New land invites action. The rulers of Spain saw and held the prospect of a great empire. This had no obvious connection with the holy war of Christendom against Islam, but was nevertheless seen as an extension of divinely blessed and papally sanctioned crusade. Even disappointment turned into attraction, for it meant that the treasure was still to be found. Columbus, the bumbler, just didn’t know where to look. This was just the beginning, and the rewards would go to the quickest. Merchant venturers bought and fitted old ships, built new ones, hired crews from a hundred leagues around. In trouble? Start over across the water. Men-at-arms and freelance caballeros, roughnecks, rogues, and ruffians, came forward to seek or remake their fortune. These people cherished the legends and fables of “chivalric romance”—the comic books of that age—tales of Amazons, headless and cynocephalous monsters, or better yet, of El Dorado (the Man of Gold). The Amazon legend was a particular favorite, combining as it did the themes of female and male prowess. These woman warriors were reported everywhere, always beyond the next cordillera or on an island some days journey away. In one instance, they were said to be coming to Spain, ten thousand of them, to get themselves pregnant “by the men of our nation, whose reputation for gallantry is well established.”* The very extravagance of these tales and promises made for credence. Anything and everything was possible in those distant lands.
THE CARIBBEAN AND ITS CONTINENTAL BORDERS
Note the difference between the larger islands (the Great Antilles) and the chain of smaller places to the east (the Lesser Antilles).
For a quarter of a century, the Spanish sailed about the Caribbean, touching the continents to south and north, always disappointed not to find the treasures that presumably lay just beyond the next landfall. They comforted themselves for the nonce with slaves, botanical novelties, exotic fauna, pieces of gold that hinted at mother lodes. Messengers went back to Spain with jewels and nuggets, by way of inducing the crown to send back reinforcements, animals, weapons. Meanwhile parties of conquistadors planted themselves, their flag, their cross; established “cities” in the legalistic tradition of the European commune and named them after divinities, saints, and sundry sacred objects; traded colored beads for gold pebbles; took part in native rivalries and played one tribe against another. They fought, terrorized, tortured, and killed the natives; bedded their wives, daughters, and Spanish-made relicts; and brought many a pagan soul to salvation, often at the same time as they extinguished the body. And always they asked after gold. Their persistence says much for their appetite…and their folly: Adam Smith describes this “sacred thirst” as “perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world.”1
Seek, and ye shall find. Sailing along the coast of Yucatan in the second decade of the sixteenth century, the Spanish encountered Indians like none seen before. These were dressed in cotton garments and lived in towns built of stone. They did not know hard metal, neither bronze nor iron, but they had weapons—slings, poison darts, clubs set with razor-sharp pieces of obsidian—and they were not so easy to kill and intimidate as the islanders. So the Spanish spoke softer, traded and cajoled, and they learned of a land somewhere to the west, over the mountains, where ruled a great king, rich in ornament and glittering treasure. Each contact confirmed the promise, partly because the ruler of this land, unbeknownst to the strangers, had given orders to appease them with gifts in the hope of inducing them to go away. This, needless to say, was a big mistake.
Now party followed party northward and westward along the Mexican coast. It was a matter of chance that the leader of the decisive exploratory flotilla was a man named Hernando Cortes—sometime rapscallion student in Salamanca, precocious and prodigious wencher with a weakness for the most dangerous kind of woman—another man’s wife. Cortes had good reason to get out of Spain. He was handsome and virile, a charmer, intriguer, and diplomat, the kind of natural leader who would give his life for his men and whose men would follow him to hell. It took such a man to bring and hold together a band of a few hundred and with them (plus later reinforcements) conquer the mightiest power in North America.
Even so, Cortes only begins the story. History is not a simple epic of derring-do. People matter, but the Aztec empire collapsed for deeper reasons. The most important lay in the very nature of tributary empires, which differ from kingdoms and nations by their ethnic diversity and want of sympathetic cohesion. The we/they division separates rulers from ruled and one member group from another; not members from outsiders. Such units are necessarily an expression of naked power. They rest on no deep loyalty; enjoy no real legitimacy; extort wealth by threat of pain. So, although they have the appearance of might, it is only appearance, and the replacement of one gang of tyrants by another is often welcomed by common folk who hope against hope that a change will relieve their oppression. In reality, the brilliance of these constructs is but glitter; their apparent hardness a brittle shell.
So with the Aztecs, alias the Mexica. They were a small group, a rough nomadic people come into the sedentary areas of the south from primitive desert lands to the north (what is now the southwestern United States). They found no welcome and even served a time as slaves to a more civilized people on the shores of the great lake of the valley of Mexico (a lake long since dried up and today the precarious, subsiding seat of the world’s most populous city). Slavery was a school for war and power. When the Aztecs broke free, they fled into reed-choked fastnesses and sheltered there until they grew in numbers and strength. When they came out, originally because they needed drinkable water, they conquered one people after another, using a combination of art, prowess, and above all a terror that unstrung their adversaries and brought them to surrender before they were defeated.2
Aztec terror took the form of the industrialization of blood sacrifice. This is a touchy subject, which anthropologists and ideologues of indigenista have preferred to avoid or ignore, if not to excuse. Yet one cannot understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Aztec empire, its rise and fall, without dealing with this hate-provoking practice. Human sacrifice for religious purposes was general to the area (including Mayan lands to the south) and reflected a belief that the sun god in particular needed human blood for nourishment. Unfed, he might not rise again. Other gods also needed offerings: of babies and children, for example, to ensure the fertility of crops or an abundance of rain; the tears of the victims were a promise of water.3
Such symbolic gestures (perceived as acts of consubstantial nourishment) needed few victims. Adult flesh came primarily from capture in battle, and the victim was presented and told to think of himself as a hero in a noble cause: this is what we were born to. Some scholars have pretended that these heart and blood donors did think of themselves that way, but it should be noted that they needed a dose of tranquilizer before they could be persuaded docilely to climb the steep steps to the altar.
The Aztec innovation was the work of a member of the royal family, Tlacallel, kingmaker and adviser to a series of emperors. This prince of darkness thought to impose and substitute for other, milder gods the Aztec tribal god Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird of the south, a bloodthirsty divinity all wings and claws; and behind those beating wings, to make of the sacrificial cult a weapon of intimidation. Where once the sacrifice touched a handful, Tlacallel instituted blood orgies that lasted days and brought hundreds, then thousands, of victims to the stone, their hearts ripped out while still beating, their blood spattered and sprinkled on the idols, their bodies rolled down the steps and butchered to furnish culinary delicacies to the Aztec aristocracy.
This last practice embarrasses politically correct ethnologists, who see in such descriptions of cannibalism a justification for foreign contempt and oppression.4 (It was certainly that for the conquistadors, who were disgusted when their Mexican hosts showed hospitality by saucing their guests’ food with the blood of victims sacrificed right before their eyes.) Some have tried to argue that the whole business of cannibalism is a myth, a Spanish invention. Others, ready t
o concede the anthropophagy, have pointed to occasional Spanish lapses—as though measures of desperation are comparable to institutionalized behavior;5 or have tried to argue that this was the only way for the Aztecs (or at least the aristocracy, who had a quasi-monopoly of human flesh) to get enough protein in their diet. The best one can say for such nonsense, especially as applied to the privileged members of Aztec society, is that it shows imagination.*
(Ironically enough, the Europeans would later find themselves accused of cannibalism by the Chinese, who preferred to think of foreigners as barbarians anyway.6 In China, such rumors served as a barrier to contact between natives and foreigners. In Africa, where cannibalism was not unknown, the Portuguese warned the locals against an alleged English appetite for human flesh, in the hope the natives would send these interlopers packing, or perhaps do worse. And the Chinese, undiscriminating in their superiority, said as much of the Portuguese. Barbarians are barbarians.)
These mass sacrifices had precisely the effect desired by our Mexican Darth Vader: they sharply lowered Aztec enemies’ will to resist. But the losers naturally nursed their hate. Aztec ceremonies also created a supply problem: where to get enough victims. In war? But that meant incessant fighting. In the prisons or among the slaves? But that meant an intensification of oppression and potential instability. With the connivance of the rulers of allied/subject peoples? This was the device of the so-called flower wars, where aristocratic collaborators from other nations watched behind flower screens as the Aztecs staged simulated war games and jousts designed to produce prisoners for sacrifice before the hidden eyes of their own chiefs.
For all its seeming power and glory, then, the Aztec empire was a house of feathers. Detested for its tyranny and riven with dissension, it was already in breakup when the Spanish arrived. Such was the hatred that Cortes had no trouble finding allies, who gave him valuable intelligence and precious help with his transport. Without this he could never have brought his small force up from the coast, guns and all, over the sierra, and into the valley of Mexico.
Once there, the invaders enjoyed an enormous advantage. They had superior weapons—not so much guns and cannon, although these proved terrifying initially and Cortes used well-timed salvos to impress and intimidate—but their steel swords and daggers. The Aztec sticks and slings and obsidian-spiked clubs wounded more than killed, and this indeed was what they were made for. The purpose of warfare was to disable and capture, the better to immolate. By Aztec standards, the Spanish did not fight fair: they thrust at the body rather than at arms and legs, because a belly wound stopped an opponent if it did not kill him outright. The Aztec tactic of crowding round and smothering the adversary by weight of numbers ironically worked against them: every Spanish thrust went home. On the edges of the fray, Spanish lancers and swordsmen on horse were a nightmare with their swift slashing movements. The Aztec thought them at first a single, two-headed animal.*
All of this testifies to the fundamental advantage of ferrous metallurgy. Weapons were only part of the story. The Spanish depended completely on such iron objects as shovels, picks, axes, hammers, anvils, tools. They needed to make horseshoes and affix them, to repair weapons, to replace things broken. Every nail, every piece of iron was precious, because it had to come from Spain. A horseshoe cost 30 pesos; nails, 80 pesos the hundred. Many a horseman found it cheaper to have his animal shod with gold.7
The Aztec response to these tactics was drastically weakened by uncertain, wavering leadership. The emperor Moctezuma, on learning of these strangers, of their tall ships, their sometimes fair hair and light skin, their bearded faces, their gleaming garments, did not know whether to think them gods or men. Mexican legend had it that the great god Quetzlcoatl, highest of the pantheon but long ago entrapped by his all-too-human appetite for drink and driven into exile by a rival deity, would one day return from the east and the sea. Was this the promised return?
Moctezuma’s spies reported that these strangers behaved more like men than gods. For one thing, they enjoyed eating. This could be interpreted both ways, because they would not partake of blood or human flesh, and that accorded with the legend of Quetzlcoatl’s humane disposition and his opposition to human sacrifice. For another, they had a marked fondness for women, especially pretty women. Did gods like or need sex? Hard to say. The question, of course, would have posed no problem to a European. Had the Aztecs known their Greek mythology, they would have recognized these carnal appetites as a sign of divinity. Torn between the impulse to fight and acceptance of dismissal, Moctezuma tried to bribe Cortes to go away while inviting him to receive his kingdom.
For all this, the Spanish found themselves in perilous plight. They were there to stay: Cortes had burned his vessels, which told his men that they could not run. They had to fight or die. Or worse than die: the Aztecs made sure the Spanish knew the fate of Mexican prisoners, displaying bloody, flayed bodies on their walls. Another mistake in tactics. Nothing was better calculated to make the Spanish brave and resolute.
Even so, despite reinforcements (originally sent to arrest Cortes) and some success in hand-to-hand combat, the Spanish, so grievously outnumbered, suffered disproportionately heavy losses. Moctezuma may have vacillated, but other Aztecs, born and trained warriors, knew men when they saw them and had no intention of yielding to a handful of arrogant invaders. The Spanish were driven out of the capital city. They made a nightmarish retreat, along the causeways, in the water (the Aztecs had cut the bridges), enemies on all sides. Numbers of Spanish were pulled to the bottom by the weight of their gold, which they could not bear to abandon. Something between half and three quarters of their small force died.
Noche trista, the Spanish called it, and yet it was a miraculous escape. The Mexicans, moreover, could not pursue their advantage and finish them off, in large part because they were tragically weakened by the most subtle and secret of the Spanish weapons, one the invaders did not even know they possessed. These were the Old World pathogens, invisible carriers of death to a population never exposed to these diseases. They had already done terrible work in the Caribbean. Now they laid hundreds of Aztec warriors low at the very moment of their victory.
Cortes got his respite. Months passed. New fleets brought new forces. His Indian allies helped build the components of ships and move them across the sierra into the valley of Mexico, where they were assembled and launched against the Aztec island capital. This time, the war was over; the Aztec empire beaten; their temples destroyed; their idols overthrown. They could hardly be surprised: the Aztec glyph for a conquered city was a burning temple. Winner’s god takes all.
The conquest of the Inca empire was essentially similar: again, a far-flung tributary empire, centralized and ingenious in its administrative structures; but again, internal divisions and hatreds, setting Incas not only against subject tribes but against one another; and again, European disease as a silent partner of European conquest. When Francisco Pizarro arrived with his small war party, the country was just coming off seven years of civil war (the Inca had apparently died of smallpox) and much the weaker for it.
Here, too, the first contacts were appetizing: the smallest coastal villages seemed to abound in gold. Again, mistaken dispositions facilitated the Spanish advance. The Incas did not mistake them for gods, but they sorely underestimated the possibilities of so small a force and they had an immemorial contempt for the people of the coast. How could these possibly prevail against the harder warriors of the highlands? Again, the Spanish knew to make the most of these divisions to get help from locals. They went up to the highland town of Cajamarca, there to meet the Inca, whom Pizarro, with sublime assurance, promised to receive as friend and brother. Then most of them hid and lay in wait. The Incas took this as a sign of fear, and indeed, many of the Spaniards were literally peeing in their pants.
The Inca party of thousands marched in, brilliantly clad but unarmed. They filled the square, the greatest nobles in the kingdom bearing Inca Atahualpa on his royal l
itter. Now a Spanish priest advanced to offer the Inca a holy bible. Atahualpa opened it, looked, and threw it on the ground. That did it. The friar ran back to Pizarro: “Come out! Come out, Christians! Come at these enemy dogs who reject the things of God.” The slaughter that followed left some seven thousand Indians dead on the spot, plus numerous wounded. Spanish horsemen pursued the rest, spearing them at will, targeting those with fancy clothes, presumably leaders. “If night had not come on, few out of the more than 40,000 Indian troops would have been left alive.”
Atahualpa was taken prisoner, naked but unharmed. The Spanish demanded and obtained a ransom greater than any European monarch could have paid—enough gold to fill a good-sized room to the ceiling. So the Indians paid, and now the Spanish had to free their hostage; a deal is a deal. But they immediately rearrested him on a charge of treason to the Spanish crown (sic!); and after bestowing the last rites (salvation first), figuratively and literally decapitated the kingdom.*
It is a bloody story, full of cruelty and bad faith, condescension and sanctimony; but one must not judge these events in terms of the good, the bad, and the ugly. They all deserved one another. Before Pizarro arrived on the scene, Huayna Capac, emperor and father of Atahualpa, set the terms for defeat when he decapitated the members of a rebel tribe and threw their bodies into a lake: “Now you’re just a bunch of little boys!”8 We are told that the victims numbered twenty thousand, that this “was probably the bloodiest encounter in the history of the pre-Hispanic New World.”9 The place is known to this day as the Lake of Blood.10
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 13
