The most powerful and important civilization of the Mesoamerican
cultures at the arrival of the Spanish conquerors was the Aztecs, a young,
mystical society formed by the union of different ethnic groups such as the Acolhua,
Chalca, Xochimilco, Tepanec, but, above all, the Mexica; powerful warriors who under this
alliance exercised absolute dominion over the peoples of the region of the Valley of Mexico.
The latter, founders of the legendary city of Tenochtitlan, would be the center of the Aztec
empire, possessing great economic and cultural wealth, with unique knowledge in architecture,
agriculture and astrology. Its fascinating pyramids, inspired by the Toltec culture,
keep stories inside their temples of sacrifices with which they pleased their imposing gods.
Today we will get to know one of the most enigmatic cultures that inhabited the new
world before the arrival of Hernán Cortés. We will be included in their customs and rituals while we
praise Tlaloc and the majestic feathered serpent, Welcome to Copernicus’s Galaxy.
Human Sacrifices were more frequent than we think in Aztec society...
Leaving aside the looting and the innumerable acts of tyranny that
the Spaniards applied to the Mexican ancestors, if there is something that
anyone who visited Tenochtitlan at that time would not miss, it would be the grotesque
and numerous human sacrifices that these people used to do in all their festivities.
They worshiped deities of all kinds, gods of water, fertility and war. Like many other
ancient civilizations of the world, they were polytheistic, and the mythological Aztec beings
were not inherently good, as they were surrounded by a marked duality between good and evil.
If they were happy, they would give them abundant rains for their crops
or watch over their victory in battles, but on the other hand,
if something or someone made them angry, they would send storms and misfortunes upon them.
To calm the anger of their gods it was not enough to pray to them, they were bloodthirsty beings
and demanded human sacrifices as payment for their services. The Aztecs truly believed that
if they did not offer these lives to their deities, great calamities would strike them,
the sun would not rise again and the world would end. They did not do it simply in response to a
bloodthirsty instinct, these rituals carried a whole religious and political issue. Francisco
Lopez de Gomara, a prominent ecclesiastic chronicler of the Spanish conquest of Mexico
pointed out that there was no evil within the Aztecs when performing these sacrifices.
The Aztecs officiated massive ceremonies where several people were sacrificed per day during
the festivities celebrated for their gods. The sacrifices were usually prisoners captured in
raids or invasions to other tribes, who were detained and fed until it was time to lie down
on the ceremonial altar. Some historians assure that between 20 thousand and 30 thousand people
met their end each year at the hands of the Aztec priests, others raise the figure to 80 thousand,
however, this is an exaggeration considering that in the 200 years that this culture lived
in the valley of Mexico, the inhabitants of all the tribes that resided in this territory
never exceeded 2 million. According to anthropologist Yolotl Gonzalez Torres,
these discrepancies in the number of sacrifices are due to the enemies of the Aztecs who inflated
the numbers to demonstrate their supposed superiority when facing such fearsome enemies.
The ritual was always the same, four priests held the limbs of the man or
woman to be sacrificed on the altar that was located on top of a pyramid. After their
usual ceremonial guidelines, a fifth priest firmly took an obsidian knife with which he
opened the person’s thorax and ripped out the heart with his hand to offer it to the gods.
According to testimonies left by the men who accompanied Cortés on his emblematic journey
in these territories, they were horrified to realize that in addition to extracting the heart,
they cooked it to eat as part of the ceremony. They explained how the body
of the sacrificed person was thrown down stairs so that the so-called
"Cuacuacuiltin" could take it and prepare it to be the main dish of the banquet.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes how they only fed on the extremities,
the palm of the hand being a delicacy for them. The torso was thrown to the wild
beasts and the head was stored in a large altar where they were collected. He affirms
that in one of the banquets officiated by the emperor Moctezuma every night,
they offered meats of young boys stewed among the typical dishes based on different birds. Although,
the historian Diego Luis de Moctezuma affirms in his work "Corona Mexicana, or History of the
nine Moctezumas" that the tlatoanis did not used to eat human meat unless a sacrifice had been
previously carried out, in which case the right thigh was always kept for the emperor's delight.
Aztecs: The largest empire in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.
In only 200 years they went from being a nomadic people to occupying the position as the largest
and most powerful Mesoamerican empire, dominating a territory that covered 500,000
square kilometers, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast, subduing great civilizations
and consolidating one of the largest trade routes of that unknown continent.
The story of how they managed to achieve such a feat is full of mystical events that possibly
only lived in the collective imagination of the Mexica people. According to them, they came
from the island of Aztlan, a mystical expanse of land whose name meant "Place of Herons",
from where a group of hunters made a pilgrimage in search of a sign indicating where they should
settle to become the "Empire of the Sun" that the god Huitzilopochtli prophesied to them.
They wandered for more than 200 years until finally the future Aztec leader
Tenoch found an eagle devouring a snake perched on a cactus in the center of a
lake. This was the long awaited sign that prevails today as a symbol on the Mexican
flag and that marked the beginning of the great city of Tenochtitlan in 1325.
They had to face great challenges from the beginning of its construction,
because nature itself was against them, to begin with,
any building they built on that marshy land would undoubtedly sink... but no
neighboring village ever expected that their engineering capabilities could be so advanced,
finding the solution through wooden stakes driven into the bottom of the lake and volcanic stone
with which they filled the hollow spaces that gave any construction a greater resistance.
Their architectural knowledge and resilience in the face of such adversities allowed them
to build causeways that facilitated access to the city, with drawbridges that allowed them
to control the entrance of their enemies, and aqueducts through which they transported fresh
water from Lake Chapultepec. They defeated the leader of the Tepaneca tribe that controlled
the area with the help of Nezahualcoyotl, who later also contributed to the construction of
a 16 kilometer long dam with floodgates that allowed the Aztecs to regulate the water level
that often threatened the powerful city with floods, all revolutionary feats for their time.
They also devised a cultivation system called "Chinampa", converting the inhospitable swampy
lands into fertile fields that guaranteed the food supply for their people and soldiers in
their incursions to expand their territory. These were small artificial islands built with
sticks assembled together to form a smooth and solid surface on which branches were piled and
covered with different fertilizers made from animal excrement and mud from the lake bottom.
In only 100 years they managed to expand their territory in all directions,
controlling everything from the now city-state of Tenochtitlán.
They changed the social and political organization of the Valley of Mexico,
and they managed to monopolize not only material wealth,
but also technological and cultural wealth, with advanced knowledge in mathematics and astronomy.
What was life really like in Aztec society?
The Aztecs were a particular group that had a unique way of seeing and doing things, however,
they kept certain similarities with other ancient civilizations. They were not the
only ones who worshiped uncharitable deities related to natural elements or social aspects,
nor were they the first to officiate ceremonies with human sacrifices.
Living in Tenochtitlan meant belonging to the most booming civilization of the
time. They enjoyed a wealth superior to other neighboring peoples thanks to several factors,
among which was precisely the subjugation of other tribes in the Valley of Mexico,
from which they got free labor for the development of their roads,
temples and palaces and the work that the highest social stratum did not want to do.
They also enriched themselves by charging mandatory tribute to all these peoples.
Their community was divided into three different levels. At the highest point we find the nobility,
called "Pipiltin", which had control over the government and religion.
They could wear things, such as feathers, cotton fabrics, gold jewelry and precious
stones that were forbidden for the rest of the population, not to mention that they had
land that was worked by the lower levels of their society ... very similar to other ancient empires.
The simple mortals were called "macehualtin", these were the peasants of this culture, artisans
and other merchants who had to earn a living with their own hands, paid tribute and had to help in
the construction of public works, aspiring only to rise in level if they excelled in what they did.
At the bottom were prisoners of war or criminals who served
as slaves with all that this commonly means,
besides the peculiarity of being the perfect people for sacrifices in religious festivities.
They were governed under a theocratic system,
where the monarch was elected by the representatives of each of the
20 family groups in which the Aztecs were divided. They acquired a sacred position
that would rule for life as "Tlatoani", being 11 who passed through the throne.
Many aspects of their life revolved around their polytheistic religion, which was made up
of elements from different Mesoamerican cultures. The Aztecs believed in the myth of "the five suns"
that represented the 5 times that the gods had created worlds and these had destroyed
themselves by their own defects. For them, this world was destined to the same end, therefore
they worshiped their temperamental gods and offered them human sacrifices in the
hope of keeping them satisfied and getting their protection, thus avoiding the end of the world.
This bond was so strong with their faith that many of their cultural elements were linked to
their religious beliefs and practices. From their architecture inspired by the Toltec civilization,
with stepped pyramids leading to a temple at the top, to their artistic representations
of which the colossal sculptures of their gods and kings stood out,
to their well-known and praised knowledge of astronomy, with the study of both solar
and lunar movements and the planet Venus, creating the famous 365-day solar calendar.
The fall of the largest pre-Columbian empire, what did the Spaniards do?
We all know the fate of this Mesoamerican empire... but how?
How did such a powerful, fierce, prosperous and cultured people,
who dominated so many people and overcame so many adversities, succumb to the Spaniards?
To understand this historical event that would mark the end of the legendary city
of Tenochtitlan of its culture and beliefs, it is necessary to understand how the Aztec people,
and especially the emperor Moctezuma, saw these strange people with pale skin
and long beards, with their shining armor and imposing beasts on which they moved.
For the Mexica, Cortes was the living incarnation of the god Quetzalcoatl,
who could appear to them every 52 years, coinciding with the arrival of Hernan Cortes.
They wore armor that glittered in the sun and gigantic animals that they had never seen before,
it was clear to them that they were in the presence of a divine being.
The famous conqueror already had some time with the knowledge of the immensity and wealth that the
Aztec empire had. He had a flock of 11 ships, 508 soldiers, 16 horses and 14 pieces of artillery,
besides having been making alliances with different native enemies of the Mexica,
These civilizations gave them numerous slaves,
among them Malitzin, better known through history as "Malinche",
who was quite intelligent and could speak Nahuatl, which gave them a communicative advantage.
Upon his arrival in present-day Veracruz, the Spaniards were visited by the Mexica
on behalf of the emperor Moctezuma with gifts that included food, magnificent gala dresses,
feathers and gold jewelry with their only request being that he not enter their territory,
as they believed that his presence heralded terrible omens. However,
he was finally received in the legendary city by the Tlatoani himself in November 1519.
They soon began to earn the discontent of the villagers, as they were opposed to their religious
cults, in addition to taking all the gold that was within their reach whenever possible. After
the events of the so-called sad night, where the treacherous crime committed by the soldiers of
Hernán Cortés against numerous Mexica nobles unleashed the wrath of the Aztec people,
forcing them to leave the city with numerous casualties on their backs,
the Spanish conqueror managed to isolate the city, achieving a shortage of food and water, which
added to the epidemic of smallpox spread by the Spanish, causing great imbalances within the city.
The emperor Moctezuma and his successors fell one by one before the great military advantage
of their enemy in terms of weaponry and mastery of the horse. In just one year they managed to
finish with a society that took 200 years to build. Their defeat had several factors,
among which highlights the initial belief that the strange man was the
divine feathered serpent incarnate in man and the way in which the Spanish invaders
made war. It was a total disaster for the Aztecs with no intention of showing mercy.
Aztec culture was not exactly a utopia, in fact it was far from it. Even today we are far from it, on
the contrary, it seems that every time we advance we become further from being a utopia. We may have
more comforts, knowledge and we do not offer systematic human sacrifices, but can we really
boast of being an example for our ancestors? What we cannot deny is that their cultural
contribution to the history of mankind was and will continue to be one of the most fascinating
and worthy of being analyzed... at least we will continue to do so here, at Copernicus’s Galaxy.