A Short History of the Aztec Empire

Victories in arms and the mass death of enemies by disease were read as clearly affirming the justice of the conquistadore ”cause.” And if external events failed to inspire, priests were ready to say Mass, preach the rectitude of crusade against heathens, and console or intimidate doubters. One unusually honest conquistador, Bernal Dı´as del Castillo, who accompanied Corte´s to plunder Aztec temples, those sites of awful carnage in the midst of glorious urban vistas and sophisticated building and craftsmanship, put it succinctly: ”We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich.” On the other hand, Ross Hassig-the leading contemporary military historian of the Aztec Empire-argues forcefully and convincingly that the Aztecs ”did not surrender, did not relinquish their beliefs, and were not paralyzed, but rather fought to the end-bitterly, effectively, and valiantly-with no sign of the various forms of ideological or psychological collapse to which their defeat is often attributed.”

It is possible that over 1 million Mesoamericans died during the course of the Spanish conquest, 1519-1521, most from disease but several tens of thousands in battle. When pandemics also wiped out Mesoamericans like the Tlaxcalans who were allied with the conquistadores, the Spaniards were left to collect the spoils of victory won by the Indian rebellion. They quickly enslaved Aztec and Tlaxcalan alike, driving the pathetic and demoralized remnants of Indian city-states into the encomienda system the ”conquerors” set up on the ashes of Mesoamerican civilization in Mexico. This was possible because the collapse of the Aztecs was sudden, and left the other city-states still divided by old hostilities and deeply distrustful. Over the next three years the Spanish played off one Indian power against another, conquering them severally then altogether. The original population of Mexico and Central America then underwent a catastrophic decline from exposure to a Pandora’s Box of epidemic diseases of European and African origin, to which Mesoamericans had no native resistance.

Within 50 years of the conquest the Indian population fell by 90 percent, from 25-30 million to just 2-3 million. By 1620 there were only 1.2 million Mesoamericans left in Mexico, at which point demographic decline stopped, to slowly reverse during the 17th century as natural resistance built. Given the horrors of the Aztec state it might be argued that the tragedy of the conquest was not their political downfall, but the unintentional killing of 95 percent of the Mesoamerican population by pandemics that would have arrived by ship from Europe and Africa even if Corte´s and the conquistadores had borne gifts and good will, not swords and muskets.