Overwhelming and Collective Murder

On November 8, 1519, the first Europeans to walk into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán saw something none of them had seen before. “All these buildings,” the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo later recalled, resembled “fairy castles . . . so high, majestic, and splendid.” The city was a garden filled with flowers. In the evenings, the air smelled of perfumed resin. The squares were “kept so very clean that there was not the smallest particle of dust or straw to be seen anywhere.” And then Díaz del Castillo climbed the one hundred and fourteen steps of the great temple and saw the “altar encrusted with blood grown black,” and the bowls in which human flesh was cooked, and the endless piles of skulls.