Just Finished Reading: The Aztecs – A Very Short Introduction by David Carrasco (FP: 2012)

The Aztec civilisation has become, since its discovery and destruction over the late 15th and 16th centuries, larger than life, a sort of a myth within a myth. It is seen as a society drenched in the blood of its enemies brought down like a house of cards by a handful of European invaders. Of course as with all myths, especially about such momentous events, things are never anywhere near as simple as first presented. Here, in this interesting short booklet (120 pages) the author tries to set at least some of the record straight without falling into the trap of being completely revisionist. He accepts that human sacrifice was an important and integral part of Aztec culture (although some historians have actually denied this) but that it did not play such a large part that the streets ran with blood as some of the original commentators contended. By and large, although different in many ways, the Aztec civilisation stunned the first Europeans with its scale and grandeur the likes of which few of the explorers had even seen before. Continuing archaeological discoveries underline the point that in many ways Aztec civilisation was very advanced indeed.

Such advancement did not, however, prevent the collapse of the Aztec way of life within a few generations of first contact with Europeans – mostly but not exclusively – from Spain. Again the military prowess of the European men at arms has been exaggerated with good effect. The majority of those engaged in the decades of military campaigning in that region where native armies allied to the Spanish and fighting, in effect, their own people for their own reasons. Without this assistance the European expansion into the continent would have been slow and patchy if it had succeeded at all. Likewise the diseases that the Europeans brought with them have had an exaggerated impact on the collapse of the Aztec world. Europeans had no defence against the many tropical diseases they met for the first time and died in droves just like their American counterparts. But things are covered in a great deal more detail in an upcoming VSI review so I’ll stop here.

This volume is dedicated to discussing the Aztecs from their own point of view and not that of the European invader – no matter how successful. The Aztecs certainly saw themselves as a high civilisation with a superior culture and a right to rule over their vast empire. In the context of Mesoamerican history they were very successful indeed and no doubt would have continued to flourish, expand and change had not they been contacted at the time and in the way they were. What might have happened if Columbus had failed in his mission and never returned from America is an interesting question. Might the Aztecs be a global super-power or would European archaeologies be digging through the remnants of a failed empire lost before it was even discovered? You also can’t but wonder what might happen if we humans are contacted at some point by a ‘European equivalent’ alien civilisation. Would we cope and adapt or collapse into a historical heap of rubble argued over in the halls of alien academia?