SUBDUING tHE AZTEC

As Spain’s New World empire expanded, Spanish conquerors, or conquistadors, met the massive empires of Central and South America. The Spanish arrival coincided with the height of the Aztec Empire. Militaristic migrants from northern Mexico, the Aztec had moved south into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and built the largest empire in the New World.

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they found a sprawling Aztec civilization centered around Tenochtitlan, an awe-inspiring city built on a series of natural and man-made islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-day Mexico City. Tenochtitlan, founded in 1325, rivaled the world’s largest cities in size and grandeur. Much of the city was built on large artificial islands called chinampas which the Aztec constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to form new landscapes. A massive pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the city center (its ruins can still be found in the center of Mexico City). When the Spaniards arrived they could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 people, all built on a lake and connected by causeways and canals. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the Spanish soldiers, later recalled, “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments … Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? … I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”^[3]

This sixteenth-century rendering of Tenochtitlan shows the causeways that connected the island city to the surrounding land.

From their island city the Aztec dominated an enormous swath of central and southern Mesoamerica. They ruled their empire through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute—including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold—and provided troops for the empire. But unrest festered beneath the surface. Aztec dominance rested upon fragile foundations and many of the region’s semi-independent city-states yearned to break from Aztec rule. Meanwhile, European conquerors lusted after the empire’s vast wealth.

Hernán Cortes, an ambitious, thirty-four year old Spaniard who had won riches in the conquest of Cuba, organized an invasion of Mexico in 1519. Sailing with 600 men, horses, and cannon, he landed on the coast of Mexico. Relying on a Native translator, whom he called Doña Marina, and whom Mexican folklore denounces as La Malinche, Cortes gathered information and allies in preparation for conquest. Through intrigue, brutality, and the exploitation of existing political divisions, he enlisted the aid of thousands of Native allies, defeated Spanish rivals, and marched on Tenochtitlan.

Possibly because some Aztec mistook Cortes for the god Quetzalcoatl, the Spaniards managed to enter Tenochtitlán peacefully. Cortes then captured the emperor Montezuma and used him to gain control of the empire’s gold and silver reserves and its network of mines. Eventually, the Aztec revolted. Montezuma was branded a traitor and uprising ignited the city. Montezuma was killed along with a third of Cortes’s men in la noche triste, the “night of sorrows.” The Spanish fought through thousands of indigenous insurgents and across canals to flee the city, where they regrouped, enlisted more Native allies, captured Spanish reinforcements, and, in 1521, besieged the island city. The Spaniards’ eighty-five day siege cut off food and fresh water. Meanwhile, smallpox swept through the city. One Spanish observer said it “spread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it … They could not move; they could not stir.”^[4] Cortes, the Spaniards, and their Native allies then sacked the city, including its temples. About 15,000 died. After two years of conflict, the Aztec Empire was toppled by disease, dissension, and less than a thousand European conquerors.

Spain’s acquisitiveness seemingly knew no bounds as groups of its explorers searched for the next trove of instant riches. One such explorer, Francisco Pizarro, made his way to the Spanish Caribbean in 1509, drawn by the promise of wealth and titles. He participated in successful expeditions in Panama before following rumors of Inca wealth to the south. Although his first efforts against the Inca Empire in the 1520s failed, Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532 and executed him one year later. In 1533, Pizarro founded Lima, Peru.

Although multiple factors deterred the Spanish in North America, the empire’s greater challenge on the whole was in obtaining the necessary labor to translate land into profit. Early in the Spanish conquest, the Spanish crown instituted a legal system known as the encomienda to manage labor needs and reward the conquistadors and colonizers who helped expand Spain’s holdings. The encomienda system was an exploitive feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indian laborers to vast estates. The monarchy granted encomenderos (encomienda recipients) not only land but also the right to collect tribute from a specified number of native inhabitants. Typically this tribute included an oppressive labor obligation. The system reflected the Spanish view of colonization: the king rewarded those who served him and the empire. Meanwhile, the Spanish believed native peoples would work for them by right of conquest. In return, the Spanish would bring them Catholicism. In theory the relationship consisted of reciprocal obligations, but in practice the Spaniards ruthlessly exploited it, seeing native people as little more than beasts of burden. Convinced of their right to the land and its peoples, they sought both to control native labor and to impose what they viewed as correct religious beliefs upon the land’s inhabitants. Native peoples everywhere resisted both the labor obligations and the effort to change their ancient belief systems. Indeed, many retained their religion or incorporated only the parts of Catholicism that made sense to them.

In this startling image from the Kingsborough Codex (a book written and drawn by native Mesoamericans), a well-dressed Spaniard is shown pulling the hair of a bleeding, severely injured native. The drawing was part of a complaint about Spanish abuses of their encomiendas.

The system of encomiendas was accompanied by a great deal of violence. One Spaniard, Bartolomé de Las Casas, denounced the brutality of Spanish rule. A Dominican friar, Las Casas had been one of the earliest Spanish settlers in the Spanish Caribbean. In his early life in the Americas, he owned Indian slaves and was the recipient of an encomienda. However, after witnessing the savagery with which encomenderos (recipients of encomiendas) treated the native people, he reversed his views. In 1515, Las Casas released his native slaves, gave up his encomienda, and began to advocate for humane treatment of native peoples. He lobbied for new legislation, eventually known as the New Laws, which would eliminate the encomienda system.

Las Casas’s writing about the Spaniards’ horrific treatment of Indians helped inspire the so-called Black Legend, the idea that the Spanish were bloodthirsty conquerors with no regard for human life. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who held this view of the Spanish were Spain’s imperial rivals. English writers and others seized on the idea of Spain’s ruthlessness to support their own colonization projects. By demonizing the Spanish, they justified their own efforts as more humane. All European colonizers, however, shared a disregard for Indians.

Las Casas estimated that by 1550, there were fifty thousand slaves on Hispaniola. However, it is a mistake to assume that during the very early years of European exploration all Africans came to America as slaves; some were free men who took part in expeditions, for example, serving as conquistadors alongside Cortés in his assault on Tenochtitlán. Nonetheless, African slavery was one of the most tragic outcomes in the emerging Atlantic World.

The greatest tragedy of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, however, was the unintentional holocaust of disease unleashed on native peoples. Everywhere the Spanish traveled, they brought European pathogens that claimed thousands of native lives. For millennia, the New World’s isolation from the old, together with its lack of disease-prone domesticated livestock, had protected the inhabitants of this side of the Atlantic from the illnesses that routinely swept through Europe. After 1492, the isolation that had served to keep them healthy now put Native Americans at grave risk. Having no immunity to illnesses as benign as the flu, they perished on a scale never before seen in human history.

This sixteenth-century Aztec drawing shows the suffering of a typical victim of smallpox. Smallpox and other contagious diseases brought by European explorers decimated native populations in the Americas.

Estimates of the population of pre-Columbian America range wildly. Some argue for as much as 100 million, some as low as 2 million. Whatever the precise estimates, nearly all scholars tell of the utter devastation wrought by European disease. In 1983, Henry Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years following European contact, 95 percent of Native Americans perished.^[5] (At its worst, Europe’s Black Death peaked at death rates of 25 to 33 percent.) A 10,000-year history of disease crashed upon the New World in an instant. Epidemics of smallpox, typhus, the bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, and measles decimated populations up and down the continents. Wave after wave of disease crashed relentlessly and flung whole communities into chaos.

The epidemics were the most terrible result of a broader, cross-hemispheric, biological transformation that affected other life on earth. After Columbus’s landfall in 1492, continued interaction between the Old and New Worlds allowed for the transfer of various plants, animals, and microbes across the Atlantic in a process known as the Columbian Exchange. Whether it occurred through happenstance, trade, or migration, this biological transfer affected peoples and ecosystems around the world. Some of the effects were positive. Global diets, for instance, were transformed. The Americas’ calorie-rich crops revolutionized Old World agriculture and spawned a worldwide population boom. Many modern associations between food and geography are but products of the Columbian Exchange: potatoes in Ireland, tomatoes in Italy, chocolate in Switzerland, peppers in Thailand, and oranges in Florida are all manifestations of the transatlantic process.

Europeans, for their part, introduced their domesticated animals to the New World. On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus brought pigs, horses, cows, and chickens to the islands of the Caribbean. Later explorers followed suit, introducing new animals or reintroducing ones that had died out (like horses). With less vulnerability to disease, these animals often fared better than humans in their new home, thriving both in the wild and in domestication.