Human Sacrifice and the Aztecs

Human Sacrifice and the Aztecs

Although some maintain that the notion that the Aztecs (Mexica) practiced human sacrifice is a myth that originated with the Spanish conquistadores to justify and legitimate their conquests, in fact, abundant evidence demonstrates that the Aztec state, like many other pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and Andean polities, regularly practiced ritual human sacrifice.

The evidence also shows that the Aztecs institutionalized this practice, elevating it to a high art form, the state’s most important public spectacle, and a key state function essential to the well-being of the cosmos.

This evidence includes scores of Spanish and native accounts composed during and after the conquest of Mexico, along with abundant archaeological and textual artifacts that predate the Spanish invasion.


The religious and cultural beliefs inspiring Aztec ritual human sacrifice had deep roots in Mesoamerican society and culture. Many pre-Columbian polities in the Americas are known to have ritually sacrificed human beings to their gods.

These included many Maya kingdoms and city-states, Monte Albán and subsequent Zapotec polities, Teotihuacán, the Toltecs, and others. Such practices were rooted in a pan-Mesoamerican corpus of beliefs concerning the spiritual power of human blood, and the everyday intervention of the gods in human affairs.

States transformed these broad cultural understandings into state ideologies and spectacles. Ruling groups portrayed public offerings of human blood as payment of a debt owed to the gods.

By propitiating the gods with the most valuable substance in the universe—human blood—states terrorized foes and depicted themselves securing a larger social and cosmic good. Public and private bloodletting rituals in the service of the gods were common across Mesoamerica, and ritual human sacrifice was the most extreme form of bloodletting.

The Aztecs took the practice to an extreme, sacrificing people on diverse occasions in propitiation of many divine beings. Of the 18 ceremonial events that occurred during each of the 18 months of the Aztec solar year, eight included ritual human sacrifice.

These included the ceremony of Quecholli (“Precious Feather,” October 31–November 9), in which priests ritually slew and sacrificed captives dressed as deer, and the ceremony of Atl Caualo (“Ceasing of Water,” February 13–March 4), in which infants and children were publicly marched in groups before being sacrificed. The gruesome sacrifice involved four priests holding the victim down on top of a large stone for another priest to cut open in order to remove the heart.

By ritual preparation and transformation, the victim was depicted as becoming the god to whom he or she would be sacrificed. There were many variations on these general themes. The most frequently propitiated divine entity was Huitzilopochtli, the god of the Sun and war, particularly at the end of each 52-year Aztec century. Without such offerings, the state claimed, the Sun would cease to rise and the universe would come to an end.

After the Aztec Triple Alliance of 1428 joined together Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopán, the practice of human sacrifice was institutionalized at the highest levels of the Aztec state. Major events such as victory in war, inauguration of a new ruler, or dedication of an important public structure became occasions for large-scale human sacrifice.

The most extensive such instance occurred in 1487 with the dedication of the Temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán, in which an estimated 20,000 people were ritually sacrificed over four days. The Aztecs also initiated prearranged wars with neighboring polities—ritualized battles called the “Flowery Wars”—in large part to secure sacrificial victims.

In its meteoric rise to domination, the Aztec state made such practices integral to state ideology and imperial ambitions. Ritual human sacrifice displayed the Aztec state’s awesome political and religious power, terrorized its enemies, worked as a cohesive ideological force among its subjects, and generated animosities against its rule among subordinate states that the Spanish later exploited in the conquest of Mexico.

Postclassic Period of Mesoamerica

Postclassic Period of Mesoamerica

Postclassic Mesoamerica (900–1500 c.e.) encompassed four principal geographic regions: the Maya zones to the south and east; the central highlands, centered on the Basin of Mexico; the Zapotecs of the Oaxaca Valley; and the Mixtec polities in the region north and west of Oaxaca. Sometimes called “The Time of Troubles,” the Postclassic period in these regions was characterized by several broad and overlapping trends.

The most important were political fragmentation and the rise and decline of new polities; a heightened emphasis on militarism, aggression, and violence, accompanied by the political supremacy of an ascendant class of warrior elites; the institutionalization of the practice of human sacrifice; increased movements and migrations of peoples; and the disruption and reconfiguration of regional and long-distance trade and commercial networks.

Toltec

In the Basin of Mexico and the central highlands, the Postclassic period was inaugurated by the decline and collapse of the great city of Teotihuacán around 650; the expansion and contraction of the city-states of Cholula, Xochicalco, and El Tajín; and the subsequent political fragmentation of the region into numerous competing city-states. Around 900 another polity saw a rapid rise to prominence in the central highlands: the Toltecs.


Originating somewhere in the northern deserts, probably around the present-day Mexican state of Zacatecas, the Toltecs were but one of several waves of migrants from the arid northern regions to whom the settled peoples of the central highlands applied the generic name Chichimeca, meaning “lineage of the dog” and connoting both their martial skill and their “barbarism.” The later Aztecs would also be called Chichimeca.

According to Toltec legend, their semidivine founder Mixcóatl (Cloud Serpent) swiftly defeated his adversaries in his inexorable march into the Basin of Mexico, where he established a capital city at Culhuacán.

Mixcóatl’s brother then treacherously assassinated him, after which his pregnant widow fled into exile, where she bore his son, whom she named Ce Acatl Topiltzín (Prince One Reed). As a boy, Topiltzín became a devout follower of Quetzalcoatl (the Plumed Serpent), the principal deity of the former great city of Teotihuacán.

Topiltzín took on Quetzalcoatl’s name to become Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl; the man-hero slew his uncle (his father’s assassin) and around the year 968 founded a new city in the northern section of the Basin of Mexico, Tula, which would become the capital of the Toltecs.

Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl, in turn, became the font of all the stunning achievements of the Toltecs, including the cultivation of maize, the invention of writing, the introduction of the ritual calendar, and all of the other attributes of the Toltec civilization.

Meanwhile a power struggle emerged within the Toltec capital of Tula between devotees of the two principal rival gods, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror).

The latter craftily tricked Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl into engaging in an incestuous relationship with his sister and forced him into exile in consequence of this disgrace, first to Cholula and then into the Maya region. In this way, according to legend, Tezcatlipoca became the preeminent god of the Toltecs.

A capricious, whimsical deity who reveled in exposing the frailties and pretensions of human beings, Tezcatlipoca was said to require for his propitiation ritual human sacrifice. This is how, according to legend, the practice of human sacrifice arose among the Toltecs.

It is more likely that, as among other polities before and after, ritual human sacrifice emerged as a way for the Toltec ruling classes, particularly its warrior elite, to legitimate and consolidate their dominion and to strike fear into their actual and potential enemies.

The Toltecs ruled a substantial portion of the Basin of Mexico until the mid-1100s, when a combination of drought, famine, and endemic warfare fatally weakened the still-forming polity. By the mid-1100s they had abandoned their capital city of Tula, which became the site from which the later Aztecs claimed direct lineage.

Zapotec

Among the Zapotec-speaking peoples of the Valley of Oaxaca, the decline of Monte Albán between 700 and 900 (the terminal phase of Monte Albán IIIb and the beginning of Phase IV) was followed by political fragmentation and the rise of numerous competing polities.

Among the most prominent of these was centered at the ceremonial complex of Mitla, southeast of Monte Albán, where construction began in the early- to mid-900s, around the same time as Tula to the north and west.

The ruins at Mitla have long captured the imagination of archaeologists and visitors, with their elegant lines, precision stonework, and complex geometric ornamentation.

While the palaces and courtyards of Mitla were built in an open area, a nearby fortress testifies to the heightened militarism that characterized the Oaxaca Valley polities long after the site of Monte Albán itself had been largely abandoned and become mainly a site for pilgrimage and ritual.

Scholars have yet to decipher the Zapotec inscriptions that grace the ruins of Monte Albán and other sites in the Oaxaca Valley. It is hypothesized that specific hand gestures represent verbs; that noncalendric glyphs were intended to convey information regarding political, military, and ritual affairs; and that as-yet undiscovered connections exist among Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Aztec writing systems. Investigations into these and related arenas of Zapotec history continue.

Mixtec

The mountainous zones lying north and west of the Valley of Oaxaca were home to numerous Mixtec (Cloud People) polities that emerged during the Postclassic period.

By the 1200s these Mixtec states had extended their influence south and east into areas traditionally controlled by the Zapotecs—including periodic occupations of Monte Albán and Mitla. The Postclassic Mixtec developed one of the most extreme systems of social stratification in all of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

While all Mesoamerican polities placed a high degree of emphasis on purity of lineage, birth order, and elite status, these attributes were especially salient among the Postclassic Mixtec.

For instance inscriptions record at least four cases of full brother-sister marriage among the descendents of the Mixtec lord named Eight Deer— an evident effort to retain purity of lineage.

Among both the Mixtec and Zapotec Postclassic polities, there was little of the elaborate administrative and bureaucratic hierarchy that characterized other states during this period, including the Aztecs. Instead the word of the ruling lord was deemed law, carried out by a second tier of elite lords who ruled subject polities under the main lord’s dominion.

The Aztec state, which emerged in the Basin of Mexico during the middle of the Postclassic period, exhibited all of the principal features characterizing the Postclassic polities of the central and southern highlands, particularly the heightened emphasis on militarism, warfare, human sacrifice, and conquest of lesser polities in the formation of a tributary empire.

Aztecs (Mexica)

Aztecs (Mexica)

Because the Aztec elite continually retold their own history to accord with contemporaneous political and religious concerns, the origins of the Aztec Empire are shrouded in myth and legend.

The consensus view among scholars is that the Aztecs, or Mexica, were a Nahua-speaking nomadic hunting and gathering people who began migrating south from their mythical homeland, called Aztlán, located somewhere in Mexico’s northern deserts, beginning in the early 1100s.

One in a series of Nahua-speaking ethnic groups that migrated into the more fertile regions of Mexico’s Central Highlands after the fall of the Toltecs during the Postclassic period, the Mexica were considered barbarians and dubbed Chichimeca, or “lineage of the dog,” by the more advanced and sedentary groups already settled in the Basin of Mexico.


With its rich diversity of environmental resources, the Basin of Mexico, a region called Anáhuac in Nahuatl, had been a primary locus of sedentary agriculture and the development of advanced civilizations since the Preclassic period.

The Aztecs migrated into Anáhuac around the year 1250, where they lived a precarious existence for the next century, learning the sedentary lifeways of their more numerous and powerful neighbors.

According to Aztec legend, the site of their capital city was chosen around the year 1325, when one of their holy men saw fulfilled the prophecy of their principal god, Huitzilopochtli: an eagle perched on a cactus, in some versions devouring a snake. The site was a small outcropping of rocks on the western edge of the southern part of Lake Texcoco.

On this site the Aztecs began building their capital city, an island linked to the mainland by causeways, which they called Tenochtitlán (Place of the Cactus Fruit). At the time other city-states dominated the Basin of Mexico, most notably Tepaneca, Texcoco, and Tlacopán.

The island-city grew rapidly, as did Aztec military and political power. In 1428, under Itzcoatl (c. 1427–40), the Aztecs overthrew their Tepaneca overlords, asserted their independence, and became the “first among equals,” in a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopán.

Bent on imperial expansion, the Mexica polity under Moctezuma I (c. 1440–69) combined wars of conquest with alliance-making to expand their domain, a process continued under the rulers Axayacatl (c. 1469–81), Tizoc (c. 1481–86), Ahuitzotl (c. 1486–1502), and Moctezuma II (c. 1502–20).

By the early 1500s, the Aztecs had created an expansive tributary empire that reached far beyond Anáhuac to embrace most of the settled territories to the east (to the Gulf of Mexico) and south (to the edge of the Maya domains), and whose influence was felt as far south as the Maya kingdoms of Guatemala. To the west, various Tarascan polities resisted Aztec efforts to subdue them, while closer to home, some retained their independence—most notably the Tlaxcalans.

Far from unitary or monolithic, the Aztec Empire was shot through with multiple fractures and divisions—of languages, ethnic groups, religions, kingdoms, city-states—largely a consequence the Mesoamerican political-cultural imperial tradition of leaving intact the ruling dynasties and bureaucratic infrastructure of dominated polities. An estimated 400 polities were subordinate and paid tribute to their Aztec overlords.

By this time, Tenochtitlán had become one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world, covering nearly 14 square kilometers, with intricate systems of canals, footpaths, gardens, walls, paved streets, residential complexes, temples, and pyramids.

The city’s population probably reached 250,000 people. The planned city was divided into quarters, corresponding to the four cardinal directions, with a separate fifth quarter, Tlatelolco, serving as the city’s principal marketplace.

At the city’s core lay the sacred precinct, covering perhaps 90,000 square meters, filled with more than 80 imposing structures, dominated by the Great Pyramid (Templo Mayor), some 60 meters high, with its twin temples devoted to Huitzilopochtli (the god of the Sun and war) and Tlaloc (the god of rain).

Aztec Society

Aztec society was extremely hierarchical, with complex gradations of class and status extending from top to bottom, with each individual and family pegged into a specific social category.

After the household and nuclear family, the foundational social unit upon which social relations among the Mexica were built was the calpulli, an extended lineage group that corresponded to occupation, place of residence, and local governance—variously translated as “parish,” barrio, and “clan.” The vast majority of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán and its subordinate polities were maceualli (commoners, plebians) engaged in agriculture, petty trade, or service.

A small minority, at most 10 percent of the populace, constituted the ruling class of top-echelon bureaucrats, dignitaries, warriors, and priests. Merchants, or pochteca, divided into merchant guilds, appear to have constituted a separate social class, as did warriors, priests, and craft workers.

The Aztec economy was based on a highly developed combination of agriculture, tribute, and trade, along with intensive exploitation of Lake Texcoco’s abundant lacustrine resources.

An ingenious agricultural device, the chinampas (sometimes erroneously called “floating gardens”), artificial islands built of woven mats of reeds and branches atop which was piled mud and organic matter dredged from the lake bottom, provided abundant maize, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Trade and commerce occupied a central place in the Aztec economy. cacao beans were the principal form of money.

Religious concerns intruded into every aspect of Aztec daily life. The notion that the worlds of the sacred and the secular constituted distinct or separate realms did not exist. The Aztec corpus of religious beliefs and practices was dizzyingly complex, their pantheon of gods, deities, sacred beings, and divine entities reaching into the hundreds.

The most important deities were Huitzilopochtli (the Aztec’s most honored deity), Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl (“Plumed Serpent”), and Tezcatlipoca (“Lord of the Here and Now,” “Smoking Mirror,” “He Whose Slave We Are”).

The latter was considered an especially capricious, devious, and dangerous god, one who derived great pleasure from laying waste to human ambition and pretension. Propitiation of these and many other gods constituted one of humanity’s principal tasks, for without adequate ritual and obeisance, they might well turn on their mortal underlings and wreak havoc on their lives and fortunes.

Unlike the Christian God of this same period, Aztec gods, like Mesoamerican deities generally, were not considered exclusive. It was common for groups and polities to adopt new gods, especially those of a dominant or conquered group, by incorporating them into an already well-populated pantheon.

Intimately tied to Aztec religion were Aztec conceptions of time. The Aztec solar calendar was divided into 18 “months” of 20 days each, with a five-day “barren” or “hollow” period at the end of each solar year—a time of foreboding and dread. Each month, in turn, was devoted to specific rituals and ceremonies paying homage to a particular god or combination of gods.

aztecs solar calendar

Thus, for instance, the “Feast of the Flaying of Men” took place on March 5–24, and included mass ritual human sacrifice in honor of Xipe Totec (the god of fertility and martial success), as well as gladiatorial contests and sacrifices, dancing, and feasting.

In addition to the solar calendar was the sacred or divinatory calendar, a pan-Mesoamerican phenomenon, composed of 260 days and divided into 20 units of 13 days each—all associated with particular gods and rituals. An Aztec “century” consisted of 52 solar years.

The end of each 52-year cycle was considered a period of great danger, for unless the Sun god Huitzilopochtli was adequately propitiated with human blood, the Sun would cease to rise and the world would come to an end.

Closely linked to these temporal cycles, to the propitiation of the gods, and to the expansion of the Aztec Empire generally were conceptions and practices of warfare, which occupied a central place in Aztec political culture and cosmology.

By the Postclassic period, Mesoamerica as a whole had developed a highly elaborate series of beliefs and practices concerning warfare. In general, its principal purpose was not to occupy territory or kill enemy combatants, though the latter in particular was not uncommon, but to subdue competing polities and capture enemy soldiers on the battlefield.

These captives would be sacrificed to the gods, in order to ensure the good harvests, the well-being of the empire, and the continuation of the world. Thus, the so-called Flowery Wars (“flower” being a metaphor for human blood) between the Aztecs and as-yet unconquered kingdoms such as Tlaxcala were conceived and undertaken principally as ritual events whose principal purpose was to capture victims for later sacrifice.

The accumulation of animosities that resulted from these ritual battles, along with these cultural beliefs concerning warfare and divine intervention in human affairs generally, proved crucial in the later conquest of Mexico.

Huaxteca

Huaxteca

Much of what is known about the Huaxteca, or Huasteca, before the Spanish conquest of Hernán Cortés is because of the work of Dr. Gordon F. Eckholm, who was curator of Mesoamerican (Middle American) archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1937 to 1974. Eckholm began his work on the eastern coast of Mexico in 1941, with the original intention of tracing possible Mesoamerican cultural influences on the southeastern United States.

Although Eckholm later modified his point of view, his fieldwork established that the Huastecans had “developed in a wide area that extends without precise boundaries through the actual states of Tamaulipas, northern Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, and some parts of Queretaro and Puebla.

Realizing that there were abundant archaeological sites and materials in the region that had been neglected,” Eckholm developed a timeline that showed that the Huastecans had developed a flourishing culture, which began sometime in the early Christian era.

The Huastecans appear to be descended from the Mayans and became isolated in their region around the year 100 by stronger peoples, the Nahuas and the Totonacs. Ake Hultkrantz advanced the thesis in his The Religion of The American Indians that all Mayans, including the Huastecans, “spread from Huehuetenango in northwestern Guatemala, where a corn-farming community was in existence as early as 2600 b.c.e.”


In this enforced exile from their Mayan homeland (possibly among the Mayans of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico), their language developed its own character. The Mexican archaeologist Lorenzo Ochoa felt that the Huastecans eventually broke out of their insularity and established contacts with the dominant cultures of Mexico.

The Preclassical period of Mexican history is considered to have existed from 2000 b.c.e. to 300 c.e., the Classical period from 300 c.e. to 900 c.e., and the Postclassic from 900 c.e. to 1520 c.e., the year before Cortés crushed the last major indigenous kingdom, the Aztec Empire, thus ending the independent rule of Mexicans.

Some of the Huastecan centers identified by Eckholm were at Las Flores, Tampico, Pánuco, Tuxpan, Tajin, and Tabuco. Unique among cultures like the Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec famed for their use of rectangles and squares, the Huastecans built oval structures, like their temple at Las Flores. Eckholm advanced the thesis that the cult of Quetzalcoatl actually began among the ancient Huastecans.

The Huastecans, as with other Mesoamerican peoples, used the bow and perhaps the sharp obsidian-edged sword used by Aztecs in warfare. Mesoamerican warriors also used the atlatl, or spear-thrower, which was used to add great range to darts that they fired with its aid.

Shields, often brightly covered with bird feathers, were also a common feature among Mesoamerican armies. Hassig observes, “The use of body paint in warfare extended throughout Mesoamerica and was practiced inter alia by Mayans, Tlaxcaltecs, Huaxtec, and Aztecs.” Among the Aztecs at least, wrote Hassig, “the use of special face paint was a sign of martial accomplishment.”

The Aztecs had emerged by the 15th century as not only the dominant warriors of Mexico, but were also renowned for their trading ability. This, of course, evoked jealousy among the other kingdoms of Mexico. The Gulf Coast of Mexico where the Huastecans lived, known to the Aztecs as the “hot lands,” was a natural target for Aztec merchants. In 1458 Huastecans murdered Aztec merchants in Tziccoac and Tuxpan.

In revenge, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma I launched a campaign to punish the Huastecans. It also gave the Aztecs a cause to conquer some of the richest lands in Mexico. As Peter G. Tsouras writes in Warlords of the Ancient Americas, the region produced “cotton, brilliant feathers, and jewels, and ocean products such as various prized shells, and exotic foods like chocolate and vanilla.”

The Huastecans, like the Aztecs, were a warrior people, and the Aztecs were wary of the encounter. For one thing, their military strategists were not familiar with the geography of the Gulf Coast area. To bolster the spirits of the Aztec army, Tsouras notes, on the eve of the battle with the Huastecans, an Aztec captain declared to the soldiers, “Contemplate your death and think of nothing else. You have come here to conquer or die since this is your mission in life.” Moctezuma I decided to leave nothing to chance.

The night before battle some 2,000 of his knights covered themselves up with grass, ready for a massive ambush of the Huastecan army. On the next day, when the Huastecans attacked, Moctezuma’s men bolted and pretended to run away in panic. When the Huastecans followed, shouting for victory, the waiting warriors sprang up and attacked them, defeating them completely.

The Aztecs fought largely to gain prisoners for human sacrifice, not to kill, as did the Spanish. After the victory of Moctezuma, many—if not all—of the Huastecan captives had their hearts cut out by obsidian knives to feed the thirsty gods of the Aztecs.

When Hernán Cortés landed on the gulf coast at what is now Veracruz, it seemed impossible that he would ever achieve his goal of conquering the Aztec Empire. Yet, many of the subjugated peoples, hating the Aztecs for their exorbitant taxation and human sacrifices, joined him in his war. In 1521 the Aztec Empire fell, its last emperor Moctezuma II either stoned to death by his people for appearing to collaborate with the Spanish or garroted by the orders of Cortés.

Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl evokes one of the great tales of Middle American (Mesoamerican) mythology. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs of Mexico, the name Quetzalcoatl can be translated as “feathered serpent.” There is in fact a quetzal bird, prized for its plumage and highly priced on the international bird market.

However the figure of Quetzalcoatl is not just confined to Mexico, where the Spanish under Hernán Cortés overwhelmed the Aztecs in 1521. The Maya of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula know Quetzalcoatl as Kukulcán, and their cousins the Quiché Maya of Guatemala know Quetzalcoatl as Gugumatz.

There are three main interpretations to this profound myth. They are that Quetzalcoatl appears as the creator god, a civilizer coming from the east, and the last king of the Toltecs, the greatest warrior race in Mexico, before the advent of the Aztecs in Mexico in about 1100.


The Codex Vaticano, one of the few surviving Aztec documents (most were destroyed by zealous Spanish priests and friars), remarks that the supreme god Tonacatecutli created Quetzalcoatl.

The description of Quetzalcoatl is remarkably similar to that of the story of Christ in the New Testament, and one cannot discount that fact the friars or priests may have added to the Codex Vaticano their own interpretation in order to make Christianity more palatable to the Aztec people.

The Codex Vaticano notes that Quetzalcoatl was “sent as an ambassador and announced this to a [virgin, much like the visit of the archangel Gabriel to Mary, announcing she would give birth to Jesus] in Tula. He said that he was sent to save the world with penance [for the people] since his father had created the world but all humanity had fallen into sin. And that Tonacatecutli (known also by the name of Citinatonali) had sent his son to save the world.”

Quetzalcoatl depicted as feathered serpent

The idea of god-kings was as common among the Aztecs and Mayas as it had been earlier with the Egyptians and their pharaohs. Therefore the people of Middle America very easily accepted the idea that Quetzalcoatl could become king of Tula, a Toltec city. The Aztec emperors presided over the massive human sacrifices of their empire as the direct representative of the people with their gods.

Mayan god-kings would shed their own blood by passing thorny twigs through their tongues in order to connect their people to the earth and the gods in the heavens by the sacrifice of their own blood. In Yucatán the pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulcán, at the sacred site of Chichen Itza dominates the landscape.

The most intriguing part of the legend of Quetzalcoatl is its ending. The people and priests turned against their god-king because of his attempts at reformation. Most of all, Quetzalcoatl had forbidden the practice of human sacrifice. (In the legends, he appears as a tall, white man, much different from the Indians of Middle America.) In the end his own people force him into exile and he leaves across the ocean to the east on a raft of his serpents, promising to return.

When Hernán Cortés arrived at what is now Veracruz in Mexico in 1519, Moctezuma II’s scouts rapidly bore word of the appearance of this strange man—a white man—from the east. Moctezuma may have been reluctant to use force against the small band of Spanish adventurers because he thought that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl.

Conquest and Colonization of Brazil

Conquest and Colonization of Brazil

The Portuguese conquest of Brazil was a complex, prolonged, and partial process that many scholars argue was never fully realized. Lacking large cities, a centralized political structure, and a common language, the estimated 2 to 3 million precontact indigenous inhabitants of the Brazilian coast and interior were divided into an intricate patchwork of ethnolinguistic groups and clan-based tribes.

The principal coastal groups were Tupi-speaking peoples who had migrated into the area in the preceding centuries, displacing and absorbing existing groups. Seminomadic hunter-gatherers with intimate knowledge of the local environment, Tupi speakers were divided into numerous major branches and hundreds of autonomous bands, often in conflict with each other and other groups, and possessing great skill in the arts of war.

Their principal weapon, often used with deadly effect, was the bow and arrow. Like other ethnolinguistic groups in the Americas, many Tupi-speaking peoples practiced ritual cannibalism in the most general terms, a cultural-religious practice acknowledging the spiritual power of slain enemies.


The Portuguese used reports of ritual cannibalism to justify their invasion, slave raiding, and other excesses of violence, much as the Spanish had used the practice of ritual human sacrifice to justify their subjugation of the Aztecs in the conquest of Mexico.

The first European explorer to sight the Brazilian coast was Portuguese noble Pedro Álvares Cabral, in command of 13 ships headed around the southern tip of Africa to India, on April 22, 1500. Following a brief excursion on the beach, the expedition’s chronicler, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, produced the first written report on the land and its people.

Cabral sent one ship back to Portugal loaded with brazilwood, a red dyewood from which the later colony derived its name, and left behind two convicts to begin the process of mixing with the natives. The following year Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci sailed along Brazil’s southern coast. A number of French and Spanish expeditions followed.

These initial contacts with the natives were largely peaceful, though here as elsewhere they resulted in the spread of European diseases against which native peoples had no biological immunity. These diseases led to rapid population declines in many areas long before Europeans arrived.

The years 1500–30 saw the growth of the brazil-wood trade between Europeans and Brazil’s coastal peoples. Relations between rival French and Portuguese traders soon degenerated into a series of violent clashes, with the French ignoring the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, to which it was not a signatory.

In the early 1520s, the Portuguese established a garrisoned trading station at Pernambuco, where sugar cultivation was introduced in 1526. French-Portuguese hostilities along the coast intensified. In 1530, the Portuguese Crown responded by commissioning Martím Afonso de Sousa to begin the process of settlement and colonization, an expedition that in 1532 established the first permanent colony at São Vicente near modern São Paulo.

As conflicts with the French grew, in the mid-1530s King João III and his advisers devised the donatory system, which divided the coastland into 15 sections or donatories that extended along imaginary boundaries west into the interior, each to be ruled by a captain or hereditary lord.

Entrusting colonization to a handful of private individuals who would exercise full authority within their respective domains, the Crown hoped to secure its claims against its French rivals. Most donatories languished and failed, with São Vicente and Pernambuco seeing the greatest albeit limited success.

Important in this early phase of colonization were a small number of individuals who mixed with the natives and acted as cultural intermediaries between indigenous peoples and the Portuguese. Sailor Diogo Álvares ventured into the interior near Bahia in the early 1500s, married the daughter of the chief of the Tupinambá tribe, learned their language and culture, and changed his name to Caramurú.

By the 1530s, he had become a respected tribal chieftain and from this position of authority worked to facilitate the process of colonization. That the Bahia captaincy failed was due mainly to poor administration and the settlers’ failure to heed Caramurú’s counsel regarding their interactions with the natives.

Farther south, the settlement of São Paulo succeeded in large part by the efforts of Portuguese castaway João Ramalho, who had also married into a local tribe, the Goiana Tupinikin, and served as interpreter and intermediary.

Portuguese colonists generally mixed with the local inhabitants to a greater extent than was true of other European powers, thereby facilitating subsequent cultural and linguistic melding of different ethnic and racial groups.

Sugar Trade

As the brazilwood trade faded, sugar became the colony’s economic backbone. By the mid-1540s, two sugar-producing centers had emerged; one was around Pernambuco in the north, and the other was in São Vicente in the south.

By this time, competition with French, Spanish, and other rivals had sharpened, prompting the Portuguese Crown to intensify colonization efforts. Consequently, the Crown would play a major role in the colony’s economic development.

In 1549, Tomé de Sousa was appointed governor-general of Brazil at the head of a major expedition that included royal officials, artisans, soldiers, and Jesuit missionaries. Sousa established Salvador as the colony’s capital. To the south, the French colony at the Guanabara Bay threatened Portuguese control of the southern littoral.

In 1565–67, the Portuguese defeated and ousted the French colony and established the town São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro. Sousa’s successor Mem de Sá (governor-general, 1558–74) consolidated royal control over these coastal population centers.

Indigenous resistance to colonization intensified, particularly in consequence of slave-raiding expeditions organized by planters in the rapidly growing sugar industry. Indian counterattacks nearly destroyed the settlements of Bahia, Espirito Santo, and Ilhéus, and killed Brazil’s first bishop, but could not stem the Portuguese tide.

The Jesuits played a key role in this early phase of colonization and in the centralization of royal authority. Though their numbers were never large (110 in all of Brazil in 1574), their economic, social, and cultural impact was huge.

Young and aggressive, the Jesuit order (founded in 1540) was instrumental in establishing the town of São Paulo in 1557, and in facilitating generally peaceful relations between Indians and colonists in the south.

Taking no vow of poverty, Jesuits made their missions (aldeas) self-supporting and profitable through farming, ranching, and related enterprises. They were also crucial to the colony’s educational life. For most of the colonial period, Jesuit colleges in all the major towns served as the colony’s principal schools.

By the mid-1500s, sugar planters considered that labor had become the colony’s principal economic bottleneck. Land was plentiful, but sugar production in their view required a steady and reliable supply of bound labor. Enslaving native peoples was their initial strategy for meeting these rising labor demands.

The period from 1540 to 1600 saw the most extensive use of Indian slave labor in Brazil’s burgeoning sugar industry. By the late 1500s, disease and native resistance combined to make Indian slavery unable to meet sugar growers’ labor demands, leading to conflicts among the Crown, sugar growers, and the Jesuits.

The Crown tended to advocate the integration of Indians into the economy as free wage laborers; sugar growers promoted slavery; and Jesuits worked toward the transformation of Indians into a kind of smallholding or peasant class. Whose vision predominated hinged on a host of local and regional variables.

The transition from Indian to African slave labor was gradual, though by the early 1600s African slave labor dominated the sugar industry. The first Africans came as servants and sailors, while the first large-scale importation of African slaves did not begin until the 1570s. By the 1580s, the labor force on the 66 sugar plantations of Pernambuco is estimated at two-thirds Indian and one-third African slaves.

In later decades, the proportion of African slaves grew, so that by 1600 Brazil’s slave labor force was predominantly African. Over the next 250 years, Brazil became the single largest recipient of African slaves in the Americas, especially the Northeast, the colony’s principal sugar zone.

Brazil’s European population remained overwhelmingly concentrated in coastal areas. All the major cities founded in the 1500s were ports, including Bahia, São Vicente, Olinda (1537), Santos (1545), Salvador (1549), Vitória (1551), and Rio de Janeiro (1565). The pattern continued well into the 1600s, especially in the north and along the lower reaches of the Amazon.

The Brazilian population remained heavily concentrated in coastal areas through the colonial period and after. As European coastal populations swelled, migrations of Indian peoples away from the coast intensified, producing a ripple effect throughout the interior.

In 1585, São Paulo colonists officially authorized slave-raiding expeditions, and for the next 150 years the bandeirantes hunted Indian slaves across much of Brazil in the service of Paulista sugar planters. From the 1550s on, a series of epidemics ravaged Indian populations, including those of 1552 around Bahia, 1554 around São Paulo, Espírito Santo in 1559, and continuing through the colonial period.

Further impelling the Portuguese Crown to consolidate its hold on the colony was the Dutch presence in the Northeast, from the 1620s until their expulsion in 1654. The discovery of gold in present-day Minas Gerais in the mid-1690s led to a gold rush in these regions from 1700 to 1760, while discovery of diamonds in the same region in the 1720s further propelled expansion into the interior.

Many escaped African slaves also escaped into the interior, sometimes forming Maroon societies of runaway slaves, called quilombos. The largest and most resilient, Palmares, endured through most of the 1600s. By 1700, the population of the colonized areas was an estimated 300,000, with 100,000 whites, 150,000 mostly African slaves, and 50,000 free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race groups.

Colonial Brazil’s first 250 years set in motion a series of patterns and processes that profoundly shaped the subsequent development of Brazilian society. Especially important in this regard were the formation of an export-oriented economy (most notably brazilwood, sugar, gold, and diamonds); stark divisions of race and class; highly unequal landownership; a substantial degree of racial and ethnic intermingling, particularly among the lower classes; the gradual movement of the frontier of settlement westward; the subordination of Indian and African peoples within a relatively rigid social hierarchy; and the existence of vast unconquered lands beyond the western and northern frontiers.