For example, an account of “Some Aspects of New Spain” by an “anonymous conquistador” (first printed in 1566 in Italian as a Relatione) claimed that in some regions the people “worship the member of the body that is between a man’s legs” and were such drunkards that they took wine enemas when they were too drunk to swallow; and Aztec men urinated sitting down, while the women did it standing up. The focus of the account, however, was on the trifecta of savagery. The Aztecs were “so solicitous in sacrificing men, and offering their hearts and blood” to their “idols” because those idols, possessed by the devil, had convinced the credulous natives that they only ate human hearts. Allegations of cannibalism were inevitably made, both against the ancient Mexicans—who “used to have great wars and great differences among themselves, and all those captured in war were eaten or enslaved”—and even their sixteenth-century descendants, who “are the cruelest people to be found in warfare, for they spare neither brother, relative, nor friend, taking their lives even if they are beautiful women, killing them all and eating them.” The Relatione concluded:
All the people of this province of New Spain, and including those of other neighboring provinces, eat human flesh, and they value it more than all the other foods in the world, so much so that they often go to war and risk their lives just to kill someone and eat them; and, as I have said, most of them are sodomites and drink excessively.8
It may be tempting today to dismiss such stereotypes as silly, or to view them in the larger context of the unadorned bigotry of the age in which modern racism was born. Yet whatever the stereotype, it was always connected to the twin topics of human sacrifice and cannibalism, and the use of these allegations to justify centuries of conquest and colonization.
Take this example: In 1554, two Spaniards strolled through Mexico City, chatting in Latin. Their dialogue was fictional, but it tidily reflected the popular perception of the Aztecs that had rapidly taken hold in the colony (as in Europe). Walking through the plaza that had been, since long before the Spanish invasion, the ceremonial center of the city, one Spaniard pointed out where “men and women were offered up and sacrificed as victims to idols . . . as if in a butcher shop.” This horror, “incredible as it may seem,” occurred “almost monthly,” taking the lives of “numberless thousands.” The other Spaniard responded,
O Indians, most blessed by the arrival of the Spaniards, who were transformed from their former great misery to their present happiness, and from their previous slavery to true liberty!9
The more grisly and diabolist the image of Aztec religion, the more profound the redemption of the indigenous Mexican people—and the more justified their conquest and subjugation. Just as accusations of cannibalism had been used to justify enslaving indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, so did the conquest and colonization of mainland “Indians” such as the Aztecs become justified and legalized through accusations of “idolatry,” sodomy, and cannibalism.
“Because of the care and devotion the natives of these parts devote to the nurturing and veneration of their idols and of the devil,” declared Cortés in the orders read out to the invasion force gathered in Tlaxcallan in December 1520, prior to the assault against Tenochtitlan, “your primary motive and goal is to separate and uproot all the natives of these parts from those idolatries.” This was not a reflection of Cortés’s mythical piety (more on that in a later chapter), but another small yet significant link in the manufactured legal chain of conquest justification. The cluster of edicts issued by Emperor Carlos V in October 1522, when he appointed Cortés “governor and captain general of New Spain,” included a grant of prerogatives to the conquistadors in Mexico. Almost a quarter of the document was devoted to an astounding royal confirmation that allegations of sacrificial cannibalism now legally justified Spaniards not only waging a war of invasion, but depriving survivors of their freedom. It is worth quoting at length. Carlos reasoned that, as he had
received reports that many chiefs and lords and others of the land hold many local people as slaves, which they capture and retain through the wars that they wage against each other; and many of those slaves they keep to eat and to kill and to sacrifice before their idols; and that this gives us license to recover [rescatar] those Indian slaves; and it will serve us and be to the advantage of the settlers and benefit those Indian slaves if I hereby give license and authority . . . to the settlers . . . to recover those Indian slaves and take them as their own slaves.10
Spanish theologians and other officials debated these issues for much of the sixteenth century. But even though those on one side—most famously, Las Casas—seemed to win the argument when “Indians” were legally deemed not to be “natural slaves,” the conquest and colonial subjugation of millions of Native Americans had long ago become a fact, and its ideological rationale deeply established. Men like the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria and the royal chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda wrote at length in Latin and Spanish to prove why and how “just war” had been waged against Native Americans. But their arguments were surely grasped by Spaniards and other Europeans in simple terms: the conquest had spared the innocent from being “sacrificed” and eaten; Christianization sealed the deal. Sépulveda himself could put it in terms simple enough: “For this cause alone—not keeping the law of nature or being idol-worshippers—the Indians can be conquered and punished.”11
In his epic poem about Spanish conquests, first published in 1610, Gaspar de Villagrá wrote that
not more than one hundred years ago,
every year in the City of Mexico,
were offered up in tribute, in horrific inferno,
more than one hundred thousand souls.
But in the contrastingly bright present, the poet-conquistador proclaimed, that dark past had been forgotten by the contentedly Christian “Indians,” just as “the trees and plants [are] forgetful in the happy spring of the hardships of the winter past.”12
As the vanguard of Christianization in central Mexico, the Franciscans were at the forefront of detailing and circulating such a perspective, but over the centuries it was developed and spread by writers of all kinds, not only ecclesiastics and not only Spaniards. In presenting religious rituals in pre-invasion Mexico not as somber or pious ceremonies, but as satanic orgies of cruelty and bloodletting, the emphasis was often on the horrors of scale. The gods of the Aztecs, whose “idols” were worshipped with obsessive violence, numbered more than two thousand (the number claimed by fray Diego Valadés and other Franciscans). Valadés asserted that fifteen or twenty thousand men were routinely sacrificed, and that after one war with Tlaxcallan, the Aztecs sacrificed seventy-six thousand prisoners—“certainly a lamentable and mournful spectacle.” The Franciscan don Juan de Zumárraga asserted that twenty thousand were sacrificed a year, an oft-quoted figure that morphed over the decades into twenty thousand children; the figure happened to match the exact number of “idols” or religious statues that Zumárraga claimed he had destroyed within a year or two of becoming Mexico’s first bishop. By the late sixteenth century, it was widely “known” that the emperor Ahuitzotl’s coronation ceremony in 1486 featured the nonstop sacrifice of 80,400 victims.13
It was not only readers of Spanish, Italian, and Latin who learned these “facts” about the Aztec past. English and Dutch readers learned from the twin compendium on America, first printed in 1670 (Ogilby’s version) and 1671 (Montanus’s), that the “business of the Satanical Religion” of the Aztecs was to sacrifice “to their Devil-god Vitzilopuchtli” thousands of people a year, “whose flesh likewise afterwards they did eat in a solemn Banquet.” Rather than sharing in this religion, however, the peoples subject to the Aztecs increasingly grew to “abhor” their “particular Religion,” with its “cruel slaughters and butcheries of Men.” This, the English and Dutch authors concluded, echoing earlier Spanish arguments, “was the chief reason why they so easily receiv’d the Roman Religion.”14
The images that accompanied such books offered lurid illus
trations of Aztec butchery. Some became well known and influential, copied again and again; a good example is “Human Sacrifices of the Indians of Mexico,” used for centuries to accompany numerous accounts and histories in many languages. Variations on this visual theme often included an Aztec priest holding aloft a human heart, freshly torn from a sacrificial victim (as examples in the Gallery illustrate). These images tell us far more about the Europeans and Christianized indigenous Mexicans who made them than they tell us about the Aztecs, a crucial point since “much of what the world thinks it knows about Aztec human sacrifice derives from visual images” like these.15
The dawn of a more objective, open-minded view of the Aztec past came in fits and starts. A Greco-Roman view of the Aztec pantheon was commonly expressed from the sixteenth century on, casually mentioned by the likes of Cortés and Las Casas, explored in detail by certain Franciscans (most notably Valadés and Juan de Torquemada, another chronicler of Mexico’s early church), and often seen in drawings of long-destroyed “idols.” Although Franciscan writers still emphasized the gory satanism of Aztec religion, classical analogies encouraged the development of more positive comparisons; and in 1680, when Sigüenza y Góngora was asked to design the triumphal arches for the entry into Mexico City of the new viceroy, he chose to place images of the eleven Aztec emperors and the god Huitzilopochtli where traditionally classical figures would have gone. The images were based on drawings by native artists from the previous century, with each Aztec figure associated with one of the heroic virtues of a model ruler.16
The undercurrent to Sigüenza y Góngora’s choices was one of Mexican patriotism—specifically the view that it was the Aztec past that made Mexico a unique and bright star in the sweeping constellation of Spanish imperial territories. Such ideas surfaced with increasing force in Mexico from the late eighteenth century into the present one. When construction in Mexico City’s central plaza in 1790 uncovered two gigantic monoliths—a statue of the earth goddess Coatlicue and the now-famous Calendar Stone—Mexicans were fascinated by a civilization that colonialism had denigrated and buried. Perhaps the Aztecs had not been “irrational or simpleminded,” mused astronomer Antonio de León y Gama. In a book about the stones he declared “the Indians of this America possessed great knowledge in the arts and sciences.” Soon afterward, a Dominican friar, Servando Teresa de Mier, delivered a sermon before the viceroy and archbishop extolling the virtues of Aztec civilization; that civilization, built on the preceding achievements of the Toltecs, was the basis of Mexican greatness, not the Spanish colonial regime. In response, the regime arrested, excommunicated, and exiled Teresa de Mier.17
These events hardly amounted to serious efforts to rehabilitate the Aztecs, however. Shortly after its discovery, the Coatlicue statue was reburied—under one of the corridors of a university building in the city. If the Aztec past could not be buried, it would be defaced; a few decades earlier the viceroy ordered the destruction of the stone carved portrait of Montezuma that had survived on a rock face in Chapultepec since its creation in 1519. And Teresa de Mier’s revolutionary sermon did not exactly seek to evaluate the Aztecs on their own terms; he gave credit, rather, to St. Thomas, who he claimed visited the Toltecs a millennium earlier, civilized them, and lived on in Aztec memory as the deified holy ruler Quetzalcoatl.18
The Franciscan filter of prejudice and judgment, it turned out, was not so easily destroyed; it had grown so virulently over the centuries that few seemed aware of its roots (and many, especially Protestant writers, would have denied them). This was even more the case outside Mexico. Across Europe and the Americas, generations of students in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries learned about the Aztecs through the books of German educator Joachim Campe. Despite being “For the Use of Children and Young Persons” (as the subtitle of his Cortes: or, the Discovery of Mexico declared), Campe’s books on the early Americas depicted Aztec religion as a nightmarish sequence of “barbaric superstitions” and ritualized atrocities.
The books were structured as tales told by a father to a group of children, in the style of children’s literature of the time. Thus in The Discovery of America a fictional father described an Aztec heart sacrifice to his young audience, sparing no details as he told of the heartless bodies thrown down the pyramid steps to the waiting populace, who took pieces of the corpses “home, and ate them with their friends.” The father asked, “Is it not true, my children, that this is horrible? Well, prepare to hear something that is even more so.” And he goes on to detail the flaying of living victims by Aztec priests. Campe sought to use education in order to instill moral lessons about civilization and colonialism two centuries later; in contrast, two centuries further on, in Angry Aztecs, Terry Deary used humor to inspire interest in history. But both are manifestations of a long tradition of perpetuating specific Aztec stereotypes among all readers, even the youngest.19
ANOTHER ASPECT OF AZTEC practice that has been a perennial fascination is the numbers game played by Franciscans in the sixteenth century. Ever since, writers have used their assertions to debate how many tens of thousands of people were sacrificed annually. Mused Englishman John Ranking in 1827, was it twenty (as Zumárraga claimed), fifty (Gómara’s claim), or fifty to a hundred (Las Casas)? And were the thirty thousand sacrificed at Montezuma’s coronation a typical number for a coronation? Ranking has been ridiculed for claiming that Mongols on elephants invaded the Americas in the thirteenth century, but his fixation on quantifying annual Aztec “atrocities,” rather than questioning the supposed evidence for them, puts him well in the mainstream of his day. He even rightly noted that the estimate of Tenochtitlan’s population by some Spaniards as only sixty thousand was reasonable—without asking if the claim that as many people were executed each year in the same city was unreasonable.20
The same numbers game, with the same myopia, was still being played a century later. Sherburne Cook, a pioneer scholar of demographic history, examined the logistics of large-scale human sacrifice in a 1946 essay—cited for decades as authoritative. Unconcerned with the Spanish origins of stories of such ceremonies, Cook took a putatively scientific approach, measuring sacrificial slabs and calculating cutting times to conclude that by removing a heart every fifteen seconds, a team of Aztec priests could indeed have sacrificed 88,320 people in four days.21
As modern academic disciplines came slowly into being, defenders of Aztec culture (or those seeking to study it objectively) were regularly drowned out by those determined to keep the Aztecs in a category far below that of Western civilization. Although William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico—which was a smash hit for generations beginning in the 1840s—was restrained in its revisionism, being based overwhelmingly on the traditional conquistador canon of Cortés, Gómara, and Díaz, it nonetheless argued that the Aztecs had built a real civilization. For that, Prescott was roundly denounced. Lewis H. Morgan, for example, called the book “a cunningly wrought fable.” A lawyer and politician (eventually a New York state senator), Morgan was also a founding father of modern anthropology, whose “influential” Ancient Society firmly placed the Aztecs in the middle category of barbaric (between savage and civilized). There was no state, he insisted, “nor any civilization in America when it was discovered,” and there was “but one race of Indians, the Red Race.” For Prescott, the Aztecs presented a paradox, for cannibal consumption was an elite “banquet” that was “prepared with art” and unfolded “with all the decorum of civilized life.” Here was Prescott’s “refinement and the extreme of barbarism” sitting uncomfortably beside each other. But for Morgan, there was no paradox: “Montezuma’s dinner” was no more than the simple “daily meal” of barbarian “Indians.”22
There was considerable irony in Morgan’s insistence that to claim the Aztecs and other “Indians” were civilized was to “caricature the Indians and deceive ourselves.” For he was hardly alone in applying moral indignation to the caricaturing of “Indians” as uncivilized by virtue of the
ir devotion to human sacrifice and cannibalism. The centuries-old theme was seized upon by writers such as John Abbott, a New England minister and author of moralistic biographies; in his Makers of History: Hernando Cortez, first published in 1856 but in print well into the twentieth century, the Mayas encountered by Cortés were howling savages whose “horrible entertainment” was “midnight orgies” of cannibalism, while the Aztecs routinely ate “the flesh of the wretched victims” of their abominable human sacrifices.23
The proliferation of such characterizations of the Aztecs over the past hundred years has been extraordinarily extensive. Perhaps it is not surprising to find it in books aimed at broad audiences; be they plays, novels, or history textbooks, such works tend to depend for their success upon dramatic narratives, vivid imagery, and even lurid sensationalism. Nor is it surprising to see Aztec caricatures work their way into the new media of the modern age, from comics and graphic novels to television documentaries and video games. What is perhaps surprising is how profoundly such views have been perpetuated in scholarly publications: judging the Aztecs for “the horrible sacrifices that they made to their gods” has been, and remains, a deep-rooted, mainstream perspective, even in international academic circles. The following string of quotes is intended not to single out individual scholars and writers, but—on the contrary—to offer a glimpse into the long, strong march of this judgment (“horrible sacrifices” is from 1928).24
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 11
