The Aztecs: Building an Empire - Part 3

Remember at the end of the last blog where I said this would be about the Aztec's society and social structures? That part's true. Remember how I said it would be more entertaining than it sounds? Well... I'll give it my all. Keep in mind the purpose of this blog: to better remember what I read for when I teach it sometime down the line. You can read about it all here. I taught about the Aztecs in my second round of student teaching to a bunch of surprisingly eager to listen grade eights (my class was one of those 'advanced learner ones' so I can't take credit for it). Unfortunately, the problem with students that actually listen is they tend to ask a great number of questions. Soon I began to realize that I had the answers to maybe about half of them. My solution was to write down any question I couldn't answer, look it up, and return the next day and tell them - something my mentor teacher approved of. For the first week or so that was all well and good, but after a while it started to look pretty rough when I was writing down multiple questions a day. If you go to that well one too many times they'll start to believe you're just getting your stuff from the textbook with no additional knowledge. Naturally, that's exactly what I was doing, but I was not eager to express that to my students. So the point of this rambling is to say that a lot of this I will have to teach, so I better remember my stuff. The curriculum doesn't just centre around warfare, after all.

If Tenochtitlan's defenses fell, I'm sure they could
scare them away with their unpleasant art.

Anyways. I'm kind of jumping right in here, but one of the first reasons why Tenochtitlan survived as long as it did was the geography of the city itself. It had three main causeways that would connect to the central island, the main hub of the city. Each causeway was a bridge "as broad as a horseman's lance", in the words of Cortes. This made the island a defensive juggernaut. Similar to the idea of the three-hundred Spartans (movie or reality) plugging up the one entrance, it allowed them to funnel their enemies into these three defensible positions. It's hard to take a city by boats (arrows will drop a great number before they reach the shore) and a thin line of troops is never a way to storm a fortification. I mean, anyone who has ever played Starcraft knows this stuff by heart.

The city was also able to sustain prolonged sieges. Often, the attacker will surround the city if they refuse to leave, and essentially starve them into attacking. If you wait long enough and cut off the supply chains, they really don't have a lot of choice. However, in Tenochtitlan, they were perhaps not entirely self sustaining but at least able to provide a good amount of food for their troops right from within their borders. This was due to their chinampas, a form of farming that made their city in a lot of ways similar to Venice. Canals went in between buildings and farms, irrigating the crops and providing streets that can be crossed by bridges or canoes. The actual farmland itself is raised as to not flood the crops. They were made by piling up pounds and pounds of vegetation and mud until it formed a mound higher off the ground than the rest, allowing the dirt on the top to be used for seeding. It's a pretty ingenious way of farming that is apparently still used in an area near Mexico City. Between the farming and the influx of food sent to them from their tributaries (which you'll see is a heck of a lot) it supported as high as 200,000-300,000 people.

An Aztec eagle warrior. It is
rumoured that they were
actually just people.

So what about these tributaries? It wasn't just raw might that took them over, but a little bit of planning as well. Under the Aztecs employ were a number of long-distance traders, men who would travel to far-away cities and exchange goods to bring back to Tenochtitlan. In addition to that, they also served as somewhat of a spy; they would scout out the area, see how large of a population is within the city, and check for weak spots that can be exploited. Sometime later the Aztecs would come, and demand payment in one of two ways: gold, goods and so on, or their very lives on the sacrificial temples. Either way, the Aztecs didn't mind. They were able to take these places because pretty well every man was a warrior in some regard - even priests were trained in battle. It started at an early age, too. Their schooling wasn't far from a military academy, teaching combat and eventually having them shadow warriors, telling the children that "[their] mission is to give the sun the blood of enemies to drink, and to feed Tlaltecuhti, the earth, with their bodies". Yesterday at my girlfriend's school they called the parents of a number of children for cheering on a fight. The times they are a changin'.

All told, these tributaries brought in a tremendous number of goods. Somehow their ledgers managed to survive over all these years, and each year it was reported that Tenochtitlan received "7,000 tons of maize and 4,000 tons each of beans, chia seed, and grain amaranth, and no fewer than 2,000,000[!!!!!] cotton cloaks, as well as war costumes, shields, feather headdresses and luxury products, such as amber, unobtainable in the central highlands." No matter how astronomically high these numbers are, my first question is still 'what's with all the cloaks?'.

A depiction of the sacrifices with a god overlooking the
ceremony. Four of the five figures pictured
are having just a great time.

So lets say they didn't give up their weekly supply of cloaks and Tenochtitlan comes knocking. Typically what they're looking for is bringing sacrifices back to their temples to appease their absolutely terrifying gods (see the picture of the monstrosity on the left). Those were actually so important that you would rise up the ranks in Aztec society depending on how many captives you brought back alive. I mean, yes, they would be brought back alive just to be killed shortly after, but it's a ceremonial death and that means a heck of a lot more. It seems the whole process would have been way more efficient if they had only considered bringing mini-temples along with them and simply sacrificing the citizens of rival towns right in their homes. Come on, Aztecs - efficiency!

The sacrifices themselves were gruesome even by ritual murder ceremony standards (which are pretty gruesome already). The most common one would be stretching someone out across a stone and cracking their chest open with a knife. Then you reach in and pull the heart out (without touching the edges or it makes a buzzing sound). Another method was the victim would fight an Aztec warrior armed with a club without the usual spiky pieces of obsidian lodged in there, meaning it would take a little while longer but they still didn't really have much of a shot. The last one (and the worst) was when they did the first one with the stretching and the heart removal and all but only after throwing them in a fire, removing them, and throwing them back in a few times. If all this is bothering you somewhat, well, know that the whole cannibalism thing probably didn't happen too often. Just on special occasions.