Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [196]
He was horror-struck.
He cried out, he shouted to his lords and vassals,
He said, ‘Who are they, eh, O Culhuacans?
Have you not seen? They have flayed my daughter!
They shall not remain here, the fiends!
We shall slay them, we shall massacre them!
The evil ones shall be annihilated here!’
Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc. Crónica Mexicayotl, trans. Thelma D. Sullivan
The Aztecs were then driven into the lake, but they made improvised rafts out of their arrows and shields, and when they emerged on the other side, they were inspired. It was prophesied that they must settle ‘where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart’. In the distance, on a prickly-pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: ‘O Mexicans, it shall be here! ’ But no one could see who spoke. They knew that the reedy, but defensible, islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenochtitlán, ‘place of the prickly-pear’. It was the year ome calli, ‘2 House’, 1325.
This was the origin of the vast and miraculous lake city, which so entranced the invading Spaniards when they reached it in November 1519. The Aztecs had regrouped and prospered in their lakeland home for a hundred years, and then begun to expand their domains through a series of aggressive wars. First, under Itzcoatl (’Obsidian-Snake’), 1427-40, they achieved control of the Valley of Mexico as a whole, then under Motecuhzoma I Ilhuicamina (’Heaven-Shooter’) they outflanked the territory of their resistant neighbours to the west, Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala, to reach the Caribbean coast and the central highlands to the south. Two more long-reigning tlatoani added to the empire, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had conquered about 100,000 square kilometres of territory in the centre of modern Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, including the curious enclave of Xoconochco, down the coast on the Pacific border of Guatemala.
A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this bloody expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypassed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the šoci-yāōyōtl or ‘flower-war’, a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word šocitl, ‘flower’, has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example, in šocitl in kwīkatl, ‘the flower the song’, meaning ‘poetry’, used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of association with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.
Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of nauatlato, ‘interpreters’, to ensure effective transmission of the rulers’ wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortés when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortés’s interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.
Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomí, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or