Cortez the Killer (Neil Young cover)

Just to back up entrodamc on this one; I love the song and am taking a college class that involves a trip to Mexico and a reading in the book "Triumphs and Tragedy" by Ramon Ruiz. While they have both noble and ignoble aspects to their society, I see a lot of the noble in them. They were an empire based on expansion by war, but unlike most empires of that sort, they did not force their conquered people to adhere to any rule or to change their customs to match the Aztec. They expanded using war, but once in a time of peace they learned the culture of the people they conquered and became very peaceful and civilized, to an extent. What proved to be their downfall was their benevolence- unlike the Spanish, or many other conquering nations, they did not subjugate the people they conquered-- instead they imposed a tributary system allowing the other tribes to keep their culture and cities and just pay the Aztec. Cortez played off of this and fought Montezuma with only 600 Spaniards but 30,000 allied Indians. The one ignoble aspect of the Aztec civilization was their Human Sacrifice, which sounds barbaric but has several asterisks. It started because during their time of expansion, they were suffering from an extended drought and many Aztec were dying. They sacrificed themselves to their Gods and soon after the drought ended and they won a great military battle. They saw this as a sign of the Gods being pleased and continued the practice until the Spanish came. (This practice was also prevalent in most of Central America, including the island that Columbus first landed on). The reason I include the asterisks is because while barbaric, the reason the Spanish felt justified in their pillaging was due to their superior religion; they had just kicked out all Jews and Moslems from Spain. This does not add up with their character, as almost all of the first settlers in Mexico were the greedy or criminals of Spain, left with no wealth or land in Spain and bent on becoming wealthy and prosperous in the New World. Using their religion to appease their conscious and extend their domain, they reaped the benefits and enslaved all of the Indians-- you speak of the Indians having slaves, but as mentioned above they were not slaves by most standards. The Spanish left all of Mexico enslaved, in the sense that they were forced to work for the Conquistadors and the penalty for leaving their land was death.