The Aztec and Inca Empires
9 Popular Claims, Checked

The Aztec and Inca empires fell to Spanish invaders within about a decade of each other, in the 1520s and 1530s. Most of what the world repeats about them comes from the conquerors, from friars writing decades later, or from 19th-century retellings. Here are nine common claims, checked against the conquest-era sources and against archaeology.

1. “The Aztecs thought Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl”

Disputed The story is old, but it is not found in the one account written at the time. In his second letter to Charles V, written in 1520, Hernán Cortés reports Moctezuma telling him “that our race was brought to these parts by a lord, whose vassals they all were, and who returned to his native country”, and that the lord’s descendants would “come to subjugate this country and us, as his vassals”. Later in the speech, as Cortés reports it, Moctezuma says: “we believe, and hold for certain, that he is our rightful sovereign”, meaning Charles V. It names a lord, not a god, and never mentions Quetzalcoatl. The link to Quetzalcoatl in the English edition comes from its 1908 editor, Francis MacNutt, in a note.

The god story appears in print decades later. The historian Camilla Townsend (American Historical Review, 2003) names a history published in 1552 by Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’s chaplain and secretary, who had never been to Mexico, as one of the first to claim in print that the Spaniards were taken for gods. Its fullest version is in the work of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, compiled with Indigenous informants from the 1550s. There the coast-watchers who meet an earlier expedition, led, the text says, by Juan de Grijalva in 1518, kiss the prows of the ships in adoration, “pensant que c’était le dieu Quetzalcoatl qui revenait”: thinking it was the god Quetzalcoatl returning (our translation, from the French edition of 1880). When Cortés’s ships appear the following year, Moctezuma sends envoys to receive Quetzalcoatl, “pensant que c’était lui qui venait”: thinking it was he who was coming.

Scholars have divided over this. Townsend lists David Carrasco (1982) and H. B. Nicholson (2001) among scholars who accepted the story. She argues that it took shape after the conquest, and Matthew Restall’s 2018 book When Montezuma Met Cortés challenges the long habit, in one reviewer’s words, of casting Moctezuma’s actions “as a surrender to prophecy”. The evidence leans toward a later origin: as a summary of Townsend’s work in JSTOR Daily notes, “Cortés own letters during the conquest make no mention of being mistaken for or interpreted as a god.” The record cannot show what Moctezuma privately believed.

2. “A few hundred Spaniards conquered the Aztec Empire”

Myth Cortés counted his own forces when the siege of Tenochtitlan began in 1521: “eighty-six horsemen, a hundred and eighteen bowmen and musketeers, seven hundred and odd foot soldiers”. By our arithmetic that is about 900 Spaniards. Beside them, in his own words, “there were more than fifty thousand warriors” from allied peoples on one occasion, and “more than twenty-five thousand warriors of Tascaltecal”, that is Tlaxcala, in one division alone. These are round figures from a man with reasons to make his campaign look both bold and well supported, but they are his.

Disease struck before the siege. Cortés writes of “the sickness of small-pox”, from which one of the lords of Tlaxcala “had died”. In Sahagún’s list of great epidemics, “La première eut lieu en 1520”: the first was in 1520 (our translation). Historians now describe a conquest fought inside a world of Mesoamerican alliances. In a review of the scholarly volume Indian Conquistadors (2007), the historian Raphael Folsom summarises: “the Spaniards stumbled into a Mesoamerican world of constantly shifting alliances and coalitions.”

3. “The Aztecs sacrificed 80,400 people in four days in 1487”

Unverified Human sacrifice was real, and archaeology confirms it. The figure is another matter. It is best known from the friar Diego Durán, writing in 1581, almost a century later, who says the temple of Mexico was rededicated in 1487 with eighty thousand four hundred men (our translation). Durán says he took it from the history he was translating (“Dice la historia”). He added that the number “se me hizo tan increíble” (seemed to me so incredible, in modern spelling) that he would not have dared set it down, for fear of being taken for a man who wrote fables, had his source not compelled him and had he not found it “en otros muchos lugares”, in many other places, written and painted (our translation). Another colonial record disagrees: the Codex Telleriano-Remensis pictures 20,000 victims, and the Spanish note beside the picture says 4,000 men, according to the historian Xavier Noguez (Arqueología Mexicana, 2011), who adds that most scholars doubt such large totals.

Between 2015 and 2017, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) excavated the great skull rack, the Huei Tzompantli, beside the Templo Mayor. By February 2023 it reported “655 cráneos humanos”, 655 human skulls, identified so far (our translation). Two of the bioarchaeologists who worked on the site, Ximena Chávez Balderas and Lorena Vázquez Vallín, write that the finds “prove both the existence of human sacrifice and the fact that Spanish sources exaggerated the numbers of people sacrificed in Tenochtitlan.” Archaeology counts what survived, so it cannot give a total either.

4. “They called themselves Aztecs”

Partly true The people of Tenochtitlan called themselves Mexica. Durán records both names from their migration story: they came from a land called Aztlan, “y así les llamaban á estas naciones Azteca” (and so these nations were called Azteca), and “por otro nombre Mecitin, que quiere decir Mexicanos” (by another name Mecitin, which means Mexicans) (our translations). The historian Susan Kellogg explains that the Mexica “called themselves ‘Azteca’ early in their history but then were commanded by a patron deity to change that name,” and that “Late colonial and nineteenth-century writers like Francisco Javier Clavijero and William Prescott popularized the use of ‘Aztec’”. She also notes that “those we call Aztecs never saw themselves as a single people.” Kellogg still uses “Aztec” in her book because, she writes, it “remains widely recognized”.

5. “The Inca were a people”

Partly true “Inca” was a title. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1609 that the name, “when applied to the prince, signified lord, king, or emperor”, and that more broadly “it may be said to indicate a person of the blood royal.” The empire had its own name, which modern writers spell Tawantinsuyu: Garcilaso says it “means the four quarters of the world”. Two of the first Spanish reports did not use the word at all. Pizarro’s secretary, Francisco de Xerez, called Atahualpa’s late father, the emperor Huayna Capac, “Old Cuzco”, and Hernando Pizarro did the same; the 1872 editor Clements Markham notes that “Xeres never seems to have heard the word Ynca”, “mistaking the name of the capital city for the name of the sovereign.”

6. “The Inca had no writing”

Disputed The Inca had no writing on paper, but they kept records on knotted cords called khipu. Whether those cords could also record words is still open. Garcilaso says “they recorded every thing relating to numbers by means of the knots”, but that “neither the words nor the reasoning, nor any historical event could be expressed by the knots.”

Two studies, from 2017 and 2018, argue that some khipus did record names. The anthropologist Sabine Hyland (Current Anthropology, 2017) studied khipu letters from the village of Collata and concluded that khipus “could constitute an intelligible writing system, possibly logosyllabic”. She adds that the Collata khipus are 18th-century and that “It is unclear how similar the 18th century khipu missives may have been to the earlier Inka khipu letters.” Manuel Medrano and Gary Urton (2018) matched six colonial khipus to a written census and argue they record villagers’ names. As Hyland also writes, “no specific khipu has ever been reliably identified as a narrative text.”

7. “Pizarro captured the Inca emperor with 168 men and took a room full of gold”

True, with context. In November 1532, “a group of 168 Spaniards seized the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in the town of Cajamarca”, as the historian James Lockhart’s study The Men of Cajamarca (1972) is described by its publisher. Xerez’s own count at the last muster before Cajamarca is slightly lower: “sixty-two horsemen and one hundred and two foot soldiers”, 164 in all. The empire was already split by a civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huascar. Xerez reports Atahualpa’s offer: “I will give gold enough to fill a room twenty-two feet long and seventeen wide, up to a white line which is half way up the wall”, and silver to fill it “twice over”. The ransom was paid. Atahualpa was then sentenced to burning “unless he became a Christian”, and, Xerez writes, “strangled” instead, in 1533.

8. “Machu Picchu was a lost city discovered in 1911”

Myth Hiram Bingham, who reached it in 1911, recorded that it was not empty. Two farmers had made the terraces their home, and one “told us that they had been living here four years.” Bingham also learned “that the ruins were visited in 1902 by Lizarraga”, a local tenant farmer who had written his name on the granite walls.

The site’s original name is also in question. A 2022 study by Donato Amado Gonzales and Brian Bauer argues, in the University of Illinois Chicago’s summary, that “the Incas originally called it Huayna Picchu”. Radiocarbon dating published in Antiquity in 2021 found the site “was occupied from c. AD 1420–1532”, about two decades earlier than the dates in the Spanish-era chronicles.

9. “The Aztecs sacrificed people; the Inca did not”

Myth The Inca state carried out child sacrifice in a ceremony called capacocha. The priest Cristóbal de Molina, of the hospital in Cuzco, writing between 1570 and 1584, described it using “one or two male and female children aged about ten years.” In 1999, archaeologists found three children buried near the summit of Llullaillaco, a volcano in Argentina. A 2013 study in PNAS identified them as “a 13-y-old girl and a girl and boy aged 4 to 5 y” and found evidence of “escalating coca and alcohol ingestion in the lead-up to death.” The museum in Salta, Argentina, where they are kept gives their ages as about 15, six and seven. The authors relate their findings to “questions of consent, coercion, and/or compliance”, and write that for such young victims “any kind of informed consent to their own deaths cannot be unproblematically presumed”.

Our reading

Both empires are usually remembered through the eyes of the people who destroyed them. Spanish sources inflated the conquerors’ own daring and the scale of the rites they condemned; later writers added gods, lost cities and tidy numbers. The record that survives is stranger and more human: alliances of Indigenous peoples deciding the fate of Tenochtitlan, a friar who found his own source’s number incredible, knotted cords that no one can yet fully read, and children buried on a mountain more than 6,700 metres high.

Sources

• Letters of Cortes, trans. and ed. Francis Augustus MacNutt, 2 vols (Putnam, 1908): Second and Third Letters.
• Bernardino de Sahagún, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne, trans. D. Jourdanet and Rémi Siméon (G. Masson, 1880).
• Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, review of Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés (2018), Not Even Past, University of Texas at Austin (2019).
• Matthew Wills, “The Mexica Didn’t Believe the Conquistadors Were Gods”, JSTOR Daily (2020), on Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods”, American Historical Review 108(3) (2003).
• Raphael Folsom, review of Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk (eds.), Indian Conquistadors (2007), H-Net Reviews (2008).
• Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico”, American Historical Review 108(3) (2003), pp. 659–687.
• Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España, ed. José F. Ramírez, vol. 1 (Mexico, 1867).
• Xavier Noguez, “Sacrificios en el Templo Mayor”, Arqueología Mexicana 108 (2011), online extract.
• Ximena Chávez Balderas and Lorena Vázquez Vallín, “Mexica (Aztec) Human Sacrifice: New Perspectives”, Mexicolore.
• INAH, “Huei Tzompantli” (Lugares INAH) and Boletín, 25 February 2023.
• Susan Kellogg, “Aztecs: Image and Reality”, Fifteen Eighty Four, Cambridge University Press (2024).
• Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, trans. Clements R. Markham, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, 1869–71).
• Reports on the Discovery of Peru, trans. and ed. Clements R. Markham (Hakluyt Society, 1872): Francisco de Xerez.
• Sabine Hyland, “Writing with Twisted Cords”, Current Anthropology 58(3) (2017), author’s accepted manuscript.
• Duke University Press, on Manuel Medrano and Gary Urton, Ethnohistory (2018).
• University of Texas Press, catalogue page for James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca (1972).
• Hiram Bingham, Inca Land (Houghton Mifflin, 1922).
• University of Illinois Chicago, “Study reconsiders name of Peru’s Machu Picchu” (2022).
• Richard L. Burger et al., “New AMS dates for Machu Picchu”, Antiquity 95 (2021), abstract.
• Cristóbal de Molina, An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas, trans. Clements R. Markham (Hakluyt Society, 1873).
• Andrew S. Wilson et al., “Archaeological, radiological, and biological evidence offer insight into Inca child sacrifice”, PNAS 110 (2013), abstract and full text; Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña, Salta.

Checked September 2026.

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