Why did I get this book?
Native American history, especially pre-Columbian, has always been something I feel I need to have at least a passing familiarity with. Lately, I’ve worked with a few students who’ve really pushed me to read more in the field, as well as a colleague who has made Native American studies a much more urgent (and compelling) priority for me. It’s a field that I also think often has historiographical alignments with and notable divergences from work by historians of Africa that are intellectually and methodologically important. As I undertook this reading, I came to see Mesoamerican and Andean history as areas that I felt particularly unknowledgeable about. So Townsend’s Fifth Sun seemed a good place to turn.
Is it what I thought it was?
Absolutely. It’s the kind of book I’m completely jealous of: a historian writing in a masterful, accessible, factually rich and yet narratively compelling way about the entirety of a major subject area. I’m normally drawn to more microhistorical work, but I just love it when someone who can write well and has deep expertise writes at a bigger scale without any of the fatuity that generalist histories by non-scholars sometimes have.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I don’t see myself assigning it in a class ever—I don’t have the scholarly range to teach to the book. Maybe if I ever did a course on debates over the concept and comparability of empire in world history.
I think this is just the kind of book that you read as part of your overall plan of intellectual maintenance and then you try to hold on to the general insights it gave you.
Quotes
The book’s narration of Aztec history is not so detailed as to be difficult to grasp or think about, but it’s also hard to pull out specific passages that sum it all up—everything is tightly dependent upon the cumulative understanding that she skillfully builds throughout the book.
“The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made. They thought of themselves as a humble poeple who had made the best of a bad situation and who had shown bravery and thus reaped the rewards. They believed that the universe had imploded four times previously, and they were living under the fifth sun, thanks to the extraordinary courage of an ordinary man.”
“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant ‘year count’ or ‘yearly account’, even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources ‘annals’. In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events.”
“Traditionally, the subject of slavery in the Aztec world has been a vexed one. Because the Aztecs were disparaged for so long as cannibalistic savages, serious scholars have been loath to write anything that might be perceived as detracting from their moral worth; associating them in any way with famous slave societies was hardly going to help matters. Thus the idea was often promulgated that Aztec slaves by definition were prisoners of war taken for sacrifice to satisfy a religious compulsion, and that household servants were a different category altogether…However, modern scholars now acknowledge that the reality was quite different. Some prisoners of war (usually men) were indeed sacrificed, and some household servants had in truth indentured themselves or been sold by their chief as a punishment. But there were also many other enslaved people.”
“Nahuatl-language sources produced beyond the purview of the Spaniards suggest that many men sometimes chose to have sex with other men. There was a range of sexual possibilities during one’s time on earth, understood to be part of the joy of living, and it certainly was not unheard of for men to go to bed together in the celebrations connected with religious ceremonies, and presumably at other times as well.”
“The most powerful monarchs each left impressive architectural remnants of their reigns, visible to all the world for all time (or so they hoped), and the state found plenty of practical uses for them.”
“Their hosts offered them food, and they feasted. The tamales boasted decorative designs on top, such as a seashell outlined with red beans. Guests could choose between turkey, venison, rabbit, lobster, or frog stewed with chilis of various kinds. On the side, there were winged ants with savory herbs, spicy tomato sauces, fried onions and squash, fish eggs, and toasted corn. There were all kind of fruits, tortillas with honey, and little cakes made of amaranth seed.”
“Because the city [Tenochtitlan] had grown so quickly from scratch, rather than evolving gradually, like ancient Paris or London, its construction was planned and organized. The buildings ranged along orderly, straight streets. Ordinary households consisted of adobe buildings on three or four sides of a central courtyard. The flat roofs held gardens and sometimes additional small rooms, often used for storage.”
“If the women of Tlatelolco fought on this occasion, though, their actions did not deter the men from Tenochtitlan, who were led by Axayacatl himself. There were far more of the Tenochca. They drove the remaining Tlatelolcan warriors off the northern tip of the island into the marshy lake. And still they chased them, beating the reeds and killing them wherever they found them. It was said that the Tenochca ‘made them quack like ducks,’ and thereafter, if anyone wanted to taunt a Tlatelolcan, they had only to call him a ‘duck.’”
“The concept of a fixed law existed in the minds of many thousands of people, even without a written code.”
“The market also served as a repository for the urine collected in clay pots in households across the city…the practice served two purposes. The collection of the waste in one place rendered most of the city very clean. Ammonia was also needed for tanning hides and making salt crystals, and there was no better source than the urine from the island’s tens of thousand of people. Canoes full of basins of it were lined up near the market, and there the tanners and salt-makers brought their requisite supplies.”
“Only a few decades earlier, Mexica society could not possibly have dedicated so much time, manpower, and psychic energy to the rituals of death. But their strength enabled them to do so by the later decades. And their leaders were convinced if they could do so, they should, as they believed the practice reduced distant altepetls to abject terror.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This is not the kind of book that someone who’s just looking for one more case study to add to their bag of comparisons will find helpful. Though I also appreciated that Townsend is not so aggressively idiographic that there’s no comparative thinking at all. I had a kind of Goldilocks reaction every time she did it: that it was just right to reason as she did about state formation or migration or warfare comparatively as a way to guess at less-knowable details of Aztec history.
Townsend determinedly pushes through a kind of methodological-epistemological problem in the first third or so of the book in a way I really admired. Namely, she’s dealing with several kinds of evidence in reconstructing a relatively smooth narration of the migrations of the people who formed the Aztec polity and then their political ascension. She strongly favors the narratives told by the “grandchildren”, the “annals”, written after the Spanish arrival, and uses archaeology, Spanish observations, and comparative inference where necessary or useful. But she doesn’t let the methodological questions underneath that mix slow down the narration, nor does she get tangled up in a need to treat the annals as epistemically alien or unrepresentable. It reminds in some ways of why I like the new wave of work on West African history from about 500 CE to 1600 CE by scholars like Michael Gomez and Toby Green so much—it’s methodologically sophisticated and creative and it takes the problems of interpreting the available sources seriously but it doesn’t get caught in a kind of over-elaborate framework that overemphasizes epistemic difference between those sources and contemporary historical interpretation. It’s a difficult dance to get right—to not give into easy, essentially Eurocentric, forms of universalism and comparativism, but also to avoid making it impossible to offer an intelligible and coherent narrative that recognizes the comprehensible humanity of Aztec (or African) history. There’s something vaguely disrespectful about a certain kind of over-escalation of epistemological difficulty—it ends up making some histories unrepresentable, and knowable only by specialists. This is a good model for punching through that tendency.
Thinking about how Townsend discusses the origins of Tenochtitlan—that the Mexica settled there at the end of a period of migration and living in subordinate status within other polities because the city’s site was seen as not particularly habitable (an island in a lake with marshland) and thus was available for settlement. That seems like an important dimension generally of the relationship between environments, migration and state formation outside of Western Europe (where land holding, imagined land scarcity and permanent settlement fell into a pretty distinctive pattern prior to the 1300s)—that sometimes politically and economically powerful cities or communities end up sited in a place that otherwise doesn’t seem like an ideal location because it’s a location that doesn’t create any forms of obligation or subordination to someone already living nearby.
One very satisfying thing for me at least is that this book gave me far more narrative and empirical understanding of the reasons why what is often represented as a Spanish conquest really should be understood as a civil war within the Valley of Mexico and environs, an argument that’s made very clearly by Matthew Restall in his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest as well. I feel as if this is a paradigm shift that should be part of general knowledge of world history, at a basic level—say, in U.S. terms, the kind of thing that 9th graders are taught. Conquest in the sense of subjugation, in the sense of establishing a state apparatus built to dominate by turning people into colonial subjects and eradicating their indigenous languages, institutions and practices, comes later than the appearance of figures like Cortes or Pizarro (and similarly elsewhere in the non-Western world at a later date).
The book is extremely good at describing the material world of the Mexica in Tenochtitlan at its height and the social structures that materiality both organized and expressed. It’s also great at explaining the political economy of sacrifice and its varied cultural and religious meanings—and the role it played in making the Mexica both powerful and vulnerable.
Another thing the book excels at, especially for someone like me with very little familiarity with this specific history, is giving a fully-developed sense of the Mexica’s philosophical and cultural imagination in all its specificity and richness—the debates they had within their society, between themselves and neighbors, the forms and tropes of their thought.
You can’t just skip ahead to the arrival of Cortes and expect to really understand or appreciate the narrative at that point, but I could easily imagine assigning that part of the book alongside a mid-20th Century textbook from the US or Europe describing the arrival of Cortes as a basic introduction to historiography for students—to see what a stupendous difference it makes to write the history of Spanish arrival from the indigenous side in a way that’s detailed, knowing and clear, and to understand that in a purely unadorned and uninstrumental way that’s just more factual and more important, that it’s not just a matter of perspective or woke or whatever rot the culture warriors are spouting these days. In particular, to understand Marina (aka La Malinche), the woman who became a translator for Cortes, in the fullness of her context makes all the difference in the world. The thing that makes me the most bitter and angry about conservative complaints against political correctness, etc. in the academy is simply that from the beginning that complaint has thoughtlessly rejected the incredibly straightforward work of acquiring more knowledge about more things. Townsend isn’t just switching lenses or changing sides, on this point, she’s a historian telling her readers a deeper, more accurate and more explanatory version of the truth of Cortes’ arrival and his march towards Tenochtitlan.