The Conquistadors (15 page)

The legal system was quite highly developed. Every city had its supreme judge appointed by the crown. Below him was a magistrate's court of three. In the country districts there were local magistrates chosen by the people themselves, and at the family community level the responsibility for law and order was assigned to what amounted to a village constable. Corruption in officialdom was punishable by death. Inured to the cruelty of their religious rites, capital offences were many – for murder, of course, even for the murder of a slave, for thieving, for altering land boundaries, giving short measure, prodigality, even drunkenness. Lesser crimes were punished by slavery. No man or woman could be born into slavery, but parents could sell their children. Slavery, however, was itself governed by very exact laws so that the cruelty of the system was not apparent in Mexico until after the Conquest.

As in the Dark Ages of medieval Europe, it was religion that raised the crafts to the level of fine art, particularly the stonemasons' craft. One of the best examples of this is the intricate motif-sculpture of the great Calendar Stone. The central part is a representation of the four eras of the world's destruction and re-birth, the mythology of earlier Indian cultures having been incorporated by the Aztec priests into their own theological teaching. The rest of the stone is extremely practical, a clear statement of the way the astronomer-priests operated their solar calendar. The division of the year into 18 months of 20 days each, left a short month of 5 days, all of which were considered unlucky and required propitiation rites. A god or goddess ruled over each 20-day month, rather like our signs of the zodiac. The days were designated by a number and a month name as in our own calendar (i.e. 15 Tozoztontli). There was also a 260-day divinatory cycle based on 13 numbers and 20 signs repeated in series (i.e. 5 Calli or House). Each day could thus be designated by reference to either system. It was very complex, the divinatory cycle being set down in picture-writing in the
tonalamatl,
a long folded strip of amate, or figbark paper, with usually two ‘pages' for each week of the year. This was the priests' handbook of ritual, a sacerdotal almanac that was used for casting horoscopes and dominated the lives of all.

Each year was designated by the name of the day in the 260-day cycle on which it began and mathematically this was restricted to 4 out of the 20 (i.e. Rabbit, Reed, House or Flint Knife), each with its appropriate number. The number 1 attached to one of these four only came up on the first day of the year every 13 years. As with cards, these 13-year ‘suits' resulted in ‘packs' or sheafs, of 52 years. In this way the two systems came together, for the dual designation of two numbers and two names meant that, again mathematically, the four of them could only be repeated in each 52-year cycle, 52 X 365 days being the lowest common multiple of 365 and 260. Thus the year of completion of the Calendar Stone would be recorded as 13-Cane of the 7th sheaf. The change from one cycle to another was as important to the Aztecs as the centuries are to us, the death of one sheaf and the birth of the next being marked by the New Fire Ceremony.

Moctezuma came to the Aztec throne in 1503. He had been chosen out of a number of candidates by twelve electors who included Nezahualpilli, king of the powerful and allied city-state of Texcoco, just across the lake from Tenochtitlan. Moctezuma was then about twenty-three years old, and because the end of each cycle or sheaf of years could be the end of an era, he was chosen more for his close observance of the ritual ceremonies of their religious beliefs than for his ability as a warrior. Thus the electors paved the way for Cortés' entry into Mexico and their own destruction.

Moctezuma's father, Axayacatl, had died in 1481, the year 2-House of the 7th sheaf. He had been succeeded by his brother Tizoc, who had been war chief and who had begun the reconstruction of the huge joint temple to the gods of war and rain – Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. He was responsible also for the carving of the greatest of the sacrificial stones, and when he died, supposedly poisoned by his own captains, he was succeeded by his brother, Ahuitzotl. This was in 1486, the year 7-Rabbit, and it was Ahuitzotl who completed the great temple and for its dedication amassed the staggering total of twenty thousand human sacrifices.

The survival of Aztec man depended on the strength of his gods, and since a human being was the most precious offering they could make, they presumed a diet of human hearts provided the best nutriment. War, being the prime business of the state, the hearts of captives were regarded as superior – the more virile and combative the warrior captive the more beneficial the offering of his heart to the god. But when so many were required, it was the tributary tribes who had inevitably borne the brunt of the demand for human victims. The effect of this blood-bath was wide-spread revolt, particularly in the Puebla region, where the war-like Tlaxcalans and Cholulans resisted strongly. All of which Ahuitzotl probably enjoyed. He was a ferocious and blood-thirsty man, whose military prowess greatly extended the Aztec empire. As a result, Mexico-Tenochtitlan expanded to such an extent that he had to construct a new aqueduct. He died of a head injury while supervising the reconstruction of the dykes after a disastrous flood in 1503.

This then was the position when his nephew, Moctezuma, succeeded him – the cult of human sacrifice at an absolute peak and the Tlaxcalans, the Cholulans and other tribes only kept in submission by the force of Aztec arms; and the end of the 52-year cycle only four years off. What sort of a man Moctezuma was it is difficult to say at this distance of time. He was not lacking in military ability, for he kept a tight hold on the conquered tribes, and in one campaign against the rebellious Oaxacans was able to sacrifice some twelve thousand captives to Huitzilopochtli. And he was certainly not lacking in cunning, for he lured his Texcocan allies into an ambush as a reprisal for the death of his sister, and when their king, Nezahualpilli, died in 1516, he appointed a successor of his own against the wishes of the Texcocan electors. Politically, this high-handed action was ill-advised, for it very nearly broke the alliance. This underlines the outstanding weakness of the Aztec empire. Military successes were never consolidated into an administrative unit. The word ‘empire' is, therefore, misleading. The Aztecs, like every Middle American Indian power before them, exacted tribute from the tribes they conquered, but left them organizationally independent. This was the Achilles' heel upon which Cortés was able to play with such effect.

Aguilar, writing like Bernal Díaz at the end of a long life, when he had been more than forty years a member of the Dominican order, describes Moctezuma as being ‘of medium height and slender build, with a large head and somewhat flat nostrils. He was very astute, discerning and prudent, learned and capable, but also harsh and irascible and very firm in his speech.' The description given by Bernal Díaz is similar, but more detailed: ‘The great Moctezuma was about forty
years old, well-proportioned, spare and slight, and not very dark, though of the usual Indian complexion. He did not wear his hair long, but just over his ears, and he had a short black beard, well-shaped and thin. His face was rather long and cheerful, he had fine eyes, and in his appearance and manner could express geniality or, when necessary, a serious composure.' And he goes on to say that Moctezuma was very neat and clean, and took a bath every afternoon, and that he had many women as his mistresses; these were daughters of chieftains, but two of them were legitimate wives and were caciques in their own right. He says that Moctezuma did not practise sodomy, but that when he had intercourse with any of his wives it was so secret that only a few of his servants knew about it.

Moctezuma had apparently a guard of some two hundred chieftains lodged in rooms beside his own, only some of whom were permitted to speak to him; and when they entered his presence they were compelled to take off their rich cloaks and put on others of little value. They had to be clean and walk barefoot, with their eyes downcast, for they were not allowed to look him in the face. The same applied to all the great chieftains who came to visit him from the distant lands of tributary tribes.

His meals were served to him by two handsome Indian women, and if the weather was cold, a large fire was made of the bark of a sweet smelling tree, and round him was placed a screen with the figures of gods worked in gold. Before he ate, four beautiful girls brought water for him to wash his hands. When he had been handed maize-cakes, very white, made with eggs and served on plates covered with clean napkins, the women retired and his only companions during the meal were his four closest advisers, all old men, relatives and chieftains. ‘He talked with them every now and then and asked them questions, and as a great favour he would sometimes offer one of them a dish of whatever tasted best … and if he gave them anything to eat they ate it standing, with deep reverence and without looking in his face.' He was served with a great variety of dishes, all cooked in the native style, and they were put over small earthenware braziers to keep warm. Díaz talks of more than thirty dishes and over three hundred plates of food, including fowls, turkeys, pheasants, local partridges, quail, tame and wild duck, venison, wild boar, marsh birds, pigeons, hares and rabbits. The food was served on red and black Cholula ware, and whilst he was dining the guards in the adjoining rooms were not allowed to speak above a whisper. With his food Moctezuma drank chocolate, sometimes out of cups of pure gold. And he was attended by jesters and clowns, and even stilt-walkers, all drawn from a quarter of the town reserved for entertainers. ‘They also placed on the table three tubes, much painted and gilded, in which they put liquid-amber mixed with some herbs which are called tobacco. When Moctezuma had finished his dinner, and the singing and dancing were over and the cloths had been removed, he would inhale the smoke from one of these tubes. He took very little of it, and then fell asleep.' After that it was the turn of the guards and the household
servants to feed, and ‘more than a thousand plates of food must have been brought in for them, and more than two thousand jugs of chocolate frothed up in the Mexican style, and infinite quantities of fruit'.

For his amusement Moctezuma had an aviary full of every type of Mexican bird, from the gay-feathered species of the coastal swamps to the eagles of the high mountains. There was also a zoo, where, besides every kind of beast from his dominions, Tapia says Moctezuma ‘kept men and women monsters, some crippled, others dwarfed or hunchbacked'. He also describes another house in which he kept water fowl in such numbers that six hundred men were employed in taking care of them. There was an ornithological sick bay for birds that were ill, and in this house the king also kept human albinos. All these houses and cages were in the gardens, which ‘were a wonderful sight and required many gardeners to take care of them. Everything was built of stone and plaster; baths and walks and closets and rooms like summerhouses where they danced and sang.'

Moctezuma came to the throne at a bad time, the shadow of the 52-year cycle's end already looming. The sheaf was always tied in a 2-Cane year, and 2-Cane was only four years away. Since he was at that time already the head of the priesthood, he knew only too well how bad the omens were. Even at the time of his accession, the astrologers were beginning to prophesy that the end of the 7th sheaf would mark the end of the world, the end of the 4th era, the era of Fire Sun. After what Ahuitzotl had done, the sacrifice of twelve thousand Oaxacan captives was perhaps not too much to propitiate the gods against such a dread prospect and to satisfy his people that everything possible was being done to ward off the threat of doom that faced them. Moreover, word had been brought by far-travelled traders of strange men with white skins and beards and ships like castles. The story of Columbus and those who had followed him had doubtless grown in the telling, and in the picture-writing the ships would probably have seemed like fortified islands emerging from the waves.

The Dark Ages were a world-wide phenomenon in man's cultural development. It was an age of superstition, and just as the Spaniards, clad in the chivalric armour of the Christian faith, ascribed every victory or escape from death to the intervention of Divine Providence and rode to victory with the names of saints as their battle cry, so the Aztecs, like children, twisted natural, even imagined events, to prophetic purpose. Sahagún gives no less than seven omens of doom beginning in the year 12-House (1517) with a comet ‘like a flaming ear of corn', and continuing through to the last year of the cycle: the temple of Huitzilopochtli burst into flames; another ‘was struck by a blow from the sun' – a lightning bolt; another comet, showering sparks, streaked across the sky in full sunlight; the great lake of Tenochtitlan boiled on a windless day, rising for no apparent reason and washing away many houses; a woman was heard weeping, night after night, and crying, ‘My children, we must flee away from this city!'; and fishermen caught a crane in their nets that was the colour of ashes and had a mirror in its
head in which Moctezuma is supposed to have seen the Spanish cavaliers riding into battle against his people.

The cumulative effect of these portents was that Mexico and all the rest of the Aztec world waited in growing terror as the last days of the 7th sheaf drew to a close. Throughout those last days, the five unlucky ones, they fasted and prayed. On the fifth day all fires were extinguished according to custom, even the sacred flames on the temple altars; and all household furniture, utensils, ornaments, all the little family gods, were thrown into the lake, the empty houses swept clean, the pregnant women locked up for fear they might be changed into wild beasts, the children forcibly kept awake to save them from being turned into rats.

As the sun finally set, Moctezuma, with the priests and all the chieftains and civic dignitaries of the city, climbed to the top of the old crater of Huixachtecatl, the Hill of the Star, to the temple on its summit that looks out over all the Valley of Mexico. The end of the world, or the birth of a new sheaf of fifty-two years – which was it to be? The suspense was appalling. Fear ran naked through the night and the massed multitude of Aztecs stood silent and awed, their eyes on the little group of astrologers on the temple summit of the old volcano.