Tlaxcaltec

And the most pivotal example of this is the Tlaxcalan Alliance.

The Tlaxcalans were a massive, powerful tribe that the Aztecs were essentially keeping around as a free-range farm to harvest warriors for sacrifices.

Yeah, a brutal existence.

When Cortes first entered their territory, the Tlaxcalans didn't welcome him.

They attacked him with 50,000 warriors.

Cortes and his 500 men were utterly terrified.

Some of them are things that we talk about, but we barely understand yet, AI.

And some of it are things that we hear about, terrorism, ISIS, totalitarianism, but which we don't really understand the texture of, where I'm gonna be sitting down with people who've actually lived on the ground in Mosul under ISIS, in Manbij, northeast Syria, as ISIS is coming up, talking about human nature, about totalitarianism, about extremism.

And in all of this, I hope we're getting to the real core of what really in the end matters about politics, the really biggest things.

The things that our minds struggle to predict, that our political systems, our newspapers struggle to really talk about, that voters aren't incentivized to raise.

So it's a lovely place to start.

So obviously, uh, Yuval, you're describing the arrivals of the Conquistador, the, the Spanish invaders into Latin America.

And the astonishing thing there is that it's a few hundred people arriving into an empire of many millions.

And despite the fact that they have horses and simple muskets.

How did he defeat the Aztecs? I mean, they're a big empire.

Well, the Taxalan tribe that had been persecuted, and I know I'm not pronouncing that right, Tlaxcalan, D-L-A-X-C-A-L-A-N.

That's a tough one, man.

They were the ones that were being captured by the Aztecs and, of course, having their hearts ripped out on top of the pyramids.

The main source of sacrificial victims was prisoners of war, and this is where the flower wars appear.

The Aztecs participated in ritualized wars against neighboring city-states, especially against the Tlaxcalans on the other side of the valley.

These wars were not fought to conquer, plunder, or gain territory.

They were organised specifically to capture enemy warriors.

or perhaps reflecting on troubling omens and prophecies that had circulated throughout the empire.

Cortes took Moctezuma prisoner and attempted to rule through him, but the situation quickly destabilized.

Local allies joined Cortes, especially the Tlaxcalans, who had been at war with the Aztecs and saw an opportunity to break Aztec domination.

In June of 1520, the Spanish were forced to flee the city, Cortes reorganised his forces, returned with a larger army, and in May of 1521 laid siege to Tenochtitlan.

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On their way to the Mexican capital, Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, Cortes and his group encounters a group of Tlaxcalans and fights his way through their city.

The next day, after commending ourselves to God, we set out with all our ranks in good order, the horsemen well instructed in the way they should charge through the enemy and return to us, and see that the enemy should not be permitted to break our ranks and separate us one from the other.

As we thus marched on, two armies of warriors approached to give us battle.

Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates.

On tonight's show, I will be reading from the second part of Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz.

Last week, I covered the arrival of Cortes to the New World, his finding of two interpreters, and his march from the coast into the inner parts of Mexico, or back then, New Spain, and the conquest of the Tlaxcalans.