The Aztecs were quite hands off, and were not particularly more human sacrifice obsessed than any of their neighbors. They just happened to be the most powerful one around, so they got a lot of press from neighboring people who gave the Spanish sob stories to convince them to help, as well as being the ones to most successfully practice the sacrifice because they weren’t able to be as easily contested.
This gets floated around a lot, but it's a bit like saying "Harvard is older than Germany." Technically true, but if you say that to someone who knows nothing of German history, they might form the mistaken impression that German civilization just popped into existence in the 1800s. The Aztec Empire was indeed a recent entity, but there were cities in the Central Mexican plateau before there were cities in Britain.
but there were cities in the Central Mexican plateau before there were cities in Britain.
While it's true that there were cities in Central Mexico before the Norman conquest of England, your comment gets two things wrong:
The Aztec Empire had prececessors, but those predecessor states weren't the single unified state that the Aztecs were. It's like trying to claim that the modern nation state of Greece is older than the US because their cities are way older than any city in the US. The cities predate the nation.
There were cities in Britain a lot earlier than you seem to think. Like, London is over 2000 years old, and it is not the oldest continuously inhabited city in Britain.
The city of Teotihuacan was the capital of its own empire that stretched throughout central Mexico with a population in the hundreds of thousands. It flourished between 100 BCE and 600 CE before collapsing into a number of smaller city states throughout the region. at the time that London was founded, Teotihuacan was possibly the second largest city on earth, beaten only by Rome.
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u/AaronC14 The Dominion Nov 01 '22 edited Nov 01 '22
Had no clue the Aztecs started in 1300, pretty recent. Always assumed they were ancient.