Warlords of the Ancient Americas: Central America (v. 1)
The military leaders of the pre-Columbian empires of the Western Hemisphere included a number of distinguished warriors about which little is known and less is available to the general reader. This book begins filling the gap. Tsouras has distilled, from a wide range of sources, accounts of Smoking Frog, founder of the Mayan Empire, of numerous builders of the rule of the Mexica (known to us as the Aztecs), of Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotl (i.e., Montezuma--a bad ruler, by the way), and of the last king of the Mexica, Cuauhtemoc. Relaying their stories, he sheds much light on many intriguing subjects, among them the legend of Quetzalcoatl (both the name of a god and a title) and Native American military technology (cotton armor, it is revealed, was much tougher than you might think). The lavish illustrations almost equal the text in value, and the whole volume is a valuable reference on a subject on which material is not easy to find.Roland Green