Torture, cannibalism Montezuma's revenge

Hernando Cortes

MEXICO - As every Mexican school child knows, theirs is a nation forged nearly 500 years ago by the conquests of a Spanish adventurer named Hernando Cortes who subdued the once proud Aztec Empire with just a few hundred men.

They also know Cortes was helped by European disease and by misplaced Aztec hospitality. The story lingers like an arrow in Mexico's national pride.

As Cortes marched towards the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, on the same site as today's Mexico City, the then Aztec King, Montezuma II, failed to put up a fight, instead welcoming him into the city.

By way of thanks, Cortes put the king in prison and the colonisation of the greatest culture in Mesoamerica by Spain and the Catholic Church had begun.

The only revenge taken by Montezuma that anyone will tell you about is, of course, of the gastrointestinal variety suffered by foreign tourists unaccustomed to Mexico's cuisine. Until now, that is.

An archaeological dig in Calpulalpan in the state of Tlaxcala, about 160km east of modern Mexico City, has surrendered evidence suggesting that at least at this place the Aztecs got their chance for shocking pay-back.

Experts say that in 1520, Aztec warriors captured a caravan of Spanish conquistadors as they travelled towards Tenochtitlan and did not treat them mercifully. Instead they caged them, sacrificed them individually over a period of months and then - most grisly of all - they ate them.

It is a discovery, told by the study of hundreds of skeletons and bones unearthed at the site since excavations began in 1990, which will demand revisions in Mexico's history books and a readjustment of our perception of Aztec culture and how foolishly compliant it really was.

"This is the first place that has so much evidence that there was resistance to the conquest," said archaeologist Enrique Martinez, director of the dig at Calpulalpan. "It shows it wasn't all submission. There was a fight."

That the Aztecs practised human sacrifice is well known. Indeed every member of Aztec society was expected to be ready to offer themselves to the Gods if asked to.

Each ceremony would begin with an unfortunate soul being lifted on to a slab of stone where priests would rip open his abdomen and remove his heart, which would then be raised in a bowl as an offering to the Gods.

Nor was human sacrifice just an occasional event. Scores were conducted on each of their 18 festival days in the year.

According to Aztec writings, as many as 84,000 people, all prisoners of regional skirmishes, were sacrificed in one go to mark the consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487.

Scholars have cast doubt on the simple feasibility of so many people being slaughtered at once, but the Aztecs used to boast to the Spanish that they did not kill their foes in war, but took them prisoner only to take their lives, and pluck out their hearts, when the fighting was over.

There is little mystery, meanwhile, over how such a proud and cultivated people succumbed so quickly.

Two factors seem to be behind Montezuma's decision to open the gates.

On the one hand, the Aztecs were reportedly dazzled and intimidated by the Spanish soldiers, their firearms and in particular their horses.

More importantly, however, they were distracted by the teachings of their Gods.

Legend had taught them that one day a "white god" would descend among them and that they should be ready at all times to welcome him. The quandary for Montezuma was this: perhaps Cortes was the returning white god and his arrival, therefore, a celestial gift.

The fall of Tenochtitlan did not happen all at once. Angry at the imprisonment of Montezuma, the Aztecs did finally lose their illusions about their visitors and mounted a rebellion in June 1520.

The Spanish fled the city. Cortes rounded up more allies from rivals of the Aztecs and the following year laid siege to the capital for three months until it eventually fell.

But it was hunger and disease that finally sealed the fate of the capital, of the empire and of Aztec society, beginning with a plague of smallpox that began in 1520, followed later in the century by two huge outbreaks of typhus.

The dig at Calpulalpan tells us, however, that the Aztecs were not alone in suffering. What happened at the site seems now to have amounted to a massacre of followers of Cortes over a period of up to six months.

As many as 550 people were killed, all belonging to the caravan bringing supplies from the sea. Among them were men, women and children.

Their capture was revenge - but not in the name of Montezuma, who had yet to be defeated, but rather of Cacamatzin, another king who ruled over the second most important Aztec city, Texcoco, who had been murdered by soldiers loyal to Cortes.

Scholars have been wary about claims that Aztecs indulged in cannibalism. But the discoveries at Calpulalpan, in those days called Zultepec, by Martinez and his team of archaeologists seem to warrant an end to such caution.

Painstaking inspection of the bones and skeletons found leave little doubt the victims' bodies were not only dismembered by the Aztecs but also served up as food.

According to Martinez, knife cuts and even teeth marks are visible on some bones, showing how human flesh had been stripped off to be cooked.

He also contends he found evidence that some pregnant women in the caravan were seized and their unborn babies stabbed while still in their bellies, also as part of a religious ritual.

That was not the end of the cruelty. After their capture, all the caravan's members were placed in cages. Aztec priests imported to Zultepec from the capital would come to the cages before dawn and select individuals for that day's sacrificial activities.

If there was any mercy shown at all, it may have been the drugging of victims with hallucinogenic mushrooms or pulque - an intoxicating substance made from fermented cactus juice - to at least soften some of the fear of what was about to befall them.

"It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected," Martinez explained.

"You can only imagine what it was like for the last ones, who were left six months before being chosen, their anguish."

- INDEPENDENT