Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

First, although Aztec political life has been assumed to revolve around their religiously motivated belief in the necessity of human sacrifice to keep the gods happy, the annals indicate that this notion was never paramount for them.

The Aztecs’ own histories, however, indicate that they understood clearly that political life revolved not around the gods or claims about the gods but around the realities of shifting power imbalances.

the man who at dusk blew the conch shell and chanted profound poems might call a terrified slave girl to him later that evening.

What is everywhere apparent in the historical annals is the recognition of a great technological power imbalance in relation to the newly arrived Spaniards, one that called for a rapid reckoning.

It was possible, some thought, that this current crisis might be the war to end all wars, and many wanted to be on the side of the victors as they entered the new political era.

Some who were already adults when the strangers came helped lead the way in demonstrating the importance of a phonetic alphabet, for instance, or learning how to build a ship larger than any prior canoe, or constructing a rectangular rather than a pyramidal tower. Not everyone exhibited this remarkable curiosity and pragmatism, but many did. Moreover,

Yet what made all this beauty and high culture possible was the Mexica rulers’ increasingly draconian measures, their tightening bureaucratic organization and control in various arenas of life, the ritualized violence they regularly enacted before audiences, and the warfare they did not fear to wage at the edges of their realm.

As paramount rulers, the Spaniards would offer one advantage—they were even more powerful than the Mexica, which meant not only that they could defeat them but also that they could insist that all intervillage warfare cease in the regions they controlled. Many opted for that possibility and thus gave victory to the newcomers.

In the central basin, the Mexica were told for the first time that they would have to pay a tax or tribute as great as any other conquered people. The protests on the part of both men and women caused many to be imprisoned and sold into indentured servitude.

They would be the last for many years to write analytically as indigenous intellectuals. Thereafter, poverty and oppression largely held sway in their communities until the twentieth century, when a reservoir of remembered anger surfaced in revolution and rebellion, and ultimately new vistas on ancient traditions opened.

Do we ourselves not become both wiser and stronger every time we grasp the perspective of people whom we once dismissed?

So it was that in the year 1299, Shield Flower looked upon her own death and found the courage to pass from this earthly life with the dignity and style that befit a royal woman.

Some two hundred years had passed before their descendants made it to the central basin of Mexico, and the tales of the land’s fertility had all proven to be true. Here the precious maize crop grew easily.

Shield Flower and her father, Huitzilihuitl (Wee-tzil-EE-weet, Hummingbird Feather), were taken to Culhuacan, the most important Culhua town. Huitzilihuitl’s heart wept for his daughter, whose torn clothes rendered her body visible to all, exposing her to shame.

The bound girl struggled to mark herself with the black and white substances in the ancient way. Then she stood and began to scream, “Why do you not sacrifice me?!” She was ready, the gods were ready; the Culhuas only dishonored themselves by delaying, as if they had no courage for the deed.

Archaeological and linguistic evidence, as well as the written historical annals of multiple Mexican towns, all indicate that the ancestors of the people now known as the Aztecs came down from the north over the course of several centuries, that those who came last found themselves without land, and that they then had to jockey for power in the fertile central valley.

We even know that the people of the valley educated their noble girls to be almost as stoical as their brothers in times of duress,

Here and there, they found a few groups who had preceded them in the new hemisphere, apparently traveling down the coast in canoes. By about fourteen thousand years ago, before the land bridge made sizable migrations possible, a few people had gotten as far as southern Chile.

When the people of Eurasia later met those of the Americas, decisions that human beings had made about farming in those early times would determine their fates, in the sense that the past determined their degree of strength relative to each other. It is a tale worth telling if we wish to understand both the rise and the fall of the Aztecs.

The women told the men what they had deduced, and those men who valued survival listened to them.

In other places, such as New Guinea, where bananas and sugarcane were the tastiest plants available, people experimented eagerly with the sweet treats, but they continued to depend on wild boar and other game animals to feed themselves.

In short, the sedentary lifestyle of full-time agriculturalists eventually yielded more powerful civilizations.

With only a few centuries of difference between themselves and their neighbors, farmers soon found that their cleverest inventions and their best weapons could be bought, borrowed, or stolen by the more nomadic peoples who surrounded them.

It required thousands of years of effort on the part of Mexico’s women to turn those little tufts into what we would recognize as ears of corn;

Even when the ears of corn began to grow to a substantial size, scraping off the kernels and eating them still left a person hungry. Eventually, the women began to notice that when they ate corn at the same time as they ate beans, they were better nourished.

But there had been several millennia of delay in comparison with the Old World, a fact that would matter a great deal in the future, as Shield Flower’s descendants would discover.

(the volcano did its job so thoroughly that Mexican archaeologists were forced to use dynamite to uncover even part the city.)

The first newcomers from the north who stumbled upon the city’s inspirational ruins must have been stunned at what they saw. The old city lay between two great pyramids, each of which was aligned with a towering mountain behind it; each offered homage to the power, the divinity, of the earth itself. Between them lay a great avenue, and along each side ran the houses and schools and temples of a people long vanished.

The working people—peasant farmers, or perhaps even slaves who had come as war captives—rose in revolt. They burned the palaces and the ceremonial precincts but left untouched the apartments of the ordinary folk. Archaeologists know that this was no foreign invasion: foreign enemies always try to destroy the common people’s homes and livelihood, but they do not destroy the great monumental architecture they hope to acquire for themselves.

It does not take much imagination to envision the kind of coercion that had to have taken place in Teotihuacan in order to maintain such a metropolis in a world without highways and railroad supply lines, or engines to aid construction projects.

Bows and arrows did not give a decided advantage over the atlatl in the hunt; they only offered definite benefits in warfare with other humans, as they could kill from a greater distance, and they allowed for stealth. It was probably for that reason that this type of technology had not been vigorously pursued in the sparsely populated New World, where it was far easier to wander away to unclaimed territory than to attack one’s neighbors.

Likewise, it was central Mexico’s ancient culture that absorbed the incoming barbarians, as they were called (and as the latter proudly called themselves).

The complex calendar system, on the other hand, had made its way to nearly every village in central Mexico, and a particular version had taken root there.

On a much simpler level, one could argue, we do something similar. We know what day of the year it is, which relates to our position in connection with the sun, and at the same time, we run a totally arbitrary, continuous seven-day series of Nordic gods’ names, so we know it is Wednesday or Thursday as well.

Almost all the wanderers believed they came from the northwest, from Chicomoztoc, “the place of the Seven Caves.” Some groups said their specific origin was called “Aztlan,” a word of uncertain meaning, but it was probably meant to be “Place of the White Heron.” Where was Aztlan? We don’t know, and we never will.

Like all humans, the Chichimec barbarians seem to have spent most of their time forming alliances with others and deciding when and where to break them.

reference to a place called “Tula” (meaning “a reedy place” or “a swampy piece of ground,” like most of the central valley) was a symbolic way of speaking of any nomadic group’s first important moment of settling down with locals. The tensions, it seems, were always horrendous.27

The Chichimec barbarians bossed the others around, but it was not exactly the Chichimecs’ fault that they exhibited such rough, uncouth behavior. One of the more malicious gods had tricked them: he left a foundling for them to find and take pity on and raise as their own.

He said to the Nonohualca, “You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide.” The Nonohualca said to him, “So be it. Let us first seek where we can get one whose buttocks are four spans wide.” Then they brought four women who had not yet known sexual pleasure. But as to size, they were not enough. He said to the Nonohualca, “They are not of the size I want. Their buttocks are not four spans wide. I want them really big.”

This Huemac proceeded to do the most terrible thing one could do to a conquered people’s women: rather than keeping them as minor wives, he sacrificed them.

Working together, the two groups managed to defeat their preposterously evil enemy, but in a sense it was too late.

“The Nonohualca gathered together and talked. They said, ‘Come, what kind of people are we? It seems we have done wrong. Perhaps because of it something may happen to our children and grandchildren. Let us go. Let us leave our lands…. We should leave here.’”

they did not simply tell exciting stories of the forging of alliances and the dramatic crises that would break them apart. What Shield Flower really learned as a girl as she listened to the elders around the fire was that her people were destined to survive.

They worked night after night, patiently, painstakingly gluing, sewing, and repairing, rendering the feathered, painted shields and spears truly beautiful. At last they were ready to launch their bid for their people’s freedom—which of course they won.

They said, for example, that after Shield Flower died, the survivors among her people were given land by the king of Culhuacan, in exchange for which they had to act as his servants. He entertained himself by giving them impossible tasks and threatening them with dire punishment if they failed to perform them. They had to move a chinampa (a farmable field built in swampy ground by constructing a basketry-style fence and filling it with earth—nothing could be less movable); they had to capture a deer without piercing its hide or breaking its bones; they had to defeat an enemy unarmed. In each case, they managed the task, either through trickery or, in the latter example, the use of extraordinary violence.

Hidden in the bushes, he watched as they prepared the dedication of their temple. Suddenly the people’s god chose to intervene.

The town they built would be called Tenochtitlan,30 and it would soon have a tlatoani, or king, and be beholden to no one else. This was what Shield Flower’s father had attempted to orchestrate years before, but he had acted prematurely. A generation or two later, in the mid-1300s, the Mexica were better prepared to defend themselves, and this time they began with no rash implicit declarations of war against their neighbors.

Had she known of the future good, she would have known of the future agony as well.

Although his father had been chief of the Mexica for decades, Itzcoatl himself was just the son of one of the tecpan (palace compound) women who was far from royal. His half brothers by more important mothers had names that harkened back to the thirteenth century—

The Mexica had managed to turn themselves into an independent entity at last by making friends with their on-again, off-again enemies, the people of Culhuacan.