More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Tezozomoc’s elder sons had been born to wives whose marriages predated the rise of Itzcoatl and his family, but the youngest one, Axayacatl, or Water Beetle, was his son by one of Moctezuma’s daughters, Atotoztli.
Before Moctezuma died, he did everything to ensure that the royal clan would elect to follow the boy when he himself was gone. He bribed and threatened and, whenever possible, displayed young Axayacatl to advantage. It worked.
However, although the two older brothers insisted that they be considered themselves if there were to be another transition in their lifetimes, they let the matter drop when they were given high military titles and lucrative sources of income.
Many years earlier, not long after the Mexica settled their island and began to make a home for themselves, some sort of internal disagreement broke out, and a dissident group established a separate village on the north shore of the island, where they became known for hosting the island’s largest market trading with villages on the perimeter of the lake. Their separate altepetl was called Tlatelolco (Tla-tel-OL-co), and it had its own tlatoani, as the smaller, breakaway group had no wish to live and work under the power of the larger group’s king.
For the next half century, Tlatelolco acted as Tenochtitlan’s junior partner, helping the larger town to secure victories and collecting a share of the winnings.
They believed that Tenochtitlan’s meteoric rise was due to the military support that the Tenochca had always received from their kin on the north shore of their island, and they therefore felt that they had a right to a larger share of the available wealth and power.
Moquihuixtli started to insist that his Tenochca wife would no longer be his primary consort and that her children would not inherit power. Indeed, he said, she would have no children, for he certainly would not sleep with her. Such a thin, fragile-looking little thing could appeal to no man, and he preferred his other women, he added snidely. Whether Moquihuixtli really believed he would elicit better terms from Tenochtitlan, or whether he actually wanted to provoke a war and try to topple Axayacatl is not clear;
Eventually, so the gossips and storytellers said, he even beat her and made her stand naked with the other women while he looked them all over.
In 1473, the war came swiftly.
Some said that the people of Tlatelolco were by now so enraged that the women bared their bodies in an insulting gesture, and that those who could squeezed milk at the oncoming enemy. It might be true:
More importantly, perhaps, the Tenochca ended Tlatelolco’s royal line, forbidding anyone to sit on their reed mat ever again.
Moquihuixtli was either thrown from the heights of his people’s temple pyramid or he chose to hurl himself downward and end his own life.
From now on, said Axayacatl, the Tlateolcans would pay tribute like everyone else, including a quota of slaves for sacrifice.
At the time, however, the idea that only one woman’s son could conceivably inherit was not a notion that existed in the polygynous Nahua world; the people would have been highly amused at the idea that there were no other possible choices when there were 117 siblings in existence.
His oldest half brother, Tizoc, was elected to the reed mat by the royal clan. He must not have mustered the needed margin of support to maintain power, however, for he went down in the histories as a coward despite waging nearly constant warfare. He died after only about five years of rule—some said four, some said six—and people talked openly about the probability that he had been poisoned by an enemy faction. His brother Ahuitzotl now followed. He ruled successfully enough, but by the time he died in 1502, it was certainly expected that the pendulum of power would swing back to the other
...more
Under Ahuitzotl, Tlacaelel, the old Cihuacoatl, had died and been replaced by one of his sons; the institution of the council had solidified and its meeting continued uninterrupted despite the loss of a key individual.
In their selection of the tlatoani, the royal clan overwhelmingly backed a son of Axayacatl, Moctezuma Xoco...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
his goal was nothing less than the creation of a true state apparatus, capable of exerting control far beyond face-to-face situations. By now, there were no more upheavals coming from within the central valley—no more rebellions on the part of such altepetls as Chalco or Tlatelolco.
Permanent military garrisons were built at key locations in order to support the Mexica who were scattered far and wide.
The local Mexica officials’ most important task was to collect all required tribute on time.
They continued to work on synchronizing various altepetls’ calendars, so it would be clear when tribute was due, and they held public ceremonies, recorded in paintings, delineating what and when each altepetl owed.
especially regarding landholding, which Moctezuma wished to see standardized, since in each area some lands were dedicated to helping to support Tenochtitlan.
They intervened with some frequency; years later, long after the Spaniards were in power, some local families were still simmering about Tenochtitlan’s decisions, which were generally still in force, by then having the weight of custom behind them.
from time immemorial, unpleasant tasks (like maintaining a local temple, or clearing weeds away from a lakeshore to form a port, or collecting tribute to turn over to a conqueror) had been rotated between the different component parts of a polity. So, too, was there the tradition of passing the chieftainship back and forth between lineages, so as to avoid breeding resentment.
Often the Mexica conceived of society as one of their beloved birds; the pipiltin might be the head, but the macehualtin were “the tail, the wings.” And what bird could fly without its tail and wings?
As the nobility brought home increasing numbers of captive women, they had more children. The families of the pipiltin threatened to become unmanageably large relative to those of the macehualtin. As far back as the reign of Moctezuma the Elder, it had been concluded that the king had too many children to expect the macehualtin to support them all with their tribute.
There were separate officials to handle commoners’ grievances and those of the nobility,
No laws were written down, but certain principles of legal tradition were understood by all, and the judges issued penalties for breaking them.
A married woman could not have any sexual relations outside of her marriage; a married man could, but if he slept with a woman who was married, then he, too, was guilty.
Later, a Spaniard who saw the market at Tlatelolco four days after the Europeans first arrived remembered it with a sort of awe, as it was both so huge and yet so well controlled: “We were astounded at the great number of people and the quantities of merchandise, and at the orderliness and good arrangements that prevailed, for we had never seen such a thing before. The chieftains who accompanied us pointed everything out. Every kind of merchandise was kept separate and had a fixed place marked for it.”56
But what was remarkable about Tlatelolco, what made it different from neighborhood food markets, was that food could be bought partially prepared, for urban customers too busy to make everything from scratch.
Startlingly—at least to newcomers—the market also served as a repository for the urine collected in clay pots in households across the city. Whether people were paid for what they brought or fined for what they didn’t bring is not clear. In either case, the practice served two purposes. The collection of the waste in one place rendered most of the city very clean. Ammonia was also needed for tanning hides and making salt crystals,
By the time of Moctezuma, almost all of the city’s children, boys and well as girls, nobles as well as commoners, were educated in temple-run schools. They entered these boarding schools around the age of thirteen and stayed a few years. Thus they passed the most trying adolescent years away from home—much like European youths who entered apprenticeships.
She discovered, for instance, that she would have very little sleep for much of her adult life, and that she must not resent it. “Here is the task you are to do: be devout night and day. Sigh many times to the night, the passing wind. Call to, speak to, cry out to it, especially in your resting place, your sleeping place. Do not practice the pleasure of sleep.”
Merchants formed their own tight-knit group and educated their children for the harrowing treks across unknown country; priests were educated in a separate school, where they would learn far more than other boys about religious matters, the calendar, and the pictographic writing system. Those two groups aside, every young male had to learn to be a warrior.
commoner could rise to become a quauhpilli (kwow-PIL-li), an eagle lord, or honorary nobleman. The slaves and other loot he brought back from battle made him rich.
When a student at a calmecac, as the schools were called, committed a particularly serious infraction, such as drinking, he was doomed to participate in a ceremony in which the priests attempted to drown him—
As the polygynous noble families grew rapidly, this practice touched the lives of an increasing proportion of the people. Moctezuma himself spent an exorbitant amount of time playing a sacrificial role: he was constantly called on for participation at key junctures in many of the monthly ceremonies.
their leaders were convinced that if they could do so, they should, as they believed the practice reduced distant altepetls to abject terror. By this time, a number of elite figures and their priests clearly took a cynical view of the question of human sacrifice.
bring them to Tenochtitlan, not in a public procession so that they might serve as sacrifices, but secretly, so they could be made to watch. Then they were released to bring word home to their people of what awaited them if they did not accept Mexica terms peacefully.
What happened to Huexotzincatzin is a long story that illuminates both politics and gender at the peak of Mexica power. There was among his father Nezahualpilli’s women one who was particularly valued.
What Huexotzincatzin and the Lady of Tula became known for, however, seems to have been a bit different. They earned a reputation for composing works addressed directly to each other,
If he were of a philosophical turn of mind, he might have said that in order for the central valley to have such peace and space for their art, then the chaos of warfare and the predicament of hunger had to be expelled to the distant villages of strangers whom he himself would never see.
the residents of great cities almost never saw the vulnerable, shattered peoples in distant lands who supported them—except briefly, in an almost unreal sense, as honored sacrifice victims in magisterial ceremonies.
In 1518 he sent observers to investigate some strangers who had apparently made several appearances in Maya country along the sea coast.
Living at the fringes of empire, this Daughter Child had no illusions about the agonies of war; she harbored no belief that it was for a greater good. It was simply the way things were.
If she allowed herself to have any feelings about the Mexica at all, her sentiment was hatred.
Unless the aggressors happened to be in need of child sacrifices for the annual festival of Tlaloc, no one thought of killing the young. They were far too valuable. They could be raised as loyal household dependents, or sold as slaves. That is what had happened to Daughter Child.
At the coastal town of Xicallanco, lying not far to the east, where many Nahuatl merchants lived, she was sold to some Maya, either for a certain weight of cacao beans or for bolts of cotton cloth.
It was a leading settlement of the Chontal Maya, the “Phoenicians of Mesoamerica,” as they have since been dubbed. These were a powerful people, for their nobles, nearly all of whom were merchants, were extremely wealthy.
