Sometime late in the year that many call 1451 A.D., a baby was born in Genoa. Christened Cristoforo Colombo, the infant grew up to transform the world. He would become the adept sailor known in the world he would sail to by his Latin name, Christopher Columbus.
On the other side of the Atlantic, another boy was born. His name is unknown to us but records show that a baby born in Tenochtitlan -- the ancient and sophisticated trade center of 200,000-300,000 people that would one day be called Mexico City -- would have been blessed in a ceremony and would have received a purification ritual involving water, similar to the Christian baptism.
Did the midwives and priests who assisted in the birth of the Meso-American child intuit that another birth in a far-away place eventually would end their civilization?
The two boys lives ran parallel. In both worlds, war was an obsession of men. In both, religion permeated daily life and led to bloodshed -- sacrifice on pyramids in one, crusades and inquisitions in another. Both boys studied the divine and its manifestations. Both studied mathematics and the stars.
The Genoese sailor born in 1451 arrived in the Americas in 1492, his flawed navigation theories leading him not to China and the Indies he sought, but to what would be called the Americas. The end of Tenochtitlan was beginning.
Other explorers would follow, and in 1521 they would reach the Aztec capital. Built on a lake, the city was like Venice, the Spanish explorers wrote after seeing its temples, markets, palaces, gardens and canals. The visitors called it a "new world," but to its Aztec inhabitants it was ancient -- a complex universe of mighty religions and civilizations rising and falling over the centuries.
The city fell to firepower and to smallpox and to measles brought by the visitors it had welcomed. Its art and architecture were destroyed in the name of someone else's God. "A marvel," they would call Tenochtitlan, before bringing it down with guns, germs, horses, diseases, ambition and greed.
The unknown boy whose life paralleled that of Columbus, like all the others whose history was almost erased by its explorer voyages, eventually would be remembered by no other name than the Genoese sailor who had come to destroy them...they are called "pre-Columbians".
