Why? Before you start feeling really terrible about the demise of the Aztecs, here's a hopefully comforting final note. The disease swept through Mexico and Guatemala in the latter part of the 16th century, decades after Cortés' conquest of Tenochtitlán. Yes, it's true that they were conquered and beaten back by the conquistadors, and it's true that they lost a huge proportion of their population to disease, but nearly every horrible catastrophe has at least a few survivors. It was a combination of horrific moments in history and the horrific actions of terrible people, with some nasty diseases thrown in for good measure. 1.They had advanced weaponry as guns and such while the aztecs still where using spears, 2. After the Spanish Conquest, he uses the term Nahuas for the conquered people, from their shared language Nahuatl. For 200 years, the Aztec Empire thrived in what is now modern Mexico. Regardless, the Aztecs were amazed by the Spanish. Salmonella enterica was the one they kept finding. They lived in a swampy, generally inhospitable landscape, and yet they were one of the most advanced civilizations of their time. Europeans pretty much messed up everything they touched between 1492 and 1944 or so. The Aztecs moved on from there, too. The collapse didn’t happen all at once; instead, it’s believed to have occurred over time from place to place, between about the late 8th and 925. But 100 years later, there were just 1 million left. It's like asking why King Richard the first didn't bring a bunch of gold to give to the poor when he went to the holy land like Mansa Musa did. Yes, it's the same disease that makes you obsessively compulsively wash your hands every time you come within a few inches of a piece of raw chicken. While the Spanish conquered the Incans in 1523, their stories and ways wouldn’t be wiped from history. … Records appear in the Codices as early as 1301 (before the Aztecs even founded their empire) to right at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1524. The drought likely made the epidemic worse, not because it changed the contagion, but because when people are already suffering, well, it's not like drought is going to improve anything. He believed that Cortés was actually a god in human form What did the Spanish have that the Aztecs didn't? The Conquest of the Inca Empire. Battle against the Spanish and the Aztecs where Spanish had to flee. "As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease, they died in heaps, like bedbugs," wrote a Franciscan monk who was with Cortés during the whole ugly affair. From Cuba came another Spanish army, to make sure that Cortes followed his orders. Why would they react the same way? Is it true that the Spanish didn’t like chocolate at first? However, we've known for some time about the epidemic that really did them in. But for a long time, we didn't know what the cause of the illness actually was, even though it was responsible for the deaths of between seven and 17 million people in South America. “This sounded like a hemorrhagic fever. Scientists finally think they've figured it out, and you'll probably be stunned by their conclusions: It was likely a form of Salmonella enterica. The Aztecs didn’t have horses, so they must have been captured from the Conquistadors. So if the people scientists examined died from an RNA virus, researchers wouldn't be able to tell. The Aztecs were a fierce people with a strong warrior culture. The Atlantic says it's possible that Spanish-style agricultural practices contributed to the spread of the disease, so its unlikely that a similar outbreak could happen today, since we live in a system of tightly regulated agriculture that makes it a lot easier to prevent Salmonella outbreaks and control them when they actually do happen. “They knew before we did, it seems, that technology was the crux.” Townsend says that two facts, seemingly counterintuitive, need to be considered about the conquest. The research also determined that the epidemic began in the valleys of central Mexico, and although losses were heavy in the indigenous population, the Spanish population was hardly affected at all. Another 1/3 of smallpox victims usually go on to develop permanent blindness, which means that the population of the capital city wasn't just reduced in numbers, but also in its fighting effectiveness. What happened to the Aztecs? But in 1520, Cortés briefly left the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán, which at the time was one of the largest cities in the world, in order to deal with (of all things) another conquistador. He chose to use Aztecs to refer to all of the people who claimed to have come from the mythical place of Aztlan, which include several million people divided into about 20 or so ethnic groups including the Mexica. However, she did not authorize slavery. It seems the god-myth originated with the Mexica decades after the conquest, trying to make sense of the disaster which had befallen them. According to The Atlantic, it's possible that other diseases making the rounds at the time exacerbated the Salmonella, or even that the Salmonella exacerbated some other as yet unidentified disease. Until recently, we haven't really had a clear picture of what dealt the final blow to the Aztec Empire, but recent discoveries are finally shedding some light. Where was the Sunstone in Aztec times? The epidemic did make people thirsty, and thirsty people need water, and drought means there was none of that, either. I didn't expect to find in their histories an Aztec woman sounding so plaintive and so proud, so dignified.” Townsend said spects of Aztec culture are still alive today. a combination of things allowed the small spanish force to beat the aztecs. “He who surpasses or subdues mankind, / Must look down on the hate of those below.” —, When Coca-Cola Made ‘White Coke’ For A Soviet War Hero, The Tragically Common Practice Of Roman Infanticide, In the Hall of Maat: Burying the White Gods, The Snack Food That Once Honored An Aztec God, The Tree So Deadly It Was Used As A Torture Instrument, We Use Way More Than 10 Percent Of Our Brains, The Pueblo Revolt Was The First American Revolution, The 16th-Century Myth Of Giants In South America, Ponce De Leon Didn’t Search For A Fountain Of Youth. They were not called the Aztecs. In the 15th century, there were 25 million people living in the Aztec Empire. Paratyphi C causes an enteric fever nearly identical to typhoid, which is why a lot of scientists once believed that cocoliztli and typhoid were the same thing. Disease played a big part in the fall of the Aztecs. It's a subset called Paratyphi C, which is similar to a rare modern type that has a 10 to 15 percent mortality rate. So not only did the Aztecs have to deal with the fact that so many of them were dying from this terrible disease, there was also the fact that they couldn't grow enough food to feed the people who were left over. The Aztec emperor at the time, Moctezuma, seemed uncertain how to react and may even have believed that the appearance of the Spanish marked the fulfillment of a prophecy.It was the height of the harvest season, when the Aztecs normally did not wage war; thus, Moctezuma invited Cortes to … "The image we have of the Aztecs … We do know that samples taken from the teeth of people buried in the same cemetery as cocoliztli victims who died before European contact didn't show any evidence of Salmonella infection, but all that means is that those particular individuals didn't encounter the bacteria before they died. The Aztecs are famous for their clash with Cortes during the discovery of the New World. The cultural and spiritual predecessors of the Aztecs, the Toltecs, also practiced human sacrifice, as did the Mayans and the Tarascans. Of course, probably not many of them really felt like going out in the field between bouts of turning yellow and developing weird pustules behind their ears, but still. Columbus defied those orders, which eventually led to tensions between the explorers and the Spanish government. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. The problem with the tooth examination strategy is that it can only look at DNA, but some viruses don't have DNA — they have RNA. That, along with Spanish steel, guns, and horses, was the reason for the small Spanish retinue's unlikely conquest. Except no one, not even the Spanish, initially suggested there was any case of mistaken identity. For a people who were already devastated by smallpox and conquistadors, cocoliztli must have been both terrifying and demoralizing. According to The Atlantic, some scientists suggested it was a hemorrhagic fever, similar to Ebola or yellow fever. The scientists who uncovered the dwelling said it was likely that the people who lived there were first and second generation descendants of the citizens of Tenochtitlan. The foreigners couldn’t possibly be worse than the Mexica, right? Secondly, the armor and weapons that the Spanish used would have been mostly unimaginable to the Aztecs. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery.". They didn't have access to iron or bronze, but they made ingenious use of stone and copper. They didn't have access to iron or bronze, but they made ingenious use of stone and copper. How do you explain the conquest of an impressive civilization like that of the Mexica by mere hundreds of conquistadors? The finely made weapons did not pass inspection until they could bend in a half-circle … So if the Spanish didn’t bring about the fever, what did?” Querying the climate Not from the conquistadors themselves. This stage was followed by delirium and seizures. So all the best researchers can really do is say "Okay, we found Salmonella in the teeth of these people who died around the same time as the epidemic," but they can't really say for sure that the Salmonella is the whole story behind what killed them. Death usually occurred on the fourth day, which frankly sounds like way, way too much time. The conquistadors also introduced the Aztecs to things like mumps and measles, too. ... Why didn't these diseases develop among the Incas? And after a 93 day siege, the city fell to the Spanish once again. Small pox. Well, a question of mistaken identity, i.e., that the Mexica believed the Spaniards to be gods sounds a lot better than the alternative. Straightforward enough, so where did the belief the Spanish were gods come from? Francisco Guerra, who wrote a research paper on Aztec medicine, says there's some a chance that the epidemic might've existed before the arrival of the conquistadors. The Spanish played their part later on in the myth-making. We know the Spanish conquistadors had something to do with their demise, but it wasn't just those nasty European diseases that led to their ultimate downfall. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, it was called ōllamaliztli ([oːlːamaˈlistɬi]) or tlachtli ([ˈtɬatʃtɬi]). Teeth are useful for identifying pathogens because the insides are full of soft tissue and blood vessels, and any pathogens that remain there after death are protected from decay by the hard enamel on the outside of the teeth. He was greeted as an honored guest, which was cool with him because it meant he'd be able to take the entire civilization quickly and treacherously. First, the Aztec had never seen a person with white skin before. Aztecs didn't have any idea that there was a world outside their area. Why were Aztec parents so strict? But of the three, smallpox did most of the damage. For 200 years, the Aztec Empire thrived in what is now modern Mexico. They are heavily bearded. Any mention of being hailed as a god is conspicuously absent from Cortes’s letters and memoirs. Nice analogy, father. Your knowledge is limited to just what you can pull out of the teeth of people who died hundreds of years ago and what you can read in the historical accounts that may or may not have been written by people who had any idea what they were talking about. In 2006, research published in FEMS Microbiology Letters examined census data from 1570 and 1580, and they found a population loss of 51.36 percent, which is pretty astonishing over such a short time period. Some of the epidemics sound similar to the cocoliztli of the post-European era, and some were even called "cocoliztli," although the term was originally used to describe epidemic disease in general and not something specific. Smallpox kills roughly 1/3 of the people it infects, but it's even worse than that. Certainly, it wasn’t the ignorance of foreign threats, oppressive rule which alienated subjects, or Spanish weaponry which undid the Mexica empire. Their adoption of the rapidly-spreading Spanish language would be symptomatic of the loss of their culture and land (one of the richest in America) at the hands of the Spanish invaders. The first cocoliztli epidemic happened in 1545, and it was so devastating that it forced the abandonment of entire villages, including a Mixtec village in Oaxaca, where researchers uncovered skeletons believed to have been victims of the first occurrence of the disease. For example, the Aztec would not have known what firearms were, or understood how they worked. They made drills out of reed or bone, they understood mathematics, they used a 365-day calendar, and they were one of the first cultures in the world to require that all children receive an education. What exactly was cocoliztli? Like pretty much all Europeans of the time, the conquistadors were hell-bent on ruling the world. Wait, didn't the Aztecs practice human sacrifice? Questions to address: How did the Aztecs initially respond to the arrival of the Spaniards? Today there are 1.5 million Nahua — the descendants of the Aztecs — living in small communities in rural Mexico. And as the conquistadors made their way inland toward the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan, the Spanish solicited native allies. According to Yahoo! A historian from the period described the extent of the devastation, writing, "In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.". As to what significance the Aztecs … The Aztecs had inferior weapons, so subduing them was not a huge problem for Cortés. Which is the Spanish conquest of the Mexica was made possible thanks largely to the Mexica’s oppression of subject peoples. Spanish went there as conquerors looking for gold. Because at least when you get sacrificed to the gods, you get to die in honor and glory and the only really terrible thing that happens to you is the whole ripping out of the heart thing, which sounds pretty danged good compared to four days with a black tongue, painful ear nodules, and dysentery. The sailors were ordered to treat the natives humanely, and they were to be considered equal. A second outbreak hit in 1576, right around the time survivors were probably starting to relax and think the pestilence was a thing of the past. One account mentions a native mistaking a mounted Spaniard as a centaur creature, before realizing he was viewing, “man and beast.” Hardly deification. “These symptoms didn’t sound like smallpox or any other known European disease that was in Mexico during the 16th century,” Acuna-Soto told me. Cortés didn't get the hint, though, and he quickly began plotting his recapture of the city. Cortes didn’t want any of that and went to fight them. The Florentine Codex, written in the 1550s, is a native account of the Spanish conquest and the earliest extant example of the deification of the Spanish. The city fell in just 93 days largely thanks to an epidemic that swept through the Aztec population. The Cuban governor responded by sending a larger force to Mexico, where they set up a settlement and immediately began training for conquest. This research identified cocoliztli as a probable cause for the final collapse of the Aztec culture, though it was unable to precisely identify the pathogen responsible for the disease. Today, Salmonella outbreaks are typically confined to people who eat food from contaminated sources, and they're usually very quickly identified and contained. The trouble with trying to diagnose a disease so many years after the fact is that it's impossible to really know the whole picture. Of course, if the portends and symbols all had pointed to the Spanish being returning gods, the reason for Mexica leaders’ indecision is clear. It wasn't until this century that researchers finally started to put two and two together, based on historical accounts of the disease and the high death toll. The Spanish didn’t wipeout the art, culture, and celebrations of the Incan people, though. Describe the relations between the Aztec and Spanish. In English, it is often called pok-ta-pok (or pok-a-tok).This term originates from a 1932 article by Danish archaeologist Frans Blom, who adapted it from the Yucatec Maya word pokolpok. The type of Salmonella that killed the Aztecs isn't the same as the one that lurks in meat packing plants and factory chicken farms, either. One is that it was “much more difficult than is commonly imagined for the Spanish to vanquish the Aztecs.” Later, the Aztec ruler Montezuma died under "mysterious circumstances," but everyone can probably guess what those mysterious circumstances entailed. Smallpox was a bad disease among Europeans, but it was even worse for the Aztecs because no one on the continent had ever been exposed to the virus, and therefore, they had no natural immunity to it, nor did they have medicine to help them combat it. So their next step was to murder a bunch of nobles, which they did during a ritual dance (classy move, guys). Spanish … Just in case the Aztecs weren't already starting to suspect that the gods were out to end their civilization, the two cocoliztli epidemics coincided with long periods of drought. As Cortes demonstrated in small actions, his conquistadors were a formidable match for the much-feared Mexica warriors. In the modern world, slavery is such … Some scientists still don't think it was Salmonella that killed off the Aztecs, though. The Mexica were not the most benevolent or interested of rulers; aside from the crippling demand for a third of all produced goods and crops from subject peoples, the Mexica were mostly content to allow the conquered to govern themselves. They lived in a swampy, generally inhospitable landscape, and yet they were one of the most advanced civilizations of their time. It was, of course, the warrior class which had been responsible for Mexica ascendancy and later for its demise when the Spanish could not be defeated. Speaking of visiting Inca history, Machu Picchu is a desired vacation destination. Only a real optimist could witness such a thing and not see it as the beginning of the end, and it's probably safe to say there weren't a lot of Aztec optimists left in the world at the time. According to The Guardian, it killed 80 percent of the population within five years, and it was one of the worst plagues in history, similar in scale to the bubonic plague epidemic that killed 25 million people in Europe during the 14th century. The word Aztec was taken up by Europeans in reference to the city … The story was likely an apocryphal invention of the conquered Mexica to recast their defeat as a result of religious symbols, not military failings. The Mesoamerican ballgame is known by a wide variety of names. The did not have the same contact with farm animals. Naturally, we're going to want to blame Europeans for the introduction of this particular strain of Salmonella, because duh. Which, in retrospect, was probably the best idea they ever had. Researchers sequenced all the DNA they could find in each sample, and then used that data to generate a list of bacteria that were present in the teeth. In Ancient Aztec Society, It Was Illegal To Mistreat Your Slaves. Others thought it might've been spread by rodents, like bubonic plague. The queen ordered the natives to be converted to Christianity and taught European behaviors. The fact that cocoliztli was so devastating and had such a high mortality rate, combined with the fact that it disproportionately seemed to affect indigenous people while having little or no effect on the Spaniards who were living in the area, does seem to suggest that it was of that European origins. There's evidence that epidemics contributed to the first migrations into Mexico, and an epidemic may have contributed to the fall of the Tula kingdom, which preceded the Aztecs. They actually thought that the Spanish were Gods and that is the main reason they didn't fight so hard against them. That, along with Spanish steel, guns, and horses, was the reason for the small Spanish retinue’s unlikely conquest. It was mistaken identity and religious devotion which crippled the Mexica response to invasion. So here it is at last, the awful truth about why the Aztecs disappeared. The conquistadors’ unprovoked invasion suddenly had the tacit acceptance of the conquered. According to The Atlantic, scientists finally arrived at this conclusion after they examined DNA in 11 different skeletons uncovered in the cemetery of an abandoned Mixtec village in southern Mexico. He then went on to describe specific symptoms, saying, "The tongue was dry and black. Most interesting fact you’ve come across about the Aztecs (4) Did the Spanish first meet the Aztecs during the day or at night? So its safe to say that Aztecs didn't really disappear, they just went somewhere where there weren't any Spanish conquistadors or cocoliztli. After Cortes (the Spanish explorer, mainly famous for the conquering of the Aztec empire) had arrived in Mexico. As much as they may have wanted to celebrate their military prowess, the Spanish used the god-myth to confer a quasi-divine right to rule upon themselves. But even more telling is the depiction of the human heads on the rack. Except no one, not even the Spanish, initially suggested there was any case of mistaken identity. Smallpox devastated the Aztecs, but it wasn't the end of them. We finally understand why the Aztecs disappeared, Bernardino de Sahagún / Wikimedia Commons, Margaret Duncan Coxhead - Wikimedia Commons. The eyes and the whole body were yellow. Historically, it's been referred to as "cocoliztli," which is an Aztec name meaning "pestilence." According to a 2002 study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, tree-ring evidence suggests that the two cocoliztli epidemics coincided with the worst North American drought in 500 years, which stretched all the way from Mexico to the boreal forests of Canada and from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic. When the Spanish arrived, they seemed as appealing an alternative as any other to the current system of tribute bondage. By the time of the Spanish arrival, the Aztecs were at a highly developed cultural stage, and human sacrifice rituals were fully established, regular, and took place on a massive scale. According to The Guardian, the second epidemic killed half of the region's surviving population. Urine of the colors sea green, vegetal-green, and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, by Matthew Restall The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction, by Matthew Restall, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto In the Hall of Maat: Burying the White Gods, The Real Reason No One Smiled In Old Photographs, Dogs And Bears Are Closely Related To Seals, Difference Between The Aztec, Maya, Inca, And Olmec, That Isn’t Chlorine You’re Smelling In The Pool. This granted the Spanish further justification for the annexation of these new territories. News, in 2017, archaeologists in Mexico announced that they'd found the remains of a dwelling where upper class Aztecs lived following the Spanish conquest. All Rights Reserved. You've been in suspense long enough. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the 16th century, the conventional narrative declares that the native Aztecs (properly: the Mexica) mistook the conquistadors for gods. They built their empire in Central Mexico in the area where Mexico City is found today. According to PBS, the smallpox epidemic that helped to take down the capital city spread from the coast of Mexico and eventually reduced the population of Tenochtitlán by a whopping 40 percent. If they had fight then history would be much different. They also cause mild symptoms, at least compared to the symptoms described by contemporary accounts of cocoliztli. What had the Spanish left behind? Tens of thousands of native auxiliaries aided the Spanish conquest and in battle often served as the vanguard of a conquistador-native army. Little did the residents of the massive Inca empire know that they would soon be learning Spanish in Peru. For example, it’s claimed that since the Spanish didn’t write about this event for over a decade (which is apparently true: the first existent writing we have from the Spanish is from 1548), then it didn’t exist. Only the Salmonella we all know and despise typically only confines us to the bathroom floor for a couple of days, while we launch the contents of our stomachs out of one or both ends. The Spanish didn't see it that way. He forged alliances with local tribes, gathered an army, built ships to give himself an advantage on Lake Texcoco, and by May 1521, he was ready for action. What percentage of Aztec society were slaves? Why did Moctezuma II welcome Hernán Cortés when the Spanish conquistadors first arrived? The Aztecs were severely weakened by diseases that the Spanish brought such as smallpox, influenza, and malaria. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the 16th century, the conventional narrative declares that the native Aztecs (properly: the Mexica) mistook the conquistadors for gods. The Aztecs aren't really gone. Obviously, smallpox showed up in South America courtesy of the Spanish, but that wasn't the only disease they brought along. KnowledgeNuts © 2020. The Spanish were smart (and sociopathic) enough, though, to understand that to truly conquer a civilization, you need to take out all of the people in power. The Mexica empire which Hernan Cortes encountered in 1519 was actually a confederation of several disparate Native American peoples brought together under the Mexica yoke. Enormous thirst. Within just two years, Aztec ruler Montezuma was dead, the capital city of Tenochtitlan was captured and Cortés had claimed the Aztec empire for Spain. All quotations require a citation; all paraphrasing and summarization should also have a citation. There are no other historical incidents of Salmonella causing an outbreak quite so deadly, so if the authors of the recent study are correct, the Aztecs were just really unfortunate to encounter such a rare and devastating illness just as they were recovering from the Spanish conquest and other deadly diseases like smallpox. 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