Two Empires at Their Apex

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is one of our shows that's a fill-in as Victor is over in Europe.

And we are going to talk about his last chapter in

his new book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

And that last chapter is on the Aztecs or the Mexicas as they called themselves.

And we're going to use the term, or I'm going to use the term Aztec, to just as convenience.

But Mexica was another term that the Aztecs actually used for themselves.

Anyway, that is

the subject of this episode.

So stay with us, and we'll come back after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So, Victor, I wanted to start your discussion about the Aztecs with the historical sources and then observations on Aztec culture.

And you state in the book that Bernal Diaz del Castillo is the historian that we often go to for information on this, the closest to the events themselves.

And I wanted to know how much should we believe his account and also a broader question, the state of science or rational inquiry in the early 16th century under that strong papacy and the tie between the emperor and the or the Spanish king and the pope.

Well,

you got to remember that when Cortes landed at what is now Veracruz in 1519,

the Spanish Empire was at its apex under Charles V, and there would be this 60 to 80-year period of Charles V and his son Philip II,

roughly from 1500 to 1600 year.

And

that was a result of this exuberance of the Reconquista, 1490s, and they had united all of Spain,

they driven out the Islamic groups, and they were prepared to fight the Protestant Reformation.

So the idea that they were going to go to the New World, and not unlike the northern explorers, the British, the Dutch, the French,

They were not going to let anybody who was not Catholic and Spanish into their area, their domain, which was essentially from California and Arizona all the way down to

Cape Horn.

And so it was a

this Habsburg Empire was

very adept in warfare.

They had the Spanish Tercio, which was one of the most formidable formations in Spain.

Their Spanish steel from Toledo was the best in the world.

And they were highly educated.

So Cortes himself was, I guess we would call him a,

I don't think you'd call him quite a lawyer, but he would be like a public accountant or an auditor.

He was fluent in Latin and Spanish.

But what he brought with him were people,

at least the original group that came with him, maybe not Navarrez, they were fresh from Spain and they were young.

But his group were veterans that had been fighting Muslims in North Africa.

They had been been fighting

Italians and French in Italy, and they were very fierce warriors and they had very sophisticated technology, not just vis-a-vis the Aztecs.

So this was a period of high Spanish science, military technology, a renaissance.

They were only a half century away from the Battle of Lepanto.

where they really took a very prominent position under Don Juan, the repeal of the Ottoman fleet.

So

it was a very dynamic culture.

And people like Bernal Diaz was very learned and

he wrote in the Thucydidean tradition of trying to cite evidence and interview people on the Spanish side.

We had other sources, Gomorrah, for example, and Sehugun, and some of them, Sehugun and Gomorrah, to a lesser extent, interviewed survivors of the Aztecs and they had Nahutu translators.

So there are

histories written in Spanish and Latin which incorporate survivors from Tenochtitlan that

can give the other side.

So we have a pretty, we have seven or eight.

There's an anonymous,

there's an anonymous Conquer treatise

that's translated, but we have eight or nine, I should say,

contemporary accounts.

Cortes himself wrote five letters to Charles V.

And I don't mean letters, I mean lengthy essays.

So, but to the question of Bernald Diaz, since a lot of us go to him for this period,

are you trying to suggest that he was working in a scientific tradition and

that overrode any sort of imperial obligations or religious obligations, etc.?

That it's a very trustworthy account, in other words, that he did the best he could with the evidence that he had.

Well, it was written almost three decades.

We don't know how long it took him to write it, but it didn't appear until when he was quite old.

And one of the reasons that people read it is not just, and they don't read the other accounts.

It's...

It's moving and it's very graphic and it's emotional.

So when he says that he looks up from a distance at the great pyramid at Temple Mayor, the pyramid complex, and he sees people he knew his entire life, and they're naked and they're painted, and they've got these ceremonial feathers on, and they're lined up to have their hearts torn out, and he can't do anything about it.

Or when he's in battle, he sees that the Aztecs are not trying to kill people.

They're trying to knock them down and then rope their feet with leather bound,

you know, bind them with

some kind of binding and then drag them over to a central place so they can be dragged up and used for human sacrifice and then cannibalized.

And he has, it's almost eerie, it's spooky.

And he writes about it, and he writes about the Tax Callans eating Aztec prisoners.

This is, the whole thing is very interesting because, you know,

We have this San Diego State Aztecs, and Aztecs are where I live, it's kind of a national, you see t-shirts with Aztecs, and that was part of the whole La Raza movement, was a return to indigenous traditions to reject the so-called European Spanish.

But as fierce and as murderous as the Spanish were,

they had never seen anything like this.

This was institutionalized murder.

They were sacrificing, I don't know if it's quite accurate, but there were records that the Aztecs kept of several thousand in a four-day period, and they dumped the bodies in the lake that abutted Tenochtitlan and they had to flee because it was so polluted.

So this was his institutionalized murder.

This was Auschwitz in the ancient world, or not the ancient world, in 1519 to 21 when the Spanish saw it.

So they were, and that's why they, that's the only reason they fell, because Cortes was a brilliant diplomat.

And he understood that he could turn many of these four million subject peoples, especially the Tlaxcalans, against the Aztecs because they each year had had their children and anybody captured in war taken by the Aztecs to be sacrificed in the thousands.

A lot of, you know, anthropologists say, well, you know, this is just a ritual to disguise the fact that there were no large mammals in indigenous Mexico.

There were no cows, there was no buffalo, there was no deer.

And so people had to have, you know, they had to have, they were ostriches, kind of emus and things like that, but they needed large sources of protein.

And they couldn't get enough from fish, so that they ate people.

Yeah.

Well, I guess the reason that I asked too about the credibility of Bernaldias or any of them,

of the historians at the time, is because a lot of our current historians want to say, well, that

human sacrifice of the Aztecs was overplayed and you can't really believe what the Spanish have to say about it.

They were doing it for propaganda purposes or something to that.

But the reason that that is false is that we have indigenous testimonies that

talked about it to Spanish chroniclers.

Then, more importantly, we have pic.

They didn't have a written language, but they had a pictograph or sort of a language, but only for

archival purposes.

And there was pictures of a skull rack, and so they had numerations.

And some of these have survived, some of them the Spanish described in detail, but when you total up according to their own numerology, you get in the very end of the thousands.

The point is they weren't,

what's the word

Quelzaka told the main god they were serving, they weren't shy about it.

They didn't think there was anything wrong with it.

And so when the Spanish got there, they were accompanied by priests within the warrior class.

They looked at this and they had no problem about killing people, but they said, these people eat people, and they sacrifice human sacrifice, and they ritualize sodomy.

And these things are against Christ and our religion.

And that was one of the main motivations to destroy them.

Yeah.

All right, let's turn to Aztec culture.

And I guess two big things are that Tenocchitlin was quite a spectacular

city, you know, even for the Europeans.

They didn't have cities that size.

So your commentary on that.

And then also the Aztec religion.

Well,

when they got there in 1519,

they arrived in

November.

They compared it with Venice.

which was one of the larger cities in Europe.

There was somewhere between 250,000 or

400,000.

It was situated on an island in a swamp.

I should say a lake, but it was more like an estuary.

It was very shallow, Lake Texkakovo.

And it was impenetrable.

You could not enter it because they had a series of causeways from the mainland surrounding.

four main freeways and then it was sort of like a cross and the city was in the middle and they could protect it in two ways.

They could have draw bridges and break up the freeway the highway so you couldn't come in because the water would intervene.

So they had wood bridges and then they had a very sophisticated form of locks so they could modulate the inflows and the outflows from the lake and they could raise the level over the bridges if they wanted to in terms of dress.

So they thought they were

invulnerable, that no one could ever go through it.

When Cortez got there,

he claimed later post facto, he didn't want to destroy the city, that it had it was very well planned and he wanted to incorporate it into the Spanish Empire and use the sub-convert everybody to Christians and use them as part of this kind of great crusade against the infidels, which was the Protestant Reformation, Islam.

The idea, we came to the new world, there's all these people who need Christ.

We're not going to slaughter them, we're going to, well, we might enslave them to use them for mining and things, but we're going to create a new Christian Spain here.

That's what the title of this

Bernal Días's book is.

It's the

true history of the conquest of New Spain.

What about their religion?

They had lots of gods, and did they sacrifice to a lot of them or all of them?

Or what was the

gods of moon, gods of sun.

They were animate.

They were nature gods.

And they were

greedy gods.

They were not invested in what we would.

They were like Greek gods.

They were powerful.

There's two gods that

come up again and again in

the Spanish description of

of the conquest.

And one of them is the feathered serpent god.

And

I don't speak well, especially kind of right now with long COVID.

But

Kuwetzatkutkotel, Kuetzatkotel was the serpent god, and he was one of the ones that they sacrificed to.

And there had been a prophecy

10 to 20 years earlier by Sears that he would appear and he would be fair-skinned.

And people even suggested he might be bearded and he would come from the sea.

And of course when Cortez came, people argued, some of them,

some of them thought, but the, I guess you would say, the Zeus of them was

Huatzil Opakatul, and I didn't pronounce that right, but he was the chief god, and he was the one

that had that hummingbird, I don't know what it was, a hummingbird dress, a golden tiara, feathers, and he's kind of a monstrous god, and he was the hummingbird god, and he was the one that they usually sacrifice.

He was hungry.

So when there was a famine, when there was an outbreak of disease, when there was a war that didn't go well, they often targeted the sacrifices to him.

In the center of Tenochetlan, they had something that the Spanish called Temple Major, Mayor.

And that was

a huge temple with a sanctuary on top where they killed the sacrificial stone, I don't know what you call them, altars.

And

it was kind of a mass.

They had, I think, four to six of them and people, they could bring up captives and they use obsidian blades which for the first three or four

uses were as sharp as steel.

Then they lost their edge very quickly, but they would cut open the sacrificial victim and take the heart while it was still connected and then hold it while the person was watching this and then

see it beating and then cut it off and then take the victim and either behead him or throw him down the stairs of the temple and then the people could eat him cut the legs and arms off and then they gave the intestinal and the carcass to the royal zoo animals jaguars and things like that and

it was pretty horrific that is horrific Victor, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about military calculations and the important aspects of the defeat of the Aztecs.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So when we read about the Aztecs, Victor,

we read that the auxiliary troops, the Tlaxicalans, were very important, disease was very important, the technological difference and superiority of the Spanish was important.

And I know that you talk a lot about Cortez's leadership, and I was wondering if you could evaluate the importance of each of those things.

Well, it's if you read

Prescott's fabulous history, you Thomas wrote a great history, a narrative history, but the best still is the 19th century Prescott history, which incorporates all the sources.

And that narrative of why the Spanish, and remember, although

in aggregate they had about somewhere between 25 and 3,000 conquistadors,

never at any one time did they have more than 1,500.

And they were opposed by armies of the Aztecs and their allies from up to 100 to 150,000.

So there has to be a reason, and Prescott's view, I think, is the correct one, that they had a series of force multipliers, partly because of superior technology.

By that I mean the Spanish were 3,500 miles from the coast of Spain, and they sailed there, and there was no way in the world the Aztecs could do the same.

They couldn't sail.

They had no maritime expertise.

They had no gunpowder.

They were sitting on

vast deposits of salt peter and carbon and all of the ingredients to make

saltpeter and therefore gunpowder.

And they didn't know what it was.

They had tin,

they had zinc, they had copper, they could have made bronze cannons.

In fact, the Spanish made gunpowder and they cast cannons from native sources.

But my point is that there was a technological gap.

Why were they so lethal?

They had cannon and they could use grape shots and when they shot a volley it would go through 10, 15 people.

It would kill 20, 30 at a time.

That was one thing.

They had arquebuses

and

that was a primitive type of musket.

It had a little often, some of them that were heavier had a tripod, but that something was a 50 to 80 caliber ball.

That would go through three or four.

The Aztecs had no metal, remember, none.

So they were dressed out in feathers and they had wicker shields and wicker armor.

They had no steel.

So the Toledo steel at that time was the best in the world.

So when you read about this, a conquisador who's on a horse, I'll get to that in a minute, they slash off whole heads and arms with one.

And when you use an obsidian blade, usually it could not be used as a slashing, it had to be a stabbing.

And after five or six attacks it would be dull.

More importantly, the Spanish had Toledo armor, steel armor, and so they were almost invulnerable.

They had crossbows, and

these were not 12th or 13th century, these were state-of-the-art,

16th century that had been reinforced with steel, so those bolts had the velocity almost of

a rifle, maybe 800 or 900 feet a second, and they would just go through people.

People, plural, three or four of them.

In addition to that, they had huge mastifs.

These were a breed of dog.

It's hard to know in the sources, but they were 100 pounds and up.

They were something like today's mastif, maybe a vicious Doberman, but the size of a Saint Bernard, and they were killers.

And they frightened them.

Then, of course, they had about 100 horses, and the Aztecs at first thought they were centaurs.

They were attached to people.

They'd never seen horses.

The horses had padding or armor, and these were lancers.

So they had these 12 to 15 foot pikes.

And we know that

cavalrymen like Pedro Alvarado, we have descriptions of him going right back and forth, back and forth, back and forth the ranks of the Aztecs, killing eight, nine, ten.

And they could not pull him off the horse.

and they couldn't hurt him because of his armor.

Their weapons were knives, spears, and arrows, all with obsidian blades.

That was the advantage technologically and culturally with horses and dogs, but there was one other thing very quickly, and that is there was a cultural confusion.

The Western tradition said that you win in war by killing

enough of the enemy or breaking their spirit, so you advance and you force terms on the defeated, and you usually, as a result of that, gain ground and territory.

That's not how the Aztecs envisioned most wars.

They called them flower wars.

They were ritual wars.

So in a typical Aztec war, people would dress up in gaudy costumes.

They didn't work in unison.

There was no discipline.

There was no phalanx or legion.

Individual warriors would swarm each other.

The purpose was to knock somebody down, hurt them, wound them, but not kill them, and then pull them to a standard.

One person had a long feathered banner

and then dragged them there and then the more, you wouldn't call them kills, but the more captures you got, the more you enhanced your

reputation.

And of course you

winnowed out the enemy ranks and then those were fought back for ceremonial human sacrifice.

So you can see what was happening when the Spanish met them.

You would have somebody like Alvarado or Castillo or Cortez himself, and they would be swarmed by three or four people, but they weren't using these flint blades to hit their jugular vein or face underneath their helmets.

They were trying to get on top of them or jump on their shoulders and knock them down.

And that's how they, and clubbed them.

They had wooden clubs with spikes of obsidian in them.

And that's how

we don't know how many were sacrificed, but it may have been as many as four or five hundred.

Yeah.

Can I ask you if you, the evaluation of the Arquebus versus the sword, which one was most more useful on the gun or the sword on the battlefield in 1600?

Well,

it was

hard to know because the Arquebus took over a minute to load,

but it had a huge round.

and it had enormous penetrating power.

So if you had a line of Arquebusmen, maybe 30 or 40 like Cortez,

and you could protect them with crossbow people, that was very...

So what they traditionally did, they had ranks in the tercio like phalanx with spearmen, and they would go up close to the Aztecs, and then the arquebusmen and the crossbow,

and these were very sophisticated crossbows.

They would shoot volley after volley, and as the Aztecs came forward, they were thinned out, and then they would melt back into the ranks, and then the spearmen, covered from head to toe, would then proceed, and they would reload, and then they would come forward and shoot, and they needed protection.

And then you had on the wings these 50 or 60 heavy,

pretty large

North African Arabian horses.

and they would be armored and they would have a lance, a lancer who was one of the most deadly people who they steal lance, Toledo blade lance, and they just went back and forth.

When Cortez went into Tenochtland and then Navarez landed at Veracruz and he was supposed to arrest him, Cortez only had 200 he only had about 800 people.

So he took 250 and marched 160 miles to deal with this Spanish investigatory force.

It turned out that he flipped them.

He blinded Navarez and said, look all you young guys, I know you want to arrest me, but I can make you rich.

There's gold beyond measure and wealth.

And so then he got another 1,500 to come with him.

In his absence,

he left the command to one of the most skilled but unstable of all of his advisors, Pedro Alvarado, who became famous.

His family was famous for generations in Mexico afterwards.

And he claimed later that during a festivity, rumors were that they were going to swarm the Spanish compound and kill all three or four hundred

inside of Tenochtitlan.

Yes, inside of Tenochtitlan.

How did they get in there in the first place?

Well, they were invited in.

And they said they were peaceful and they were trading, and they stayed for months, and then they stayed longer.

And then Cortes realized that he wanted to conquer this for Charles V, but it was going to be impossible given his number.

So he took captive Montezuma.

And

they felt that was a sign of weakness on their part.

In fact,

somebody killed him.

Either they threw stones and hit him or they killed him.

But the point I'm making is, in his absence, Cortez's absence, then Pedro Alvarado tried to preempt and he unleashed the cavalry.

And

you don't know how many he kills.

People say three, four, five thousand unarmed festive givers.

So when Cortez came back in, he had to fight his way in and they were under siege in a compound.

And they were hopeless.

They were in a city of 300 or 400,000.

There was no way out of the lake.

And so the only thing they could dream up was at night.

And he came back with Navarrez, so they had more gunpowder, more horses, more dogs, more men.

And at this time, their force may have swelled to 2,000.

1,500 or so,

just for a brief period.

And then they tried to break out in the middle of the night when it was raining, and they were caught.

And that was called La Noche Triste,

the sad or tragic night, because at least 500 of them, mostly Navarez's young men, that were full of gold, they were too heavy, and they knocked them into the water and they drowned.

And some of them, hundreds were taken captive, 200 were probably taken captive.

And then

what was left was only five to seven hundred, and they went to Antumba, and then they turned around and there was 70, 80,000 Aztecs

on the plain of Antumba and they were going to be wiped out.

They were tired, they were wounded, the survivors, they were in shock.

They had a lot of women, Maria Estrada, you know, she was a conquistadora.

And Cortez fought even though everybody thought they would keep running and

retreating.

And he made his stand and he said to Alvarado, we've got to kill the head of the Aztec contingents.

And they had the most elaborate and identifiable feathers.

And they took sorties and killed them.

And when they killed them, they dissipated.

But then all of the allies turned on them.

Even the Tlaxcalans didn't want to be around them.

So they had to go back to

Taxcala, make peace.

And then they figured out that the only way they could win was to build a fleet.

They needed brigadines.

These are small sloops with a sail and oars.

So built 13 of them, pretty big ones, and they labeled all the parts.

And

they disassembled them and carried them back over the mountains.

And then they had to dig a huge ditch to launch them.

And they launched them onto the lake.

And at that point, they had men in

on the water and on the causeways, and they could each day

fight, use their brigadines.

They had high, high sides on them and the Aztecs couldn't climb in and they had canoes.

Maybe there was suggestions they had thousands of canoes with archers in them and that was what had really hurt them during the Noche Triste.

But now Cortez

would go each day and take part of the causeway and then fortify it and then rest and then the fleet would

would anchor itself and then the next day, next day, next day and they blockaded the city, city, they cut off the water supply, there was an outbreak of

smallpox, whooping cough, and they starved the city out.

And then they had to go in block by block.

They wouldn't surrender, and they destroyed the entire city.

They probably killed 200,000 to 300,000 Aztecs.

They unleashed the Tlaxcalans on them.

Remember, we're talking about 20 to 30,000 TlaxCalan warriors.

And maybe he wouldn't, and other allies on the lake that joined them, once they saw that the Aztecs were losing, they hated them so much that many of the empire, which had been 4 million at one point, joined Cortez.

That's never talked about in contemporary.

I don't know why a lot of people say they take pride that their ancestors were Aztecs rather than Tlaxcalmans.

Tlaxcalans didn't institutional murder.

murder people to the same degree they did, but not to the same degree as the Aztecs.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about this episode with especially Cortez and his leadership and then also Pedro Alvarado.

Very interesting that he got tried for killing some of the Aztecs.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X and his handle is at V D Hansen.

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connect up with him there.

So Victor,

you just sort of mentioned that

Navarez

or

sorry, Narvaez

Panfilo de Narvaez was there to arrest Cortez.

And that that's one thing.

It It was interesting to me the political and judicial

setup of the Spanish because somebody came to arrest Cortez and Pedro Alvarado was put on trial for having killed some of the Aztecs and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about those two things.

Well, Cortés had an ambitious relationship.

He had five or six marshals that were much more stable, but none of them as adept or courageous as Pedro.

So when when he left, he put him in charge, and as I said,

he butchered

thousands of Aztecs and caused a general uprising.

But when they fled the

city and they were on the causeways, he deliberately brought up the rear guard.

So here he had Alvarado and his trusty cavalrymen, and they were fighting off the Aztecs to allow everybody.

There's a very famous incident, it's not true how accurate it is, it's called Alvarado's Leap, where

when he was backing up on the causeways, he turned around and as he had given cover for the retreating Spaniards, suddenly

the bridge, because these were earthen causeways with bridges in between so you could interrupt them and then you'd be trapped, it collapsed.

And he went back on this horse, they call it Alvarado's leap and he jumped all the way over and survived.

And then in the subsequent battles he had

the leading role.

And then I think

probably

20 years afterwards, in his 50s,

he

kept conquering areas of what would now be southern Mexico, Guatemala.

And he tried to carve out his own kingdom, and he was killed.

But

again, these are, I think he came from Guadalajara, but most of these people were Castilians.

They weren't Catalina.

They were the fiercest people in Spain.

And it was just the unfortunate.

It was the unfortunate, as I mentioned an earlier caste, it was the unfortunate destiny of the Aztecs.

This wasn't John Smith and the Pilgrims.

This was not a bunch of English religious refugees.

This was not even the French trying in Quebec.

These were very different people in the sense that they were much more skilled they were males.

There was almost no children,

and

there were a few women in the army, but for the most part,

they came to conquer and to convert and to get gold for Charles V.

And it is interesting, though, that they had laws about what could be done in war.

I mean, I think we often think that they went into war and that was it.

So, why would you put Alvarado on trial for killing some of the Aztecs inappropriately must be the assumption.

What was so strange about it is that Cortez had to justify.

He was arrested.

They sent inspectors from Madrid and they said, where was your authorization to destroy this wonderful city?

How many people did you kill?

How many people did you enslave?

Did you have a legal right to do this?

And he spent much of his time defending himself.

And he also may have killed one of his wives.

Malinche was the famous translator, Lao Malinche.

She was an indigenous

person who knew Spanish and she knew at least two indigenous dialects.

And so, without her, they wouldn't have been able to function.

But she was the intermediary and could talk to both the Tuxcalans and the Aztecs and then interpret for Cortez.

And she was pro-Spanish.

She's considered the archtraitor

in Mexico today.

But,

you know,

it's very funny how this idealization, and my hometown, there was once a women's Christian temperance monument.

They widened the road, they destroyed it years ago, and then for years they had an Aztec monument there

for Quedet Zal Patul, and the serpent god eating, and there were heads and everything.

It was a glorification of this Aztec God and human sacrifice.

And then it had on the bottom Laraza.

It It was in Salon.

So, again, I was curious.

I took a picture of it and wrote about it.

And I thought,

this is so strange.

I mean, it would be,

if you were German, you wouldn't be talking about

Nietzsche or Goethe, but you would be glorifying National Socialism because that's kind of what it was.

It was a cult of death, of mass killing.

And it was a regimented totalitarian city.

And when the

again, the only thing that

saved Cortez was that when he got there, the empire was 200 years old, and you could argue it was in decay.

Montezuma II was not a very strong ruler, and they had severe problems with protein supplies, food.

They didn't have any pack animals, so there was no oxen or mules or donkeys.

So they

had to use

kind of llamas and

human carriers with packs on their back to bring in grain so that the larger the empire became and the bigger this capital became, the more difficult it was to supply them.

I thought it was interesting as well.

Another thing that we don't often hear about in our history books is that the Aztecs themselves, their leaders, argued over whether to let the Spanish in.

And the nephew of Montezuma wanted to let that, or wanted to keep him out.

He said, you're going to

suffer a bad fate to him.

Or bring him in and kill him.

Yeah, but the son was saying, bring him in, the son of Montezuma.

And it does show you that they weren't just passive people in this movie.

No, no, they looked at these concusadors and they were completely freaked out because they came, they had spies all over, and they'd heard that these weird ships had sailed, and they didn't know where they were wings or birds.

And then as they were walking, they got these descriptions of them.

And then when they didn't know what the cannon were, they thought they had, at first they said they were deities.

Some said, I don't think most people believed they were gods because they were lusty, they wanted women, they ate, they bled.

But there was a lot of people who were very impressed by them because they thought they had mastered thunder and they had thunder weapons.

They'd never seen, their dogs were like chihuahuas.

They'd never seen Mastif.

They didn't know what they were.

They didn't know what the horses were.

They didn't know what steel was.

They were just freaked out that every question they got is, where's the gold, where's the gold, where's the gold?

And they didn't understand that.

Gold for them, it was just a decorative, no different than silver.

And they didn't understand the religion and

the need to convert people.

And so.

Again,

Cortez was there to get gold for Charles V and riches and become famous and wealthy and to get land for Spanish conquistadors and to have large estates and, you know, slave labor if they could with indigenous people.

And

it didn't take much.

From 1519 to 1521, they destroyed the city down to the foundations and then killed between 200 and 300, enslaved the rest.

And I think you could make...

And then the Tlaxcalans were given exemptions.

They were not conquered.

Because of their help, they were allowed free status.

And then you could make the argument within 100 years or 50 years there were very few people in Mexico who still spoke Nahutul.

Although there is today in Yucatan,

Michael Can,

Oaxaca,

Chiapas in southern Mexico below Mexico City.

But

they completely wiped out indigenous culture and they created a new culture that had the remnants of it grafted onto Catholicism, the Spanish language, and the

traditions of Spanish culture.

Yeah.

I would like to read a passage from one of Cortés' letters to Charles V, because they seem to be very rich in detail about what was going on in the Aztec capital.

And here he's talking about what's going on on the altars up on the Temple Mayor.

And he says, quote, pronouncing the words of the ritual, he, the priest, plunged a sharp knife made of flint into the victim's breast, and quickly thrusting his hand into the opening, tore out the beating heart, which he first elevated and then deposited at the feet of the image of the god.

Sometimes the heart was placed in a vase and left standing on the altar, or it might be buried or preserved with diverse ceremonies as a relic, or it might be eaten by the priest.

The fresh blood blood was smeared on the lips of the idols.

If the victim were a prisoner taken in battle, his head was given to the priest to keep as a trophy.

The entrails were fed to the dogs, and the other parts of the body were cooked with maize and offered in small pieces to the guests invited to partake by the giver of the sacrificial feast.

Grim.

That's the best.

It was very grim.

And

again,

it had consequences because when smallpox broke out, everybody said, well, the Spanish had some immunity and the indigenous people did not.

That was partly true.

And a very virulent form of malaria came from Africa.

The Spanish had some, I think, a small number of African slaves that had malaria that introduced it.

But the problem was that when the Spanish were relying on this

medical tradition that went back to Hippocrates, and some of the tenets of it were epidemiology, that when you saw pustules, as you see in Thucydides' second book, Description of the Plague, they knew that you could get acquired immunity.

They knew how to treat you,

isolate you, quarantine you, and then have people who had acquired immunity to feed you and take care of you.

What the Aztecs kept doing is

they kept sacrificing people, even though they had smallpox, and they would rub

they would skin people and make shawls out of it, and they would use the blood for a maze, and they spread it into it.

And

I don't think it killed eight to ten million people.

That's been downgraded in central Mexico.

But it was one of the reasons why the Spaniards in the next century were so successful, because the native population was much smaller.

And

this was the fourth of the chapters I did, Classical Thebes, as we've talked about, in Carthage, in Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan.

And this was the last last one, but it had the same

theme.

In other words, a majestic empire thought that it was at its height of powers.

It underestimated the intrinsic weaknesses that occurred in the last half centuries, the dissension among the people,

schisms within its own culture and with allies.

It relied on the idea that the the intruder or the invader would not wipe them out, had no intention to do that, or could be negotiated, or there would always be allies on the horizon.

They thought that surely no indigenous person would join these people, these white-skinned, bearded, crazy people, wherever they came from, rather than us.

And of course, all of the allies, to the degree that Cortez could guarantee they wouldn't be sacrificed, they joined them.

At least the great majority did.

And so it was the same idea that it can't happen here, and yet you had these prophecies that

10, 20 years earlier that

they were doomed, and that people would come and destroy their city.

And

Montezuma was a very enigmatic character.

He was very curious about what was going on.

He was kind of ineffectual, almost a feet.

And when they would tell him, kill them, kill them, kill them, he'd say, well,

they're kind of neat to look at.

I like them.

And they wouldn't do this.

I don't know whether I'm a captive or I'm still the emperor or what am I.

I don't know if they're going to kill me.

I don't know if to lead a revolt.

It was kind of that type.

And the Aztecs were happy to get rid of them.

Hamlet.

I have two more questions.

One is in terms of the numbers of estimating things.

So your book estimates that there were probably 200,000

Mexicas or Aztecs that perished in this warfare, 2,000 Spanish, which is probably an easier statistic to come up with, and then 20,000 tlaxicalan auxiliary.

Was it hard, especially for to come up with a number of Aztecs and Tlaxicalans?

How do we assess that?

In what sense?

How do you estimate the number of Aztecs dead or Tlaxicalans dead?

What are the sources and how do we know?

A lot of it is

they knew the size of the city, especially when they attacked it, and they looked at the density of the city and they had comparable ideas of how big Paris or Madrid

in the 16th century was or Venice.

And then

they inquired

because they wanted to know what they were up against.

So they would talk to the Tlaxcal and the Toltecs, etc.

And they said, how many people in here?

And how many people do you have?

And so when they marshaled their allied forces they'd say well

you've got 20 30 the spanish were very meticulous record keepers and with their translators they were able to find how many indigenous people were with them to the exact number almost and then they could extrapolate for you every man you probably had four in a family and then they would ask them how big when you fight the aztecs how many are there So they had a pretty good idea.

And then when they destroyed the city and they counted the houses, they came up with a figure of somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 or 400,000 had lived there at one time.

And then they enslaved the rest.

Or they know that the tax calendar, there's various reports.

They killed 30,000 to 40,000, sacrificed them, and took them slaves.

They let them run loose, just like the Ottomans did with the Janissaries.

Just like the Romans did with the legions.

And then the last question is, of course, consistent with the theme of your book.

Why the annihilation completely of the Aztec civilization as it stood there and placing a Spanish city over it that is Mexico?

It was exactly the same thing.

Alexander destroyed Thebes and he left only the house of Tindor and a few temples and he said,

I didn't want to do it.

They forced me to do it.

Every time I see a Theban, I like them now.

There wasn't any Thebans left to speak of.

And same thing.

Scipio sat on a hill with Polybius and he started crying.

He said, oh, I didn't want to destroy Carthage.

It reminds me of what might happen to Rome someday.

Or this reminds me of the Iliad and Troy falling.

Same thing with Mehmed.

Oh, what a beautiful city I've destroyed.

And the Cortes wrote to Philip V, he said, was my intention to have this the crown jewel of an indigenous.

He thought that if you destroy the city, you would incur animosity,

and then it would take a lot of labor and capital to build a new city.

And that's exactly what happened.

But he so destroyed it, and he discovered as he was destroying it that people wanted to join him because of their hatred of the Aztecs.

So he gave amnesty, as I said, to Tlax Cowans.

And then he,

very smart, he took Temporal Major, and that's where he put the Great Cathedral.

And he put a lot of the government buildings and the cathedral and Spanish headquarters in the nicer part of town.

And today's Mexico City is built right on top of the Aztec city.

And the lake was drained, and

it was considered a little healthier because it was high, it was, I don't know what the exact is, it's almost 6,000 feet.

So it's above,

for the most part, malaria, or at least it's not as malarial as most places.

And when it would get hot and stagnant, they could drain or

they could adjudicate the inflows of the lake.

And they claimed they were as sophisticated

as the Venetians in controlling the tides in the lagoon of Venice.

Well, Victor, why the title to it?

I think you said it was called Imperial Hubris in this chapter, yeah.

Well, they were so preeminent, and they had migrated up from Central America supposedly 300 years earlier, and they had been so successful in their organization.

And they were very sophisticated in things like architecture and mathematics and astronomy and technology.

And they conquered every, and they realized that this lake was what they wanted.

It had fish in it, and it had the ability, because they didn't, as I said, they didn't have large mammals for transport, no horses, oxen.

So

you could go on the lake for miles and then tap all the resources of its shores, maize, fields, etc.

So it was an ideal place.

And so they grew spectacularly, and then by the time Cortez got there,

they were spending a large amount of their capital in non-productive enterprises, like building these huge temples and human sacrifice.

It's not very efficient to

go to war to conquer people and then to take them captive in the thousands and then to sacrifice them when you could use them as slaves.

They did use some as slaves.

And again, anthropologists try to explain that.

This was just a ritual that disguised a need for protein.

I don't quite believe that.

Nick Harris wrote a big book about that.

But

it was a beautiful.

One of the things the Spanish did experience,

they had never seen a city that high.

So when they got there,

it was kind of a mystical high because

I should say I think the city wasn't six, it was over 7,000 feet.

And that rarefied air was crisp and clear, and it took a while to adjust to the altitude.

And it kind of enhanced the romance of the city, like a mountain city.

And

they'd seen, everybody in Europe at that time thought that Venice was the most spectacular of all the European cities because of its canals

and its religious, you know, St.

Mark's Square, etc.

And they looked immediately, they said, this is Venice.

And this was a big shock to them because they had not seen people

in Cuba or the Caribbean or on the coast.

They didn't even know much about Mexico.

There had just been rumors of people that

had experienced the coast of Florida and the coast of Mexico, Cozumel, the island.

This was very unusual.

And Cortez got a writ to go explore it, but not to conquer it.

And that's why they sent Navares to

execute him or capture him or bring him back.

And they would have.

So

you've got to remember also, 1492, Columbus comes to the Caribbean.

1519.

So you're talking about 27 years.

That's it.

And nobody, they've only been in the New World 27 years, and they're mostly in Cuba, what is now now the Dominican Republic, Hispaniola.

And they don't know anything about the United States, the southern coast, or Mexico, or Guatemala, or any of Latin America, Brazil.

And so it's this was...

And what happens, all the poor people from Castile, the Castilian regions, heard about this place where you could get land and gold, and young males were coming, this was in the thousands, in an overpopulated, poor Spain, and

to seek their fortune, but not to bring their families.

That's why

the Mexican people represent that marriage between an indigenous culture and the Spanish, and for the first hundred years or so it was almost asymmetrical.

Mexico provided the women in that union, and Spain provided the men.

And so they created a new people, the Mexican people, which were indigenous and Spanish.

And that was very different.

That in North America, indigenous people did not marry to the same degree with Europeans, not because they were more racist, less racist on either side, but because the Europeans came for different reasons.

They did not come necessarily to convert all of the indigenous people.

There were missionaries, but they didn't want to convert the Mohawks and even later the Apache or Comanche.

And they didn't come

to get gold.

They came for land and they came for religious persecution and they brought their families.

And so they implanted a very distinct culture where there was a small number of Spanish men and a large number of indigenous women.

And that was the basis for the Mexican people.

Well, Victor, your dog has announced the end of this episode.

Again, it is the fourth chapter.

Yeah, in the end of everything,

how wars descend into annihilation.

It is really selling well.

It's very

timely in the sense that that question seems to be on the mind of a lot of people.

I hope everybody buys it.

I was a complete surprise.

It's been out seven weeks, each week on the New York Times bestseller list.

It's never happened to a book.

And I thought that it would be of...

marginal interest.

I think what made it interesting to people was to try to put the context of the times we're living in.

So it came out during the Ukrainian war and the threats of Putin to new people and

Kim Jong-un and this new Chinese alliance and then the Chinese threats over Taiwan and then the Iranian threats to wipe out Israel.

And we always just kind of laughed at it.

And now, for some reason, I think it's the present administration's loss of deterrence after Afghanistan or whatever.

But now we're taking very seriously these threats and they want to learn is, should we?

And has it happened in history?

Because most war, even World War II and World War I, where all the millions that were killed, they didn't end with the extinction of the German people or the extinction of the Japanese people or the extinction of Italian culture.

And it's very rare for large cultures to disappear, but these disappeared.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor, for this episode.

And thank you to our listeners as well.

Please come join us at the website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

And buy the new book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.