The Conquistadors (13 page)

On the far side, dominating the whole flat sprawl of adobe dwellings, was the great pyramid-pile of the temple of Quetzalcoatl. This temple is composed of seven distinct layers, each layer completely encasing the previous temple and representing a thank-offering at the completion of a 52-year cycle. The most important temples throughout the Aztec world were treated in this way, so that they grew steadily in size each half century. And, since the last 52-year cycle had ended only a dozen years before the Spaniards arrived, the great temple at Cholula would have looked not only enormous, but also gleamingly new.

Early next morning the Spaniards were on the march, accompanied now by their ‘faithful' Zempoalans and only about five or six thousand Tlaxcalans. They were met on the road by the chiefs of Cholula ‘with great noise of trumpets and drums, and many of their so-called priests dressed in the vestments they wear in the temples and singing in the same fashion'. After their twenty days in Tlaxcala, the Spaniards were well rested. Nevertheless, apart from their allies, they were a small force of only four hundred determined men about to enter a city that was allied to an Indian prince of almost fabulous power. They were moving towards his territory uninvited, and behind them they had left a trail of revolt that no man, however great his power, could afford to ignore. It was a desperate gamble; and Cortés must have wondered why he had been allowed to get so far, always being offered gifts and fair words. What was Moctezuma afraid of? Or was he just biding his time, cruelly waiting for the kill, intent upon sacrificing the Spaniards to his filthy gods?

To understand the situation, it is necessary to view the Spanish invasion from Moctezuma's point of view, against the background of Mexican history and the social, cultural and religious structure of the Aztec civilization.

The American Indian is now generally believed to have stemmed from a Mongoloid-red movement from Asia across the area of the Bering Straits more than 20,000 years ago. However, the earliest radio carbon-dated sites of unquestioned human association are about 11,500 years old. Discoveries at Iztapan and Tepexpan in Mexico indicate that primitive man may have established himself in the lake area of Middle America by around 9000 B.C. By 5000 B.C. hunting and fishing was being supplemented by cultivation of beans, later of maize; and by the middle of the third millenium B.C. some form of cultural life was beginning to emerge among the nomadic tribes of this area. There is evidence of pottery handcraft in established village centres during the next 500 years and it was some time after this that the first advanced culture, that of the Olmecs, began to develop in the lowlands of the Gulf Coast.

The belief that this was a theocracy is supported by evidence of ritual development; in Mexico this was marked first by the construction of platforms and altars, later by the building of pyramid-like structures. Initially, these were probably of earth and oval in shape – the 80-foot cone-shaped pyramid of Cuicuilco, which was later buried by lava, is a development of these. Burials, which had previously been in pits, became more elaborate, and many temples were built, chiefly to the god of fire or sun – ultimately the god of war.

In the first millenium B.C. the Maya civilization emerged in the southern forests. It lasted more than a millenium and spread north as far as Yucatán, where the ruins of the great city of Chichén Itzá testify to its advanced cultural development. In Mexico the even larger city of Teotihuacán began to rise on the north-east shores of Lake Texcoco in the first two centuries A.D. It represents the first urban civilization in Middle America and eventually covered seven square miles – a great ceremonial and commercial centre that constantly adapted itself, being altered and rebuilt several times. It influenced most of Middle America for five hundred years and though its destruction by fire in the seventh century A.D. presaged a collapse of what is called the Classic period, its temple structures provided the architectural models upon which most subsequent religious edifices were based.

This Classic period is almost bewildering in the profusion of culture revealed
by archaeological excavation and renovation. From Chichén Itzá in the east, right across the crumpled mountain face of Mexico, to Monte Albán in the west, the whole country is littered with cultural remains of extreme complexity, being both individual in their local development, yet interwoven with the main stream of Middle American Indian development. Teotihuacán was almost certainly a great religious centre, and, since it was from this city that most of the elaborate ceremonial of later cultures stemmed, it has inevitably attracted the greatest archaeological attention. Not only have the colossal pyramids of the Sun and the Moon – the former is some two hundred feet high and in volume larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt – been repaired, but the two-mile long Street of the Dead, the buildings of which had become mounds overgrown with maguey, the great Square of the Moon, the remarkable Temple of Quetzalcoatl, later covered to form the Ciudadela, have all been cleared of the wind-blown earth and undergrowth that buried them.

It is astonishing now to contemplate the gigantic architecture of these people as revealed in the sites of their city-states, the high level of their arts and crafts, the intricacy of their metalwork, and to realize how little of all this imaginative ability was put to practical use. They knew about the wheel, yet they did not use it, except for toys, and even when the conquistadors entered Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1519 the Indian method of transport was still confined to the human back or to their lake boats. They did not even use sleds, for they had not domesticated any animals other than dogs, which they bred for food.

Their metalwork was confined largely to the jewellers' art – some of the best examples are from the Mixtec culture, hundreds of necklaces, pendants and ear-rings found in Tomb 7 at Monte Alban. Their jewellers' technique was so advanced that they could cast by cire-perdue and even solder, the ornamental work so fine that it is hard to believe that it was executed without the use of a magnifying glass. Yet their skill in handling metal was mainly confined to the working of gold and copper. They had no knowledge of steel or even of the most primitive form of iron, and for the cutting edge of their ‘swords' and the ritual cardiectomy of their victims they were back in the Stone Age, using ‘flint' blades and knives of volcanic obsidian.

The earliest levels of Monte Albán, the religious centre of Oaxaca, two hundred miles south-east of Mexico, pre-date Teotihuacán; and with its hundred tombs of the priests, its huge complex of temples – a whole hill cut in terraces, it finally almost rivalled it in size. But the influence of Teotihuacán was much more widespread, though this did not apparently lead to any sense of military unity, so that its ultimate destruction was inevitable. Throughout pre-history there had not only been nomadic migration back and forth across Middle America itself – a movement that resulted in the cross-fertilizing of the developing Indian culture – but there had also been constant infiltration by hardy nomadic tribes from North America itself, drawn south by the warmer climate and to the lake area of the central Valley
in particular by the richness of its volcanic soil and the cool clear brightness of its climate. It may have been one of these southward migrations that finally destroyed the city.

But, though Teotihuacán itself was destroyed, the worship of one of its gods, Quetzalcoatl, was not, and this has some bearing on the Spanish conquest half a millenium later. At about the beginning of the tenth century yet another nomadic tribe infiltrated into the Valley. These were the Toltecs, a tough, warlike people, whose god was Tezcatlipoca, god of the sky with a taste for human sacrifice. They were armed with club-shaped wooden ‘swords' set with obsidian blades, spoke the Náhuatl tongue, and they absorbed the culture they found in the Valley and its gods. It was they who gave Teotihuacán its present name, taking the people who had built those fantastic structures to be giants. Teotihuacán means the place of the gods, by which they meant the ancient gods, and they gave Quetzalcoatl, god of learning and of the wind, the name by which he has always since been known –
Quetzal
is the Náhuatl name for the brightly plumaged trogon birds still found in the rain forests of Guatemala and Costa Rica,
Coatl
means serpent; i.e. Feathered Serpent. Led by their chief, Mixcoatl, these people founded a military state that included most of what is now the province of Mexico.

It was at this stage that the story of Quetzalcoatl the god becomes confused with that of Quetzalcoatl the man. The latter was the son of Mixcoatl by a woman he took during the campaign in the Morelos district. The woman died in childbirth. The father was assassinated by his brother, Ihuitimal. The son was taken to Tepoztlán, a little town nestled in a magnificent gorge with temples built high up on the rock face to the north. Here, and at Xochicalco, not far away, he was brought up by the priests of Quetzalcoatl. He was called Topiltzin, and when he was grown up, he avenged his father's death, killing the uncle who had usurped the throne and burying Mixcoatl's bones on the Hill of the Star. The Toltec capital was Culhuacán, but after he became king he built a new capital at Tula, where he erected a temple to Quetzalcoatl and became its high priest, assuming the name of the god and thereafter having all the virtues of Quetzalcoatl attributed to him.

Since he represented a more enlightened religion, he was opposed by the old priesthood, who were devoted to war and insisted on human sacrifice in the name
of Tezcatlipoca. Inevitably, the old guard won, for he was a man in advance of his time. His defeat is charmingly attributed to a technicality – Tezcatlipoca introduced him to
pulque
(a form of beer produced from the fermented juice of the maguey cactus), which he had never touched before, and when he was drunk had him seduced by a woman. He abdicated and fled to the Gulf Coast, where he took a boat to Yucatán.

Quetzalcoatl's arrival in Yucatán may well have given rise to the Maya stories of the appearance of a culture hero called Kukulkán, which in Maya means Feathered Serpent. In Chichén Itzá itself the most conspicuous buildings date from the Toltec period – late tenth to thirteenth centuries – and since the beginning of this phase coincides with the date of Topiltzin-Quetzalcoatl's expulsion from Tula, the Maya legend may explain the uncanny resemblance of the buildings to those at Tula. On the other hand, it may have been solely due to the spread of Toltec influence, for besides being a warrior race, they were great builders, constructing temples, palaces, even their houses of stone. They used mortar, also stucco and plaster, and had a form of steam bath which they called
temascal.
The Greco-Roman analogy is thus a reasonable one, and with the replacement of the Classic period by the post-classical Toltecs, we are now at the dawn of Mexican history, the names and dates of their kings, their customs, even their mythology reasonably known.

This mythology is more basic than most. An example quoted by Dr Bernal symbolizes the conflict between the Toltecs and new warrior tribes driven by a period of drought to the rich irrigated land around Tula. It occurred during the reign of Huemac, last king of Tula, about the middle of the twelfth century. Tohueyo, a lusty young warrior who was the physical embodiment of the rising foreign element in Tula, was sent into the market place disguised as a seller of chile peppers. He took up a position opposite the royal palace, sitting naked like all the warriors of his tribe. Huemac's daughter, who had turned up her nose at all the eligible Toltec chiefs, doubtless because they were too effeminate for her liking,

looked towards the market place and saw Tohueyo naked, and his genital organ, and after having seen it went back into the palace and took a sudden fanciful desire for the organ of the young Tohueyo and then became very sick because of the love for that which she had seen; all her body was swollen and Lord Huemac learned that she was very ill and asked the women who guarded his daughter: ‘What illness does my daughter have?' And the women replied to him: ‘Lord, the cause of this sickness was the Indian Tohueyo and she is sick with love for him.' The king ordered his men to search for the seller of chile who had disappeared. At last they found him and brought him before the king. The latter ordered him to cure his daughter. Tohueyo refused. But the servants took him, washed him, painted his body, dressed him sumptuously, and brought him to the bedroom of the young girl who ‘then was cured and regained her health'.

It was, in reality, a marriage of convenience, an attempted political merger of the Toltecs and the new warrior races. It was unsuccessful. The Toltecs rebelled, Huemac fled, and early in the thirteenth century Tula ceased to be a power.

This pre-Mexican period saw the growth of five cities in this central area – Culhuacán, Texcoco, Azcapotzalco, Cholula, and Tenochtitlan – and the merging of the Toltecs with yet another immigrant branch of the Chichimecs. The city-state of Culhuacán virtually bridges the gap between the decline of the Toltec capital of Tula and the rise of the Tenochcas, the Aztec power centred on Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

The Tenochcas first appear on the Central American scene as a primitive people who are thought to have emerged from a lake island in the western part of the country early in the twelfth centry. They worshipped Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird Wizard), an idol that they are supposed to have found in a cave; they carried it with them everywhere and through it their priest-leaders directed all their wanderings. The migratory period lasted almost a hundred years. During this time they were a simple, nomadic farming folk, moving from site to site, sowing and harvesting crops on a year-to-year basis. They came into the Valley by way of Zumpango, the northernmost lake, still desperately poor, and there they existed on the sufferance of the great cities. Adversity taught them eventually to be warlike, cruel and perfidious. About 1248 they settled at Chapultepec, a rocky fortress of a hill standing high above the waters of the main lake; it is now a castle and the centre of a great park to the south-west of Mexico City. Here, during the
next half century, they developed a cultural life, but the ambitions of their priests and their increasingly warlike behaviour so provoked the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco and the Culhuacáns that these two cities formed an alliance against them. The Tenochcas were defeated, their chief sacrificed in Culhuacán and the majority of the people carried off as slaves. The few that escaped fled into the reed marshes of the lake itself.