(^102) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
their folly: Adam Smith describes this "sacred thirst" as "perhaps the
most disadvantageous lottery in the world."^1
Seek, and ye shall find. Sailing along the coast of Yucatan in the second
decade of the sixteenth century, the Spanish encountered Indians like
none seen before. These were dressed in cotton garments and lived in
towns built of stone. They did not know hard metal, neither bronze
nor iron, but they had weapons—slings, poison darts, clubs set with
razor-sharp pieces of obsidian—and they were not so easy to kill and
intimidate as the islanders. So the Spanish spoke softer, traded and ca
joled, and they learned of a land somewhere to the west, over the
mountains, where ruled a great king, rich in ornament and glittering
treasure. Each contact confirmed the promise, pardy because the ruler
of this land, unbeknownst to the strangers, had given orders to appease
them with gifts in the hope of inducing them to go away. This, need
less to say, was a big mistake.
Now party followed party northward and westward along the Mex
ican coast. It was a matter of chance that the leader of the decisive ex
ploratory flotilla was a man named Hernando Cortés—sometime
rapscallion student in Salamanca, precocious and prodigious wencher
with a weakness for the most dangerous kind of woman—another
man's wife. Cortés had good reason to get out of Spain. He was hand
some and virile, a charmer, intriguer, and diplomat, the kind of natural
leader who would give his life for his men and whose men would fol
low him to hell. It took such a man to bring and hold together a band
of a few hundred and with them (plus later reinforcements) conquer
the mightiest power in North America.
Even so, Cortés only begins the story. History is not a simple epic
of derring-do. People matter, but the Aztec empire collapsed for
deeper reasons. The most important lay in the very nature of tributary
empires, which differ from kingdoms and nations by their ethnic di
versity and want of sympathetic cohesion. The we/they division sepa
rates rulers from ruled and one member group from another; not
members from outsiders. Such units are necessarily an expression of
naked power. They rest on no deep loyalty; enjoy no real legitimacy;
extort wealth by threat of pain. So, although they have the appearance
of might, it is only appearance, and the replacement of one gang of
tyrants by another is often welcomed by common folk who hope
against hope that a change will relieve their oppression. In reality, the
brilliance of these constructs is but glitter; their apparent hardness a
brittle shell.
nora
(Nora)
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