Mesoamerica is one of only three world regions to have developed pristine cities, that is, without outside influence. Mesoamerica scholarship, especially the influential work of Richard E. Blanton, has vigorously applied world systems theory to the region in a way reminiscent of Mesopotamia studies. Teotihuacan, for which this analysis is apt, bears similarities to today’s migrant magnets, replete with expat neighborhoods and multilingual apartment blocks. Moreover, it reaped the benefit of trade relations outside its sphere, growing to massive size. The chapter culminates with Tenochtitlan, the apogee of Mesoamerican urbanism, at its height when Europeans arrived in 1519. It did not directly hold territory, making the Spanish-derived term “Aztec Empire” somewhat misleading. This chapter stresses the multiplicity of exchanges between cities. Environmental scarcity was central to the ebb and flow of urbanization. Tenochtitlan, like modern world cities, inspired European imaginations much the way Venice did. Its imagery fascinated renaissance figures in Europe such as Albrecht Dürer, in this sense making it the first “global” city.

From the moment Christopher Columbus used the tinkling of a hawk’s bell to excite the interest of the welcoming Taínos during the First Encounter, music became a weapon of both conquest and resistance in the struggle for America. Here we are introduced to the nightmare of the Spanish conquest as reflected in the recovered Aztec songs of the Cantares mexicanos describing the massacres at Tenochtitlan and Cholula in the 1520s. Following the Spanish mission to Christianize America through the imposition of church music against the holdouts of Indigenous song, the European scramble for the “New World” introduces British explorations of Canada and musical encounters with the Inuits – sometimes against a background of violence, and sometimes in a tenuous moment of peace.

In Reconquista Spain, a barely united state turned its anxieties inward with anti-Semitic laws on blood purity among converts from Judaism and Islam. The same insecure state turned outward to conquer Mexico, where Franciscans spent fifty years recording Aztec human sacrifice in codices and color drawings. Castilians and Aztecs alike marked their external bounds and internal bonds with blood. Ethnicizing ideas of blood purity crossed the Atlantic to ruddy Christian perceptions of Mesoamerican sacrifice. Two blood-obsessed cultures met to reveal disturbing resonances in Christian blood language. Uses Sircoff on limpieza de sangre and Timothy Radcliffe on cultic irony in Hebrews.

The Americas constitute one of the most topographically diverse and environmentally heterogeneous regions of the world, and each of these dimensions, and a host of social, economic, political, and cultural variables, necessarily serve to define the nature of war and society in the American hemisphere. In the two centuries anticipating Columbian contact with the New World in 1492, the Americas were largely dominated by the rise and fall of hundreds of kingdoms and warring polities, and the emergence of two powerful, albeit militaristically distinctive, imperial traditions – one Mesoamerican, the other Peruvian. Each evolved from a pattern of military statecraft and conquest interaction that coalesced in the highlands of each region in the period extending from 1300 to 1500 ce. While the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia were the crucibles of a centuries-old tradition of empire building, questions regarding the extent to which Mesoamerican empires fully and completely consolidated their gains as hegemonic imperial formations remain.