This study will examine two works to determine what the rise and fall of the Aztec Empire tells us about "culture" in general. The works are Inga Clendinnen's "The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society," and the first two chapters from Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism, by Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest. The thrust of the study will be that, as unique as the Aztec Empire certainly was as a culture, it nevertheless mirrors culture in general in its origins, development, and collapse.
Clendinnen makes clear that the Aztec Empire's origins did indeed reflect the origins of many other cultures. The particularly unique feature of the Aztecs, in Clendinnen's view, was the special emphasis on the military and the accompanying courage of its warriors. She quotes an Aztec song-poem: "Proud of itself/ is the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan./ Here no one fears to die in war./ This is our glory. . . . / Who could conquer Tenochtitlan?/ Who could shake the foundation of heaven?" (Clendinnen 44). In reference to this excerpt, the author writes in her opening words that "Today we are tempted to read this fragment on an Aztec song-poem as a familiar piece of bombast: the aggressive military empire which insists on its invincibility, its warriors strangers to fear" (Clendinnen 44).
Every major empire in the history of the human race has put an emphasis on the military aspect of its civilization. An empire is marked by conquest and expansion, and the objects of that drive for conquest and expansion are in most cases going to offer some form of resistance. The resistance of the objects of conquest in turn inevitably lead to military force. In this regard, then, the Aztec Empire does reflect culture in general, from the Egyptians to European empires to the "empires" of the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century.
We cannot know the psychology of the warrior of the Aztec Empire. Certainly th...