Will my glory be nothing one day?

Will my fame be nothing in the earth?

At least flowers, at least songs!

Alas, what will my heart do?

In vain do we pa.s.s this way across the earth!

Nahuatl lyric (Cantares Mexicanos, folio 10 recto, ll. 23ff.) First in terms of magnificence, and also in population, was the realm where Nahuatl was spoken.* This language was usually known in the Spanish period as lengua mexicana, since the Aztecs, as we have seen (see Prologue), referred to themselves as Mexica, and their land as Mexico.* But this language had never been exclusive to the Aztec community. Specifically, when Cortes arrived in the valley of Mexico in 1519, Nahuatl was spoken by their neighbours in Tlaxcallan to the east also, outside the circle of the Aztecs' va.s.sal states, neighbours who, as it turned out, were ready to ally themselves with the Spanish against their fellow-speakers of Nahuatl. But this was just one of the last traces of a distribution of Nahuatl that pre-dated the Aztecs. In fact, there is evidence that the language's presence in the general area of central Mexico goes back at least to the seventh century AD, when the monumental city of Teotihuacan was destroyed by fire: at that time the Pipil community are supposed to have moved south, through some interaction with the then dominant Toltec civilisation. The Toltecs left little concrete trace except a memory hallowed among the Aztecs who a.s.sumed control of central Mexico after them: but of the Pipil descendants who are left today, living far to the south in El Salvador, twenty or so still speak a form of Nahuatl. The straightforward a.s.sumption is that Nahuatl was the language of almost all the people living in the Valley of Mexico around the turn of the first millennium AD, encircling what was then a vast lake: the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco on the north-western sh.o.r.e, the states of Tezcoco and Culhuacan, apparently successors of the Toltecs, on the eastern. There were also areas of Nahuatl farther afield, westward in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, and eastward in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, perhaps remnants of an earlier empire, centred on the Toltecs or even Teotihuacan.

Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of a family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute peoples in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs' foundation legend, by which they claimed to have come from Aztlan ('heron place'), an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their Nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants and scavengers and eaters of snakes. Yet they always represented themselves as a branch of the Chichimeca people, renowned hunter-gatherer nomads of the north. If this story is true, they must have learnt their Nahuatl fairly late; for the Chichimeca or Pame language is related to Otomi, also spoken north and west of the Valley of Mexico, but quite unlike Nahuatl. The Aztecs may have been like the Normans in France, settling and learning a new language before projecting it through conquest.

First squatting in the western region of Chapultepec, then chased out and enlisting as mercenaries with Culhuacan (another people who claimed descent from the Chichimeca), they accepted a very lowly billet on the lava beds of Tizaapan.

'Good,' c.o.xc.o.xtli [king of Culhuacan] said. 'They are monstrous, they are evil.

Perhaps they will meet their end there, devoured by snakes, for it is the dwelling-place of many snakes.'

But the Mexicans were overjoyed when they saw the snakes.

They cooked them, they roasted them and they ate them...

After twenty-five years of this, they brought matters to a head, requesting a Culhuacan princess, presumably as a bride, but then committing a characteristic atrocity on her.

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her, and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

Huitzilopochtli [Humming-bird on the Left, the Aztecs' tribal G.o.d] then said: 'O my chiefs, go and summon Achitometl [the princess's father].'

The Mexicans went off, they went to summon him.

They said, 'O our lord, O my grandson, O lord, O king...

your grandfathers, the Mexicans beseech you, they say, 'May he come to see, may he come to greet the G.o.ddess.

We invite him.'...

And when Achitometl arrived in Tizaapan, the Mexicans said in welcome: 'You have wearied yourself, O my grandson, O lord, O king.

We, your grandfathers, we, your va.s.sals, shall cause you to become ill.

May you see, may you greet your G.o.ddess.'*

'Very good, O my grandfathers,' he said.

He took the rubber, the copal, the flowers, the tobacco and the food offering, and he offered them to her, he set them down before the false G.o.ddess whom they had flayed.

Then Achitometl tore off the heads of the quail before his G.o.ddess: he still did not see the person before whom he was decapitating the quail.

Then he made the offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up, and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter's skin.

He was horror-struck.

He cried out, he shouted to his lords and va.s.sals, He said, 'Who are they, eh, O Culhuacans?

Have you not seen? They have flayed my daughter!

They shall not remain here, the fiends!

We shall slay them, we shall ma.s.sacre them!

The evil ones shall be annihilated here!'

Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc. Cronica Mexicayotl, trans. Thelma D. Sullivan The Aztecs were then driven into the lake, but they made improvised rafts out of their arrows and shields, and when they emerged on the other side, they were inspired. It was prophesied that they must settle 'where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart'. In the distance, on a p.r.i.c.kly-pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: 'O Mexicans, it shall be here! ' But no one could see who spoke. They knew that the reedy, but defensible, islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenocht.i.tlan, 'place of the p.r.i.c.kly-pear'. It was the year ome calli, '2 House', 1325.

This was the origin of the vast and miraculous lake city, which so entranced the invading Spaniards when they reached it in November 1519. The Aztecs had regrouped and prospered in their lakeland home for a hundred years, and then begun to expand their domains through a series of aggressive wars. First, under Itzcoatl ('Obsidian-Snake'), 1427-40, they achieved control of the Valley of Mexico as a whole, then under Motecuhzoma I Ilhuicamina ('Heaven-Shooter') they outflanked the territory of their resistant neighbours to the west, Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala, to reach the Caribbean coast and the central highlands to the south. Two more long-reigning tlatoani added to the empire, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had conquered about 100,000 square kilometres of territory in the centre of modern Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, including the curious enclave of Xoconochco, down the coast on the Pacific border of Guatemala.

A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this b.l.o.o.d.y expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypa.s.sed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the soci-yaoyotl or 'flower-war', a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word socitl, 'flower', has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example, in socitl in kwikatl, 'the flower the song', meaning 'poetry', used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of a.s.sociation with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.

Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of nauatlato, 'interpreters', to ensure effective transmission of the rulers' wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortes when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortes's interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.

Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomi, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre in Tenocht.i.tlan must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of pochteca, 'merchants', who also functioned as amba.s.sadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy that they could offer their slaves for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli along with the war captives offered by great warriors.

The spread of Quechua

K' akichanpi millmachayuj,

nina rauraj puka runa,

mana uqaqa atinichu

watuyta chay simiykita.

Imatachus iw.a.n.kipas

manapuni yachanichu.*

Red man who blazes like fire

and on the chin raises thick wool,

it is quite impossible for me

to understand your weird language.

I do not know what you are saying to me,

I cannot know in any way.

(An Inca addresses Pizarro, before the battle of Cajamarca)

Atau Wallpaj p' uchakakuynninpa w.a.n.kan

The Tragedy of the End of Atawallpa19

Language spread had been a far more complex process in the growth of the other great pre-Columbian empire, the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu, 'Four Portions'. When the Spanish reached Peru, its empire-and its language-covered the whole altiplano to the west of the Andes, from Quito in the north to Talca in the south, linked by a royal road that stretched some 4,000 kilometres, and uniting under one government the Andean and Pacific strips of modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. The language is known by its speakers as runa simi, 'human speech', but there was no accepted term for it when the Spanish arrived: Inca Garcilaso, a well-connected bilingual writing at the end of the sixteenth century, refers to it always as la lengua cortesana de Cuzco, 'the courtly language of Cuzco'. The first published grammar, by Domingo de Santo Tomas, in 1560, names it, however, la lengua general del Peru, llamada, Quichua, following a tradition that had been attested for at least twenty years,20 and this has stuck. The term qhiswa actually refers to 'temperate zone' or 'valley', intermediate between the coast and the highlands. The general view at the time was that the temperate zone round Andahuaylas in Apurimac province, south of the city of Cuzco (Qusqu, 'navel'-the Inca capital), had been the heartland of the language.21 In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation.22 Quechua was by origin the language of a coastal region round Lima, with an oracle located at Pachakamaj ('earth-ruler'), the base of a seaborne trading community called the Chincha, who spread their language primarily as a trade jargon out towards the north, particularly up into the northern highlands round Cajamarca and into Ecuador, the area that was to be designated the Chincha-suyu, the most northerly portion of the Inca empire. This all happened in the first millennium AD, long before the Incas were a force to be reckoned with. The grafting of the language on to the growing Inca empire would in fact come almost as an afterthought, by a process rather similar to the adoption of Aramaic by the politic Persian emperor Darius (see Chapter 3, 'The story in brief: Language leapfrog', p. 47).

The Inca story began far to the south, on the southern sh.o.r.es of Lake t.i.ticaca, where a group speaking the Puquina [pukina] language had established a major centre now known as Tiahuanaco. It seems that in the first millennium, in concert with speakers of Jaqi [haki], another language to the north (the ancestor of modern Aymara, still spoken in Bolivia), they developed an inland trading zone to the north and west; this trade would have spread knowledge of the Aymara language, and its sisters k.a.w.ki and Jaqaru (which still survive vestigially south-east of Lima), over much of the area of southern Peru. It is visible in the archaeological record in a distinctive style of pottery, depicting a face surrounded by rays or serpents, which could be the creator G.o.d Viracocha. It is, in fact, still possible to find place names that stem from this period, for example Cajamarca itself (Jaqi q'aja marka, 'town in the valley').