A. Kennedy reviews the Moctezuma exhibition at the British Museum.

image Moctezuma was the ruler who allowed the Spanish, led by an adventurer called Hernan Cortes, to seize the Aztecs’ Central American empire in 1519-21. The way was thus opened (as historians like to say) for the subsequent destruction of the Inca empire in Peru and the colonisation of the whole of South America. This exhibition examines Moctezuma’s role at the time, but also how he has been portrayed since.

The popular image of the Aztec (or Mexica) empire is one of human sacrifice on a huge scale, hearts being cut out of bodies, the piling up of victims’ skulls. Unfortunately, it’s all true. One of the first sculptures we meet is of a fearsome-looking eagle with a cavity in its back to hold human hearts. Most of the other sculptures look pretty fearsome too – scowling warriors, skulls, serpents.

Yes, anthropologists will say, but the Aztecs saw the universe as a dangerous and unstable place. Human blood was required to feed the gods and hence maintain cosmic balance. Even the rulers were supposed to give some of their own blood occasionally. Anyway, what about the impressive monuments, the town planning, the sophisticated networks of trade, the maintenance of a large population through advanced agricultural techniques?

Again, all true. But theirs was a society based, like ours, on inequality and exploitation. As Marxist author Berthold Brecht once asked, ‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’ Who built these splendid monuments? We should not fall into the trap of seeing such societies, riven by class and ethnic division, as just one thing – monolithic , unchanging, or God forbid, ‘harmonious’.

We note, for example, that Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs’ capital, had been founded less than 200 years previously, in 1325. And their wonderfully advanced agriculture, based on floating islands in the lake around the capital, soon created a surplus which was appropriated by the ruling warrior class. The lower classes often went hungry, for example during the great famine of 1505.

But perhaps their spirits would have been lifted by the ritual slaughter of foreign captives as the empire expanded. The Aztec rulers constantly sought to acquire new territories which would furnish them with luxury goods such as turquoise, greenstone, shells and featherwork for the display of status and for religious ceremonial, as well as new labour and sacrificial victims.

Thus a key element in the success of the Spanish was that they found allies among the peoples subjugated by the Aztecs, not least the Tlaxcala. Surrounded by the Aztec empire, the Tlaxcala had functioned (a bit like the Taliban), as the empire’s favourite enemy, always good for sustaining the imperial cult of military valour.

The exhibition is quite effective in presenting information about the role of the empire in maintaining Aztec identity through ritualized warfare and religious ceremonial. The two main shrines at the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan were dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc, related to agriculture, and the war god Huitzilopochtli.

The feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, is also featured, but his significant role in the events that led to the overthrow of Moctezuma is not touched on. When the Spanish invaded there was already widespread social discontent among the lower classes, leading to a growth in popularity of the more peaceful Quetzalcoatl and a challenge to the cult of the war god. The welcome that Moctezuma initially extended to Cortes might have been motivated by the fear that Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl.

Another neglected aspect is the role of women in Aztec culture. Across a range of human societies, the shift to permanent agriculture and away from hunting and gathering entailed massive increases not only in class inequality, but in gender inequality. Women worked long hours tilling the fields and processing cereal crops in addition to raising children. It looks as though Aztec society presented no exception to this rule, judging by the images of male power and violence on offer in the exhibition.

But we should not draw the conclusion from this that Spanish rule was possibly somewhat better, or at least no worse. To take the position of ‘a plague on both your houses’ plays into the hands of neo-colonialists. The Spanish destroyed Tenochtitlan; the indigenous population was devastated by smallpox epidemics and by the brutal forced labour required to sustain the new empire.

The invaders also sought to convert the native peoples to Catholic Christianity, burning those who were judged to be heretics. Indigenous ways of life across the region (not just that of the Aztec ruling class) suffered massive assault, with all the material and psychological consequences that persist to this day.

The exhibition could have shown this more clearly. One interesting exhibit is that of a wooden drum played by Aztec warriors and priests during militaristic imperial ceremonies. It was subsequently used by communities around Malinalco until the late 19th century. This suggests that the drum became a symbol of and a vehicle for cultural resistance to Spanish colonialism among the peasants.

Their former masters, meanwhile, may have been reconciled to colonial rule partly by the use that the Spanish made of the image of Moctezuma. The emperor’s death remains a mystery. He may have been killed by the Spanish, or by one of his disgruntled subjects who saw him as a sell-out. Smallpox,guns, horses, naval technology, steel swords and armour all helped the invaders to defeat the Aztecs in the battles that followed.

It suited the new rulers to portray Moctezuma as a noble king who had welcomed them in and recognised the authority of the Spanish Crown, but had been unjustly killed by his own people. Both full-length portraits of him in the exhibition show him as noble, while the later one also shows him as loyal to the Spanish. The message was that the native upper class could maintain their traditional status whilst adopting a subservient role.

‘Every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism’ , wrote Walter Benjamin. This is certainly the case for the Aztec empire, but also for the Spanish empire and for the global empire of capital which succeeded it. More material on the Conquista – and the resistance to it which has continued to this day – would have helped visitors to reach these conclusions. But I doubt whether either the Mexican or British governments would have countenanced an exhibition on the Zapatistas.

Further reading: Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World.

Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution: A People’s History.