When a set battle was on the point of beginning, the warriors uttered deafening cries, increased by the dismal howling of conchs and the piercing noise of bone whistles. 25 These instruments not only raised the courage of the troops, but also served as signals: some chiefs hung a little drum about their necks and struck it to give their orders. 26 The archers and the javelin-throwers first discharged their weapons and then the warriors rushed forward with sword and shield, using much the same tactics as the Romans did, with their pilum and sword. But when the hand-to-hand fighting began the battle took on an aspect completely unlike anything known in our ancient world; for here it was not so much a matter of killing the enemy as of capturing him for sacrifice. Specialists with ropes followed the fighting-men in order to bind those who had been overthrown before they could recover consciousness. 27 The battle spread out into a great number of separate duels in which each tried less to kill his opponent than to gain possession of his person.
While the end and aim of each war was to capture an enemy, or several enemies, the general intention of operations
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was clearly to bring about the enemy's defeat. There was, however, a conventional notion of what constituted defeat: a city was beaten, and acknowledged itself to be beaten, when the attacking force succeeded in reaching the temple and burning the sanctuary of the tribal god. Thus the symbol for conquest in the native manuscripts is generally a blazing temple with an arrow sticking into it. 28
The taking of the temple was the defeat of the local god and the victory of Uitzilopochtli: from that moment on, the gods had spoken, and all further resistance was useless. The defeat had the nature of a symbol, and it reflected a decision taken upon a more than human level -- taken, indeed, by the gods. Mexican war, therefore, had no resemblance to the total wars which our civilisation has brought to such a fatal pitch of efficiency. The Aztecs' intention was not to force the enemy to yield by ruining the country or massacring the population, but to make manifest the will of Uitzilopochtli. As soon as his will had become obvious to everybody the war had no further object. Those who had presumed to resist the empire -that is, to resist the empire's god -- had no possibility other than acknowledging their mistake and trying to obtain the least unfavourable conditions that they could.
For war, which began with talks, ended in negotiations. On the very field of battle, in the streets of the invaded city, while flames destroyed the sanctuary, an enemy delegation approached the Mexicans. The fighting stopped, and in this temporary armistice, this precarious truce, an astonishing bargaining began. In effect, the defeated said, 'We were wrong. We acknowledge our error. Spare us. We beg to be admitted to the protection of your gods and the emperor. Here is what we offer --' and the envoys would give the list of the victuals, merchandise, jewels and services that they proposed as tribute.
Generally the victors replied that these were not enough. 'No. You must expect no mercy. . . As well as this you must send us men every ten days to serve by turns in our palaces. . .' They bargained. The defeated would yield a little ground, literally and figuratively. 'We will give up
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our territory as far as Techco,' said the beaten Chalcas. At the end, the Aztecs said, 'Consider what you are pledging yourselves to very thoroughly. Do not come to us one day and say that you never made any such promises.' 29 In short, it was a question of a contract agreed to by both victors and vanquished, and which bound the one equally with the other.
The idea that underlay this negotiation was that the winner, as the favourite of the gods and their instrument, had all possible rights: if he wished, he could annihilate the conquered city, carry off all the inhabitants or massacre them, and pull down its sanctuary. But he renounced his total power for a consideration: this consideration, or compensation, was the tribute, the ransom, as it were, with which the vanquished bought the right to live. The Mexicans insisted that the city should acknowledge the supremacy of Uitzilopochtli and thus that of Tenochtitlan, that it should have no independent foreign policy, and that it should pay taxes. In exchange, it kept its institutions, its rites, its customs and its language. The city remained the essential nucleus, the centre of all political and cultural life. It was obliged to become a member of the confederation, but it was not in itself abolished. The empire was nothing more than a league of autonomous cities. There were only a very few towns in which the central government had for special reasons appointed a governor: this was the case at Tlatelolco, for example, which became an integral part of the capital.
Nothing would have seemed more incomprehensible to the ancient Mexicans, nor more atrocious, than the characteristic features of our modern war: huge destruction, the systematic extermination of whole nations, the annihilation of states or their overthrow.
The only native rulers who ever attempted to do away with any states, as, for example, to destroy the dynasty of Texcoco and to wipe the kingdom off the map, were Tezozomoc, the old tyrant of Atzcapotzalco, and his son Maxtlaton; they were therefore remembered, in the sixteenth century, with universal execration. They are the outcasts of Mexican
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historical writing. When the rulers of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco had succeeded in defeating the tyrant in 1428, they certainly took care that the tyranny should not arise again; but they also took care to invite Tlacopan, a city belonging to the vanquished tribe, to share the supremacy with them. This was the foundation of the triple alliance. 30
Whether it was sacred or political, war in Mexico was always surrounded by a network of conventions. If it were sacred, it could be reduced to a kind of duel arranged for the service of the gods; if it were political, to a crisis or a passing tumult, in which the gods would be able to make their decisions known. The campaign might be long, because of the very great distances and the absence of any kind of transport; but the battles themselves were short.
All these considerations explain, to some degree, why the last war that ever Tenochtitlan was to wage ended so disastrously for the empire and the civilisation of the Aztecs. The Spaniards and the Mexicans were not really fighting the same kind of war. On the material plane, they fought with different weapons: on the social and moral, they had totally different concepts of war. Faced with an unforeseen attack from another world, the Mexicans were no more capable of an adequate response than would be the men of today faced with an invasion from Mars.
With their guns, their helmets and their armour, their steel swords, their horses and their sailing ships, the Europeans had a decisive superiority over the warriors of Tenochtitlan and their wooden and stone weapons, their canoes and their troops of infantry and nothing more. Would a Macedonian phalanx or one of Caesar's legions have been able to withstand artillery? The accounts of the siege of Mexico show how effective the fast-sailing Spanish brigantines were, as they swept the lake with their fire, isolating the surrounded city, cutting its lines of communication and discouraging all idea of reinforcement. They also show how the guns, by battering down walls and houses, helped the attacks of the conquistadores in the very heart of the embattled city.
And above all, as one studies these accounts, 31 one cannot
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but see that all the traditional rules of war, which the Mexicans instinctively obeyed, were violated equally instinctively by the invaders. Far from negotiating before the battle, they got into Mexico with peaceable words and then suddenly fell upon the Indian nobles massed upon the dancing place in the courtyard of Uitzilopochtli's temple, and massacred them. Instead of trying to make prisoners, they killed as many warriors as they could, while the Aztecs wasted their time capturing Spaniards or their native auxiliaries to sacrifice them. At last, when all was over, the Mexican rulers could have expected a bitter bargaining that would fix the amount of the tribute to be paid to the conquerors; they were physically incapable of imagining what was to come, the overthrow of their entire civilisation, the destruction of their gods and their beliefs, the abolition of their political institutio
ns, the torture of the kings for their treasure, and the red-hot iron of slavery. 32
For the Spaniards, for their part, were making 'total' war; there was only one possible state for them, the monarchy of Charles V, and only one possible religion. The clash of arms was nothing to the clash of ideologies. The Mexicans were beaten because their thought, based upon a tradition of pluralism in both the political and the religious aspects of life, was not adapted to contend with the dogmatism of the monolithic state and religion.
It is also possible to assert that the institution of the 'war of flowers' itself may have been an important factor on the downfall of Tenochtitlan, for it had preserved Tlaxcala, an inimical state, almost at the gates of the capital, 'so that there might be captives to sacrifice to the gods'. 33 If the Mexicans had really wished to destroy Tlaxcala and do away with the danger, it is very probable that they could have done so, by concentrating the whole strength of their empire upon it. They did not do so, no doubt because in the last resort they felt bound by the necessity for perpetuating the xochiyaoyotl, the flowery war.
Without knowing it, they had thus provided the as yet unknown invader with the ally who was to supply him with his infantry and the retreat in which he could take refuge after
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his setback. As for the republic of Tlaxcala, it certainly thought that it was using these powerful strangers for its own ends -- that it would profit by them to finish an ordinary war between Mexican cities to its own advantage. Tlaxcala no more saw the real nature of the peril than Tenochtitlan; or if they did, only when it was too late. 34
In so far as war is not merely Clausewitz's continuation of politics, but a glass which reflects a civilisation in its critical moments, when its most fundamental tendencies are visible, the war-time behaviour of the Mexicans is extremely revealing. Here are clearly to be seen the promise and the shortcomings of the civilisation -- a civilisation which, isolated from the rest of the world, could not withstand an attack from the outside.
By reason of its material inadequacy or the rigidity of its mind, the civilisation was defeated; and it perished before it had shown its full potentialities. It went down above all because its religious and legal conception of war paralysed it before the attack of an invader who acted in accordance with a totally different set of ideas. However paradoxical it may seem at first, one is led to believe that the Aztecs, although they were so warlike, were not warlike enough when they were confronted with sixteenth-century European Christians; or rather, that they were, but in another fashion, and that their heroism was as inadequate and unavailing as would have been that of the soldiers of the Marne faced with today's atomic bomb. 35
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CHAPTER SEVEN
CIVILISED LIFE
Barbarism and civilisation. The Chichimecs and the Toltecs: how the barbarians became civilised--Self-control, good breeding, social order. The civilised man and his attitude: the 'precepts of the elders': the duties of the sovereign--The arts as a setting for life. Sculpture, frescoes, painting and manuscripts: the minor arts--The arts of language, music and dancing. The Nahuatl language: the system of writing: rhetorical and poetical styles: religious and profane poems: the Rôle of music and dancing.
BARBARISM AND CIVILISATION
All highly developed cultures have a tendency to set themselves apart from those which surround them. The Greeks, the Romans and the Chinese always contrasted their civilisation with the barbarism of the other nations they knew: sometimes this was a justifiable contrast, as in the case of the Romans and the Germanic tribes, or the Chinese and the Huns; and sometimes highly questionable, as, for example, in the case of the Greeks and the Persians. Furthermore, the members of a civilised community have an inclination when, at a given moment, they look back into the past, to prize some ancestors -- those of the 'golden age' -- and to look upon others with a certain degree of pity, as having been vulgar and countrified. These two characteristics of the civilised man are both to be found in the Mexican of the classical period, or, as one may put it, between 1430 and 1520.
The central Mexicans were very much aware of the value of their culture and of its superiority to that of other Indian peoples. They did not think that they alone possessed it, but rightly considered that some other tribes, particularly those of the Gulf coast, were their equals. On the other
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hand, they held that certain tribes were backward and barbarous. They knew perfectly well that their own nation, which had only recently settled in the central valley, had also lived a barbarian kind of life until not long ago: but they thought of themselves as the heirs of the civilised men who had colonised the plateau and built their great towns there long before them.
They had no hesitation in thinking of themselves as former barbarians who derived their warlike qualities from their nomadic ancestors and the high civilisation that they were so proud of from their settled ancestors. To take another parallel from our Mediterranean antiquity, it may be said that their attitude was not unlike that of the Romans in the time of the Scipios, when they were still close to their unpolished beginnings and yet were already imbued with a highly-developed culture that had been evolved by others before them.
To these two extremes, the barbarian and the civilised man, answer two conceptions made up of combined history and myth -- the Chichimeca and the Tolteca. The Chichimecs were the nomadic hunters and warriors of the plains and mountains of the north: in the mythical past they lived on the flesh of wild animals alone, 'which they ate raw, for they did not yet understand the use of fire. . . (They dressed in the skins of beasts and) did not know how to make houses, but lived in caves which they found already made, or they made a few little houses with the branches of trees and covered them with grass.' 1
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs and the other tribes that belonged to the empire, such as the Otomí of Xilotepec, came into contact with the northern barbarians in the regions of Timilpan, Tecozauhtla, Huichapan and Nopallan, and traded with them -- keeping them, however, at arm's length. 2 'Those who were called teochichimeca, that is to say, complete barbarians, 3 or zacachichimeca, which is to say, wild men of the woods, 4 were they who lived deep in the country, far away from the villages, in huts, caves and the woods; and they had no fixed abode but wandered as nomads from one part to
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another: when night surprised them on the road, they slept in grottoes, if they found any. They had a lord, or chief . . . and this chief had only one wife, in the same way that all the other chichimeca had only one wife each. None might have two wives, and each lived on his own with his mate, seeking to find his livelihood. . .' 5
The same account, which was dictated to Father Sahagún by his Aztec informants, goes on to describe these barbarians dressed in skins, carrying bows and arrows, clever at using plants and roots -- 'and it was they who first discovered and used the root which is called peyotl; they who eat it take it in the place of wine. In the same way they use the evil fungus called nanacatl which, like wine, causes drunkenness . . . Their food was herbs and the fruit of the prickly pear, the root which is called cimatl, and others which are found by digging in the ground . . . mizquitl (an acacia whose fruit is edible) and the fruit and the flowers of a palm called izcotl. They knew how to get honey from palm-trees, agaves and (wild) bees . . . They ate rabbits, hares, deer, snakes and a great many birds. And, as they ate victuals that were neither prepared nor mixed with others they lived healthy and strong and for a long time. On rare occasions one might die; but he would be so old and his hair so white that it would be of old age that he died.' 6
The value of this picture of barbarian life is not only that it gives exact information on the habitat, the clothing and the food of the savages, but also that it reflects the state of mind of its authors, that is to say, the settled, town-dwelling Indiana. In their eyes, the barbarian was the 'man of nature': he was stronger and healthier than the man of the town; he possessed that manuum mira virtus pe
dumque which, in the De Natura Rerum, the poet attributes to the earliest men. 7
The Aztecs were quite aware that four or five centuries before they had lived in the same manner. At that remote period they called themselves 'the barbarians of Aztlán', chichimeca azteca, and they had been leading that kind of primitive life for a very long time, 'twice four hundred years and ten times twenty years and fourteen years', when
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their migration began. 8 It was not by mere chance that their former dweding-place, after Aztlán, was called Chicomoztoc, 'the seven caves'. It may be asked what they lived upon. 'With their arrows they killed deer, rabbits, wild beasts, snakes, birds. They went dressed in skins, and they ate what they could find.' 9 They were therefore true collecting and hunting nomads, living as the Indians of northern Mexico continued to live until long after the Spanish conquest. 10
The process of acculturation by which the barbarians who had penetrated the central valley soon came to adopt the customs, the language, the laws and the manners of the settled civilised people is known to us through the chronicles of the house of Texcoco. This dynasty, as it happened, prized itself upon its direct descent from Xolotl, 11 the Chichimec chieftain who led the barbarous hordes when they came to establish themselves after the fall of the Toltec empire.
Daily Life of the Aztecs Page 27
