As those bright sparks among you will have realised, our company name is an Anglicised form of the Aztec Emperor Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (Motecuhzoma II).
Nevertheless, for those who missed that history lesson at school, or possibly are still waiting for it, we have scrambled together a brief background to Monty and his love of chocolate.
In a nutshell, Monty was the boss of the Aztecs and loved chocolate. The Spanish arrived to loot their riches, Monty got the idea that their leader, Hernán Cortés, was a returning god, and so gave him chocolate.
In the beginning...
For some time, the history of cultivating and drinking chocolate, or to be more precise, various mixtures made from cocoa beans, has been thought to date back to about AD460 in what is now Guatemala.
However, discoveries in Belize show that early Mayan civilisation were preparing cacao as early as 600BC. This discovery leaves 'hot chocolate' unchallenged as the world's oldest non-alcoholic beverage.
In about the early 1500s, the Aztec Empire covered central and southern Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The unsuspecting Montezuma II was ruling his people from the capital of Tenochtitlan when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, led by Hernán Cortés.
Chocolatl and beyond
At this time, cocoa beans and cocoa pods were greatly valued by the Aztecs and are often depicted in the art from that period. Merchants traded them between the humid Mexican basin and the major Aztec cities, and it is thought that they were a form of currency.
The cocoa was also used in ceremonies, including ritual human sacrifice, where the heart of the victim was replaced with a cocoa pod: this didn't do so much for their digestion or indeed the development of cocoa! Cocoa beans were consumed, mainly in the bitter and thick maize- and cocoa-based drink called chocolatl. It is somewhat unpalatable to modern tastes, despite some attempts to replicate the orginal recipes.
It was in this form that Montezuma drank up to 50 mugs a day in order to keep his harem smiling. The drink is also where the once common phrase 'Montezuma's revenge' derives from; the ingredients used acted as a mild laxative.
The increasingly unfortunate Aztecs wrongly assumed that the Spaniards were long-awaited returning gods and presented them with, among other things, Chocolatl. It was becuase of this formal and seemingly innocuous presentation that the Spanish took cocoa back to Spain, marking the beginning of chocolate consumption in Europe.
At least we can thank Imperialism for something useful, although the outcome for Emperor Montezuma II was not so positive. Poor old Monty was stoned to death by his own people, who gradually realised that Cortés was about as far from saviour god as possible!
