The History of the Renaissance World (81 page)

Lake Texcoco was a runoff lake, filled with melted snow that had trickled down from the mountains ringing the Basin of Mexico. All that runoff brought salt and minerals with it; and because it was also a closed lake, with no channel to the sea, the salt remained in the lake when the water evaporated. It was shallow and briny, filled with saltwater reeds and dotted with islands of liquid mud, completely hostile to settlement.
⁵

70.1 The Aztecs

Nevertheless, the Mexica were stuck in it, trapped by three major powers in the middle of a swamp. So, as they had done for the last decades, they made the best of their situation. They began to tell a story that would transform their mucky new home into a divinely chosen land.

Their god Huitzilopochtli, they declared, had told them long before that they would know they had reached the end of the wanderings when they saw a sign, an eagle sitting on a cactus (
tenochtli
) with a snake held in its beak: “It is there that we shall fix ourselves, it is there that we shall rule, that we shall wait, that we shall meet the various nations and that with our arrow and our shield we shall overthrow them.” When they arrived at Lake Texcoco, the story went on, they sloshed their way into the middle of it and suddenly saw the eagle of prophecy, “poised on a cactus, eating with delight. . . . And they wept, crying, ‘At last we have been worthy of our god; we have deserved the reward; with astonishment we have seen the sign: our city shall be here.
’
” It was a wonderful story, and useful; it allowed them to celebrate the inevitable.
⁶

The Mexica began to build houses for themselves on one of the larger islands, where underlying rock would keep them from sinking down into the bog that surrounded them. This island they named Tenochtitlán, after the cactus in the prophecy. They lived on fish and waterfowl; they trapped and hunted and traded the meat with the surrounding cities for bricks and timber and the other necessities of life. Slowly, Tenochtitlán was transformed from a muddy survivor’s camp into a town. Slowly, the tribe of the Mexica was becoming a nation: the Aztecs. But they did not forget the horror of those first years on the island. “This is the place of the serpent’s anger,” the Aztec priests chanted, over a century later, as they descended into Lake Texcoco for their ritual yearly bath, “the humming of the water-mosquito, the flight of the wild-duck, the murmur of the white rushes.”
⁷

Sometime between 1337 and 1357, a splinter group of Aztecs moved out of Tenochtitlán, to a dry patch of land less than a mile away, at the north end of the lake. The Dominican friar Diego Durán, who gathered and preserved the oral histories of the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, tells us that Tenochtitlán had grown large enough to be divided into four sections, or
barrios
, with each section parceled out to the men of the city. “Some of the elders who felt they deserved more property than they had received . . . rebelled,” Durán writes. “They decided to seek a different place, and by going through the reeds and rushes they found a small dry piece of land.” Here, four chieftains (“restless and seditious men, of evil intentions”) built a second city and called it Tlatelolco. The twin cities on Lake Texcoco existed in a state of constant simmering hostility: “They were never at peace,” Durán says, “nor did they get on well with their brothers.”
⁸

The division forced both Aztec settlements to shore up their defenses. “[The men of Tlatelolco] have abandoned us, they have gone away,” one of the elders of Tenochtitlán explained. “I am afraid that with their cunning they will one day wish to surpass us and subdue us. . . . Before we find ourselves in a situation like that, I believe we should make a rapid decision and choose a king who will rule over us and over Tlatelolco as well.”
⁹

The king they chose was Acamapichtli, “Handful of Arrows,” the son of an Aztec father and a Colhuacan mother. Crowned in 1375 as the first ruler of Tenochtitlán, he was immediately forced to carry on complicated and delicate negotiations with the surrounding powers; Tezozomoc, the powerful king of the city-state of Azcapotzalco on the western ridge of the valley, had become alarmed by the rapid rise of Tenochtitlán. He sent a demand for immediate tribute: fish, frogs, willow and cypress trees, maize, chiles, beans, squash, and large loaves of bread made out of the ground redworms called
ezcahuitli
(an important source of protein for the lake dwellers).

Paying the tribute would acknowledge that the Aztecs were vassals and servants to Azcapotzalco. The new king was a “valiant youth,” but he decided to be cautious; he ordered the people of the city to pay the tribute and keep the peace. (Conveniently, his chief priest agreed; the god Huitzilopochtli, he said, had appeared and promised to make the city prosperous if the tribute were paid.)

And so it happened. “The Aztecs continued to pay the same tribute for fifty years,” Durán says,

pretending to be content and feigning obedience, while their numbers multiplied, while they became stronger. King Acamapichtli reigned forty years in the city of Tenochtitlán, ruling in peace, in quiet, in harmony. He built the city, organizing its houses, canals, and streets . . . [and] achieved other benefits for the good of the state.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, the chieftains of Tlatelolco ignored the election and chose their own king. Acamapichtli was half Colhuacan and the vassal of Azcapotzalco; so the city on the north end asked Tezozomoc of Azcapotzalco to send them one of his own royal sons as their ruler. Tezozomoc agreed and sent his younger son, Cuacuauhpitzahuac. This too made Tlatelolco a vassal of the greater city, but a vassal in higher standing than its neighbor.

From the beginning, they were set against each other: Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco, brother against brother, Cain and Abel in the same lake, twin cities competing for the favor of the stern and distant Tezozomoc. “No kingdom divided against itself can endure,” Durán concludes. “And dreading destruction, yet warring against each other, both groups pretended ignorance of the reality.”
¹¹

Chapter Seventy-One

A Hundred Years of War

Between 1329 and 1347,
Edward III of England fights against Scotland,
tries to claim the throne of France,
and begins a hundred years of war

R
OBERT
B
RUCE
, the king of Scotland, was ill. “He had grown old,” says Jean Froissart, “and was afflicted with leprosy, of which he was expected to die.” In fact, he was only fifty-five, but he had been suffering from “heavy sickness” for years; “leprosy” was a catchall term for a whole range of unpleasant wasting diseases. He died on June 7, 1329, leaving his five-year-old son David on the Scottish throne.
¹

Bruce had done his best to guard his son’s claim to the throne. At the signing of the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, young David had been betrothed to the seven-year-old sister of Edward III (the marriage was celebrated the same year, and the little girl had come to live in the Scottish royal palace). As regent and guardian, Bruce had appointed one of his own relations: Thomas Randolph, the Earl of Moray, an experienced soldier who had commanded a regiment at Bannockburn and fought by Bruce’s side during the War for Scottish Independence. “It was publicly proclaimed at [David’s] coronation,” says the
Chronicle of Lanercost
, “that he claimed right to the kingdom of Scotland by no hereditary succession, but in like manner as his father, by conquest alone.
²

This was a silly assertion to make of a child, but the Earl of Moray knew that the Scots had a tradition of following the strongest man, not the next in line by blood. Sure enough, David’s rule was soon challenged by Edward Balliol, son of the deposed John (who had died in France some fifteen years earlier, having been released from the Tower of London on condition that he never return to Scotland). With a small mercenary army and the support of a handful of English barons who had lost their Scottish territories and wanted them back, Edward Balliol took ship and landed his men near Kinghorn, on the eastern coast, in August 1332.

On his way to repel the invasion, the Earl of Moray was taken suddenly and violently ill and died. The Scottish nobles elected another of their number, the Earl of Mar, to replace him. With the help of David’s illegitimate half brother Robert and the son of the dead Earl of Moray, the new regent led thirty thousand Scots against the little English army, and was thoroughly and embarrassingly beaten. “The Scots were defeated chiefly by the English archers,” says the
Chronicle of Lanercost
, “who so blinded and wounded the faces of the first division of the Scots by an incessant discharge of arrows, that they could not support each other.” More than half of the Scottish army was killed or taken prisoner in this defeat, known as the Battle of Dupplin Moor. The Earl of Mar died fighting, after only nine days as regent. Robert fell too; so did the young Earl of Moray.
³

Edward Balliol marched triumphantly to Scone and had himself crowned king of Scotland on October 4. But he had no supporters in Scotland; three months after his coronation, he was forced to flee Scotland by a reassembled Scottish army loyal to David.

At this point, both kings of Scotland appealed to Edward III for help. David’s ambassadors arrived at York, where the king was holding court, and begged him to assist the young king “as an ally ought to do, seeing that he had his sister to wife.” Balliol’s officers appeared at the same time, pointing out that Balliol and his allies were merely taking back land that had once been theirs.

Nationality, and the chance to get Scotland back, won out over family ties; Edward decided to support Balliol. “The King’s council was of the opinion,” writes Thomas Gray, “that he was not bound so to act against his own subjects.” An English army joined Balliol and his men, and in early July of 1333, the combined armies of Balliol and Edward III attacked the border town of Berwick. This time, the Scottish defenses were outmanned, and “a great number of barons, knights, and common people were slain.” Berwick surrendered, and Balliol marched to Scone for the second time.
⁴

Seeing that the odds had turned against Scotland, David’s new regent arranged to get him and his child wife, Joan, out of Scotland and into France, where Philip VI agreed to help him regain Scotland in return for David’s homage to the French throne. Meanwhile, back in Scotland, Balliol repaid Edward III for his aid by handing over half of Scotland to the direct control of the English crown.
⁵

But the war between England and Scotland had only been the prequel to a much longer and more complicated war between England and France.

War between England and France was nothing new. The two countries had never been friends, and their relationship had grown knottier when Henry II, heir to French lands by way of his father, had become the first king of England to owe homage to the French throne as Count of Anjou. The complicated interactions of the two monarchs, one of which was also the liege man of the other, had grown even thornier when Eleanor of Aquitaine had taken her family lands with her into the bed of the king of England, away from the king of France.