The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West Part 7

The Mexicans wove many kinds of cotton cloth, sometimes using as a dye the rich crimson of the cochineal insect. They made a more expensive fabric by interweaving the cotton with the fine hair of rabbits, and other animals; sometimes embroidering with pretty designs of flowers and birds, etc. The special art of the Aztec weaver was in feather-work, which when brought to Europe produced the highest admiration:

With feathers they could produce all the effect of a beautiful mosaic. The gorgeous plumage of the tropical birds, especially of the parrot tribe, afforded every variety of color; and the fine down of the humming-bird, which reveled in swarms among the honeysuckle bowers of Mexico, supplied them with soft aerial tints that gave an exquisite finish to the picture. The feathers, pasted on a fine cotton web, were wrought into dresses for the wealthy, hangings for apartments, and ornaments for the temples.

When some of the Mexican feather-work was shown at Strasbourg: "Never,"

says one admirer, "did I behold anything so exquisite for brilliancy and nice gradation of color, and for beauty of design. No European artist could have made such a thing."

Instead of shops the Aztecs had in every town a market-place, where fairs were held every fifth day--i. e., once a week. Each commodity had a particular quarter, and the traffic was partly by barter, and partly by using the following articles as money: bits of tin shaped like an Egyptian cross (T), bags of cacao holding a specified number of grains, and, for large values, quills of gold-dust.

The married women among the Aztecs were treated kindly and respectfully by their husbands. The feminine occupations were spinning and embroidery, etc., as among the ancient Greeks, while listening to ballads and love stories related by their maidens and musicians (Ramusio, iii, 305).

In banquets and other social entertainments the women had an equal share with the men. Sometimes the festivities were on a large scale, with costly preparations and numerous attendants. The Mexicans, ancient and modern, have always been pa.s.sionately fond of flowers, and on great occasions not only were the halls and courts strewed and adorned in profusion with blossoms of every hue and sweet odor, but perfumes scented every room. The guests as they sat down found ewers of water before them and cotton napkins, since washing the hands both before and after eating was a national habit of almost religious obligation.[17]

Modern Europeans believe that tobacco was introduced from America in the time of Queen Isabella and Queen Elizabeth, but ages before that period the Aztecs at their banquets had the "fragrant weed" offered to the company, "in pipes, mixed up with aromatic substances, or in the form of cigars, inserted in tubes of tortoise-sh.e.l.l or silver." The smoke after dinner was no doubt preliminary to the _siesta_ or nap of "forty winks." It is not known if the Aztec ladies, like their descendants in modern Mexico, also appreciated the _yetl_, as the Mexicans called "tobacco." Our word came from the natives of Hayti, one of the islands discovered by Columbus.

[Footnote 17: Sahagun (vi, 22) quotes the precise instructions of a father to his son: he must wash face and hands before sitting down to table, and must not leave till he has repeated the operation and cleansed his teeth.]

The tables of the Aztecs abounded in good food--various dishes of meat, especially game, fowl, and fish. The turkey, for example, was introduced into Europe from Mexico, although stupidly supposed to have come from Asia. The French named it _coq d'Inde_,[18] the "Indian c.o.c.k," meaning American, but the ordinary hearer imagined _d'Inde_ meant from Hindustan. The blunder arose from that misapplication of the word "Indian," first made by Columbus, as we formerly explained.

[Footnote 18: The Spanish named this handsome bird _gallopavo_ (Lat.

_pavo_, the "peac.o.c.k"). The wild turkey is larger and more beautiful than the tame, and therefore Benjamin Franklin, when speaking sarcastically of the "American Eagle," insisted that the wild turkey was the proper national emblem.]

The Aztec cooks dressed their viands with various sauces and condiments, the more solid dishes being followed by fruits of many kinds, as well as sweetmeats and pastry. Chafing-dishes even were used. Besides the varieties of beautiful flowers which adorned the table there were sculptured Vases of silver and sometimes gold. At table

the favorite beverage was the _chocolatl_ flavored with vanilla and different spices. The fermented juice of the maguey, with a mixture of sweets and acids, supplied also various agreeable drinks, of different degrees of strength.

When the young Mexicans of both s.e.xes amused themselves with dances, the older people kept their seats in order to enjoy their _pulque_ and gossip, or listen to the discourse of some guest of importance. The music which accompanied the dances was frequently soft and rather plaintive.

The early Mexicans included the Tezcucans as well as the Aztecs proper; and since their capitals were on the same lake and both races were closely akin, we may devote some s.p.a.ce to these Alcohuans or eastern Aztecs. Their civilization was superior to that of the western Aztecs in some respects, and Nezahual-coyotl, their greatest prince, formed alliance with the western state, and then remodeled the various departments of his government. He had a council of war, another of finance, and a third of justice.

A remarkable inst.i.tution, under King Nezahual-coyotl, was the "Council of Music," intended to promote the study of science and the practise of art.

Tezcuco, in fact, became the nursery not only of such sciences as could be compa.s.sed by the scholarship of the period, but of various useful and ornamental arts. "Its historians, orators, and poets were celebrated throughout the country.... Its idiom, more polished than the Mexican, continued long after the conquest to be that in which the best productions of the native races were composed. Tezcuco was the Athens of the Western World.... Among the most ill.u.s.trious of her bards was their king himself." A Spanish writer adds that it was to the eastern Aztecs that n.o.blemen sent their sons "to study poetry, moral philosophy, the heathen theology, astronomy, medicine, and history."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ancient Bridge near Tezcuco.]

The most remarkable problem connected with ancient Mexico is how to reconcile the general refinement and civilization with the sacrifices of human victims. There was no town or city but had its temples in public places, with stairs visibly leading up to the sacrificial stone, ever standing ready before some hideous idol or other--as already described.

In all countries there have been public spectacles of bloodshed, not only as in the gladiators in the ancient circus--

butchered to make a Roman holiday,

or the tournays of the middle ages, but in the prize-ring fights and public executions by ax or guillotine, of the age that is just pa.s.sing away. The thousands who perished for religious ideas by means of the Holy Roman Inquisition should not be overlooked by the Spanish writers who are so indignant that Montezuma and his priests sacrificed tens of thousands under the claims of a heathen religion. The very day on which we write these words, August 18th, is the anniversary of the last sentence for beheading pa.s.sed by our House of Lords. By that sentence three Scottish "Jacobites" pa.s.sed under the ax on Tower Hill, where their remains still rest in a chapel hard by. So lately as 1873, the Shah of Persia, when resident as a visitor in Buckingham Palace, was amazed to find that the laws of Great Britain prevented him from depriving five of his courtiers of their lives. They had just been found guilty of some paltry infringement of Persian etiquette. During the last generation or the previous one, both in England and Scotland, the country schoolmaster on a certain day had the schoolroom cleared so that the children and their friends should enjoy the treat of seeing all the game-c.o.c.ks of the parish bleeding on the floor one after another, being either struck by a spur to the brain, or else wounded to a painful death. When James Boswell and others regularly attended the spectacles of Tyburn and sometimes cheered the wretched victim if he "died game,"

the philosopher will not wonder at the populace of some city of ancient Mexico crowding round the great temple and greedily watching the b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice done with full sanction of the priesthood and the king.

The primitive religions were derived from sun-worship, and as fire is the nearest representative of the sun, it seemed essential to _burn_ the victim offered as a sacrifice. At Carthage, the great Phenician colony, children were cruelly sacrificed by fire to the G.o.d Melkarth of Tyre.

"Melkarth" being simply _Melech Kiriath_ (i. e., "King of the City"), and therefore identical with the "Moloch" or "Molech" of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Israelites. In the earliest prehistoric age the children of Ammon, Moab, and Israel were apparently so closely akin that they had practically the same religion and worshiped the same idols. The tribal G.o.d was originally the G.o.d of Syria or Canaan. In more than a dozen places of the Old Testament we find the Hebrews accused of burning their children or pa.s.sing them through the fire to the sun-G.o.d, but the ancient Mexicans did not burn their victims, and _in no case were the victims their own children_. The victims were captives taken in war, or persons convicted of crime; and thus the Mexicans were in atrocity far surpa.s.sed by those races akin to the Hebrews who are much denounced by the sacred writers, e. g.:

Josiah ... defiled Topheth that no man might make his son or his daughter to pa.s.s through the fire to Molech (2 Kings xxiii, 10).

They have built also the high places to burn their sons with fire for burnt-offerings (Jer. xix, 5).

Yea, they shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan (Ps.

cvi, 37).

That a father should offer his own child as a sacrifice to the sun-G.o.d or any other, would to the mild and gentle Aztec be too dreadful a conception. It is the enormous number who were immolated that shocks the European mind, but to the populace enjoying the spectacle the victims were enemies of the king or criminals deserving execution.

Perhaps it is a more difficult problem to explain how so civilized a community as the Aztec races undoubtedly were could look with complacency upon any one tasting a dish composed of some part of the captive he had taken in battle. It is not only repulsive as an idea, but seems impossible. Yet much depends on the point of view as well as the atmosphere. According to archeologists, all the primeval races of men could at a pinch feed on human flesh, but after many generations learned to do better without it. We may have simply outgrown the craving, till at last we call it unnatural, whereas those ancient Mexicans, with all their wealth of food, had refined upon it. Let us again refer to the Old Testament:

Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters and these hast thou sacrificed to be devoured (Ezek. xvi, 20).

... have caused their sons to pa.s.s for them through the fire, to devour them (Ezek. xxiii, 37).

We may therefore infer that to the early races of Canaan (including Israel), as well as to the primeval Aztecs, it was a privilege and religious custom to eat part of any sacrifice that had been offered.

There can be little doubt, to any one who has studied the earliest human antiquities, that all races indulged in cannibalism, not only during that enormously remote age called Paleolithic, but in comparatively recent though still prehistoric times. "This is clearly proved by the number of human bones, chiefly of women and young persons, which have been found charred by fire and split open for extraction of the marrow."

Such charred bones have frequently been preserved in caves, as at Chaleux in Belgium, where in some instances they occurred "in such numbers as to indicate that they had been the scene of cannibal feasts."

The survival of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous condition of their Indian race; just as in the Greek drama, when that ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess or other distinguished heroine, was not unfrequent. We remember Polyxena, the virgin daughter of Hecuba, whom her own people resolved to sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles; and her touching bravery, as she requests the Greeks not to bind her, being ashamed, she says, "having lived a princess to die a slave." A better known example is Iphigenia, so beloved by her father, King Agamemnon, and yet given up by him a victim for purposes of state and religion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Teocalli, Aztec Temple for Human Sacrifices.]

From the Greek drama, human sacrifices frequently pa.s.sed to the Roman; nor does such a refined critic as Horace object to it, but only suggests that the bloodshed ought to be perpetrated behind the scenes. In Seneca's play, Medea (quoted in our Introduction), that rule was grossly violated, since the children have their throats cut by their heroic mother in full view of the audience. In the same pa.s.sage (Ars Poet., 185, 186) Horace forbids a banquet of human flesh being prepared before the eyes of the public, as had been done in a play written by Ennius, the Roman poet. The religious sacrifice of human victims by the "Druids"

or priests of ancient Gaul and Britain seems exactly parallel to the wholesale executions on the Mexican _teocallis_, since the wretched victims whom our Celtic ancestors packed for burning into those huge wicker images, were captives taken in battle, like those stretched for slaughter upon the Mexican stone of sacrifice.

Human sacrifice was so common in civilized Rome that it was not till the first century B. C. that a law was pa.s.sed expressly forbidding it--(Pliny, Hist. Nat., x.x.x, 3, 4).

CHAPTER VI

ARRIVAL OF THE SPANIARDS

The "New Birth" of the world, which characterized the end of the fifteenth century, had an enormous influence upon Spain. Her queen, the "great Catholic Isabella," had, by a.s.sisting Columbus, done much in the great discovery of the Western World. Spain speedily had substantial reward in the boundless wealth poured into her lap, and the rich colonies added to her dominion. Thus in the beginning of the sixteenth century the new consolidated Spain, formed by the union of the two kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, became the richest and greatest of all the European states.

The Spanish governors in the West Indies being ambitious of planting new colonies in the name of the Spanish King, conquest and annexation were stimulated in all directions. When Cuba and Hayti were overrun and annexed to Spain, not without much unjust treatment of the simple natives, as we have seen, they became centers of operation, whence expeditions could be sent to Trinidad or any other island, to Panama, to Yucatan, or Florida, or any other part of the continent. After the marvelous experience of Grijalva in Yucatan, then considered an island, and his report that its inhabitants were quite a civilized community compared with the natives of the isles, Velasquez, the Governor of Cuba, resolved at once to invade the new country for purposes of annexation and plunder.

Velasquez prepared a large expedition for this adventure, consisting of eleven ships with more than 600 armed men on board; and after much deliberation chose Fernando Cortes to be the commander. Who was this Cortes, destined by his military genius and unscrupulous policy to be comparable to Hannibal or Julius Caesar among the ancients, and to Clive or Napoleon Bonaparte among the moderns? Velasquez knew him well as one of his subordinates in the cruel conquest of Cuba; before that Cortes had distinguished himself in Hayti as an energetic and skilled officer.

Of an impetuous and fiery temper which he had learned to keep thoroughly in command, he was characterized by that quality possessed by all commanders of superior genius, the "art of gaining the confidence and governing the minds of men." As a youth in Spain he had studied for the bar at the University of Salamanca; and in some of his speeches on critical occasions one can find certain traces of his academical training in the adroit arguments and clever appeals.

Other qualifications as an officer were his manly and handsome appearance, his affable manners, combined with "extraordinary address in all martial exercises, and a const.i.tution of such vigor as to be capable of enduring any fatigue."

Cortes on reviewing his commission from the Governor, Velasquez, was too shrewd not to be aware of the importance of his new position. The "Great Admiral," with reference to the discovery of the New World, had said: "I have only opened the door for others to enter"; and Cortes was conscious that now was the moment for that entrance. Filled with unbounded ambition he rose to the occasion.

Velasquez somewhat hypocritically pretended that the object he had in view was merely barter with the natives of New Spain--that being the name given by Grijalva to Yucatan and the neighboring country. He ordered Cortes

to impress on the natives the grandeur and goodness of his royal master; to invite them to give in their allegiance to him, and to manifest it by regaling him with such comfortable presents of gold, pearls, and precious stones as by showing their own good-will would secure his favor and protection.

Mustering his forces for the new expedition, Cortes found that he had no sailors, 553 soldiers, besides 200 Indians of the island; ten heavy guns, four lighter ones, called falconets. He had also sixteen horses, knowing the effect of even a small body of cavalry in dealing with savages. On February 18, 1519, Cortes sailed with eleven vessels for the coast of Yucatan.