500 years ago, another epidemic swept Mexico: Smallpox
MEXICO CITY (AP) — There were mass cremations of bodies; entire families died and the inhabitants of the city, afraid to pull their bodies out, simply collapsed their homes on top of them to bury them on the spot.
The scene, beyond even the current Coronavirus pandemic, was a scourge brought 500 years ago by Spanish conquistadores and their servants that exploded in Mexico City in September 1520.
Smallpox and other newly introduced diseases went on to kill tens of millions of Indigenous people in the Americas who had no resistance to the European illnesses. The viruses later spread to South America, and helped lead to the downfall and overthrow of empires like the Aztecs and Incas. And its lessons remain largely forgotten today.
Hernán Cortés and his band of a few hundred Spaniards had been kicked out of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, today’s Mexico City, on June 30, 1520, by angry residents after the conquistadores took the emperor Moctezuma captive and he died.
But the Spaniards left behind Indigenous and African slaves they had brought with them from Cuba. Some of them were already infected with smallpox, and amid the harsh conditions in the capital — Cortés and his allies blockaded the city after the June defeat.
Historian Miguel León Portilla in his book “The Vision of the Conquered” cites chroniclers who described it as “a great plague ... a huge destroyer of people.” Cuitláhuac, Moctezuma’s successor, died of the disease in 1520.
The Aztecs, or Mexicas as they were known, tried long-trusted remedies to combat the unknown disease. Like the Coronavirus pandemic, that did not necessarily work out well.
They tried medicinal steam baths known as temezcales, a sort of sweat lodge, but because people were packed so tightly into the enclosed stone and mud chambers, the baths served only to propagate the disease more efficiently.
“It was a massive group contagion,” said medical historian Sandra Guevara,
Cortés and his men would reenter and conquer the disease-ravaged city a year later in August 1521.