[839] This is placed a.d. 1325. Cf. references in Bancroft (v. 346).
[840] On the conquest of the Tecpanecas by the Mexicans, see the references in Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 412).
[841] For details of the period of the Chichimec ascendency, see Bancroft (v. ch. 5-7), Brasseur (Nat. Civil. ii.), and the authorities plentifully cited in Bancroft.
[842] On the nature of the Mexican confederacy see Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 416). He enumerates the authorities upon the point that no one of the allied tribes exercised any powers over the others beyond the exclusive military direction of the Mexicans proper (Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 559). Orozco y Berra (Geografía, etc.) claims that there was a tendency to assimilate the conquered people to the Mexican conditions. Bandelier claims that “no attempt, either direct or implied, was made to assimilate or incorporate them.” He urges that nowhere on the march to Mexico did Cortés fall in with Mexican rulers of subjected tribes. It does not seem to be clear in all cases whether it was before or after the confederation was formed, or whether it was by the Mexicans or Tezcucans that Tecpaneca, Xochimilca, Cuitlahuac, Chalco, Acolhuacan, and Quauhnahuac, were conquered. Cf. Bandelier in Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 691. As to the tributaries, see Ibid. 695.
[843] Cf. Brasseur’s Nations Civ. ii. 457, on Tezcuco in its palmy days.
[844] Sometimes written Mochtheuzema, Moktezema. The Aztec Montezuma must not, as is contended, be confounded with the hero-god of the New Mexicans. Cf. Bancroft, iii. 77, 171; Brinton’s Myths, 190; Schoolcraft’s Ind. Tribes, iv. 73; Tylor’s Prim. Culture, ii. 384; Short, 333.
[845] This has induced some historians to call these wars “holy wars.” Bandelier discredits wholly the common view, that wars were undertaken to secure victims for the sacrificial stone (Archæol. Tour, 24). But in another place (Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 128) he says: “War was required for the purpose of obtaining human victims, their religion demanding human sacrifices at least eighteen times every year.”
[846] As to these carvings, which have not yet wholly disappeared, see Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 677, 678. There is a series of alleged portraits of the Mexican kings in Carbajal-Espinosa’s Hist. de Mexico (Mexico, 1862). See pictures of Montezuma II. in Vol. II. 361, 363, and that in Ranking, p. 313.
[847] Bancroft (v. 466) enumerates the great variety of such proofs of disaster, and gives references (p. 469). Cf. Prescott, i. p. 309.
[848] Tezozomoc (cap. 106) gives the description of the first bringing of the news to Montezuma of the arrival of the Spaniards on the coast.