Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

356 DEBT
of palace intrigues during which Cortes's men briefly held the emperor
hostage before being forcibly expelled.
During the time when Moctezuma was being held captive in his
own palace, he and Cortes passed a good deal of their time playing
an Aztec game called totoloque. They played for gold, and Cortes, of
course, cheated. At one point, Moctezuma's men brought the matter
to the king's attention, but the king just laughed and made a joke of
it-neither was he concerned later when Pedro de Alvarado, Cortes's
chief lieutenant, began cheating even more flagrantly, demanding gold
for each point lost and when he lost, paying only in worthless pebbles.
Why Moctezuma behaved so has remained something of an historical
mystery. Diaz took it as a gesture of lordly magnanimity, perhaps even
a way of putting the petty-minded Spaniards in their place.107
One historian, Inga Clenninden, suggests an alternate interpretation.
Aztec games, she notes, tended to have a peculiar feature: there
was always a way that, by a freak stroke of luck, one could achieve total
victory. This seems to have been true, for instance, of their famous
ball games. Observers always wonder, viewing the tiny stone hoops set
high above the court, how anyone could ever possibly have managed
to score. The answer seems to be: they didn't, at least not that way.
Normally the game had nothing to do with the hoop. The game was
played between two opposing squads, attired as for battle, knocking
the ball back and forth:
The normal method of scoring was through the slow accumulation
of points. But that process could be dramatically preempted.
To send the ball through one of the rings-a feat,
given the size of the ball and the ring, presumably rarer than
a hole in one in golf-gave instant victory, ownership of all
the goods wagered, and the right to pillage the cloaks of the
onlookers.108
Whoever scored the point won everything, down to the audience's
clothing.
There were similar rules in board games, such as Cortes and Moctezuma
were playing: if, by some freak stroke of luck, one of the dice
landed on its edge, the game was over, and the winner took everything.
This, Clenninden suggests, must have been what Moctezuma was really
waiting for. After all, he was clearly in the middle of extraordinary
events. Strange creatures had appeared, apparently from nowhere, with
unheard-of powers. Rumors of epidemics, of the destruction of nearby
nations, had presumably already reached him. If ever there was a time