46 Fi f t h Su n

Nezahualcoyotl responded that it would not be an easy task to collect loyal families to follow him into battle, as Tezozomoc, after attaining power, had made his own grandsons (his daughter’s children by the old Texcocan king) the rulers of most of the region’s villages. It was even said that Tezozomoc had his people ask local children who were no more than nine years old if their current ruler was the rightful one. At that age, the children did not have the circumspection necessary to edit their responses: they gave away their families’ political position as it had been discussed it in the privacy of their own homes. Some of the prattling children’s families had been brutally pun- ished since.36 But the fear that had been engendered by such acts had also bred anger. Nezahualcoyotl said that he was game, indeed eager, to join the alli- ance; he would gather what followers he could.

The ensuing battles were brutal, but village by village, the supporters of Maxtla the Azcapotzalcan were brought down. Within a year or so—the sources vary as to date—Itzcoatl was able to declare himself tlatoani of the Mexica. He was implicitly huey tlatoani, or high chief, of all the valley. He soon had Nezahualcoyotl ceremoniously declared tlatoani of Texcoco, and within another year or so after that, they had between them killed all of Nezahualcoyotl’s remaining Azcapotzalcan half brothers and the husbands of his Azcapotzalcan half sisters. They recorded in their histories: “Nezahualcoyotl sought out the descendants of Tezozomoc in all the places where they were ruling; conquests were made in as many places as they were found.” Maxtla himself fled and disappeared in 1431.37

The kings of Tenochtitlan (of the Mexica people), Texcoco (of the Acolhua people), and Tlacopan (of the Tepanec people) now ruled the valley as an unofficial triumvirate. There was no formal statement to that effect. Later generations would say that they initiated a Triple Alliance, even though in a literal sense there was no such institution. In a de facto sense, however, there most certainly was what we might call a lowercase triple alliance. No one moved in the central valley without at least one of these three kings being aware of it, and beyond the mountains that surrounded them, in the lands that they gradually conquered, they had many eyes. They worked together to bring down their enemies; they divided the resulting tribute payments judi- ciously between them. The Mexica, with the largest population and having played the most important role in the war, got the largest share, but they were careful not to engender resentment among their closest allies by taking too much.38

It was a complex web that they wove among them. In a certain sense, the political lay of the land remained almost unchanged. In general, each altepetl

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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People of the Valley 47

continued to rule itself, choosing its tlatoani as the people thought best, and rotating tasks and responsibilities among the various segments that composed it, in the same fair-minded way as they always had. And if several altepetls had a tradition of governing themselves as a unit, as a “greater altepetl” at least in their foreign affairs, then that tradition generally continued, too.39 A sort of democracy continued on a local level, in the sense that people continued to discuss local matters among themselves and arrive at solutions that pleased most of them. The same arrangement was allowed even to the non-Nahuas who were conquered. The central valley’s triumvirate was satisfied that it should be so, as long as these other communities fought alongside them when called upon to do so, participated in public works—like the building of roads or great pyramid temples—and paid their assigned tribute on time. “This was no Rome,” one historian has commented succinctly, meaning that the Mexica had no interest in acculturating those they conquered, no desire to  teach them their language, or to draw them into their capital or military hierarchy.40

Yet despite the maintenance of local tradition, in an economic sense the region was profoundly changed. Each altepetl that fell under the sway of the triumvirate had to pay tribute wherever it was assigned. Often the financial exigencies were head-spinningly complex. One part of a greater altepetl might be assigned to pay tribute, for example, to nearby Texcoco, their regional boss town. But by the terms of the peace agreement, the next segment of the same greater altepetl might pay their taxes to Tenochtitlan. They might pay part of the tribute (such as a certain number of bales of cotton) once a year, and another part (such as some bags of corn or beans) three times a year. By neces- sity, the calendar grew increasingly consistent across more and more territory, for Itzcoatl’s collectors were timely, and the people had to be ready to receive them. Different villages had adopted the calendar at different times, so one altepetl’s year One Reed might be another one’s Two Rabbit. Now they were forced to try to synchronize their time counts. The calendars were never per- fectly aligned, but they began to come closer.41

On one level, Itzcoatl enforced the same kind of tribute collection system that would have been in place under Tezozomoc of Azcapotzalco in the old days—and probably others before him in the deeper past. But now the central valley’s net of power spread wider. With three altepetls working together, the armies they could send out were larger, the roads they had been able to build were longer. Altepetls that had been far from old Tezozomoc’s grasp now came within the central valley’s reach. Many resisted, but those who fought back against the new arrangements tended to lose. Then they were faced with

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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48 Fi f t h Su n

tribute payments in perpetuity that sent shudders down every wise chief ’s spine: they were tasked not only with sending corn and beans, or chocolate and cotton, but also with supplying people to serve as sacrifices in the reli- gious ceremonies of the central valley. A chief knew that this tax meant he would be forced to constantly make war against his neighbors if he were to avoid sending his own people’s children to the cutting stone. It was enough to make anyone think twice before resisting. And chiefs had had it inculcated in them from an early age that a good chief was a responsible chief, one who avoided battles he was likely to lose and preserved his people’s lives in order to protect the future of the altepetl. An impetuous chief could be referred to derogatively as a “child.”42

If a town had fought strenuously against the Mexica with any significant degree of success, and yet ultimately lost, then its fate was even worse. The Huaxtecs (WASH-tecs) to the northeast, for example, fought back like wild animals; their reputation for it became fixed in local lore, together with their sad destiny. “The soldiers from all the allied provinces took many captives, both men and women, for they and the Mexica entered the city, burned the temple, sacked and robbed the place. They killed old and young, boys and girls, annihilating without mercy everyone they could, with great cruelty and with the determination to remove all traces of the Huaxtec people from the face of the earth.”43 Their story was to serve as a lesson to other potentially recalcitrant altepetls. And so it did.

After such a battle, the long lines of captives were tied together and taken to Tenochtitlan (or perhaps Acolhua or Tepanec country). The terrified pris- oners first passed by other villages like theirs, with their flat-roofed adobe houses grouped in squares opening onto courtyards, where the women chat- ted as they worked, grinding corn and patting out tortillas, while their men labored in nearby fields.44 As they approached the capital, the towns that were more closely entwined with the center of power were visibly wealthier, their buildings and religious pyramids grander, some even built of stone or wood.45

A great causeway was being constructed by the defeated people of Xochimilco. It stretched from the island to the southern shore of the lake, and along this the prisoners walked. Most prisoners were distributed among the nobility after a battle, but those who had been taken by a particular warrior were sent to their captor’s neighborhood temple for sacrifice at local religious festivals, or, if they were young women whom he wanted, to his household. Some were earmarked to be sent to the city’s two central pyramid temples, one dedicated to Huitzilopochtli (the Mexica protector god) and the other to Tlaloc (the rain god). The ones not needed in either temple were sold in a

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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People of the Valley 49

slave market—there was a huge one in Azcapotzalco—and might be bought by neighborhoods in need of ceremonial sacrifice victims, or occasionally by men seeking concubines. Women slaves bought for sacrifice could sometimes convince their new masters to keep them alive to work in their household.46

Horrendous misconceptions have grown around the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. In novels, movies, and even some of the older history books, hundreds of people at a time were made to climb the narrow steps of the pyra- mids to the top, where their hearts were cut out and their bodies hurled downward, while the people screamed in near ecstasy below. In reality, it seems to have been a gravely quiet, spellbinding experience for the onlookers, much as we suspect it was in other old worlds, like that of the ancient Celts.47 The people who watched had fasted and stood holding sacred flowers. In the early decades of Tenochtitlan’s life, when the altepetl was still gathering strength, only a few people would have been sacrificed on the monthly reli- gious festival days, and they were always treated as a holy of holies before they died. After a sacrifice, the warrior who had captured and presented the victim kept the remains (the hair and ceremonial regalia) in a special reed chest in a place of honor in his home for as long as he lived.

Most of the victims were men, classic prisoners of war. Not all were, how- ever. In one annual festival, for instance, a young girl taken in war was brought from a local temple to the home of her captor. She dipped her hand in blue paint and left her print on the lintel of his door, a holy mark that would last for years and remind people of the gift she gave of her life. Then she was taken back to the temple to face the cutting stone. It was an ancient tradition among native peoples not to give way before one’s enemies: such stoicism brought great honor. Sometimes those who were to die could get through their part without letting their enemies see them sob; sometimes they could not. “Some, in truth, wept,” one man remembered later.48

The Mexica, like all their Nahua neighbors, believed they owed everything to the gods. “They are the ones who taught us everything,” their priests would later explain to the Spanish. “Before them, we kiss the ground, we bleed. We pay our debts to the gods, offer incense, make sacrifices. . . . We live by the grace of the gods.”49 Each group of Nahuas had carried sacred bundles devoted to its own deity in the long marches from Aztlan; in the case of the Mexica, it was the relics of Huitzilopochtli that they had protected year after year, until they were finally able to bury them beneath a permanent temple. Other alte- petls had carried relics of the rain god Tlaloc or his water-world consort, Jade- Skirted Woman. Others honored Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent, the god of wind, who was at home both on earth and in the sky, a crosser of boundaries,

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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50 Fi f t h Su n

special protector of priests. Some were most dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, a mischievous god who led humankind in a dance by assist- ing chiefs and warriors to bring change through conflict. Cihuacoatl, Woman- Snake, was known by many other names as well, but she was always sacred to midwives; she often bore a shield and spear, for she helped birthing mothers seize a new spirit from the cosmos. There were many gods and goddesses each of whom appeared with a range of possible traits; today, we do not always understand their characteristics as well as we would like to, for the Nahuas did not write freely of them in the colonial era. They could write openly of his- tory, but it was dangerous to write of the gods. We do know, however, that just as in ancient Greece, all the altepetls honored and believed in a pantheistic range of gods, not just the deity who had especially protected them.50

The gods asked human beings to appreciate what had been given to them and to make sacrifices, mostly by bleeding themselves, but sometimes even by giving the ultimate gift, that of human life. If human beings refused to do this, the fragile world might come to an end. Other, prior worlds had ended in disaster; the Nahuas never forgot that they were living under Nanahuatzin’s Fifth Sun. In more ancient days one of their own children was probably offered up. This seems to have happened around the world in the earliest eras, before writing existed to document the practice in any permanent way. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Hiel the Bethelite begins to rebuild the city of Jericho by burying his eldest son beneath the gate. Likewise, in English lore, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in speaking of Merlin, says that he had to talk his way out of becoming a foundation sacrifice for a king’s tower.51 The notion of a youth dying for his people was hardly unique to the Nahuas.

However, as the Mexica rose, they sacrificed not their own young people but rather, increasing numbers of prisoners of war. They and all the other Nahuas had sometimes sacrificed their enemies: the burning of Shield Flower in 1299 was proof of this. But now the Mexica were nearly always the winners; they were no longer the ones who sometimes died themselves, and the num- bers of their victims gradually grew. They allowed politics and the outcomes of wars to affect the numbers who died in any one year. They did this even as they prayed devoutly, even as they wrote heartrendingly beautiful poems and painted their walls with images of shells that looked so real one might imag- ine oneself in an eternal sea, transcending the struggles of this earthly life.52 Did they know that the world would not shatter like jade if they did not sac- rifice living human beings? Did they laugh cynically at the terror they inspired and the political power they wielded as a result? Probably there were some brilliant strategists and far-seeing, experienced people who did—perhaps like

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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People of the Valley 51

Itzocatl. They would not have been alone among world leaders; we know that there were some Greek and Roman leaders, for instance, who questioned the very existence of the gods yet did not let it shake their worldview.53 Surely there were many more of the Mexica who simply never thought much about it—like people in so many times and places who choose not to see the pain inflicted on other people when it is more convenient not to. Can we blame them? Should we blame them?

Or perhaps they did think about it, as Itzcoatl himself must have done, and decided that whatever their philosophical views, there was no choice. After all, they did not live in a modern, liberal state, where certain protections are guaranteed to the majority. They simply could not afford too much gener- osity, for the real world that they inhabited was every bit as dangerous as the cosmos they envisioned. The Mexica themselves had been on the other side for more years than they cared to remember. For generations, it had been their own young warriors and maidens who faced the fire and the cutting stone. Even now, if they began to lose their wars at any point, it would be their turn again. They knew this, as they sent their sons to practice the arts of war and learned to construct maces with bits of jutting obsidian glass embedded in them. In the midst of words of love addressed to their “little doves,” mothers taught their children that the world was a dangerous place. “On earth we live, we travel, along a mountain peak. Over here is an abyss, over there is an abyss. If you go this way, or that way, you will fall in. Only in the middle do we go, do we live.”54

The image of mothers teaching their children to live with these realities is a compelling one. Everything we know about the Mexica tells us that mothers valued their children dearly, more than anything else in life—they said that they were precious, like polished gems, or iridescent feathers, treasures fit for high kings. They warned them of dangers and begged them to be responsible, to care for themselves and their communities so that the altepetl would go on forever.55 And children heeded their mothers’ words. This was far from a world in which maternal figures were disparaged or in which women appeared as interchangeable sex objects. In the first place, it was generally only the men of noble families—those of the pilli class, the pipiltin—who had the right to take numerous wives and bring home captive women from the battlefield, for one had to be rich to afford to do such a thing. Even in that situation, who one’s mother was mattered to an enormous degree to each child; but one has to admit that from an elite man’s point of view, the women may have been somewhat interchangeable. That, however, simply was not the experience of the majority. The majority of the people were of the macehualli class, the

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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macehualtin, and in their families, one husband lived with one wife, whose cloak had been tied to his in a formal ceremony. Sometimes a household was multigenerational or contained several siblings, but even there, each woman had her own hearth in her own adobe apartment facing onto the common courtyard. A woman raised her own children, teaching them to help her in the labor that everyone recognized was essential. In a world without day care, restaurants, vacuum cleaners, or stores, who would have dared to think that childcare, cooking, sweeping, and making clothes were inessential activities? No one, it seems, for the indigenous sources leave no record of disrespect, or even of veiled misogyny. Women’s roles were complementary to those of men, and everyone understood this to be so; the house, the four-walled calli was symbolic of the universe itself.56

So we should take seriously whatever the women said, for their own peo- ple did. Women comforted their children, yet in the same breath warned them in no uncertain terms that they must learn to be ruthless in maintaining order, to do their duty, to take lives or give lives in the eternal wars if neces- sary. They must be willing to be like the brave but modest Nanahuatzin, who had jumped into the fire to bring forth the Fifth Sun for his people. These mothers would probably have been confused if someone had tried to talk to them about “good and evil.” They would have said that all people had the potential to do good or to do harm, that it wasn’t possible to divide people into two camps on that basis. To do good, a person had to suppress egotism and do what was best calculated to keep his or her people alive and successful in the long term. Everyone was expected to give thought to the future. It wasn’t always easy. Often one’s fate involved doing just what one did not want to do. In some ways, it was not so much gratifying as exhausting, this playing “king-of-the-mountain” for life-or-death stakes.

For the system to work over the long term, Itzcoatl and, later, his heirs had to choose their military targets carefully. They had to be relatively sure of vic- tory, based on rational calculations, not divine promises. Fortunately, the highest level priests were members of the leading noble families, and they seemed to understand this, too. At least, the gods whom they prayed to never demanded that they wage unwinnable wars. There were certain pockets of resistance that were more formidable than most and these had to be handled carefully. The best known was the greater altepetl of Tlaxcala, a large city-state composed of four independent sub-divisions, with four separate but united kings, located just to the east of the central basin. Tlaxcala was relatively wealthy—its name meant “place of the tortillas,” or we might say “Bread Town.” It was lodged securely in its own highly defensible valley and surrounded by

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:59:08.

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People of the Valley 53

pine woods that served as havens for deer and woodland birds and other game. These people were Nahuas, too, having arrived about the same time as the Mexica—they even shared some of the same myths and stories—and they weren’t going to give the latter an inch if they could help it. Early on, the Mexica did launch several attacks against them, but it became clear that they were going to become mired in a stalemate. It was likely as a result of this that the Mexica initiated what they called the “Flower Wars,” a kind of Olympic games played every few years, in which the winners, rather than earning a crown of laurels, saved themselves from death. It is unclear whether these games unfolded on a ball court or a battlefield, but probably the latter. The system worked well to keep young warriors on their toes even in times when there was no current war. And it made it unnecessary to explain to anyone why Tlaxcala was allowed to continue to exist without paying tribute. The world at large could assume that Tlaxcala was being left alone to serve as an enemy in the ceremonial Flower Wars. No one needed to discuss the fact that bringing down the large polity would have been far too destructive of Mexica resources, if it was even possible. Leaving Tlaxcala as a free enemy with a recognized role was a clever strategy. The leaders could not have fore- seen that one day in the future it would cost them dear, when a new enemy, stronger than they, would land on their shores and find allies ready-made.57

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