III. The Religion of the Aztecs

Now the Aztec Empire was a rather loose confederation of states bound
together by allegiance to a common overlord, who had his capital across
the mountains in the City of Mexico. It had been founded by the influx
of an army of fierce marauders from the North who had overwhelmed the
Toltecs who occupied the country and had attained a degree of
civilization which is presumed to have been higher than that which
displaced it. This Empire of Anahuac, as it was sometimes called, had
endured for two centuries. It was a military despotism and the emperor
was a military despot. His rule was the rule of fear. It subsisted by
force of arms and terror was its cohering power. It had been extended
by ruthless conquest alone until it comprised from eighteen hundred to
two thousand square leagues, about two hundred thousand square miles of
territory. The capital, situated on an island in the midst of a salt
lake, was known as Tenochtitlan, or the City of Mexico, and what Rome
was to the Italian states, or Carthage was to the north African
literal, this city was to Anahuac, the empire of the Aztecs. The name
Tenochtitlan is thus explained by Fiske:

"When the Aztecs, hard pressed by foes, took refuge among these
marshes, they came upon a sacrificial stone which they recognized as
one upon which some years before one of their priests had immolated a
captive {126} chief. From a crevice in this stone, where a little
earth was imbedded, there grew a cactus, upon which sat an eagle
holding in its beak a serpent. A priest ingeniously interpretated this
symbolism as a prophecy of signal and long-continued victory, and,
forthwith diving into the lake, he had an interview with Tlaloc, the
god of waters, who told him that upon that very spot the people were to
build their town. The place was thereafter called Tenochtitlan, or
"the place of the cactus-rock," but the name under which it afterward
came to be best known was taken from Mexitl, one of the names of the
war god Huitzilopochtli. The device of the rock, the cactus, with the
eagle and the serpent, formed a tribal totem for the Aztecs, and has
been adopted, as the coat-of-arms of the present Republic of Mexico."

Included in the sway of its emperor were many different tribes. They
were kept in submission by the strong and inexorable hand. There were
a few tribes, however, which had not been subdued and which still
maintained a more or less p