Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler

In case you were wondering whether the character currently starring in his own show in the Reading Room at the British Museum was an obscure brother of the more famous Montezuma - they are one and the same person. The BM has elected to use the more authentic name -which is fair enough at the most scholarly of institutions. But for those who arrive at this final exhibition in the museum's series repositioning great historical leaders in the context of their times with little more prior knowledge than the fact that the Aztecs were a bloodthirsty lot and Montezuma was their last elected ruler, the Emperor who put up surprisingly little resistance when Spanish arrived in 1519, the name change probably doesn't help.

There are stunning stone carvings and intricate mosaics made from shell and vivid turquoise in the show. Surprisingly, though, there's actually little immediately apparent gore; you have to be a diligent reader of labels to satisfy a bloodlust. Although the cavity of a colossal vessel , a wonderful carved stone eagle, turns out to have been used to hold the hearts of Aztec prisoners, the caption for a small knife with a crouching warrior for a handle admits, apologetically: 'X ray photography reveals that it is not strong enough to have been used for human sacrifice.'

More label reading reveals that another huge and stunning vessel carved from volcanic rock was originally an Aztec sculpture of a serpent god. The conquistadors removed the head, turned the offensively pagan item upside down and pressed it into service as a baptismal font. In contrast, a quick glance at a case devoted to the apparatus of war is enough to show that the Aztecs had only wooden swords with obsidian blades projecting from each side with which to defend themselves against Spaniards on horseback protected by steel armour, who fought with cannons and muskets as well as steel swords.
But the Aztecs were fierce warriors and even after Moctezuma's death (the exhibition's evidence for the contradictory theories about that is intriguing though not in anyway conclusive) it was more than a year before the territory became New Spain in 1521.