Don’t call us traitors: descendants of Cortés’s allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire:
When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots.
Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernán Cortés’ tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire.
Now, as Mexico marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán on Friday, the role of the Tlaxcalans in the conquest is being reconsidered.
Many historians argue that without the participation of the Tlaxcalans and other indigenous soldiers, Tenochtitlán might never have fallen to the Spanish.
As a reminder, the Aztecs, or Mexica, were known for child sacrifice as described in Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas:
What was necessary, in the meantime, was a suitable appeasement of Tlaloc, the rain god. He had to be given food, precious objects, people, chlidren (small, like the little Tlalocs who were believed to wait on the chief god of that name), in a series of festivals. The children had to cry, in order to indicate to the god exactly what was required; and to achieve this, their nails were often drawn out and thrown into the lake monster Ahuitzol, who usually lived from the nails of drowned persons.
As I said, and still do, that was a culture that needed to be put down.
An interpretation of the history that doesn’t get much play because it does not conform with what the cool kids say is that the Aztec was at the end of its time anyway, with a feckless leader and surrounded by subjugated peoples chafing at the demands of the Mexica. Including some tribes who used copper instead of stone knives. If it hadn’t been the Spanish, some leader would have arisen amongst the other tribes and united enough of them to topple the Aztec Empire.
Of course, how they would have dealt with the (later) arriving Spanish is another matter to speculate.
(Link via Instapundit.)
