The Aztecs

There was no Aztec state in the territorial sense. What existed was the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, which had defeated the previous hegemon and divided the spoils, and Tenochtitlan steadily became the dominant partner. Beyond the Basin of Mexico, conquered altepetl kept their own rulers, gods and customs, and paid tribute.

This is an entirely different instrument from Roman provincial administration or Han commanderies. There were no imperial governors in most of the empire, no standing garrisons, and no attempt to integrate subject peoples into a common citizenship. What the centre wanted was goods on schedule, and the Codex Mendoza preserves the schedules: quantities of cloth, cacao, feathers, jade, warriors’ costumes, itemised province by province.

The weakness is obvious in hindsight and was obvious at the time. A tribute empire that leaves local power structures intact leaves intact the people who resent paying, and when Cortés arrived he found allies immediately. The most decisive was Tlaxcala, an independent republic the Aztecs had never subdued and had used as a sparring partner.

Internally the system was more sophisticated than its reputation. The tlatoani was elected from within a royal lineage by a council rather than inheriting automatically. Texcoco under Nezahualcoyotl developed a codified legal system with courts of appeal. And the empire ran a real judiciary with graded penalties, professional judges, and a ban on judicial corruption enforced by execution.

Aztec warfare was organised around capture rather than killing, for theological reasons. The sacrificial economy required living prisoners, so a warrior’s status rose with the number of captives he took rather than the enemies he killed. The weapons reflect it. The macuahuitl, a wooden club edged with obsidian blades, was designed to disable.

Military distinction was the main route by which a commoner could rise, through the orders of Eagle and Jaguar warriors, with dress and ornament tightly regulated to display exactly what a man had achieved. Every boy received military training at the telpochcalli, which made the empire’s mobilisation capacity very large.

The xochiyaoyotl, or flower wars, are the institution outsiders find hardest to credit. These were arranged battles with neighbouring states, fought on agreed ground, mainly to take captives and train warriors rather than to seize territory. Scholars still argue about how much was ritual and how much was attritional pressure on states the Aztecs could not easily conquer outright.

Two of those states never fell. The Tarascans to the west defeated a full Aztec invasion and held their frontier, helped by metallurgy the Aztecs lacked. Tlaxcala held out in the east. Both facts matter enormously in 1519, and neither fits a story about an invincible empire meeting an unstoppable European.

The chinampa was the foundation, and it ranks among the most productive farming systems of the pre-industrial world. Rectangular plots were built up from lake mud and vegetation between staked channels, anchored by willows, and cropped continuously: several harvests a year, irrigated by capillary action from below, fertilised by dredging. The Basin of Mexico fed a very large urban population from a lake.

Exchange was market-based to a degree with no parallel elsewhere in the Archives at this date. The market at Tlatelolco astonished the Spanish, who compared it to Constantinople and Rome for scale, and Cortés estimated sixty thousand people trading daily. Goods were priced, market officials judged disputes on the spot, and cacao beans and cotton cloaks were used as small change.

Long-distance trade was run by the pochteca, a hereditary merchant guild with its own courts, gods and internal ranks, who travelled beyond the empire’s frontiers for feathers, jade, cacao and skins, and who reported what they saw. They were merchants and an intelligence service at once, and their wealth made them politically awkward, rich commoners in a society organised around noble birth.

Metallurgy was limited to gold, silver and copper for ornament rather than tools, and stone did the work bronze did elsewhere. Obsidian from the volcanic highlands was quarried, worked and traded at industrial scale, and it takes a cutting edge sharper than steel.

Aztec society divided between pipiltin, the nobility, and macehualtin, the commoners, with the mayeque working land they did not hold and slaves at the bottom. Aztec slavery was closer to indenture than to chattel property. It was usually a debt or a judicial sentence, it was not heritable, and it could be bought out.

The most unexpected institution is universal schooling. Every child attended one of two systems: the telpochcalli for commoners, teaching military skills, civic duty and craft, and the calmecac for the nobility and the priesthood, teaching writing, calendrics, rhetoric, history and religious knowledge. A society with compulsory education for both sexes in the fifteenth century is not what the popular picture prepares you for.

Tenochtitlan itself was a considerable feat of urbanism: causeways with removable bridges linking it to the shore, an aqueduct bringing fresh water from Chapultepec, dikes controlling the lake’s salinity, and a rubbish and sanitation regime that visitors remarked on because European cities had nothing comparable.

The vulnerability was ecological. The One Rabbit famine of the 1450s, caused by successive frosts and drought, killed enormous numbers and drove people to sell themselves into slavery, and shaped Aztec religious anxiety about a cosmos that could withdraw its cooperation without warning.

Aztec cosmology begins from instability. The present world is the Fifth Sun, and four previous creations were destroyed, by jaguars, wind, fire and flood. The fifth will end too, in earthquakes, and the gods sacrificed themselves at Teotihuacan to set it moving. Human sacrifice is a repayment, because the cosmos runs on a debt that has to be serviced.

That is the logic to hold onto, because it makes the practice intelligible without making it comfortable. Blood and hearts fed the sun and the rain, and the state’s expansion supplied the captives. The Templo Mayor, rebuilt in successive enlargements at the centre of Tenochtitlan, carried twin shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, war and rain, the two things the city could not do without.

The scale is disputed, and the dispute itself is informative. Spanish accounts give numbers that are demographically impossible and served an obvious purpose in justifying conquest. But excavation at the Templo Mayor has recovered sacrificial deposits, dedicated burials and skull racks, so the practice is not in doubt, only its frequency and volume.

Beneath the state cult ran a dense religious life of household deities, midwives’ rituals, curing ceremonies, and the tonalpohualli divinatory calendar that assigned a character to every day and shaped the naming of children and the timing of decisions.

Aztec monumental sculpture is heavy, frontal and deliberately overwhelming. The Coatlicue is a standing figure with a skirt of serpents, a necklace of hands and hearts, and twin snake-heads where a face should be. It shows a deity assembled from what she governs, and it makes no attempt at a human form. The Sun Stone, a carved basalt disc over three metres across, sets out the cosmological ages in a single diagram.

The city was the largest artwork. Tenochtitlan was laid out on a grid quartered by causeways, with the sacred precinct at the centre and the Templo Mayor rising in stages, each rebuilding encasing the last, so that the excavated temple is a nest of earlier temples, datable by the offerings sealed between them.

Featherwork was the most prized craft and almost none survives. The amanteca worked tropical feathers into mosaics of intense colour for shields, headdresses and cloaks. A handful of pieces reached European collections, and they remain the only substantial evidence of an art form the Aztecs themselves valued above gold.

Painted books were both art and record. Aztec pictographic writing combined logographic and phonetic elements in screenfold manuscripts of bark paper or hide, and the survival rate is catastrophic, since Spanish authorities burned them as idolatrous. The Codex Mendoza and the Florentine Codex are post-conquest productions, which is why they exist.

The Aztecs ran two calendars at once. The xiuhpohualli was a 365-day solar year of eighteen twenty-day months plus five unlucky days, and the tonalpohualli was a 260-day ritual count of twenty day-signs against thirteen numbers. The two mesh and return to their starting alignment every fifty-two years. The completion of that cycle, the Calendar Round, was marked by the New Fire ceremony, when all fires were put out and the world was, briefly, not guaranteed to continue.

Astronomical observation was exact where it mattered. The Venus cycle was tracked closely because Venus carried ominous significance, and on one widely held reading the Templo Mayor was aligned so that the sun rose between its twin shrines around the equinox.

Aztec writing was pictographic with a growing phonetic component. It could record names, places, dates, tribute quantities and genealogies, and it was used alongside trained memory rather than replacing it. A codex was a prompt for a performance as much as a text to be read silently.

The intellectual tradition that survives best is philosophical, and it is distinctive. In xochitl in cuicatl, flower and song, names poetry as the only reliable way of speaking truth in a world understood to be transient and slippery, and the poems attributed to Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco return again and again to impermanence, doubt and whether anything said about the divine can be accurate.

The pre-conquest written record was destroyed almost completely. What replaced it is a body of post-conquest material produced under Spanish supervision, in which indigenous knowledge was recorded by people whose purpose was often to identify what should be suppressed, and which is, despite that, very rich.

The central document is the Florentine Codex, compiled over decades by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún working with Nahua elders and trilingual students at Tlatelolco. It runs to twelve books in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish columns, covering religion, astronomy, rhetoric, natural history, trade and daily life. Book XII narrates the conquest from the Mexica side, including the smallpox epidemic described clinically by people who lived through it.

Alongside it sit the Codex Mendoza with its tribute lists, Durán’s history drawing on lost indigenous annals, and the eyewitness account of Bernal Díaz, written as an old man to correct what he saw as Cortés’s self-promotion.

The historiography has swung hard and is still moving. Nineteenth-century accounts like Prescott’s presented a providential triumph of civilisation over barbarism. Revisionist work, Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest in particular, has dismantled the standing myths: that the Aztecs mistook Cortés for a returning god, that a handful of Spaniards conquered an empire, that indigenous people were passive. What replaces them is messier and better, a war won by an indigenous coalition with Spanish participation, in a population already collapsing from disease.