Sometimes the Aztecs would perform a special type of sacrifice called a gladiatorial sacrifice: a one-on-one battle between a prisoner (normally a noble) and one of the Aztec’s best warriors. The prisoner would be given weakened weapons, such as a wooden club covered with feathers. The encounter between prisoner and Aztec warrior was a ceremonial act, carried out on the Tizoc Stone.
The market of Tenochtitlán has arcades all around, where more than sixty thousand people come [to] buy and sell, and where every kind of merchandise produced in these lands is found. Ornaments of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, stones, shells, bones, and feathers. They also sell lime, hewn and unhewn stone, adobe bricks, tiles, and cut and uncut wood of various kinds. There is a street where they sell game and birds of every species found in the land.
—Hernán Cortés
In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on Mexico’s eastern coast with a force of 530 Spanish soldiers, several hundred Cuban Indians and Africans, a few dozen arquebuses, twenty cannons, sixteen horses, and a pack of large dogs trained for warfare. The first reports that reached Montezuma about the strange men from across the sea came from the people on the eastern seashore who had seen fair-skinned, bearded men climb out of “two towers or small mountains floating on the waves of the sea.” The emperor sent messengers to meet the strangers, bearing costly gifts that only whetted the Spaniards’ greed for gold.
Cortés’s small army marched inland, accompanied by thousands of warriors from the city-state of Tlaxcala, on the east of Lake Texcoco, which had never fallen under the control of the Triple Alliance. When Cortés and his men reached Tenochtitlán, Montezuma welcomed them into the city as honored guests. The city dazzled its would-be invaders; it was bigger and wealthier than any city in Spain. One Spanish observer later described his first impressions of Aztec civilization: “When we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to [Tenochtitlán], we were astonished. These great towns and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision. . . . Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream.”
Like Venice, Tenochtitlán was a city of canals. Its only roads were three main causeways that met at the center of the city. When under attack, the Aztecs pulled up drawbridges across the causeways, cutting off access to the city.
The Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlán dazzled its would-be invaders; it was bigger and wealthier than any city in Spain.
Inside the city without a fight, Cortés was nonetheless aware that Montezuma could “obliterate all memory” of his forces with a single command. So a week after entering the city, Cortés seized the Aztec ruler and held him captive in his own palace. Montezuma cooperated with the Spanish, heaping upon them gold from the Aztec storehouses for Cortés to take back to the Spanish king as tribute from his new vassal—an act that made sense in the context of the Triple Alliance’s style of empire building.
For seven months, Cortés demanded more and more from his captive, including conversion to the Christian god. Worse, when Cortés briefly left the city, one of his officers attacked an unarmed crowd of singers and dancers at the religious festival Toxcatl, killing thousands of Aztec nobles. The city rose up in response to the massacre.
The Aztecs besieged the Spanish in Montezuma’s palace, fewer than fifteen hundred men at the mercy of thousands. Their fate lay in the hands of the captured ruler. Cortés, now back in Tenochtitlán, took a chance and pushed Montezuma onto the roof of his palace to address the crowd. He told the emperor that he must order his people to put down their weapons. It was a risk. With one wink from the Aztec ruler, his subjects could swarm to his rescue.
Disease not only greatly reduced the population; it destroyed power structures as leaders died and succession processes crumbled.
The crowd grew silent at the sight of their king. But to their disappointment, Montezuma raised his arms and begged his people to disperse. The crowd roared in anger and pelted the ruler with rocks.
Spanish records say Montezuma was killed by one of those stones; Aztec histories say he was driven back into the palace, where the Spanish killed him. Either way, with Montezuma dead, Tenochtitlán erupted in violence. During what the Spanish called “the sorrowful night,” Cortés and his men were driven from the city, more than half of them dead and many of the rest wounded. They retreated to Tlaxcala.
If the Tlaxcalans had repudiated their earlier treaty, Cortés’s invasion of Mexico would have ended in failure. Instead, the combined Spanish and Tlaxcalan forces attacked the Aztec imperial capital in 1520. After a fifteen-week siege, Tenochtitlán fell into Spanish hands. Three-quarters of the population was dead. Many were killed in the fighting; more were dead from starvation or the smallpox that swept the city after the expulsion of the Spaniards like a punishment from angry gods.
The Spanish faced even greater odds against the Inca Empire, and it fell even more quickly. By the time Francisco Pizarro and his small band of conquistadores reached Cuzco in 1530, the empire was already on the verge of collapse, weakened by a raging smallpox epidemic. The disease had swept down Mexico from Tenochtitlán, through Central America, and was now raving through the central Andes. With the center weakened, unrest among recently conquered tribes and bitter rivalries between ruling families had erupted into rebellion and civil war. Playing the warring factions against each other, Pizarro was able to smash Incan resistance with only 180 men, sixty-two horses, and one cannon.
But the real conqueror throughout the Americas was disease. Europeans brought with them smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, pleurisy, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, whooping cough, pneumonia, strains of influenza, and possibly typhus. The African slaves the Europeans brought to the New World beginning in 1510 brought malaria and yellow fever.
Smallpox was the greatest early killer of Native Americans. The first epidemic of smallpox hit in 1520, followed by the measles in 1531, influenza in 1559, bubonic plague in 1545, typhus in 1586, and diphtheria in 1601. True epidemics, these diseases did not simply kill a generation of Native Americans and disappear. They came in recurring waves, killing again and again. Disease not only greatly reduced the population; it destroyed power structures as leaders died and succession processes crumbled.
Our clearest picture of how badly diseases devastated Native American cultures comes not from the golden civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, but from the smaller Mississippian culture. When Hernando de Soto landed in Tampa Bay in 1539, he found flourishing Mississippian chiefdoms from Florida to the upper Tennessee River Valley, with an estimated population of about one million. De Soto had been with Pizarro in Peru, where he earned a reputation as the most brutal of the brutal. He displayed the same brand of brutality during the four years he spent in the American Southeast, pillaging the countryside in his search for gold. De Soto and his men were personally responsible for thousands of deaths, but the diseases they brought with them were responsible for hundreds of thousands more. When French explorer René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, arrived by canoe in 1682, the area was virtually deserted. De Soto found Mississippian cities packed together; La Salle didn’t see a single village for two hundred miles.
OVER THE NEXT CENTURY, American resources would flood across the Old World. Gold and silver poured into Spain, and back out across Eurasia, reaching all the way to China as part of the growing trade with the Indies.
Precious metals were the most dramatic and most glamorous of America’s resources to reach Europe, but not the most important in the long term. A cornucopia of new foods changed the European diet forever. Maize, tomatoes, and peppers. Lima beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and wax beans. Chocolate and vanilla. And most important of all, the miraculous potato, which could be planted in fallow fields, produced more calories per acre than existing grain crops. Potatoes could also be left in the ground until needed, making them difficult for plundering soldiers to take
in times of war.
1492 marked a fundamental shift in the axis of power in human history, from East to West. Columbus’s voyages across the Atlantic led to the first lasting European contact with America, inaugurating a period of European exploration and colonization of foreign lands that lasted for several centuries. Hereafter, maps would be redrawn, and the story of us would change direction.
The meeting of Old and New Worlds was, of course, inevitable. What was harder to predict was how humankind’s future would be shaped by the ingenious inventions, cultural exchanges, and unintended consequences that stemmed from this great age of discovery.
Only time would tell.
8
SILVER
SIXTEENTH CENTURY CE. EXPLORERS BRIDGE THE WORLD’S OCEANS IN SEARCH OF NEW ROUTES TO ASIAN TREASURES–AND FIND SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM WHAT THEY’VE BARGAINED FOR.
Columbus stumbles upon a tropical paradise and encounters, not Asians, but partially clad Tainos wearing gold baubles. Enthralled by exotic new foods, fascinating new materials like rubber, and—above all—gold, he and his men gather samples and tales to excite potential investors back home.
Soon, reports of the place Columbus calls Hispaniola sets off a gold rush to the New World. But instead of stockpiles of gold, the Spanish who follow him find silver. Rivers of silver. Mountains of silver.
European explorers and rulers are quick to divvy up the New World’s spoils and trading lanes, and then set about amassing raw materials and enlarging the scale of production to enable trade on a global scale. Driven by avarice, they enslave native peoples and force them to refine, harvest, and carry goods to waiting ships. Globalization dawns. The need to share the hazards of global trade will one day lead to the creation of the world’s first stock exchange.
But in the meantime, Spanish businessman Bartolomé de Medina discovers a new chemical process for making high-grade silver out of low-grade ore in the Peruvian Andes. One man’s ingenuity becomes the world’s bounty—until unexpected complications arise.
Moche headdress, Peru 700 AD
MANKIND’S LUST FOR RICHES HAS sent us places we wouldn’t otherwise go. And has prodded us to invent things and processes we might not have puzzled through without the drive for wealth of the sort that lies deep within the earth or in the far reaches of a rain forest. Ultimately, the human race is as practical as we are greedy.
The pre-Colombian cultures of Latin America used gold and silver for ornamentation and ritual purposes but did not value them as precious metals for their own sake. As the son of one Panamanian chief told the Spanish, gold ore was no more valuable than a lump of clay—until it was used to make something either beautiful or useful. The Aztecs, the Incas, and even the Tainos, who inhabited the islands where Columbus first landed, used gold and silver ornaments as a sign of rank. The Incas in particular made a lavish display of what they described as the “tears of the moon” and the “sweat of the sun.”
Inflamed with greed, the Spanish invaders conquered the existing American civilizations, killed their rulers, melted down their beautifully worked gold and silver ornaments, and went in search of more. They found more—in modern Mexico and across the Andes, from what is now central Chile to modern Colombia, in Taxco, Pahuca, Porco, La Plata, and most of all, at Potosí, in modern Bolivia. “As rich as Peru” became a popular description of something valuable in Spain after Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire. Cervantes’s Don Quixote changed the saying to “as rich as Potosí.”
Potosí in the Andes of modern Bolivia is a conical mountain, dark red in color and nearly fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Sometimes known as Cerra Rica, the rich hill, it contained one of the largest, richest silver lodes ever found. We don’t know who named the mountain Potosí, what the name means, or even what language it came from. One long-held tradition is that it means “high place.” But in the seventeenth century, it meant “silver.”
Latin American silver flooded into Spain for 250 years. It not only turned Spain into a global power; it created the first global economy, linking Mexico and Peru to India and China by way of Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands. The power of silver fueled Spain’s empire and financed its wars. The labor needs of the silver mines drove the Portuguese slave trade and decimated the Native American population of the Andes. Soon, silver decorated Europe’s churches and palaces and paid for Europe’s maritime trade with Asia.
RICH WITH SILVER
PERU. 1544. GUALPA IS LEADING HIS LLAMA train back to Porco from La Plata. Carrying food from the rich farmland of the valleys to the Spanish mining town is profitable business for a man who knows his way around the mountains.
He stops at the foothills of the red mountain to water the llamas. Gualpa has no intention of climbing that mountain today. He has business to do.
But suddenly, one of his beasts breaks free and wanders up the side of the mountain. Gualpa doesn’t see it at first, but then . . .
There she is, the wayward llama. Gualpa mutters a curse. He can’t afford to lose the animal—or her cargo.
Gualpa takes off after the stray, scrambling up the steep hill through the twisted evergreens. Even though he stays on the narrow trails worn by hoofed feet, the going is rough. The gravel shifts under his feet; he grabs a shrub to steady himself, but he falls as the shrub uproots.
Gualpa scrambles to his feet, brushing dirt and rocks off of his clothing—and instantly forgets all about the roaming llama. He’s spent enough of his life around the mines to recognize that the soil on which he now stands is rich with silver.
INCA SMELTING
In the early years of Peruvian silver mining, Native American smelters dominated the industry.
Spanish smelters soon discovered that the ore was too rich for European methods: if heated too quickly, the silver content burned and volatilized instead of melting. Traditional Incan metallurgy allowed a smelter to maintain more precise control over smelting temperatures. The native smelters used portable ceramic ovens that had slits in the walls of the fuel chamber. When the oven was set up on a hill and the charcoal in the chamber was ignited, the slits used the wind to create a blast furnace effect. Smelters controlled the temperature by estimating wind velocity and moving the oven up or down the hill to get the correct draft. Once the silver was extracted from the ore, using the wind oven, it went through two more refining operations, ultimately producing ingots of pure silver. By agreement, Native American smelters delivered a specific amount of refined silver per hundredweight of ore, keeping the remainder for themselves.
Once the methodology of silver extraction changed, the power equation of mining fundamentally shifted—bringing devastation and centuries of misery to the Native American tribes who had built and mastered the first foundries.
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, Gualpa uses the llama train as his cover. He returns to Potosí again and again, gathering and refining the rich ore. It is hard to keep his new and growing wealth a secret, especially from his friend Guanca. Guanca begs to be let in on the secret. Finally Gualpa gives in and takes his friend to the source of the silver.
It is a big mistake. Soon the friends disagree over how to work the lode. Out of spite, Guanca shares Gualpa’s secret with his master at the Porco mine, Juan de Villarroel.
Native Americans Working in Spanish Silver Mine
In the sixteenth century, Potosí was the world’s largest industrial complex
In April 1545, man and master file a formal claim on one of the richest veins of ore on the mountain—and push Gualpa aside.
When Juan de Villarroel, the principal Spanish mine operator at Porco, investigated the reported deposit at Potosí, he saw a massive outcropping three hundred feet long and thirteen feet wide. It was high-grade ore—50 percent silver. The visible lode, exposed by years of erosion, was just the beginning. Most of the Potosí lode was hidden.
When de Villarroel filed his claim on the exposed outcropping in April 1545, he triggered the silver rush of 1545. One hundred seventy Spaniar
ds, eager to get rich at the new lode, abandoned the newly settled mine town of La Plata and came to Potosí, bringing with them three thousand Indians in their service. The would-be miners barely had time to establish their claims before winter forced them to move down to a less-hostile elevation, displacing the existing Native American population. Within eighteen months, the invaders had built a ramshackle boomtown at the foot of the mountain. Fourteen thousand miners, refiners, merchants, and moneylenders lived in twenty-five hundred hastily constructed, straw-roofed shacks. Concentrating solely on the silver, the settlers grew no crops, and they manufactured nothing in the town. Every tool, shirt, bed, and morsel had to be brought up from below by mule and llama train. But transporting goods to a town almost fourteen thousand feet above sea level was difficult—and costly. Prices soon got higher, thanks to the profligate spending habits of successful miners.
The Spaniards had already discovered that African slaves did not survive hard labor at high elevations and low temperatures. The local Native American population was too small to provide enough forced labor to work the mines. Mine owners were forced to rely on a free labor market, whether they liked it or not. They had plenty of labor to choose from as Spaniards and free Native Americans hurried to Potosí, hoping to get rich. Some of them did.
The mines at Potosí produced more than 127 million pesos of silver during the first eleven years, but production tapered off as the more accessible veins of high-grade ore became exhausted. There was still a mass of low-grade ore to mine, but no easy way to extract the silver from it. Potosí was on the verge of financial collapse.
Potosi silver mine
Mankind Page 22
