I studied the Aztecs and Incas when I was at university and for many years I fell for the heavily overplayed propaganda of 'conquistador greed and imperialism.'Like all the best lies and deceits, the stories of conquistador brutality seldom include their vehement desire to spread the Christian faith which has always been downplayed by historians with a leftwing axe to grind unless they have made out that the Christian element was equally brutal. There are indeed some cases which lend a limited justification to this slant.
So desperate are they to attack faith and empire that they conveniently fail to show the naked evil practised by the peoples who were displaced - or at least, they minimise it.
Some years before the arrival of Cortez to Tenochtitlan - now Mexico City - the Aztec Emperor Montezuma the 1st had overseen a 5 day blood-fest in which 86,000 people were sacrificed by having their still beating hearts wrenched from their bodies by cutting with flint knives.
These historians and anthropologists are quick to absolve the Aztecs of their barbarity and yes, cannibalism, justifying these horrors as 'being their way' so they can portray the Christian destruction and replacement of this evil as a negative; a cultural disaster. They were a brutal power who viciously subjugated all non Aztec tribes whom they utilised as 'sacrifice fodder'.
Incredible double standards.
