Chapters 5–8, the Epilogue and the closing essay of Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. Read from
RAW/books/The Fifth Sun-A New History of the Aztecs.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 1 — Introduction and Chapters 1–4 · What Runs Through All of It · thread map: The Explanation You Adopt When You Lose
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which was built from vault concept pages rather than from chapters. What changed: the whole second half of the book, which that reading compressed into two or three findings about defeat and memory.
Source ingest: Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
A dead woman nobody could move. She had been lying in the palace for days when Moctezuma's daughter woke beside her sisters on the soiled mats. Nobody left in the building was strong enough to carry her out. The girl was about eleven. Her sisters' faces and arms were covered in sores, and the sores were beginning to heal, which meant they were going to live.1
Her name was Tecuichpotzin, Lordly Daughter. Two of her brothers had been killed the night the Spaniards were driven out of the city, and her father had been found strangled. When the singers buried people they called out are we born twice on this earth? and the chorus answered no.2 She understood what they meant now.
What is real. Power is made of things you can name. When the old warriors were asked, thirty years later, how a few hundred foreigners had beaten them, they did not say the foreigners were better men. They said tepoztli — metal — more often than any other word. Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies in iron. They put iron on their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron. Then they said the second thing: they wanted to know how word had travelled so fast, to so many people across the sea, about a kingdom nobody there had visited.3 They had seen the ships. They had not seen the compasses or the printing presses. They picked the right two questions anyway.
Nothing in that account gives the enemy more merit or a better mind. It gives him better equipment and a faster post, and both of those are objects in the world rather than qualities in a soul.
What makes things happen. For the first time in the book, the answers stop working. Priests promised a great victory within eight days and it did not come. In an earlier defeat, priests had promised one on the eightieth day, and the promise cost more lives than the fighting.4 The allies who had walked away came back — Spanish writers said it was because the priests had been discredited, and the indigenous account of the earlier failure supports that people did lose faith. But something else happened the same week: messengers arrived from the coast carrying powder and crossbows, which anyone spying on the camp could see.5 Two causes stand next to each other and nobody picks.
The smallpox has no cause at all in this chapter. It arrives, rises for about sixty days, takes as much as a third of a town, then recedes because there is nobody unexposed left, and starts again somewhere else.6 No god sent it. No mistake invited it. It is the one thing in the whole book that happens without anybody doing anything.
The shape of time. Everything gets counted. Cuitlahuac ruled for about eighty days before the pox killed him.7 Moctezuma spent about eighty days in irons.8 The Mexica went silent for more than twenty days while they widened the canals and walled up the passages between houses.9 The Tlaxcalan kings argued for twenty days about whether to finish the Spaniards off.10 The fighting lasted three months. These numbers are not decoration — they are how the people involved held the shape of a crisis in mind, the same way the year-count histories held a century.
Against all that counting sits the singers' flat answer. You get one life here and there is no second one. Time on earth is fleeting, and the dead do not come back.2
What a person is. Two answers were live in the same city at the same time, and they could not both be acted on.
A ruler exists to keep his people alive. Moctezuma stood on a rooftop and had a younger man with a carrying voice shout it down to the crowd: We are not their match. May the arrows and shields of war be laid down. The poor old men and women, the common people, the infants who toddle and crawl, who lie in the cradle and know nothing yet, all are suffering.11 The old histories and prayers are consistent about this. A ruler's one paramount duty was to save the lives of his people down to the youngest babies, so the altepetl could go on. A ruler who was stubborn and committed his people to a war he could not win was the lowest of the low — he lacked a chief's wisdom.12
A young warrior exists to fight. It was not their duty to be circumspect. It was their duty to die if that was what defending their honour took, and the long-term consequences were somebody else's department.13 Cuitlahuac's messengers put it to Cortés in arithmetic: they had worked out that even if twenty-five thousand of them died for every one Spaniard, they would finish first, because they were many and the Spaniards were few.14
Neither of those is cowardice and neither is recklessness. They are two jobs, and the city had both.
How people should relate. The old alternation between royal branches keeps running right through the catastrophe, and it keeps costing lives. Cuauhtemoc came from Itzcoatl's side of the family and had a Tlatelolcan mother, which brought him the big market on the north of the island and the people who used it.15 Moctezuma's surviving sons came from the other branch and had been taught by their father that open war with the strangers was futile. They were an argument as much as a faction. So Cuauhtemoc had six of them killed — one of them, some said, with his own hands — and the Tlatelolcan noblemen who held him blameless explained why: the reason these nobles were killed is that they were favouring the common people in desiring peace, and trying to see to it that shelled white maize, turkey hens, and eggs should be collected so that they could have them submit to the Spaniards.16
Then he married Tecuichpotzin. Not out of desire — she carried both royal lines in her person, and a new ruler from one branch marrying a close relative of the man he replaced was simply how the thing was done. It also settled a rumour. Out in the countryside people had started pairing her name with Cortés's, or confusing her with Malintzin, and that had to stop.17
How you know. Moctezuma built an instrument out of his own daughters. He sent Tecuichpotzin and two sisters to the newcomers as possible brides, and the point was to see what came back. If the strangers treated them as concubines rather than brides, that was bad news, but he would at least know where he stood.18 Either answer was information. At the same time he kept a younger daughter and a boy hidden, so the Spaniards did not learn they existed for years.19
The warriors observed the same way. Their description of a crossbow is not awe, it is a report. He pointed it right at the person he was going to shoot, and when it went off, it went whining, hissing, and humming. And their arrows missed nothing. Then the guns: the shot came upon people unawares, giving them no warning when it killed them. Whoever was fired at died if some dangerous part was hit: the forehead, the nape of the neck, the heart, the chest, the stomach or the abdomen.3
They acted on what they saw, too. They made spears long enough to match Spanish lances. They learned to zigzag canoes fast enough that men on the brigantines could not aim. They took a cannon, worked out that they had neither the ammunition nor the experience to use it, and sank it in the lake so nobody else could.20 When the Spaniards built a catapult and the arm threw its stone almost straight down behind the marketplace, the Mexica watched the carpenters jab their fingers in each other's faces and found it funny.21
What is worth having. Food, and being allowed to go and look for it. At the end Cuauhtemoc paddled out in a canoe with his advisers and his wife and gave himself up, and asked for one thing: that his people be let out into the countryside to find something to eat.22 By then they had eaten deer hides, insects, lizards and softened adobe. The roads had shattered bones and scattered hair on them, and the walls of the houses were slippery.23
And keeping up appearances to the last. Four weeks into the siege the warriors called across a broken bridge for the woman who was one of the people from here, and offered immediate peace if the Spaniards would go home. While the terms were being put, an old man in full view of everybody pulled provisions out of his knapsack, very slowly, and ate them.24
Read: lines 1080–1269.
A blind man listening to a village burn. In 1559 riders sent by the Franciscan prior set fire to the little village of Amozoc, and the thatch went up fast and came down onto everything underneath. The people ran out screaming and then stood and watched their belongings crackle. An old chief nearby had gone too blind to see it, but the sound and the smell told him what was happening. He was called Smoking Shield by his people and don Alonso de Castañeda by everyone else, and he had spent two years telling those villagers the Spaniards meant it about moving into the big town.25
He had helped grant them that land himself, twenty-eight years earlier.
What is real. The gods are one thing and political power is another, and the second can be taken while the first cannot. In 1524 the friars preached for hours to a room of Mexica lords, and the lords said they were not the right men to answer and would fetch the priests. In the morning the priests came, asked to hear the whole thing again from the beginning, listened to all of it a second time, and then the senior one stood up.
You have told us that we do not know the One who gives us life and being... This way of speaking is entirely new to us, and very scandalous. We are frightened by this way of speaking, because our forebears who engendered and governed us never said anything like this.26
He worked his way through the reasons to be grateful to the gods — they give rain, they make the things of the earth grow, through them we live and exist — and then he arrived where he had been going the whole time. All of us together feel that it is enough to have lost, enough that the reed mats, the thrones have been taken from us. As for our gods, we will die before giving up serving and worshipping them.27
The reed mats and the thrones mean rule. He is conceding the conquest in one clause and refusing it in the next, and the two halves are about different things.
There is also a hole in the language that shows the same split from the other side. The friars needed a word for the Devil and could not find one. They settled on tlacatecolotl, which had meant a malicious shaman who could turn into a horned owl and fly about at night casting spells on people — somebody to avoid, not a rival to God.28 There was no Lucifer-shaped gap in the world for the word to drop into.
What makes things happen. A thing becomes binding by being said aloud in public, by more than one person, and then painted. When nineteen refugee families arrived in 1531 under two chiefs and the Cuauhtinchan leaders agreed to give them empty land, the agreement was made permanent through formal public statements repeated by several parties, and then a designated man painted it — hills, water, roads, marking the boundaries.29
That year they added something. They brought along a young man who had learned the Roman letters from one of the Christians, and he wrote the statements out. Smoking Shield gave his Nahuatl name and added the Spanish one, plus a title the Spaniards had told him meant nobleman. He came out of the meeting as don Alonso de Castañeda Chimalpopoca.29
The shape of time. One of the friars, hearing the priests refuse, muttered that they would just have to wait for these old men to die, because the young ones would be better listeners.30 Then that is exactly what the order did. They picked four towns, set up missions, and worked with young people.
The same clock runs everywhere in the chapter. Noblemen were pressured to pick one wife out of several and simply did not, and the pressure could be ignored for a while; in the end only generational change brought them round to monogamy.31 The school at Tlatelolco wanted boys of ten to twelve — old enough not to need watching, young enough to shape.32 Cristóbal came home a fluent writer with beautiful handwriting who prayed to the Christian god and dressed in Spanish clothes, and walked straight into a quarrel between the families who had sent sons and the families who had not.33
What a person is. Someone whose death can be done to them correctly or incorrectly. Smoking Shield's father was invited to a neighbouring village by a messenger who spoke with extreme courtesy, went, and was strangled. His brother reacted badly to the sight and was put on the cutting stone, but not treated as a real sacrifice to the gods — when they cut his breast, they did not quickly take his heart out. They stopped in the middle. So he went into convulsions before he died.34 A child watched that and was still specifying the pause sixty years later.
Also someone who fights when they give birth. Isabel called it nomiquizpan, my moment of death, and her Nahua servants talked her through it the way they had always talked women through it: exert yourself. Here are your old mothers. Grab hold of the shield. My daughter, young one, be a brave woman. Face it. Imitate the brave goddess Cihuacoatl.35 All her life she had understood a woman in labour as a warrior with a chance to win honour, not as somebody being punished for her sex. This time there was no honour in it, because the baby was taken away as soon as it was born and carried to the house of Cortés's cousin.
And a person can be turned into an animal with a pun. A relative of Cristóbal's wrote in a margin, in Spanish: well-born noblemen who do not know their letters have no understanding. They are noble beasts. Tamed animals were called noble beasts and were owed kindness. But bestia also meant stupid, so the line reads either as calling them livestock or as calling them stupid noblemen, and it was meant both ways.36
How people should relate. Obligations get rotated so nobody carries one forever. Thirty men from Cuauhtinchan had to serve in Spanish households, and the town was free to rotate that duty among themselves however they liked, as long as able bodies turned up at the right place on the right day.37 The rest of the tribute was flat and enormous: twenty-four thousand woven blankets every four years, twenty turkeys, six thousand bushels of corn, sixteen baskets of beans, eighty of chilli, sixteen of chia, sixteen of salt.38
Smoking Shield's first act under the new order was to send the messengers back for better terms. Not to refuse — to ask exactly how many, and to fix a basket size for the corn that both sides would recognise as the right amount.39 Then he agreed, because it was a number his people could actually meet.
The Spanish side had its own arithmetic of obligation. In 1524 every Spanish man had to own a dagger, sword, lance, shield, helmet and breastplate. A man holding up to five hundred Indians also had to buy a crossbow and bolts, or a musket and enough ammunition for two hundred shots. Between five hundred and a thousand, he had to get a horse. Fail to comply and the whole grant went.40
How you know. In 1546, instead of going out at night to burn the Tepeacans off the fallow land, don Alonso sued them. He and his entourage went to Mexico City, found lodgings, spent frightening amounts of money, and turned up at the High Court from May to August. He demanded that particular witnesses appear. He organised his own. After each statement was transcribed he had the court interpreter read it back, and then he nodded.41
That is where the chapter turns. He had spent his life in a world where a decision was made permanent by being spoken publicly with ritual language and then commemorated on paper — which is what happened in the Spanish court too. But the paper was different. Pictographic writing needed priests who spent decades memorising hundreds of symbols and then took much of what they knew into the grave; these new marks encoded the voice, and young men like Cristóbal assured him anybody could learn them. If an epidemic killed every trained man in the High Court tomorrow, somebody else could still read the documents. His own words could be heard, exactly, generations later.42
What is worth having. A history, and a joke.
He went home and started a book. Not for sentiment — he could see it being used as evidence about land in a Spanish courtroom, and carried to ceremonies as a sacred object. But the real reason was further out. Once the meaning of the old glyphs had faded and the communities had been pushed into poverty deep enough to narrow everything down to survival, a great forgetting would follow. And if they could not remember their past, how were they going to make demands about their future?43
So Cristóbal picked up a quill and don Alonso started talking, and the first thing out of his mouth was an old story about a man called Huemac. Then he demanded women of them. He said to the Nonohualca, "You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide."44 Huemac meant Big Gift; he had been a foundling, supposedly a present from the gods. Some gift he turned out to be. The question hanging over the room is whether the boy's Nahuatl was still good enough to get it.
Read: lines 1270–1473.
A man on a rack who will not say a name. On the night of 7 January 1568 the guards came down to the cell under the High Court for don Martín, Malintzin's son by Cortés. They tied him naked to the rack, turned the levers, and dislocated both arms and both legs. He said he had already spoken the truth and had no more to say. They turned it again. He said it again. Then they put his head below his body, held his nose, pushed a horn into his throat and poured. Four times. Between each one he said the same sentence.45
Every other man they had brought in had confessed and given names. They were sons of Spanish noblemen, highborn, proud, used to sunlight and to contests held in public, and they had never had to imagine a world in which they were completely powerless in a dark room with men who were not afraid to kill them.46
What is real. A king is, by definition, a man who knows what is best for his people and thinks about their future. That is not an opinion in this chapter; it is what the word means, which is why it can be used as a weapon.
In a prison cell the judge Ceynos told a jailed protester named Pedro Acaçayol to pay one peso and three tomines and a basket of corn, and to stop being difficult. Acaçayol answered: It will not be possible, O king. Where will I get it from? I have only saved one half-peso and ten cacao grains. Ceynos asked whether he served only his children. Whom if not my children? Our Lord gave them to me. Ceynos said: Fine, you will be sold to the metal works. And Acaçayol said: Fine, you know what to do, for you are the king.47
He was sold to the metal works. The line was remembered anyway.
What makes things happen. In October, after the first collection came in, the four quarters of the city each sent a speaker to the open meeting. Don Martín Ezmallin of Moyotlan, a grandson of Ahuitzotl old enough to remember the days before the conquest, sobbed. He talked about the injustice of asking landless men to produce income as if by magic, and about having to ask the women to earn it by spinning. Then he turned on the men who had rioted. You elders, you men of experience, you have hurt the altepetl by confronting it and rising up. Did anyone here order this? It came from Spain.48
That last sentence is the whole fight. The inspector Valderrama had spent the year trying to relocate the cause — he told the king that the people only thought they were poor because their own nobility and their friars were eating the difference, and that ordinary Indians would be delighted to pay a head tax if it freed them of supporting their lords.49 When the city exploded anyway he was genuinely bewildered, and wrote that an animal without reason understands and recognises the good that is done for him, more than a man, even though he has a bit of reason.50 It had not occurred to him that the grandchildren of the men who ruled Mesoamerica forty years earlier might object to becoming tribute-paying plebeians inside one lifetime.
The shape of time. Forty years, which is exactly one working generation. The Mexica who were small children at the conquest or born in the decade after it were now at the peak of their adult lives. They knew the world their parents had lived in and they had been raised in a different one, and they could argue with Spaniards in terms Spaniards understood.51
The tax had its own calendar and everyone learned it fast: fourteen thousand pesos a year, three payments, the first due in July, signed into law in January and effective immediately.52
What a person is. Honour comes to a man by birth, and it also comes from courage — don Martín had both available and only the second one left. He had grown up at the Spanish court as a half-breed Indian in the eyes of everyone around him, silent and distant, and he had learned early that people could look past him. When the water went in the fourth time he had nothing to trade except the thing he had built himself.46
Standing is carried in a syllable. When the city decided its governor had not fought hard enough against the tax, they started calling don Luis Cipactzin Nanacacipac, Mushroom Alligator — up overnight, no substance. And they dropped the -tzin from his name, which they still gave to every other royal figure of the recent past.53
The category for made nobility never went away either. The Spaniards liked to appoint Indians they got on with, and the Nahuas filed them under an old word: quauhpilli, eagle lord, which had always meant a commoner or an outsider who reached power by merit rather than birth.54 The word was already there.
How people should relate. The nobility owe the commoners anxiety. When don Luis sent emissaries out to the church painters and scribes, they spoke in the old formal way and reminded the artisans what their governors were doing on their behalf. They suffer anxiety in the night. They don't eat with tranquility, worrying about how they will care for the wings, the tail.55 Wings and tail meant the ordinary people. He also married doña Magdalena Chichimecacihuatl, the youngest of Tizoc's line, and danced in front of the crowd in traditional feathers with a gold-painted drum — because a king dancing meant something, and everybody watching knew what.56
The judges spent the year trying to break that bond. They encouraged a lawsuit against the governor brought by a baker and a tailor, and the complaints filed in their names were about literacy, feast-day dancing, feathers, polygamists and taverns — not the sort of grievance a baker arrives with. Only at the very end came the one that might have been real, that the nobility squeezed the commoners.57 When those two ran off to the countryside and would not come back, the judges released a man from the sentenced rioters and ran the case again through him.58
How you know. Truth is necessarily multiple, and one person cannot hold it.
After it was over, men set about writing as full an account of the disaster as they could, and they built it the way a xiuhpohualli was performed: different perspectives given voice, one after another. They took statements from men of different neighbourhoods, which still matched the old calpolli groupings, and transcribed them carefully, because no single person could give a full account of an important moment. They filled dozens of pages with dialogue and detail and anger, and they wanted posterity to see the constraints they had been under and why they finally paid.59
The other method in the chapter produces the opposite. Every Spaniard on the rack confessed and named names, and none of the naming was true.
What is worth having. Not being forgotten, specifically and by name. Forty-six men were arrested after the riot — thirty-one Tenochca and fifteen Tlatelolca. Their heads were shaved to mark the shame, they were marched through the streets taking two hundred lashes as they went, and then sold into servitude for two or five years, with the town crier announcing it at every corner so nobody in the city could miss it. The man writing it all down made a list of their names, so that posterity should not forget what they suffered.60
The Spaniards understood the counter-move. On the Monday after, they put up eight poles by the indigenous market and announced that anyone criticising the authorities would be tied to them.61 The Sunday before that, somebody had performed the Chalca Woman's Song in the streets — the same song Flamingo Snake had sung to Axayacatl's face eighty-five years earlier. It is infuriating. It is heartrending, here on earth. Sometimes I worry and fret. I consume myself in rage.62 The authorities recognised it, which is why the poles went up.
Read: lines 1474–1667.
Straw mats pulled off beds to carry bodies. At six in the evening on 3 May 1612 the doors of the Royal Accounting Office were unlocked and twenty-nine headless black bodies were lying inside. Their families had been allowed in earlier to spread cloths over them, but the flies were still there. The people who came at the hour passed around by word of mouth — black men and women, Spanish friars, a number of Indians — found there were no biers for so many, so the families brought straw mats taken off beds and floors and walls. As they carried them towards the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy, the friars began to sing.63
Don Domingo, who worked at a church by the southern gate and whom scholars call Chimalpahin, helped with the burial and then went home and wrote it down.
What is real. Every soul is worth exactly the same, and every person alive is descended from Adam and Eve. He said it repeatedly, and he was not saying it to please anyone — he said it about mestizos who belittled him, and about the Africans, and about the Filipinos, whom he called macehualtin, the same word he used for his own people.64 His favourite book was the Confessions, Book 1 best, which ends the God who made me must be good, and all the good in me is his.65
Sitting alongside that, without visible strain, is the older thing. His grandparents' religion was built on a careful record of worlds that collapsed and were remade, none of them ever entirely forgotten. He and Tezozomoc were not living in the original world. They lived under a Fifth Sun, and since it began people had been getting through changes in it by reciting everything that came before.66
What makes things happen. He wanted a world that was mostly good with some bad men loose in it. When the chaplain Zárate had a sick man stripped, tied to a stone pillar and lashed nearly to death, then preached about him from the pulpit and had him jailed to pay the money back, Chimalpahin's verdict was: let him alone give an accounting to our lord God. And: let him not be talked about — meaning let him not be honoured or known.67
May 1612 broke that. Thirty-five people were hanged in one day on eight new gallows, denying to the end that there had been any plot at all, shouting we do not know what we are accused of, what we are being punished for.68 He did not write an argument about it. He wrote down the names and titles of every one of the fourteen Spanish royal officers who had condemned them, in a long vertical column that dominates the page, and finished: these were the councillors who administered the law upon the thirty-five blacks, so that they were hanged on this day.69
The problem had stopped being certain evil individuals. It was that a small group had the legal right, born of might, to do this to a great many people, and the disempowered had almost no recourse when they chose to strike. So, as he said about Zárate's parish, they kept it inside.70
The shape of time. He counted nine generations back to his family's arrival in the region in the 1200s.71 He kept a year-count of his own days from the age of eleven, at the level of detail that means a boy is enjoying himself: on Sunday 26 April 1592 two jaguars from the zoo were shipped to Spain, and on another day a horde of grasshoppers arrived at exactly four o'clock.72
The pageant of 1600 gave him the other measurement. Juan Cano de Moctezuma wanted a tableau, and needed somebody to play Moctezuma; the man who took it was Tezozomoc, at least sixty, grandson of Moctezuma through his mother and grandnephew through his father. He rode through the streets on a canopied litter with dancers ahead of him, and the dancers could not do the old dances as well as people had at don Luis Cipac's wedding, so they improvised, and it worked.73 But it had been eighty years since the city fell. Almost nobody was left who could remember a celebration from before 1519, or who had heard one described by a parent. Antonio Valeriano, the best of the first generation of the friars' students, was going deaf and a little senile and needed a young man beside him for everything.74
What a person is. A condition can now be inherited, and that is new. Before the Spaniards came, a slave's child was never a slave. Now it was settled that children followed the legal condition of the mother, so a woman's disaster reached her descendants forever. Chimalpahin recorded that his people got used to the idea that in tliltique, they who were black, were tied to slavery if born to an enslaved mother — living and working alongside them, sometimes resenting them, sometimes loving them, and almost never questioning the arrangement holding all of them.75 He notes that this would once have been unthinkable.
He also made up a word. The honorific -tzin in ordinary speech was less a mark of rank than of affection, so he wrote in tliltzitzin, something like the poor blacks. Strictly he should have written in tlilticatzitzin, but he had invented it himself and could do as he liked.76
The colonial machinery worked the other way. Cimarrón had meant runaway cattle and other stray farm animals before it was shortened and applied to people.77
How people should relate. By what you may wear and how many of you may live in one house. In April 1612 the criers read out that no black man was to carry a sword or wear a Spanish-style collar, no black woman was to wear a veil, and no household was to keep more than two black slaves — so the rest had to be sold. No sitting viceroy would have taken that much money off the richest men in the city; there was no viceroy, and lesser men were in charge. Guards went onto every road into the city in case the maroons came in to free their kin, and Chimalpahin could see them on the southern road from where he lived.78
What made the Spaniards frightened enough to do it was a party. On Christmas Eve 1608 dozens of black residents had crowned a king and queen with paper crowns on decorated thrones and celebrated all night, which is normal in West Africa and normal at European carnival. The investigation could not prove that anyone had ever seriously meant to start an African monarchy.79
How you know. Truth is what cannot be said falsely in front of the people who were there.
The best document Chimalpahin ever got hold of came through don Vicente, who had copied part of a book belonging to his father-in-law don Rodrigo, who had been Amaquemecan's scribe in the 1540s. In 1547 the five sections of that town were arguing about which of them should supply the ruler, and a judge was sent to settle it. So the noble elders held a great public meeting and each segment put forward its ancient statements, and don Rodrigo wrote them down. What the elders sought to present was really a true account, just like it had been, because it was impossible to lie before the others.80 The guarantee is the room.
Tezozomoc worked the same way from the other end. He held dozens of detailed Mexica genealogies in his head and in rolls of paper in boxes and baskets, he knew where the gaps were, and when he could not remember the name of somebody's third daughter or who she married, he said so instead of making something up.81 Chimalpahin, for his part, spent the last section of his great work explaining where every document had come from, because — as he put it — a scholar's readers might someday want to know, so that you the reader, you who are Christian, may not doubt or waver.82
He also thought about his reader's ignorance. When he mentioned a god called Ome Tochtli, Two Rabbit, he knew a seventeenth-century reader might not know the name even if that reader was indigenous, so he told them to think back to their school days and compared him to Bacchus.83
What is worth having. The record, and the promise attached to it. He and Tezozomoc made almost the same vow in almost the same words, both of them reaching for the old formula. It will never be forgotten. It will always be preserved. We will preserve it, we who are the younger brothers, the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great-grandchildren, we who are the hair, eyebrows, nails — the colour and the blood, we who are the descendants.84
And the small things, said plainly and without embarrassment: chicken's eggs, cow's milk, wax candles, and boxes with locks.85 Also the new music in the streets from Africa and Europe, and the colours on the silks off the Manila galleons.
He started the great history in 1608 and worked on it into the 1620s. He stopped keeping the record of current events in 1615.86
Read: lines 1668–1859.
Paying a workshop for an old-looking document. By the second half of the eighteenth century virtually nobody could write a year-count history any more, or read one. When a village needed papers with the flavour of olden times to defend its land, it hired a workshop to produce them. The results were often very beautiful and were certainly indigenous, and they bore almost no resemblance to the histories that had actually been written.87
How you know. That is the epilogue's centre, and it runs in two directions. Forged antiquity at one end; at the other, Nahuatl speakers today writing a Nahuatl-to-Nahuatl dictionary, because they do not want translation into a European language to be the only point of working with a Nahuatl text. They would rather do the thinking in the terms their own language allows.88
How people should relate. The Crown built two republics — one for creole Spaniards, one for the indigenous, each governing itself, with the second contributing labour to the first.89 What eventually damaged indigenous identity was not that system but its abolition. After independence, with everyone suddenly equal before the law, it seemed backward to keep encouraging people to speak their own language. So a native person in court no longer got a translator. A parent could no longer say she preferred to educate her child in the old way. A village could no longer say it preferred to hold its land in common and let the chiefs allocate it — and if it wanted to prove title, it could go to court, in Spanish.90
What a person is. Africans and Native Americans intermarried so extensively that the African phenotype was largely lost, and their descendants thought of themselves as largely Indian.91
What is worth having. A story everybody wants to be true. Pilgrimages to the Virgin of Guadalupe became a full phenomenon in the mid-1600s, carrying the account that she had first appeared to an Indian called Juan Diego in 1528 on the edge of the city. That the story was recent did not matter to anyone, because rich and poor alike wanted it.92 At the end of the same century Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote some of her poetry in Nahuatl. Her grammar was dreadful and she clearly never spoke it well, and her Spanish-speaking readers were delighted with it anyway.93
The shape of time. The counting never stopped. Perhaps, say the poets, we have now started life under a Sixth Sun.97
What is real, and what makes things happen. Not in the range read (lines 1860–1891). The epilogue is a survey of what became of a people and carries almost nothing on either — what it carries instead is the fate of their way of holding a record, which is where its weight sits.
Read: lines 1860–1891.
How you know. This closing essay is the book's account of its own method, and it starts by naming what everyone worked from for a century: objects out of digs, and the words of Europeans.98 Columbus wrote in his log on the first day he met Taino people in October 1492. Cortés lost little time before he started sending letters home. These sources were not nearly enough, and researchers made do because they thought they had no choice.
Two groups got closer than the rest. Epigraphers working on Mayan glyphs eventually realised that some elements were phonetic, which meant they would have to learn Mayan languages to read them. What had been taken for the highly individual spiritual expression of artists and priests turned out to be political narrative — the births, marriages and deaths of kings and queens. And scholars of the painted codices found the same kind of thing: kings, conquests, past migrations, and the clothes people wore.
What is real. The limit on both is stated plainly and it is a limit on genre rather than on quantity. Neither the tightly controlled carvings nor the codices made collaboratively with Spaniards gave vent to full, open-ended or spontaneous language.99 No meandering revealing tales. Precious few poems, jokes, innermost fears or flashes of anger. The carvings told what Mayan kings wanted posterity to know about their lineages, and the codices told what sixteenth-century Spaniards wished to believe about the people they had conquered.
Even the questions were theirs. Whom did you sacrifice, and when did you do it? the Spaniards would ask — and a chapter would duly begin this chapter tells of the feasts and blood sacrifices which they made on the first day of the first month.
What makes things happen. So the question that went unasked for four hundred years can be put in eight words. Who were they when no Spaniard was in the room asking?100
And the reason it went unasked is not scarcity, which is the essay's sharpest correction. Dozens of year-count transcriptions survived and sat in rare book collections in libraries. What was missing was people who could read them, and behind that was something less flattering: many academics seem to have thought learning Nahuatl was not worth the trouble, because we had in many ways already decided who the Aztecs were.
That was the implicit reason. The explicit one was that it would be disrespectful, even imperialistic, to work with a few surviving crystallised moments of what had once been a vibrant oral tradition.
What a person is. The essay then opens the fork that every historian of a distant people stands at, and refuses to pretend it is settled.101 Some argue that peoples foreign to us in space and time are, and must always be, unknowably remote — that we can struggle to understand them on their own terms and will still be trapped inside our own. Others argue that cultures vary immensely and we are nevertheless human in the same ways: what makes us feel loved varies, and the desire to be loved does not. What makes us afraid differs; the need for some security is constant.
How people should relate. Which of those two truths a historian emphasises is a decision about the reader rather than about the past, and the essay says so outright. Writing about the Founding Fathers, it would be worth nudging everybody to remember that they lived inside a framework utterly unlike ours.102 Writing about Moctezuma, the opposite reminder is needed — because we are accustomed to being afraid of the Aztecs, even repelled by them, rather than identifying with them.
What is worth having. Then a finding about readers that runs against the obvious, and it is the most transferable thing in the essay. Historians can either show their working — where the sources came from, how they read them, what earlier assumptions caused people to miss things — or tell the story directly and authoritatively as though the present state of knowledge had always existed.103
People have less tolerance for a book that shows no working when the topic is one they know little about. We prefer a seamless authoritative account when we already think we know the subject and can judge the author for ourselves. On a topic where we cannot judge, we need signposts about what matters and why — or we cannot follow the argument, and cannot tell whether to trust the speaker.
The shape of time. The quarrel the book takes a side on every page is about how far back the annals can be trusted.104 At first scholars were delighted by them and quoted large chunks literally, even when the events were centuries old. Then the reaction set in and the annals were discounted as history. And the irony is that the same scholars went on quoting Spanish friars and Spanish-influenced texts with abandon — which are precisely the culturally dissonant sources.
Read: lines 1892–1943.
Everything above is sourced to the chapters named. Everything below is built rather than found, and is not measured by assessgate.sh.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, argued by people the source names. In Tlaxcala, with Maxixcatzin dying of smallpox and thousands of his people with him, the four kings' councils argued for twenty days about killing the Spaniards outright. The case for it was made in the room: these strangers were a plague of hungry grasshoppers who had turned up during a sickness, and their appetite for war had already cost hundreds of young Tlaxcalan lives. Against it came two arguments and a piece of intelligence. The first argument was experience — twenty-odd horses and a few hundred men had already done extraordinary damage. The second was doña Luisa's and Malintzin's, and it was about the future rather than the present: these are the advance party, thousands more are coming.10
The road not taken was finishing the job in the twenty days when it was still possible. What makes it a real fork rather than a wish is that the losing side had the numbers and the moment, and lost on a forecast — one that turned out to be right.
[SPECULATIVE]A Stoic advisor on Moctezuma's rooftop speech. The dichotomy of control divides what is yours from what is not: your judgement, your intention and the quality of your action are yours; your body, your property, your reputation and your command are not. See The Stoic Dichotomy of Control. It is not a counsel of withdrawal — Marcus wrote it while running an empire and a frontier war.
Read that way, Moctezuma is doing the thing exactly right and is punished for it precisely where the doctrine predicts. He assesses accurately, acts on the assessment, and loses the one thing the doctrine says was never his: reputation. His own words were pulled out of context for centuries afterwards to prove he was a coward interested in saving himself. A Stoic advisor would have told him that outcome was always outside his control and that the assessment was still correct — which is true, and which would not have kept a single warrior off the roof.
A Kautilyan advisor on the same moment, and they diverge. The Arthashastra reads a bonded confederacy as the hardest thing to beat and treats the strength of an enemy's internal cohesion as the first variable to attack. See What a Mauryan Statecraft Manual Took For Granted. From that seat, Moctezuma's error is not the assessment but the venue: he made the case for surrender in public, to everybody at once, including the young men whose entire function was to refuse it. The Kautilyan move is to make the same case privately, to the men who can be brought along, and to give the young warriors an errand somewhere else while it happens.
Where the two converge is worth naming. Neither says fight. Both say the war is lost. They split entirely on whether telling the truth in public is a duty or a blunder, and that split is the whole distance between a doctrine of the self and a doctrine of the state.
[SPECULATIVE]Negotiate the unit of measure, not the number. Smoking Shield's first move under conquest was to send the messengers back to fix a basket size for the corn that both parties would recognise. The headline figure is what everybody argues about; the unit is what actually determines the burden, and it is usually settled by whoever cares enough to raise it. Applies when the obligation is recurring and denominated in something physical. Fails when the demand is in cash, which has no unit left to negotiate — which is exactly why the 1564 head tax broke Mexico City and this tribute did not break Cuauhtinchan. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
A technology that survives its custodians will beat one that doesn't, even when it is worse at the job. Glyph-writing carried more per mark and needed decades of training, so an epidemic took a generation of readers with it. Alphabetic writing carried less and could be learned in weeks by anybody. Don Alonso worked that out in a courtroom, watching his own words read back. Applies when the population holding the skill is itself at risk. Fails as a general rule — under stable conditions the expensive craft usually wins, which is why the trade-off is invisible until the crisis arrives. Decision type: timing a bold move.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, proposed and refused in the room. One protester, still out of jail, asked for a meeting with don Luis Cipac and the cabildo and put a plan to them. Two Mexica — one nobleman and one commoner — would stand up together and loudly refuse to pay. They would probably be executed. But the point would have been made in front of the Spanish authorities that the Mexica could not be pushed past a certain line, and that would give them pause and force them to readjust.94
The council heard it out, looked at each other, and laughed harshly. You propose that only two will die? When they have died, then you will die.94
What the proposal assumed is that the authorities were running a calculation about acceptable cost — that a demonstration of resolve is an input they would process. What the council knew, from forty years of watching, is that the calculation was about fear, and that a demonstration of resolve is an input that makes fear go up. The same misreading is why the two-martyr plan and the July riot both ended in the same place.
[SPECULATIVE]When an intermediary is squeezed from both ends, the squeezers will pay to have him blamed. Valderrama's entire strategy in 1564 was to route the anger of the commoners onto don Luis Cipac rather than onto the tax: sponsor a lawsuit in a baker's name, release a convicted rioter to run the case when the baker vanishes, invite a jailed painter to draw the nobility's abuses. Applies when an unpopular demand has to be collected through a local authority who did not set it. Fails when the demand's origin is common knowledge — Ezmallin's did anyone here order this? It came from Spain is the counter-move, and it works because it is true and everybody already knew it. Decision type: power consolidation.
Positioning beats planning when you cannot predict the shock. The strategic point is not to execute a brilliant sequence but to end up somewhere with more options than the other side has — see Shih and Strategic Depth. Between 1565 and 1567, with the Spaniards tearing each other apart, don Luis's people did not rebel. They ran a new census designed to show the head-count the tax was based on was too high given the recent epidemic deaths, and they widened the cabildo to let non-royal families sit on it.95 Neither is dramatic. Both left them with more places to stand. Decision type: strategic retreat.
[SPECULATIVE]A Nahua archivist's own doctrine, applied to his own decision. Writing history down is treated here as a form of resistance rather than of scholarship — see Archive as Resistance and Chimalpahin's Annals and Indigenous Historiography. On that reading, Chimalpahin stopping his record of current events in 1615 while carrying on with the ancient history until at least 1631 is the sharpest decision in the chapter, and the source offers two explanations and settles on neither: perhaps there was not time and energy for both, perhaps the present was depressing and the past was energising.86
A third reading is available from his own practice. His method needed the guarantee he named himself — that a true account is one nobody in the room can contradict. The ancient history had that: elders speaking in turn in front of each other in 1547, transcribed. The current events did not, and by 1612 he had watched the same procedure run in reverse, with thirty-five people confessing to a plot that had not happened because the alternative was more water. A man whose test for truth is the room stops writing when the room is the basement of the High Court.
An advisor on equanimity, and where it runs out. Composure under pressure is treated in this vault as an operational asset rather than a temperament — see Equanimity as Operational Advantage. Chimalpahin had it, visibly: he could watch Spaniards keep vigil all night over a rumour started by a practical joker or some roving pigs, and find it funny that they were being destroyed by their own fear and did not look like such great warriors after all.96 That detachment is what let him keep working for thirty years in a church at the city gate.
It is also what the column of fourteen names breaks. The list is the one thing he wrote that has no composure in it, and it is the only sanction he had.
[SPECULATIVE]A record that names the officials outlasts one that describes the injustice. He did not write an indictment. He wrote down who signed. Applies when you have no enforcement and a long time horizon — a name attached to an act is the cheapest durable sanction there is. Fails where the record itself can be destroyed, and fails completely where the officials are anonymous by design, which is the countermeasure. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.