Mark Gagnon (76:27)
And it just happened like this is. He's telling him things that happened like 200 years earlier, right. So this is fresh in their mind and their writing. So they, they, they even have the, the, the Aztecs had even written down in codices. It's in the Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. They have a whole codex written down, down where you can see them. And they draw like comic books basically. And some of them even have, some of them even, even have like talking bubbles, like the way we do comic books today. Oh yeah, yeah. And it shows the Aztecs migrating from place to place until they get to the, to the Mexican Valley. So we know exactly what happened. This isn't just mythology. This really happened. So they go to Calon and they're like, come on, you got to help us. We got to like any, anything. Like our people are starving. We're not going to survive. And so the Cal, you know, king gets together with, with his people and they're like, well, what can we do? We got to do something with these guys. Are we going to kick them out again? Do we want to make enemies of them? What if, you know, they knew that the Aztecs were great warriors, but they were, like, savage and not really given a purpose, right? So kind of like wasted potential in a way. And they. And they were probably cautious of, like, well, what if someone else partners with these warrior. This roaming warrior tribe? Why don't we be the first ones to use them? So, like. Okay, okay, that's a good, good idea. All right, let's go give him this rocky outcropping in the middle of the lake, Teshcoco, which is like, it's a pile of rocks sitting up in the middle. Sitting up in the middle of the lake with no vegetation or anything. So they gave him, like, the crappiest real estate ever. So they say, okay, you guys go live out here at this site called Tenochtitlan or whatever. And it's just. It's in the middle of the lake. And what we're going to do for you is we're going to hire you guys out as mercenaries regularly to perform military operations for us. So this goes on for about two centuries and. Or maybe a century and a half, like 150 years or so. And during this time, the Aztecs are being compensated for their work, and they're being paid, and they're able to build houses and build roads and build streets, and they're kind of making this little island thing work. Like, they're bringing in stone and building up the island and then kind of lifting themselves up out of the water, right? They get more and more powerful until, I think, until, let's call it like 1350. Somewhere between 13. Yeah, probably about 1350. They've got a pretty sizable town now. Like, they've been doing this for maybe 100, 150 years or so. Pretty sizable town, growing pretty fast. And the high priest of the Aztecs goes and takes this, like, Detura mushroom rooms and glaze back, and he gets this prophecy from the God Huitz Dipotli to go offer the proposal of a dynastic marriage to the cawn princess to send. So he's a priest. He's gonna go tell the king to send the prince to go marry the cat princess. And so they follow the order of Huitzipotli. So they go the. The cat. The Aztec king goes to the Caukan king and say, look, we've had this alliance for 150 years now. We've had this alliance for 150 years now. There's other civilizations growing around the Mexican valley. You know, they may want to work with us someday. They may try to hire us or buy us out, but we don't want to have any problem with you. So let's have a dynastic marriage. I propose that my son marries your daughter and your daughter, we'll build a palace for your daughter and parts of your family to come live in Tenochtitlan. And now we can really make our city wealthy. And it'll be a part of the same kingdom. We'll be dynastically aligned. And so Kawakan, they think about it, and they come back and they're like, okay, it's time. Let's do this. So they have this huge marriage, this big marriage ceremony thing. They have this big marriage ceremony. And then the Caan princess comes back to live at Tenochtitlan. And then the priest goes to. Back to the temple, takes the detour again, and asks kuitipoli, what's your next command? And he says. He says, I want you to invite the Cain to finally come to Tenochtit titan for a ceremony. And I want you to kill the princess and fillet her and have the prince put her skin on and be dancing in a parade when the caon king arrives. And so he does that. The caon king arrives and he sees his daughter's skin being worn by the prince that. That he just married her to. And they bring, you know, at the same. It's like a. It's an ambush. They bring all the important people in, and they see him do that. They torture him to death. They sacrifice the king to Huitzipoli, and they raid the city of caon and conquer it all at once. So all of a sudden, the Aztecs control the. The Aztecs control everything. And that piece of crap property that the cause put them on, they put them in a castle, in a moat in the middle. What. That's effectively what they did, was put them in a castle, and they built the castle for the Aztecs over 150 year period, period, in the middle of a moat in an impenetrable fortress. And now the Aztecs control everything in the Mexican valley, just like that. And they're an unstoppable empire at this point that expands and absorbs everything else around them. And they did that for about 150 years. Just expanded and absorbed and just raided, pillaged, conquered, and built Mesoamerica's most impressive city ever. Like, the. The Spaniards who saw Calvican, the way that they describe it is, like, dreamlike. I mean, they had. And so we imagine the Aztecs being so savage, which they are, and they're so warlike. They're not. They're they're not very Mesoamerican at all. They're like their own thing. We think of them as Mexican, as Mesoamerican, but they're, they're. They're north of Mexico. North America is a very violent place. It breeds violent people. So it's, it's fascinating. Um, so. So anyways, we think of the Aztecs as being so savage and so warlike, but when you would go through ancient Tenochtitlan, it was like Venice, like a city sitting on top of water. Beautiful. It was so stunning that Cortez's men, when they left Tenochtitlan, and he's sitting up on his horse and his men are marching next to him, they look up at him. They're like, did we really see what we thought we saw? Is this all a dream? Like, what's the likely we're going to wake up and none of this is real? The way they described the city was that it was, like, serene and clean and, and just like perfect. The people had great hygiene. The cities were clean. The markets were full of thousands of people that had. That had, like, police and investigative forces to make sure there was no fraud, like fraudulent goods being sold in the market. 60,000 people would visit the markets in one day. They had zoos with wild animals, animals that contained the most exotic animals from all, from all around Mesoamerica. And they had. They had a zoo for birds as well. So the most exotic birds that they could find, like the quetzal bird and the condor, were being kept in these zoos. How they. I don't know if they were being kept inside nets, like open air nets, but the Spaniards described seeing these things. There was also an archaeology museum where the Aztecs had gone around Mexico. Mexico. And found ancient artifacts and drug them all the way back to Lake Tenoche or Lake Texcoco, across the bridge, like moats that led into the city and put them in museums and. And then there are these beautiful gardens with the most exotic plants and flowers from around Mexico. And there would be people standing in the gardens reading poetry and people sitting around listening. It was like a full on metropolitan area area. What.
