The Dark History of the Aztec Empire

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The Aztecs cut out an estimated 80,000 human hearts at the dedication of the Templo Mayor in 1487. Four days, four nights, four lines of victims stretching from the pyramid steps out into the city.
The Aztecs cut out an estimated 80,000 human hearts at the dedication of the Templo Mayor in 1487. Four days, four nights, four lines of victims stretching from the pyramid steps out into the city. This is the dark history of the empire the conquistadors found, the cosmology that drove it, and the smallpox that ended it. The Five Suns cosmology explains why the Aztecs believed the universe required blood to keep functioning, and what their priests calculated as the daily quota. The Flower Wars were ritualized warfare with Tlaxcala designed to capture sacrifice victims, not territory, with named tlatoani and named campaigns. Tenochtitlan in 1487 saw Ahuizotl's dedication of the renovated Templo Mayor, the four day mass sacrifice, and the eyewitness Nahuatl sources. Cortés landed at Veracruz in 1519 with six hundred men against an empire of millions, and the named Indigenous allies who actually fought the war were Tlaxcala, Cempoala, and Texcoco. The smallpox plague of 1520 killed Cuitláhuac mid resistance, and archaeology shows the population collapse. The Noche Triste retreat over the causeways on June 30, 1520, and the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521, an eighty day blockade that starved the lake city out, recorded from inside in the Nahuatl language Annals of Tlatelolco. Drawn from the Florentine Codex, Bernal Díaz, the Annals of Tlatelolco, the Mendoza Codex, and modern Templo Mayor archaeology. A darker, more cosmologically rooted angle on the conquest that textbooks soften.

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Themen in »The Dark History of the Aztec Empire«

Aztec human sacrifice Templo Mayor dedication Five Suns cosmology Flower Wars Tlaxcala Moctezuma Florentine Codex smallpox conquest Aztec Noche Triste causeway

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