Bitter Chocolate Read Online Free

Mexico and extended south for about two hundred kilometres to present-day Nicaragua. The population of Montezuma’s empire is estimated to have been between six and seven million people of different tribes, including the Maya.
    Historians describe Montezuma as a ruthless and despotic leader who was obsessed with conquering territory and who murdered thousands of his subjects in ritual sacrifices. The fact remains, however, that under Montezuma, the Aztecs also developed a sophisticated and advanced society. Splendid houses for generals and noblemen lined the wide avenues stretching through Tenochtitlán. State-financed canal systems and aqueducts fashioned from bricks and mortar provided both a source of fresh water and transportation for the capital. Engineering, architecture, mathematics and music flourished. The Aztecsloved books—specifically those about themselves—and they created an extensive record of their existence. Traders with goods from across the empire and even beyond its borders came to the bustling markets of Tenochtitlán, and as many as sixty thousand people could swell the central squares on any given day. This was a civilization to rival anything in Europe at the time, an Emerald City in an uncharted continent.
    Great banquets and feasts were routine in Montezuma’s court, where several hundred different dishes might grace his tables, even though the emperor was said to be a spare eater. He shared these feasts with his noblemen, his warriors and the longdistance traders whose job it was to bring the vast stores of wealth back to Tenochtitlán from all of the Aztec-controlled provinces.
    No matter what else was on the menu, the highlight was one of the most coveted foodstuffs in all the Meso-American culture:
cacahuatl
. Vessels of liquid cocoa concluded meals, though Montezuma refreshed himself with cups between courses. In fact, he consumed vast quantities of cocoa daily, taking his frothy beverage in mugs of painted calabash and never drinking twice from the same cup.
    As it was for the Maya, the preparation and consumption of
cacahuatl
was an entirely elitist pursuit, far out of the reach of the common folk and a luxury even for those who harvested the beans. Cocoa was such a valued commodity that it was beans, not bullion, that served as the coins of the realm in Montezuma’s treasury and the empire’s official currency. At the height of his power, the emperor had a stash of nearly a billion cocoa beans, all extracted begrudgingly from the hard labour of his empire.
    Montezuma’s warriors were treated as nobles, and as such they consumed cocoa as well, but they also took
cacahuatl
on their conquests. The Aztecs had developed the first solid chocolate bars or tablets, portable nourishment that was later dissolved in water to make a drink. A chunk of rehydrated cocoa could sustain a man over a long day of trekking and providesustenance to soldiers while they put down insurrections and sacked villages. Montezuma’s uncompromising warriors helped make Tenochtitlán the superpower of Central America. No army could stand up to them.
    As with so many other luxury goods in the Aztec capital, cocoa didn’t come from the lands around Tenochtitlán, where the soil and climate was inhospitable to such tropical plants, but from the farthest reaches of the empire, particularly the highly fertile cocoa-producing region of Xoconocho, where the prized Criollo beans flourished. This coveted and prolific parcel of land on the Pacific Coast is now the Chiapas region of Mexico, but Xoconocho also included a part of what is now Guatemala. A twice-yearly supply of two hundred loads of the precious beans (the fruit of about 160,000 pods) had to be delivered from Xoconocho to Tenochtitlán, but even this was not enough to satisfy the capital. Other beans came from the conquered Tabasco region of the Maya and from the area around what the Spanish would later call Vera Cruz, the