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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.”
The ones not needed in either temple were sold in a 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This was far from a world in which maternal figures were disparaged or in which women appeared as interchangeable sex objects.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
If the question of an attack was always imminent, few people would want to approach the Mexica or their allies even to discuss mutually beneficial business deals. Perhaps for this reason, not just the Mexica but all the Nahuas as if by common consent accepted the existence of certain neutral trading towns along the coasts and along the banks of rivers that led inland from the sea.
for example, there was a coastal town called Xicallanco
In most of the Mesoamerican world, however, permanent truces did not exist. Warfare and expansion were perennial, for the Mexica state needed to grow wealthier as its polygynous noble families grew larger.
Itzcoatl had won his gamble, attaining power, wealth, and glory beyond any of his childhood dreams. But as a result, he had forged a complex political organism, one that, for all his vaunted power, he could not control simply by making a declaration.
One nephew, Tlacaelel, was an active and successful warrior who made a great name for himself as the Cihuacoatl: the name of a goddess had become a title reserved for the man who was the second-in-command after the tlatoani, the inside chief who governed domestic affairs. Supporters of Huitzilihuitl’s old royal line—many of them Tlacaelel’s own children and grandchildren—liked to say that Itzcoatl really owed everything to Tlacaelel, that he was the one who had defeated the Tepanec villain Maxtla, and that it was his savvy strategizing that helped Itzcoatl govern in the toughest of times.
When all the annals, not just those authored or orchestrated by Tlacaelel’s descendants, are considered, this version of events strains credulity. If the man were really so indomitable, he himself would have emerged as tlatoani, rather than the bastard son of a slave girl.
even before Itzcoatl died, it was understood that Tlacaelel would keep his lands and titles in perpetuity, and that Moctezuma, Huitzilihuitl’s son by the Cuernavacan princess, would be next in line to rule.
The young Moctezuma was destined to rule for twenty-nine years. In his time, he would expand Aztec territory dramatically and solidify control over rebellious city-states conquered in earlier years.
Relatively early in his reign, a great drought afflicted his people. Locusts passed through the land in the 1450s, and in 1454, the corn did not yield nor did it yield for the next four years. The priests begged the gods to take mercy on the powerless people who suffered, the common folk and the little children.
They are perishing. Their eyelids are swelling, the mouths drying out. They become bony, bent, emaciated. Thin are the commoners’ lips and blanched are their throats.
Times were so bad that some families might sell a child to the merchants who were traveling to the east, to Totonac or Maya country. There the drought was not so grave, and people were interested in buying children cheaply. As slaves, their parents told themselves, their children would not starve.
But the Mexica swore to themselves that they would never let themselves be this vulnerable again.
Moctezuma mounted another military campaign, this time against a former ally that had earlier been subjugated by the Mexica but then had become restive during the drought. The place was called Chalco.
Henceforth, announced Moctezuma, the Chalca people would not rule themselves but would be ruled according to his decrees. Power had been given him by the gods.
No one had ever handed them anything. They had been realists and strategists, and they were determined that they would continue to be.
Here in Tenochtitlan, he represented the greater altepetl of Chalco.
Quecholcohuatl’s generation had grown restive: they had begun to talk among themselves and insist that Tenochtitlan give them a place at the council table and treat them as relative equals, as they did the other major powers of the central valley.
In ordinary times, in ordinary marriages, women were understood to be complementary to men and in no way inferior. But in times of war, the female sex truly suffered.
She had become a nonentity in a social sense, a sexual object without lasting power, a bearer of relatively unimportant children; she had lost, in short, her future.
in case the point still was not clear, she began to make direct allusions to sex and even to the king’s penis: Will you ruin my body painting? You will lie watching what comes to be a green flamingo bird flower … It is a quetzal popcorn flower, a flamingo raven flower.
She remembered what her life used to be, how her family had thought she would bear the children of her people’s future. “As a noble girl child, I was spoken of in connection with my marriage.” Her hopes had all come to nothing, and she did not think she could bear it.
When the song ended, however, the king suddenly went inside and sent a messenger to summon the lead performer. The Chalcans did not know what to think, but they feared the worst.10
The tlatoani liked the song, and he liked the singer. He took Quecholcohuatl to bed forthwith and asked him to promise to sing only for him. Chimalpahin claimed he even said joyfully to his wives, “Women, stand up and meet him, seat him among you. Here has come your rival.”14
It is clear from the few available sources that before the conquest there was no category of people who lived their lives full-time as gay individuals in today’s sense.
many men sometimes chose to have sex with other men. There was a range of sexual possibilities during one’s time on earth, understood to be part of the joy of living, and it certainly was not unheard of for men to go to bed together in the celebrations connected with religious ceremonies, and presumably at other times as well.
Axayacatl sent Quecholcohuatl back outside, bearing aloft symbolic gifts: a full outfit—cloak, loincloth, and sandals—embroidered with jade, all of which items had been the king’s own.
Directly behind these was Axayacatl’s palace. It received fresh running water, the supply fed by a clay aqueduct that originated on a hill on the lake’s western shore and then crossed over a causeway to the island, part of an extraordinary waterworks system containing dikes and sluices as well as causeways and aqueducts.
On Quecholcohuatl’s evening in the city, however, he had nothing to fear, but rather much to hope. He and his peers were focused on the possibility that their beloved Chalco might yet be restored some measure of independence.
The tamales boasted decorative designs on top, such as a seashell outlined with red beans.
Indeed, a former servant once counted two thousand different dishes made for the Mexica king and then passed on to be sampled by his councilors, servants, and entertainers.
People who saw the city always remembered first its beauty. It was because of the gardens—the gardens overflowing from ordinary people’s flat rooftops, as well as the gardens of the tlatoani. There, Mexico’s most gorgeous flowers—many with names never perfectly translated into European tongues—blossomed amid trees whose fascinating shapes could make them appear enchanted.
The central valley of Mexico now contained about 1.5 million people, most of them farmers. In the very center of the fertile basin, on this little island of 5.5 square miles, there lived as many as 50,000 people.
Instead, the city folk obtained much of their food from the rural hinterland.
their growing population made it economically attractive for the people of the basin to voluntarily bring food to sell, in exchange for the artisan craftwork the urbanites were becoming so adept at producing.
Because the city had grown so quickly from scratch, rather than evolving gradually, like ancient Paris or London, its construction was planned and organized. The buildings ranged along orderly, straight streets.
There was no furniture; people sat and slept on thick, comfortable mats and pillows.28
