Thomas also highlights An insightful, well-researched and wide-ranging history of the Spanish conquest of Aztec Mexico. Thomas also describes how anxious Montezuma became about the foreign visitors and the myth of Quetzalcoatl. A thorough, readable and engaging work. Nov 09, Enrique rated it it was amazing. Conquest detailed how the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was possible. With a good glimpse of the context and day-to-day life. For example how was to be a woman or a child between Mexicas very few details we have about this.
What they eat, how they eat, what eat the Spaniards, what they do, what they believed, how they endure in a difficult enterprise. Of course, Cortes had luck, a lot of luck: they succeded in acting boldly and swiftly. But the superiority of Spaniards to kill has no question: Conquest detailed how the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was possible.
But the superiority of Spaniards to kill has no question: they can kill a lot and quickly. Mexicas survived, and their loyalty and endurance were formidable. Even the women fighting in a street war. Mexicas didn't have the luck of the Incas that had the Andean mountains. Without a doubt, they had finished the Spaniards if they could control the horses, the most lethal weapon of the Spaniards.
The author made a wonderful work and gives you also a touch of the history, architecture, customs, and political situation of both empires. Jul 24, El-Jahiz rated it it was amazing. So good!! Feb 28, Dan rated it liked it.
And since they speak Spanish in Mexico, I figured the Spanish won out in the end. But I was a little short on the details. I read this book to try and learn what happened. And I did! As far as narrative histories goes, this one is pretty impressive.
The first pages or so introduce the Aztec and Spanish civilizations as the existed before they discovered one another. And then it's off to the conquesting, as Cortez reaches Mexico and sets about toppling the Aztec empire.
The really interesting part of the book is learning how heavily Cortez relied on the Aztecs enemies in his efforts. I suppose it was all over for pre-contact Mexican civilizations once smallpox shows up, but it's interesting to wonder what would have happened had the various groups of Indians not been so focused on short term gain. Anyhow, this book is really informative if, like me, you know nothing about the subject.
I'd give it four stars for contect, but I docked it a star because I found the writing dry at times and it was a bit hard to get through in parts Oh Bookface! Why don't you let me give half stars? For anyone interested in the subject it's well worth the effort.
May 06, Ed Mestre rated it it was amazing. From Bernal Diaz' eyewitness account to Prescott's classic 19th century tome it was a story well worth revisiting. But was there anything really new to learn? The cover of this book said there was. The research of this book, including newly discovered documents, is simply awesome.
He brings a multi-sided perspective that is not just the European point of view. Details, details, details that continued to have me saying to myself "I never knew that".
Thomas is not shy to say when he thinks some source is biased or exaggerated. This may be a good start for the source material. View 1 comment. May 22, Steve Bennett rated it it was amazing. Fascinating history of the destruction or more accurately sharp decline of the Aztec culture brought on by Cortes' invasion. Fortunately the book depicts all persons involved whether Aztecs, Spanish or Tlaxcalian as fully human, with both good and bad attributes.
The book just as powerfully depicts the beauty that was lost with the downfall of the Aztecs. I absolutely loved this book--one of my favorite history books ever. To be honest though, the book is very long and loses its compass and i Fascinating history of the destruction or more accurately sharp decline of the Aztec culture brought on by Cortes' invasion.
To be honest though, the book is very long and loses its compass and interest in a couple places, but overall, excellent times five.
Gains a point or two because a woman who saw me with the book was amazed that I read such books for pure enjoyment--she thought I was reading it for colege or something. So well worth reading--or just carrying with you on the subway. Oct 27, Kyle Sullivan rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction , favorites. Easily one of the greatest accounts of the conquest of old Mexico ever written. Not only are there newly discovered sources shining an unexpected light on centuries-old accounts, not only does the author display a finely tuned sensitivity towards both the bias of past historians and the massive cultural gulf between the Mexica and the Castilians, but the author is also a damn fine writer.
This book is a riveting tale, a page-turner. Hugh Thomas has done humanity a great justice here Exceptional. Hugh Thomas has done humanity a great justice here. This book is about an INSANE, mind-boggling, unforgettable, dumbfounding, bizarre, heartbreaking event that will electrify you. You won't be able to put it down. It is difficult to comprehend that these events happened, that these people existed Witness the birth of the West. An equally interesting manifestation was the tradition of long speeches, huehuetlatolli, "words of the old men", learned by heart as was the poetry for public occasions, and covering a vast number of themes, usually affording the advice that temperance was best.
Nahuatl was an oral language. But the Mexica, like the other peoples in the valley, used pictographs and ideograms for writing. Names of persons -- for example, Acamapichtli "handful of reeds" or Miahuaxochitl "turquoise maize flower" could always be represented by the former.
Perhaps the Mexica were moving towards something like the syllabic script of the Maya. Even a development on that scale would not have been able to express the subtleties of their speech. Yet Nahuatl was, as the Castilian philologist, Antonio de Nebrija had, in the s, described Castilian, "a language of empire". Appropriately, the literal translation of the word for a ruler, tlatoani, was "spokesman": he who speaks or, perhaps, he who commands huey tlatoani, emperor, was "high spokesman".
Mexican writers could also express elegiac melancholy in a way which seems almost to echo French poetry of the same era: I am to pass away like a faded flower My fame will be nothing, my renown on earth will vanish.
Nahuatl, its foremost modern scholar has passionately said, "is a language which should never die". Beautiful painted books usually called codices recorded the possession of land, as of history, with family trees and maps supporting the inclination of the ancient Mexicans to be litigious. The importance of this side of life can be gathered from the , sheets of bark paper regularly sent as tribute to "the storehouses of the ruler of Tenochtitlan".
The politics of the empire were happily guaranteed by the arrangements for imperial succession. Though normal inheritance customarily passed from father to son, a new emperor, always of the same family as his predecessor, was usually his brother, or cousin, who had performed well in a recent war.
In the selection of a new ruler, about thirty lords, together with the kings of Texcoco and Tacuba, acted as an electoral college. No succession so decided seems to have been challenged, even if sometimes there had been rival candidates. Vestiges of this method of election can be detected by the imaginative in modern methods of selecting the President of Mexico.
Disputes were avoided since each election of a ruler was accompanied by the nomination of four other leaders, who in theory would remain in their places throughout the reign of an emperor, and of whom one would become the heir. No doubt the actual duties of these officials "Killer of Men", "Keeper of the House of Darkness" had become detached from the titles just as the "Chief Butler of the King" had ceased in Castile to have much to do with the provision of wine.
The system of succession varied in nearby cities: in most of them, the ruler was hereditary in the family of the monarch, though in some places the kingship did not always fall to the eldest son. In Texcoco primogeniture was the rule.
Yet there is nothing to prove that in fact they did not die from natural causes. The Mexican emperor stood for, and concerned himself with, the external face of the empire.
Internal affairs were ultimately directed by a deputy emperor, a cousin, the cihuacoatl, a title which he shared with that of a great goddess, and whose literal translation, "woman snake", connected him with the feminine side of divinity. The word gives an inadequate picture of his multifarious duties.
Probably in the beginning this official was the priest of the goddess whose name he had. The internal life of Tenochtitlan was stable. It was in practice managed by an interlocking network of something between a clan, a guild and a district, known as the calpulli, a word about whose precise nature every generation of scholars has a new theory, only agreeing that it indicated a self-governing unit, and that it held land which its members did not own, but used.
It was probably an association of linked extended families. In several calpultin that being the plural style families had the same professions. Thus featherworkers mostly lived in Amantlan, a district which may once have been an independent village.
Each calpulli had its own gods, priests, and traditions. Marriage celebrated in old Mexico with as much ceremonial as in Europe outside the calpulli, though not impossible, was unusual. The calpulli was the body which mobilised the Mexica for war, for cleaning streets, and for attending festivals. Farmers of land which had been granted by the calpulli gave a proportion of the crops perhaps a third to that body for delivery to the imperial administration.
Through the calpulli, the farmer heard the requests, or the orders, of the Emperor. There were perhaps as many as eighty of these in Tenochtitlan. Earlier, the leader, the calpullec, had apparently been elected but, by the fifteenth century, that office had become hereditary and lifelong.
He too had a council of elders to consult, just as the Emperor had his more formally contrived advisers. The most powerful calpulli was that in the suburb known as Cueopan, where there lived the so-called long-distance merchants, the pochteca. These had a bad name among Mexica: they seemed to be "the greedy, the well-fed, the covetous, the niggardly But they were officially praised: "men who, leading the caravans of bearers, made the Mexican state great".
Knowing that they were the object of envy, they were secretive. They served the Mexica as spies: telling the Emperor the strengths, the weaknesses and the wealth of the places which they saw on their journeys.
These merchants, who imported Tenochtitlan's raw materials, as well as the luxury goods from both the temperate zone and the tropics, antedated the empire in their organisation. Much of their work consisted of the exchange of manufactured objects for raw materials: an embroidered cloak for jade; or a gold jewel for tortoiseshells used as spoons for cocoa.
These great merchants lived without ostentation, dressed badly, and wore their hair down to their waists.
Yet they had many possessions. They were even referred to by the Emperor as his "uncles"; and their daughters were sometimes concubines of monarchs.
Important though the merchants were, the supremacy of the Mexica in the valley and beyond had been won by their soldiers. These warriors were both well organised and numerous: the rulers were said to have waited till their population was large before challenging the Tepanecs, to whom they had previously been subject, in Boys in Mexico were prepared for war from birth in a way which both Spartans and Prussians would have found congenial.
At baptisms the process of naming a child included the use of water sprinkled on the infant, and the placing of water over the heart, so the Christian word is appropriate the midwife, taking the male child from the mother, would announce that he "belongs to the battlefield, there in the centre, in the middle of the plains".
Male children's umbilical cords were buried in places facing where the enemy might be expected. The weapons of war were present too at christenings: the bow and arrow, the sling, the stone-headed wooden spear. Those weapons, along with the club and the macuauhuitl, a two-edged sword of black obsidian blades set in oak they cut "like a razor from Tolosa", one conquistador would say , had given these armies their victories.
The sign glyph for government in Nahuatl was a depiction of a bow and arrow, a round shield of tightly arranged feathers on a wooden, or cane, backing , and a throwing stick atlatl, used to launch spears -- at fish as well as at men. The best cloaks and the richest jewels were obtained as prizes for valour, not by purchase. Any male who failed to respond to the call to go to war lost all status, even if he were the son of the Emperor "he who does not go to war will not consort with the brave" was a Spanish chronicler's formulation of the principle.
Promotion in the army and hence a social rise generally depended on capturing a specific number of captives: an event consummated by special insignia. Membership of the knightly orders, the "jaguars" and the "eagles", was a supreme distinction obtained by the brave.
The costumes of these orders, and indeed all the war costumes, ridiculous though they seemed to Europeans, were intended to terrify, by playing on the nerves of enemies.
Full-feathered constructions on bamboo frames were strapped to captains' backs, while feather-decked heads of animals, sometimes worn as part of a full animal skin, completed the psychological warfare of armies whose first aim was to inspire fear, and so secure surrender without conflict.
The colossal Mexican sculptures, such as that of the great Coatlicue, for which there was no precedent in earlier empires in the valley, had the same purpose. There had been so many conflicts that war, not agriculture, seemed the main occupation of the ancient Mexica: "if war is not going on, the Mexica consider themselves idle," the Emperor Montezuma I had remarked.
For, as poets insisted, "a battle is like a flower". It must sometimes have looked like that. Wow There was a lot to this chapter of history than I had ever realized All of the contextual information on both the Mexica and the Spanish led to a greater understanding of the opposing forces The background on Cortes was especially enlightening it s much clearer why he was so determined to conquer Tenochtitlan.
At first consideration, the mere girth of this book is daunting Opened, though, it is an amazing glance into a civilization snuffed out in its prime It s got it all descriptions of the land, the Aztecs, the governing systems of the Mexica, battles, blood, gold and, of course, Cortez the conquerer Recommended for history buffs with time to burn.
Interminable account overstuffed with unreadable people and place names but short on maps and pictures seems to take as long to read as it took Cortes to conquer The weighty writing never conveys the majesty and mystery of the historical events described.
Still the author s conclusion of Cortes s audacity is well proven. I liked some of the detail that I gleaned from the book, but at a lot of points the detail really bogged me down Plus I really needed maps showing who went where how The sections that set up the mental state of both the Spaniards and the Mexica were very good, so that saved the book for me from being a totally dry volume.
This was a fantastic tour de force, a book covering, with some delicacy, the destruction of an entire nation The book itself is large, with significant depth, but all I remember of reading it was the joy, how quick a read it was This is historic storytelling at its highest point, its most erudite. Detailed, but dry. This is a history book written by a historian It deals with one of the most stunning adventures ever experienced It does this in the very matter of fact third person narration of a historian Granted Hugh grant is an historian, it is what should be expected.
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