The World

Medici and Mexica, Ottomans and Aviz

HENRY THE NAVIGATOR: SLAVES, SUGAR AND GOLD

In 1425, Infante Henry, duke of Viseu, ordered the planting of a new crop on one of his new territories. It was a crop that would change the world: sugar cane. The location was the formerly uninhabited Atlantic island of Madeira, claimed by two of Henry’s knights, and developed for him by a merchant from Piacenza, Bartolomeu Perestrello.

Sugar originated in the South Seas, probably in Papua New Guinea, reaching India around AD 350 and then the Arab caliphate. Al-sukkar was a labour-intensive crop, worked by zanj, African slaves, in their Iraq plantations, later transplanted by the Arabs to Sicily and al-Andalus. As the resurgence of the Ottomans was blocking sugar supplies from the east, Henry, backed by the Genoese, brought sugar saplings from Sicily and planted them on Madeira. There Perestrello, capitão donatário and Lord of Porto Santo, one of the islands of the archipelago, used Italian and Portuguese workers, soon joined by 2,000 slaves, probably Berbers from Morocco. Later his daughter married a young Genoese sailor: Columbus.

Next, Henry developed the Azores, tried to steal the Canaries from Castile and then in 1434 commissioned his men to sail further south. Three years later, realizing that Saharan caravans were avoiding Ceuta and arriving at Tangier, he persuaded his brother King Duarte to back a Tangerine assault, which was a disaster.^* Henry’s sailors started to sail around the coast of west Africa.

In 1444, one of Henry’s henchmen arrived at Lagos on the Algarve with caravels filled with 225 slaves, some Berbers, some black Africans: ‘some white enough, fair to look upon … others … less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly’. Henry exhibited them on the river front. ‘It’s not their religion but their humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,’ wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry’s biographer. ‘To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers …’ Much of the slave trade had originally been driven by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families and then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning of an industry that would sweeten European palates and poison society for five centuries.^*

After 1445, Henry’s captains travelled past the Senegal River and started to negotiate with African potentates who had their own complex interests, experienced as they were in trading pepper, ivory, gold and slaves with Arab or Berber merchants across the Sahara.^* Portuguese venturers exchanged horses or paid in local currencies, iron bars, cloth or, most commonly, cowrie shells, receiving in return slaves, usually prisoners from wars against neighbouring enemies, pepper, gold and ivory. These traders divided the region known as Guinea (based on a Berber word for black people) into product sections – Gold Coast, Pepper Coast, Ivory Coast and Slave Coast – like a continental hypermarket.

On the coasts of west Africa, palm tappers were drinking palm wine and playing akonting music beside the beach when suddenly, lit by lights on the sea, ‘cannibal ghosts’ landed and seized them, never to be seen again. These handed-down memories, recalled by Daniel Jatta, a Gambian musician-historian, mark a pivotal moment: the ‘cannibal ghosts’ were Henry’s Portuguese; the palm tappers were among the first to be seized from African beaches and enslaved – probably taken to work on Perestrello’s Madeiran plantations. As the Aviz probed Africa, in Lisbon Henry sent a gift to Pope Martin V, who was already interested in Africa and slavery. In 1418, soon after his election, Martin recognized the Portuguese campaign in Morocco as a crusade, but African slavery was not yet an issue. Mediterranean slaves were still usually Turks, Slavs and Georgians traded by Genoa, Venice and Egypt via Crimea to the Islamic and Christian markets. In 1425, Martin banned the sale of Christians to Muslims, but not to Christians because wealthy Italians often owned Slavic (Orthodox) slaves, usually girls for domestic work and sexual exploitation. But now Henry sent the pope ten African slaves.

Martin was engaged in a world-changing project – the re-establishment of a single, Roman papacy after a century of multiple simultaneous popes and anti-popes, backed by German and French potentates, and brought with him a family that defined a new mercantile world and a new sort of dynasty: the Medici.

COSIMO AND THE PIRATE POPE: IN THE NAME OF GOD AND GOOD BUSINESS

In 1417, when he was elected, Pope Martin was living in Florence where a banker named Giovanni de’ Medici was immediately keen to win his favour. Already rich from papal business, Medici personified the rising prosperity of Florence, a landlocked Tuscan city state, a republic ruled by the Signoria, a nine-man committee, and several other councils, all elected by its trading guilds and dominated by its mercantile dynasties who competed for power. These oligarchs juggled their urge to flaunt their magnificence in clothes, palazzos and churches with the populist austerity and Christian philanthropy expected of a prosperous Florentine. The Medici, descended from apothecaries who inspired their name and insignia – the palle or red balls that represented pills – had served as gonfaloniere (commander) several times but now seemed to be in decline.

Giovanni changed that. Florentines were experts in refining, dyeing and exporting wool shipped to them from England, Flanders and Burgundy, a trade aided by their capture of Pisa and its port, Livorno. Medici was the owner of two wool workshops, but then he expanded into the other Florentine expertise, banking,^* which was aided by the widespread use through Europe of the city’s gold coins, florins. In 1401 Giovanni had played a role in commissioning the new doors of the Baptistery, a thanksgiving for Florentine emergence from a spasm of the plague, to be decided by a competition. It was jointly won by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, and Giovanni then commissioned the latter to build a Medici family basilica, the San Lorenzo. Afterwards Brunelleschi created the 138-foot-diameter dome of the city cathedral, Il Duomo, which was consecrated by the pope.

Medici had become rich through his friendship with the most unlikely pope since Marozia. A Neapolitan pirate, Baldassare Cossa, had flourished in the chaos of multiple popes, murdering his predecessor, winning election as John XXIII, his papacy and wars funded by ‘my very great friend’ Medici. Often accompanied by Giovanni’s son, Cosimo, Cossa hoped to end the schism of popes but in 1414 he was deposed, accused of sodomy, piracy, murder, incest and the seduction of 200 girls. Cossa escaped but was captured and imprisoned. Medici ransomed his piratical patron, but he now backed a rising cardinal, Oddone Colonna, a Florentine monk and descendant of Marozia. Ecclesiastical potentates then elected Colonna as Martin V in order to reunite the Church. In September 1420, Martin formally processed from Florence to Rome, where he appointed Medici as papal banker assisted by his son Cosimo.

Already experienced in trading in Rome and Flanders, Cosimo, now thirty, had been educated by Florence’s humanist scholars. As the Medici became richer, their rivals in the Signoria became jealous. ‘Don’t appear to give advice, but put your views forward discreetly in conversation,’ Giovanni advised Cosimo on his deathbed. ‘Don’t make the government house your workshop, but wait until you are called to it … and always keep out of the public eye.’

Just after his father’s death, an anti-Medici party on the Signoria had Cosimo charged with treason and he was lucky to be banished: ‘Should you send me to live among the Arabs, I’d go most willingly.’ Politics is often simply the art of waiting. In 1434, he was invited back. He ruled while contriving to appear a private citizen, rarely serving as gonfaloniere but becoming ‘king in all but name’, according to one of the popes, for the next thirty years. He poured money into the embellishment of Florence and continued his father’s patronage of the artists, which he regarded as a bet against the upheavals of politics. ‘I know the moods of the city,’ he said. ‘Before fifty years have passed, we shall be expelled, but my buildings will remain.’

When his Tuscan friend and fellow bibliophile Tommaso Parentucelli was elected Pope Nicholas V, Cosimo helped fund an astonishing project: the new Rome. He opened banks all over Europe, with the slogan ‘In the Name of God and Good Business’, trading wool, spices, brocades. But much was based on the trade in alum, a mineral necessary for dyes, glassmaking and tanning. As the Ottoman advance cut off eastern supplies, alum mines were developed in the papal lands. Medici was appointed papal alum agent and alum became the windfall that funded the start of a two-century enterprise of urban regeneration: a Christian sacred city grafted on to the pagan splendour.

Rome was a ruin. Its monuments – the Colosseum, the tombs of Augustus and Hadrian – were now fortified as the headquarters of gangsterish feuding clans, Colonnas and Orsinis. In the nine years of his reign, the pope, flush with money channelled from wars in Italy, tithes from Europe, alum, and a cult of pilgrimage, started to restore Rome, a project that would be one of the engines of a new intellectual radiance. This was the florescence heralded by Petrarch in the darkest days of the plague that had broken Europe but also cracked the mould of its structures and ideas – just as the competition of European states encouraged new technologies of war, new media of information and new conceptions of humanity and beauty. At its heart was a gradual shift from belief in total divine agency to the idea that humanity itself was sacred and beautiful, worthy of expression and improvement.^* All of this engendered an invincible sense of possibility that, while expressed as a return to classical knowledge, was actually all new, bracingly brutal and brash, shiny and shameless, based on new technologies – ships, guns, voyages and an invention that allowed ordinary people to read all about it: the printing press.^*

Nicholas V and Cosimo de’ Medici were uninhibited by contradictions between Christian glory and pagan grandeur: all was to be mobilized for the greater glory of God and God’s pontiff and God’s banker. Nicholas converted Hadrian’s mausoleum into his papal fortress, Castel Sant’Angelo, restored the Leonine walls plus forty old churches and Roman viaducts and moved his residence from the Lateran Palace to the Vatican. An innovator, he survived Roman conspiracies to assassinate him, but he was also a European player, eliminating the last anti-pope, appeasing France and, in March 1452, anointing the new German king, Frederick III, the first Habsburg actually crowned emperor by the pope.

The thirty-seven-year-old Frederick was a dull, somnolent and soon obese plodder who would ironically be the architect of the rise of the Habsburgs, but his slim, beautiful Portuguese bride Eleanor, who would find his Viennese court tedious and philistine and loved dancing and gambling, no doubt helped her brother, King Afonso V, procure papal backing for new African expeditions – in return for help in a more urgent crisis in the east.

In April 1453, Mehmed II, the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan, surrounded Constantinople with an army of 160,000, including thousands of elite arquebusiers, a flotilla of 110 ships and 70 cannon, including one so huge it took sixty oxen to pull it. The age of the cannon and firearm had truly arrived.

THE THROAT -CUTTER AND THE CONQUEROR: THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos appealed for European help. Pope Nicholas V dispatched a flotilla, partly funded by the Portuguese, under Isidore, metropolitan of Kyiv, and 2,000 Genoese volunteers rushed to aid Constantinople. The city, home now to just 50,000 Romaioi, had long been the coveted prize of the Ottomans.

Tamerlane had almost destroyed the sultanate, but Mehmed’s father Murad II, energetic, able but inconsistent, unstable and distracted, had exhausted himself fighting: in the Turkish marches, where the beys seized independence, backed by Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh;^* in the Balkans, where Hungary, Venice and Serbia rebelled. On the Aegean coast, Gjergj Kastrioti, a Christian princeling coverted to Islam, brought up at the Ottoman court – where he was known as Iskender Beg – had served as a governor. Now he rebelled, recoverted to Christianity, declared himself Lord of Albania and defied Murad for twenty-five years, calling himself Scanderbeg. But the sultan improved his forces, commissioning cannon and something new: handheld, shoulder-fired firearms, successors to the Chinese fire-javelins, later known as arquebuses. These were the earliest muskets, first used by Murad’s Janissaries and soon adopted by their Christian opponents.

In 1444, at Varna, after ostentatiously kneeling to pray in the midst of battle, Murad defeated the Hungarians and killed their king. But then the forty-year-old sultan suffered a personal crisis. He called his son Mehmed, aged only twelve, to the capital Edirne (Adrianople) and abdicated. Mehmed was girded with the sword of Osman. But in 1448 the Hungarians, Poles and Wallachians advanced, and Mehmed, exasperated by his father’s midlife crisis, told him, ‘If you’re the sultan, lead your armies. If I’m sultan, I hereby order you to come and lead my armies.’ Murad returned and together they defeated the Christians. The sultanate was restored – but amid its European and Asian territories stood the much-diminished Great City: Constantinople.

Mehmed had planned to take Constantinople but was foiled by his patronizing Turkic grand vizier Çandarlı Halil Pasha, who received bribes from Constantine IX. When his father died in 1451, Mehmed had his brother strangled, a fratricide that he made policy,^* and then turned on Constantinople. Çandarlı preferred to keep Constantinople as a client state but when the Romaioi intrigued against Mehmed, the vizier warned them, ‘You stupid Greeks. All you will do is lose the little you have.’

Mehmed was a cosmopolitan visionary. Educated by Turkish and Italian tutors, he read the Iliad and Arrian’s Life of Alexander the Great, spoke seven languages and wrote Turkish and Persian poetry. He grew up among Christian princelings, not least Radu the Beautiful, one of the Dracula brothers.^* They became lovers, Mehmed penning erotic poems – ‘His lips gave life anew to one whom his glances kill’ – in a culture that regarded sexuality as a question of power rather than identity: the penetrator, virile, the penetrated, submissive. Aspiring to the Roman legacy and international prestige of Constantinople, which the Turks called the Red Apple on account of its desirability, Mehmed realized that its defences were manned by scarcely 5,000 men, and that gunpowder had diminished the impregnability of its walls. Approached by Orbán, a Hungarian cannoneer, he commissioned a full gun park ranging from a monstrous showpiece to smaller, manoeuvrable cannon.

Mehmed built a castle, Rumelihisarı, on the European side of the Bosphoros that he called the Throat-cutter, designed to blockade the city. When a Venetian captain tried to run the blockade, Mehmed’s guns sank the ship, and he had the captain anally impaled on the Bosphoran shore as a living scarecrow.

On 5 April 1453, Mehmed arrived to oversee the encompassment of the city with an army that included Christian detachments of Serbians and Wallachians under his favourite, Radu the Beautiful. But full encirclement from the water was prevented by a huge chain boom stretched across the Golden Horn estuary, so he created a pathway of greased logs across Galata and had the entire fleet dragged over it then floated on the Golden Horn. The Romaioi tried unsuccessfully to burn the fleet by using fireships. Forty captured Italians were impaled on the sultan’s orders, at which the Christians slaughtered Ottoman prisoners on the walls. Ottoman attackers were fried in spurts of Greek Fire.

Mehmed mined the walls; a Romaioi expert, John the German, who was supposedly Scottish, countermined under Ottoman positions. Mehmed’s cannon repeatedly damaged the fortifications (though Orbán was blown to smithereens by one of his own creations). After midnight on 29 May, the sultan ordered the assault. His troops broke in through the damaged north-western section of wall as the last emperor tore off his purple regalia and threw himself into the fighting. His body was never discovered. In scenes of apocalyptic havoc, Venetians and Genoese jumped off the walls, heads bobbed in the Bosphoros like ‘melons in a canal’ and the Turkish conquerors ran amok, pillaging the Red Apple for three days – as Mehmed waited outside.

The pope was so depressed, he wished he was still a librarian. As Europe recoiled in horror, the pope’s flotilla, funded by the Portuguese king Afonso, arrived after the city had fallen. But in return Nicholas V recognized the Portuguese conquests in Africa as a crusade permitted ‘to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens, and other enemies of Christ … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery’, a right expanded to include ‘Guineans and other negroes captured by force or bought with legitimate contracts’. Afonso expanded his Moroccan territories – winning the epithet O Africano – and backed his uncle Henry the Navigator.

In 1456, two of Henry’s captains, one Venetian, one Genoese, settled Cape Verde, an uninhabited island off Senegal that became the Portuguese slaving headquarters and the first tropical colony. The settling of islands in the Atlantic naturally encouraged the idea that there could be other, larger islands. Around 1139 – a century and a half before Columbus – a Milanese monk, Galvano Fiamma, wrote in the newly revealed Cronica Universalis about ‘another land, further westwards, named Marckalada’ – Markland, the Norse name for the coast of the USA–Canada – which he said had been described by ‘sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway’. English sailors had visited mysterious islands, probably Newfoundland, and Perestrello, the colonizer of Madeira, also possessed papers about a mysterious land there. Bodies said to have washed up in Ireland with Mongol faces were surely the corpses of Native Americans somehow lost at sea.

ITZCOATL’S MEXICA: THOSE WHO DIE FOR THE GOD

Just as Afonso the African was advancing across Morocco and down the African coast, another empire builder, no less ambitious and self-righteous, was aggressively expanding his Mexica empire, ruled from his island capital of Tenochtitlan. Motecuhzoma I was forty-two when he succeeded to the throne of the Mexica empire in 1440.

It was a civilization of sophisticated organization, of storytelling that was recorded in illustrations painted on to deerskin and accordion-folded books made of maguey-plant fibres, of constant war against rival cities and of voracious gods. Worshipped at monumental temples, these deities demanded human sacrifices, offered by having their still-beating hearts pulled out of their chests, their skins often donned by dancing priests. But Tenochtitlan was just one of many city states within the empire, that existed alongside a variety of polities, some autocracies, some theocracies and some semi-democracies.

As a young prince, Motecuhzoma was one of the trio that had created the Mexica empire. Around 1427, over twenty years after the death of Tamerlane, the council of Tenochtitlan had chosen the dynamic Itzcoatl – Obsidian Serpent – as ruler or tlatoani, the Speaker – who created the empire, aided by his nephew Motecuhzoma, son of an earlier monarch.

The Mexica had been restless vassals of the dominant Tapenec city state Azcapotzalco whose Speaker Tezozomoc had in a long reign conquered much of the Valley of Mexico. His death loosened the city state’s hold over the Mexica: in 1427, Itzcoatl led a coup, asserted independence, killed his pro-Azcapotzalco relatives and formed an alliance with two fellow rulers in nearby city states, Texcoco and Tlacopan. Together they defeated Azcapotzalco and secured the Valley, then they expanded outside it, fighting constant wars on the south shores of Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco. When they crushed other states, Itzcoatl burned their histories, recorded in a pictorial writing system written on codices of bark or leather, because it was ‘not wise that all the people should know the paintings’. Instead he promoted the official history of Mexica’s national god of war and sun, Huitzilopochtli, who demanded the blood of human victims. In his honour, Itzcoatl started to build the centrepiece of the city’s sacred precinct, the Great God’s House (Great Temple) dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and to Tlaloc, god of rain, each with their own shrines atop a massive stepped pyramid.

At the base of the stairway stood the round carved figure of Coyolxauhqui between two huge serpent heads, engraved with depictions of the dismemberment of the goddess which was re-enacted in sacrificial rituals annually.

The sacrifices were carried out by the priests, mainly men but also women, who blackened their faces and bodies, scarring their ears, genitals, arms and chest in autosacrificial rituals, wearing their hair long and matted with human blood that also stained their mouths and faces. The victims, slaves or prisoners, were transformed into God Impersonators, first spoiled with feasts, sex and cleansing before being led up the steps of the Great Temple by the fire priests who laid them on the sacrificial stone. ‘Four men stretched [the victim] out, grasping arms and legs’; the fire priest raised the knife ‘and then when he had split open the chest, he at once seized the heart. And he whose chest was open was still alive. And the priest dedicated the heart to the sun.’ The victims, Those Who Have Died for the God, ‘were sent rolling down the steps bathed in blood’, whereupon a priest beheaded them and mounted the skull on a rack which held hundreds of thousands of others.^*

On Itzcoatl’s death in 1440, his successor and nephew Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina completed both the Great Temple and the empire, taking Chalco. Together they further expanded around the Sky Sea (Gulf of Mexico), calling themselves Neighbours of the Sea of the Sky.

Yet the Mexica’s elected autocracy were not the only Mesoamerican system: their rival Tlaxcala was a semi-democratic republic, ruled by around 100 elected teuctli – councillors – who had to demonstrate a civil ethos of humility, including fasting, bloodletting and moral preparation, before taking office, for which showy eloquence was required. There were no royal ballcourts or palaces in Tlaxcala. Democracy, far from being exported to the Americas by Enlightened Europeans and Founding Fathers, was already there. These elected republicans were the opposite of the monarchical Mexica, against whom their warriors and otomi fighters held out, preserving their independence and loathing the arrogant Mexica imperialists.

Motecuhzoma promoted himself to Huehuetlatoani, Supreme Speaker, translated as emperor. The Mexica differentiated themselves from their allies, believing that as the chosen people of the gods and successors to Teotihuacan, they were destined to rule the world. Their Speakers were surrogates of the gods, hailed at their accession: ‘You are their flute … they make you their fangs, claws, you are their wild beast, their eater-of-people, their judge.’ They also created a new nobility with military-religious orders of quauhpili knights who enjoyed privileges – only nobles being allowed to wear lip plugs, cotton cloaks, golden armbands.^* Noblemen owned hundreds of concubines, including slaves captured in war, but within the royal family women were powerful.^*

Yet as the empire expanded and tension rose with its allies, the bloodletting at the Great Temple^* became ever more frantic. Their allies and vassals bitterly resented them. Given a chance, they would rise and destroy them.

* Their brother Fernando was captured. Henry negotiated through a Jewish doctor to swap him for Ceuta, but just as the king was about to approve the deal, he died of the Destructive Death – and their brother died in confinement after six years of humiliation. Infante Fernando was eviscerated and embalmed, his fellow Christian prisoners hiding his heart and viscera in pots under the jail floor while the prince’s naked body was hung for years from the battlements of Fez.

* Zurara himself, who so admired Henry – ‘Our prince’ – sensed the ominous implications in this invocation to cruel Fate: ‘O powerful fortune, that with your wheels makes and unmakes, encompassing the matters of this world as pleases you, do you at last put before the eyes of that miserable race some understanding of matters to come; that they may receive some consolation in the midst of their great sorrow? And you who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look with pity upon so much misery; and see how they cling one to the other, so that you can hardly separate them.’

* Conquest was inconceivable: Europeans, checked by the power of African rulers and their armies, daunted by the inhospitable vastness of Africa, decimated by malaria, did not conquer the continent for another four centuries. They lacked military supremacy and the physical endurance until the development of steam, machine guns and quinine in the late nineteenth century.

* The word banking derives from banco, the marketplace stall from which these early financiers did their business.

* The word Renaissance was not used by contemporaries. It was the polymath Leon Battista Alberti who, advising Pope Nicholas V on the rebuilding of Rome and designing the Vatican, sensed the possibilities of Uomo Universale – ‘A man can do all things if he will.’ Giorgio Vasari, biographer of Michelangelo, used the word rinascita (rebirth) in his Lives of the Artists, but Renaissance was really coined by English historians in the 1830s.

* A German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, was the first to use movable print, modelled on a wine press, to publish 180 copies of the Bible. The spread of reading, like the internet in the twenty-first century, did not only enlighten people’s minds, it also darkened them: the hysteria of witch trials and witch burning was at least partly intensified by the popularity of books such as one of the first bestsellers, Henricus Institor’s 1487 Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy as with a two-edged sword.

* A refined, merciful Persianate padishah (emperor), Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh ruled the core empire for forty years while his son Ulanbeg governed Samarkand. Ulanbeg’s interests were astronomy and science, building his observatory – parts of which survive in Samarkand – to aid his calculations; his catalogue of the stars and measurements of the earth’s tilt and sidereal years were highly accurate. But perhaps astronomy distracted him from politics: he was assassinated and the empire disintegrated. Shahrukh and Ulanbeg joined Tamerlane in the Gur Amir, which later inspired the domed Persianate style of Tamerlane’s Mughal descendants.

* ‘Whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne it behoves him to kill his brothers in the interest of world order,’ decreed Mehmed. ‘Most of the jurists have approved this. Let action be taken accordingly.’ Altogether around eighty Ottoman princes were strangled by the bowstring so as not to shed royal blood in the only family in which filicide and fratricide were not just occasional and accidental but religious and political policy.

* They were the sons of the voivode (prince) of Wallachia, Vlad II, known as Dracul after his membership of the Order of the Dragon.

* At other times of the year, the priests celebrated the Flaying of Men in honour of the skin-hungry god Xipe Totec, when the Speaker watched gladiatorial fights and wore the flayed skin of victims. Such sacrifices were emphasized by the Spanish to justify their conquest, but the Mexica’s sophisticated and literate culture was much more complex than that: it is likely that in these earlier decades the rate of sacrifice was less frenzied than it later became.

* Noble children were educated in special schools linked to temples. Children and adults played patolli, a rubber-ball game, on special courts, that had been since the Maya kingdoms part of royal ritual. The monarchs often played the game; spectators sometimes bet so heavily on the results that they had to sell themselves into slavery; and losers were often killed – a sort of real Squid Game.

* The ultimate grand dame, Atotoztli, daughter of Motecuhzoma I, married Tezozomoc, son of Itzcoatl, and was the mother and often regent of the next three rulers, starting in 1478 with Axayacatl, grandson of both Motecuhzoma I and Itzcoactl (and father of the last of them Motecuhzoma II).

* The capital Tenochtitlan, built on a grid system and approached across the water by a causeway or in a barge or canoe, was now a wonder of the world with 250,000 inhabitants, much larger than Seville with 45,000.