164 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
the same time, the native peoples were envied for their (presumed) freedom from
some of the restrictions that circumscribed life in Europe. Critiques of European
customs were phrased in terms of comparisons with native America. For example,
Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibalism,” though based on an inaccurate con-
ception of native Brazilian peoples, nevertheless constituted a brilliant satire of the
author’s sixteenth-century French society. As much as any other factor, the existence
of America and its peoples helped drive European thought out of the Middle Ages
and into the modern age.
It was the Aztec civilization, with its sophisticated art and oratory, its centralized
state and extravagant court life, and its bloody rituals of human sacrifice and canni-
balism, that provided European commentators with their most frequently cited ex-
amples of both American accomplishments and American depravity. Both Las Casas
and Sepúlveda drew principally on Aztec ethnographic data in constructing their ar-
guments for and against the legitimacy of native cultures. The need to justify the
Aztec practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism was perhaps the greatest challenge
that Las Casas faced in the debate. He insisted that the number of victims (Sepúlveda
claimed 20,000 a year) had been grossly exaggerated, otherwise the land could not
have been so populous as it was when the Spanish first arrived. Las Casas asserted that
the number must have been less than 100 or even less than fifty. And even a cen-
tury’s total of victims amounted to fewer native lives than the Spaniards had sacrificed
to their precious “goddess of greed” every year since their conquests began.THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE AZTECS
We now turn to the Spanish campaign against the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés’s victory over
the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan brought with it military control over a massive
part of Mesoamerica, already organized into a tribute-producing empire. The story
of this campaign is one of the great dramatic narratives of European colonial ex-
pansion; as such, it quickly accumulated elements of legend, with Cortés potrayed as
a military hero and the native peoples depicted as too paralyzed by their fatalistic re-
ligious beliefs to mount an effective resistance. Some native accounts blamed the
emperor Motecuhzoma for the defeat and also claimed that various supernatural
omens preceded the Spaniards’ arrival.
A common misconception is that the Aztecs failed to resist because they believed
Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl returning at a prophesied time, but this is a legend
that developed after the Conquest. This legend assumes that the Spaniards were
smarter and more rational than the Mesoamericans, who were too blinded by their
religious beliefs to realize what was going on and to respond appropriately. The
Aztecs did resist, and they and their fellow Mesoamericans did not really view Cortés
or other Spaniards as gods. For Spaniards, denying Indian resistance made it easier
to pretend that a small group of clever white men was responsible for the fall of the
great Aztec Empire, when in fact the Aztecs were militarily overwhelmed by fellow
Mesoamericans whose uprising against them was led and organized by the Spaniards.
For native people, interpretations of the Conquest as having been preordained by