The Discovery of America Part 7

Now it is worthy of note that Cortes made the same comparison in the case of Tlascala, one of the famous towns at which he stopped on his march from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. In his letter to the emperor Charles V., he compared Tlascala to Granada, "affirming that it was larger, stronger, and more populous than the Moorish capital at the time of the conquest, and quite as well built."[96] Upon this Mr. Prescott observes, "we shall be slow to believe that its edifices could have rivalled those monuments of Oriental magnificence, whose light aerial forms still survive after the lapse of ages, the admiration of every traveller of sensibility and taste. The truth is that Cortes, like Columbus, saw objects through the warm medium of his own fond imagination, giving them a higher tone of colouring and larger dimensions than were strictly warranted by the fact." Or, as Mr.

Bandelier puts it, when it comes to general statements about numbers and dimensions, "the descriptions of the conquerors cannot be taken as facts, only as the expression of feelings, honestly entertained but uncritical." From details given in various Spanish descriptions, including those of Cortes himself, it is evident that there could not have been much difference in size between Tlascala and its neighbour Cholula. The population of the latter town has often been given as from 150,000 to 200,000; but, from elaborate archaeological investigations made on the spot in 1881, Mr. Bandelier concludes that it cannot have greatly exceeded 30,000, and this number really agrees with the estimates of two very important Spanish authorities, Las Casas and Torquemada, when correctly understood.[97] We may therefore suppose that the population of Tlascala was about 30,000. Now the population of the city of Granada, at the time of its conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, is said by the greatest of Spanish historians[98] to have been about 200,000. It would thus appear that Cortes sometimes let his feelings run away with him; and, all things considered, small blame to him if he did!

In studying the story of the Spanish conquest of America, liberal allowance must often be made for inaccuracies of statement that were usually pardonable and sometimes inevitable.

[Footnote 96: "La qual ciudad ... es muy mayor que Granada, y muy mas fuerte, y de tan buenos edificios, y de mucha mas gente, que Granada tenia al tiempo que se gano." Cortes, _Relacion segunda al Emperador_, ap. Lorenzana, p. 58, cited in Prescott's _Conquest of Mexico_, vol. i. p. 401 (7th ed., London, 1855).]

[Footnote 97: See Bandelier's _Archaeological Tour in Mexico_, Boston, 1885, pp. 160-164. Torquemada's words, cited by Bandelier, are "Quando entraron los Espanoles, dicen que tenia mas de quarenta mil vecinos esta ciudad." _Monarquia Indiana_, lib. iii. cap. xix. p. 281. A prolific source of error is the ambiguity in the word _vecinos_, which may mean either "inhabitants" or "householders." Where Torquemada meant 40,000 inhabitants, uncritical writers fond of the marvellous have understood him to mean 40,000 houses, and multiplying this figure by 5, the average number of persons _in a modern family_, have obtained the figure 200,000. But 40,000 houses peopled after the old Mexican fashion, with at least 200 persons in a house (to put it as low as possible), would make a city of 8,000,000 inhabitants! Las Casas, in his _Destruycion de las Indias_, vii., puts the population of Cholula at about 30,000. I observe that Llorente (in his _Oeuvres de Las Casas_, tom. i. p. 38) translates the statement correctly. I shall recur to this point below, vol. ii. p. 264.]

[Footnote 98: Mariana, _Historia de Espana_, Valencia, 1795, tom. viii. p. 317.]

But when Cortes described Tlascala as "quite as well built" as Granada, it is not at all likely that he was thinking about that exquisite Moorish architecture which in the mind of Mr. Prescott or any cultivated modern writer is the first thing to be suggested by the name. The Spaniards of those days did not admire the artistic work of "infidels;"

they covered up beautiful arabesques with a wash of dirty plaster, and otherwise behaved very much like the Puritans who smashed the "idolatrous" statues in English cathedrals. When Cortes looked at Tlascala, and Coronado looked at Zuni, and both soldiers were reminded of Granada, they were probably looking at those places with a professional eye as fortresses hard to capture; and from this point of view there was doubtless some justice in the comparison.

[Sidenote: The ancient city of Mexico was a great composite pueblo.]

In the description of Tlascala by the Spaniards who first saw it, with its dark and narrow streets, its houses of adobe, or "the better sort"

of stone laid in adobe mortar, and its flat and terraced roofs, one is irresistibly reminded of such a pueblo as Zuni. Tlascala was a town of a type probably common in Mexico. In some respects, as will hereafter appear, the city of Mexico showed striking variations from the common type. Yet there too were to be seen the huge houses, with terraced roofs, built around a square courtyard; in one of them 450 Spaniards, with more than 1,000 Tlascalan allies, were accommodated; in another, called "Montezuma's palace," one of the conquerors, who came several times intending to see the whole of it, got so tired with wandering through the interminable succession of rooms that at length he gave it up and never saw them all.[99] This might have happened in such a building as Pueblo Bonito; and a suspicion is raised that Montezuma's city was really a vast composite pueblo, and that its so-called palaces were communal buildings in principle like the pueblos of the Chaco valley.

[Footnote 99: "Et io entrai piu di quattro volte in una casa del gran Signor non por altro effetto che per vederla, et ogni volta vi camminauo tanto che mi stancauo, et mai la fini di vedere tutta." _Relatione fatta per un gentil' huomo del Signor Fernando Cortese_, apud Ramusio, _Navigationi et Viaggi_, Venice, 1556, tom. iii. fol. 309.]

[Sidenote: Natural mistake of the Spanish discoverers.]

[Sidenote: Contrast between feudalism and gentilism.]

[Sidenote: Change from gentile society to political society.]

Of course the Spanish discoverers could not be expected to understand the meaning of what they saw. It dazed and bewildered them. They knew little or nothing of any other kind of society than feudal monarchy, and if they made such mistakes as to call the head war-chief a "king" (i. e.

feudal king) or "emperor," and the clan-chiefs "lords" or "n.o.blemen," if they supposed that these huge fortresses were like feudal castles and palaces in Europe, they were quite excusable. Such misconceptions were common enough before barbarous societies had been much studied; and many a dusky warrior, without a t.i.the of the pomp and splendour about him that surrounded Montezuma, has figured in the pages of history as a mighty potentate girt with many of the trappings of feudalism.[100]

Initial misconceptions that were natural enough, indeed unavoidable, found expression in an absurdly inappropriate nomenclature; and then the use of wrong names and t.i.tles bore fruit in what one cannot properly call a theory but rather an incoherent medley of notions about barbaric society. Nothing could be further from _feudalism_, in which the relation of landlord and tenant is a fundamental element, than the society of the American aborigines, in which that relation was utterly unknown and inconceivable. This more primitive form of society is not improperly called _gentilism_, inasmuch as it is based upon the gens or clan, with communism in living, and with the conception of individual ownership of property undeveloped. It was gentilism that everywhere prevailed throughout the myriads of unrecorded centuries during which the foremost races of mankind struggled up through savagery and barbarism into civilization, while weaker and duller races lagged behind at various stages on the way. The change from "gentile" society to political society as we know it was in some respects the most important change that has occurred in human affairs since men became human. It might be roughly defined as the change from personal to territorial organization. It was accomplished when the stationary clan became converted into the township, and the stationary tribe into the small state;[101] when the conception of individual property in land was fully acquired; when the tie of physical kinship ceased to be indispensable as a bond for holding a society together; when the _clansman_ became a _citizen_. This momentous change was accomplished among the Greeks during a period beginning shortly before the first Olympiad (B. C.

776), and ending with the reforms of Kleisthenes at Athens (B. C. 509); among the Romans it was accomplished by the series of legislative changes beginning with those ascribed to Servius Tullius (about B. C.

550), and perfected by the time of the first Punic War (B. C. 264-241).

In each case about three centuries was required to work the change.[102]

If now the reader, familiar with European history, will reflect upon the period of more than a thousand years which intervened between the date last named and the time when feudalism became thoroughly established, if he will recall to mind the vast and powerful complication of causes which operated to transform civil society from the aspect which it wore in the days of Regulus and the second Ptolemy to that which it had a.s.sumed in the times of Henry the Fowler or Fulk of Anjou, he will begin to realize how much "feudalism" implies, and what a wealth of experience it involves, above and beyond the change from "gentile" to "civil"

society. It does not appear that any people in ancient America ever approached very near to this earlier change. None had fairly begun to emerge from gentilism; none had advanced so far as the Greeks of the first Olympiad or the Romans under the rule of the Tarquins.

[Footnote 100: When Pocahontas visited London in 1616 she was received at court as befitted a "king's daughter," and the old Virginia historian, William St.i.th (born in 1689), says it was a "constant tradition" in his day that James I. "became jealous, and was highly offended at Mr. Rolfe for marrying a princess."

The notion was that "if Virginia descended to Pocahontas, as it might do at Powhatan's death, at her own death the kingdom would be vested in Mr. Rolfe's posterity." Esten Cooke's _Virginia_, p. 100. Powhatan (i. e. Wahunsunakok, chief of the Powhatan tribe) was often called "emperor" by the English settlers. To their intense bewilderment he told one of them that his office would descend to his [maternal] brothers, even though he had sons living. It was thought that this could not be true.]

[Footnote 101: The small states into which tribes were at first transformed have in many cases survived to the present time as portions of great states or nations. The shires or counties of England, which have been reproduced in the United States, originated in this way, as I have briefly explained in my little book on _Civil Government in the United States_, p. 49.

When you look on the map of England, and see the town of _Icklingham_ in the county of _Suffolk_, it means that this place was once the "home" of the "Icklings" or "children of Ickel," a clan which formed part of the tribe of Angles known as "South folk." So the names of Gaulish tribes survived as names of French provinces, e. g. _Auvergne_ from the _Arverni_, _Poitou_ from the _Pictavi_, _Anjou_ from the _Andecavi_, _Bearn_ from the _Bigerrones_, etc.]

[Footnote 102: "It was no easy task to accomplish such a fundamental change, however simple and obvious it may now seem.... Anterior to experience, a township, as the unit of a political system, was abstruse enough to tax the Greeks and Romans to the depths of their capacities before the conception was formed and set in practical operation." Morgan, _Ancient Society_, p. 218.]

[Sidenote: Suspicions as to the erroneousness of the Spanish accounts.]

[Sidenote: Detection and explanation of the errors, by Lewis Morgan.]

The first eminent writer to express a serious doubt as to the correctness of the earlier views of Mexican civilization was that sagacious Scotchman, William Robertson.[103] The ill.u.s.trious statesman and philologist, Albert Gallatin, founder of the American Ethnological Society, published in the first volume of its "Transactions" an essay which recognized the danger of trusting the Spanish narratives without very careful and critical scrutiny.[104] It is to be observed that Mr.

Gallatin approached the subject with somewhat more knowledge of aboriginal life in America than had been possessed by previous writers.

A similar scepticism was expressed by Lewis Ca.s.s, who also knew a great deal about Indians.[105] Next came Mr. Morgan,[106] the man of path-breaking ideas, whose minute and profound acquaintance with Indian life was joined with a power of penetrating the hidden implications of facts so keen and so sure as to amount to genius. Mr. Morgan saw the nature of the delusion under which the Spaniards laboured; he saw that what they mistook for feudal castles owned by great lords, and inhabited by dependent retainers, were really huge communal houses, owned and inhabited by clans, or rather by segments of overgrown clans. He saw this so vividly that it betrayed him now and then into a somewhat impatient and dogmatic manner of statement; but that was a slight fault, for what he saw was not the outcome of dreamy speculation but of scientific insight. His researches, which reduced "Montezuma's empire"

to a confederacy of tribes dwelling in pueblos, governed by a council of chiefs, and collecting tribute from neighbouring pueblos, have been fully sustained by subsequent investigation.

[Footnote 103: Robertson's _History of America_, 9th ed. vol.

iii. pp. 274, 281.]

[Footnote 104: "Notes on the Semi-civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America," _American Ethnological Society's Transactions_, vol. i., New York, 1852. There is a brief account of Mr. Gallatin's pioneer work in American philology and ethnology in Stevens's _Albert Gallatin_, pp. 386-396.]

[Footnote 105: Ca.s.s, "Aboriginal Structures," _North Amer.

Review_, Oct., 1840.]

[Footnote 106: Mr. R. A. Wilson's _New History of the Conquest of Mexico_, Philadelphia, 1859, denounced the Spanish conquerors as wholesale liars, but as his book was ignorant, uncritical, and full of wild fancies, it produced little effect. It was demolished, with neatness and despatch, in two articles in the _Atlantic Monthly_, April and May, 1859, by the eminent historian John Foster Kirk, whose _History of Charles the Bold_ is in many respects a worthy companion to the works of Prescott and Motley. Mr. Kirk had been Mr. Prescott's secretary.]

[Sidenote: Adolf Bandelier's researches.]

The state of society which Cortes saw has, indeed, pa.s.sed away, and its monuments and hieroglyphic records have been in great part destroyed.

Nevertheless some monuments and some hieroglyphic records remain, and the people are still there. Tlascalans and Aztecs, descendants in the eleventh or twelfth generation from the men whose bitter feuds gave such a golden opportunity to Cortes, still dwell upon the soil of Mexico, and speak the language in which Montezuma made his last harangue to the furious people. There is, moreover, a great ma.s.s of literature in Spanish, besides more or less in Nahuatl, written during the century following the conquest, and the devoted missionaries and painstaking administrators, who wrote books about the country in which they were working, were not engaged in a wholesale conspiracy for deceiving mankind. From a really critical study of this literature, combined with archaeological investigation, much may be expected; and a n.o.ble beginning has already been made. A more extensive acquaintance with Mexican literature would at times have materially modified Mr. Morgan's conclusions, though without altering their general drift. At this point the work has been taken up by Mr. Adolf Bandelier, of Highland, Illinois, to whose rare sagacity and untiring industry as a field archaeologist is joined such a thorough knowledge of Mexican literature as few men before him have possessed. Armed with such resources, Mr.

Bandelier is doing for the ancient history of America work as significant as that which Mommsen has done for Rome, or Baur for the beginnings of Christianity. When a sufficient ma.s.s of facts and incidents have once been put upon record, it is hard for ignorant misconception to bury the truth in a pit so deep but that the delving genius of critical scholarship will sooner or later drag it forth into the light of day.[107]

[Footnote 107: A summary of Mr. Bandelier's princ.i.p.al results, with copious citation and discussion of original Spanish and Nahuatl sources, is contained in his three papers, "On the art of war and mode of warfare of the ancient Mexicans,"--"On the distribution and tenure of land, and the customs with respect to inheritance, among the ancient Mexicans,"--"On the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans,"

_Peabody Museum Reports_, vol. ii., 1876-79, pp. 95-161, 385-448, 557-699.]

[Sidenote: The Aztec confederacy.]

At this point in our exposition a very concise summary of Mr.

Bandelier's results will suffice to enable the reader to understand their import. What has been called the "empire of Montezuma" was in reality a confederacy of three tribes, the Aztecs, Tezcucans, and Tlacopans,[108] dwelling in three large composite pueblos situated very near together in one of the strongest defensive positions ever occupied by Indians. This Aztec confederacy extended its "sway" over a considerable portion of the Mexican peninsula, but that "sway" could not correctly be described as "empire," for it was in no sense a military occupation of the country. The confederacy did not have garrisons in subject pueblos or civil officials to administer their affairs for them.

It simply sent some of its chiefs about from one pueblo to another to collect tribute. This tax consisted in great part of maize and other food, and each tributary pueblo reserved a certain portion of its tribal territory to be cultivated for the benefit of the domineering confederacy. If a pueblo proved delinquent or recalcitrant, Aztec warriors swooped down upon it in stealthy midnight a.s.sault, butchered its inhabitants and emptied its granaries, and when the paroxysm of rage had spent itself, went exulting homeward, carrying away women for concubines, men to be sacrificed, and such miscellaneous booty as could be conveyed without wagons or beasts to draw them.[109] If the sudden a.s.sault, with scaling ladders, happened to fail, the a.s.sailants were likely to be baffled, for there was no artillery, and so little food could be carried that a siege meant starvation for the besiegers.

[Footnote 108: In the Iroquois confederacy the Mohawks enjoyed a certain precedence or seniority, the Onondagas had the central council-fire, and the Senecas, who had the two head war-chiefs, were much the most numerous. In the Mexican confederacy the various points of superiority seem to have been more concentrated in the Aztecs; but spoils and tribute were divided into five portions, of which Mexico and Tezcuco each took two, and Tlacopan one.]

[Footnote 109: The wretched prisoners were ordinarily compelled to carry the booty.]

The tributary pueblos were also liable to be summoned to furnish a contingent of warriors to the war-parties of the confederacy, under the same penalties for delinquency as in the case of refusal of tribute. In such cases it was quite common for the confederacy to issue a peremptory summons, followed by a declaration of war. When a pueblo was captured, the only way in which the vanquished people could stop the ma.s.sacre was by holding out signals of submission; a parley then sometimes adjusted the affair, and the payment of a year's tribute in advance induced the conquerors to depart, but captives once taken could seldom if ever be ransomed. If the parties could not agree upon terms, the slaughter was renewed, and sometimes went on until the departing victors left nought behind them but ruined houses belching from loop-hole and doorway lurid clouds of smoke and flame upon narrow silent streets heaped up with mangled corpses.

The sway of the Aztec confederacy over the Mexican peninsula was thus essentially similar to the sway of the Iroquois confederacy over a great part of the tribes between the Connecticut river and the Mississippi.

It was simply the levying of tribute,--a system of plunder enforced by terror. The so-called empire was "only a partnership formed for the purpose of carrying on the business of warfare, and that intended, not for the extension of territorial ownership, but only for an increase of the means of subsistence."[110] There was none of that coalescence and incorporation of peoples which occurs after the change from gentilism to civil society has been effected. Among the Mexicans, as elsewhere throughout North America, the tribe remained intact as the highest completed political integer.

[Footnote 110: Bandelier, _op. cit._ p. 563.]

[Sidenote: Aztec clans.]

The Aztec tribe was organized in clans and phratries, and the number of clans would indicate that the tribe was a very large one.[111] There were twenty clans, called in the Nahuatl language "calpullis." We may fairly suppose that the average size of a clan was larger than the average tribe of Algonquins or Iroquois; but owing to the compact "city"

life, this increase of numbers did not result in segmentation and scattering, as among Indians in the lower status. Each Aztec clan seems to have occupied a number of adjacent communal houses, forming a kind of precinct, with its special house or houses for official purposes, corresponding to the _estufas_ in the New Mexican pueblos. The houses were the common property of the clan, and so was the land which its members cultivated; and such houses and land could not be sold or bartered away by the clan, or in anywise alienated. The idea of "real estate" had not been developed; the clan simply exercised a right of occupancy, and--as among some ruder Indians--its individual members exercised certain limited rights of user in particular garden-plots.

[Footnote 111: The notion of an immense population groaning under the lash of taskmasters, and building huge palaces for idle despots must be dismissed. The statements which refer to such a vast population are apt to be accompanied by incompatible statements. Mr. Morgan is right in throwing the burden of proof upon those who maintain that a people without domestic animals or field agriculture could have been so numerous (_Anc. Soc._, p. 195). On the other hand, I believe Mr. Morgan makes a grave mistake in the opposite direction, in underestimating the numbers that could be supported upon Indian corn even under a system of horticulture without the use of the plough. Some pertinent remarks on the extraordinary reproductive power of maize in Mexico may be found in Humboldt, _Essai politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne_, Paris, 1811, tom.

iii. pp. 51-60; the great naturalist is of course speaking of the yield of maize in ploughed lands, but, after making due allowances, the yield under the ancient system must have been well-nigh unexampled in barbaric agriculture.]

[Sidenote: Clan officers.]

The clan was governed by a clan council, consisting of chiefs (_tecuhtli_) elected by the clan, and inducted into office after a cruel religious ordeal, in which the candidate was bruised, tortured, and half starved. An executive department was more clearly differentiated from the council than among the Indians of the lower status. The clan (_calpulli_) had an official head, or sachem, called the _calpullec_; and also a military commander called the _ahcacautin_, or "elder brother." The _ahcacautin_ was also a kind of peace officer, or constable, for the precinct occupied by the clan, and carried about with him a staff of office; a tuft of white feathers attached to this staff betokened that his errand was one of death. The clan elected its _calpullec_ and _ahcacautin_, and could depose them for cause.[112]