Barbarism: Who Gets to Define the Civilized World?
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they encountered civilizations they had never imagined. They found enormous cities, sophisticated political systems, organized markets, monumental architecture, extensive trade networks, complex calendars, religious institutions, and intellectual traditions that had developed independently of Europe. These were not empty lands waiting for history to begin. They contained societies with their own histories, governments, alliances, rivalries, religions, economies, and ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds.
Europeans also encountered something that horrified them: human sacrifice.
Human sacrifice was practiced by several Mesoamerican societies, and it occupied an important religious and political place in the Mexica, or Aztec, world. Scholars continue to debate its scale, the interpretation of particular archaeological evidence, and the reliability of some Spanish descriptions, but the existence of ritual human sacrifice itself is not seriously explained away as a Spanish invention. Indigenous-language accounts, archaeology, and colonial records provide substantial evidence that people were ritually killed. Captives taken in warfare could be sacrificed, and particular ceremonies connected sacrifice with gods, agriculture, warfare, cosmic order, and the responsibilities human beings were believed to owe the supernatural world.
For Europeans raised within Christianity, these practices were profoundly disturbing. They did not merely encounter a foreign religion; they encountered religious practices that contradicted fundamental assumptions about God, worship, salvation, and the value and meaning of human life. Human sacrifice consequently became one of the most powerful images through which Europeans understood the civilizations of Mesoamerica. Descriptions of temples, blood rituals, sacrificed captives, and human remains traveled back across the Atlantic and entered European accounts of the newly encountered lands.
That history should not be sanitized. If American Humanities is going to examine the civilizations of the Americas seriously, human sacrifice belongs in the classroom. Removing it because it is uncomfortable would produce a distorted history.
But simply presenting human sacrifice as evidence that Indigenous Americans were barbaric would produce another distortion.
The more interesting humanities question begins precisely where the horror begins: What do human beings mean when they call another civilization barbaric?
The Problem With Barbarism
The Europeans who encountered Mesoamerican human sacrifice did not come from civilizations unfamiliar with spectacular violence. Europe inherited an enormous portion of its political, legal, literary, and philosophical tradition from Greece and Rome, and Rome itself had made public violence part of civic life. Roman amphitheaters hosted gladiatorial combat, executions, animal killings, and other spectacles before enormous audiences. People could be killed publicly while thousands watched, and those spectacles could serve religious, political, judicial, and entertainment purposes simultaneously.
The Romans did not ordinarily understand themselves as barbarians because they practiced these things. Quite the opposite: Rome regarded itself as civilization. Roman writers commonly applied the idea of barbarism to peoples outside the cultural and political world they considered civilized. The distinction therefore tells us something important about the word itself. “Barbarian” has rarely been a neutral description. It is a judgment made by one society about another.
European history continued to provide examples of spectacular violence long after the Roman Empire. Vlad III of Wallachia, the historical ruler later associated with the Dracula legend, became notorious for impaling enemies. Stories about the number of his victims were magnified by hostile accounts and later legend, so the enormous totals sometimes attributed to him should be treated cautiously. The underlying practice of impalement, however, was real. It was deliberately terrifying. The sight of bodies displayed on stakes communicated political authority and threatened anyone contemplating resistance.
Yet even Vlad’s violence did not exist in a vacuum. Impalement and other brutal forms of punishment existed elsewhere in southeastern Europe and the Ottoman world. Across medieval and early-modern Europe, authorities employed punishments that modern observers would find horrifying: hanging, burning, beheading, breaking on the wheel, mutilation, torture, and public display of bodies. Executions were frequently public because punishment was intended not merely to eliminate an offender but to communicate something to everyone watching. Violence could be theater, warning, justice, religion, and political authority all at once.
None of this makes Mexica human sacrifice less violent. Nor does it mean that sacrificing a captive to a god, executing a criminal, killing an opponent in an arena, impaling an enemy, and killing a soldier in battle are morally or historically identical. They clearly are not. Their purposes, victims, institutions, beliefs, and social meanings differed enormously.
Those differences are exactly why the comparison belongs in the humanities.
Instead of merely counting bodies, students can investigate the systems of thought that made different forms of killing meaningful to different societies. Why could one civilization regard killing a captive before a god as a sacred obligation while another regarded it as monstrous? Why could another civilization execute people publicly and regard the same act as legitimate justice? Why could thousands gather to watch people die in a Roman arena without concluding that Rome itself was uncivilized? Why could rulers terrorize populations through spectacular punishment while continuing to claim legitimate political authority?
Once those questions are asked, “barbarism” stops being a simple label and becomes a subject of investigation.
Spaniards Kill. Aztecs Sacrifice.
Language becomes particularly important when civilizations describe one another.
Modern scholarship examining Spanish missionary translations of Nahuatl material has identified a revealing distinction in the language used for mortal violence: “Spaniards kill, Aztecs sacrifice.” That distinction captures a much larger historical problem. The physical result may be death in both cases, but the words surrounding the death tell the reader how to interpret it.
Consider what happens when different forms of violence receive different names. A government executes. An army kills in battle. A king punishes. A religious community sacrifices. A conqueror pacifies. A rebel massacres. Each word carries assumptions about legitimacy, morality, authority, and purpose before the reader has even examined what happened.
This does not mean all descriptions are dishonest or that all forms of killing should be collapsed into a single category. Sacrifice really is different from battlefield killing, just as judicial execution is different from murder. The humanities question is how those categories are created, who gets to apply them, and what happens when the vocabulary of one civilization becomes the vocabulary through which another civilization is remembered.
That mattered enormously during the European conquest of the Americas because Europeans possessed something the Indigenous civilizations of the Americas initially did not: access to Europe’s printing networks and reading public. Spanish accounts could cross the Atlantic, be printed, translated, repeated, illustrated, disputed, and incorporated into Europe’s developing understanding of the New World. The encounter therefore occurred not only on battlefields and in cities but also in books, sermons, letters, legal arguments, and eventually histories.
The image of Indigenous barbarism became part of that intellectual world.
When Barbarism Becomes Political
This is where human sacrifice becomes much more than a chapter about Aztec religion.
Europeans did not encounter Indigenous religious practices as detached anthropologists. Conquest, conversion, politics, economics, and religion were occurring simultaneously. Spanish missionaries wanted Indigenous people converted to Christianity. Spanish political authorities were establishing control over conquered territories. Colonists wanted labor and resources. Indigenous peoples were simultaneously resisting, negotiating, adapting, forming alliances, preserving traditions, and attempting to survive an extraordinary political and demographic catastrophe.
Within that environment, descriptions of human sacrifice carried tremendous power.
If a civilization is described primarily through its most frightening practices, domination of that civilization can begin to look like liberation from barbarism. Conquest can be described as civilization. Religious suppression can be described as salvation. Political control can be presented as moral responsibility.
But that interpretation immediately creates another humanities problem: What happens when we examine the violence of the people making the accusation?
The Spanish and other Europeans came from societies with histories of religious warfare, torture, public execution, dynastic conflict, enslavement, and brutal punishment. Europeans fought wars in which cities were sacked and civilians were killed. Religious authorities and secular governments punished heresy and rebellion. European states executed people publicly and displayed bodies as warnings. And during the conquest and colonization of the Americas, Europeans themselves participated in massacres, enslavement, forced labor, warfare, dispossession, and coercive systems that caused enormous human suffering.
Again, the conclusion should not be that everything was equivalent. That would be intellectually lazy in the opposite direction. Mexica sacrifice should be studied as Mexica sacrifice. Roman spectacle should be studied within Roman society. European executions should be studied within European political and judicial systems. Colonial violence should be examined within conquest and empire.
But after studying those differences, students can ask something much more difficult than simply identifying the barbarian.
They can ask how civilizations justify their own violence.
The View From the Other Side
Imagine teaching the encounter without immediately telling students which civilization represents barbarism.
On one side stands a civilization in which captives may be ceremonially killed as offerings to supernatural powers. Religious authorities explain that these actions participate in a cosmic order larger than the individual human being.
In another civilization, thousands gather in an amphitheater while condemned people and professional fighters face death before an audience. Political authorities sponsor the spectacle, and the population understands it within accepted religious, judicial, and civic traditions.
In another society, a ruler impales enemies and displays their bodies, using terror to demonstrate the consequences of resistance.
In another, governments publicly hang, burn, behead, mutilate, or otherwise execute people because political and religious authorities believe punishment protects the proper order of society.
And in still another setting, armies kill thousands of people during war, after which monuments may be erected to the dead and the killing described through the language of courage, duty, victory, sacrifice, or national survival.
These societies are doing different things for different reasons. That distinction must remain clear. But they also reveal something they share: human beings repeatedly create intellectual, religious, political, and moral systems explaining why certain forms of killing are permissible.
That realization gives students an entirely different set of questions.
Who possesses the authority to kill? Who becomes an acceptable victim? Does religion authorize the violence? Does the state authorize it? Does warfare authorize it? Does punishment authorize it? Does the society make the violence public or hide it? What does the audience believe it is witnessing? What words are used to describe the dead? What happens when an outsider encounters the practice? And what happens when the outsider eventually writes the history?
Those are humanities questions because they require more than remembering names and dates. They require students to examine religion, language, morality, political power, cultural assumptions, historical evidence, and human behavior simultaneously.
Who Writes the History?
There is another reason this comparison matters particularly in American Humanities.
The conquest of the Americas was also a struggle over historical memory.
Many Indigenous voices survived through oral traditions, archaeology, artwork, Indigenous-language documents, codices, and accounts produced during and after colonization. Those sources are enormously important because they allow historians to reconstruct perspectives that would otherwise have been lost. But the global narrative of the conquest was heavily influenced by European writers because Europeans controlled the institutions capable of distributing their version of events throughout Europe and, eventually, much of the world.
That creates an enduring problem for historians. A source can contain valuable information while simultaneously reflecting the worldview, interests, prejudices, fears, and political circumstances of the person who created it. Spanish descriptions of human sacrifice cannot simply be discarded because Spaniards wrote them; nor should they automatically be accepted without comparison to Indigenous sources and archaeological evidence. Historians have to interrogate the evidence.
Who wrote this?
Who was the intended audience?
What did the writer actually witness?
What did the writer hear from someone else?
What religious assumptions did the writer carry?
What political interests surrounded the account?
What evidence from Indigenous sources supports or contradicts it?
What does archaeology tell us?
That is how history becomes humanities. Students stop treating historical texts as transparent windows into the past and begin recognizing them as human creations that must themselves be studied.
American Humanities
American Humanities should therefore confront human sacrifice directly.
Students should learn that it happened. They should examine what historians and archaeologists know about it. They should study its religious and political meaning within Mesoamerican societies rather than reducing those societies to the practice. They should also understand why Europeans reacted so strongly to it and how those reactions influenced European perceptions of the Americas.
Then the perspective should widen.
Students should encounter Roman arenas, European executions, Vlad’s impalements, religious warfare, colonial violence, and other historical examples of societies authorizing or ritualizing killing. They should not be told that these practices are interchangeable. Instead, they should be asked to investigate why human societies create different moral categories for violence and why those categories change depending upon who is doing the killing, who is being killed, and who is telling the story.
The purpose is not to excuse human sacrifice.
The purpose is not to condemn Europe.
The purpose is to understand human beings.
That is what makes the word barbarism so useful for American Humanities. Instead of handing students a predetermined list of civilized people and barbaric people, we can give them the historical evidence and ask them to investigate how those categories were created.
Human sacrifice then becomes more than a horrifying fact about the Aztec world. Roman spectacle becomes more than an anecdote about ancient entertainment. Vlad’s impalements become more than the historical inspiration behind Dracula. European executions become more than gruesome remnants of another age.
Together, they reveal a recurring human problem: societies have repeatedly found ways to distinguish between violence they consider legitimate and violence they consider barbaric.
And when two civilizations meet, that distinction can have consequences far beyond language. It can shape religion, politics, conquest, colonization, historical memory, and the way one civilization is remembered by another for centuries afterward.
So the final question is not simply, “Were the Aztecs barbaric?”
The more important question is:
Who gets to define barbarism—and what happens when the civilization holding the pen is also holding the sword?This version keeps the same central argument but actually develops each stage—sacrifice → comparison → language → conquest → historical memory → humanities question—instead of using isolated sentences as substitutes for paragraphs.
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