Chapter 9
They had counted eighty horses and eight hundred men and ten or twelve guns, all of which they had represented on a piece of their paper.
—HERNÁN CORTÉS,
Letter to Emperor Charles V,
OCTOBER 30, 1520
WHEN CERVANTES WAS A SMALL CHILD, SPANISH PRIESTS really were trying to save people by burning their books. Shortly after the death of Aldus Manutius in 1515, while Albrecht Dürer was perfecting his craft in Nuremberg and Michelangelo had just finished the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, one of the great tragedies of history began to unfold in Mexico.
Dard Hunter, the indefatigable paper historian, once observed that what is fascinating about pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is that, like other cultures, “regardless of the isolation or distance of one continent from another, or the remote origins of peoples, the pattern of man’s progress developed everywhere in the same way; the steps involved in the growth of civilization were almost identical.”
Before the Europeans arrived in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, the Mesoamericans already had written languages and paper and were recording their own history. Many aspects of their civilization were as advanced as the Europeans’ except for two decisive things: the Europeans could use gunpowder, an invention they had imported from China; and they could ride horses, a skill they had learned from the people of Central Asia, who had domesticated horses long before the rest of the world.
There is some debate over whether the Mesoamericans made true paper. If they did, they were the only civilization to invent paper besides China. The reason for the uncertainty stems from the fact that the Mesoamerican civilization was so thoroughly destroyed by the Spanish that we are still struggling to learn about it. One thing we do know: They had libraries filled with books, of which only three Mayan codices and fifteen Aztec works have survived.
Until 1986 it had been believed that the first written language of the Americas was Mayan, from a people who lived in Guatemala and southern Mexico. But a monument uncovered that year showed that an early Olmec people also had a written language. In fact the Olmecs, who lived mostly in the lowlands of southwest Mexico, in today’s states of Tabasco and Vera Cruz, were the originators of many things that we once attributed to the Mayans and Aztecs. In 2006, an entire Olmec city was unearthed not far from Mexico City, and it is now thought that several writing systems were in use before the Mayans’, which is why the Mayan system is so complicated.
The earlier languages of the American peoples were largely written on stone, but the later Aztec language was mostly written on animal skin, bark, or paper. The earlier languages were all written before 900 CE, whereas Aztec writing did not begin until 1100 CE. Early Mayan script was written on stone or pottery from 600 BCE into the first century CE, but after that paper codices were used.
The fact that the Mayans were already writing on paper made from mulberry bark early in the Christian era is one piece of evidence used to support the theory that the American peoples originally came from Asia, over a Siberian land bridge that is now gone. There are other remarkable similarities between the Asian and the Mesoamerican use of paper as well. These include the utilization of folded paper fans, the burning of paper for religious ritual, and the decorating of temples with paper.
Writing in Mesoamerica reached its full development in what is called the classical Mayan period, from 250 CE to 900 CE. Mayan writing used several different types of characters. Some were a kind of phonetic pun—a picture of one thing that happened to sound like another. Some characters were purely phonetic and had to be placed together to make a word. Others were purely pictographic—a representational drawing of something. About 800 characters from Mayan have been translated. Their entire spoken language could be written in the glyphs.
The Mayans, like the Europeans of the same period, wrote through scribes. Mayan scribes belonged to a royal caste and, like the scribes of ancient Egypt, were considered leading figures in the society. Scribes could choose between using phonetic symbols or pictographs, which left much room for personal flair.
Very knowledgeable about astronomy, the Mayans developed sophisticated calendar systems. They were also far more advanced in mathematics than Europeans at that time. They grasped the concept of zero and wrote their entire number system with just three characters—a shell meant zero, a dot meant one, and a bar meant five. From both Spanish and Mayan accounts we know that Mayan libraries were full of thousands of codices about astronomy, history, genealogy, and religious rituals, written on deerskin or tree bark. All were destroyed by the Spanish except for the three mentioned above, which came from a later Mayan period and were about astronomy and ritual.
The material that the Mayans used for writing, starting in the fifth century, came from the inner bark of the wild fig tree, cut and stretched thin. Whitish in color, and called huun, it was like papyrus, but more durable. It was not made of randomly woven fibers; in other words, it was not true paper. The Mayan works were written in codex form, the same format used by the Romans, but their and later the Aztecs’ codices differed from the Romans’ in that their pages were bound accordion-style so that they could be completely opened into one long strip.
One of the surviving Mayan codices, the two-volume Codex Troano-Cortés, was found in two parts in Spain in 1860; one part was discovered in Extremadura, the native region of Conquistador Hernán Cortés and many of his men, so it is probable that one of them brought it back to Spain. Another Mayan codex, the Codex Dresdensis, or Dresden Codex, dates from the eleventh or twelfth century, but is thought to be a copy of a codex written three or four centuries earlier. It was nearly lost to water damage during the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II, but was dried and saved. The third codex, the Codex Peresianus, is currently housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where it was found in 1859 in a basket of discarded papers.
When the Mayan civilization waned, the Toltecs rose to power. Great architects and builders of cities, they created elaborate urban centers in Teotihuacan, Tula, and Cholula. Each of these urban cultures had its own writing and made its own paper. The Toltec word for “book” was amoxtli, and in the year 660 the Toltecs of Tula, under the astrologer Huematzin, wrote the Teoamoxtli—the Divine Book—which claimed to be “a History of Heaven and Earth,” with details on the constellations, a plan for the division of time, and records of the historic migrations of people. But like the Mayan civilization, the Toltec civilization declined; it was replaced by the Aztec.
All of these rising and falling civilizations had certain things in common—they all wrote, they all made paper, and they all improved their writing and papermaking techniques as time went by. In addition, they were all knowledgeable about astronomy and fascinated by time; they all produced calendars and histories.
WHEN THE SPANISH arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs were the region’s greatest power, but they had been dominant for less than two hundred years. By the Aztecs’ own account, they had come down from a northern location to consolidate power in central Mexico in 1320 CE. They began building their capital, Tenochtitlán, on a muddy island in the middle of a lake starting in 1325. They settled on several other islands as well, created produce gardens on the lake, and constructed four causeways connecting the islands to the mainland. By the time the Spanish arrived in 1519, marching in on one of the causeways, Tenochtitlán was probably the largest city any of the conquistadors had ever seen. Its population was 200,000. The population of Madrid and Seville at the time was only 150,000 each. Tenochtitlán boasted not only works of ingenious architecture but also a highly developed legal code and exceptionally capable administrators. Runners were spaced every five miles throughout the Aztec empire to relay messages written on slips of paper.
Historians argue over what percentage of Aztecs could actually read and—certainly an even lower percentage—write. They did, however, have a highly evolved writing system, perhaps adopted from the Mayan, though it was completely different, with a great deal more phoneticism and even more pictographs. For example, the character used for amatl, the Aztec word for “paper,” was a simple line drawing of a roll of paper tied around the middle with rope. Spanish missionaries tried to use the phonetic characters of the Aztecs to teach them Christianity in Latin. Not surprisingly, the endeavor was not entirely successful. Aztec scribes wrote in color using mineral pigments—red, blue, green, yellow, brown, orange, and purple—and always outlined their figures in black. This made their manuscripts appealing and fanciful to look at, and gave scribes creative choices.
Working directly with the priests, the Aztec scribes were among the most powerful people in their society. They kept track of all legal and commercial activities, including the tributes paid to the Aztecs by those they had conquered, the foundation of their state revenue; these tributes did not go entirely to the Aztec king but were distributed to various community representatives within the nation. The scribes also wrote down Aztec history, rituals, and holiday traditions. Their most important task was to follow the calendar and make sure that the end of each cycle was properly observed, in order to avoid the end of the world. Fear of such an apocalypse was very real.
ACCORDING TO ONE surviving Aztec book, the Codex Mendoza, 480,000 sheets of paper were brought in tribute to Tenochtitlán every year. The Codex Mendoza was named for the viceroy of New Spain, and it is not clear whether he ordered it, commissioned it, or just received it. It was written in 1535, fourteen years after the Spanish Conquest, and it is apparent that the economic rules of colonialism were firmly in place by then because rather than using local paper, the Aztecs wrote the work on imported Spanish paper. A record of Aztec history from the founding of Tenochtitlán to the Spanish Conquest, with tales of Aztec victories and tributes included, it was intended for the king of Spain. But the ship carrying it was seized at sea by the French, to somehow land, in 1659, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where it lay unnoticed until scholars discovered it in the nineteenth century.
In the Codex Mendoza is an illustration of a building collapsing in flames, and next to it is a scroll tied with rope. Under the list of tributes, there is another scroll tied with rope, and next to it, a pouch with three tassels. According to J. J. Valentini, a scholar of Aztec civilization who presented his findings to the American Antiquarian Society in 1880—findings that have gained wide acceptance ever since—what all this means is that the town of Yzamatitlan, “Paper City” in Aztec, was conquered by the Aztecs and forced to pay tribute to Tenochtitlán to the tune of 24,000 reams of paper every year. A pouch is the symbol for 8,000, and the three tassels indicate a multiplier of three. This is an enormous amount of paper, and the tribute shows that, on the one hand, paper was a highly valued commodity, and on the other, it was being abundantly produced.
Aztec arithmetic was based on the number 20, a number that they thought had been prescribed by the gods. Why else would humans all have exactly twenty digits? Numbers less than 20 were indicated by a dot or small circle. A flag represented 20; an upright feather meant 400; and a pouch was 8,000.
The Aztecs used paper for writing, for decorating altars and temples, and for religious rituals. Masks worn during religious dances were made of paper. Paper was also burned as a sacrifice, and the priests adorned themselves with paper for ceremonies. Some deities were symbolized by elaborate paper crowns. And for certain human sacrifices, the victims, who were to be burned alive, wore strips of paperlike hair.
The Franciscan monk Bernardino de Ribeira, usually called Father Sahagún because he was born in Sahagún, Spain, lived for most of the sixteenth century in Mexico, where he chronicled the traditions and customs of the Aztecs. His most famous book, General History of the Things of New Spain, has earned him the title “first American ethnographer.” Interestingly, at a time when modern bound books were being printed and published widely in Europe, Father Sahagún wrote his history in a codex edition of twelve books with a total of 2,400 pages. The work was bilingual, written in both Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and Spanish, with 2,500 illustrations by Aztec artists—a masterwork of book publishing for its day.
In his book, Sahagún describes many ritualistic uses of paper. In one chapter entitled “The Gods which Ancient Mexicans Adored,” he discusses the god of merchants, Yacatecuhtli, whom Aztec merchant guilds honored with offerings of paper, often covering his statue entirely with it. Clearly paper was thought of as an important commercial commodity.
BUT THERE IS a problem with this narrative. Much of this Aztec paper, like the Mayan paper before it, was not really paper, the random weaving of cellulose fibers, but the inner bark of the wild fig tree that had been beaten and stretched and dried like its forerunner, tapa.
Tapa was made in South America for almost as long as there is evidence of human inhabitants in the region. Tapa from 2400 BCE has been found in Peru, along with stone tapa beaters that are almost 10,000 years old. To make tapa, the outer bark of the fig tree was scraped off and beaten with mallets until the inner bark was ready to come free. The inner bark was then peeled off in one piece, washed in a stream to remove its latex content, hung up, and carefully stretched. After it was dry, it was stretched a little more.
The Aztecs’ variation on tapa, amate, was named after the Aztec word for the fig tree, which was also the Aztec word for writing material. Very similar to tapa, though often thinner and finer, it was made by cooking the fig tree’s inner bark in a lye powder made from soaking corn. It is highly skilled work, but was mastered by many in pre-Columbian Mexico. Amate made for excellent writing material—but it was not paper.
Some historians are convinced that the Aztecs never used true paper, just amate. They argue that the Europeans mistook amate for paper, which is quite possible, as amate looks very much like paper, though without the telltale screen marks that are made by a mold. This argument rests on the fact that no pre-European paper has been found in Mexico. However, most of the amate from that era has not survived either.
The central highlands of Mexico have a humid climate, with a rainy season, and neither paper nor amate age well there. Furthermore, the Aztecs tried to hide or burn all their ritual papers, to keep them out of the hands of the Spanish, who themselves were burning all the Aztec books they could find, claiming them to be heretical. Of the few remaining books found, none seem to be written on true paper. But to conclude from this that the Aztecs did not make paper would be like examining thirteenth-century European culture with nothing more to work with than a few surviving manuscripts and concluding that the Europeans used only parchment.
A close examination of the Mayan Dresden Codex, generally agreed to be written on huun, the Mayan variation of amate, reveals the presence of agave fibers. This is significant because there are numerous reports that the Aztecs made paper from agave, whose fibers contain cellulose, as well as many other things, such as a fermented juice called pulque, a distilled alcohol known today as tequila; roof thatching; food; clothing; and rope.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an adventurer who served with Cortés in Mexico and later became the chief chronicler of the Spanish Conquest, asserted that true paper was made from agave. Francisco López de Gómara, a Spanish historian who never went to the Americas but interviewed Cortés and other returning conquistadores, told a similar story, although Díaz del Castillo insisted that López de Gómara was an inaccurate historian. Toribio de Benavente, a Franciscan monk and one of the original twelve missionaries sent in 1524 to convert the “Indians” also reported that they made paper from agave. According to these Europeans’ reports, agave paper was coarse and bumpy, probably ill-suited for writing; indeed, it may have been reserved for other uses. There are records of paper fans made from agave.
ON APRIL 22, 1519, Hernán Cortés, a soldier on his first command, with an army of a few hundred men, most of whom had never seen combat, sailed from Cuba and landed on the Caribbean coast of Mexico in what is now the state of Vera Cruz. Cortés had largely financed the operation himself, and had no idea what he would find or even who his enemy might be. But on Easter Sunday, he met with Totonac, the chief of a people called the Tentlil, who told him that somewhere in the center of the country was a great king called Montecuçoma, ruler of all the lands even to the Vera Cruz coast.
Instantly, Cortés became singularly focused on overthrowing this Montecuçoma, better known to most North Americans as Montezuma. Mounted on horseback, Cortés’s forces rode into the central highlands looking for the king and a place called Tenochtitlán. Apparently, Cortés had great powers of persuasion. He talked to local people and formed alliances with groups whom the Aztecs had fought against but failed to conquer. Chief among them were the Tlaxcalteca, a Nahuatl-speaking group that Cortés called the Tascalteca; later, during Cortes’s siege of Tenochtitlán, the Tlaxcalteca provided him with “more than 25,000 warriors,” he wrote. Along the way, Cortés had his men shoot muskets to impress the Aztecs with his great firepower. But when the actual siege began, the Spaniards’ chief weapon was the crossbow, an old-fashioned weapon then being quickly replaced in Europe with firearms.
In one town near present-day Tabasco, Cortés was offered slaves, among them a woman named Malinche. An unusual woman, especially for a slave, she was well educated and spoke Nahuatl and several dialects of Mayan. She came from an aristocratic background and it is not clear how she become a slave. Since Cortés’s only translator spoke Mayan but not Nahuatl, Malinche became his translator’s translator and an invaluable source of information. She also became Cortes’s mistress. Malinche is remembered today as a villain of Mexican history, and her name became the word malinchiste, which means “traitor” or “sellout”—which is perhaps unfair.
Meanwhile, in the great city, even before word arrived of the Spanish landing, Montezuma had a vision of being destroyed by strange men who rode on the backs of deer. A mystic for whom premonitions and visions were very important, the king had seen other bad omens—of weather phenomena and other disasters—in his dreams.
On or about November 8, Cortés and his men marched down the causeway to Tenochtitlán. He wrote, “I left the camp with fifteen or twenty horsemen and three hundred Spaniards and all our Indian allies of whom there was an infinite number.” By November 14, they had taken Tenochtitlán. Montezuma had “voluntarily” donated his kingdom to the crown of Castile. This brief adventure, known as the Conquest of Mexico, is reenacted in masked dances in small villages in central Mexico even today. By legend, Cortés had blue eyes; the dancer who plays him wears the mask of the blue-eyed devil.
After taking Tenochtitlán, Cortés wrote five letters to King Carlos, also known as Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In them, Cortés expressed admiration for the Aztecs’ administrative skills and their skill in papermaking. He understood the correlation between papermaking and a developed civilization. Cortés also wrote to the king about the Aztecs’ system of collecting tributes, saying, “They kept an account of what each one was obliged to give in characters and drawings on paper, which they make, which is their writing.”
Cortés was impressed that Montezuma had been informed of the Spaniards’ arrival via a message written on paper stating how many men, weapons, and horses they had. He was even more impressed that Montezuma was able to rule a large empire through orders written on paper and delivered back and forth by an elaborate system of messengers.
THE LAST AREA to fall to the Christians during the Reconquista was the south of Spain, the most Arab part, and it was this region that became the center for activities in the Americas. Its ports were the ports of New Spain; the conquistadors hailed from the southern provinces of Extremadura or Andalusia. Later, the architecture of Mexico and Spanish America would be built in an Andalusian style, which is to say Moorish, with patterned tiles and arched doorways.
Architecture aside, the Spanish were determined that their newly claimed land was to be entirely Christian. The Inquisition, originally started not in Spain but in France by Pope Gregory IX in 1231, came to Mexico. Its purpose was to stop all heresy, any deviation from traditional Catholic practice, by rooting it out and punishing the heretics. But the Inquisition really had little effect in Spain until the end of the Reconquista, when King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille, a Catholic fanatic, had to figure out how to unite the various kingdoms now under their control. Their answer: the ruthless enforcement of a common Catholic faith. They became determined to root out all Jews and Muslims who had pretended to convert rather than leave but were secretly keeping their old practices; the Spanish called these Jews Marranos and the Muslims, Moriscos.
In 1478, while there were still pockets of Spain under Muslim control, Pope Sixtus IV had given Isabella the right to establish a Spanish Inquisition that could operate independently. So in Spain the Inquisition was run by the Spanish Crown; even the Inquisitor General was appointed by the Crown, though he had to be confirmed by the pope. The Spanish Inquisition conducted lengthy investigations of anyone who wanted to go to the New World, in order to make sure that no “impure blood”—that is, Jews or Muslims—settled there.
But New Spain also had its own heretics, the Mesoamericans, and so the main task of the Mexican Inquisition was to extinguish all native practices. The first clergy, who arrived with Cortés, had Inquisitional powers, and in 1522, the Mexican Inquisition conducted its first trial, of an Indian accused of concubinage. Unfortunately, the records of this trial have vanished, but it was clear from that early date that the Indians were to be the Jews and Muslims of Mexico. They had to abandon all of their practices or face torture and death.
From 1536 to 1542, the Inquisitor of Mexico was Juan de Zumárraga, a Basque Franciscan. Zumárraga is a difficult figure to understand. He considered himself a friend of the Indians and bitterly denounced their mistreatment by the Spanish authorities. He also encouraged crafts and agriculture and tried to bring flaxseed from Spain to Mexico to start a linen industry. Mulberry trees and silkworms were imported under his direction and he even brought over some Moriscos, impure blood and all, to teach Indians how to make silk. Still more surprising, given that he had burned Jews at the stake, he also brought over a converted Jew to start the first Mexican press. It seems that he had the establishment of a paper industry in mind, but it never came to fruition, perhaps because he wasn’t in Mexico long enough.
Zumárraga was also determined to root out and end all heresy, which is to say, all practice of the Aztec religion. To be fair, some of these practices were horrifying—human sacrifice especially. Motolinía, one of the first Spanish clergy to arrive in Mexico, described in appalling detail how huge numbers of prisoners of war, sometimes fifty or more, were given up to the gods, their blood and various body parts—ears, lips, arms, hearts—ripped off while they were still alive as offerings.
Zumárraga sought out Aztec idols and other religious objects and destroyed them. In reaction, Motolinía wrote in his book Historia de Los Indios de la Nueva España how the Indians would hide their idols “at the foot of the crosses or beneath the altar steps, pretending they were venerating the cross whereas they were actually adoring the demon.” Zumárraga sent his men throughout the countryside in search of Aztec books and religious objects. Using bribery and torture, they located all of the best collections and destroyed them, including almost every book. This particular act of barbarism was not without precedent. At almost the same time, in 1526, the Ottomans took Budapest and, wishing to annihilate the conquered culture, burned down their science library.
Zumárraga was eventually removed from office for excessive cruelty after he burned an Aztec leader at the stake, but his book-burning campaign was one of the most successful in history. Generally, cultures have recovered from book burning, but in the case of the Aztecs, much of their culture remains lost. Their language lives on in rural Mexico, as do some religious practices, passed on from generation to generation, but much of their learning is gone. A culture that had been literate at a time when Europe had neither writing nor books has become largely an oral culture dependent on memory.
The Mayans suffered the same fate as the Aztecs; their entire library, except the three overlooked codices sent abroad, was burned by a Spanish missionary, Diego de Landa Calderón, in 1549. A Franciscan from Spain sent to the Yucatan to convert the local Mayan population, Calderón wrote his own book on Mayan culture and traditions years after destroying all their books.
THE SPANISH PRINTED the first books in Mexico, on imported Spanish paper, at a time when printing was still a fairly new craft in Europe. They wanted to provide the indigenous people with small-format primers, catechisms, and books of grammar in order to teach them how to be good Christians. To help in this endeavor, the Spanish church contracted Juan Cromberger, a leading printer from Seville, himself the son of a German printer, who in turn enlisted Italian printer Giovanni Paoli to establish a press in Mexico. Paoli and his wife were to labor without salary, with only the barest of living expenses and only two helpers, and produce three thousand sheets of paper daily. After ten years, they were to return to Spain, where they would receive one-fifth of whatever profits their enterprise had generated.
But then a stroke of good luck befell the Paolis. After only a year, Cromberger died. They Hispanicized their name to the Pablos, inherited the equipment Cromberger had lent them, and turned their operation into a profitable business, acquiring land and living well. In 1550 they hired a well-regarded punch cutter, Antonio de Espinosa, and a type founder, Diego de Montoya. The Pablos included woodcut illustrations in their books and, starting in 1554, italic type. In 1559 Espinosa broke away and started his own print shop.
Tenochtitlán became Mexico City. The Europeans who lived there intermarried with the local people, and they and their children, a new mestizo population of mixed blood, wanted European paper. French and Spanish papermakers became interested in selling to the market in New Spain and, typical of a colonial economy, rags from New Spain were shipped to Spain to make paper to be sold back in the Americas. Paper was needed in Mexico for accounting, books, and government documents.
The Mexican printers all used imported Spanish paper—that was the rule of colonialism. But finally the Spanish recognized that the system was not practical and built their first paper mill in Mexico in 1575. Papermakers Hernán Sánchez de Muñón and Juan Cornejo were granted a twenty-year exclusive contract to make paper in the village of Culhuácan just south of Mexico City. Printing caught on in the Spanish colonies much faster than did papermaking. The second printing press in the New World was built in Lima, Peru, in 1584, and it used paper imported from Spain.
TODAY, AMATE IS still made in Mexico by the Otomi people, who live in the mountains in the central highlands of the Puebla state. The village of San Pablito is famous for its “paper making.” But the Otomi did not move to San Pablito and start their industry until after the Spanish Conquest, which had destroyed many amate operations elsewhere. Before the Spanish Conquest, forty-two Aztec villages produced amate. Now, none of those villages continue that tradition.
In San Pablito, the villagers cannot make enough amate to satisfy a booming market, mostly composed of tourists and artists. The amate is made by women and children, because there, as in many Mexican villages, many of the men have left for better-paying work in Mexican or American cities. But the biggest problem the villagers face in keeping up with the demand for amate is the lack of trees. The fig and mulberry species there are in danger of extinction.
To make amate, Otomi women pound the bark against boards, dry it in the sun, and peel off its inner layer. The stones they use for pounding are identical to the ones archaeologists have found in Aztec digs. The Otomi amate has the feel of true paper. It is vanilla-colored, but is highly textured and so not well-suited for writing or printing. Many Otomi and other indigenous people in the area use amate primarily for a feast that is held to honor the spirit of Montezuma, believed to be living in the mountains. The people present the spirit with dolls and other objects made from amate because they believe that Montezuma will return one day to resume his rule. If so, he will want his paper tribute.