Transcript
Paul Cooper (0:16)
On the night of 21st February, 1978, on a residential street in Mexico City, a group of workmen were digging through the hard asphalt of the road. They worked for the Mexico City Electric Company, and their job was to run cables across the street and through the whole neighborhood. At first, it seemed like just another day at work. But then, just over two metres into the earth, their diggers struck something. It was a enormous piece of stone, and as they excavated further around it, they saw that this stone was carved in ornate and intricate patterns. They quickly notified the archaeologists at Mexico's National Institute of History and Anthropology, and all construction work in the area was stopped. Flocks of archaeologists descended, and excavations began to discover what this remarkable stone was. The more they uncovered, the clearer the picture became. This was a carved stone disk measuring over three meters in diameter. On its surface was the image of a woman, a goddess, naked and decapitated, surrounded by snakes and skulls and wearing a crown of feathers. This was a depiction of a God named Coyolxauqui, who was worshipped by the ancient indigenous people of Mexico, who today we call the Aztecs. The discovery of this stone sparked an outburst of interest in what else might lie beneath the surface of Mexico City. The President of Mexico issued a decree ordering the entire city block to be demolished and excavated. In all, 13 buildings in the neighbourhood were torn down. And the more they uncovered, the more excited the archaeologists became. They found that the stone disc had been placed at the base of an enormous set of stairs, which led up to a platform on which the ruins of a great pyramid once sat. This was the main temple of a city that had once stood beneath the streets of Mexico City and had been completely erased by time. This city was called Tenochtitlan, and it was once the heart of a powerful empire. The excavations in Mexico City would go on for another four years, and every day its people would come and watch as the ruins of a buried civilization rose out of the familiar streets. As they watched, many of them must have wondered, who were these people who once lived on the land beneath our feet? How had they built such phenomenal constructions of such incredible craftsmanship? And how could such a large and advanced society simply disappear beneath the earth? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the Time who witnessed the end of their world. In this episode, I want to look at one of history's most incredible stories. That's the rise and the dramatic fall of the Aztec Empire. I want to explore how the Aztecs overcame the odds to create one of the America's largest indigenous empires. I want to explore how they reacted to one of the most astonishing and terrifying encounters that any society has ever experienced. And I want to tell the story of what happened to cause the dramatic and final end of their age. Up until around 66 million years ago, the planet Earth was a very different place to the world we know today. In those days, its surface was home to enormous reptiles known today as dinosaurs. If we could walk across the continent of North America in those days, we would see a landscape covered with ferns and swamps dotted with enormous primeval pine forests. Small winged pterodactyls flitted in the air. And enormous dinosaurs like the horned Triceratops traveled over the plains. In the forest, fearsome packs of velociraptors hunted for their prey. And huge carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus lumbered among the trees. But it's in the sky that perhaps the most impressive of these creatures could be seen. Quetzalcoatlus was the largest flying animal ever known. It had wingspans of over 15 meters, larger than a modern fighter plane. Because of their enormous size, they rarely landed and spent most of their lives soaring in the warm up currents rising off the sea, making migratory journeys back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, which was then only about half the distance across. And then one day, a new star appeared in the sky. It would have been dim at first, but as the days went by, it got brighter. Only a day or two would have passed before this light would look like a second sun. Then a blinding flash would have lit the skies of the entire western hemisphere in less than the time it takes to blink. An asteroid measuring 11 kilometers across, or about the size of Mount Everest, impacted the Earth's surface right on the coast of Southern Mexico. The energy released was around 100 million megatons, or the equivalent of the entire world's nuclear arsenal being detonated all at once about 15,000 times over. The Earth's surface around the impact would have rippled like water under a magnitude 10 earthquake. The asteroid itself was instantly vaporized and sublimed into a core of superheated plasma over 10,000 degrees centigrade, or twice the surface temperature of the sun. Scorching winds of more than 1,000 kilometers an hour blasted out over the continent and tsunamis of up to 200 meters high thundered into the coasts and washed over the land for distances of 100 km. Wildfires burst into light around the world as burning debris began to rain down on the Earth and plumes of vaporized rock dust cloaked the planet in a dark shroud that blocked out the sun for years. In parts of the Earth, pellets of glass began to rain from the sky. Much of the life on planet Earth would not survive this event. All large dinosaurs quickly fell into extinction. The Tyrannosaurs and the Triceratops, as well as that enormous flying creature, Quetzalcoatlus. Over half of the plant species in North America were wiped out. And for years afterwards, only mushrooms and other fungi could grow, feeding on the decaying matter of the world's forests. Only small land animals like snakes, lizards and snails survived, many of them by burrowing into the ground. Crawling among the dust and ash of the world's ruins were also the small rat sized mammals from which every person you know today is ultimately descended. Today, the enormous circle of the impact crater can still be detected around the town of Chicxulub in southern Mexico. The crater is 150 km wide and gouged a hole several kilometers deep into the Earth's crust. Over the next 66 million years or so, the Earth would undergo some dramatic changes. The continents of the Americas had already been drifting away from the landmass of Europe and Africa for over a hundred million years as the Earth's plates ground and cracked around each other. If you went far enough back, it would have been possible to walk from Nigeria to Brazil, from Morocco to New York, or from Spain to Canada. But now the world was split into two great land masses. One known as Afro Eurasia, containing Africa, Europe and Asia, and the other known as the Americas. Driven by the powerful currents of molten rock that circulate in the planet's mantle, the Earth's crust tears apart in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, the north and South American continents move westwards, all at about the rate your fingernails grow. Since the time of the Chicxulub asteroid, the width of the Atlantic Ocean has grown by about 1300 kilometers. The West coast of the Americas, from Alaska to California, down the coast of Mexico, through Colombia, Peru and Chile are the cutting edge of their continental plates. As they forge west, they force the Pacific Ocean floor down beneath them, crumpling as they go and forcing up huge ranges like the Rocky Mountains in North America and the Andes in the south. The titanic forces involved in this process Mean the whole length of the continental coast is a hotspot for earthquakes and for volcanoes. The landscape of what is today Mexico is dominated by these volcanoes. In the south of the country, a range known as the Trans Mexican Volcanic Belt has burst up over the last 20 million years, forming a dramatic range of snow capped peaks. Between these mountains, a highland plateau has formed where solidified lava flows have washed over one another. Today, this is known as the Valley of Mexico. The Valley of Mexico is a dramatic landscape. It sits at an altitude of over 2000 meters, while the active volcanoes that form its walls can soar up to 6,000 meters. The land here is fertile and water is plentiful. Rain and meltwater from the mountain snows flow down the sides of the valleys and into rivers, gathering in the floor of the basin in an enormous lake known as Lake Texcoco. Lake Texcoco was huge. It was about 40 km in width and about 80 km in length, bordered by a marshland of reeds and rushes. In winter, migratory birds from as far as Canada also came here to enjoy the warmer weather. In the 66 million years since the Chicxulub asteroid, the small rat like creatures that survived had also undergone a few changes. By this time, they had transformed generation by generation, as gradually and unstoppably as the continents. They had now diverged into the huge variety of mammals that we know today. Horses evolved in North America about 3 1/2 million years ago. And in times of low sea levels, they crossed over into eastern Russia, spreading from there across Asia and the rest of the Afro Eurasian landmass. Other animals crossed in the other direction. Giant Colombian mammoths, creatures weighing over 10 tons walked from Asia into the Americas and spread down as far as southern Mexico. The last time these sea levels dropped was during the last Ice age that began around 33,000 years ago. During this time, a land bridge emerged between the continents of Asia and the Americas. And humans used this bridge to follow where the mammoths had gone before crossing from Asia into the Americas. They travelled south from there, setting up Stone Age cultures wherever they went. And they arrived in the Valley of Mexico, probably around 12,000 years ago. Around this time, the horse went extinct in America due to a combination of changing climate, collapsing ecosystems, and possibly human hunting for food. And then, around 10,000 years ago, the last Ice Age came to an end. Sea levels rose and the land bridge between Asia and the Americas sank back beneath the waves forever. Horses would never return by natural means to the Americas. The human populations of the two sides of the world were now Separated. One day in the future, they would meet again. And this is the story of how that happened. The earliest humans in the Valley of Mexico were hunter gatherers. They found vast herds of mammoths roaming the pine forests bordering Lake Texcoco, and over the next millennia, hunted them to extinction. Today, the earth of the valley is still littered with their bones. Agriculture began around the lake about 7,000 years ago, with humans following the natural patterns of the lake's flood cycle. Various cultures made their home here over the millennia, coalescing into larger and larger settlements. And by the year 1200 BC, a number of large villages began to rise around the valley to the north. The lands were tough and arid, and if you traveled far enough, you'd reach the baking deserts of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Life in the desert was hard. And so, over history, countless migrating tribes and nomadic groups traveled south into the Valley of Mexico, where water was plentiful and food easier to find. So while young cities began to rise up on the shores of Lake Texcoco, wave after wave of new coming people also arrived. The population of the valleys swelled, cultures intermingled, and more complicated forms of society began to take shape. In the early centuries of the first millennium, the valley began to be home to some of the first cities. And of these, one would soon rise to unprecedented size and power. This city was called Teotihuacan. We've encountered Teotihuacan before, in our third episode on the Mayans. Its people built towering pyramids and stately processional avenues in their capital, monopolizing a kind of green obsidian that could be found nowhere else. Its influence spread far and wide, reaching down into Central America and interfering in the politics of Mayan kingdoms. This city had an enormous influence on the region, but we know virtually nothing about its people, who they were, what language they spoke, or even what happened to them. Archaeology shows that around the year 550 AD, the entire city, all its temples and palaces, were burned. The city went into a sharp decline and its towering pyramids fell into ruin. But its cultural influence would live on. Teotihuacan played a similar role in Mexico as the ancient Greeks did for Europeans. They inspired new cultures and left a mark on their religion, society and art. But if Teotihuacan's people were the Greeks, then the Romans of this region were the Toltecs. After the collapse of Teotihuacan and the fall of the Mayan cities in the south, the Toltec empire was the dominant force in Central America, ruling from the city of Tula, just As Rome openly admired the culture of the Greeks, the Toltecs modeled themselves on the great fallen empire of Teotihuacan. They spoke a language called Nahuatl, which would quickly become the predominant language of the region. And it's clear they were outstanding craftsmen and artisans. Their artistic abilities were so famed that in Nahuatl, the word Toltec would come to be used simply to mean artist. But before long, for reasons that we don't entirely understand, the city of Tula was also abandoned, and the Toltec empire followed Teotihuacan into ruin. And this is where our story really begins. I think it's worth taking a moment here to talk about the sources that we have about life in the time of the Aztecs. The word Aztec is not a word those people would have used about themselves. It's a later invention. They would have called themselves Mexica. And we actually have a wide variety of sources to draw from, many of them written by Mexica people who actually witnessed life before contact with Europeans. But one problem for historians is that these eyewitness accounts were all written after contact and most several decades after the events. One of the main sources for these years was the work of the Spanish churchman Bernardo de Sahagun, who some have called the first anthropologist. He arrived in Mexico in the year 1529 and spent the next 50 years learning the language of Nahuatl, as well as studying the culture and history of its indigenous Mexica people. In the 1550s, 30 years after contact, he gathered together as many older Mexica people as he could find who still remembered the age of the Aztecs. He wrote down their memories and collected them in an extraordinary book called A General History of the Things of New Spain, or the Historia General. The most famous section of the Historia General is known as the Florentine Codex. It's a manuscript consisting of 2,400 pages organized into 12 books and containing over 2500 illustrations drawn by native artists. Bernardo de Sahagun recorded the text in both Spanish and Nahuatl. On this episode, we're joined by Jan Garcia, a native speaker of Huautesca, Nahuatl from Mexico, who will help us to hear the sounds of the Florentine Codex in its original Nahuatl. The Florentine Codex is an incredible account of the culture, religion, society and history of the Aztec people. But it's important to remember that it was created under the supervision of a European priest who had his own set of agendas. The people he interviewed were remembering events and details from A distance of many years, and it's impossible to know how much they were telling Sahagun what they thought he wanted to hear. This all complicates it as a reliable source. Another key character in recording the Mexica experience was a Dominican monk called Fray Diego Duran. Duran was rare among the Europeans, most of whom never learned the indigenous languages of Mexico. He was raised from an early age by servants who spoke Nahuatl and grew up a fluent speaker. He wrote a book called the History of the Indies of New Spain, but he died without it ever being published, since he faced fierce criticism during his life for what other Spaniards saw as his excessive sympathy for the indigenous Mexicans. Towards the end of the 16th century, a handful of indigenous men also wrote down their histories. Don Fernando de Alva Ixlil Xochitl is one example. He was descended from the last king of the Aztec city of Texcoco. And although far removed from the events described, he had access to some Aztec books that had been kept a secret from the Europeans. And so these are the sources we have to rely on, each one of them potentially flawed and fragmentary. As a result, trying to find out the truth of this period can seem like navigating a hall of mirrors, reflections of reflections leading us around in circles. But combining these accounts with archaeological evidence does allow us to piece together some of the major events of the Aztecs rise to power. Our story begins around the year 1300 AD and by this time the Valley of Mexico looked like a very different place. The vast ruins of Teotihuacan and Toltec civilization could be seen all around, crumbling into the earth. The dozens of small villages around the lake had by this time grown into powerful city states in their own right. Each one had a set of tall pyramid shaped temples at their hearts. A thick traffic of canoes, some of them holding up to 30 people, crisscrossed the lake, bringing trade and goods to the markets in each of these cities. And the political situation had changed too. In the vacuum left by the Toltecs, a people known as the Tepanecs had grown to exert power over the other cities of the valley. They ruled from the city of Azcabotzalco, which rose on the western bank of the lake. This early form of empire had grown to an impressive size. At this point, at least 40 other cities paid tribute to them and sent soldiers to fight in their armies. It was at this time, around 1300 AD, that a new band of migrants arrived in the valley. These were what the people here called Chichimecas a word that in Nahuatl means barbarian or savage. And it was usually applied to the groups of wandering nomads who often arrived in the valley from the northern deserts. This group claimed to have come from a land which they had been forced to flee, but which no one else had ever heard of. They called this mysterious place Aztlan. They said they had been wandering in the deserts for many years, searching for a new place to call home. They called themselves the Mexica, but today we call them by a name derived from their mythical homeland, Aztlan. These were the people who would one day be called the Aztecs. We can imagine how these weary desert travelers must have felt when they crested the hills and saw the wide, green valley of Mexico stretch out before them. They would have seen the cities scattered out around the lake, glittering like jewels. And they must have thought that surely somewhere in this bountiful place they could find a place to call home. But they were soon to be disappointed. The steady flow of people migrating south into the valley had increased the population density. Virtually all of the land in the valley had already been claimed by one city or another. And wherever they went, the city dwellers sent them away. Part of the reason for this is that the Mexica seem to have been a rough bunch. They didn't wear the embroidered clothes of the city dwellers or have any of their sophisticated manners. And their years of fighting to survive in the wilderness had made them tough. They worshipped a fierce God, a warlike deity known as Huitzilopochtli, whose name meant hummingbird of the south. While none of the valley's city dwellers would let the Mexica settle down in their lands, they did see one obvious use for them. Several cities offered to give the Mexica food in exchange for their services as mercenaries. And so this nomadic people wandered about the valley, agreeing to fight for whoever would pay the most and dying in other people's wars. But they must have still yearned for a real place that they could call home. After 25 years or so of fighting for other people, the Mexica must have realized that no one was going to give them a home. They would have to build one for themselves. But there was only one last piece of uninhabited land left in the whole valley. It was a place so inhospitable that none of the other peoples had even bothered to claim it. It was nothing but a marshy strip of land lying some way out in the water off the western shore of Lake Texcoco. The Mexica built canoes and paddled out to this lonely stretch of land. There they managed to build a number of small huts and a simple altar made of reeds to their God, Huitzilopochtli. It was an incredibly humble start, but it was theirs. And although they were not to know it then, this swampy village would grow in the space of only 200 years to become one of the world's greatest cities. The Mexica named this settlement after one of their legendary kings who had led them wandering through the desert, A man who had been named Tenochtit. And so this place would be called Tenochtitlan. The city of Tenochtitlan expanded gradually at first from those original few huts. The Mexica soon used up all the space on their island. But with their population growing, they would need to come up with a solution. They began to build artificial islands out in the lake. They would paddle out into the water on canoes and drive tall stakes into the shallow lakebed, then pile earth in around them until the ground rose out of the water. Over the years, these new islands spread out from the centre in a chaotic pattern connected by bridges and canals. The island city of Tenochtitlan began to grow. If you returned to see Tenochtitlan a century later, in the early decades of the 1400s, the city would have been unrecognizable. It would have looked something like Venice. The city was now joined to the mainland by three great causeways branching out to the north, south, and west. These were broken in the middle by wooden drawbridges, which were raised at night for security. To the east, the great expanse of the lake stretched out. Although on a clear day, it was possible to just about see the other shore and the city of Texcoco that rose there. Tenochtitlan was surrounded by island gardens called chinampas. The Mexica built these by weaving together sticks and reeds to make underwater fences, which were then filled in with fertile earth. They used these island gardens to grow all kinds of crops, from maize, beans, and squashes, to tomatoes, chili peppers, and all kinds of decorative flowers. The farmers paddled between these gardens in their canoes, carrying sprouted plants and tools and bringing back the crops in baskets. Since a number of mountain springs fed into Lake Texcoco, its water had an unusually high salt content, and so the production of salt was another key industry of the area. 1 16th century Spanish observer named Pedro Martir describes seeing the Mexica engage in this practice.