Teocalli, Aztec Temple for Human Sacrifices.
The survival of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous condition of their Indian race; just as in the Greek drama, when that ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess or other distinguished heroine, was not unfrequent. We remember Polyxena, the virgin daughter of Hecuba, whom her own people resolved to sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles; and her touching bravery, as she requests the Greeks not to bind her, being ashamed, she says, "having lived a princess to die a slave." A better known example is Iphigenia, so beloved by her father, King Agamemnon, and yet given up by him a victim for purposes of state and religion.
From the Greek drama, human sacrifices frequently passed to the Roman; nor does such a refined critic as Horace object to it, but only suggests that the bloodshed ought to be perpetrated behind the scenes. In Seneca's play, Medea (quoted in our Introduction), that rule was grossly violated, since the children have their throats cut by their heroic mother in full view of the audience. In the same passage (Ars Poët., 185, 186) Horace forbids a banquet of human flesh being prepared before the eyes of the public, as had been done in a play written by Ennius, the Roman poet. The religious sacrifice of human victims by the "Druids" or priests of ancient Gaul and Britain seems exactly parallel to the wholesale executions on the Mexican teocallis, since the wretched victims whom our Celtic ancestors packed for burning into those huge wicker images, were captives taken in battle, like those stretched for slaughter upon the Mexican stone of sacrifice.
Human sacrifice was so common in civilized Rome that it was not till the first century B. C. that a law was passed expressly forbidding it—(Pliny, Hist. Nat., xxx, 3, 4).
CHAPTER VI
ARRIVAL OF THE SPANIARDS
The "New Birth" of the world, which characterized the end of the fifteenth century, had an enormous influence upon Spain. Her queen, the "great Catholic Isabella," had, by assisting Columbus, done much in the great discovery of the Western World. Spain speedily had substantial reward in the boundless wealth poured into her lap, and the rich colonies added to her dominion. Thus in the beginning of the sixteenth century the new consolidated Spain, formed by the union of the two kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, became the richest and greatest of all the European states.
The Spanish governors in the West Indies being ambitious of planting new colonies in the name of the Spanish King, conquest and annexation were stimulated in all directions. When Cuba and Hayti were overrun and annexed to Spain, not without much unjust treatment of the simple natives, as we have seen, they became centers of operation, whence expeditions could be sent to Trinidad or any other island, to Panama, to Yucatan, or Florida, or any other part of the continent. After the marvelous experience of Grijalva in Yucatan, then considered an island, and his report that its inhabitants were quite a civilized community compared with the natives of the isles, Velasquez, the Governor of Cuba, resolved at once to invade the new country for purposes of annexation and plunder.
Velasquez prepared a large expedition for this adventure, consisting of eleven ships with more than 600 armed men on board; and after much deliberation chose Fernando Cortés to be the commander. Who was this Cortés, destined by his military genius and unscrupulous policy to be comparable to Hannibal or Julius Cæsar among the ancients, and to Clive or Napoleon Bonaparte among the moderns? Velasquez knew him well as one of his subordinates in the cruel conquest of Cuba; before that Cortés had distinguished himself in Hayti as an energetic and skilled officer. Of an impetuous and fiery temper which he had learned to keep thoroughly in command, he was characterized by that quality possessed by all commanders of superior genius, the "art of gaining the confidence and governing the minds of men." As a youth in Spain he had studied for the bar at the University of Salamanca; and in some of his speeches on critical occasions one can find certain traces of his academical training in the adroit arguments and clever appeals.