so that they could, you know, to death was a known phenomenon to everyone. So there's no question that when these children, women or warriors were taken in war, they knew what might be their fate. So on that question of how much the Aztecs were familiar with the world beyond them, I mean, obviously, they had no idea that Europe existed. But a question from Harold Wilson, how much do the Aztecs know about the Inca and the wider world in general? So were there links with the Inca Empire?

This was a world that had only been sedentary, that had only been farming for a couple of millennia. So they were still sort of roughly where the ancient Sumerians or the Mesopotamians were in terms of their technological development. So theyians or the Mesopotamians were in terms of their technological development. So they had canoes, for example, but they hadn't turned those canoes into sailing vessels. They had some rather simple maps, but they didn't have compasses, etc. So no, they did not have direct knowledge of vast territories. Their own empire extended as far as today's El Salvador, and it also went up the coast sort of in the direction of San Diego, although never got that far. And because they went far in their military exploits, through long distance trade networks, they had heard of other kingdoms. So they were aware that there were other kingdoms out there far, far away, but they couldn't have told you, yes, and the leading ones' names are the Incas,

and they did this and that. Like the Romans and the Chinese, perhaps. Exactly. I think that's a very good comparison. Right. So Camilla, you raise technology, and I think this is a massively fascinating topic. It's one that tons of our listeners have asked about. And in your book, I mean, I'm paraphrasing your book, so maybe you should be doing it, but you have this incredibly interesting argument about, it's basically a sort of clash of two time zones. The Spanish from the 16th century and the Aztecs who are basically thousands of years behind, as it works. They haven't been sedentary for as long. So my question, I guess, is a very, very basic one. Why? Why have people in the Americas not been sedentary farmers at the same time as the Sumerians or the Babylonians or whatever? Right. It's an excellent question. And

in fact, it's one that we haven't had an answer to until quite recently, because until the mid 90s, radiocarbon dating techniques, they weren't good enough. They weren't fine-tuned enough to tell us when which plant or which crop got to which point. We just knew, for example, in the old world that wheat seemed to be everywhere for the past few thousand years. But in human history, that doesn't really tell us much. So starting in the 90s, scholars were able to plot where wheat and peas got when, when people exactly began to farm corn and beans in the New World, etc. Well, it turns out, in retrospect, this makes perfect sense.

It turns out people became full-time farmers where there was a constellation of protein-rich crops that were suitable for that. You don't give up hunting unless you have a good protein-rich substitute. And in the Fertile Crescent that you are also familiar with, you had legumes, peas, and wheat, and the wild forms were very protein-rich. That constellation of crops rapidly spread east and west, and Europe and China added other crops and became farmers too. Well, in the New World, it took a lot longer. The ancient ancestor of corn, teosinte, was much tinier and less protein rich. So, people everywhere were sort of flirting with farming, planting their favorite plants and then coming back next year to see if more of the cranberries or the wild corn had grown. But meanwhile, they were relying more on hunting. So they flirted with farming and over several millennia, they did turn the teeny tiny teosinte

into an ear of corn. And then at some point, they realized, and this took more time, that if you ate corn on the same day as you ate beans, you had enough protein to live. You didn't have to hunt down a deer. It's like eating a hamburger if you have corn and beans together, but not separately. Wheat and peas on their own are good enough. So it took about 5,000 more years in the new world than in the old. Not for people to start flirting with farming, as I call it, but for people to really settle down and become full-time farmers. And that didn't make them stupid. Not at all. I mean, the Aztecs I study, the writings that I read, these are the works of some rather brilliant men, especially some of the poems. And I would argue that women were just as smart, but that's another question. But indeed, it's just that they had not been sedentary for nearly as long. So they had not had the same number of millennia to invent all the things that come with sedentary life. You can't have a blacksmith shop or develop a writing system and a tribute system if you're on the move every day. You can only move with

what you have on your back, keep on going, hunt the next deer or the next rabbit. So it makes sense. Do you need all that for wheels? Because obviously that's one thing that people always ask about, where are the wheels? There's a great example. It's not just metallurgy and ships but the wheel and in fact um the incas for instance um also late comers to farming like like the mesoamericans um they had begun to develop a wheel they had it in certain toys and ritual objects obviously it would not have taken much longer i would guess another generation or two for them to start wheeling carts around okay we're not going to go into the detail of the Spanish conquest because I think we should save that for another episode. I mean, it's such an astonishing story. But on that topic,

there is a question here from Costas Cofaris. If the Aztecs had had another couple of centuries to advance technologically and administratively, might they have been able to hold the Spaniards off? And a question from Victoria Adams, could there have been a more peaceful, less destructive outcome for the Aztecs? Or did disease mean that first contact with the Spaniards was going to end very badly for them? So I guess the question is, was there any way in which once the Spanish had reached Mexico, that the Aztec empire could have survived? I don't think so. No matter how brilliant you are, I guess that word means something different to me than it does to you, but no matter how

intelligent and savvy you are, you can't make up on your own for a 5,000-year technological differential. I do think that had things gone a bit differently in certain specific regards, they could have held the Spaniards off for a bit longer. You might think of Japan holding the West off for a bit longer, so to speak. This can happen with the right rulership and with some bad luck on the side of the Europeans. But that's a lot different from arguing that the Aztec as a state, as a nation could have survived indefinitely. I don't see that happening. As for having accomplished the whole shift, the whole conquest, the whole set of events more peacefully, I suppose it might have been possible. One of the Indigenous women who was pressed into translating for Cortes Malinche or Doña Marina, she seems to have worked quite hard to save Indigenous lives by telling people, work with these guys, be their partner rather than their enemy, and you can come out ahead.

And some of the Indigenous villages who took that path did come out ahead of others. So perhaps the whole thing could have been done with less bloodshed. But as your listener has alluded to, microbes were part of the European arsenal. Because of long distance trade and farming, there were far more diseases endemic in Europe and Asia than there were in the New World, where people had not been living with their animals for millennia. So I think that given the brutal realities of the epidemics, people were going to suffer even if peace talks had prevented some of the wars. But Camilla, can I ask a question? Some historians, as far as I understand it, argue that the real,

I mean, the pandemics aside, which obviously the Spanish themselves couldn't really do much about, that the really sort of tough times for the indigenous people actually came much later than we think. So in other words, after independence from Spain in the 19th century, that was when things got really rough for the kind of native people of Mexico, rather than as we commonly imagine, you know, in the aftermath of the conquest. Is that right? Or am I misremembering or exaggerating? No, you're remembering quite rightly. And in some ways, I would argue that is quite right. There's no question that the generation or two after conquest was very difficult for the

indigenous people. The population dropped because of diseases, they had to accustom themselves to a whole new set of rulers who had no real respect for them. The Aztecs did have respect for the people that they were conquering. So there's no question that we watch sort of precipitous drop or level in knowledge of their ancient cultures, precipitous drop in population. They suffered in the 16th century. It is true, however, that in order to make their empire go round, the Spaniards very cleverly developed a system whereby they call it the dos republicas, the two republics. They would rule the Spanish people of Spanish descent in one way and the people of indigenous descent in another way.

And as long as the indigenous people complied on a certain level, they could even rule themselves, that they could even have indigenous chiefs continue to rule them. And so there was a sort of sense of parallel worlds. There were whole sections of the university devoted to having scholars learn indigenous languages. Why? So that people, native people could come to court and speak in their own language, for instance. So one could argue that a sort of stasis was reached of mutual accommodation over the colonial era that broke completely when they broke from Spain. That in the independence era, all bets were off. The new Republican government said all citizens are equal.

There will be no special allowances made for Indians, no indigenous languages in court. You each have the right to have your own land, for example. So show us your title. Well, of course, the indigenous people just had tradition. They didn't have their title. So yes, the average breadbasket, so to speak, of the typical native descended family in Mexico, it really declined dramatically over the 1800s. And hence, they ended up being part of the great Mexican revolution of the 19-teens. Yeah, Zapata and stuff.

Right, with Zapata and stuff. Right, absolutely. With Zapata and Pancho Villa, exactly. So you're not wrong. But I wouldn't want to say that the conquest of the 16th century was a cakewalk. That had its own challenges, right? And we talked about this right at the beginning with the myths that are commonly believed. And the assumption is that the Aztecs thought that the world was ending. And you very powerfully and movingly

demonstrate that that was not the case because they didn't have time for that kind of myth-making. They were trying to stay alive. Right. They were trying to stay alive. First, they were trying to win the war against the Spaniards. And then when that became impossible, they were trying to stay alive. Then they were trying to keep their culture alive, writing down all these histories. And thank goodness they did. I have come across, in all the reading I've done over these two decades now, no evidence that they thought the world was going to end. There was one period in the 1580s when the disease had taken such a toll, generation after generation, that they began to worry a bit. Will our population someday disappear? That was as close as they ever came to thinking that the world would end.

No vision of apocalypse, right? Yeah, I mean, I noted it down when I read it. Those Aztecs who lived through the war with the Spaniards and then survived the first great epidemic of European diseases found to their surprise that the sun continued to rise and set and that they still had to face the rest of their lives. And I think that that's a perfect note on which to end, a kind of bittersweet note of kind of mingled despair and survival. So Camilla, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Really, really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been fascinating. Thank you so much. For listeners, Camilla's book is The Fifth Son, A New History of the Aztecs. Honestly, one of the most fascinating, eye-opening, moving history books I've read. Can't recommend it highly enough. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.