Did Aztec Civilisation Really ‘Collapse’?

At a glance, the fall of the Aztec empire in the early 16th century seems like one of history’s clearest before-and-after moments: a powerful empire crushed almost instantly by a handful of Spanish conquistadors.

But that picture, vivid as it is, has long obscured the more complicated reality of what was destroyed, and what endured.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Caroline Dodds Pennock and scholar of civilisational collapse Luke Kemp examine why the Aztec imperial system fell so quickly, why ‘collapse’ is a loaded term, and what lessons it leaves behind.

The Destruction of Aztec Knowledge

One of the biggest obstacles to retrospectively understanding Aztec society is that we lack writing from the period, explains Dodds Pennock. Most Aztec records were deliberately destroyed almost immediately after the conquest that began in 1519.

Pennock stresses the scale of that loss. After taking Tenochtitlán, Spanish authorities oversaw the burning of vast quantities of Aztec pictorial texts and administrative documents, instigating “a huge destruction of this vast pictographic culture,” that included the loss of “incredible legal records, religious records, political records.” The devastation, she notes, has been likened to “the conflagration of the Library of Alexandria.”