Military history

INGA CLENDINNEN

Aztecs

The wars between Islam and Christianity were certainly a conflict of cultures; different as they were, however, those cultures shared much in common: belief in a single God, omnipotent yet benevolent, and in the duty to obey God’s law, revealed in written form and interpreted by His earthly representative. Christians and Muslims found it easy to hate each other; but they did so because each regarded the other as heretics, perverters of the true monotheistic faith. The strictly pious of both religions, moreover, were troubled by the violence into which their differences drew them. Christians accepted that the taking of human life was a wrong that could be justified only by pursuit of some higher good. Muslims shared a similar view, acknowledging a duty of protection to unbelievers who submitted to Islamic authority, even if they persisted in religious error.

The Spaniards who crossed the Atlantic at the end of the fifteenth century quickly encountered a culture whose religion resembled theirs in no way whatsoever. The Aztecs of Mexico had created a civilization which, in its power, wealth and sophisticated political structure, greatly impressed the invaders.

Its religion, and the warfare that served it, both baffled and disgusted them, for the Aztec gods were in no way benevolent, requiring a daily sacrifice of human victims to placate them. The qualities which Christians and Muslims alike sought to achieve in the practice of their ideal of the religious life — humility, charity and ultimately self-sacrifice - were not those the Aztecs believed their gods wanted at all. Blood sacrifice was the means of pleasing their deities, whose appetite for human suffering and death was insatiable.

Only in one respect did the religion of the Aztecs and those of the monotheists of the Old World resemble each other, and that was in respect for the nobility of death freely accepted for a religious purpose. Even so there were fundamental differences. Christians venerated believers who preferred an unresisting death to denying God. Muslims commemorated warriors who died in the holy war against the infidel. Aztecs thought the most noble form of human behaviour was to co-operate bravely in a ritual form of combat that would lead, slowly and painfully, to their own killing. Inga Clendinnen, an Australian historian, describes Aztec ritual combat in an account that embraces a description of a wider encounter between Old and New World cultures uncomprehending in the extent of their dissimilarity.

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The killing of selected warrior captives, usually accompanied by torture, was unremarkable among Amerindians, as the Huron ‘burning’ of the Seneca warrior indicates [this is described in the introduction to the Ragueneau extract, pp. 92-3], but the process presumably varied in accord with different understandings of war and the consequent relationship between captor and captive. In Tenochtitlán notable captives, or those taken in a major campaign, were presented before the idol of Huitzilopochtli and then displayed at the royal palace before Moctezoma, while speeches were made on the death they would die. The warrior from a Nahua city participant in Mexica understandings of war was particularly cherished, being tended by stewards in the local temple and constantly visited, adorned, and admired by his captor and the captor’s devoted entourage of local youths. Such a man presented for death before Huitzilopochtli’s shrine crowning the great temple pyramid ideally leapt up the steps shouting the praises of his city. (That act of courage might have been made easier by the great bulk of the pyramid, which loomed so huge that a man at the base or on the long climb upwards could not see what awaited him.) Some, we are told, faltered on the stairs, and wept or fainted. They were dragged up by the priests. But, for most, pulque [alcoholic drink made from agave], anger, pride, or the narrowing existential focus of their days somehow got them through.

Mexica combat at its best was a one-to-one contest of preferably close-matched combatants, with one predestined to triumph, one to die. Given the fated outcome, and given the warrior obligation to seek and embrace the ‘flowery death’ on the field of battle or the killing stone, no shame need attach to defeat. The captive was in a deep sense the reflex of his captor, who accordingly took a tense and proprietary interest in that final performance. The quality of his own courage would be on public trial there.

Such prized captives were preferably offered at the festival of Tlacaxipeualiztli, the ‘Feast of the Flaying of Men’, on what the Spaniards thought of as the ‘gladiatorial stone’, to die after having engaged in combat with a sequence of selected Mexica warriors. The victim was tethered by the waist to a rope fastened to the centre of a round stone, about waist high, a metre and a half wide, and elevated in its turn on a platform about the height of a man. The ‘display’ element was made explicit by the procession of ‘gods’ (high priests in the regalia of their deities) who formally took their places around the small round stage. The tethered victim was given a long draught of pulque, and most ceremoniously presented with weapons: four pine cudgels for throwing, and a war club, the club being studded not with the usual shallow flint blades but with feathers. He then had to fight up to four leading Mexica warriors armed with bladed clubs, who fought from the platform, so giving the captive the advantage of height — an equivocal advantage, as we will see.

Despite the combat theme, the conditions so carefully constructed in the ‘gladiatorial’ encounter bore slight resemblance to ordinary battle. The combat with each warrior was presumably timed, so there was pressure on the Mexica warrior to perform at maximum. The victim, elevated above his opponent and released from the inhibition against killing which prevailed on the battlefield, could whirl his heavy club and strike at the head of his antagonist with unfamiliar freedom. The Mexica champions were also presented with a temptingly easy target. The victim could be disabled and brought down with one good blow to the knee or ankle, as on the battlefield. But such a blow would simultaneously abort the spectacle and end their glory, so the temptation had to be resisted. Their concern under these most taxing and public circumstances was rather to give a display of the high art of weapon handling: in an exquisitely prolonged performance to cut the victim delicately, tenderly with those narrow blades, to lace the living skin with blood (this whole process was called ‘the striping’). Finally, the victim, a slow-carved object lesson of Mexica supremacy, exhausted by exertion and loss of blood, would falter and fall, to be dispatched by the usual heart excision.

Throughout all this the captor, who had nurtured his captive with such care and pride, watched his mirrored self on public display. His warrior at last dead, the heart burnt in the eagle vessel in homage to Huitzilopochtli, the head removed for use in a priestly dance and then skewered on the appropriate skull rack, the cadaver carried to his home calpulli, the captor was given a gourd fringed with quetzal feathers and filled with the blood drawn from the welling chest cavity to carry through the city, daubing the blood on the mouths of the stone idols in all the temples. Then he returned to his own ward temple to flay and dismember the body, and to distribute the limbs in the conventional way. Later again, he watched while his kin, summoned to his home household, ate a small ritual meal of maize stew topped by a fragment of the dead warrior’s flesh, as they wept and lamented the likely fate of their own young warrior. For that melancholy ‘feast’ the captor put off his glorious captor’s garb, and was whitened, as his dead captive had been, with the chalk and feathers of the predestined victim.

The captor himself did not eat the flesh, saying, ‘Shall I perchance eat my very self?’ He had earlier, we are told, addressed his captive as his ‘beloved son’, and was addressed in turn as ‘beloved father’. A surrogate ‘uncle’ had supported the captive through his last combat, offering him his draught of pulque, sacrificing quail on his behalf, and wailing for him after his death. There has been a tendency to take the invocation of kin terms as indicative of a particular emotional response, but that claim seems ill-founded: there was slight tenderness in the Huron’s slow killing of the Seneca prisoner [see p. 92], for all the mutual use of kin terminology. Neither do we see any trace of grief for the victim in the Mexica ritual: the tears shed are shed for the victor, and his putative fate. I have written elsewhere on the ambivalence of the privileges attaching to the honour of offering one’s captive on the gladiatorial stone, and the acuteness of the psychological manipulations which blurred the boundaries of self, as the two identities were juxtaposed and overlaid. The offering warrior was projected into a terrible and enduring intimacy with his victim: having proudly tended and taunted him through the days and weeks of his captivity, and watched his own valour measured in the captive’s public display, he had seen life leave the young body and its pillaging of heart, blood, head, limbs, and skin. Then he had lent out the flayed skin to those who begged the privilege, and pulled it on over his own body as it went through its slow transformations: tightening and rotting on the living flesh; corrupting back into the earth from which it had been made. Powerful emotions must have been stirred by these extravagant and enforced intimacies with death, and more with the decay and dissolution of the self, but there is no indication that pity or grief for the victim were among them.

What of the victim? It was clearly essential for reasons sacred and secular that the warriors tethered to the stone should fight, and fight well; the spectacle and the value of the offering would collapse should they whimper and beg for a quick death. There must always have been an element of risk here, but most captives seem to have performed adequately, and some magnificently. There could have been no individual bargaining. The warrior’s life had been forfeit from the moment of his submission on the field of battle, or at least from the cutting of his warrior scalp lock. How, then, were they persuaded to fight?

In view of the uninhibited triumphing over comrades in Mexica warrior houses, I would guess warrior victims were often enough teased into anger and so to high performance, especially as ‘wrath’ was identified as the elevated state in which a warrior was suffused by sacred power. The victim was also more subtly conditioned. He had been presented by his captor to the people in a sequence of different regalia over the preceding four days at the pyramid of Xipe Totec, ‘Our Lord the Flayed One’, so coming to know the place where he was to die. He had practised the routines: on each occasion he had been forced to engage in mock combat, and then to submit to a mock heart excision, the ‘heart’ being made of unsoftened maize kernels. On his last night of life he kept vigil with his captor. His scalp lock was cut at midnight, marking his social death as warrior: he would fight not in his warrior regalia but in the whitened chalk and feathers of the sacrificial victim. It was as designated victim that he watched other men from his people, men he had known when they were alive, fight and fall on the stone, until it was his turn for his last display of maximum skill and valour. If he died well, his name would be remembered and his praises sung in the warrior houses of his home city.

The ‘rehearsals’ — the garments changed again and again, the mock combats at the stone, the mock heart excisions — doubtless reduced the individual’s psychological capacity to resist as he was led step by step down a narrowing path. We will see that same technique of conditioning by familiarization used on non-warrior victims. The pulque given the gladiator came late, and I suspect its effect was more psychological than physiological as he took the taste of the sacred drink into his mouth. But the best guarantee was the cooperation which came from common understandings. For such public deaths victims were preferably taken in a special kind of war: the ‘Flowery Wars’ initiated by the first Moctezoma. These were battles staged by mutual arrangement between the three cities of the Triple Alliance, and the three ultramontane provinces of Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo, and Cholula, solely for the mutual taking of prisoners worthy of sacrificial death. The men who fought in the Flowery Wars were men of the highest rank, and they fought against matched opponents. Their capture was in a sense a selection by the god, and perhaps borne the more stoically for that. The finest demonstrations on the gladiatorial stone depended on agreement as to the nature and the necessity of the performance itself.

If few warrior captives died under such intense scrutiny, some suffered crueller fates, and there no co-operation was assumed. Victims destined for the singularly agonizing death required for the celebration of the Fire God were tightly bound before they were cast into the fire, to be hooked out, still living but badly burned, and dispatched by the usual heart excision ... What we see in the handling of warrior victims is a pragmatic and finely adjusted balance between direct physical control (those bound victims cast into the fire), coercion, and psychological conditioning and reward. That they would die was unproblematical; it was the manner of their deaths which required management.

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