3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec empire

Also great is The Fall of Civilizations' episode about Tenochtitlan [1].

The podcast is the work of a British historian named Paul M. M. Cooper, who's also published a book derived from the podcast. Each episode is really well researched, incorporating recent discoveries rather than uncritically repeating old tropes. No filler, no theatrics, just really well-told history, backed by real sources.

Another excellent history podcast is The Rest is History [2], who also devoted an excellent (albeit much shorter) episode to the same topic.

[1] https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

[2] https://therestishistory.com/episodes/

Also "The Conquest of New Spain" .. written as a first hand account by a soldier for Cortes.

Obviously cruel and exploitative what the conquistadors did, but it's an example how fact can be sometimes more incredible than fiction.

How a small band of soldiers got in way over their heads and had to bluff and bully their way through, or would have certainly been killed.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108490.The_Conquest_of_N...

there is this song by Randy Newman - the great nations of Europe. I highly recommend it as a history lesson :-( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNQxu7PWKM

   ...
   Columbus sailed for India
   Found Salvador instead
   He shook hands with some Indians and soon they all were dead
   They got TB and typhoid and athlete's foot
   Diphtheria and the flu
   Excuse me great nations coming through!

   Hide your wives and daughters
   Hide your sons as well
   With the great nations of Europe you never can tell

   From where you and I are standing
   At the end of a century
   Europes have sprung up everywhere as even I can see
   But there on the horizon as a possibility
   Some bug from out of Africa might come for you and me
   Destroying everything in its path
   From sea to shining sea
   Like the great nations of Europe
   In the sixteenth century

Actually better is the book "The Fifth Sun: A new history of the Aztecs" written in Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and translated by Camille Townsend. It is an account of how the Aztecs viewed conquest, which they didn't see as a conquest initially. Also the descriptions of the city of Tenochitlan indicate that it was just as sophisticated, and cosmopolitan as it is today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Sun:_A_New_History_of_th...

Both books are great.

Loved the revelation of planted food forests.

Strongly second these recommendations. I enormously enjoyed them for both their information density, but also their extremely clear and proficient writing style. Absolute class journalism.

Almost all inland Celtic “cities” of western Europe were built around strong fortifiable positions, aka oppida. They were definitely well planned for defense against tribal warfare and tribal invasions. Aztec cities (probably all cities) had similar root motivations—-control and defend territory.

Bibracte near Autun in Burgundy — the city Julius Ceasar had to conquer — is built at the top of a 900 meter hill;

Pyrene/Heuneburg built on a rocky spur overlooking the Danube in southern Germany is considered the first real city north of the Alps.

Titelberg in Luxembourg was built on a site easily defended on three of four sides and with plenty of space at the top.

One interesting exception—-Milan (Mediolanum). Like ancient Mexico City its defenses consisted of water; tributaries to the Po and surrounding marshes.

Venice is even more like Tenochtitlan and a more radical and more “modern” version of Milan. The Venetia hit chased into their lagoon thanks to Attila and waves if Goths.

You are right that Tenochtitlan had a much more obviously planned lurban structure. But the “organics” of Venice have their own logic, partly partly due to tides and winds but mainly due to a focus on commercial districts rather than religious/ceremonial districts.

In 1500 both cities were very large: Tenochtitlan was close to 300,000 and Venice close to 200,000.

The grid is still visible in Mexico City today. All the canals you see in the reconstruction essentially became the streets as they were gradually filled in.

Not to undermine what they did in any way but one thing the Mexica had that favored a strong grid with central planning was that each new bit of the city was built on land that had to be created from scratch. If you're going to build a new "neighborhood" from the lake, might as well make it rectangular. To some extent, they didn't even have to dig their canals, just leave bits of the lake not filled in (though there is more to making canals than just digging a ditch).

Having said all that it certainly seems that ancient Meso-American city builders of all stripes were really into grid-tastic cities, at least for the monumental cores with the temples, ball courts etc.

As a counterpoint, I much prefer the street layout of European cities to grids. I don't think the grid is particularly impressive; just a sign of a particular urban organization.

That's sort of a simplification. Medieval European cities were absolutely "planned," but generally as defensive structures. The nature of feudal government is that it discourages investment in big centralized "cities" and builds a ton of little forts for individual aristocrats instead. So by the time the economics of Renaissance trade effectively forced the cities on the governments, the floorplans were already set and things didn't fit.

Tenochtitlan, in comparison, was purpose-built as the seat of an empire (and a recent one, in fact). The centralized authority was there from the start.

You can read a first-person (colonial) perspective from someone who was there.

"When I beheld the scenes around me, I thought within myself, this was the garden of the world. All of the wonders I beheld that day, nothing now remains. All is overthrown and lost."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_verdadera_de_la_con...

Also check out Álvaro Enrigue’s fictionalized account You Dreamed of Empires. Vividly told from the perspectives of the principals, it makes for unforgettable reading…

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127938747-you-dreamed-of...

Not to the future victims of the Aztecs.

Spanish colonialism in the new world was largely an extension of the reconquista abroad. The Spanish crown used wealth from conquered territories to placate and balance the power of Iberian nobility. With the conquest of the canaries and the fall of Granada, the only obvious place to continue that system was North Africa, which would have brought the Spanish crown into direct conflict with the kingdom of Portugal.

Then Columbus returned with news of a route to the indies that avoided the increasingly powerful Ottomans. The war machine just got pointed in a new direction until the realities of the new world eventually caught up.

A moorish kingdom would not have had the same approach to the new world, even if someone had discovered it.

> Similarly, popular opinion in Israel likes to call Palestinians "Arabs" because they adopted the language of their conquerors.

That's not a practice imposed by the Israelis. The (genuine) Arabs, as you would expect, favored themselves. So, everywhere in their empire, social climbers claimed to be Arabs.

When you read about the history of the region, the luminaries who appear tend to be Persians, but this is obscured.

> The Spanish Catholics were the Wahhabis of the day.

I don’t understand this comparison.

> If the Iberian Moors were still in power in 1518,would we today be calling Latin Americans "Arabs"?

This assumes the Moors would have ventured to the Americas in the first place. At the very least, they didn’t have the same incentives as the Spanish to do so.

That's an interesting juxtaposition. I was going to comment on another (insightful!) comment here about how "the only indigenous-majority country is Greenland" brings up just how Americas-centric (plus the commonwealth...) the term "indigenous" is in the first place, and this is a great illustration of that IMO. Hopefully we can all agree that applying the term even to the British Isles gets really tough, and it gets downright impossible if you try to do it to somewhere like Palestine.

And it's no mystery why it has such big sway today in commonwealth countries as opposed to the relatively-minor importance it has in Latin America... In case anyone wasn't aware, the British Empire (and early US!) were definitely the baddies. I just recently found this quote by Jacob Howard, the liberal abolitionist senator who drafted the first sentence of the US's 14th Amendment, that I think shows how deep the assumption of animosity ran:

      I am not yet prepared to pass a sweeping act of naturalization by which all the Indian savages, wild or tame, belonging to a tribal relation, are to become my fellow-citizens and go to the polls and vote with me.

On another note: you likely know this, but Columbus only got funding for his voyage because the monarchs were doing their victory-lap after finally conquering the last stronghold of the Iberian Moors, Granada. So it's all quite connected, not just by chance.

It's semi-common knowledge among nerds that the Islamic Golden Age isn't appreciated enough in western culture beyond "someone presumably was on the other side of the Crusades", but this is making me consider how the age of discovery's push for colonization might've been driven/inspired by a feeling of jealousy and inferiority compared to the rapid growth of the Islamic emirates...

There are also some articles talking about Thomas Kole doing the 3d modeling from about a year ago:

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-02-13/the-lost-city-... https://www.wired.com/story/explore-tenochtitlan-ancient-azt...

Yep. You can see it on the map in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. El periférico ("the ring highway") and other major roads follow the old causeways. I have been there many times in my life, maybe 30 or 40.

> The current “Hispanics” are largely descended from the natives, I think?

You can generally divide most of the Americas into three categories: (mostly) pure indigenous ancestry, mixed ancestry (Mestizo is the common term), and (mostly) European ancestry. In regions where slavery was important, you also have significant groups of African ancestry, mixed African/indigenous ancestry, and sometimes Asian ancestry from post-slavery labor importation.

In most of the Americas, the dominant ethnic group is mestizo. Greenland is the only country where indigenous peoples are the clear majority, and Guatemala is probably the only other country where indigenous comes closest to being a plurality over mestizo. (The degree to which modern people accept indigenous versus mestizo as a term varies from country to country).

> I put “Hispanics” in quotes because it’s pretty weird to be labeled by the language of your conquerors who don’t even control anything in the area anymore.

The vast majority of modern Latin Americans speak Spanish or another European language as their dominant language.

I think you put too much stock into the conquered / conqueror narrative. These are living breathing cultures which develop in their own ways beyond the interactions of their ancestors. The majority of the population is a blend between both, and even many cultural traditions are a clear blend of both (Dia de los Muertos being probably the most obvious).

Most Hispanics I've spoken to about this see it all as apart of what makes them, them, not some artificial separation based on what modern politics thinks of the groups their ancestors were apart of. In another sense you cannot remove one part and still have the Hispanic people, and they also cannot reconstruct what has been lost.

You can also see this with groups like the Cape Coloureds who have their own distinct culture from the black, white, and indian cultures which it grew out of.

> who don’t even control anything in the area anymore

Note that they still speak Spanish and many are Catholic to this day - you can identify a lion by the marks of its claws so to speak.

The genetic background of Hispanics varies considerably from individual to individual, a lot of them are lily white by any visual measure and most of them have considerable if not majority European ancestry. In any case, culturally it's no contest; they have far more in common with European cultures than the Aztecs. Remember that most of them are Catholics, not humans sacrificing sun worshipers.

This seems like a very Anglo and anachronistically racialist take.

Catholic colonial empires were characterized by a different ethos than, say, the Protestant English. The former involved a good deal of intermarriage (beginning with Cortes himself) and saw what could be described as cultural transfiguration and fusion. The latter tended to see the natives through the lens of Amalek (ask the Acadians about their experiences with the British). So, the distinction between conqueror/conquered is a false dichotomy, as Hispanic peoples are heirs to the heritage of both. And even where the heritage of non-Spanish origin is concerned, here, too, it is not quite so simple. After all, Cortes did not conquer Tenochtitlan with his merry band of men alone. He did so in alliance with the enemies of the Aztecs (e.g., Tlaxcalans, Tetzcocans, Cempoalans, Huejotzingans) who numbered in the thousands, and these do not include the historical enemies of the Aztecs, some of whom were conquered by them.