The Rise and Fall of Aztec Empire

The resistance of the objects of conquest in turn inevitably lead to military force. In this regard, then, the Aztec conglomerate does reflect culture in general, from the Egyptians to European empires to the "empires" of the Soviet sodality and the United States in the twentieth century.

We can non know the psychology of the warrior of the Aztec Empire. for certain there was sociable pressure on the Aztec warrior to at to the lowest degree act as if he were fearless and ready to grammatical case death in battle. As Clendinnen writes, to act cowardly, to refuse to weight-lift and kill, to fail to advance through military training consort to the schedule of education into military fearlessness---any or all of these shortcomings meant that the idiosyncratic would be marked for feeling as a coward, would offend at least psychological and emotional ostracism, and would be relegated to the life of a menial laborer instead of the life of an prestigious and privileged warrior with wealth and power for himself and his family. In new(prenominal) words, the sociable forces at work in the Aztec Empire were tremendous in terms of encouraging fearlessness in battle.

All cultures which maturate through conquest and refinement necessarily place an idiom on the military and on wartime heroics, notwithstanding this emphasis in other cultures ancient and modern in many cases cedeed and allow for options other than such unadulterated fearlessness. The empire of the

Conrad and Demarest argue that the sacrificial cult of the Aztecs was a study cause of the empire's downfall in the face of Cortes and his men. The emphasis on this cult and its increasing need for victims caused the empire's leaders to neglect other affairs of state: "The obsession with mass sacrifice [to placate the gods] was becoming increasingly maladaptive and increasingly difficult to satisfy. . . . The deuce major goals of . . . warfare, captives for sacrifice to the gods and tribute for the support of the state, gradually dumbfound to be conflicting . . . objectives" (Conrad and Demarest 60).

The Aztec Empire in its origins and expansion was marked not only by war, but also by hard work, a pioneer spirit, innovative approaches to the physical environment, kindly opportunities to radically alter that environment, and an emphasis on developing and expanding globe holdings. The military emphasis of the Aztecs in the early years was characterized not by conquest which would expand its own territory imperialistically, but rather by exploits which benefitted others. The combination of the military and the environmental and social marked the origins of the Aztec Empire in a way uncomparable to that culture, and those early times were hardly notable for the kind of distinction which would later be emphasized in the Aztec culture:

In the first days of empire Itzcoatl had taken the precautionary amount of money of destroying tribal records, to allow the construction of a past more than compatible with the Aztec present and what he had come to recognize as the glory of their predestined future (Clendinnen 53).

Under Itzcoatl's successor Moctezuma the senior the armies of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan spilled beyond the valley to carve come out of the closet the broad shape of their magnificent if unstable tribute empire. That expansion was paralleled by the increasing magnificence of Tenochtitlan (Clendinnen 46).

The loosely knit empire flew to pieces as tributary states ros
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