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Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend review – a revolutionary history of the Aztecs
A famous narrative turned on its head – how the Spanish conquistadors, not the Aztecs, were driven by bloodlustIn the summer of 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer viewed a sampling of the treasures the conquistador Hernán Cortés had recently shipped to Europe from the land that would later be called Mexico. In his diary, Dürer enthused about a golden sun “a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size”, plus “all kinds of wonderful objects”. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.”The awe with which Europeans at first beheld the civilisation of the people who would be known as the Aztecs – they called themselves the Mexica – would not last long. They would later be remembered mainly through images of hearts torn from living bodies with obsidian blades and corpses tumbling down bloody-stepped pyramids, as a people ruled by ritualised bloodlust, trapped in a rigid fatalism, easily conquered by more agile newcomers from across the sea. Moctezuma, the story goes, mistook Cortés for a god whose return had long been prophesied, and surrendered his empire without a fight. Continue reading...
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Mexico archaeologists reveal tale of cannibalism and reprisal from conquest
A convoy of Spaniards and allies was ritually sacrificed in 1520 at Tecoaque – ‘the place...
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How Aztecs told history
For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history...
