The "Flowery Wars"

I spent the weekend in a neighboring city, just for a change, and the hotel I stayed in was quite unusual. It had a pool, but the defining feature was a library that extended over three levels:

The first photo was the basement level, the second the ground floor level (with glass floor so you can see into the basement level) and there was a second floor level that I didn't take a photo of. The books were in no particular order and many of them were of little interest, but on a special shelf in the basement I found this:

This was a privately published very large format book, in Spanish and English, reproducing a mid-16th century pictograph book. Tlaxcala was a city-state before the Spanish Conquest and is a small state in present-day Mexico. This book was fascinating. Here are some sample pages:

And a close-up:

There were three originals of this book, all lost so we only have copies, which told the story of the Conquest, but from the point of view of the Tlaxcalans, who were allies of Cortés. Tlaxcala was a loose federation of cities, with four principal capitals, established around the end of the 14th century. In the 1450s there were a series of wars between the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City), Tetzcoco and Tlalcopan against the independent city-states of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. These wars were often ritualistic with their prime motivation being to produce sacrificial victims for ceremonies honoring the god Huitzilopochtli. Don't you love the names? My favorite is "Tliliuhquitepec." The elites of both sides pretended to be antagonistic, but the reality was that this was mainly to deceive the commoners. The elite of Tlaxcala were often invited to attend festivities in Tenochtitlan, for example.

These wars were called the "Flowery Wars" or "las guerras floridas" in Spanish. I'm telling you all this because I find that it is inspiring me to compose something suitable, a March for the Flowery Wars or something. It would be suitably sardonic as it tried to capture both the ritualistic staged battle and the hypocrisy that surrounded it. One wonders how many current conflicts in the world are just as deceptive as these were.

I suspect a suitable envoi would be the Symphony No. 9 by Shostakovich, one of his most sardonic works. This is Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinstky Theater.