FROM DISCOVERIES TO EMPIRE^105war games and jousts designed to produce prisoners for sacrifice before
the hidden eyes of their own chiefs.
For all its seeming power and glory, then, the Aztec empire was a
house of feathers. Detested for its tyranny and riven with dissension, it
was already in breakup when the Spanish arrived. Such was the hatred
that Cortés had no trouble finding allies, who gave him valuable in-
telligence and precious help with his transport. Without this he could
never have brought his small force up from the coast, guns and all, over
the sierra, and into the valley of Mexico.
Once there, the invaders enjoyed an enormous advantage. They had
superior weapons—not so much guns and cannon, although these
proved terrifying initially and Cortés used well-timed salvos to impress
and intimidate—but their steel swords and daggers. The Aztec sticks
and slings and obsidian-spiked clubs wounded more than killed, and
this indeed was what they were made for. The purpose of warfare was
to disable and capture, the better to immolate. By Aztec standards, the
Spanish did not fight fair: they thrust at the body rather than at arms
and legs, because a belly wound stopped an opponent if it did not kill
him outright. The Aztec tactic of crowding round and smothering the
adversary by weight of numbers ironically worked against them: every
Spanish thrust went home. On the edges of the fray, Spanish lancers
and swordsmen on horse were a nightmare with their swift slashing
movements. The Aztec thought them at first a single, two-headed an-
imal.*
All of this testifies to the fundamental advantage of ferrous metal-
lurgy. Weapons were only part of the story. The Spanish depended
completely on such iron objects as shovels, picks, axes, hammers, anvils,
tools. They needed to make horseshoes and affix them, to repair
weapons, to replace things broken. Every nail, every piece of iron was
precious, because it had to come from Spain. A horseshoe cost 30
pesos; nails, 80 pesos the hundred. Many a horseman found it cheaper
to have his animal shod with gold.^7
The Aztec response to these tactics was drastically weakened by un-
certain, wavering leadership. The emperor Moctezuma, on learning of
these strangers, of their tall ships, their sometimes fair hair and light
skin, their bearded faces, their gleaming garments, did not know
- The battle dogs were also terrible—rippers and killers against which Aztec weapons
were almost unavailing—but their tenacity limited the damage. The Spanish used
them primarily in reconnaissance and against prisoners and passersby, instruments of
terror and entertainment. Cf. Todorov, La conquête de l'Amérique, p. 146.