by Marie Arana
Complicating our ability to fully appreciate the past, the Incas and Aztecs had no writing. Although the Mayans perfected a complex system of glyphs we can now decode, the Incas and Aztecs preserved the past in oral histories handed down through generations or, in the case of the Incas, through knotted string quipus historians are only now beginning to understand. Moreover, much of what we know about these ancient cultures is tainted by European bias—filtered through Spanish chroniclers, priests, or mestizos striving to please their colonial masters. The mark of the conqueror is all too clear in the extant “record.” In it, we read that the New World indigenous are heathen, unenlightened barbarians, a disposable race, hardly human; even though we now know that in many ways they were more evolved than Europeans. The Inca moral code, for instance—ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qhella (do not steal, lie, or be slothful)—was deeply ingrained in the Andean people. Eventually, when the colonial system locked into place, the accepted, popular gloss was that Indians were beasts of burden, whatever their rank in the preconquest universe, and their just reward was to serve the higher order of Spain. As a result, historians must navigate a quagmire of opinion and prejudice to understand even the most basic contours of indigenous life.
So what, if anything, can we conclude about these cultures’ interest in gold and silver? There is plenty of physical evidence that the Incas held a reverence for precious metals. Gold had been part of their belief system from the very beginning, since the day that Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, the founding patriarch and matriarch, along with their brothers and sisters, allegedly left the hollows that surround Lake Titicaca to seek the sacred land on which to found their empire of the Sun. The Sun God, as legend had it, had armed them with a gold rod that would sink deep into the earth when it recognized Qosqo—Cuzco—the earth’s umbilical, the center from which their dominion would radiate to far corners of the world. That larger world was Tahuantinsuyu, and their charge was to penetrate it, enlighten it, and bring more hands and souls to the labors and glories of worshiping the Sun.
As the Inca Empire expanded, following a logic that is altogether different from any known model of conquest, precious metals became the symbols of its mandate, if never its currency or goal. The Incas fanned out from the holy medulla of Cuzco gradually, methodically, growing ever more powerful as they subjected others to their faith and will. Tribes were subsumed with promises of a more comfortable life, a grander community, a better god. The more rebellious were conquered in brutal wars. Once subdued, the curacas, or tribal leaders, were sent with their families for reeducation in Cuzco. When they returned to their tribes, prepared to rule in fealty to the Incas, a favorite son or brother would be detained indefinitely in the capital as a way of ensuring loyalty.
Each Inca emperor advanced the cause, bringing more worshippers to the Sun, creating a mighty webwork that grew along ceques: lines that reached like rays from Coricancha—the Temple of the Sun, the empire’s vital heart—to borderlands of conquest. Mobilizing a massive army of forced laborers, the Incas split rock, raised fortresses, and built storehouses and holy sanctuaries, as well as the magnificent Royal Road, the Capac Ñan, a road system traversing every possible landform and stretching twenty thousand miles from Argentina to Colombia—a span nearly four times as long as China’s Great Wall, and the equivalent of traveling from Lima to Tokyo and back two times. To glorify that expansion, they combed gold from rivers, carved silver from mountains, hacked copper from open pits, and sent it all back to ever more powerful lords in Cuzco. The walls of Coricancha, the “golden realm” of the Incas, were tiled in gold. Silver hung from its ceilings. Elaborate gardens made entirely of intricately wrought metals were fashioned for the emperor’s delectation. Indeed, every utensil in his house was made of precious metal. Gold was the “sweat of the sun”; silver, the “tears of the moon.” As such, these substances were cherished gifts from the heavens, signaling the essential connection between the earthly and the divine. The European intruders who came to these lands scavenging for riches never did understand this fundamental difference: to the Inca, gold was light’s refuge in a never-ending battle against the dark, a manifestation of the holy, a bridge between man and his creator. Only the anointed ruler, who himself descended from gods, could own such sacred stuff.
So revered were these metals and so personal their ties to the Lord Inca—who was, after all, primogenitor, Christ, and king—that when he died, no inheritance was possible. His mansion would be shuttered with all his gleaming possessions inside, exactly as he had left them. The belief was that he would hold court in the afterlife and come again to reinhabit those rooms someday. His bowels were meticulously removed and buried in a temple with his gold and jewels. His fingernail and hair clippings, painstakingly accumulated over the course of his lifetime, were stored away to be deposited in sacred places. His mummified remains, perfectly embalmed to resemble him at the peak of his powers, were placed on a throne in Coricancha, along with the mummies of all the other dead Lord Incas, to await the moment of return. He would continue to rule, as vigorously as when he was alive, through family representatives—or panaca—who would consult his corpse, control the narrative of his reign, and impart his ongoing will. So it was that all the gold, silver, and precious artifacts that an Inca took with him to eternity were seen more as tribute than principal. They were more illusory than real, more connected to the gods than to mortals, more a testament to collective memory than currency to be coveted in the here and now.
But halfway through the 1400s, with the spread of empire by two dynamic Inca rulers, Pachacutec and Tupac Inca Yupanqui, gold and silver began to be regarded as a mark of earthly glory.
Pachacutec decreed that only the royal family could wear these precious metals, while Tupac Inca Yupanqui returned from conquests with trains of llamas weighed down by silver. Huayna Capac, who delighted in symbols of power and grandeur more than either his father or grandfather, honored the birth of a son by commissioning a chain of gold that reached from one end of Cuzco’s marketplace to the other. An army of men was required to carry it.
These metals were not forged in the same way as gold or silver were forged in Europe—by pouring liquid metal into molds. The American Indians didn’t value metal for its solidity but for its malleability and resilience. They fashioned masterpieces by hammering the metal into sheets, pounding it with mallets until they were left with a tough and brilliant foil. Working the sheets around sturdy molds, they would then solder the parts to form a magnificent, glittering whole.
With time, the Incas became renowned for these symbols of power, and, because of ongoing conquests, news of their love for them spread through the continent. They became known as the people who wore glitter: the white kings. The shining. The warriors of sun and moon. This is not to say that they were the first civilization on the continent to develop precious metals or that they had a monopoly on production. Indeed, the art of metallurgy had been flourishing in the Americas for thousands of years. The Chavín culture, which dominated Peru’s coastline for much of the millennium before Christ, had excelled in metalwork. Like the Incas, they had pounded gold into intricate jewelry and headdresses, sewed it into garments, valued it as a badge of nobility, proof of a higher order, a more aristocratic bloodline. The “Lady of Cao,” a Mochica priestess who ruled the Peruvian coast in AD 300, was buried with a splendid array of jewelry, as well as elaborate crowns, nose rings, and scepters.
The Andean cultures that followed—the Moche and the Chimú—were equal masters, especially of silver. Eventually metalwork was taken up by the powerful Muísca people, a highly sophisticated confederation that inhabited the Colombian highlands and, in the fifteenth century, began producing exquisite gold for its chieftains. Indeed, it was around a particular Muísca prince, or zipa, that the legend of El Dorado took hold: the young eminence was said to be so wealthy, so accustomed to an abundance of shimmering metals, so winsome and athletic, that he would dust himself with a thick layer of gold powder before
plunging into Lake Guatavita for his daily swim.
So it was that the art of metalwork spread along the cordillera and prospered in Andean isolation, the strict property of royalty in cultures that dominated those mountains for more than three thousand years. But at some point during the eleventh century—even as Norman invaders swept into England and Vikings slunk home, even as Spain suffered the grip of the Arab conquest—an invasion of a very different kind was taking place in the Americas. Trade from the Andes gradually began to creep up the continent and across the Caribbean, and the art of metalworking began to pique the interest of peoples elsewhere in the hemisphere. Call it gossip, cupidity, curiosity, trade route serendipity, but it was then—almost five hundred years before the arrival of the conquistadors—that a wider interest in precious metals began in earnest, spreading that mastery through Panama and the Caribbean to the great civilizations of the North.
TENOCHTITLÁN
Mexico, 1510–1519
There was no sin then. No disease. No aching in the bones. There was no gold fever.
—Chilám Balám, c. 1650–1750
Intercontinental trade, which began to proliferate along the coasts—especially in precious shells and feathers—brought metallurgy to Mesoamerica. By the turn of the first millennium AD, the Mayans, whose extraordinarily advanced culture was thriving in what is now Guatemala and Mexico, began to mine silver, gold, and copper for the same purpose as the Andeans: as a mark of nobility; as a way to distinguish class. Just as the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut draped herself in gold frippery and dusted her face with silver, the Mayan potentates used shiny metals to signal their growing power. It did not occur to the Mayans, or to any of the early Andean cultures, for that matter—as it had to the Egyptians, Romans, and Germans—to forge something as utilitarian as arms and tools from iron ore. Not until the rule of Huayna Capac had the Incas begun to use bronze in crowbars, knives, and axe heads. And not until the Aztecs began fashioning copper spears in the fifteenth century was metal used for killing. Stone was the preferred bludgeon, obsidian the favored impaler, and though iron was plentiful in the landscape that surrounded these first nations, they did not mine it or imagine it as weapons until conquistadors disembarked on their shores. Much as the load-bearing wheel was unknown in the Western hemisphere until European contact, metal would not enter the American imagination as cudgel or currency until the conquest imposed it in radical and transformative ways.
In truth, Spain’s startling encounter with the people of the “Indies” brought it face-to-face with an original world, entirely distinct from any that Europe had ever imagined. Certainly it was a world beyond the conquistadors’ capacity to understand—one they hardly paused to consider, having crossed seas not to learn about civilizations but to enrich themselves, reap honors, and evangelize the natives by force, if need be. In turn, the hemisphere into which they had sailed was hardly prepared for such bewildering aliens. For millennia, the so-called New World had felt comfortably old to its inhabitants—a “great island, afloat in a primordial sea.” Isolated from the rest of the world and left to its own devices, it was a land teeming with residents. They were descendants of the people of Beringia, who had once inhabited a remote strip of grassland between Siberia and Alaska that, nineteen thousand years before, had been overrun by the Bering Sea. Migrating south, as waters rose and separated them from Asia and Europe, these newly indigenous Americans were flung far and wide by necessity and a pioneer spirit. They adapted to terrain, became a profusion of cultures, conducted wars as well as commerce, and developed strong tribal identities and a vigorous appetite for conquest.
By the 1400s, when Europe was no more than a modestly populated area roughly the size of Brazil, indigenous Americans occupied every habitable area of their hemisphere, from the Arctic tundra to the Caribbean islands, and from the Andean peaks to the deepest redoubts of the Lacandón Jungle. It was, to put it plainly, a world brimming with people. By 1492, historians say, there were one hundred million of them—one-fifth of the human race—and they had become distinct cultures and tribes. The Mayans had abandoned the great cities of Tikal and Chichén Itzá to fan out into the countryside. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, was a bustling home to a quarter million residents—quadruple the population of London at the time. But beyond the city limits, the Aztecs governed twenty-five million more, double the density of the population of India or China. The Inca capital, Cuzco, too, was a humming metropolis. At the height of Incan power, Cuzco held two hundred thousand citizens, with as many as thirty-seven million more under its control—more than the Arab caliphate that had once held Spain, the Middle East, and northern Africa in its clutches. Though a vast and surpassingly difficult geography separated them, the great civilizations that were destined to defend the hemisphere against the Spanish invader shared striking commonalities. This was so evident by the 1500s that conquistadors were able to repeat strategies of conquest by assuming that the Aztecs and Incas were virtually identical in important ways: they were highly hierarchical, with a single emperor, perceived simultaneously as god, king, high priest, and supreme warrior. Both considered themselves People of the Sun. Both the Incas and the Aztecs had subjugated others over great expanses of land, and so had acquired many enemies. Thrones did not pass automatically from father to eldest son, which made the process vulnerable to intrigue and manipulation. Both cultures practiced human sacrifice and incest, and therefore were handily labeled by Christians as abominators. Both employed sophisticated techniques of engineering, agriculture, timekeeping, and astronomy, and so a vast knowledge base was immediately available to their conquerors. Both worshipped the sun and moon and glorified them in art. Perhaps most significant of all to the plundering Spaniards, both had reached zeniths in the production of gold, silver, and copper and had erected vast and efficient slave systems that could support—even increase—the output.
Indeed, the Aztec ruler Montezuma, like the Inca Huayna Capac, favored gold and silver adornments above all others. Whereas rulers of more ancient times in Central America had preferred emeralds, amethysts, jade, turquoise, and precious stones, Montezuma arrayed himself in ear spools and lip plugs of gold, as well as nose rings and silver necklaces. Gold—“the excrement of the gods,” as the Aztecs called it—was available only in limited supply in Mesoamerica, harvested largely from the rivers of Oaxaca and seen as the exclusive preserve of the royal family. But when the Aztecs launched conquering incursions in the early 1400s, they annexed neighboring territories that were rich in silver, establishing mines that the Spanish would adopt, expand, and make world famous: Taxco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and the prodigal veins of Sierra Madre—some of which are still in operation today. “What can be grander than a barbarian lord,” Hernán Cortés crowed to the Spanish king about Montezuma, “wearing phony baubles . . . alongside gold and silver ornaments that no goldsmith in the world could rival.”
That meeting between Cortés and Montezuma in 1519 was, as far as we know, the first in which a Spaniard beheld an American sovereign in all his magnificent glory. Cortés had seen no one remotely like this Indian in Hispaniola or Cuba, where he had spent fifteen years serving the Spanish Crown. Born into a family of impoverished nobility and all too eager for the metal that would restore his status, Cortés reckoned correctly that the eminence before him was a man of formidable power. Those baubles would bring him glory.
* * *
Montezuma II was the huey tlatoani, the supreme leader of the Mexica Triple Alliance, an agglomeration of tribes that included three city-states: the Aztec metropolis of Tenochtitlán, as well as the neighboring cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan. The language he spoke—the elegant, mellifluous tongue of Nahuatl, still spoken in areas of Guatemala and Mexico today—was part of a vast family of languages spoken by the Comanche, Shoshone, and Hopi peoples. His empire, expanded vigorously by eight generations of Aztec leaders before him, was a territory roughly the size of Britain. As the huey tlatoani, or “reigning speaker,” of this scrappy,
pugnacious federation, he held unrivaled power in Mesoamerica. But he hadn’t been born into that role. Montezuma II had been elected democratically in 1502 by a small cabal of elders. Chosen from among the princes of Tenochtitlán’s royal families, he seemed an appealing candidate. He was deliberate, serious, with a pronounced gift for oratory. He was also, by all apparent evidence, an unpretentious young man. When the old men sent for Montezuma to tell him of their decision, legend has it that they found him sweeping the temple floors.
All that was to change. Charismatic, dignified, tall, the emperor Montezuma had impeccable personal habits and demanded as much from those around him. He bathed twice a day, favored lavish clothes and jewelry, was finicky about food, and discreet about sexual affairs. His long, triangular face, punctuated by an assiduously groomed goatee and a piercing gaze, gave him the appearance of an alert fox. Infinitely charming when he chose to be, he had an army of concubines who fussed over him and answered his every whim. It was said he took special potions to boost his virility and, at one point, had impregnated as many as 150 of his concubines at the same time. It was also said he was strong, nimble, and an excellent archer, attributes that—at least at first—earned him the wide-eyed admiration of his warriors.
If the ruling elders thought the mild-mannered man sweeping the temple floors would be a tractable and easily controlled puppet, they were soon proven wrong. Once the initiation rituals were done—his nose pierced; his limbs pricked and bled as custom demanded—Montezuma turned to the business of making his predecessors’ vast dominion into an empire all his own. History books, especially those written by early European chroniclers, describe Montezuma II as a weak and anxious ruler, a coward in the face of peril. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was cunning, ambitious; a consummate strategist. As years passed, he grew increasingly ruthless in human affairs, fierce in command, and surpassingly cruel in war. He would become—as the Nahuatl name Montezuma actually means—a raging, unforgiving force.
