Just as Afonso the African was advancing across Morocco and down the African coast, another empire builder, no less ambitious and self-righteous, was aggressively expanding his Mexica empire, ruled from his island capital of Tenochtitlan. Motecuhzoma I was forty-two when he succeeded to the throne of the Mexica empire in 1440.
It was a civilization of sophisticated organization, of storytelling that was recorded in illustrations painted on to deerskin and accordion-folded books made of maguey-plant fibres, of constant war against rival cities and of voracious gods. Worshipped at monumental temples, these deities demanded human sacrifices, offered by having their still-beating hearts pulled out of their chests, their skins often donned by dancing priests. But Tenochtitlan was just one of many city states within the empire, that existed alongside a variety of polities, some autocracies, some theocracies and some semi-democracies.
As a young prince, Motecuhzoma was one of the trio that had created the Mexica empire. Around 1427, over twenty years after the death of Tamerlane, the council of Tenochtitlan had chosen the dynamic Itzcoatl – Obsidian Serpent – as ruler or
The Mexica had been restless vassals of the dominant Tapenec city state Azcapotzalco whose Speaker Tezozomoc had in a long reign conquered much of the Valley of Mexico. His death loosened the city state’s hold over the Mexica: in 1427, Itzcoatl led a coup, asserted independence, killed his pro-Azcapotzalco relatives and formed an alliance with two fellow rulers in nearby city states, Texcoco and Tlacopan. Together they defeated Azcapotzalco and secured the Valley, then they expanded outside it, fighting constant wars on the south shores of Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco. When they crushed other states, Itzcoatl burned their histories, recorded in a pictorial writing system written on codices of bark or leather, because it was ‘not wise that all the people should know the paintings’. Instead he promoted the official history of Mexica’s national god of war and sun, Huitzilopochtli, who demanded the blood of human victims. In his honour, Itzcoatl started to build the centrepiece of the city’s sacred precinct, the Great God’s House (Great Temple) dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and to Tlaloc, god of rain, each with their own shrines atop a massive stepped pyramid.
At the base of the stairway stood the round carved figure of Coyolxauhqui between two huge serpent heads, engraved with depictions of the dismemberment of the goddess which was re-enacted in sacrificial rituals annually.
The sacrifices were carried out by the priests, mainly men but also women, who blackened their faces and bodies, scarring their ears, genitals, arms and chest in autosacrificial rituals, wearing their hair long and matted with human blood that also stained their mouths and faces. The victims, slaves or prisoners, were transformed into God Impersonators, first spoiled with feasts, sex and cleansing before being led up the steps of the Great Temple by the fire priests who laid them on the sacrificial stone. ‘Four men stretched [the victim] out, grasping arms and legs’; the fire priest raised the knife ‘and then when he had split open the chest, he at once seized the heart. And he whose chest was open was still alive. And the priest dedicated the heart to the sun.’ The victims, Those Who Have Died for the God, ‘were sent rolling down the steps bathed in blood’, whereupon a priest beheaded them and mounted the skull on a rack which held hundreds of thousands of others.*
On Itzcoatl’s death in 1440, his successor and nephew Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina completed both the Great Temple and the empire, taking Chalco. Together they further expanded around the Sky Sea (Gulf of Mexico), calling themselves Neighbours of the Sea of the Sky.
Yet the Mexica’s elected autocracy were not the only Mesoamerican system: their rival Tlaxcala was a semi-democratic republic, ruled by around 100 elected
