Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He has written more than two dozen books. This one – The End of Everything – ranks at the top of the list.
He takes the reader through the wars that have caused the extinction of four civilizations. The first chapter details the utter destruction of the city-state of Thebes in Greece by Alexander the Great in 335 B.C. The second chapter relates how Roman armies in 149 B.C in the Third Punic War not only conquered their arch-enemy, Carthage, but finished off the entire population by either killing them or selling off the women and children into slavery. Cato the Elder had famously ended his every speech in the Roman Senate with the words: Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed. And his words came true.
The third chapter deals with how Sultan Mehmet II led the Ottoman Turks in 1453 to breach the formidable walls of Constantinople – something that no foreign enemy had been able to accomplish for centuries – and not only occupy the city but utterly destroy the Byzantine Empire.
And the fourth chapter describes how Hernan Cortes from 1519-1521 with fewer than 3,000 conquistadors was able to conquer the Aztec Empire with a population of more than four million with its hundreds of thousands of Aztec warriors. When Cortes and his conquistadors were finished, the Aztec civilization had been eradicated.
In my travels over the years, I have visited both Istanbul and Tunis. The ruins of Carthage lie about ten miles from Tunis. And, being an amateur historian, I had previously studied the Punic Wars — so, while enjoying my brief glimpse of where Carthage once stood, I did not learn much new about the final siege that finished off the inhabitants of Carthage, which historians estimate numbered 500,000. But Hanson goes into great detail about the mistakes the leaders of Carthage made which led to “the end of everything” – not just defeat, occupation, and death of its soldiers, but the annihilation of the civilization.
I also traveled to Istanbul several years ago and hired a guide to show me the famous Theodosian ramparts walls that were breached by the Turkish armies on the afternoon of May 29, 1453 – more than 1,100 years after Constantinople was founded. Hanson recounts how historian Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that once the Ottoman Turks had breached the walls, citizens from every part of the city of Constantinople rushed to the church of Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Eastern Christendom, believing that their God would send an avenging angel and save them from the Turks. Alas, no angel intervened to save Constantinople. It was even rumored that the emperor Constantine charged the incoming horde and was killed along with his guards, his head being cut off and brought to the sultan as a trophy. Hanson chronicles in great detail how Constantinople experienced “the end of everything.”
For me, however, the absolutely riveting chapter in Hanson’s superb book deals with Cortes and the Spanish annihilation of the Aztec empire. Many people are aware that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, but the mindboggling barbarism of the Aztec civilization revealed in this chapter is beyond anything I could imagine.
Left-leaning intellectuals in the West over the past half century have infected American cultural elites with the narrative that all white Europeans and their American descendants should be ashamed of their evil European forefathers who came to the New World and conquered, plundered, colonized, and exploited innocent and peace-loving indigenous peoples. Like the Aztecs. And, undoubtedly, over the four centuries between 1500 and 1900, much harm was done by the pioneers from Europe, as they built the New World in the Americas.
But Hanson’s chapter on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire reveals that the Aztecs practiced a degree of human sacrifice and cannibalism that is beyond imagination. Were the Aztecs really morally superior to Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors?
In this chapter, which chronicles Cortes’s remarkable subjugation and destruction of the Aztec empire between 1519 and 1521, Hanson quotes first-hand sources from this period about the tens of thousands of bound captives who were sacrificed by priests plunging a flint knife into their chests and having their hearts ripped out of their bodies, after which their bodies were thrown from the Temple of Mayor to be eaten by the Aztec people and animals below.
Were Cortes and his conquistadores somehow worse morally than the Aztec priests and warriors? Was Spanish colonization of the Aztecs and the surrounding tribes not to be preferred over the constant demands of the two gods – Tlaloc, the God of Rain, and Huitzilopochtli, the God of War – who needed to be appeased by frequent gifts of human flesh and blood provided by tens of thousands of boys, girls, and captives at the Temple of Mayor at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan?
Hanson attributes the amazing victory of Cortes and his troops to many factors, but one of the key ones is that he was joined by numerous tribes on the outskirts of the Aztec empire whose peoples had been snatched, bound, and marched up the Temple steps to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods. Hanson vividly describes how the Aztec warriors, when fighting the Spanish soldiers, would often try to capture them rather than kill them so that the Spanish prisoners would be victims of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Cortes’s conquistadors were sickened but also energized by watching their captured friends and comrades marched up the steps of the evil Temple of Mayor to be sacrificed with hearts torn out of their bodies. Cortes’s decision to utterly destroy Tenochtitlan proceeded largely from the Spanish utter hatred of the Aztec barbarous practices. And thus, Tenochtitlan was reduced to rubble, and ultimately Mexico City was built on its ruins.
In his final chapter, Hanson analyzes why these four civilizations were annihilated. On the one hand, the great cities and city-states that were under siege were inhabited by proud people whose leaders believed that they would prevail – and moreover, they also believed that if their cities were overrun, their enemies would spare them the worst because of the greatness of their civilizations. On the other hand, the attacking forces first insist on impossible terms of surrender, then become enraged by prolonged and toxic resistance, and finally find military leaders who will achieve victory even at the price of the extermination of the enemy. And finally, the leaders of the occupying forces lose control of their marauding troops, who turn victory into annihilation.
Hanson points to our unstable contemporary world and warns that there are occasions when the unthinkable can become reality. With Russia’s 60,000 nuclear warheads at his back, Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and occasionally threatened that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons to win the war. Another flashpoint is the Mideast, where Iran, constantly threatening the annihilation of Israel, is inching ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons to be mounted on their missiles. Can the unthinkable become a reality there? And, of course, tensions grow each year over China’s goal of bringing Taiwan under their sovereignty. Where will that lead?
The End of Everything is must-reading for American statesmen, politicians, and leaders, most of whom assume that we will navigate through these uncertain times. But Hanson sounds a warning trumpet that if America is saddled with poor leadership, a weakening military, and outmoded strategic thinking, the unthinkable can become a reality. Great civilizations can be and have been extinguished.
Robert H. Bradley is Chairman of Bradley, Foster & Sargent Inc., a $7. 5 billion wealth management firm with offices in Hartford, Connecticut; Wellesley, Massachusetts; and four other locations. Read other articles by him here.
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