16 Incas and Aztecs

The people of medieval Europe had some idea that there were other magnificent cultures and powerful rulers apart from their own—the sultans and caliphs of the Muslim world, the Great Khan of the steppes, the emperor of far Cathay. But they had no idea that west across the Atlantic, beyond the setting sun, there lay a vast continent where there flourished civilizations of unimagined wealth and brilliance.

The irony is that, when they did come across these civilizations—those of the Incas and the Aztecs—a handful of European adventurers succeeded, in just a few short years, in bringing about their utter destruction.

The first humans reached the North American continent from eastern Asia some time during the last Ice Age, when the two continents were linked by a land bridge. This migration may have been made as early as 25,000 years ago, and certainly no later than 8000BC, when rising sea levels drowned the land bridge across the Bering Strait. Thereafter, human settlement spread rapidly right down the Americas. The beginning of agriculture can be traced back to the 7th millennium BC in the Andean region of South America, spreading from there to other parts of the continents.

Early civilizations As agricultural surplus enabled societies to become more complex, the first great ceremonial centers appeared in both Mesoamerica and the Andes. Some of the most striking monuments—including plazas, pyramids and colossal stone heads—were those built from around 1200 BC on the Caribbean coast of Mesoamerica by the Olmec people. Ceremonial centers grew into temple-cities laid out geometrically on astronomical principles, such as Tiahuanaco in the Andes and Teotihuacán in the Mexico valley. By the 1st millennium AD Teotihuacán had a population of some 200,000, far larger than any European city of the time, apart from Rome before its fall. But by the end of the millennium Teotihuacán, along with the great city-states of the Maya people in the Yucatán peninsula, had been abandoned—for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Many of the enduring characteristics of Mesoamerican cultures had their origins in these early societies. At the heart of their cities and ceremonial centers stood lofty stepped temple-pyramids. There was also a great interest in astronomy and the calendar, and the Maya in particular developed sophisticated mathematical systems, such as place-value notation for numbers, as well as a form of writing that was still in use in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. Finally, there was the practice of sacrificing humans in order to propitiate the blood-hungry gods and to ensure the cycle of the seasons. “When they sacrifice a wretched Indian,” wrote a European eyewitness in the 16th century, “they saw open the chest with stone knives and hasten to tear out the palpitating heart and blood …” Human sacrifice was also a characteristic of some of the Andean cultures.

The Nazca lines

The Nazca Desert of Peru is littered with hundreds of giant linear figures. Some are simple geometrical shapes while others depict animals such as monkeys, killer whales, lizards and hummingbirds. These mysterious figures were created over a period of nearly 1,000 years, from around 200 BC to AD 700, and were made by removing dark stones from the surface of the desert to reveal the paler ground beneath. They are so vast that their outlines can only be made out from the air, so those who made them could never have seen them in their entirety. However, the method of making such giant figures is not complex, and it is likely that they were used for various shamanistic rituals, during which worshippers would process along the lines before making offerings to the gods.

The last empires When the first Europeans arrived on the American mainland in the early 16th century, two great empires held sway over large areas of territory. Much of Mesoamerica was under the control of the Aztecs, while the Andean region, from Ecuador to northern Chile, was ruled by the Incas of Peru. The Aztecs were the last of a number of warlike states to dominate Mesoamerica in the Pre-Columbian era, and from their magnificent capital Tenochtitlán (on the site of present-day Mexico City) they extorted tribute and human sacrificial victims on a massive scale from neighboring peoples.

The Inca state appears to have been less bloodthirsty (although human sacrifice was not unknown) and more unified. The task of central government was made easier by a network of well-built roads, which extended for thousands of miles across the length and breadth of the empire. However, nowhere in the Americas was the wheel in use; transport depended on foot or—in the Andes—on the principal beast of burden, the llama. As an aid to communication the Incas had a system of knotted strings called quipu, used for accounts and censuses, although, unlike the Maya script, it does not appear to have developed into a more flexible writing system.

“Many lords walked before the great Moctezuma, sweeping the ground where he would tread and spreading cloths on it, so that he should not tread on the earth.”

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, 1560s, describing the progress of the Aztec emperor

The Spanish conquest When the Spanish conquistadores first encountered these civilizations, they were astonished by their magnificence, but also prepared to exploit their own technological superiority. Not only did the indigenous people lack the wheel, their tools and weapons were still made of stone. So when confronted with Spanish soldiers with steel helmets and breastplates, steel swords, firearms and horses, they were quite overwhelmed.

“Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.”

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador who accompanied Cortés, describes the Spaniards’ reaction to the wonders of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán

In Mexico, the conquistador Hernán Cortés found that the neighbors of the Aztecs were only too happy to join the Spaniards in attacking their rulers, whose insatiable demands for human sacrifices they had long resented. In just over a year, in 1519–20, Cortés and a few hundred Spanish troops had defeated the might of the Aztecs, whose emperor Moctezuma believed Cortés to be a manifestation of the god Quetzalcoatl (“the Feathered Serpent”), and so offered little resistance.

It was a similar story in Peru, where Francisco Pizarro, another ruthless Spanish adventurer in search of gold and power, led fewer than 200 men against the Incas. In 1532 he lured the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, into a trap, massacred his escort of thousands of men, and took the emperor captive. Atahualpa offered Pizarro a roomful of gold in return for his release, but when he got the gold Pizarro went back on his word and ordered that Atahualpa be burned at the stake. When, faced with death, the emperor converted to Christianity, Pizarro relented and had him garroted instead. The conquest of Peru was completed in 1535 with the capture of Cuzco, the Inca capital. Both here and in Mexico, the new colonial power set about enslaving and forcibly converting its subjects, and destroying all residues of their cultures.

the condensed idea

Millennia-old civilizations were wiped out in just a few years