Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

Each section of the altepetl would have presented their remembered history, one after the other, as was traditional, but this time the statements were phonetically transcribed and preserved in a book. Thus Chimalpahin could step back in time to the 1540s, to the days of his grandmother’s childhood, and actually hear the elders speaking, giving him nearly unique access to the past.

But sadly, someone in the intervening years had disposed of the disintegrating and possibly worm-eaten object.

When he couldn’t remember, for example, the name of someone’s third daughter, or whom she had married, he said so, rather than making something up.

He said to his readers of the future that he knew, if they were reading his work, that they had become Christians, and he acknowledged that the Christians had brought a great deal of scientific and technological knowledge with them (mentioning eclipses, for instance).

But their own people had had a wealth of knowledge, too, which they had preserved as best they could in the early days, and he would explain how he had come by these writings, “so that you the reader, you who are Christian, may not doubt or waver.”

For example, when he mentioned a god named Ome Tochtli (Two Rabbit), he knew that a seventeenth-century reader, even an indigenous one, might not know what he was talking about. He asked his readers to recall their school days and compared Ome Tochtli to the Roman god Bacchus.

He theorized that the peoples from the edge of Europe, from the Baltic, who had given the medieval Christians the most trouble in their conquest, might have been the Nahuas’ ancestors.76 Someone from the Old World, he was sure, had constructed boats and somehow made it to the (then unknown) New World. However it had happened, people had somehow ended up at Aztlan, at the Seven Caves, and from there had begun to wend their way south.

Before long, Shield Flower was shouting at her captors, daring them to attempt to extinguish her. Her people, she warned them, including those yet unborn, would never waver. Individuals would perish, but her people would never die.

Yet one May evening in 1612, Chimalpahin’s steadiness of purpose and eternal optimism seem to have wavered. Even before the events that had ended in the brutal killing of thirty-five people, he had been struggling.

Chimalpahin evinced the greatest admiration for Juan’s wife. “The people thought [Zárate] very evil, but although the Mexica were angry about the priest because he treated them like this, they had patience, they kept it inside, no one dared to make it public and make complaint to the Royal Audiencia.” These were remarkable words for the seventeenth century, a direct avowal of hidden feelings: They kept it inside, no one dared to make it public. And Chimalpahin added that it would have remained thus “if it hadn’t been for María López, who was so bold as to accuse him before the lord judges.”