Dinner with an emperor:

When an Aztec emperor like Moctezuma sat down to dinner he was served delicacies from all over the empire--the best the Aztec world had to offer. According to Spanish witnesses, more than 300 elegant dishes were prepared for him to choose from, including all kinds of meats, vegetables and fruits, covered with rich sauces of tomatoes, chilis, herbs, chocolate and toasted seeds. While eating Moctezuma was entertained by singing and dancing or by the antics of acrobats, dwarfs and clowns with whom he shared special tidbits from his plate. At the end of the meal the women brought him a drink of frothing chocolate in a cup made of pure gold and tubes of tobacco to smoke. Then, we are told, he retired to rest.

Most Aztecs, the peasants and trades people, did not fare as well as the upper classes. Their simple meals were based primarily on maize (corn) grown in their own fields or bought in the market place. The Aztecs believed that corn had been a gift to human kind from the great god Quetzalcoatl. Corn was grown in many varieties and colours. Flavoured in various ways, ground corn flour was eaten as tortillas, atole (a thick drink made of flavoured ground corn and water), gruel and, at special events, tamales, the favourite dish of Aztec Mexico.

Corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, limes, avocados, chilis, peanuts, cashews, turkeys, pineapples, chewing gum, yams, potatoes, vanilla and chocolate all have their origin in the Americas. Today it is hard to imagine spaghetti without tomato based sauces, movies without popcorn, hamburgers without french fries, summer without watermelon and corn: all of these were products of the New World, developed over a long period of time by the farmers of the Americas.

The next time you eat a tortilla or burrito, just remember you are also putting thousands of years of history into your mouth!

The fall of the Ming dynasty, the conquest of the Inca and Aztec empires, the collapse of the last great West African kingdom, the Songhai Empire, and the great rift in European Christianity--the Reformation--these are some the major upheavals that marked the world 400 to 500 years ago. But people were now living in relatively less isolated communities. Long distance trade and travel were not anything new, but they were becoming more common. Mass communication was developing through newspapers and books--no longer were only a few copies made by hand, thousands of copies of a single work were now produced. European colonization of the world was in full swing, and traditional societies in India, China, Africa and the Americas would face the challenge of new European ideas--and the military force to impose them. In Europe itself, however, the established order, the dominance of society by the nobility, was being challenged. The catastrophe of the 30 Years' War and the development of democratic forms of government in England and the Netherlands was setting the stage for the American and French Revolutions.