Posted on 01/09/2019 10:35:33 PM PST by vannrox
Tenochtitlan was an absolutely amazing city. The city was larger than any in Europe at the time and held approximately 200,000 people with some estimates as high as 350,000. Built over 100 years or so on Lake Texcoco, the city was impressively organized.
Being built on the lake meant that land platforms were created as needed in an orderly fashion leaving clean canal streets for canoe traffic and multiple bridges and paths for pedestrians. Each neighborhood was distinct and had its required services from schools to garbage collectors.
The city also had fabulous amenities befitting a great city. Huge gardens were quite popular and the city zoo and aquariums held wildlife from all over Mesoamerica. Fresh spring water flowed through several aqueducts along the three long causeways that connected the city to the north, west and south shores.
Among the beauty of Tenochtitlan was a great amount of war and death. The large central temple complex usually held daily sacrifices and many of the different gods required human sacrifices whether they be battle captives or willing victims. On either side of the main temple were the houses of the eagle and jaguar warriors, elite warrior clans who led the armies in battle.
When Hernan Cortez brought his band of around 600 soldiers to Mexico, his chief motivation was evading his superior. Many of the men’s motivations were some combination of gold, power or God. As Cortez established a base at Veracruz he left some men to guard the camp while proceeding inland, but not before destroying his fleet to prevent any insurrection from a desire to escape.
He had a force of about 3-400 men with steel armor and swords along with crossbows, primitive firearms, and a few light cannons. One of his men, Gerónimo de Aguilar, was a survivor of a shipwreck eight years’ prior and had learned many of the languages and customs.
The temple complex. on the flat lake the temples rose above the city and could be seen for miles. The temple complex. On the flat lake, the temples rose above the city and could be seen for miles.
In a series of misguided battles, the confederation of tribes known as the Tlaxcala launched several attacks against the advancing army of Cortez. In these first engagements the Spanish were faced with armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands and easily prevailed. The Aztec Macuahuitl was a viscious weapon against unarmored foes and indeed in these battles a horse was essentially decapitated but the steel armor of the Spaniards was too effective.
Counter to some popular thought, the Spanish actually fought mostly with swords and crossbows, though they had a similar devastating result. Steel swords cut right through the padded cotton armor of the natives and crossbow bolts would fly right through the light shields. When firearms were used that had a truly terrific effect with their loud bangs and smoke they truly terrified the natives.
After every battle, Cortez released prisoners with messages of peace. Finally, the Tlaxcala were willing to meet, and the two sides realized that they both sought to control the Aztecs. The Tlaxcala were one of the few independent groups left near Tenochtitlan and were often targets of new wars primarily to steal more sacrificial victims. After this alliance was formed, the king/emperor Montezuma urgently requested to see Cortez and summoned him to Tenochtitlan before any more of his enemies united against him.
The motives of Montezuma are difficult to ascertain, he clearly was afraid of the Spanish to a degree owing to their established power and strange origins, but he seems to have attempted to orchestrate an ambush as Cortez was on his way to Tenochtitlan and prepared and sent an army towards Veracruz. He seems to have truly favored an appeasement policy, giving gifts to get the Spanish to leave but also seemed ready to hit hard with his armies.
When Cortez and his men arrived at Tenochtitlan they were given a royal welcome. They were given rooms in the royal residences and given tours around the city. They made notes of the impressive causeways and the city zoo as well as the evidence of wealth and treasures everywhere.
Here though the Spanish began to become horrified by the constant and routine human sacrifices. While it is true that the Spaniards often lusted after power and riches, the witnessing of what they perceived as pure evil would have also provided future motivation to topple the empire. Not only were their sacrifices but other brutal acts such as feeding these victims to captive jaguars and outright cannibalism.
The details are uncertain, but Cortez seems to have figured out some of Montezuma’s plots to attack the Veracruz settlement and decided to hold the emperor captive. This captivity was very civil with all daily activities, including sacrifices, continuing for months, but with the Spanish cautiously monitoring things.
This standoff persisted until Cortez had to leave the city to meet a force of around 900 Spaniards tasked with arresting Cortez for disobeying the Cuban (New Spain) governor. Cortez was able to ambush skillfully and capture the commanding officer and showed his great speaking ability by convincing the 900 men to join his cause.
While Cortez was with his newly gained army, his garrison in Tenochtitlan faced dire odds. The city was at peace when Cortez left but his second in command, Pedro de Alvarado, had been invited to a traditional Aztec feast. Accounts differ but supposedly unprovoked, Alvarado blocked the exits and slaughtered all the natives at the Feast, 600 to 1,000 people mostly of the noble class were ruthlessly slaughtered and their bodies looted for jewelry.
Following this slaughter, the residents of Tenochtitlan had enough of the Spaniards and spurred by a divine proclamation that the Spanish must be expelled, they besieged the palace complex with the garrison and the captive Montezuma.
a different massacre but no less helpless than the one at the Aztec festival a different massacre but no less helpless than the one at the Aztec festival. with guns and steel weapons the Spanish had no problem killing everyone in the temple. their looting of the bodies shows the greed, but everyone was likely on edge irregardless of the desire for treasure. Cortez had secured his army and had gained more local allies but was now faced with the prospect of losing his entire city garrison, his captive Montezuma and his foothold in the city. Cortez had to figure out how to regain his hold on the 200,000 people in the city while saving the few hundred they were trying to capture and sacrifice. Reports from the besieged Spanish maintained that the Aztecs would shout threats such as, “you will be sacrificed” and “we will eat you”. Every day of this would have been agonizing for the Spanish, knowing full well that capture meant certain and brutal death.
I received no such “update” warning
Cannibals bad. Conquistadors heroes. Stopping the aztec and Mayans was justified.
You are forgetting that the reason Europeans were fleeing Europe was because European nations were waging savage brutal wars against one another, for thousands of years, and certain rich kingdoms were seeking new trade routes, to build wealth to wage war on other European nations.
The Spanairds had just driven armies of Moors off the European continent when they sent expeditions to America stocked full of war veterans.
They didn’t want all of these battle tested veterans hanging around medival towns causing trouble.
Anyways. Please read some history....
This is a very interesting time in European history. There is a lot a written accounts of the new world expeditions. It’s very fascinating to see good Catholic people deal with native American cultures.
You will be surprised how many Catholic people agonized over fighting and killing the indigenous people of the Americas, and wrote about it.
They were smart enough to know that killing people, because they were different... isn’t a Christian Virtue.
You’re being dramatic. Almost all the Indians died of European diseases without ever seeing a European. It wasn’t a mass murder like Hitler.
That’s because you don’t know enough history.
Good estimates put the death count of Indigenous Americans at 100 million+.
Oh wow.
Read Christopher Columbus, and the history of what he did to the indigenous people of what is now the Dominican republic.
He literally worked the population to death.
His men documented that he established conditions so brutal, that slave men didn’t have to strength to breed with their wives.
Columbus worked generations of people to death.
Why do you think the left goes ape-$hit about Columbus.
He wrote it all down.
City on a lake? Immediately raises questions about sewerage runoff?
The European immigrants came to a largely unpopulated continent and claimed it, lost by the tribes in constant warfare among themselves, and with many of those tribes dedicated to hideously brutal practices.
The Europeans were more civilized, more organized, more united, and more numerous. That, and the more advanced technology that naturally accompanied being more civilized, more organized, more united, and more numerous, made the outcome inevitable.
There are things I have always admired about Tribal American culture, but their civilization overall was in decadent disarray; their more advanced tribes were already a thing of the past.
Note that I call them Tribal Americans, not Native Americans. I am a Native American, but not a Tribal American (although my father had a Tribal American forebear, and I am even more Tribal American than Elizabeth Warren).
I do not object to the term, Native American Tribe(s), but I vehemently object to the term, Native American(s), unless it is applied to all Americans who happen to be natives.
So funny.
Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs had full running water plumbing and sewage disposal.
Check out Engineering Empire with Peter Weller, and also Josh Gates does some brilliant New America history.
Group, no, individual, yes. I happen to be a native to North America; so are quite a few others.
So did the Romans.
I’m native to New Jersey.
There was no death of “hundreds of millions” of people by either the Spanish in the New World or the other countries listed re “these settlements”.
The Mongol and Moslem invaders of Asia Minor and then all of Europe all the way to France (Tours), Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Serbian region, Vienna, and Spain, killed millions but I don’t know the exact figure. I saw one Polish article about a battle they lost to the Mongols? with a loss of “60,000” knights.
Tours, Vienna, Spain, the Hungarian campaigns all featured reported losses in the ranges of tens of thousands, but this is outside of my area of study.
Remember, one of the first acts of Mohammed was to wipe out a friendly Jewish Arabian Peninsula city of some claimed 600,000 people, and then it was off to the races of genocide throughout much of Africa, Middle East and southern Europe.
The death tolls in the above were horrible until the Nazis and Communists came in with their more efficient killing machines (Russia/Soviet Union - Captive Nations losses estimated at over 30-50 Million or so. Red Chinese killings externally (India, Tibet, Vietnam, possibly Burma/Thailand), and internally, numbered upwards of 60-100 Million).
Sources for modern Sov Union/Red China, Prof. Richard Walker (SISS study “The Human Cost of Communism in China”; Prof. Robert Conquest’s “THC of Communism in Russia”, also SISS (both 1971-72, and “THC of Communism in Vietnam”, SISS, 1972, plus “The Black Book of Communism” and the more recent works of J.R. Rummel - “Death by Government”, 1997; “Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder”, 1999, and Benjmain A. Valetin, “Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the 20th Century”.
Ok,
So if the place was uninhabited, how long did the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock go before encountering indigenous established tribes?
I’ll give you a hint
Pilgrims landed in fall, but it was the natives that prevented them from starving to death in the first month of shorefall.
Please read more American history.
Rush Revere even talks about this.
I love white people!
I really do.
White people built America into THE Marvel of the modern world.
Why didn’t the awesome natives just ride down the evil whities or march up an army of artillery and wipe ‘em out?
Yes, you have very good points. I agree with you, however I would not be able to match your ability to say things so clearly and plainly.
I don’t like people saying the killings of millions of indigenous American natives is ok, because some were brutal and or cannibals.
I don’t like that hundreds of thousands of Roman’s were systematically exterminated by Muslim Turks in Constantinople.
Historical people who lived in these times understood that brutality for the sake of brutality was not good.
The tribes in the Americas were not united. The European settlers were. The cultures were fundamentally different and incompatible, quite apart from actual warfare.
Even among the less warlike, more agrarian tribal cultures, the lack of understanding about crop rotation apparently doomed them. Advanced localized civilizations, such as in Ohio (Cahokia), were long dead by the time the European settlers arrived, replaced by much more primitive ones.
I do not extol murder of anyone by anyone, in particular not the murder of children in ritual sacrifice.
But the descendants of the Europeans have devolved to that level now in the form of abortion - so I think this decadent culture is entering its last stages as well.
P.S.
Not all European enclaves were the same, any more than all American tribes were the same. The Anglo settlers were far less involved in the kind of butchery you chronicle than the Spanish and related. I share with many others the sense of ironic wonder that so many of the descendants of American Tribes claim Spanish with pride, and reject English, considering that fact.
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