Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating ‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’,14 immensely vaster than any city in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the Mexica. It was also a monument to something much more: their understanding of time itself. The city, only recently built, existed in the shadow of other, earlier cities, once no less magnificent, but long since abandoned. The emperor of the Mexica, going on foot, would often make pilgrimage to one of these massive ruins. No more awesome warning could have been served him that the world was endlessly mutable, governed by cycles of greatness and collapse, than to visit the wreckage of such a city. The anxiety of the Mexica that their own power might crumble shaded readily into an even profounder dread: that the world itself might darken and turn to dust. So it was, across Tenochtitlan, that they had raised immense pyramids; on the summit of these, at times of particular peril, when the...