Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

"That’s right. It just won the Cundill History Prize and deservedly so, I think. It’s a groundbreaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience. With the publicity from the Cundill Prize, there will be many more people reading it. Rather like Milton, in a way, she has this grasp of the languages that are needed to access the documents from which she takes the Mexica—the Aztec—accounts of their past. So she speaks Nahuatl. And she’s not just looking at Mexico. This goes all the way up to Utah where some of these people come from. There is a huge network of people for whom, Townsend suggests, the great basin of Mexico, where the city of Tenochtitlan is crucial, is seen as a kind of paradise. It’s almost like a promised land. Maize grows there, corn grows there. It seems abundant in things and it has this almost mythical quality for anyone who’s returned from there. She has access to these documents called xiuhpohualli , which she translates as ‘yearly accounts’, but they are the Nahuatl people’s annals and, using these, she concentrates on a period of roughly about a hundred years either side of Hernan Cortes’s arrival. She is very concerned not to portray the Mexica, the Aztecs, as these people who indulge in human sacrifice and all the other things we know from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto . But it does go on and the human sacrifice actually increases with time. “This account gives us a much more complex and nuanced account of that world pre-conquest and post-conquest, as well as of the conquest itself” The story she tells is that, basically, from about 1420, there is an alliance of people who turn the tables on the people who held power before. The Mexica gain this position of power and they build this fantastic city, Tenochtitlan , one of the great cities of the world. She’s very good on the way they organise their religious world. She’s very good on things like the way they organise sanitation and markets. They have this incredibly well-ordered system of markets that are overseen by groups of older women as law enforcers. It’s a remarkably peaceful, progressive kind of place—most of the time. And she’s very good on their extremely complex belief systems. She’s very interested in the women who survived the conquest. One of the points she makes is that this culture carries on. It’s not destroyed by the arrival of the Spanish. There are still many people who speak these languages, as does Townsend. There’s a kind of intellectual love affair you sense she has with some of the people who survived. One of those is a woman called Malintzin, who is Cortes’s interpreter. She has access to Cortes, who treats her almost as an equal. What we also get is an understanding of the divisions between the indigenous peoples of Mexico and that landscape. The Spanish were only able to do what they did because they formed alliances with people there. The book gives us a much more complex and nuanced account of that world pre-conquest and post-conquest, as well as of the conquest itself. She gives quite a substantial appendix over to the sources that she’s talking about and uses. That is groundbreaking and absolutely fascinating. But it’s a relatively short book, just over 300 pages. It’s an important work, but it’s also a wonderful introduction to this culture and the people. It reads something like a labour of love, without at all whitewashing the worst aspects of this society. There’s much to admire, but there is also human sacrifice and slavery. There’s a kind of decadence that creeps over it. It doesn’t really end, as such. She goes into quite a lot of stuff about the Nahua people now. So, it goes right up to the present day, but obviously that’s not the bulk of the book. But she goes deep into this history, thousands of years before the conquest and right up to the present day, looking at cultural and linguistic resonances. And more than resonance. It’s a living culture."