HISTORY OF THE AZTECS

The Aztecs and Mexico City: 14th century AD

The Aztecs have been a tribe, according to their own legends, from Aztlan somewhere in the north of complicated Mexico. From this place, which they leave in about the 12th century AD, they get their name as Aztecs. By the time they solve again, after dual centuries of emigration and warfare, they have been job themselves by a opposite name – the Mexica.

This is the name they use when the Spaniards find and knock out them in the 16th century. Their collateral after becomes good good well known as Mexico City, and the finish segment acquires the name of Mexico.

It is possibly in the year 1325 or, some-more probably, 1345 which the Aztecs solve upon an void island in Lake Tetzcoco (the disproportion in date depends upon how the Mesoamerican 52-year monthly monthly monthly calendar cycle is integrated with the chronology of the Christian era). They call their allotment Tenochtitlan.

Their prospects in this place, where they have been surrounded by rivalry tribes, appear as unpromising as those of the Venetians upon their dour firth islands a couple of centuries earlier. Like Venice, opposite all the odds, Tenochtitlan becomes the centre of a drawn out sovereignty – and it does so many some-more rapidly, stretching opposite executive America inside of a century. But distinct Venice, this is not an sovereignty of trade. It is formed upon the Aztecs’ inhuman cult of war.

Aztec object rituals: 15th – 16th century AD

The enthusiast deity of the Aztecs is Huitzilopochtli, God of quarrel and pitch of the sun. This is a fatal combination. Every day the immature soldier uses the arms of object to expostulate from the sky the creatures of dark – the stars and the moon. Every dusk he dies and they return. For the subsequent day’s quarrel he needs strength. His diet is tellurian blood.

The need of the Aztecs to supply Huitzilopochtli chimes good with their own majestic ambitions. As they magnify their empire, they accumulate in some-more captives for the sacrifice. As the sacrifices spin some-more countless and some-more frequent, there is an ever-growing need for war. And reports of the blood-drenched ceremonies set upon apprehension in to the rivalry hearts compulsory for sacrifice.

A church at the tip of a good pyramid at Tenochtitlan (now an archaeological site in Mexico City) is the place for the sacrifices. When the pyramid is lengthened in 1487, the rite of re-dedication involves so many carnage which the line of victims stretches distant out of the city and the massacre lasts 4 days. The God favours the hearts, which have been ripped from the bodies as his offering.

Festivals and scapegoat have been roughly successive in the Aztec rite year. Many alternative gods, in serve to Huitzilopochtli, have their share of the victims.

Each Feb young kids have been sacrificed to maize gods upon the towering tops. In Mar prisoners quarrel to the death in gladiatorial contests, after which priests skirt up in their skins. In Apr a maize enchantress receives her share of children. In Jun there have been sacrifices to the salt goddess. And so it goes on. It has been distributed which the annual collect of victims, especially to Huitzilopochtli, rises from about 10,000 a year to a figure closer to 50,000 prior to long prior to the attainment of the Spaniards.

The many critical gods, detached from Huitzilopochtli, have been the sleet God Tlaloc (who has a church subsequent to Huitzilopochtli’s upon tip of the good pyramid in Tenochtitlan) and Quetzalcoatl, God of flood and the arts.

Quetzalcoatl: 10th – 16th century AD

Human scapegoat plays comparatively tiny partial in the cult of Quetzalcoatl, yet the God himself has an unusual purpose in American history. The reason is which he merges in Aztec fable with a chronological figure from the Mesoamerican past.

A Toltec king, the owner of Tula in about 950, is a clergyman of Quetzalcoatl and becomes good good well known by the god’s name. This king, described as aryan and bearded, is banished by his enemies; yet he vows which he will lapse in the year ‘One Reed’ of the 52-year monthly monthly monthly calendar cycle. In 1519, a ‘One Reed’ year, a aryan foreigner lands upon the easterly coast. The Aztecs acquire him as Quetzalcoatl. He is the Spanish conquistador Cortes.

Cortes advances in to Mexico: AD 1519

Cortes reaches the seashore of Mexico, in Mar 1519, with eleven ships. They lift a small 600 men, sixteen horses and about twenty guns of assorted sizes. The Spanish celebration is shortly confronted by a vast series of Indians in a conflict where the outcome of horses and guns (both new to the Indians) is fast decisive. Peace is done and presents exchanged – together with twenty Indian women for the Spaniards. One of them, good good well known to the Spaniards as Doña Marina, becomes Cortes’ chick upon the side and interpreter.

Cortes afterwards sails serve along the seashore and founds a allotment at Veracruz, withdrawal a small of his celebration to urge it.

Before move inland, Cortes creates a confidant gesture. He sinks 10 of his ships, claiming which they have been worm-eaten and dangerous. The singular flourishing vessel is charity to any of his soldiers (and right away sailors too, about 100 in all, released from their prior duties) who would cite to lapse rught away to Cuba, publicly revelation which they have no go through for the good charge ahead. No a single takes him up.

His tiny celebration is right away irretrievably committed to the success of the adventure. Cortes leads them in to the interior of the country.

The subsequent battles, distant some-more dangerous than the initial encounters upon the coast, have been with the Tlaxcala people. The Spaniards in the future better them, and have been perceived as conquerors in their collateral city. This is a feat of good stress in the maturation story, for the Tlaxcaltecs have been in a state of permanent crusade with their dangerous neighbours. Any rivalry of the Aztecs is a crony of theirs. They become, and remain, constant allies of the Spaniards in Mexico.

In Nov 1519 when Cortes approaches Tenochtitlan, the collateral of the Aztecs, his tiny force is protracted by 1000 Tlaxtalecs. But to the mystification of the Spaniards, no force is needed.

Cortes and Montezuma: AD 1519-1520

The Aztec emperor, Montezuma II, has had copiousness of notice of the attainment of the aryan whiskered strangers. He additionally knows which this is a One-Reed year in the Mexican monthly monthly monthly calendar cycle, when the aryan whiskered Quetzalcoatl will at a small time return.

He sends the coming Spaniards a period of embassies, charity abounding gifts if they will spin back. When these fail, he decides opposite hostile the intruders with force. Instead Cortes is greeted in Tenochtitlan, upon 8 Nov 1519, with the pleasantness due to Quetzalcoatl or his emissary. In the difference of a single of the tiny band of conquistadors, they seemed to have fitness upon their side.

For a week Cortes and his companions suffer the liberality of the emperor. They lay in his gymnasium of assembly and try to modify him to Christianity. They impact turn his city upon their horses, in full armour, to see the sights (they have been quite repelled by the chunk for tellurian scapegoat and the newly extracted hearts at the tip of the church pyramid).

But Cortes is good wakeful of the impassioned risk of the situation. He devises a devise by which the czar will be private from his own house and eliminated to the office building where the Spaniards have been lodged.

The constraint of the czar is carried out with a brilliantly tranquil mix of warning and threat. The outcome is which Montezuma appears to say his full justice procession underneath Spanish protection. A couple of hundred Spaniards have taken carry out of the strong Aztec empire.

During the subsequent year, 1520, disharmony and shake outcome from the proceed of a opposition Spanish expedition, launched from Cuba to dispossess Cortes of his spoils. He is means to better it, yet at a high price. In his deficiency the 80 Spaniards left in Tenochtitlan remove carry out of the city – mostly interjection to their own execrable diagnosis of the inhabitants.

When Cortes returns, he finds castle and czar besieged together. He persuades Montezuma to residence his people from a turret, propelling peace. The accost of missiles nod this try leaves the czar mortally wounded.

The incident is right away so unfortunate which Cortes withdraws his armed forces from the city in haste, in Jul 1520, during ‘the Sorrowful Night’. With Tlaxcala benefit he captures it again a year later, upon thirteen Aug 1521. There is no serve Aztec resistance. The defeat of executive Mexico is complete.

A heartless end: AD 1521-1533

The drop by the Spaniards of the good Inca sovereignty in Peru, twelve years after the identical predestine of the Aztecs, brings to an in effect finish scarcely 3 millennia of inland civilized world in America – yet the Maya, tough to conceal in the Yucatan jungle, safety for a whilst their own ways.

The Spanish fall short the changed artefacts of these cultures with an rare care – especially in their lust for bullion and silver, yet infrequently (as with Mayan manuscripts) as an ideological attack upon paganism. The outcome is which there is comparatively tiny to uncover right away for these abounding cultures and their rarely learned crafts. Only the good pyramid mounds of their temples mount currently as skinny witnesses of a clear past.