# From "The Hidden History of Beverages" by Alexander Lukashev

## 6. Conquistadors and Cacao: How a Sacred Drink Became a Sweet One

Part One (history), chapter 6 of 14 · 11 footnotes to 10 sources
Page: https://herbalmind.bar/history/conquistadors-and-cacao/

How the bitter Aztec and Maya cacao drink became sweet European chocolate, how it was proved that the Maya drank cacao, and how cacao ceremonies are sold today.

Sections:
- **The Gift of the Gods** — cacao in the Maya codices, and why the foam mattered
- **The Colonial Reinvention** — why the Spaniards rejected the drink, how sugar and royal courts changed it, and chocolate in Inquisition cases
- **What the Jar Says** — how a Maya vessel was shown to have held cacao, and by whom
- **Try It: Bitter Cacahuatl** — a reconstruction of the bitter drink from its described ingredients
- **The Return of Sacred Cacao** — today’s cacao revival, and which of its claims hold up

Questions this chapter answers:
- Did the Aztecs actually call their drink “chocolatl”?
  Short answer: No: the Nahuatl texts of the time call it cacahuatl, “cacao water”; “chocolatl” is in none of them.
- Why did the conquistadors reject cacao, and what made Europe accept it?
  Short answer: As barbaric, pagan and unpleasant: bitter, cold, chili-hot, often red as blood. Sugar changed the drink, and royal courts and a 1631 medical treatise made it respectable.
- Why did the Inquisition’s chocolate cases target whoever served the cup?
  Short answer: Chocolate was the base of women’s love spells and potions; what was tried was not the drink but the servants, cooks and wives for whom the cup was a lever of power.
- Whose laboratory proved that the Maya drank cacao?
  Short answer: A chocolate maker’s: the residues of a fifth-century Maya vessel from Río Azul were analyzed by W. Jeffrey Hurst, a chemist at the Hershey Foods technical center, with Stanley Tarka.
- Which claims about “ceremonial cacao” hold up, and which do not?
  [The answer is in the book](https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)

Short answers only. The full account, with its sources, is in chapter 6 of the book — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723

Sources:
- Coe, Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
- Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe: School of American Research; Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982.
- Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570. Cambridge Latin American Studies 61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Colmenero de Ledesma, Antonio. Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate. Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1631.
- Gage, Thomas. The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land: or, A New Survey of the West-India’s. London: R. Cotes, 1648.
- Few, Martha. “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala.” Ethnohistory 52, no. 4 (2005): 673–687. [DOI 10.1215/00141801-52-4-673](https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-52-4-673).
- Behar, Ruth. “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Powers: Views from the Mexican Inquisition.” In Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin, 178–206. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
- Hall, Grant D., Stanley M. Tarka, W. Jeffrey Hurst et al. “Cacao Residues in Ancient Maya Vessels from Rio Azul, Guatemala.” American Antiquity 55, no. 1 (1990): 138–143. [DOI 10.2307/281499](https://doi.org/10.2307/281499).
- Stuart, David. “The Río Azul Cacao Pot: Epigraphic Observations on the Function of a Maya Ceramic Vessel.” Antiquity 62, no. 234 (1988): 153–157. [DOI 10.1017/S0003598X00073634](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00073634).
- Zarrillo, Sonia, Nilesh Gaikwad, Claire Lanaud et al. “The Use and Domestication of Theobroma cacao during the Mid-Holocene in the Upper Amazon.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, no. 12 (2018): 1879–1888. [DOI 10.1038/s41559-018-0697-x](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0697-x).

Free to read: the opening of this chapter, up to “What the Jar Says”, is free on https://herbalmind.bar/history/conquistadors-and-cacao/ (also in the free Apple Books sample — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)

## Chapter 6, free to read

When Hernán Cortés and his men came among the Aztecs in the early sixteenth century, they met a bitter, spiced, frothy drink made from cacao beans. The Nahuatl texts of the time call it cacahuatl, “cacao water”; the word “chocolatl,” usually offered as the Aztec original of “chocolate,” is in none of them.[^coe2007]

Among the Aztecs, cacao was bound up with war, religion and desire, and the beans themselves served as money. Warriors drank it before battle: cacao carries theobromine and a little caffeine, both mild stimulants — enough to feel, nothing like the effect the word “stimulant” suggests. At the merchants’ feasts Sahagún describes, the mushrooms were eaten with honey, and through the night there was no food, only chocolate to drink; nothing says the two were mixed.[^sahagun1959] And it carried an erotic charge, turning up in wedding and courtship contexts.

### The Gift of the Gods

Cacao appears in the Maya codices in the hands of gods, poured and offered. Preparations combined cacao with chili, vanilla, flowers and — in ritual contexts recorded in the codices — blood. The foam mattered: it was raised by pouring the liquid from a height between two vessels, and a Maya drinking cup was judged by the head it produced.

### The Colonial Reinvention

The ceremonies cacao belonged to were pagan, and some of them were bloody. The drink itself was bitter, flavored with chili, maize and other spices, served cold and unsweetened — which was not what Europeans then meant by good food. And colored red with annatto, as it often was, it looked like blood: the chronicler Oviedo, who saw it drunk in Nicaragua in 1528, wrote that the red foam left on the lips “seems like blood itself.”[^coe2007oviedo] So cacao as a drink was rejected as barbaric, pagan and unpleasant to the taste.

In 1562 Diego de Landa held his auto-da-fé at Maní and burned the Maya codices and idols he could find — one of the most destructive acts ever committed against Mesoamerican literature.[^clendinnen1987] Ritual practice around cacao belonged to the world he was trying to erase.

The drink outlived de Landa’s fires. What changed it was sugar. The colonists began brewing cacao with cane sugar, which they had brought themselves, drinking it hot, and serving it in Spanish homes as a remedy for melancholy. By the seventeenth century Madrid’s chocolate houses were selling a sweet hot drink, and the cold, bitter one flavored with chili was nearly forgotten.

Chocolate arrived in Spain and then in France through royal households — Anne of Austria, queen to Louis XIII, is the name usually attached to its arrival in Paris — and a drink taken at court is not easily condemned as pagan.

In 1631 the physician Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma published in Madrid a treatise on the nature and qualities of chocolate.[^colmenero1631] It was English by 1640 and French by 1643, and it did for the drink what no decree could: it put a medical case for it in print, in the language physicians argued in.

A century after the conquest, the Spanish ladies of Ciudad Real, in Chiapas, had their servants bring them a cup of chocolate in the middle of mass. The bishop threatened excommunication, the ladies moved their devotions to the convent churches, and soon afterward the bishop died — of a cup of chocolate, the town said. The story was told in 1648 by Thomas Gage, an Englishman with no love for Catholics, so it may well have gathered invented detail along the way.[^gage1648] But it makes the point even so: the drink the conquistadors had called pagan became the thing a colony quarreled with its own bishop about.

By then, though, suspicion in the colonies fell not on the cup but on the hand that served it. In Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America, chocolate in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was drunk by every rank of society — and it was also the stuff of women’s magic: the base for love spells, for potions that cast illness, and at times for public quarrels. The historian Martha Few, who went through the Inquisition cases there, calls it the central vehicle of women’s ritual power.[^few2005]

What that looked like in practice can be seen in a denunciation from Querétaro. In 1692 Francisca de los Ángeles, a mulatta married to a mestizo shoemaker, came to the Inquisition of her own accord to report what she had seen during two years in the house of her husband’s aunt. The aunt, a mestiza named Clara de Miranda, had a remedy for every kind of bad husband: dried earthworms ground into his food to make him simple; a hair from his head tied around a frog’s neck to make him waste away; and, to make him loving, his chocolate brewed with the water his wife had washed with after lying with him. Francisca did none of it. She took fright and went to inform.[^behar1989]

Look closely and it was not cacao that stood accused. The drink had physicians writing in its defense and was served at two royal courts. What was tried were the people for whom the morning cup was one of the few levers of power in the house — servants, cooks, wives. Cacao had moved out of the question of faith and into the question of order: who pours what for whom.

[^coe2007]: Coe and Coe, 2007, 117–119.
[^sahagun1959]: Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 9.
[^coe2007oviedo]: Coe and Coe, 2007, 111.
[^clendinnen1987]: Clendinnen, 1987, 70 and 75–77.
[^colmenero1631]: Colmenero de Ledesma, 1631.
[^gage1648]: Gage, 1648.
[^few2005]: Few, 2005.
[^behar1989]: Behar, 1989, 189–190.

The rest of this chapter continues in the full book.

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These are chapter cards — what each chapter covers, with a few short answers and the book’s free pages — not the chapters themselves.
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