The Amicus Journal, Spring 1997 v19 n1 p28(6)
Prophecy, plague, and plunder. (Aztecs and Spaniards in Mexico) Joel Simon.

Abstract: Spanish occupation of Mexico in the 1500s led to extreme degradation of what had been a carefully balanced environmental structure. As the Aztecs were wiped out by the European diseases brought by the Spanish, their sustainable agricultural system was replaced by resource exploitation and the introduction of livestock that ravaged the landscape.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Copyright held by Author. First published in Amicus Journal (www.nrdc.org/amicus).

Five hundred years ago, the Aztecs lived in fear of ecological doom. Then the Spaniards arrived.

When we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision.... I was never tired of noticing the diversity of trees and the various scents given off by each, and the Paths choked with roses and other flowers, the many local fruit trees and rose bushes, and the pond of fresh water... But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.

--Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, circa 1562

In the beginning, the Aztecs believed, the sun had been stillborn, lifeless. It had hung motionless in the sky. Then Cihuacoatl, the demonous earth mother, had pulled an obsidian knife from her loins and cast it upon the earth. Humans used the knife to give their blood to the sun, and only then did the orb begin its slow journey across the heavens. The sun was sustained by offerings of human hearts. Without them it would stall again and the earth would perish.

The Aztecs believed that their world had been created in violence, that it was a fragile place in which their existence was precarious. The believed that nature could not! be depended upon to function without their assistance. It was an awesome responsibility--and one that their conquerors never assumed.

The Aztecs expressed their vast knowledge of nature and natural forces in mythical terms. They did not know about the volcanic upheavals that had shaped the place where they lived, but they rightly believed that their world had been born in cataclysm. They knew nothing about high-pressure systems or prevailing westerlies, but they knew that the water god, Tlaloc, was at times benevolent, at times fickle. They had no idea that seven thousand years before the founding of their empire, the growing human population had hunted the big game--the mastodons, mammoths, horses, sloths, and camels that once roamed Mesoamerica--to extinction. And yet their own myths perfectly reflected this history: the Aztecs believed that there had been a time in the past when they had lived in a watery Eden full of fish, deer, and birds, and that the game had then suddenly disappeared.

The Aztecs knew nothing of the Olmec civilization, which had thrived for four centuries until 800 B.C. Perhaps, through Toltec myths, the Aztecs knew something of the Maya. They may have known that a great civilization had grown out of the jungle, built enormous pyramids, and then vanished without a trace. But certainly, the Aztecs were acutely aware that they lived in a land dotted with ruins, where whole peoples had simply vanished. This knowledge fueled their sense of collective doom.

The Aztecs' religion of imminent ecological doom did not prevent them from constructing a massive infrastructure that transformed the natural habitat, and brought remarkable stability to an unstable world. In fact, it was the logical outgrowth of their beliefs: since the Aztecs fully expected their capricious gods to send wind or rain or earthquakes or wild animals at any moment, they took measures to protect themselves.

In this effort, they had one enormous advantage. The Valley of Mexico where they lived--site of the modern Mexico City--was not the game-rich Eden of their mythical homeland, but it was still an ecological marvel. Two million years earlier, during a period of intense volcanic activity, lava had sealed off the valley's natural drainage, and the waters that had formerly flowed south to the sea spread out into a series of five interconnected lakes. The valley's geology fostered a series of microclimates--marshes and dry scrub, subtropical plains and alpine forests, and fresh- and salt-water lakes--that shared a small, clearly defined area.

The Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico in 1325. Within half a century, they had given up the life of hunter-gatherers and taken up farming. Since they had settled on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, they had to create farmland artificially. They dredged mud from the shallow lake bottom and piled it along the shores, a technique borrowed from other tribes that had already settled in the valley. These artificial fields, called chinampas or "floating gardens," were astonishingly productive, producing 100 million pounds a year of corn alone. Water seeped up through the mud, keeping the soil moist, allowing plants to germinate before the rainy season began, and protecting the crops from drought. As the Aztec population expanded, the chinampas were appropriated for urban settlement while food production was shifted to the southern part of the valley. The Aztecs' settlement, Tenochtitlan, emerged as a city of thousands of small islands divided by canals--the Venice of the New World.

The canals formed the basis of a transportation revolution. Aztec engineers constructed an urban infrastructure that later amazed the first European visitors. Despite a population of perhaps 500,000--as much as ten times the size of the largest Spanish city of the time--Tenochtitlan's ingenious transportation system made getting around easy. Each street was half roadway and half canal. Canoes went everywhere in the city, including directly into the emperor's palace. A fleet of 200,000 canoes brought the valley's products to the city's doorstep: squash, chilies, and tomatoes came from the chinampas of Xochimilco (some of which are still in use today); corn, beans, and amaranth, which were grown along the lakeshore in small irrigated plots and in terraced fields that climbed the mountain slopes, arrived daily in enormous canoes.

The city was connected to the shore by a series of well-defended causeways. Fresh water was brought in through an enormous stone aqueduct that spanned the lake. Around 1440, Nezahualcoyotl, poet-king of the neighboring city of Texcoco, was commissioned to construct a ten-mile dike, which divided Lake Texcoco and alleviated damage from the perennial floods.

In their urban design the Aztecs tried to replicate the paradisiacal realm of the water god, Tlaloc. The streets of the city were lined with flowers, and nearly every house had a rooftop garden. Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor at the time of the Spanish conquest, kept an aviary full of quetzals, macaws, ducks, and other rare birds, as well as a zoo with pumas and jaguars. The streets were spotless, there were no beggars, and unlike the European cities of the time, which reeked of sewage, Tenochtitlan had a highly effective and efficient way to get rid of human waste. Small outhouses at the end of each street emptied directly into canoes, which were poled each day across the lake to the farmland, where the cargo was used as fertilizer.

The Aztecs' ability to expand their dominion over all of Mesoamerica was based on their good fortune in settling in such an ecologically advantageous location. The interconnected lakes allowed them to use canoes to exploit the diverse products of the ecosystem. This was an enormous breakthrough in a country that had no domesticated animals. (The decline of game had been so complete during the era of the big-game hunters seven thousand years earlier that Mesoamerica had been left without any large animals from which to breed domestic livestock.) Given the topography of Mexico, whose mountainous terrain had prevented the formation of major navigable rivers in the highlands, as well as the technology of the time, no culture outside the valley could hope to generate the same level of production. By the sixteenth century, the Aztec empire extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Still the Aztecs believed that the end was near. While canals, aqueducts, canoes, chinampas, and dikes had helped Tenochtitlan achieve a remarkable ecological stability, by the middle of the fifteenth century the city was confronting some serious environmental problems. Drought, flood, frost, and famine became increasingly common. To the Aztecs, then, the most important projects of their environmental infrastructure were the enormous pyramids that towered above Tenochtitlan's central plaza. The pyramids offered a way for the Aztecs to petition the gods who controlled natural forces. When the rains were late or the lake waters rose quickly, the Aztecs offered human sacrifices to Tlaloc, the god of water.

Each victim, who was usually a prisoner captured in battle, was led up the 114 steps of Tlaloc's pyramid, where priests bent him back over the sacrificial stone, plunged an obsidian knife into his taut stomach, and then reached under the rib cage to extract the beating heart. The heart was placed in a basin while the body, representing the setting sun, was tumbled down the steps of the pyramid. At the bottom, other priests made quick work of dismembering the body. The arms and legs were cooked with chilies and tomatoes and served at a ceremonial feast; the torso was fed to the beasts in Moctezuma's zoo. The head was placed on a wooden rack at the base of the pyramid, which, according to one of Hernan Cortes's men, contained more than a hundred thousand skulls.

Although the Aztec practice of human sacrifice horrified the Spaniards and helped justify their toppling of the empire, to the Aztecs it was merely an expression of their belief that the world was constantly threatened with environmental calamity. The Aztecs were extremely devout and extremely apprehensive. Throughout Mesoamerica, human sacrifice was a widely accepted and institutionalized form of showing devotion and subservience to the gods. "[It] was inspired by neither cruelty nor hatred," wrote Jacques Soustelle in his classic Daily Life of the Aztecs. "It was their response, and the only response they could conceive of, to the instability of a continually threatened world."

Indeed the Aztec world, their carefully constructed and maintained universe, was doomed. But they could not have imagined the source of the danger. In 1502 vague, unsettling rumors reached Moctezuma about a new race of men from the east. Then, in the summer of 1518, some Indians near Tabasco saw a mountain range bobbing off the coast. When they paddled out to explore, they realized that these were ships carrying strange white men with beards. After a bit of barter, the ships sailed up the coast. The visitors fought a brief battle with other Indians near the present-day coastal city of Veracruz before turning eastward, dipping below the horizon, and sailing back into the oblivion from which they had come.

When a small-time lord and big-time adventurer named Hernan Cortes sailed from Cuba in February 1519, planning to conquer the Aztec empire and its rumored riches, he provisioned his eleven ships with an array of steel weapons. He also procured sixteen horses, which were rare in Cuba and more expensive than slaves. And indeed, in the earliest stages, Spanish armor, cannons, and crossbows allowed Cortes and his forces to defeat the large armies of coastal Indians that attacked them soon after they landed at Veracruz. Horses in particular terrified the Indians. They had never seen animals that big and initially thought that man and beast were a single animal.

Technological superiority, military strategy, and cultural misunderstanding, as well as Moctezuma's unwillingness to attack immediately, all played a role in the early course of the campaign. But the most important weapon in the Spanish arsenal was not even aboard Cortes's ships. It was brought later by a single African slave who landed on the shore of Veracruz in 1520. The slave had been infected with the smallpox virus. He was well enough, however, to march to Tenochtitlan, where he introduced smallpox among the Aztecs. Without the aid of this European disease, Cortes could not have conquered the Aztec empire and its vast armies.

On reaching Tenochtitlan, Cortes first negotiated with Moctezuma and then betrayed him, taking the emperor captive after Moctezuma had invited the Spaniards into the city as his guests. Several months later the Aztecs rose up and drove the invaders from Tenochtitlan. But the Spaniards had left behind a time bomb. Within months, Tenochtitlan had been ravaged by smallpox. In the tightly packed city the disease spread with terrible swiftness, striking down commoners and rulers without distinction. Given the way the disease is known to have spread in similar environments, it is not inconceivable that it could have killed 50 percent of the population within a few months.

In December 1520, with the smallpox epidemic at its peak, the Spaniards began to lay siege to the Aztec capital. Soon neither food nor water was reaching the population. On August 13, 1521, the Spaniards broke through the last Aztec defenses and marched into the ruined city. "We found the houses full of corpses and some poor Mexicans were still in them who could not move away," wrote Spanish soldier Bernal Diaz in his account of the conquest. "The city looked as if it had been ploughed up. The roots of every edible greenery had-been dug out, boiled and eaten.... There was no fresh water to be found; all of it was brackish."

"The sky was crushed," recalled an Aztec poet. "The sun did not follow its course."

A cross the urbanized heartland of Mexico, European diseases from measles to chicken pox proved devastating. There is too much debate about the size of the population at the time to cite any reliable figure; estimates for Tenochtitlan range from about 60,000 to 1 million, for the valley itself from 1 to 3 million, and for what is present-day Mexico from 6 to 25 million. What is certain is that millions were killed in the epidemic. Data confirm that many individual towns lost 90 percent of their population.

The population collapse changed the shape of the land itself. Over the next century, the Aztecs' highly regulated system of environmental management, which supported an extremely dense population, gave way to a much more haphazard exploitation of resources. Essentially, disease opened an ecological niche for the Spaniards to occupy. Actually it was not the Spaniards themselves who moved in--they were not much for farming--but their animals. Pigs were in the vanguard; conquering Spanish expeditions drove herds of swine in front of their advance so that they would be provided with food. Many pigs that escaped the ensuing hunt went feral. Within a few generations in the wild they had sprouted tusks and lost their pudge. The Arkansas razor-backs are their descendants. Pigs flourished along riverbanks and in lowland forests. they also did well across the highlands. A decade after the arrival of the first pigs, the beasts were so numerous that raising them was no longer a profitable enterprise.

Luckily for the Spaniards, cattle took hold in the next decade. Mexico's vast plains extending north to points unknown had not been grazed in ten thousand years, since the New World horse and the mastodon had died out. The cow's-eye view must have been overwhelming; the tufts of thick, tall grass were the bovine equivalent of a Roman banquet. As herds grew, the price of beef plummeted, until by 1542 meat was so cheap that butcher shops opened in Indian villages. Before the conquest, only warriors who participated in the cannibal feasts had eaten meat regularly.

Herds of cattle were soon traipsing through Indian fields, often before the corn could be harvested. In the Valley of Mexico, Indians built fences, dug trenches, killed invading cows, and burned pasture to ward off the hungry beasts. But the marauding cattle could not be contained. They ate the Indians' food and poisoned their water supply, the creeks and springs, with their manure. Soon, whole villages' picked up and moved to avoid the ravenous herds. Because unplanted land was considered open pasture, the abandoned plots often fell into Spanish hands.

The cattle not only chased off the Indians, but overgrazing in the central highlands also led to long-term and even permanent degradation of the land itself. The herds left hillsides bare, and exposed soil washed away in the rain. Cows were often introduced into areas that had been recently deforested for Spanish construction or cleared for grazing or mining; in these areas the soil tended to be even more unstable. Hillside erosion was accelerated by animal-drawn plows, which replaced Indian digging sticks. Finally, as disease wiped out the Indians, many hillside plots were abandoned; when the stone terraces of these plots collapsed, rain washed away the uncontained topsoil. Fifty years after the conquest, once-cultivated hillsides were pocked gullies of hard yellow earth. Whole areas were permanently lost to production. The prevalence of the phenomenon is suggested by the fact that tepetate, the Nahuatl (Aztec) word for exposed hardpan, was quickly incorporated into the New World Spanish vocabulary.

The Spanish authorities did take some steps to protect the Indians' corn supply, which, in the first century after the conquest, also fed the Spaniards. By the 1530s, most of the large herds had been driven north into the grasslands region now known as the Bajio, which was then occupied by nomadic Indians. There, amidst the lush waving grasses interspersed with cacti, prickly pears, and scrub, the cattle population exploded. By the time a mining strike in 1546 drew Spanish settlers into the region, herds of twenty thousand animals were not uncommon.

The damage caused by grazing was compounded by the fact that the hillsides around the mining centers were quickly deforested. The mines consumed huge amounts of timber for the construction of shafts and the production of the charcoal used for smelting. In 1543, the Indians living near one mining area complained that the mines had not left a tree standing. The same was true around the sugar plantations developed in the upland valleys of Veracruz and the interior lowlands. Extensive stands of highland tropical forests were cleared to make way for the cane. Timber was also needed to power the mills that ground the cane into sugar. Cattle swarmed over the denuded hills, preventing the forest from regenerating. Widespread desertification was the result.

By 1570, as the mining boom continued, the Bajio was turned over to wheat production, and the cattle were driven further north into the sparsely populated grasslands. For twenty years or so, cattle herds doubled every fifteen months; the largest herds had 150,000 animals. Then, suddenly, the cattle started to die off. The rate of reproduction slowed; herds thinned. The Spaniards could not understand what malady had befallen their cattle. They blamed the shrinking herds on packs of wild dogs and Indian nomads. But in fact, the cows were eating the pasture more quickly than it could reproduce. A mere sixty years after the first cow was brought from Cuba, the vast country--from the rugged mountains of the south to the grass-covered northern reaches--was so crowded with cattle that the land had reached its carrying capacity.

If cattle were a blight on the land, sheep were an absolute pestilence. Like cattle, the sheep herds exploded across the landscape, grazing hillsides bare. Sheep, however, crop grass much more closely than cattle. They also graze in steep and rocky terrain, which is especially vulnerable to erosion.

In the Mezquital Valley to the north of the Valley of Mexico, writes Elinor G.K. Melville in A Plague of Sheep, the sheep "transformed ... a complex and densely populated agricultural mosaic into a sparsely populated mesquite desert." When the first Spaniards came upon the Mezquital Valley, it was peopled by Otomi farmers who were under the dominion of the Aztec empire. The hillsides were covered with pine-oak forests, and creeks ran clear down from the mountains. The valley floor was heavily irrigated; terraced fields climbed the hillsides. To the Spanish eye, the valley seemed ideal for pastoralism. The Spaniards could not possibly have understood the underlying fragility of a region that appeared so fertile. Nor could they have imagined the destructive potential of sheep, animals that after millennia of grazing in Europe had reached an accommodation with the Old World environment.

The first sheep were introduced in the Mezquital Valley in the 1530s and 1540s. By the late 1550s there were 400,000 of them. Fifteen years later there were 2 million. The growth of herds coincided with the demise of the human population as the waves of plagues wreaked their havoc.

Then, in the 1580s, the sheep suddenly began to die off. The Spanish pastoralists saw that their animals were not fattening and that breeding was slowing, but they could not understand what was happening. An explanation for this strange phenomenon would have to wait nearly four centuries, until scientists came up with a model called "ungulate irruption. " Scientists discovered that when ungulates--sheep, deer, goats, pigs, horses, bison, or any herbivores with hard, horny hooves--are introduced into virgin grasslands, the animals reproduce at a frenetic rate until the growing herds have eaten every bit of grass down to the nub. Then the population crashes as the animals die in droves. The decline in population allows the flora to recover. When the grass returns, the herds grow slowly, rising and falling until they reach an accommodation with available resources. Scientists who have studied the cycle by introducing ungulates onto isolated islands have found that the whole process takes only thirty-five to forty years.

By the 1590s the sheep herds in the Mezquital Valley had been reduced by half. The cycle had come to an end. After three decades of being picked over by millions of sheep, the valley was too degraded to recover. Springs dried up. The torrential summer rains eroded the exposed hillsides. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the hillsides showed extensive sheet erosion and deep gullies. The topsoil was carried away, leaving only tepetate.

One final ingredient transformed the American environment after disease and grazing animals had done their damage: weeds. A new era of biological competition ensued in the degraded environment as New World and Old World plants competed for the same ecological niche. A great many New World food crops made it to Europe and beyond; corn, potatoes, and tomatoes are three examples. But European weeds won the battle in the New World. Most arrived accidentally, via seeds hiding in animal dung or clinging to clothing. By 1600, entire meadows were largely devoid of New World plants. Dandelions, nettles, a host of grasses, and European clover annihilated their New World rivals. Thousands of plant species were wiped out within the first century after the conquest.

Why did European weeds have an advantage over the New World varieties? Biohistorian Alfred Crosby calls weeds "the Red Cross of the plant world"; their evolutionary niche is to recolonize land that has been destroyed in floods, fires, and other natural disasters. Their specialization, however, is also their vulnerability. Once the emergency is over, weeds generally give way as the original ecosystem reestablishes itself.

These hardy plants did so well in the New World precisely because it was suffering an ecological calamity of historic proportions. The population crash meant that plowed fields were never planted, and European weeds quickly rooted in the exposed soil. An overgrazed and eroded hillside is a propitious environment for a weed. The weeds wiped out hundreds of native plants, but they also stabilized eroding hills--essentially cauterizing open wounds.

In the Mezquital Valley, for example, grazing sheep had so damaged the environment that the original ecosystem could not regenerate. Forests of pine and oak and native grasses gave way to European weeds and drought-tolerant plants such as maguey, yucca, thorn scrub, and mesquite. The Spaniards began to disparage the once-fertile valley as a blasted badlands only marginally suitable for sheep pasture.

This unprecedented ecological transformation was utterly lost on those who had inadvertently brought it about. The Spaniards were unequipped to notice or understand what was going on. It happened with such rapidity that they had no reference point. Indeed, even if they had noticed, they would not have been concerned that familiar weeds were thriving in the new land. The Indians must have been aware of the process, but in most cases we are not privy to their observations. All we know for sure is that if Moctezuma had returned in 1600, he would not have recognized the place.

Joel Simon lives and writes in Mexico City. This article is adapted from Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books), to be published in April.


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