This is hopefully the first in a series in which I take a historical look at the unique units in the real-time strategy game Age of Empires II. In this game the different civilizations share mostly the same units, with different civilization bonuses and varied accessibility to certain techs and upgrades making them unique. Each civilization can build a castle, where it trains a unique unit (some get secondary unique units in other buildings). These units are a big part of what makes each playable civilization unique. I will attempt to go in alphabetical order of the civilizations included in the HD edition and explain the background of each unique unit. I will also include a comparison to the in-game and real-life units.
First up is the Aztecs. They get the Jaguar Warrior. It is an infantry unit with an attack bonus against other infantry. The Mesoamerican civilizations in Age of Empires II also get the Eagle Warrior, which was in reality another warrior class equal to the jaguar warriors. I will get back to the in-game unit once I’ve gone through their history.
The Jaguar Warriors were called Cuauhocelotl in the Nahuatl language. For easer typing I will simply call them jaguar warriors. The main primary source comes from a Spanish writer. Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, arrived in Mexico a few years after the fall of Tenochtitlan the Aztec capital, and the assumed extinction of the jaguar warriors. He took great interest in the natives’ culture and, using native sources and artists, wrote the Florentine Codex, a history and ethnography of the Aztecs in their own Nahuatl language. Along with the later Mendoza Codex, this source is referred to by all historians of the Aztecs. I have looked at several scholarly works on the Aztecs (as well as a couple heavily illustrated histories) and actually found some dispute over a couple widely accepted facts about the jaguar warriors and their wars.
