Book Review: "Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs"
Camilla Townsend's new history sheds significant light on the history of one of the most famous empires of the Americas
First, some housekeeping. I know I haven’t been as consistent with this newsletter as I should be, and so I want to announce that, starting the week of July 11, I’m going to commit to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday release schedule. Monday and Wednesday will be short essays and reviews, while Friday will be the release date for that week’s long-form writing. Hopefully, this will mean that you’ll not get a blizzard of e-mails from me on the weekend. If I’m feeling especially ambitious or productive, I hope to also increase my output, so that you can expect to hear from me 5 days a week. As always, it’ll be a mix of political and cultural commentary and straight-up reviews of my favorite movies, TV shows, and books.
So, with that out of the way, here’s the first of this week’s reviews.
When I was in junior high, I developed a fascination with the Native American cultures of Central and South America, particularly the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans. I’ll be the first to admit that I probably didn’t approach these civilizations with the sensitivity and complexity that I should have, in large part because the historiography surrounding them had largely ossified around a certain set of expectations. The Aztecs, for example, have become associated in the American imagination with human sacrifice. This, in turn, has shaped how popular culture--in forms such as History Channel documentaries, films (including Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, and novels--understands and represents these complicated people.
Which brings us to Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, by the noted historian Camilla Townsend. Working from the premise that a more ethical and rich history of this fascinating people can only emerge from reading their own texts, she has given us a book that allows us to see this extraordinary civilization in all of its (sometimes bewildering) complexity.
To begin with, Townsend does an excellent job at dispelling many of the pernicious myths that have coagulated around the Mexica in the centuries since the Spanish conquest. As it turns out, human sacrifice was not nearly as central to their way of life as many have assumed; as with so much else, it served the interests of the colonizers to paint their enemies as bloodthirsty savages in order to make their conquest seem both inevitable and justified. Furthermore, the idea that Cortes was greeted as the return of the god Quetzacoatl, Townsend contends, was more than likely a later invention, once again constructed to justify a brutal conquest after the fact.
Likewise, she dispels the myth that Moctezuma, the ruler of the Mexica at the time of the conquest, was a weak or vacillating emperor, a sitting duck simply waiting for the right conqueror to come along and topple him. In her telling, he was a cunning and subtle ruler, one who tried to find a way of buying off the invaders in order to protect his people. Given that this was what the people expected of their leaders, this allows him to emerge in a very different, and more complimentary, light than has been the case with many previous histories.
There’s a lot to enjoy in this book, and I especially enjoyed reading about the many conflicts and royal conflicts that periodically swept through the region. Though Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Mexica, they had to constantly contend with other local powers and monarchs, not all of whom were willing to submit. Townsend has a keen eye for what makes a narrative history work, and she never lets you get too bogged down in the details, instead keeping you eagerly turning the pages, waiting to see what will happen next.
As others have noted, Fifth Sun is a brief history, and for this reason it leaves some elements out. We don’t learn a great deal about Mexica culture, except insofar as culture impacted politics and the unfolding of historical events. However, there’s still much here for lay readers to enjoy, and we do get a pretty rich look at how tradition shaped the way that the Mexica looked at themselves, their history, and their world.
Given that this is a history from the point of view of the conquered, it makes sense that Townsend would focus very much on individuals. We meet, for example, the various scribes and historians who worked to preserve their people’s history, even if that meant that they had to learn Spanish and submit themselves to the authority of their conquerors and their Catholic priests.
Arguably one of the book’s most controversial, and strangely tragic, figures is the woman Malintzin (who would be baptized and given the name Marina). There are few figures in the bloody saga of Cortés and the conquest of the Mexica who have been so maligned by history, since her name has become synonymous with a betrayal of one’s own people. Townsend shows us, however, that she was caught in an impossible position and that, like many women (including Moctezuma’s daughters) she made the best of a bad situation. Her son by Cortés, Martín Cortés, would lead a tragic life, caught up in the terrible politics that afflicted his people as the Spanish brutally asserted their control and worked to remake their new colony in their own (preferred) image. Like so many others, he fell victim and was even subjected to torture.
For me, the most evocative part of the book comes near the end, as we meet the generations that came after the initial conquest. These were the men (and presumably women) who saw their culture slipping away into the mists of time and so did everything in their power to preserve some vestiges of it for future generations. The work of Chimalpahin was particularly important in this regard, and we owe a great debt to him for his ability and willingness to record his people’s traditions and histories.
Reading Fifth Sun, I appreciated Townsend’s providing pronunciation guides, and interpretations of Nahuatl names. I’m one of those people who believes in approaching foreign languages with respect, and given how strange the Nahuatl can appear to English speakers, having an actual pronunciation guide was very helpful. It was also very helpful to be told that the term “Aztec” is a later term and that the people in question referred to themselves as the Mexica.
Indeed, if you take nothing else away from Fifth Sun--and there’s plenty to take away, even for a lay reader--then it should be this: that Cortés and his successors did not succeed in destroying the Mexica, much as they might have wished to do so. Though their empire fell, their way of life, and their voices, endured. Thanks to the work of historians like Townsend, these voices are once more raised up, and it can be hoped that they will find an audience ready and willing to listen to them at last.