Aztecs

So who is the man most accredited with the Conquest of the Mexican/American Empire of the Aztecs? Francisco Pizarro or Hernan Cortes? And what can the Hebrew Bible teach us about such Empires?

Difficult question. When I look down from the heights of the ridges above Mulholland Drive in the San Fernando Valley and cast my history guided eyes over that beautiful city of Los Angeles shining in the distance in the near foreground with its crystal towers advertising it all as a crystal city much like the Aztecs of once upon a time to the south there, I am oft put to wondering what if things had been different? What if? Modern historians sometimes ask this question - What if the Aztecs had won and beaten the Spanish conquistadores when they invaded, and what if the Aztec king Montezuma had not been kind to the pale white prisoners and had not let them go back to their armies, certainly the French Huron indians did learn something from the Aztecs not to trust the prisoner industry and allow returns to armies again during the Indo-French wars on the Canadian borders. "General Munroe, until now I have only known you as a gallant adversary, I hope now that we can know one another as forgiving friends," says the French general in that pale pale movie The Last of the Mohicans. So it is a question that is often asked by the historians of another time.

It seems the fates were against the Aztecs and their sunlit empire so we must assume that they had come to the end of their lifetimes, that the whole concept of the empire had become difficult and too heavy to bear, though in some respects the Aztecs were quite innocent of greater crimes when they sacrificed their prisoners to the sun-god like Apollo of the eurozones. The Bible reminds us in the relevant passage from the Prophet Daniel that sometimes at the height of banquets and celebrations the shadows of mightier hands than local despots and kings can sometimes appear on the wall and pronounce the end of an empire as occurred in the case of the king of the Babylonians when Daniel was a prophet at the pagan court - Mene, Tekel, Parsin - words to symbolise the end of empire. So the Hebrews in their Bible did have a super-transcendent concept of the mortality of empires and kings - they were not blind to such events, even though when push came to shove they asked for a king for themselves in the Book of Judges and in the Books of Samuel to replace the presiding council of the judges of Israel.

So back to the Aztecs, it was rumoured among the Aztecs that one would come and be a pale messiah for them, and he would come from beyond the great seas, a pale being bringing an end to the sun-god worship and the sacrifice of humans. But this did not pan out precisely as foretold, even though when Cortes - rather more so than Pizarro - appeared there on his centaur like horses, producing a real supernatural fright among the Aztecs comparable to the fright the young roman legionaries experienced when they landed on the shores of Britannia in 55 BC or 705 AUC, but the superstition of the Aztecs meant that they did not fight the pale warriors with gusto or zeal, they were waiting for the advent of the pale messiah, and this was why the raising of the cross and the crucifix was important for the Conquistadores as it nullified the spirit for the fight. In sum the Conquistadores conquered the empire of the just and brave king Montezuma by accident - it was more about what was going in the minds of the Aztecs than about the reputed putative bravery of the conquistadores on the battle fields. Strange parlance, strange events. The more than brilliant historian W H Prescott alludes to this strange anomaly in his classic work, The Conquest of Mexico. A pale wraith of a ghostly messiah would descend on them. That was what they believed, that is why they were compassionate to the whites, evidently somewhat foolishly. The once mighty Aztec empire humbled. But caveat emptor, there may yet be some DNA around in Mexico and Arizona from that great empire, and some lineage from the great king himself, for in truth saving his lights Montezuma was a just man, sufficient to make an american royal family, what with modern genome projects making the finding of such nobles possible in the contemporary time frame. An american royal family could easily be an Aztec royal family. Very easily.