The Aztec Empire at the time of Cortes was a military state sustained by near-perpetual wars of conquest and raids, large-scale human sacrifice of victims drawn largely from subject peoples -- a means of keeping the adult male population of subject peoples in check, thus reducing threats of successful rebellion, though the ideological justification was religious -- but nonetheless facing constant resistance from those subjects. Its social and political structure was oligarchic and theocratic, presided over by a narrow ruling strata of warlords, priests and an imperial family, on a social base of servile commoners thoroughly mystified and made passive by grandiose religious ceremony and cosmology. The Aztecs Empire had indeed inherited the successful agricultural and other technologies, and tools of political rule of earlier meso-American civilizations in the region (the Olmecs, etc.). This enabled it to sustain a large population, generate a successful ruling-class ideology internally via religion and cosmology, and organize for the conquest and extraction of resources from surrounding peoples. They also inherited a highly developed tradition of arts and building from these earlier civilizations, one of the reasons why those who see the remains of Aztec arts and architecture today think they were an admirable people and culture. It must be said, however, that while these elements of what is often called "higher culture" were real enough, they were also derivative; and are usually used today to obscure or even deny the extreme brutality of the internal organization and external policy of this empire. While it is ahistorical to judge the past entirely by the standards of the present, it should be remembered that it was the extreme hatred that the Aztecs generated among their many subject peoples and enemies through their practices that was a large part of why Cortes and his small band of followers found eager supporters when they arrived in the Empire in 1519, enabling them to conquer that it with that support so quickly. Those who think otherwise should read the contemporary accounts of the conquest for proof of this.
Source(s):
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain
Hernan Cortes, Letters to Charles V
The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico.


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