Aztec Imperial Strategies

"This is a book that presents the results of a project undertaken by six Aztec specialists, including me. We had archaeologists, historians and art historians, and we basically remapped the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs had an extensive empire. We can read the Codex Mendoza and see where the provinces were, who the Aztecs conquered and when they conquered them. But how did the empire stick together? The only other map of the Aztec Empire was published in 1952 and it really made some questionable assumptions. We decided we needed to redo this and map the empire, not from the point of view of the Aztec armies marching out from Tenochtitlan, but rather from the point of view of local communities and how they were conquered, how they were incorporated into the empire, and how they related to the empire, the kind of taxes they paid. When we mapped the empire from the ground up, we found something new. We found that there were two kinds of provinces and two ways that they controlled their provinces. There were standard tax provinces. They’re all in the Codex Mendoza . You just have to read that to figure them out. But there was another kind of province. Along enemy borders, the empire would say, ‘You don’t have to pay us regular taxes. You just have to keep a fortress or garrison here and keep our enemies from crossing.’ The project showed a new view of how the Aztec Empire was organized, and we were able to do that because we worked from the ground up. We took all the towns throughout the empire, found local documentation and related it to documents like the Codex Mendoza . That’s one of the central issues of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. The Spanish had superior weapons and tactics and so on, but the Aztec Empire had armies in the tens of thousands. However, they never sent the full force of the empire against Cortés and his followers. If they had done so, when Cortés landed, they would have won, for sure. Eventually, who knows what would have happened, but they didn’t immediately attack Cortés head-on because the Aztec king, Moctezuma, hesitated. He wasn’t sure who the Spanish were and what they were going to do. Cortés was very astute. He quickly allied himself with local dissident groups that didn’t like being part of the Aztec Empire and got their troops to go with him. So, when Cortés finally made it through to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, it wasn’t just Cortés and 400 Spaniards. It was Cortés, 400 Spaniards, and thousands of troops from the enemies of the empire. The Aztecs could have defeated the Spaniards early on, but ultimately, other forces, particularly the epidemic diseases that were introduced, were just too devastating."