In this imaginative monograph dealing with culture change during the conquest of Mexico Padden seeks to analyze the interplay of two simultaneous historical processes. One was evolutionary, the development of sovereignty among the Aztecs from the mid-thirteenth century to 1519. The other, of course, was the revolutionary change imposed on the Aztec world by the lightning military conquest of Cortés. However divergent these traditions of sovereignty may have been, both contained, deeply embedded, the intimate alliance of political and religious authority. To view the conquest in Indian as well as Spanish terms is a perspective not only consistent with recent historiography, but indeed more meaningful than any other.
My quarrel is not with Padden’s intent but with his execution. His treatment of the two worlds is uneven. The discussion of Aztec society (fully a third of the text) is evocative and exciting; that of Cortés’ world is not. While not pretending to be comprehensive, these chapters lucidly analyze the historical development of the Aztec political system. Padden emphasizes that human sacrifice long antedated the Aztecs, and that their innovation was to make it into a calculated instrument of statecraft. He develops with detail and fresh insights the thesis of León Portilla that Tlacaellel, the “grey eminence” of the Aztec world, fashioned out of this sacrifice an elaborate political theology to justify and to sustain imperialist expansion. The political system which he put together was in an acute internal crisis when the sudden appearance of Cortés posed an even graver external threat to its survival.
In reconstructing the Aztec past Padden comes up with no new sources, for he uses the already known Nahautl codices and other familiar Indian and Spanish materials. But he brings to these a sophisticated understanding of the new methods of ethnohistory, with their emphasis on historical probability rather than historical certainty. However controversial some of his conclusions may be, he has provided us with a lucid, imaginative, and thoughtful recreation of historical development in the Aztec world.
The most convincing and compassionate portrayal of a personality in this study is not Hernán Cortés but Moctezuma II. Padden’s central thesis is not original—that Moctezuma’s initial response was conditioned by his fear that Cortés was the returned Quetzalcóatl—but he develops this proposition with a wealth of data and sensitive understanding. Hence there emerges a poignant, three-dimensional portrayal of the man and the acute dilemma confronting that autocratic theocracy. Padden persuasively argues that Moctezuma ultimately became disabused of his fixation on Quetzalcóatl. In fact, he tricked Cortés into releasing Cuitláhuac, who he knew would be his successor. If Moctezuma emerges as a credible historical personality, however, Hernán Cortés is insipid and two-dimensional in Padden’s treatment. Although he dutifully traces all of Cortés’ astute and crafty tactics, the late medieval and Renaissance world, which Cortés so splendidly typified, never comes to life.
The two concluding chapters deal with Indian responses to Hispanization during the first two decades after the conquest. They are suggestive rather than exhaustive. The emergence of a new Pipiltin class through the alliance of the new caciques and the conquerors was a very transitory fact, as Charles Gibson has demonstrated, but Padden evidently did not use The Aztecs under Spanish Rule. The last chapter concerns Archbishop Zumárraga’s inquisitional activity against the continued performance of pagan rituals, culminating in the celebrated trial of Don Carlos de Texcoco. Abundantly documented from Mexican archival sources, this chapter is not a conclusion at all but an entremés for a sequel.
This handsomely designed monograph is an enlightening contribution to our understanding of the preconquest world. We look forward to Padden’s next book when he comes to grips with religious life of Indian Mexico after 1521.