Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Travelling to Mexico in Cortés’ wake, Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexica’s gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexica, whose temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the Flayed One’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favours could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep. Such cruelties cried out to the heavens. ‘It was the clamour of so many souls, and so much blood shed as an affront to their Creator,’ wrote one Franciscan, that had inspired God to send Cortés to the Indies – ‘like another Moses in Egypt.’16 Yet even Cortés himself had lamented the cost. The glories of Tenochtitlan had been obliterated; its canals filled with floating corpses. In the Spaniards’ wake had come killers even more terrible: diseases borne from Europe, against which the Indians had no resistance. Millions upon millions would die. And then there were the Spanish themselves. The wealth of the Indians, fallen into Christian hands, was not spent on bringing the world into the fold of Christ. Instead, shipped back to Spain, it was used to fund wars against the king of France. The Indians, crushed beneath the hooves of Spanish greatness, were worked as slaves. Resistance was savagely punis...