Why the Aztecs lost the war with the Spanish
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They couldn't win those wars. They said, "He will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." I recognize the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War, hunger, terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing for me.

I'm Venetia Rainey and this is Battlelines. Today we've got another Christmas holiday special for you. We're going to be looking at the Aztecs, how they dealt with internal conflicts, why they lost the war with the Spanish and how history has misremembered them.

Now, if you think that sounds a bit left field for this news-focused conflict and security podcast, you're right. And that's exactly the point. This is another idea that came from our much-missed late colleague and founder of this show, David Knowles. He was a font of unusual and creative ideas. And shortly before he died in September, he was reading a book called Fifth Son, A New History of the Aztecs by author and academic Camilla Townsend.

He had raved about it, and in our last team meeting together, he pitched the idea of doing an episode based on it. Pains me now to say that at the time I dismissed it. Too historical and far removed from the world we cover on this podcast, I said. But I've since read the book, and I can see why he was so excited about it. So, this episode is in memory of David.

and to help us travel back 500 years and get into the world of the Aztecs, I'm thrilled to be joined by that book's author, Camilla Townsend. Camilla, welcome to Battlelines. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Now, the book opens with the founding story of the Aztecs. It's the story of Shield Flower, or Chimal Xochitl, a woman who's been captured and caged by a local chief to punish her father for trying to establish his own kingdom. She's naked, she's humiliated, and she asks to be sacrificed to the gods rather than endure life as a slave.

As she burns to death, she screams at her enemies, "People of Culhwacan, I go to where my God lives. My people's descendants will all become great warriors. You will see." Camilla, there's so much to unpack in this one story. The pride, the identity as people who fight and survive, this idea of being fated to be great.

What does it tell us about the Mexica people, better known today as the Aztecs? Right. Well, we have this impression of the Aztecs as people who ate hearts for breakfast, you know, somehow were worse than all other human beings. But in fact, when I read their writings in their own languages,

they come across very much like other people do. And that doesn't mean that they're not violent. I don't think I have to tell the listeners of your podcast that human beings do have tendencies towards violence and that we have to learn how to check and control those tendencies. But they behave very much like other human beings. And in fact, the Aztecs who later became so powerful, they were the ones who were ruling Central Mexico when Hernando Cortes arrived.

You are not wrong if that is who you thought they were. They saw themselves as underdogs because they remembered that about 150 years earlier they had been very literally underdogs. They were the latest arrivals in a group or several waves of arrivals of migrants from the north, from what is today the United States.

And they saw themselves as they had been, that is, people without land, people without a home who had to beg, borrow and steal, kind of carve out a place for themselves in the Central Valley of Mexico. And they had been in the midst of doing that when they lost

badly lost a war, which caused the daughter of the king to end up as a human sacrifice victim, as you read aloud. And they remember that very tragically, but they also remembered that in the stories that they told later as sort of proof that they were brave. If even this poor girl, this poor, humiliated, caged girl had been so strong, then surely they could be strong too and do what they needed to do to survive so that there would be a next generation.

They didn't see themselves as people who wanted to destroy the world. They saw themselves as people who were doing their best to survive, as so many people do. As you mentioned, they weren't born ruling this part of Mesoamerica. They were forced to set up in an unwanted marshy swampland in the middle of a massive lake. And from there, they established Tenochtitlan, this powerful city-state, which became the centre of their empire that lasted hundreds of years. How did they do that?

That is a great question. And I suppose I can't answer it with certainty, but I do have my theories based on the sources. I mean, they were great fighters. There's no question that they were talented in a military sense. But to be quite blunt, many people are. I don't think we can just say that the explanation is they were better fighters than others because there were some, excuse my American language, some kick-ass fighters all around them. I think that they had two strategies that were really...

quite extraordinary and that probably explain better their level of success. I guess, well, one wasn't so much a strategy as a recognition of what a strategy could be. And that was that they were living on this island because nobody else wanted it because it was swampy marshland, as you said.

But from that island they could canoe within just a couple of hours to about 30 other city-states who ringed the edges of the Great Lake in which the island was. So they happened to be located in the best possible place for trade

Or for tribute collection. They, again, were within an easy reach of all sorts of peoples with all sorts of crafts and crops. So it was almost like, one could argue, a bit like the phenomenon in the early Mediterranean, when people realized, oh, this open sea allows us to do things that people inland can't do as effectively. I mean, it's not an accident that the Mediterranean becomes sort of the cradle of Western civilization in a sense.

So they realized that if they could kind of force certain trade arrangements with other people, they could become rich and they could even help make some of those other peoples rich. So some of the people that they first brought into their orbit through violence

came to see that it was in their own best interest to work with these Aztecs too, because they could sell their goods in this extraordinary island market. I mean, it came to be a market that housed tens of thousands of stalls of sellers every day. So part of their strategy was economic and had to do with their location. The other thing they were really talented at was using polygamy to their advantage.

This was a world in which great warriors and noble men had many women. That's true throughout the ancient world. And it causes a lot of problems. And I'm not making a sort of feminist statement here. I'm going to stay away from that. I just mean it causes problems in the sense that a man ends up having too many sons, right?

all of whom would like to inherit, you know, when there are many wives and each of them have a subset of brothers, those brothers are going to, those subsets of half-brothers are going to be at each other's throats. But the Aztecs saw this somehow more clearly than most. They must have had some very

wise or at least prescient people amongst them at the highest circles. And they cleverly ended up using other people's, other communities' divisions based along these having too many sons against them. And they prevented it from happening in their own worlds by cleverly braiding together the different lines. One of their greatest kings said, "I agree, my sons will not inherit. One of my cousin's sons will inherit."

But that boy has to marry one of my daughters or granddaughters so that my descendants eventually will be part of the ruling line. And they kept doing that. They kept passing back and forth direct power, but then marrying the line that was currently in direct power with the daughter of one of the other lines so that multiple lines ended up being invested. That's pretty clever. And it does not seem to have been something that all the other city states did.

So they were good fighters, but I would say mostly they were also good businessmen and very clever about marriage. And in that way, I would argue they rose to the top so that by the time the Spaniards came, they really did rule the roost. The people of central Mexico, all of them owed fealty to some degree or other to the Aztecs.

You mentioned that they were all really good warriors and that pretty much every young man, unless he was going to go into priesthood, had to train to be a fighter. Can you tell us a bit more about what that involved and why it was so important? Right. I mean, we mustn't imagine that there was a standing army. I mean, this was not that common.

yet. Perhaps they would have come, I'm sure they would have come to that eventually. But this was still a world in which, as you said, all men were expected to be warriors to defend their people. This was not just true of the Aztecs, but all Native Americans and certainly all the indigenous people of Mexico.

The Aztecs did bring that to a high art, though, in the sense that they actually developed schools for this. When you were about 12 or 13, if you were a guy, you went off to a boarding school, literally. Now, these boarding schools, there were many of them, and they were not so far from home, but it meant that you lived with people who were teaching you and with other boys, and

you learned gradually how to be a warrior, then you were sent off to battle but not expected to be a full fighter. You were to work with a group of people to maybe take one captive, something like that. And then little by little you worked your way up, so to speak, earned your stripes until you became a full warrior. Now, needless to say, there were some boys and young men for whom this really didn't work.

And the sources are not entirely clear on what happened to them, but there is some reason to believe, there's some implicit evidence that they became the water carriers, that it was a mark of real shame to be unable to sort of pass your military classes and you would then use whatever male strength, upper body strength you had to carry water within the city. Although that may not have been the case. It is also true, and we have direct evidence for this,

that some of them became priests, but more priests were simply from priestly families. There's certainly no sense that all young boys who were unable to or unwilling to be that kind of warrior necessarily became priests, but some of them did. And priests themselves sometimes took on violent roles

They were, after all, among the teachers, the military teachers of the other boys, but some of them also kept the calendar, kept the writings, watched the stars. There were more scholarly and spiritual roles available for some of the priests. So it was a well-thought-out system that we don't know as much about as we would like to. Let's just put it that way.

And what sort of weapons were these boys being trained to use? Right. This is an essential question. They didn't have in their world anything equivalent to our nukes. That is, there was no weapon that they had that nobody else had that gave them more power, which is why their various strategies were so important in building their power. But they did have an arsenal of weapons. And in fact, one of the things that they demanded in tribute from some of the people they conquered was more weaponry.

and more armor. So they were aware of its importance. Let's just put it that way. But most men worked on creating their own weapons and armor. Now, when I say armor, I mean cotton armor, padded layers of layer after layer of cotton designed to diminish the impact of a stone arrow. And also shields, which were extraordinarily effective, very large and

sort of warrior costumes that were designed to be intimidating but still leave freedom of movement, sometimes made, for example, out of a jaguar pelt or something like that. What were the shields made out of? Wood? Iron? Right. The woods, no, no metal. They did have a little bit of copper that they used for pins and needles, but it was literally a Stone Age society despite its extraordinary sophistication.

So very light wood that was then strung with layers of animal pelts and then beautifully decorated with the feathers often of tropical birds. So some of these shields literally were neon colors in the way that tropical bird feathers are.

you know, rivaling the most modern synthetic dyes. So in fact, there are descriptions of canoes, because they like to approach by water, where the shields were literally hung on the edges of the canoes and you could just see these rows, almost arcs of beautiful shields as the canoe came closer and closer in the early dawn.

In any event, the weapons that you asked about did consist largely of projectiles, so bows and arrows, and spears, and the all-important spear thrower. They were, even before they had imported bows and arrows from the North,

They had become expert at spear throwers. The closest that we would have in our modern, largely urban lives, probably for your listeners, would be when you go to the park and you see elderly women like me, whose arms are too spindly to throw the ball very far for their little doggie, using these spears.

Little sticks that allow you to extend your ability to throw the ball for the doggy. It worked in essentially that way. They also had clubs and these clubs were particularly important in close combat because in them they embedded glass, obsidian, volcanic black glass so that not only being clubbed but cut. These were their most brutal weapons and really used for the most horrific battles when they were really, really trying to make a point.

There's a myth out there in some of the older literature that they never fought to kill, that they only fought to take prisoners. That is complete hogwash, utter nonsense. When it was necessary to use violence to put down rebels or when they were themselves threatened, they fought with the same violence that any other army fights with. Whether ever there are any female warriors?

That's a good question. We're not 100% sure. The sources in Nahuatl actually say that there were on a few occasions, but we're not sure what their role was because they mention this. It's in the context of their people already losing or being in the midst of losing a war. And in that desperate moment, it seems, at least in certain communities, the women would come out and fight. But we're not sure. Is the implication that they were trying to save the day?

Is it just that they wanted to be killed rather than taken prisoner and becoming concubines? Was it purely symbolic? Was it in a way of conveying that they did admit defeat? We're not sure. We don't have enough references or enough descriptions.

Largely warfare was a male endeavor. But women understood themselves to be warriors too. In fact, when you went into the all-encompassing pain of childbirth, it was understood that you were taking a prisoner sort of from the universe. You were grabbing a soul from the universe for your people. And if you died in childbirth, you were honored just as much as a young man who died in war because both are people who are giving their lives for their people. And it's the same kind of honor.

So they didn't imagine that the average woman was just as good a military fighter, but they did imagine that the average woman was just as brave and just as important as a man. They separated physical strength from courage.

Let's talk a bit about human sacrifice. As you say, one of the things that's most associated with the Aztecs, thanks to popular cultural depictions over the years. Traditionally, your book says that people had to be sacrificed to the gods at the end of every Nahua, their local calendar month. But during the reign of the last true Mexica emperor, Moctezuma, things ramped up significantly, didn't they? What did the sacrifices actually involve and what was their purpose?

Over time, more and more people were sacrificed and it became, I would argue, more brutal. There's no question that by the end, dozens and possibly hundreds of people per year were being killed, their hearts excised on the killing stone in these ritual ceremonies.

what they'd hoped to accomplish, or I guess I should say why they were doing this is a subject of great debate among scholars. The priests

said that they were doing it because if they did not feed the gods, the blood of these human sacrifice victims, the universe would be threatened. The sun might not rise. And so some scholars have developed whole theories about this being their cosmo vision, that it was a matter of great devoutness and spiritual faith, and it wasn't a mark of what we think of as violence or horror.

On the other hand, we also know that that had only been occurring in the last few decades before the Spaniards arrived. For most of the century in which they were rising in power, the Aztecs weren't nearly powerful enough to do anything like that. They said, when we wanted to conquer somebody, we used to kidnap boys, young warriors from that region, bring them to see these horrible ceremonies,

and then let them go. We knew, I'm paraphrasing here, but it's, I'm being accurate. They said, we knew that they would go home and tell their people not to fight against the Aztecs, but just to agree to join the empire. Because if they fought and lost as was likely untold numbers of people would then be sacrificed in this brutal way. One direct quote is in this way, they were undone.

So there is some direct evidence that it was a form of realpolitik, that it was a terror tactic, that their clever marriages and their clever financial offers were no longer enough to convince ever-growing numbers of people to join the empire. And they didn't have the equivalent of nukes, but what they could do was terrorize people in this way.

That is the school of thought that I subscribe to based on these Nahuatl language sources. But I will say many anthropologists, many of whom do not read Nahuatl and are operating on the evidence of the archaeological site of the Templo Mayor, the great temple in Tenochtitlan, sort of the only aspect of Aztec culture that they know well, they argue that this clearly was the be-all and end-all for them, this religious view. And I want to represent their view fairly. Right.

About half of your book deals with the pre-conquest Aztecs and the other half looks at what happens to their encounters with the Spanish and how they deal with the aftermath of all of that. You've painted a very good picture of the Mexica, the Aztecs at this time with their brightly coloured wooden shields, padded armour, bows and arrows, spears. What kinds of things would the Spanish have been equipped with in terms of weapons and defensive equipment when they landed on the shores in the 1500s?

Yeah, that's the key question, isn't it? It has been fashionable for a while in academic circles to argue that the Spanish weapons really weren't that much better. After all, one can actually aim at a target almost more effectively with a bow and arrow than one can with a metal crossbow. And there's bits of truth to this.

But in sum, in toto, there is no question that sort of late medieval, early Renaissance Europe had the technological advantage. It's true that with crossbows, for instance, with a key weapon of the Spaniards, you can't aim very well, but you can hit targets or general targets, whole towns from a great distance so that you can actually send fire.

fire, you know, burning arrows, fire arrows into an Indian town long before any of them with their bows and arrows can come anywhere near reaching you. And they didn't have cotton armor, they had metal armor. So these obsidian black glass arrows would just shatter when they hit the metal armor. We find that in archaeology, archaeologists agree, that's not just a sort of from a

from a theoretical test, we find the shattered arrows. So the Spaniards could approach a town on horseback or in the case of Tenochtitlan on ships, on small ships that they built to run in the lake and use these crossbows to

spread terror and cause infinite little wounds. I mean, so even if a crossbow, or they could use their falconets, their tiny little cannons to spew out grape shot, the bits of lead. I guess I don't need to tell your listeners that, do I? So even if they only killed five people, they might wound, they might, you know, have bits of lead shot embedded in the legs and arms of dozens of people. Meanwhile, not one Spaniard had even been touched by

because they were still at a great distance or if one arrow got to them it shattered or maybe maybe one arrow got in between the armor it could be pulled out and that guy might live. So it really was an unfair fight. Likewise because of ships and compasses and navigation the Europeans could bring more and more people, more and more horses, more and more weapons, more and more crossbows, more and more of everything that they needed and they did.

And it was, it seemed to be at that point when the indigenous realized that more and more Europeans and horses and crossbows were coming, that many of them came to join the Spaniards. There's a sort of a myth that everybody in Mexico hated the Aztecs so much that they all immediately ran into the arms of the Spaniards. And that is actually not true. The Nahuatl, the indigenous language records show that was not the case. They were very confused about what to do. There were sort of civil war battles, arguments over it.

But when it became clear that more and more Europeans and more and more European weapons were coming, at that point, most of the indigenous people came to side against the Aztecs. Not all, but most. So there's no question that

If you take everything into account, starting with their shipping and navigation and moving through armor, crossbows, falconets, etc., that the Europeans had a military advantage. This is obviously a huge subject and whole books have been written about it, but what were the other factors that contributed to the Aztecs ultimately losing to the Spanish in your view?

Right. So another big one would be disease. And, you know, in the post-COVID era, we're all more aware of that, I think. Smallpox especially was devastating. I do not believe that it

alone, as some people have argued, explains what happened. Some of the greatest, sort of most horrific defeats of the Indigenous in certain parts of the Americas actually occurred before the first smallpox epidemic. Also, you kind of can't have it both ways. That is, it's absolutely true that Indigenous people came to side with the Spaniards, not all, but many, and they were a big help. And so sometimes people have argued it was because of the Indigenous allies.

that it was only because of them that the defeat of the Aztecs was possible. And there's some truth to that, but on the other hand, you can't also say, and it was the smallpox anyway, because the indigenous allies died in just as great numbers as the indigenous enemies of the smallpox. When it went through an area, all the indigenous people were laid flat for several months before some of them survived, stood back up, and the disease by then had moved

on to the next sort of virgin soil territory. So disease was relevant. It absolutely was. They did not have, the indigenous people did not have the immunities that the Europeans had. On the other hand, we cannot argue that

that disease was the be all and end all, the one and only factor because of these other situations where it is clear, it becomes clear that indigenous people lost battles for other reasons, not only because of the disease and because the indigenous enemies as well as the indigenous allies to the Europeans succumbed to the diseases. Were there any other factors that you think listeners might not be aware of? I really think

that the technological imbalance is key. I guess the one thing that I find many people are unaware of is that this does not come about from differences between the people in a cultural sense. That is, it isn't as though the Europeans and Asians had a unique interest in technology or weaponry that the Native Americans didn't have. That is clearly false. I mean, the Aztecs' history of warfare and strategy certainly proves that.

Likewise, there were some peaceful people in Europe and Asia. No, I think that what many people don't realize is that the real difference comes from the length of time that a society as a whole has been sedentary. So it comes from the length of time that a society as a whole has been devoted full-time to farming, to agriculture. In the West, people have been farming in the Fertile Crescent for about 12,000 years, and

by the time we get to the moment in 1400 or 1592 or 1519 that we're interested in here. And when a society as a whole has been sedentary farmers for that long, your population rises, all kinds of inventions occur.

When you are largely hunter-gatherers or have only been farmers for 2,000 to 3,000 years, as in the case of the Mesoamericans, you simply haven't had as much time to invent a wide array of writing systems, of navigation equipment, of

a whole variety of weapons. You have what you need. You're smart people and you develop what you need. Everything's going fine. But when you're suddenly pitted against a people that have been farming for somewhere between five and 10,000 years longer than you have been, you've got a problem. You've got a problem in terms of the power imbalance.

So that is something that many scholars are aware of that I think many regular folks are not and they're left with the question, why couldn't the Native Americans fight back more effectively? The Native Americans were doing great. They were doing just about as well, technologically speaking, as the ancient Sumerians or the Mesopotamians were. We all were impressed by them in school, right? We all have vague memories of something about them from our grade school days.

And they had been farming for about as long as the Mesoamericans had. And had the Native Americans come face to face with the ancient Sumerians, I think it would have been a draw or more coincidental who won. But of course, you know, thousands of years had continued, thousands of years of sedentary life had continued in the old world. And by the time the rising Renaissance Europeans met the Native Americans, they had advantages.

that no matter how clever, brilliant and brave the Native Americans were, and they were, they simply, they could win a battle here and there, but they couldn't win those wars. And it's unfair for us to expect them to have done so. It's fascinating. And there's one more question I want to ask, because there's another conflict that runs throughout your book and sort of comes to the fore at various points. And that's about the historiography of the Aztecs. You've sort of touched on it briefly, but I'm wondering, why did you feel that their story needed to be retold?

Right. You know, it's interesting. In some ways, we've been hearing about the perspective of the Native Americans since long about the 1970s. But most of them, when they rely on Indigenous sources at all, rely on the sources written by Indigenous people hand in hand with the friars.

or in the court system. So in other words, in places where the European frame of reference was still dominant, was still shaping the narrative. So you end up getting accounts that still felt lopsided to me, kind of unconvincing. So one famous example would be the story that

continues to be told here and there that Moctezuma was just shaking in his shoes. He was so terrified, so sure that white gods were approaching. And this comes from Spaniards and from Spaniards interrogating the grandchildren of Moctezuma and men of his generation and extracting from them a sort of a statement that, well, yes, I guess maybe they did think that these were gods, things like that.

So the whole story feels quite different when you're actually reading in the Nahuatl language what the indigenous people themselves said in private, you know, when Spaniards weren't asking the questions. There they come across as much more complex and complex

just as more human bloodly than they do when either the Spaniards are telling the stories or indigenous people are telling the stories via the questions asked by Spaniards. So as I was working with these sources and writing a more scholarly book about the sources, it occurred to me, maybe I should just write the story the way they told it, quoting them at great length, the way they would like to sit around fires and tell the stories.

And I wasn't sure to be quite honest that anyone else would like this. And the first person who read it, a copy editor didn't like it at all. And she said, this is not the story of the Aztecs. So I was rather deflated and thought about not publishing it. But then I thought, well, I still think it's interesting. I think these people would have wanted it published. And then lo and behold, it became my most popular book, which is quite funny. But it does, I think it just rings a little differently because it's,

it's so full of the language of these people and what they said and when they said it. You know, it quotes even their jokes and their angry, snarky little statements. And I think that's what people liked about it, probably, that the Indigenous people come across as very real. Thank you so much for joining us, Camilla Townsend, academic and author of Fifth Son, A New History of the Aztecs. Thank you. Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. The producer is Jolene Goffin.

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