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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