FLOWERS AND SONG.

In 1524, according to colonial accounts, an extraordinary face-off took place in one of the great buildings of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple Alliance-the Aztec empire, as it is better known-which Hernan Cortes had conquered three years before.*13 Facing each other across a room, two delegations of elite clerics battled over the nature of God. On one side were twelve eminent Franciscan monks, who had traveled from Europe in a mission authorized by Pope Hadrian VI. On the other were twelve high priests from the Triple Alliance, men who had wielded immense spiritual and political power until Cortes shuttered the grand temples and brought down the clerisy. Although the pope in Rome had authorized the friars' mission, all twelve were Spanish, because Spain had conquered the empire, and because Spain, which had spent centuries extracting itself from the rule of African Muslims, had experience with powerful alien ideologies. Analogously, the priests of the Triple Alliance were probably all Mexica. The Mexica were the dominant partner in the Alliance, and they had founded and populated Tenochtitlan, the empire's biggest city.

The Franciscans' mission had begun with a request by Cortes. Cortes believed that the military conquest of the Alliance had to be accompanied and justified by an equivalent spiritual conquest. The Indians, he said, must be led to salvation. And he asked King Charles V of Spain for some priests to do the job. In turn the king turned to the pope for his blessing and advice. Cortes did not want "bishops and pampered prelates," wrote historian William H. Prescott, "who too often squandered the substance of the Church in riotous living, but...men of unblemished purity of life, nourished with the learning of the cloister, [who] counted all personal sacrifices as little in the cause to which they were devoted."

Led by the intellectual Martin de Valencia, a man so dedicated to ascetic faith that he ended his days as a hermit in the Mexican desert, the friars intended to guide Spain's new subjects along the exhilarating path to Christendom. The monks understood that the Mexica already had a church-a false church intended to snare their souls for the devil, but a church nonetheless. And they knew that the Indians were too numerous to be reached by even the most zealous missionaries. Valencia's plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the priests would fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.

The sole record of the discussions between the monks and the Mexica was compiled four decades later by another Franciscan, Bernardino de Sahagun. Sahagun knew ten of the twelve Spaniards at the meeting, interviewed four of the Mexica priests, and filled in gaps by extrapolating from similar theological discussions in which he had participated. Written in dialogue verse, an opera seria exchange of long recitatives, his reconstruction does not individually identify the speakers-perhaps, some historians believe, because the great meeting did not actually take place, Sahagun's account being a distillation of many smaller encounters. Only part of the original manuscript survives, written in Nahuatl, the Mexica language, which Sahagun learned to speak fluently. Still, what remains is enough to indicate how the Mexica viewed their position vis-a-vis the Spanish: defeated, but not unequal.

In Sahagun's reconstruction, the Franciscans speak first, their interpreters struggling to make European concepts clear in Nahuatl verse, the language of high discourse. The monks explain that they have been sent by "the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things," the pope, to bring the "venerable word / of the One Sole True God" to New Spain. By worshipping at false altars, the friars say, "you cause Him an injured heart, / by which you live in His anger, His ire." So infuriated was the Christian God by the Indians' worship of idols and demons that he sent out "the Spaniards, /...those who afflicted you with tormenting sorrow, / by which you were punished / so that you ceased / these not few injuries to His precious heart." The Triple Alliance was subjugated, in other words, because its people had failed to recognize the One True God. By accepting the Bible, the priests explain, the Mexica "will be able to cool the heart / of He by Whom All Live, / so He will not completely destroy you."

The Mexica respond immediately. Not wanting to join Christendom, they also know that they cannot prevail in a direct confrontation with their conquerors. Shrewdly, they try to shift the terms of the argument to more congenial rhetorical ground-an approach that will force the friars to treat them as equals. "What now, immediately, will we say?" the lead cleric asks. "We are those who shelter the people, / We are mothers to the people, fathers to the people." Translation: We priests are in the same business as you Franciscans. We are high-ranking clerics, elite intellectuals, just like you. And just like you we have a function: providing comfort and meaning to the common folk. To disavow their faith, the Mexica say, would tear apart their lives. For this reason and others, the priests explain, "we cannot yet agree to [Christianity] ourselves / We do not yet make it true for ourselves." Behind the priests' refusal is an implied request: You know what it is like to be in our shoes. You carry the same responsibilities. As one group of highly placed religious functionaries to another, don't do this to us!

Having expected childlike natives, empty vessels waiting to be filled by the Word, the Franciscans instead found themselves fencing with skilled rhetoricians, proud of their intellectual traditions. In the end the friars resorted to a crude but effective argument: the Indians had to pledge fealty to the Christian god, because their own "gods were not powerful enough to liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards." In a sober ceremony, the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.

For more than a decade, Sahagun and other religious authorities regarded the conversion as atriumph. He initially began his reconstruction of the debate to commemorate it. But he never published the manuscript, because he was slowly coming to believe that the Church's efforts in New Spain had been a failure. Despite lip-service devotion to the Gospel, the Mexica remained outside Christendom, as do some of their descendants to this day.

Sahagun is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors-dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture-unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka. From it emerges, in almost full detail, a group portrait of a kind that is usually obscured by loss.

Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent. They are best known for assembling the greatest empire ever seen in Mesoamerica. But their finest accomplishment may have been the creation of a remarkable intellectual tradition, one that like the Greeks began with the questions of lyric poets and then went on to distinct schools of inquiry associated with elite academies.

Mexica histories begin by relating their migration to the Basin of Mexico. Fringed by mountains, the basin was about a hundred miles long from north to south and perhaps half that size from east to west. At its center was Lake Texcoco, a fifty-mile-long volcanic lake with exceptionally clear, clean water. Around the time of Christ, a small village on its northeast periphery named Teotihuacan emerged as a military power. During the next four centuries its realm steadily expanded until it ruled directly over much of central Mexico and indirectly, through puppet governments, as far south as Guatemala. Its eponymous capital then may have had 200,000 inhabitants, enormous at the time; its ruins, an hour by bus from Mexico City, are among the few remnants of the ancient world that today don't seem small.

The city was organized around the Avenue of the Dead, a miles-long, north-south boulevard that cut straight as an ax stroke across the landscape. From the northern end of the avenue rose the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, each as big as the biggest Egyptian pyramids. To their south sprawled the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the empire's rulers, as ruthless and preoccupied with national glory as so many Bismarcks, considered what to do with their soldiers. Despite the empire's fame and power, its history is still little known; archaeologists do not know what language its people spoke, or even its proper name ("Teotihuacan" was coined centuries later). It had writing of some kind, though it seems not to have been used much; in any case the script has not been deciphered.

At about 200 feet tall and 700 feet on a side, the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan is the world's third-largest pyramid. It was built in stages in the second and third centuries A.D. atop a deep, 300-foot cave created by a lava tube that may have represented the place where humankind emerged onto the earth. The pyramid and the rest of the city are oriented on a rectilinear grid 15 25" from true north, a direction that may have aligned with the cave mouth.

Teotihuacan fell in the eighth century for reasons yet unknown, but left an enduring mark in central Mexico. Three hundred years afterward the rising Toltec styled themselves its heirs. They, too, built an empire, which fell amid internal dissension in about 1200 A.D. The collapse of the Toltec created an opening in the warm, fertile basin. Into it moved half a dozen groups from the northern and western desert, the Mexica among them.

The Mexica were an unlikely choice for heir to the imperial tradition of Teotihuacan and the Toltecs. Poor and unsophisticated, they probably came to Lake Texcoco about 1250 A.D. and became vassals of more important groups. Eventually some enemies drove them away from the fertile shore. The Mexica fled to a swampy, uninhabited island. According to an account by Hernando alvaro Tezozomoc, grandson of the last Mexica ruler, the refugees stumbled about the island for days, looking for food and a place to settle, until one of the priests had a vision in a dream. In the dream, the Mexica's patron deity instructed his people to look in the swamp for a cactus. Standing on the cactus, the god promised, "you shall see an eagle...warming itself in the sun."

And [the next morning], once more, they went in among the rushes, in among the reeds, to the edge of the spring.

And when they came out into the reeds, There at the edge of the spring was the tenochtli [a cactus fruit], And they saw an eagle on the tenochtli, perched on it, standing on it.

It was eating something, it was feeding, It was pecking at what it was eating.

And when the eagle saw the Mexica, he bowed his head low.

Its nest, its pallet, was of every kind of precious feather- Of lovely cotinga feathers, roseate spoonbill feathers, quetzal feathers.

And they also saw strewn about the heads of sundry birds, The heads of precious birds strung together, And some birds' feet and bones.

And the god called out to them, he said to them, "Oh Mexica, it shall be there!"

(But the Mexica did not see who spoke.) It was for this reason that they call it Tenochtitlan.

And the Mexica wept, they said, "Oh happy, oh blessed are we!

We have beheld the city that shall be ours!

Let us go now, let us rest...."

This was in the year...1325.

In this way came into being Tenochtitlan, sole rival, in size and opulence, to Teotihuacan.

Among the Mexica, a council of clan elders chose the overall ruler. Or, rather, chose the overall rulers-the Mexica divided authority between a tlatoani (literally, "speaker"), a diplomatic and military commander who controlled relations with other groups, and a cihuacoatl (literally, "female serpent"), who supervised internal affairs. For a century after Tenochtitlan's birth, the tlatoani's position was unenviable. The Mexica were subordinated by a nearby city-state on the shore, and the tlatoani was forced to send Mexica men as conscripts for its wars. Only in 1428 did Itzacoatl, a newly selected tlatoani, ally with two other small vassal states to overthrow their mutual overlords. In victory, the three groups officially formed the Triple Alliance, with the Mexica the most powerful leg of the tripod. Like Tawantinsuyu, the empire grew rapidly. Its presiding genius was not Itzacoatl, though, but his nephew Tlacaelel (13981480).

During his long life Tlacaelel was twice offered the position of tlatoani but turned it down both times. Preferring the less glorious and supposedly less influential position of cihuacoatl, head of internal affairs, he ruled from behind the scenes, dominating the Alliance for more than fifty years and utterly reengineering Mexica society. Born to an elite family, Tlacaelel first became known at the age of thirty, when he inspired the Mexica to revolt against their masters, supervised the gestation of the Alliance, and served as Itzacoatl's general during the assault. After the victory he met with Itzacoatl and the Mexica clan leaders. In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime victors in central Mexico often burned their enemies' codices, the hand-painted picture-texts in which priests recorded their people's histories. Tlacaelel insisted that in addition to destroying the codices of their former oppressors the Mexica should set fire to their own codices. His explanation for this idea can only be described as Orwellian: "It is not fitting that our people / Should know these pictures. / Our people, our subjects, will be lost / And our land destroyed, / For these pictures are full of lies." The "lies" were the inconvenient fact that the Mexica past was one of poverty and humiliation. To motivate the people properly, Tlacaelel said, the priesthood should rewrite Mexica history by creating new codices, adding in the great deeds whose lack now seemed embarrassing and adorning their ancestry with ties to the Toltecs and Teotihuacan.

A visionary and patriot, Tlacaelel believed that the Mexica were destined to rule a vast empire. But because ambition succeeds best when disguised by virtue, he wanted to furnish the Alliance with an animating ideology-a manifest destiny, as it were, or mission civilisatrice. He came up with a corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica into keepers of the cosmic order.

At its center was Huitzilopochtli, a martial god who wore a helmet shaped like a hummingbird's head and carried a fire-breathing serpent as a weapon. Huitzilopochtli had long been the Mexica's patron deity. It was he who had entered the Mexica priest's dream to explain where to found Tenochtitlan. After the formation of the Triple Alliance, Tlacaelel "went about persuading the people," as one Mexica historian wrote, that Huitzilopochtli was not a mere tutelary deity, but a divinity essential to the fate of humankind.

At the apex of the celestial hierarchy stood Ometeotl, the omnipresent sustainer of the cosmos, "the Lord of the Close Vicinity" in Nahuatl. In Tlacaelel's vision, Ometeotl had four sons, one of whom was Huitzilopochtli. These four sons had been vying for supremacy since the beginning of time; the history of the universe was mainly a record of their endless struggle. At intervals the brothers would wrestle themselves into a precarious equilibrium, like sumo giants straining motionlessly against each other in the ring, with one brother on top and the other three in a temporary, isometric balance below. In these interregnums of order, Tlacaelel explained, the topmost brother linked himself to the sun, on which all living creatures depend.

In some versions of the story, the brother became the sun; in others, he merely supervised its workings. Either way, life could exist only when one brother held sway and the cosmic battle quieted and the sun was able to shine. But when the balance came apart, as it always did, the brothers would resume their strife. The sun would go dark, sinking the cosmos into an endless, lethal night. Eventually the sons would arrive at a new transitory order and reignite the sun, letting existence begin anew. This apocalyptic cycle had occurred four times before. The Mexica lived during the Fifth Sun, when the sun was identified with Huitzilopochtli.

The sun's role was hellishly difficult, Tlacaelel said. Even when the strife among Ometeotl's sons quieted enough to allow the sun to shine, it still had to battle the stars and moon every day as it rose in the sky-a literal struggle of light against darkness. Each day of sunlight was a victory that must be fought and won again the next day. Because the sun could not hold out forever against its foes, one sixteenth-century Nahuatl account explained, it would one day inevitably lose-there was no getting around it. "In this Sun it shall come to pass / That the earth shall move, / That there shall be famine, / And that we all shall perish." But the calamity could be postponed, at least for a while, if the sun was fortified for its battles with the stars. To gain strength, the sun needed chalchihuatl-the mysterious, ineffable fluid of life-energy. The sacred mission of the Triple Alliance, Tlacaelel proclaimed, was to furnish this vital substance to Huitzilopochtli, who would then use it for the sun, postponing the death of everyone on the planet.

There was but one method for obtaining this life-energy: ritual human sacrifice. To obtain the victims, Tlacaelel said (according to one of Sahagun's contemporaries), the sun needed a "marketplace" where he could "go with his army [that is, the army of the Triple Alliance] to buy victims, men for him to eat.... And this will be a good thing, for it will be as if he had his maize cakes hot from the griddle-tortillas from a nearby place, hot and ready to eat whenever he wishes them." Occasionally the victims were slaves and criminals, but mainly they were prisoners of war. In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world. In Tlacaelel's scheme, imperial conquests were key to "the moral combat against evil," explained Miguel Leon-Portilla, a Mexican historian who has devoted much of his career to analyzing Mexica thought. "The survival of the universe depended on them."

Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance has inevitably become shrouded in myths. Two are important here. The first is that human sacrifice was never practiced-the many post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are all racist lies. It was indeed in the Spanish interest to exaggerate the extent of human sacrifice, because ending what Cortes called this "most horrid and abominable custom" became a post hoc rationale for conquest. But the many vividly depicted ceremonies in Mexica art and writing leave little doubt that it occurred-and on a large scale. (Cortes may well have been correct when he estimated that sacrifice claimed "three or four thousand souls" a year.) The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris-Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14,000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail," Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.

In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by the reading of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government-in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign's divine power after it had been injured by a criminal act. Most important, neither society should be judged-or in the event judged each other-entirely by its brutality. Who today would want to live in the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitlan and the other cities in the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.

The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally, "he who knows things") meant something akin to "thinker-teacher"-a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who "himself was writing and wisdom," was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. "He puts a mirror before others," the Mexica said. In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.

Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. (To be sure, Plato does have Socrates subtly "correct" Homer, because the gods supposedly couldn't have behaved in the immoral way described by the poet. But by and large the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus plays no role in either Plato or Aristotle.) But the tlamatinime shared the religion's sense of the evanescence of existence. "Truly do we live on Earth?" asked a poem or song attributed to Nezahualcoyotl (140272), a founding figure in Mesoamerican thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question: Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

Be it jade, it shatters.

Be it gold, it breaks.

Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

In another verse assigned to Nezahualcoyotl this theme emerged even more baldly: Like a painting, we will be erased.

Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.

Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.

Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. "Do flowers go to the region of the dead?" Nezahualcoyotl asked. "In the Beyond, are we still dead or do we live?" Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements-a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to "my hand, my foot" (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention "the crown" are actually talking about the entire monarch, and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet's speech would be "his word, his breath" (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for "truth" is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like "fundamental truth, true basic principle." In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.

Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote Leon-Portilla, the Mexican historian, "nothing is 'true' in the Nahuatl sense of the word." Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.

According to Leon-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song: He goes his way singing, offering flowers.

And his words rain down Like jade and quetzal plumes.

Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?

Is that the only truth on earth?

Ayocuan's remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, Leon-Portilla argued. "Flowers and song" was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; "jade and quetzal feathers" was a synecdoche for great value, in the way that Europeans might refer to "gold and silver." The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, Leon-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. "From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?" asks the poet. "The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?" And he answers: "Only from His [that is, Ometeotl's] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven." Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.

Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica's own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence-and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

Here and there we see clues to what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages. British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn't wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists came across this colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century. As artists will, they stole everything they could, transfiguring the images further. Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artists to explore new themes.

Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred ways with a hundred cultures-the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange. One can hardly imagine anything more valuable. Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.

ASSIGNING BLAME.

Weighing loss of such scale, one naturally wants to identify and denounce the responsible party. In the case of the Mexica, the obvious target is Hernan Cortes, who landed near what is now the city of Veracruz on April 22, 1519. An astute politician, Cortes studied the Triple Alliance with a view to dismembering it. The empire, he quickly understood, was anything but unified. Like Tawantinsuyu, it was a patchwork of satrapies rather than a unified state; indeed, several large groups within the Alliance had managed to hang on to their independence despite being surrounded by hostile forces. Although the empire left the original elites of conquered lands in place, it humiliated them. The people, forced to disgorge ever-increasing tribute to Tenochtitlan, were resentful and bitter. Cortes divined the discontent beneath the Alliance's martial display and would later benefit from it.

Marching inland from the sea, the Spanish at first fought repeatedly with Tlaxcala, a confederation of four small kingdoms that had maintained its independence despite repeated Alliance incursions. Thanks to their guns, horses, and steel blades, the foreigners won every battle, even with Tlaxcala's huge numerical advantage. But Cortes's force shrank with every fight. He was on the verge of losing everything when the four Tlaxcala kings abruptly reversed course. Concluding from the results of their battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, the Indian leaders offered what seemed a win-win deal: they would stop attacking Cortes, sparing his life, the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance. To seal the partnership, one of the four kings-Tlaxcala's main military leader-betrothed his daughter to Pedro de Alvarado, Cortes's second-in-command. Mounted on their strange, monstrous beasts, the Spanish rode at the forefront of an army of perhaps twenty thousand Tlaxcalans. In November 1519, they entered Tenochtitlan, brushing by the objections of the startled and indecisive tlatoani, the famous Motecuhzoma (pronounced a bit like Mo-tayk-SZU-ma; he is better known, inaccurately, as Montezuma).

TRIPLE ALLIANCE, 1519 A.D.

Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders-it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens-none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never conceived of such a thing.) And the whole of this wealth and power, Cortes subsequently explained to the Spanish king, flowed into the hands of Motecuhzoma.

Can there be anything more magnificent than that this barbarian lord should have all the things to be found under the heavens in his domain, fashioned in gold and silver and jewel and feathers? And so realistic in gold and silver that no smith in the world could have done better? And in jewels so fine that it is impossible to imagine with what instruments they were cut so perfectly?...In Spain there is nothing to compare with it.

Dazzled as he was, Cortes was also aware that with a single command Motecuhzoma could order his army "to obliterate all memory of us." The Spaniards counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the tlatoani in his own palace, making him first their captive and then their puppet.

In both Europe and Mesoamerica kings ruled by the dispensation of the heavens. The Mexica reacted to the sacrilegious abduction of their leader with the same baffled horror with which Europeans later reacted to Cromwell's execution of Charles I in 1649. Not wanting to act in a way that could result in Motecuhzoma's death, the Mexica took seven months to mount a counterattack. Fearing the worst, the debased tlatoani made a begging public appearance on behalf of the Spanish. He soon died, either murdered by the Spaniards (according to Mexica accounts) or slain by his own countrymen (as Spanish chronicles tell it). Soon after came the long-delayed assault. Under the leadership of a vigorous new tlatoani, Cuitlahuac, the Indians forced the invaders into narrow alleys where horses were of little advantage. Under a pitiless hail of spears, darts, and arrows, Cortes and his men retreated down the long causeways that linked the island city to the mainland. In a single brutal night the Mexica utterly vanquished Cortes, killing three-quarters of his men. Although the Alliance destroyed the causeways in front of the Spaniards, the remnants of the invaders were able to cross the gaps because they were so choked with the dead that the men could walk on the bodies of their countrymen. Because the Mexica did not view the goal of warfare as wiping out enemies to the last man, they did not hunt down the last Spaniards. A costly mistake: Cortes was among the escapees.

An enormous, opulent city of canals and (mostly) artificial islands in the middle of a great mountain lake, the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan stunned the conquistadors when they first saw it. This reconstruction, a mural by the artist Miguel Covarrubias, in Mexico City's great archaeology museum, underplays the busyness of the city; eyewitness accounts report that clouds of boats darted around its edges and through its canals.

A man of unfathomable determination, Cortes never thought of giving up. He persuaded several other vassal states to join his anti-Alliance alliance with Tlaxcala. Negotiating furiously, he assembled a force of as many as 200,000 men and built thirteen big ships in an audacious plan to assault Tenochtitlan from the water. He followed this plan and ever after has been identified by history as the city's conqueror. But all of his bold resolve would have come to nothing without the vast indigenous army whose leaders believed they could use the Spanish presence to catalyze the destruction of the Triple Alliance. And even this enormous force might not have overcome the empire if while Cortes was building his ships Tenochtitlan had not been swept by smallpox in the same pandemic that later wiped out Tawantinsuyu. Without any apparent volition by Cortes, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including Cuitlahuac.

Sixteenth-century Mexica drawings of smallpox, the disease that destroyed the empire by crippling the defenders of Tenochtitlan in the battle against Cortes and his native allies. "An epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules," begins the account in Bernardino de Sahagun's General History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1575, in James Lockhart's translation). "Large bumps spread on people, some were entirely covered. They spread everywhere, on the face, the head, the chest, etc.... [Victims] could no longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer able to move or stir. They were unable to change position, to stretch out on their sides or face down, or raise their heads.... The pustules that covered people caused great desolation; very many people died of them, and many just starved to death; starvation reigned, and no one took care of others any longer." The drawing at left, from a sixteenth-century codex, is a winter-count-like depiction of a year dominated by smallpox; two men lie dying or dead, their bodies spotted with pustules. The drawing below, from the General History, shows cries of pain escaping from victims' lips.

When Cortes and his Indian allies finally attacked, the Mexica resisted so fiercely despite their weakness that the siege has often been described as the costliest battle in history-casualty estimates range up to 100,000. Absent smallpox, it seems likely that Cortes would have lost. In the event, he was able to take the city only by systematically destroying it. The Alliance capitulated on August 21, 1521. It was the end of an imperial tradition that dated back to Teotihuacan a millennium before.

Cortes was directly responsible for much of the carnage in Tenochtitlan, but the war was only a small part of a larger catastrophe for which blame is harder to assign. When Cortes landed, according to the Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah, 25.2 million people lived in central Mexico, an area of about 200,000 square miles. After Cortes, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 162025, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

From Bartolome de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their arrival brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. "We, Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms," reflected Pedro Cieza de Leon, the traveler in postconquest Peru. "For wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path." And since Las Casas historians, clerics, and political activists have debated whether Europeans and their descendants in the Americas are morally culpable for the enormous Indian losses. Indeed, some writers have employed the loaded term "holocaust" to describe the contact and its aftermath. Following in its train, inevitably, has come an even more potent label: genocide.

Europe's defenders argue that the mass deaths cannot be described as genocide. The epidemics often were not even known to Europeans, still less deliberately caused by them. For that reason, they fall into a different moral class than the Jewish Holocaust, which was a state policy of mass murder. "Very probably the greatest demographic disaster in history, the depopulation of the New World, for all its terror and death, was largely an unintended tragedy," wrote Steven Katz in his monumental Holocaust in Historical Context. The wave of Indian deaths, in his view, was "a tragedy that occurred despite the sincere and indisputable desire of the Europeans to keep the Indian population alive."

Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah spent decades reconstructing the population of the former Triple Alliance realm in the wake of the Spanish conquest. By combining colonial-era data from many sources, the two men estimated that the number of people in the region fell from 25.2 million in 1518, just before Cortes arrived, to about 700,000 in 1623-a 97 percent drop in little more than a century. (Each marked date is one for which they presented a population estimate.) Using parish records, Mexican demographer Elsa Malvido calculated the sequence of epidemics in the region, portions of which are shown here. Dates are approximate, because epidemics would last several years. The identification of some diseases is uncertain as well; for example, sixteenth-century Spaniards lumped together what today are seen as distinct maladies under the rubric "plague." In addition, native populations were repeatedly struck by "cocoliztli," a disease the Spanish did not know but that scientists have suggested might be a rat-borne hantavirus-spread, in part, by the postconquest collapse of Indian sanitation measures. Both reconstructions are tentative, but the combined picture of catastrophic depopulation has convinced most researchers in the field.

Katz overstates his case. True, the conquistadors did not want the Indians to die off en masse. But that desire did not stem from humanitarian motives. Instead, the Spanish wanted native peoples to use as a source of forced labor. In fact, the Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that they led, according to Borah, to an "economic depression" that lasted "more than a century." To resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.

Later on, some of the newcomers indeed campaigned in favor of eradicating natives. The poet-physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., for instance, regarded the Indian as but "a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood." To the "problem of his relation to the white race," Holmes said, there was one solution: "extermination." Following such impulses, a few Spanish-and a few French, Portuguese, and British-deliberately spread disease. Many more treated Indians cruelly, murderously so, killing countless thousands. But the pain and death caused from the deliberate epidemics, lethal cruelty, and egregious racism pale in comparison to those caused by the great waves of disease, a means of subjugation that the Europeans could not control and in many cases did not know they had. How can they be morally culpable for it?

Not so fast, say the activists. Europeans may not have known about microbes, but they thoroughly understood infectious disease. Almost 150 years before Columbus set sail, a Tartar army besieged the Genoese city of Kaffa. Then the Black Death visited. To the defenders' joy, their attackers began dying off. But triumph turned to terror when the Tartar khan catapulted the dead bodies of his men over the city walls, deliberately creating an epidemic inside. The Genoese fled Kaffa, leaving it open to the Tartars. But they did not run away fast enough; their ships spread the disease to every port they visited.

Coming from places that had suffered many such experiences, Europeans fully grasped the potential consequences of smallpox. "And what was their collective response to this understanding?" asked Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Did they recoil in horror and say, "Wait a minute, we've got to halt the process, or at least slow it down until we can get a handle on how to prevent these effects"? Nope. Their response pretty much across-the-board was to accelerate their rate of arrival, and to spread out as much as was humanly possible.

But this, too, overstates the case. Neither European nor Indian had a secular understanding of disease. "Sickness was the physical manifestation of the will of God," Robert Crease, a philosopher of science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, told me. "You could pass it on to someone, but doing that was like passing on evil, or bad luck, or a bad spirit-the transmission also reflected God's will." The conquistadors knew the potential impact of disease, but its actual impact, which they could not control, was in the hands of God.

The Mexica agreed. In all the indigenous accounts of the conquest and its aftermath, the anthropologist J. Jorge Klor de Alva observed, the Mexica lament their losses, but, "the Spaniards are rarely judged in moral terms, and Cortes is only sporadically considered a villain. It seems to be commonly understood"-at least by this bleakly philosophical, imperially minded group-"that the Spaniards did what any other group would have done or would have been expected to do if the opportunity had existed."

Famously, the conquistador Bernal Diaz de Castillo ticked off the reasons he and others joined Cortes: "to serve God and His Majesty [the king of Spain], to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do." In Diaz's list, spiritual and material motivations were equally important. Cortes was constantly preoccupied by the search for gold, but he also had to be restrained by the priests accompanying him from promulgating the Gospel in circumstances sure to anger native leaders. After the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish court and intellectual elite were convulsed with argument for a century about whether the conversions were worth the suffering inflicted. Many believed that even if Indians died soon after conversion, good could still occur. "Christianity is not about getting healthy, it's about getting saved," Crease said, summarizing. Today few Christians would endorse this argument, but that doesn't make it any easier to assign the correct degree of blame to their ancestors.

In an editorial about Black's analysis of Indian HLA profiles, Jean-Claude Salomon, a medical researcher at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, asked if the likely inevitability of native deaths could "reduce the historical guilt of Europeans." In a sense it does, Salomon wrote. But it did not let the invaders off the hook-they caused huge numbers of deaths, and knew that they had done it. "Those who carried the microbes across the Atlantic were responsible, but not guilty," Salomon concluded. Guilt is not readily passed down the generations, but responsibility can be. A first step toward satisfying that responsibility for Europeans and their descendants in North and South America would be to treat indigenous people today with respect-something that, alas, cannot yet be taken for granted. Recognizing and obeying past treaties wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

ISN'T THIS ALL JUST REVISIONISM?

Yes, of course-except that it's more like re-revisionism. The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place-"a beehive of people," as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people "that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries."

So far as is known, Las Casas never tried to enumerate the original native population. But he did try to calculate how many died from Spanish disease and brutality. In Las Casas's "sure, truthful estimate," his countrymen in the first five decades after Columbus wiped out "more than twelve million souls, men and women and children; and in truth I believe, without trying to deceive myself, that it was more than fifteen million." Twenty years later, he raised his estimate of Indian deaths-and hence of the initial population-to forty million.

Las Casas's successors usually shared his ideas-the eighteenth-century Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, for example, asserted that the pre-Columbian population of Mexico alone was thirty million. But gradually a note of doubt crept in. To most historians, the colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated, though exactly why was not often explained. ("Sixteenth-century Europeans," Cook and Borah dryly remarked, "did indeed know how to count.") Especially in North America, historians' guesses at native numbers kept slipping down. By the 1920s they had dwindled to forty or fifty million in the entire hemisphere-about the number that Las Casas believed had died in Mesoamerica alone. Twenty years after that, the estimates had declined by another factor of five.

Today the picture has reversed. The High Counters seem to be winning the argument, at least for now. No definitive data exist, but the majority of the extant evidentiary scraps indicate it. "Most of the arrows point in that direction," Denevan said to me. Zambardino, the computer scientist who decried the margin of error in these estimates, noted that even an extremely conservative extrapolation of known figures would still project a precontact population in central Mexico alone of five to ten million, "a very high population, not only in terms of the sixteenth century, but indeed on any terms." Even Henige, of Numbers from Nowhere, is no Low Counter. In Numbers from Nowhere, he argues that "perhaps 40 million throughout the Western Hemisphere" is a "not unreasonable" figure-putting him at the low end of the High Counters, but a High Counter nonetheless. Indeed, it is the same figure provided by Las Casas, patron saint of High Counters, foremost among the old Spanish sources whose estimates Henige spends many pages discounting.

To Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over the number of deaths and the degree of blame obscures something more important. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died but that many people lived. The Americas were filled with an enthusiastically diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "We are talking about enormous numbers of people," she told me. "You have to wonder, Who were all these people? And what were they doing?"

PART TWO.

Very Old Bones.

Pleistocene Wars.

POSSIBLY A VERY ODD HAPLOGROUP.

The last time I spoke with Sergio D. J. Pena, he was hunting for ancient Indians in modern blood. The blood was sealed into thin, rodlike vials in Pena's laboratory at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city. To anyone who has seen a molecular biology lab on the television news, the racks of refrigerating tanks, whirling DNA extractors, and gene-sequencing machines in Pena's lab would look familiar. But what Pena was doing with them would not. One way to describe Pena's goal would be to say that he was trying to bring back a people who vanished thousands of years ago. Another would be to say that he was wrestling with a scientific puzzle that had resisted resolution since 1840.

In that year Peter Wilhelm Lund, a Danish botanist, found thirty skeletons in caves twenty miles north of Belo Horizonte. The caves were named Lagoa Santa, after a nearby village. Inside them were a jumble of remains from people and big, extinct beasts. If the human and animal bones were from the same time period, as their proximity suggested, the implication was that people had been living in the Americas many thousands of years ago, much longer than most scientists then believed. Who were these ancient hunters? Regarding Europe as the world's intellectual capital, the intrigued Lund sent most of the skeletons to a museum in his native Copenhagen. He was certain that researchers there would quickly study and identify them. Instead the bones remained in boxes, rarely disturbed, for more than a century.

Scientists finally examined the Lagoa Santa skeletons in the 1960s. Laboratory tests showed that the bones could be fifteen thousand years old-possibly the oldest human remains in the Western Hemisphere. Lund had noted the skulls' heavy brows, which are rare in Native Americans. The new measurements confirmed that oddity and suggested that these people were in many ways physically quite distinct from modern Indians, which indicated, at least to some Brazilian archaeologists, that the Lagoa Santa people could not have been the ancestors of today's native populations. Instead the earliest inhabitants of the Americas must have been some other kind of people.