Rich and Strange Aeons

"The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris -- Europeans flocked ot every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds... In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. 'The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail,' Braudel observed. 'They were part of the landscape.'"
-- Charles Man, 1491

Mann estimates England had twice the per capita execution rate of the Mexica, and France and Spain were even more bloodthirsty.

And the Mexica had had a bigger and cleaner city than any in Europe, that dazzled the conquistadors; public water projects more like those of the Romans than anything in medieval Europe; a developing philosophy; compulsory schooling for boys and girls alike...