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Admittedly, their island was available only because no one else wanted it.
These were gardens arduously built in shallow waters by piling up mud and silt, and then trapping some earth above the water level by constructing a wooden or straw-basket ring wall. The chinampas, though difficult to build, were immensely fertile, and the Mexica were thus quick to follow their neighbors’ example.
It had not been so long ago that they were wanderers, dependent on the Culhua people, or anyone who would temporarily take them on as hired bowmen. Now they made war only when they wanted to. Now they had a town of their own.
At about this time the people made the collective decision to add a layer of gravel to their original adobe shrine—where the eagle had purportedly landed—so they would have a base platform strong enough to begin to build a large pyramid.8 Certain priests dedicated themselves to caring for the temple and began to create painted books for posterity. With their history recorded on animal skins, the priests could announce that the people had reached the end of a fifty-two-year cycle, that it was time to ceremonially “bundle” the years, as they put it.
Certainly the Culhua wife, whatever her name, did not expect to remain Acamapichtli’s only woman, but it was understood that she was the primary, or First Wife, not necessarily chronologically but in the sense that her sons would rule in the next generation.
Be that as it may, there was certainly no concept of primogeniture. It would have been utterly impractical in such a fluid world in which the people needed a highly competent leader, not merely one who happened to have been born first.
it was to all of the full brothers’ advantage to support the one who seemed most like an appropriate chief.
the child who was groomed as the heir was called Huitzilihuitl, Hummingbird Feather, in honor of the thirteenth-century chief of that name. Besides his full siblings—the other children of Acamapichtli’s noble Culhua wife—Huitzilihuitl had many half brothers, among them Itzcoatl. Obsidian Snake’s mother had been no one of any importance. She had been, in fact, a slave—a beautiful slave girl from the nearby town of Azcapotzalco (Ahz-ka-po-TZAL-ko).
Because the Aztecs were disparaged for so long as cannibalistic savages, serious scholars have been loath to write anything that might be perceived as detracting from their moral worth; associating them in any way with famous slave societies was hardly going to help matters. Thus the idea was often promulgated that Aztec slaves by definition were prisoners of war taken for sacrifice to satisfy a religious compulsion,
However, modern scholars now acknowledge that the reality was quite different. Some prisoners of war (usually men) were indeed sacrificed, and some household servants had in truth indentured themselves or been sold by their chief as a punishment. But there were also many other enslaved people. As in the ancient Mediterranean world, the households of wealthy and powerful men contained numerous female slaves taken in war.
Others were more ordinary, and Itzcoatl’s mother was one of these.11
Throughout Mesoamerica, it was understood that the children of enslaved women were never slaves themselves. Indeed, it was essential that the condition not be inherited; otherwise many towns would soon have had more slaves than free people, and their world would have been torn asunder.
Huitzilihuitl, the heir, became king, and he ruled successfully for twenty-four years, conquering numerous smaller and more vulnerable city-states and demanding tribute from all of them. The men of Tenochtitlan left their island with some frequency and set forth as a united group, armed and dangerous.
even the once-dominant Culhuacan were reduced to subsidiary status.
The most important war Huitzilihuitl waged was arguably the one against Cuernavaca,
“Perhaps he will clothe her using the fibers of marsh plants, since he makes his own loincloths out of them?”
the tellers of the tale opted to depart from a realistic account of events. They did not choose to dwell on the carnage of the ensuing war or the many years it lasted, since the two peoples later became allies:
Then the mesmerized young woman swallowed the precious gem by accident and—like other girls in numerous other Native American ancient stories—conceived a child.16 The Nahua tellers of the tale and their rapt audience would have said in that moment that the joke was on the overly proud Cuernavacan king; his beloved daughter had been duped and would now bear a child by a father she would by no means have chosen herself.
under his leadership Tenochtitlan had become a client, so to speak, of what was currently the single most powerful city-state in the region. The head or “boss” state was Azcapotzalco, the leading town of the Tepanec people,
Huitzilihuitl took a bride from a Tepanec town as his primary wife, meaning that her sons were expected to rule after him.20 (The town was called Tlacopan and was later to be an important place; the Spanish, who couldn’t pronounce it, turned it into “Tacuba.”)
Huitzilihuitl died, Chimalpopoca (Chee-mal-po-PO-ka, Smoking Shield), a son by the Tepanec bride, inherited the throne, exactly as expected.
Chimalpopoca ruled for about ten years, bringing multiple new towns under Mexica control.
In 1426, the king of the powerful town called Azcapotzalco, Tezozomoc (Te-zo-ZO-moc), who had ruled since 1370, died in his bed.
Whatever our modern sensibilities may tell us, polygyny does have many benefits. It offers obvious pleasures to the senior male with multiple wives, and even the wives in such situations often say that it is a help to them as they age to bring younger women into the household, as many hands make light work.
Nahua wives certainly never sought or expected romantic love from a husband; it did not surprise them when men were fickle, nor did anyone in their world blame the women. Furthermore, polygyny generally eliminates any possibility of a king dying without an heir,
the system can work well only when the vast majority of people fully agree as to which wife is primary—that is, when they all think alike as to whose sons should inherit. If there is significant doubt about that, a civil war is imminent,
When Maxtla (MASH-tla), son of Tezozomoc of Azcapotzalco, rose against his half brother, the presumed heir, and killed him,24 Maxtla was undoubtedly assuming that he would receive help from his mother’s home village, and he did. At the same time, he turned against Azcapotzalco’s former allies, whose royal houses were all intermarried with the maternal family of the half brother he had killed, specifically, the royal household of the town of Tlacopan. This meant that Maxtla also targeted Tenochtitlan’s chief, Chimalpopoca, who had a Tlacopan mother.
In one, Maxtla invited Chimalpopoca to his home, as if to welcome him to the celebration feast of his new reign, but then had him strangled to death.25
For a brief spell of sixty days, Chimalpopoca’s young son ruled, then suddenly he fell. His name was Xihuitl Temoc, or Fallen Comet.26 The epithet seems too perfect to have been his real name;
Perhaps he had been betrayed in some way by Itzcoatl. It was, after all, Itzcoatl who came to power next. By now, Itzcoatl was at least forty years old.
he had lived through the twenty-four years of his half brother Huitzilihuitl’s reign, plus another ten years under his nephew, Chimalpopoca,
Itzcoatl, the “Obsidian Snake,” must have been distinguished by more than a long year count or respected resume; others also had these qualities. He must have had charisma, and ambition, and a subtle mind.
He turned to another city-state suffering from a comparable polygyny-induced civil war, and he sided with those who were presently losing, who were hungry for allies and desperate with rage. He was taking a great risk, and some of the historians later said that many among his people begged him simply to implore Maxtla for mercy.
Instead, he sent emissaries to a place called Texcoco (Tesh-CO-co).
the dominant ethnic group had for many years been the Nahuatl-speaking people known as the Acolhua (A-COL-wa).
“Now, when Tezozomoc found out that his daughter-in-law had married, had taken a husband in Texcoco, it made him furious. He summoned his captain, and a few others who came along, too, and he said, ‘I have heard, I have learned, that War Arrow of Huexotla (Way-SHO-tla) has bedded the former wife of [my son], your comrade. He has slept with her. My lords, hear me! I am angry, I am insulted.’”
In the tales that were told, women caused these wars:
Yet in the 1420s war had not really come to Mesoamerica because of a runaway wife—she was only a metaphor for the uppity Texcocans—but because of a broader political situation.
He began to insist that his sons by his Mexica wife would indeed inherit, thus indicating that he would no longer accept Texcoco’s status as a client state of Azcapotzalco.
Then the warriors rushed ashore and began to kill without mercy.
The boy’s name was Nezahualcoyotl (Nez-ah-wal-CO-yot), or Hungry Coyote, and whether or not he was witness to the killing of his father, it was certainly emblazoned in his consciousness. He fled and hid in Tlaxcala (Tlash-CA-la), a town to the east that was not under Azcapotzalco’s sway. It seems to have been there that Itzcoatl’s emissaries came looking for him years later, during the great political crisis.
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 punished since.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a certain sense, the political lay of the land remained almost unchanged. In general, each altepetl 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.
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.
Altepetls that had been far from old Tezozomoc’s grasp now came within the central valley’s reach.
they were faced with 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 religious 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.
