history

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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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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

Even a highly successful war-based polity of necessity faced certain prob- lems. In this world that Iztcoatl negotiated so successfully, the ongoing wars could make it difficult for the Mexica to trade with far-off peoples. 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 busi- ness 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. Near to where the Olmecs had once lived, for example, there was a coastal town called Xicallanco (Shee-ca-LAN-co), and although it was nestled within Maya territory, numerous Nahua merchants lived there. They facili- tated trade with the eastern realms, buying textiles and cocoa, beautiful shells, the plumages of rare birds—and eventually, the birds themselves—as well as other luxury goods. They sold these in exchange for the goods made by Tenochtitlan’s craftsmen, as well as excess slaves from the wars launched by the Mexica and their allies, women and children who had not been sacri- ficed but rather turned over to long distance merchants. Further along the coast, the island of Cozumel was another such neutral zone, and several others existed.58

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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. And people needed to be kept in a state of suspense in order for their old alliances to last, rather than breaking down over minor arguments. And the battle zones needed to be pushed outward if the inner sanctum of the valley was to know only peace. It would have been a familiar story to any great monarch. Gone were the days when the father of Shield Flower, the warrior maiden, could declare war or make decisions based on his own needs and desires and those of a few companions. 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 of the greatest threats to Itzcoatl’s control lay very close to home. Either because he really did love them or because it would have precipitated civil war, or both, Itzcoatl did not kill the surviving sons of his half-brother, the late tlatoani, Huitzilihuitl, Hummingbird Feather. They, presumably for a mixture of the same reasons, continued to support him. They were the ones who by the law of custom should have ruled, not Itzcoatl. But he was the one who had united the Mexica in a time of terrible crisis, found useful allies for them, and led them all to victory. So they worked together during the four- teen years of Itzcoatl’s reign. One nephew, Tlacaelel, was an active and suc- cessful 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 sec- ond-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 every- thing 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 orches- trated 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. Still, it is clear that he was a major force to be reckoned with. He must have been satisfied with the power and the income he was given by Itzcoatl, for he maintained his place and went on to become an adviser to four kings over the next several decades. A council of four men from the extended royal family always worked closely with the person serving as tlatoani, and Tlacaelel the Cihuacoatl was the chief of these.59

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In order to guarantee the continuance of the compromise, it was essential to settle amicably the question of the succession. Years earlier, Itzcoatl had married a woman from the then-powerful boss state of Azcapotzalco; his son by her was named Tezozomoc, after the old godfather king whose death had unleashed pandemonium. Itzcoatl could not present a half-Azcapotzalcan son as the people’s future tlatoani, not after the recent war to the death against Atzcapotzalco. Besides, Huitzilihuitl’s noble sons would not have been kept in line if they thought they were going to be excluded from the succession forever. So probably 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. This Moctezuma was an ancestor of the one who would become world famous in his meeting with Hernando Cortés. Moctezuma was a powerful warrior— his name meant Frowns-Like-a-Lord—whose maternal relatives lived in an important cotton-producing region. Better yet, he was reasonable. He agreed to do what much-less- important Nahua altepetls often did—that is, alternate power between different lineages in a politically expedient rotation. He agreed that though he himself would rule, his own sons would not rule after him. Rather, he would select a daughter or a beloved niece to marry one of Itzcoatl’s grandsons (a son of the passed-over son, Tezozomoc), who would be elected as ruler in his turn. Like Itzcoatl, Moctezuma would forego the oppor- tunity to have one of his own sons succeed, likewise on the understanding that a grandchild of his would eventually take over. In this way, they would allow the pendulum of power to swing back and forth between the two family lines, ultimately bringing the lines together through the birth of a child descended from all of them, and the heart of the kingdom would remain at peace.60

***

Itzcoatl was quite right that his successor would need to be able to count on peace and stability in the inner circle. Though he could not have foreseen exactly where the gravest problems would emerge, he knew that in this life, nothing ever stays the same, and thus no monarch is ever truly secure. It was fortunate that he and his kinsmen settled their differences as effectively as they did, for in their strategic handling of polygyny-induced factionalism, they cemented their hold on power. It was perhaps their greatest stroke of brilliance, what most set them apart in a political sense.

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. But his successes would not

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come easily. 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 chanted their prayers to Tlaloc aloud:

Here are the common folk, the macehualtin, those who are the tail and the wings [of society]. 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. With pallid eyes live the babies, the children [of all ages]—those who totter, those who crawl, those who spend their time turning dirt and potsherds, those who live sitting on the ground, those who lie on the boards, who fill the cradles. All the people face torment, affliction. They witness that which makes humans suffer. Already there are none who are passed over.61

In the countryside, the teenage children left home to look for food, hoping at least to spare their parents the need to feed them. Often they would die, alone on some hill or in some wood, and people would later find their bodies, half eaten by coyotes or vultures.62 In the city, tribute payments no longer arrived regularly, and the urban dwellers thus could not feed themselves. 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.

As soon as he could, 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. It was a powerful Nahua city-state within the central valley, just to the south- east of the lake. Its name meant, in effect “by the shores of the jade waters.”63 There had been some earlier skirmishing, but the war began in earnest in 1455. It took ten years, but in the end the political entity of Chalco was no more. Most of the people still lived, but their royal lines had been ousted. 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. His brother Tlacaelel, the Cihuacoatl, took as his primary wife a daugh- ter of the Chalcan royal line, and then he took up the reins of power and gave

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out chieftainships to men of of the Mexicas’ choosing. “And for [the next] twenty-one years,” said one writer of annals, “there was rule by outsiders.”64

In the courtyards of Tenochtitlan, the poets and the history-tellers once again told the tale of their altepetl’s greatness. Under starlit skies, they held up their painted books. These were new books that they displayed, painted since the time of Itzcoatl’s conflagration; the revised histories made it seem abso- lutely expected that Itzcoatl would rise to power in the place of Huitzilihuitl’s sons, and that Tenochtitlan—and not Azcapotzalco—was destined to rule the known world. The bards pointed to the symbolic images of burning tem- ples, representing the conquests the Mexica had achieved. Then they began to talk: they moved back and forth between the perspectives of the various com- ponents of the altepetl, telling their story as a conglomerate whole, twisting the strands together into one, to use their spinning metaphor. Their animated voices carried in the night.

The Mexica had come a long way, the speakers reminded their listeners, from the tragic last days of Shield Flower. They had been hunted wanderers— quite literally, at one point, after the war with Culhuacan—but under Huitzilihuitl, Chimalpopoca, Itzcoatl, and Moctezuma they had strategized and fought and jockeyed for position with such success that the surrounding people who once abused them now feared them, and hunger stalked them only intermittently. Sometimes, it was true, it felt as though they were still just barely hanging on, that there was still a threat at every turn.

But not most of the time. Most of the time, they were feeling quite suc- cessful; their stories were laden with their sense of themselves as underdogs- made-good. No one had ever handed them anything. They had been realists and strategists, and they were determined that they would continue to be. Each year, they knew, there would be more to add to their tale. All Nahua peoples were proud of the enduring life of their altepetl, the water-mountain, the community that outlived all individuals. Like Shield Flower, though, the Mexica exhibited an added panache in their pride. They weren’t merely poised between the days that were gone and the days yet to come: they beckoned to the future.

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The City on the Lake 1470–1518

Outside, the bright sun seared the stones of the patio; inside the thick adobe walls, all was coolness and shadow. One afternoon in 1479, Quecholcohuatl (Ke-chol- CO-wat), a young Chalcan nobleman, paused on the threshold of the Mexican tlatoani’s palace, letting his eyes adjust. “He was considering what judgment would come forth from the king,” a man from his altepetl explained many years later.1 Never had Quecholcohuatl felt such fear in his very gut, for he could tell from the looks passing between his compatriots that they thought he had been sum- moned inside to face a brutal punishment. They thought he would be escorted to one of the dreaded wooden cages the capital city was famous for; from there he would be taken to be burned to death. “Will we all be burned to death?” his friends wondered. Quecholcohuatl found it almost impossible to move forward, following the signals of the servants. But he did so. His name meant “Flamingo Snake”; it was a chosen name, in keeping with the gorgeously colored, finely embroidered clothing he wore when giving a musical performance before the king, as he had just dared to do.2 The tassels swayed as he walked. Here in Tenochtitlan, he rep- resented the greater altepetl of Chalco. He did not want these Mexica people to see his fear, only his pride. He steeled his nerves and put one foot in front of the other.

***

A musician plays his drum. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 70r.

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At a distance of more than five hundred years, it is impossible to know exactly what happened on that day in the palace of Axayacatl (Ah-sha- YAHK-at). The existing account was written at least one hundred years after the fact, by someone who obviously could not have been there. Nevertheless there is much to be gleaned from it. The author was Chimalpahin, the Nahua historian who lived in Mexico City in the early 1600s. He was Chalcan, and his beloved grandmother had known Quecholcohuatl in her girlhood— though by then, he was an old man and had taken the Christian name of don Jerónimo.3 So the Chalcan historian got his information from aging relatives who had known people of the ancien régime. The story that he recorded fits perfectly with numerous other sources that illuminate a variety of subjects— including political relations between Tenochtitlan and Chalco, the architec- tural patterns in Tenochtitlan, and even the cultural mores of the city. For instance, at about the same time as Chimalpahin was discussing this event with his grandmother, some Mexica men were telling the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún how terrifying it used to be to present musical pieces before the ruler, as he might punish an inept performer.4 There is thus no rea- son to doubt the gist of Chimalpahin’s account, and in fact, much can by learned by analyzing it in the context of other extant sources, for the author vividly describes life in Tenochtitlan’s imperial court.

By 1479 almost fifteen years had passed since Chalco had been destroyed by the Mexica, its royal houses disbanded. Enough time had gone by that there was a new generation of young adults who did not clearly remember the horrors of the war; yet not enough time had passed for the Chalcan people to forget their ancient royal lines and the self-governance they had enjoyed for centuries. So 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.5

Flamingo Snake and his fellow singers and drummers had come to per- form before the high king Axayacatl at his palace. They were there only to entertain him, or so they said. In reality, they had carefully chosen their song with a political agenda in mind. The piece was called “the Chalca Woman’s Song,” and when they sang its words, they were lodging a protest of sorts.6 The singer adopted the persona of a female prisoner of war, of a concubine. Everyone in their world understood the parallels between a captive woman and a conquered altepetl. 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. A captive woman lamented her

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fate, not necessarily because she was subject to any daily violence but because she had lost her sense of self as an honored being; she could no longer take pride in the idea that her children would inherit her place and carry her family line forward. 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. The singer of the song varied in her reactions from stanza to stanza. Sometimes she flirted, as any young girl in such a situation would do, trying desperately to regain a sense of agency in her own life. “What if I were to pleasure him?” she wondered. She cried out, “Go stoke the pot and light a big fire!” And finally, 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. You lie on your flower-mantled mat. It lies inside. You lie on your golden reed mat. It lies in the feathered cavern house.7

Then suddenly, in the very next lines of the song, the young woman found her heart breaking. 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. “It is infuriating, it is heartrending, here on earth. I worry and fret. I consume myself in rage. In my desperation, I suddenly say, ‘hey, child, I would as soon die.’ ” Manoce nimiqui, I would as soon die. It was a strong statement.8

In the performance that afternoon, another nobleman from Chalco had originally been the lead musician, but either the heat or his fear of what the group’s punishment might be—or both—had caused him to faint. Quecholcohuatl knew that his own fate and his altepetl’s hung in the balance: if they were going to convince Axayacatl to consider Chalco’s feelings about the current situation, the entertainment would have to be superb. He stepped around his unconscious compatriot and took the lead himself. He gave the performance everything he had: he made the gilt-edged drum throb and call aloud.9 He sang the lyrics with feeling. The song ended with an offer on the part of the concubine to live with the king, her new master, without rancor, if

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only she were treated with respect. “Don’t let your heart take a needless tum- ble. . . . Here is your hand. Come along, holding me by my hand. Be content. On your reed mat, on your throne, sleep peacefully. Relax, you who are king Axayacatl.”

In the midst of the performance, the ruler Axayacatl suddenly began to pay attention. “He came out from inside where he was with his women, and went to dance. When he got to the dance floor, Axayacatl lifted up one foot, completely happy in hearing the music, and began to dance and move in cir- cles.” He wore a gold headpiece trimmed with symbolic clusters of feathers: each element represented not only his own rank but also his city’s relationship to others. The carefully crafted diadem was itself an object of awe. It was con- sidered a great honor, a momentous occasion, when the tlatoani joined the dance. So the signs were good; the Chalcans were hopeful. When the song ended, however, the king suddenly went inside and sent a messenger to sum- mon the lead performer. The Chalcans did not know what to think, but they feared the worst.10

When Quecholcohuatl came before Axayacatl, he found him surrounded by his women, all wearing lovely embroidered skirts and blouses, edged with dyed rabbit fur or yellow parakeet feathers or other colorful features.11 He made the traditional Nahua sign of obeisance, kneeling and making the ges- ture of scooping up earth and touching it to his lips.12 He said something along the lines of “Oh, lord king, may you burn me, I who am your vassal, for we have done wrong in your presence.” Self-denigration was a polite style of greeting, and Quecholcohuatl apparently thought it might be useful here.13 He was overly cautious, as it turned out. “Axyacatl did not want to hear these words.” 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

Understanding the nature of homosexual sex among the Aztecs has long been a troubled issue, for scholars have largely relied on sources produced under the auspices of the friars, in response to direct and highly judgmental questions about the matter.15 The people answering those questions were well aware that they were not supposed to approve of the practice, and they made some negative comments, but it is hard to know what they really thought. In later years, indigenous writers of the seventeenth century would describe bru- tal punishments meted out by the church to homosexual men, but they appar- ently did not relish such scenes. If anything, they seemed to disapprove slightly. “One [of the men] was named Diego Enamorado [Diego In-Love] . . . The

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[authorities] did not specify the reasons why they hanged them.”16 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. However, Nahuatl-language sources produced beyond the purview of the Spaniards suggest that 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.17 In any case, king Axayacatl was a famous warrior and a man who fathered many children, and he could be drawn to a man as well as to a woman. “The king really loved Flamingo Snake because he got him to dance,” Chimalpahin, the Chalcan historian, later com- mented. Chimalpahin made no judgment at all, unless perhaps he evinced a bit of pride, for Flamingo Snake’s song became a multigenerational hit, with repeat performances over the next several decades, and it brought fame to his hometown. “Because of it Amaquemecan (Ah-mah-kay-MAY-kahn) was [once] famous, an altepetl which now appears small and unimportant,” he said.

At the time, the singer’s relationship with the tlatoani was definitely a source of great pride. To reassure the Chalcans waiting tensely on the patio, 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. Flamingo Snake’s companions were aware of what such gifts meant, for public gift-giving was a political language, a code that everyone knew. In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, for instance, all the narrator had to do to establish that the Azcpotzalcan ruler, Maxtla, was abu- sive and planned to undo Nezahualcoyotl was to state laconically, “He gave him only one tilma (or cloak).”18 When the Chalcans saw the richness of Axayacatl’s proffered goods, they let out a great whoop of joy, and those who had been more confident turned to tease those who had predicted only doom and gloom. Their laughter rang out.19

That night, the visiting musicians celebrated in the greatest city in the known world. They were lodged in the very middle of the island, in a house maintained for entertainers.20 Tenochtitlan was divided into four subdivi- sions (Moyotlan, Atzacualco, Cuepopan, and Zoquiapan), and each one occupied about a quarter of the city. As with most conglomerate altepetls, the people of each segment placed their finest buildings in the “four corners” area where the quadrants came together, thus creating a truly urban area in the center of a partly agricultural world. Around the edges of the swampy island, they still had their chinampas (the gardens hanging in the muddy water), and

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they reserved certain areas for fishing and aquatic foraging for birds’ eggs and other delicacies. In the center of the island, where the visitors were, rose the temple precinct, including the huge, gleaming pyramid dedicated to their own Huitzilopochtli, and next to it, the edifice dedicated to Tlaloc, the rain god. 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 cause- ways and aqueducts.21

The palace of the former king Moctezuma (the Elder), on the far side of the temple precinct, was dedicated to other purposes than the housing of roy- alty now that Moctezuma was dead. The most powerful monarchs each left impressive architectural remnants of their reigns, visible to all the world for all time (or so they hoped), and the state found plenty of practical uses for them. In this central area, for example, the war captives who faced sacrifice in the near future were closely guarded; some of them were housed sumptu- ously, others much less so, depending on the ceremonial role they were to fill.22 Not so many years earlier, Chalcans would have been among the prison- ers, but they were not now. Nearby, the Mexica king maintained a sort of zoo filled with animals brought as tribute from subject states far and wide. Some of these, too, would face the cutting stone on holy days, but many were dis- played indefinitely as a testament to Mexica power. The visitors could have seen fascinating reptiles, or jaguars, wolves, and mountain lions, among doz- ens of other creatures.23 Unlike in the wild, the visitors didn’t need to fear the yowling of an animal. In the forest lands, if one suddenly heard the mewling or scream of a flesh-eating animal, some people feared it meant that one would soon be taken prisoner and enslaved or killed, or that one’s children would become prisoners.24 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.

Their hosts offered them food, and they feasted. The tamales boasted dec- orative designs on top, such as a seashell outlined with red beans. Guests could choose between turkey, venison, rabbit, lobster, or frog stewed with chilis of various kinds. On the side, there were winged ants with savory herbs, spicy tomato sauces, fried onions and squash, fish eggs, and toasted corn. There were all kinds of fruits, tortillas with honey, and little cakes made of amaranth seed. Indeed, a former servant once counted two thousand differ- ent dishes made for the Mexica king and then passed on to be sampled by his

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councilors, servants, and entertainers. At the very end of the meal always came chocolate—crushed cacao beans steeped in hot water and flavored with honey and various kinds of dried flowers, such as vanilla pods or roses. To render it even more special, the drink was served in carved or painted gourds, often from faraway lands.25

Yet perhaps it was neither the zoo nor the food that the visitors especially recalled in later years. 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. In large, finely wrought wooden cages, the brightest birds from the jungles in the east and south fluttered and sang—quetzal birds and parrots, flamingos and tufted ducks, parakeets and pheasants—too many kinds to count. As the birds flew quickly in and out of the foliage, the colors of their wings glinted in the evening light, like flashes of magic, the result of some spell, just like in the stories people told back in Chalco. As the darkness grew, the stars appeared. Priests observed and charted them, but ordinary people just admired them. The stars looked, the Mexica sometimes joked, like popcorn scattered in the night sky.26

***

Where had this city come from? Tenochtitlan in the 1470s and 80s was a far cry from the somewhat scruffy, marshy town inhabited by Itzcoatl when he made his initial bid for power. But under him and Moctezuma the Elder, victories had multiplied until the Mexicas’ relative wealth and power were truly significant. 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.27 Counting the people of other altepetls who clustered on the far shore of the lake, facing the island, there were perhaps a total of 100,000 in the wider urban area. Tenochtitlan’s population growth had outpaced that of other regions. This was partly because the city’s wealth and political domi- nance encouraged in-migration, but victory in war also brought more captive women to the city, and as any demographer would predict, more wombs had birthed more babies. Clearly, the relatively few chinampas on the outskirts of the city could not support so large a population. Instead, the city folk obtained much of their food from the rural hinterland. Mexica success in warfare made it possible to demand greater amounts of food as tribute, and in addition,

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their growing population made it economically attractive for the people of the basin to voluntarily bring food to sell, in exchange for the artisan craft- work the urbanites were becoming so adept at producing. In this context, the city’s location on an island in the center of a great lake rendered it almost easy for its market to become a great hub of trade, tying together all the peoples who lived near the surrounding lake shores.

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. Ordinary households consisted of adobe buildings on three or four sides of a central courtyard. The flat roofs held gardens and sometimes additional small rooms, often used for storage. Generally each woman had her own hearth—whether the women of the house were co-wives or mother-in-law and daughters- in-law—and each one had her own supply of cihuatlatqui, woman’s gear arranged in orderly baskets and boxes—spindles and looms, grinding stones and pots, brooms and dustbins, as well as clothes and jewelry for adults and children. In a prominent location in the home, men kept their own gear hang- ing on the wall—their carefully accumulated handmade weapons, battle headdresses, and mementos of war. There was no furniture; people sat and slept on thick, comfortable mats and pillows.28

Over the simple structures loomed large neighborhood temples in the form of pyramids, with highly decorated compounds near each of these for the nobility. Towering above were the great twin temples of the central plaza, bordered by the royal tecpan (or palace) where the Chalcan visitors per- formed. Itzcoatl had long ago begun the process of turning the simple shrine that had once stood at the center of the island into an ornate structure on a broad stone platform. Since then, there had been several more building stages, each enhancing the splendor of the two temples, for the city’s architects and builders—in the pay of the tlatoani—never rested. An early aqueduct, built to bring fresh water to the island, had collapsed in a flood in 1449, just before the great famine had started, and under Axayacatl a new one had recently been built, significantly higher, and with two water troughs, so that even if one needed to be cleaned or repaired, there would be no interruption of water flow.29

The Mexica were able to bring all this about so successfully largely because the transition to the next generation of leadership had twice gone relatively smoothly. Itzcoatl’s son, Tezozomoc, had kept his word and willingly fore- gone the possibility of ruling, as agreed long ago (accepting lands and tribute payers in Ecatepec near Azcapotzalco instead). Itzcoatl was succeeded by

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Moctezuma, from Hummingbird Feather’s line; after Moctezuma’s death, the selection of a ruler was made from among Tezozomoc’s sons, also as agreed. 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. Perhaps the young woman was actually Moctezuma’s granddaughter (child of a daughter of Moctezuma’s who had married Tlacaelel); the bards did not agree on this point. In either case, she was a close connection to Moctezuma, someone whose sons he was directly related to, and whom he wanted to envision as occupying the reed mat someday. Axayacatl was thus the son of Tezozomoc whom Moctezuma desired as a successor.

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. After he died, at the customary council of royal family members, two of Axayacatl’s older half brothers, Tizoc (TEE-zoc) and Ahuitzotl (Ah-WEETZ-otl), complained loudly. They insulted the young prince in crude terms: “Is he really a manly warrior? Does he really take captives? Are they not really . . . slaves whom he buys and brings here, so that he appears to be a manly warrior?”30 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. Axayacatl became king in 1469, imme- diately after Moctezuma died. This seemed to bode well for the consolidation of Mexica power.31

Unfortunately for the athletic young Axayacatl—who did indeed zip around in a war canoe like a water beetle on the surface of the lake—one spe- cific issue related to the succession had never been resolved, and it exploded into a crisis. 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 alte- petl 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.32 Still, despite the split, the Tlatelolcans were nevertheless Mexica, with Mexica history and pride, and they continued to face the outside world alongside the people of Tenochtitlan. When Maxtla of Azcapotzalco murdered Chimalpopoca back in 1426, he sent some of his relatives to kill

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Tlatelolco’s king as well. So it was without hesitation that the Tlatelolcans threw in their lot with Itzcoatl when he roused the Mexica of Tenochtitlan to follow him in bringing down Azcapotzalco. 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. The people of Cuauhtinchan (in the east) and of Toluca (in the west), for instance, later remembered the high-handedness of the Tlatelolcans who collected tribute from them.33

By 1470, however, the people of Tlatelolco had grown resentful. 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. Moreover, they were the ones who operated the great market patronized by all the people of the valley. They were undoubt- edly irritated that it was Axayacatl who had become king, rather than one of his older half brothers, some of whom had a Tlatelolcan mother. Had one of the half-Tlatelolcans become king, Tlatelolco might have expected richer payoffs in future. Now they wanted to make it clear that they would no longer unquestioningly support Tenochtitlan unless changes were made. Their tla- toani, Moquihuixtli (Mo-kee-WEESH-tli), began to do what Nahua kings were wont to do in such situations: he rearranged his marital relations in order to make a statement about the succession. 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 chil- dren, 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; the latter seems plausible, as he was known for bellicose statements that verged on the irrational—or even crossed the line.34

In either case, the young Tenochca wife whom he turned against was called Chalchiuhnenetzin (Chal-chew-ne-NE-tzeen, Jade Doll), and she was Axayacatl’s full sister. When the young tlatoani heard what Moquihuixtli was saying, he publicly sent his sister rich gifts as a gesture of political support. Moquihuixtli took them from her; he also took the fine clothing she had brought with her to the marriage and left her to borrow coarse skirts and blouses from the household’s working women. Eventually, so the gossips and storytellers said, he even beat her and made her stand naked with the other

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women while he looked them all over. Chalchiuhnenetzin now slept among the grinding stones used to make the corn meal. But perhaps the borrowed clothing and the adoption of the role of servant helped her. One day, she was able to slip away, presumably traversing the streets incognito, and she made her way back to her brother’s palace. She told Axayacaatl everything. “He has given [his allies] shields and obsidian-bladed war clubs. I have heard what he says. There are consultations by night. . . . He says he will destroy us Mexica Tenochca, that the only rulership will be in Tlatelolco.”35

In 1473, the war came swiftly. Moquihuixtli had prepared by establishing numerous alliances, mostly with altepetls that were his tribute states and whose royal lines were intermarried with his family. Numerous others rejected his overtures—or at least told Tenochtitlan that they had. Axayacatl did not wish to appear to be committing many resources to a shameful, internecine squabble. So at first, the Tlatelolcans held their own. They swarmed into the center of the island suddenly, via dozens of canoes. They were beaten back, but by no means destroyed. The results of the battle were inconclusive. Each group retreated and hunkered down in its own part of the island. People long remembered the grim silence.

Such a situation could not last though: Tenochtitlan was too powerful. Eventually—it is not clear if it was days or months later—the men of the city and the allies who had come to them were fully prepared for what they had to do. They went forth in a great body. 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: the author of the Annals of Tlatelolco claimed almost proudly that their women fought in the last stages of the war against the Spaniards, too, as if it had been something they considered culturally appropriate for their women to do in moments of extremity.36 If the women of Tlatelolco fought on this occasion, though, their actions did not deter the men from Tenochtitlan, who were led by Axayacatl himself. There were far more of the Tenochca. They drove the remaining Tlatelolcan warriors off the northern tip of the island into the marshy lake. And still they chased them, beating the reeds and killing them wherever they found them. It was said that the Tenochca “made them quack like ducks,” and thereafter, if anyone wanted to taunt a Tlatelolcan, they had only to call him a “duck.”37

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. The history tellers could not agree

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about this; probably few men ever knew the truth, only those who battled their way to the top of the temple. The story of his fall lived on in popular memory. A drawing of his great descent from the pyramid made a dramatic image in a history later prepared for curious Spaniards.38 From now on, said Axayacatl, the Tlateolcans would pay tribute like everyone else, including a quota of slaves for sacrifice. The latter was a heavy charge, for it committed the losing party to waging wars against others that they were presently ill-prepared for. In the end, however, he does not seem to have enforced the demand. An old man who was a relative of both his and Moquihuixtli’s prostrated himself before the king and begged for mercy for the Tlatelolcans in this regard.39

During this period of the 1470s and 80s, Mexica power grew significantly. Axayacatl intervened routinely in the governance of other city states. In 1472, for instance, old Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco, who had joined with Itzcoatl to bring down Maxtla and the Tepaneca in the 1420s, had died, marking the end of an era. He left behind him, according to one count, sixty sons and fifty- seven daughters, with a significant number of the boys wanting to rule. Axayacatl naturally wanted a son by a close female relative of his own to be the heir. One had already been picked out: Nezahualpilli, his name meaning “Hungry Prince” and encompassing a reference to his father, “Hungry Coyote.” The problem was that he was only nine years old—some said he was actually only seven—and it was going to be difficult for him to best fifty-nine older brothers, several of whom had noble mothers of their own. Later, the Spaniards would nod sagely and say the tiny child must have inherited because he was the only legitimate heir. One friar imagined tragic scenes in which an aging Nezahualpilli had almost given up hope of his wife producing an heir. 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. The problem was not that Nezahualcoyotl had no heirs, but that he had too many.40

Axayacatl was proactive in protecting Nezahualpilli’s claim. Some of the older sons had actually been gotten rid of even before their father’s death. One called Tetzauhpiltzintli (Te-tzow-pil-TZEEN-tli, literally, Prince Terrifying) by the history tellers was accused of stockpiling weapons and fail- ing to obey his father; he was put to death. The Tenochca king insisted on this, even though the aging Nezahualcoyotl was said to have wept. Whether or not that was true, after the old king’s death, Axayacatl sent both warriors and bribes to Texcoco posthaste. Most of the half brothers accepted a buyout, but a few, fathered in Nezahualcoyotl’s early years as a fugitive in the Tlaxcala

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region, came to make war. Their arrival helped some of the other brothers— who had been raised in Texcoco—to make common cause and side with their baby brother, Nezahualpilli, in order to keep power out of the hands of the easterners, their father’s children by a long-ago wife.41

It also helped that the child was the favorite candidate of Tenochtitlan. Naturally, there were some resentments about the Mexica always dictating to them, but Axayacatl paid the rejected candidates generously in lands and titles. And because there were so many potential heirs, his emissaries’ arrival on the scene averted an internal Texcocan bloodbath that might otherwise have ensued. Axayacatl implicitly promised to continue to support Texcoco faithfully in its dealings with other altepetls, as long as his chosen candidate was king. Mexica rule, in short, was not all terror tactics, at least not among their friends. On some occasions, Axayacatl even knew enough to step back and let the local people have a bit more of their own way. Such was eventually the case in Chalco. After the 1479 performance of Quecholcohuatl’s political song, parleys were initiated, and eventually, the royal lines of the four altepetls of Chalco were reinstated. They in effect became part of the inner circle of theTenochca state. Within the central valley, Axayacatl sought to maintain perfect stability.

Then in 1481, after only twelve years of rule, Axayacatl died. Since he was young when he took the throne and was an active warrior, it seems likely that he died in battle, but his people’s historians do not say, though they do men- tion moments when he was wounded or nearly captured or made marvelous captures himself.42 His death apparently occurred before his people were quite ready for a transition, as a fraternal struggle ensued after his death. 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 branch of the family—the one descended from Huitzilihuitl, not Itzcoatl. 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 con- tinued uninterrupted despite the loss of a key individual. In their selection of the tlatoani, the royal clan overwhelmingly backed a son of Axayacatl, Moctezuma Xocoyotl, or Moctezuma the Younger.43

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In 1502, Moctezuma was a young and charismatic figure. Posterity would later characterize him as fearful and pusillanimous, but early Nahuatl sources portray him quite differently. He was a hard man, with a hard agenda. Although he himself wouldn’t have used such terms, not having studied twen- tieth-century political science textbooks, 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. The Mexica were thus ready to establish a more complete domi- nance over the several hundred altepetls outside of the inner basin, from whom they (and their partners in empire) already extracted tribute, but who generally had been left to their own devices as long as they did not rebel.

Moctezuma wanted to increase the level of direct control. He started by setting up thirty-eight administrative provinces (there were later fifty-five provinces), each with its own tightly organized bureaucracy. Representatives of his government were sent to live in each. In a town far away in the Toluca valley, they created such neighborhoods as (in Nahuatl) “Place of the Temple Lords,” “Place of the Merchants,” “Place of the Rulers,” and “Place of the Mexica people.”44 Permanent military garrisons were built at key locations in order to support the Mexica who were scattered far and wide. The chain of command between the tlatoani’s highest officials in Tenochtitlan and those lesser figures who lived locally was carefully delineated, and then recorded in documents that illustrated these political relationships.45 Archaeological studies have revealed that people in the countryside outside the central basin largely continued to prosper. The prior “Triple Alliance” rulers had encour- aged interregional trade: local markets sold such useful items as copper nee- dles, jars of salt, and small bronze bells (for dancing and ceremonies). There was no reason for life to change much. Only rarely did a recalcitrant local noble find his compound attacked and his lineage destroyed. That was gener- ally not what Moctezuma had in mind.46

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.47 But tribute collection was no longer the officials’ only task. They sup- ported Nahua merchants engaged in long-distance trade, who were at the mercy of locals if not backed by Mexica royal authority; with such support, they could orchestrate luxury trades over impressively long distances.48 The officials also oversaw local diplomatic negotiations concerning, for the most

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part, chiefly marriages and inheritance, and they acted as judges upholding certain notions of law and justice, especially regarding landholding, which Moctezuma wished to see standardized, since in each area some lands were dedicated to helping to support Tenochtitlan. The tlatoani of each local alte- petl would continue, as he always had, to distribute farmlands among his own people, but in the case of any unresolved disputes, and certainly of any dis- putes with other altepetls, it was the prerogative of Tenochca judges to decide upon the proper distribution. They intervened with some frequency; years later, long after the Spaniards were in power, some local families were still sim- mering about Tenochtitlan’s decisions, which were generally still in force, by then having the weight of custom behind them.49

The vision Moctezuma and his councilors held of a well-regulated body politic was in some ways a product of generations of Nahua tradition. Their political organization had long revolved around what a leading historian has called a sort of “cellular principle.”50 That is, no individual human being was considered to stand alone in life but existed only in relation to others; nor did any group exist alone but rather thrived by virtue of their connections with those who surrounded them. Families were grouped into kin-based clans (usually called calpolli but sometimes by some other name), and these in turn were grouped together to form an altepetl, and altepetls in turn were often collected into a greater altepetl. It was understood that harmony among the whole depended upon each cellular segment doing its part: from time imme- morial, 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. In a sense, the Tenochtitlan state had become powerful enough to formalize some of these traditions on a vast scale, but with a twist—they, and no others, would always be the head of this carefully balanced body politic, a position they had worked hard to achieve.

The social organization began at home: Tenochtitlan offered a shining example of the world Moctezuma had in mind. There, the city’s four quarters or sub-altepetls were further divided along the lines of the calpolli, in units akin to parishes or wards, each with its own noble (pilli) families, in the midst of the commoner (macehualli) families. The macehualli families supported the noble families by paying them tribute; they worked hard in the chinamp- sas or a craftsman’s workshop, while the noble families organized their endeavors. In general, over the years, there had been relatively little tension

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within each calpolli: certain families had been more special than other fami- lies for so many generations that their lineage was unquestioned. And, as in all aspects of life, it was understood that every category of person had an impor- tant role to play. 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? It was a beautiful idea and one deeply familiar to the Mexica.

There are signs, however, that in later years the relative peace was threat- ened more often than it had been before. 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. He was remembered as saying, “Not all of my children will rule.” And he concluded that they should be trained to sup- port themselves as elite artisans, such as lapidaries, sculptors, and scribes.51 The problem only grew. It was the same in Texcoco. One old woman in the sixteenth century remembered how it had been in her girlhood in the late 1400s: “Back when I was growing up there was an infinite number of nobles. How many noble houses there were, the palaces of those who were nobles and rulers! It was like one big palace. There were countless minor lords and lesser relatives, and one could not count the commoners who were their depen- dents, or the slaves; they were like ants.”52 All of this created more than a few logistical problems. The nobility worked out complex understandings as to which family members would count as nobles in the sense of depending on tribute from commoners, and who could and could not be considered a pos- sible heir; they even created an accompanying terminology. One absolutely had to inherit one’s official status through the male line, they decided, thus reducing claimants by half.53

At this point, the organization of each calpolli was tightened. Each had its own officials charged with storing tribute and organizing public works (like the repair of the temples), and with hearing and settling disputes. There were separate officials to handle commoners’ grievances and those of the nobility, as well as a sort of high court that supervised both: the latter was called the tlacxitlan, meaning “the place at the foot [of something]”—implicitly, in this case, the foot of the ruler. No laws were written down, but certain principles of legal tradition were understood by all, and the judges issued penalties for breaking them. Adultery, for example, was a crime for everyone, punishable by stoning or strangling. The exact nature of the crime differed according to

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sex. A married woman could not have any sexual relations outside of her mar- riage; a married man could, but if he slept with a woman who was married, then he, too, was guilty. An indebted person could sell his or her child into slavery, but a young person who became a slave in this way was entitled to certain protections and to buying his or her way out of slavery if it were ever possible. In theory, those rights persisted everywhere. When questioned by Spaniards, some people later insisted that the Mexica kings sometimes tried to help families buy their loved ones back from distant places; in reality, it would have been impossible to find them once they were taken to the east. Still, the concept of a fixed law existed in the minds of many thousands of people, even without a written code.54

The many markets—the small ones in each calpolli neighborhood, as well as the massive one that had grown up at the north end of the island, in Tlatelolco—were also carefully administered by officials who ultimately answered to Moctezuma and his council. Women were an important part of market life, as both buyers and sellers, and for this reason, some of the officials who governed commerce were themselves women. They carried their staffs of office proudly, and were not afraid to report on and punish any delinquents. Anyone who stole from vendors or cheated customers or even got into a fight at the market would regret it.55 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 every- thing out. Every kind of merchandise was kept separate and had a fixed place marked for it.”56

One part of the market featured luxury goods—gold and silver, turquoise, jade and other gems, the feathers of exotic birds. Merchants sold these to arti- sans as raw materials, and to wealthy customers as finely crafted textiles and beautiful jewelry. Likewise, they sold plain cotton thread or cloth and also beautifully made embroidered cloaks and other clothing. In another area, they offered firewood and lumber, as well as wood carved into tool handles, paddles, and columns for buildings. They sold copper axe-heads and needles, white bark paper, pitch pine for torches, rubber balls, herbal medicines, tobacco, pipes, and row upon row of ceramic pots and dishes. They hawked goods made of sisal: twine, rope, nets, and sandals, as well as all manner of animal furs, tanned or untanned, dyed or undyed. They sold rough grinding stones and fine obsidian knives or mirrors, in which one could see every detail

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of one’s face.. In one corner, men could pay to have their hair cut. In another, they could buy a slave or find a prostitute.57

It was the section selling food stuffs, though, that most impressed people who had never been to the marketplace before. The stalls offered everything— every type of corn and bean, all varieties of salts and herbs. Birds and animals rustled in their cages. There were fruits and vegetables, cacao and honey, bird eggs and the delicious bars of dried algae from the lake. But what was remark- able about Tlatelolco, what made it different from neighborhood food mar- kets, was that food could be bought partially prepared, for urban customers too busy to make everything from scratch. One could buy pre-made tortillas and little cakes, squash already cut into pieces, smoked chilis, and ground cacao. Hungry shoppers could go to what was effectively a restaurant—a stand where prepared meals were available for sale.58

Doctors and healers, both men and women, also operated out of the market. They sold a variety of herbs that experience had taught would help with different ailments—blisters, constipation, diarrhea, itchy skin, eye sores, headache, or fever. They could also cast stones, a like throwing dice, to try to determine the best treatment for a mysterious ailment, or make a house call to perform a ceremony designed to oust a malicious force from the body. Later, well-meaning Spanish friars would try to insist that there had been some doc- tors who dealt only in efficacious herbs, while other evil ones preyed on peo- ple’s superstitions. It was the friars’ way of trying to save the reputation of some of the indigenous doctors in European eyes. But the extant descriptions make it clear that those who often worked with medicines and those who conducted ceremonies were one and the same.59

Startlingly—at least to newcomers—the market also served as a reposi- tory 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, and there was no better source than the urine from the island’s tens of thousands of people. Canoes full of basins of it were lined up near the market, and there the tanners and salt-makers brought their requisite supplies.60

It was not just the courts and the markets that were governed by an increas- ingly well-defined apparatus: the temples and schools were likewise becoming the bastions of a highly organized set of officials. By the time of Moctezuma, almost all of the city’s children, boys and well as girls, nobles as well as com- moners, were educated in temple-run schools. They entered these boarding

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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. Every girl learned the proper prayers for her marriage ceremony and for daily life. She learned to spin and weave and embroider if she had not already become adept, and she also learned her duties as a future wife and mother. 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.” Nursing mothers and the mothers of young children could expect to be up part of every night, and they must still rise early to haul the water, rekindle the fire, and start the breakfast without complaint. When that time came, a young woman should not be surprised. The adults in her life were preparing her to handle the harshness of reality.61

Every boy studied warfare, unless he had been selected as a likely priest or had been born into a merchant family. 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. That had always been true in almost every village in Mexico, but now the Mexicas’ predominant position absolutely depended on their success; there was no room for failure or for doubt if they did not want all the surrounding altepetls that hated theirs to rise up against them. The boys learned a craft from their parents at home—perhaps sculpting ceramic vessels, or making tiny golden animals with charcoal and wax molds, or gluing the velvety fibers of exotic feathers in intricate designs on shields— but when they were about thirteen, they all left home to train as warriors. In the early weeks after starting school, they swept and collected firewood; they sang in the evenings and enjoyed themselves. The violent exercises began gradually. The boys learned to withstand pain and to fight. As older teenagers, they might accompany warriors to battle, on the understanding that whole groups of them should try to bring in a captive by separating a man on the battlefield from his cohort and then working together as a well-practiced unit to bring him down.62

By about the age of twenty, the period of apprenticeship was finished. If a man did not then make kills or take captives on his own, he had to fear a life of shame. If in the years of training, it became clear that a particular boy

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simply could not fight successfully in any capacity, he could be designated as a burden bearer. For the rest of his life, he might, for instance, ply the aquatic edges of the town in a canoe loaded with vats of fresh water, leaving them in appointed places, and everyone would know why. How often such a fate became real we do not know, but the threat of such a destiny must certainly have weighed heavily as a boy grew into manhood.63 If, on the other hand, a young man was especially adept at fighting, he won honors for himself and his whole family. A 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. If he liked, he could take more than one wife, just like a born nobleman, for he could support them and the resulting chil- dren. Often such men were honored with an official position, and no one quarreled with their right to hold it.64

In the meantime, other boys were educated to become priests. The priests who trained them, who held such power in their lives, seem to have encom- passed a wide range of personalities. Some were remembered as wise and thoughtful; others, unsurprisingly, were brutal. They were there, after all, to teach a new generation to take over their duties in the bloody sacrificial ritu- als. When a student at a calmecac, as the schools were called, committed a particularly serious infraction, such as drinking, he was doomed to partici- pate in a ceremony in which the priests attempted to drown him—or seemed to attempt to do so. “They plunged him under the water and dragged him. They went pulling him along by the hair. They kicked him. As he swam under the water, churning, beating, and swirling it up as he went, he escaped the hands of the priests. . . . When he finally reached the shore, he lay half dead, breathing his last, gasping in his last agonies.” At that point the boy’s parents were allowed to take him home. The system was not without a certain moral impurity. If a mother and father were convinced that their child was not a good swimmer and thus might actually die, they could bribe the school offi- cials. “They would give the priests a turkey or some other kind of food, so that they would let [their boy] be.”65

The priests in general wielded increasing power as they became profes- sionalized and closely entwined with the state. Traditionally, every month in the Nahua ceremonial calendar had seen sacrificial victims die, but by the end of Moctezuma’s reign, so many were killed in Tenochtitlan every month that a significant number of priests had to have worked full time preparing for, orchestrating, and then cleaning up after the deaths. They cleaned the skulls and plastered them into great tzompantlis (skull racks). They no longer killed only specially arrayed impersonators of the god but also a variable number of

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ordinary captives, whose dead bodies, sprawled on the lower steps, were understood to receive the god figure into their arms as he or she fell down the pyramid. The priests who drugged the victims, tied them down, cut out their hearts, and burned what was left of them must have become inured to their activities over time. Spiritually infused potions were made with the remains of the dead; undoubtedly priests had touched these to their lips from time immemorial. But now parts of the sacred stew were sent to elite households for them to partake of as well, figuratively if not literally. 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. For him, going to the bat- tlefield was no longer feasible as he would have been too busy participating in the public ceremonies that ran with blood.66

Only a few decades earlier, Mexica society could not possibly have dedi- cated so much time, manpower, and psychic energy to the rituals of death. But their strength enabled them to do so by the later decades. And their lead- ers 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. When they were making war on peoples at the edge of their empire whom they wished to incorporate into the realm, they would seize some of the men and 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. “Thus they were undone, and disunited,” a man who had seen these spectacles later com- mented.67 Moctezuma especially liked to bring such visitors to see the gladia- torial sacrifice ceremony in the month of Tlacaxipeualtli, when captured warriors were forced to fight for their lives—only to be slain anyway. There was definitely an underside to the controlled, well-oiled workings of the beau- tiful city.

The levers of control sometimes even threatened the central valley’s most elite citizens. In 1498, just before Moctezuma took office, daughters of many of the city’s leading families were taken to nearby Texcoco to see a horrifying spectacle as a lesson on the importance of obedience and self-control. Years ago, before he died, Axayacatl had married off his daughter, also named Chalchiuhnenetzin, or Jade Doll, like her tragic aunt, to the young Nezahualpilli, the boy whom he himself had set on the throne of Texcoco.

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When the two young people grew up, they found they were not suited. Perhaps Jade Doll was arrogant, given who her father was. Then Axayacatl died, and his daughter was left vulnerable. Her uncle Ahuitzotl—who had never accepted that Axayacatl was chosen before him—now ruled in Tenochtitlan. He undoubtedly wanted a different primary wife for Nezahualpilli. Gossips claimed that the Mexica princess had committed adultery with at least two men. Nezahualpilli either believed that she had done so, or was convinced by the hostile Ahuitztotl that he must pretend to believe it. He ordered that his wife and her lovers and all the many people who had covered for them be put to death by stoning and strangling, just as the law demanded for all adultur- ers. Many years later, an old woman would recall the day’s events. “People came from the towns all around to see. Ladies brought along their daughters, even though they might still be in the cradle, to have them see. . . . Even some Tlaxcalans, and people from Huexotzinco and Atlixco, although they were our enemies, came to see.”68 She remembered that Nezahualpilli had regained his honor by hosting an unforgettable feast; she said it put to shame any that the Mexica had ever held. She had been a child, and the food had made a great impression on her, more so than the public executions.

We will never know if Axayacatl’s daughter really showed such poor judg- ment as to take lovers. Even if she did, she might have gotten away with it had there not been those in Nezahualpilli’s court who wished to see another woman become the primary wife. The enemies of her lineage had clearly moved quickly, thinking they could improve their own position in regards to the succession.69 Her death, however, did not settle matters in favor of anyone in particular. It merely left the playing field open. A noblewoman from the Atzacualco quarter of Tenochtitlan was a favored wife who bore Nezahualpilli eleven children, and many assumed that one of her sons would inherit.70 The eldest, Huexotzincatzin (Way-sho-tzeen-CAH-tzeen), was a popular man. In Moctezuma’s reign, he became known for his participation in the evening entertainments of singing, dancing, and the telling of histories. Unfortunately, in the politically competitive environment in which he lived, his love of these arts was to cost him dearly.

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. She was not from a noble lineage but was the daughter of a merchant from Tula; thus the bards did not even give her name, as they nearly always did for princesses, but merely called her “a lady from Tula.” What made her famous was not her beauty—for there were many beautiful women in the household of any tlatoani—but

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rather her ability to spin poems and turn them into songs like any man. She was not the only woman with this skill—the art of speaking was always valued in the Nahua world, and other women are on record as having been painters, speakers, and singers—but among young women, who were ideally supposed to be demure, she was nevertheless a rarity.71 Still, when the Lady of Tula later got into trouble, it was not because she was a woman, or even because she was an assertive woman in public. Rather, it was because she, too, like everyone else, was enmeshed in the dangerous politics born of polygyny.

In the courtyard performances of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and other alte- petls, there was always give-and-take among those who held the floor. It was expected that representatives of more than one sub-altepetl would offer their version of a crisis moment in history, or that more than one noble would offer a song lauding a leader or remembering a battle. Different performers would take their turn in succession. The expression of different points of view, they knew, worked to bind people together. 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, and for teasing and being witty in front of an audience. In breaking with tra- dition, they created art.72

What poems did they sing aloud? We have the lyrics of dozens of Nahua song-poems from the era, which overlap in theme and metaphor, but we can- not know exactly which lines were their favorites or how they spun them into new works, as all performers did.73 We can, on the other hand, get a good sense of the possibilities. At some point one of them must surely have sung one of the perennial favorites about the fragility of flowers, the fleeting nature of earthly joys. Such a song would have flowed easily from the heart of a woman taken from the land of her birth to serve others until her death:

My heart is angry. We are not born twice, not engendered twice. Instead we leave this earth forever. We are in the presence of this company but a moment! It can never be—I will never be happy, never be content. Where does my heart live? Where is my home? Where does my house lie? I suffer on this earth.

The singer’s next lines were addressed to the creator god, who had such power to dispense joy in the midst of earth’s sufferings: “You are a giver of jade stones, you unfold them spun like feathers, you give flower crowns to princes.”74

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Huexotzincatzin could have responded to such a salvo with a typical poem of joy and laughter, trying to get the woman to smile, rather than continuing the lament. If so, the change of genre would have been a startling move to the audience. Or perhaps the man did continue with the same type of song laced with sadness, but looked meaningfully and directly at the originator of the dialogue, reminding her that, like all who have lived on earth, she would not be forgotten. He could easily have referenced their common Nahua ances- tors—for the songs were full of such images—and complimented her beauty at the same time. The old song, known in Itzcoatl’s time, ran thus: “You died among the mesquite plants of the Seven Caves. The eagle was calling, the jag- uar cried. And you, a red flamingo, were flying onwards, from the midst of a field to a place unknown.”75 In reading the surviving songs, hearing their cadences, and noting their powerful imagery, it becomes clear that the possi- bilities for a charged literary encounter were virtually infinite.

Whatever the two young poets did, Huexotzincatzin was the king’s son and the lady his woman, and the aging Nezahualpilli did not like it. Under normal circumstances, he surely would have handled the matter in private, since the culprit was his son. But in Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma the Younger had been looking for an excuse to replace Huexotzincatzin as the presumed heir, and now he had one. He wanted the Texcocan’s king’s heir to be a close relative of his own, someone who would always do exactly as he said. His nephew Cacama, a son of Nezahualpilli by a granddaughter of Tlacaelel, seemed a likely candidate. But first he had to get rid of Huexotzincatzin and his numerous brothers without causing a civil war in the central valley.

In the mid-1500s the elderly woman who remembered seeing the execu- tions of 1498 also remembered Huexotzincatzin’s strangulation a number of years later. She didn’t like it. “He was punished just for composing songs to the Lady of Tula,” she said briefly. Rumor had it, she added, that Nezahualpilli shut himself up in his palace to suffer his grief. But Moctezuma had been implacable. He claimed there would be no order if the nobility were allowed to flout the laws and even make cuckholds of their own fathers. He insisted that the cord be tightened around Huexotzincatzin’s handsome neck. (No source says explicitly what happened to the Lady of Tula, but undoubtedly she died, too, since other sources show culprits being punished in pairs.)76 Moctezuma must have hoped that this tactic would frighten Huexotzincatzin’s younger brothers into allowing his nephew to become the heir. Two of the older ones did come to bargain immediately: they accepted lands and titles, which their sons and grandsons still held in the 1560s. The younger boys were not considered a threat, and so Moctezuma left them alone, and this was a

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tactical error. Not so many years later, one of them would be among the first to ally with the newcomers from across the sea.77

But for now, in Nezahualpilli’s and Moctezuma’s courts, voices rose in song, and then dropped to relate the passionate tales of history. Conch-shell trumpets called hauntingly. In the early 1500s, Flamingo Snake, the drummer and singer who had so pleased Axayacatl, was still alive, and he loved to hear the performances. As a Chalcan, he knew all about the darker side of Mexica power. But he also knew and loved the beauty of the world the Mexica had helped to build, for he saw artists of the different altepetls responding to each other’s work and inspirations. They were not caught in traditional patterns but were eager to experiment. He listened to it all, and then bent to his drum and made it speak (as he would have put it), just as he had when he was young. 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 vil- lages of strangers whom he himself would never see. Thus it had always been, and thus it would always be: 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. The people who lived in Tenochtitlan were convinced that they had built something worth protecting for whatever time on earth they could.

***

Not far from the palace courtyards where the voices rose, there stood many storage chambers. Some of these were for in tlilli in tlapalli, the black and the red, meaning the painted texts of the scribes. They were care- fully rolled or folded up accordion style and placed in the proper wooden bins and reed chests. A few were timelines illustrating histories, and the his- tory tellers used these to remember what to say during performances or to help determine when a song might be appropriate. Most of the painted texts, however, had nothing to do with art or beauty. Whether Flamingo Snake knew it or not, most were business records—records of boundary decisions and chains of authority, of noble lineages, and tribute due. Moctezuma even sent people—often frightened merchants—to record their observations of the type of business conducted in as yet unconquered areas and the kinds of resources available there. About 1515, Nezahualpilli died and tensions broke out in Texcoco, as some of Huexotzincatzin’s younger brothers had proven unwilling to keep quiet about their right to inherit; they again had to be bribed with a large share of the realm, at least for a while. Moctezuma was

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very busy with that matter, and with a brief war involving the ornery altepetl of Huexotzinco: When they lost a war with Tlaxcala that he himself had incited them to begin, he had to receive many refugees from their land. He nevertheless kept track of what was going on in more distant regions as well. In 1518 he sent observers to investigate some strangers who had apparently made several appearances in Maya country along the sea coast. Governing the precarious lands he ruled required eternal vigilance, for the collectivity was a finely tuned organism—like life itself, where ferocity and peace lay side by side—and such an organism could not be expected to maintain itself. As king of the Mexica, he certainly believed that it was worth protecting. And his peo- ple trusted him to guard it; it was their very definition of the duty of a tla- toani. “The ruler used to keep vigil through the night,” they remembered.78

***

From where they were hidden, Moctezuma’s messengers could see a long stretch of the beach. The newcomers galloped their beasts—like huge deer, they thought, but much more stalwart—up and down the hard-packed sand, wheeling around suddenly and giving great shouts of laughter. Their arrow-shattering metal raiment glinted in the sun. The strangers glanced self-consciously at the bluffs, knowing they were being watched. The observ- ers knew they knew . . . but didn’t care. It was not their mission to maintain secrecy but to gather intelligence. They took notes, carefully recording in glyphs all that they saw before them. Beyond the beach, the strangers’ great boats were anchored in the waves. The watchers had seen many canoes in their time, but none as big as these. In a stroke of pure genius, the boats’ makers had thought to hang cloth blankets from poles, so as to catch the wind and speed their travel. Men could live for many days on boats that size; they could have come from far away indeed.79

When the messengers were ready, they turned to begin the trip back to the city. They knew the shortest routes leading from the humid lowlands up into the pine forests. They knew where to find passage through the ring of moun- tains that surrounded the great valley. They knew when to rest and when to push forward relentlessly. In a matter of days, they knelt before their king.

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The frightened girl and her companions followed the winding path from the Maya town of Potonchan, on the shore of the Gulf, down to the beach where the strang- ers were encamped. They moved through the shadows, surrounded by gnarled and twisted trees—ceiba, mahogany, rubber—the exposed dirt path glinting sil- very-gray wherever the sunlight managed to strike it. Warriors armed with spears walked with them, in case anyone should suddenly try to run. The young women were to be peace offerings to the fearsome newcomers; they could not outrun their fate. As the group came out into the bright sunlight, they saw the giant boats they had heard so much about, with their cloths hung to catch the wind. The bearded ones turned from their smoking camp fires—they were desperately trying to keep the mosquitoes away—to stare brazenly at the offered women.1

***

When she was young, the girl would have been called something like Daughter Child. Some girls in her world earned funny, affectionate names— like She’s-Not-a-Fish or Little Old Woman—or poetic ones—like Deer Flower—but most were simply called “Elder Daughter,” “Middle Child,” or “Youngest,” at least until their personalities became better known.2 Living at the fringes of empire, this Daughter Child had no illusions about the agonies

A girl learns to weave. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 60r.

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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.

When she was born to a Nahua nobleman of Coatzacoalcos, farther west along the coast—close to today’s Veracruz—her mother had undoubtedly buried her umbilical cord near the hearth, as almost all Nahuatl-speaking mothers did. She would have uttered a prayer something like this: “You will be the heart of the home. You will go nowhere. You will not become a wan- derer anywhere. You become the banked fire, the hearthstones.”3 It was what anyone would have wanted for a beloved daughter. The mother’s prayers, however, had been in vain. Although the child’s father was a highly ranked nobleman, her mother was no one important, probably a slave. It was such women’s children who were most vulnerable in moments of crisis.

And the crisis came. The Coatzacoalcos region was the next target in the Mexicas’ perennial expansion. When the Mexica and their allies approached other altepetls to demand their allegiance, it was the children of less powerful mothers who generally found themselves in harm’s way. 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 hap- pened to Daughter Child. Whether her father’s people had managed to pre- vent war with the Mexica by offering a sort of preemptive tribute, or whether they had actually lost a battle and been forced to sue for peace by offering a gift, is unknown. Regardless, the child was ripped from her kin and placed in a canoe with other captives. As the boat pulled away from the shore and sliced rapidly through the water, bearing her in the direction of the rising sun, she had no reason to believe she would ever see her home again.4

Daughter Child would have guessed that she was being taken to one of the neutral trading ports that rendered long-distant trade possible in war-ridden Mesoamerica. 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. These were the two kinds of currency in the busy, polyglot town that nestled in a giant blue lagoon. Here, there were no pyramids or stone monuments, just buildings made of mud and sticks of wood. No one had time to construct anything more, for they were there to trade, not to pray. People came from far and wide, and no one attacked the place, for it was too important to all of them. Every kingdom’s merchants depended on the existence of such towns.5

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From Xicallanco the girl was brought back westward to the town of Potonchan, near the mouth of the Tabasco River. 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. They used their riches to buy food and favors from the surrounding farmers and to purchase slaves from the long-distance Nahua traders. Those slaves made it possible for them to pro- duce large quantities of beautiful cotton cloth that others were willing to pay a great deal for.6

It was the honored wives and daughters of Chontal men who did most of the weaving, not the enslaved women. The creation of cloth, of tapestry, was a holy task, beloved by the gods. But while the honored wives devoted their time to weaving, other women were needed to grind corn, make tortillas, fetch water, and care for young children. A host of other textile-related activi- ties could be assigned to slaves as well. Someone had to sow and harvest the cotton plants. Then the fibers needed to be beaten and carded for many hours to rid them of the dirt and flecks. The fibers then had to be spun into yarn; dyes had to be made out of plants or shellfish and then the yarns repeatedly boiled in them until they reached the desired color. Finally the looms needed to be warped in preparation for the actual weaving. Then at last the great lady of the house could begin the sacred task of weaving. As a Nahua girl child, the newly purchased child would have adapted to her assigned chores relatively easily: back home, she would have begun by the age of five to learn to use a little spindle to make yarn, and she would have been taught to cook and clean as well.7

Years passed, and Daughter Child had a new name, a slave’s name. In her new life, no one claimed her as kin. She was no one’s Elder Sister, or Youngest Child. We do not know what the Maya who had purchased her called her. Whether she was coerced into having sexual relations, we will also never know, although that would have been a typical part of an enslaved woman’s experience. As the girl grew to early womanhood, not much differentiated one year from another. Then in 1517, the townsfolk heard that some strangers with remarkably hairy faces had landed a very large boat at Champoton, another Chontal town lying to the east. After a skirmish, the outsiders were driven off, with many of their men badly wounded, but they left many Chontal warriors wounded and dying. The strangers were clearly dangerous to the political order—a political order that required the Chontal to appear invul- nerable to the surrounding peoples.

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The strangers returned the next year. This time, they bypassed the feisty town of Champoton. Messengers on speeding canoes came to say that they had stopped near Xicallanco, but didn’t find it, hidden as it was in its lagoon. They kidnapped four young boys who had boarded the boat to trade and then proceeded west. All of Potonchan waited. Within days, the strangers found the mouth of the Rio Tabasco. From where they floated, they could see the town clearly. Hundreds of Chontal warriors gathered along the shore; they made their way out toward the larger boat in dozens of canoes, arrows notched, ready to fly. A huge dog aboard the strangers’ boat spotted land, jumped overboard, and began to swim toward the shore. The young Chontal men gave a great shout and showered the creature with arrows. Within moments, something aboard the massive boat seemed to explode, and bits of metal flew everywhere, wounding many. Some slumped over, apparently dead. The Chontal retreated.8

All the households buzzed with gossip. The next day, the town’s leaders sent a few canoes of men out to try to parley, and the strangers brought for- ward a young prisoner who spoke their language. He told the Chontal he had been kidnapped years ago near Cozumel. Yes, the warriors said, they had heard rumors that strangers were occasionally appearing along the eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula, and some even asserted that they governed a huge island six days’ sail to the east of Cozumel, but the previous year was the first time they had heard a full and coherent story, from Champoton. The interpreter told them the strangers were indeed dangerous and that they sought gold and food in regular supplies. To the indigenous, this signified that they were demanding tribute; it was not good news. The Chontal asked the interpreter to explain that the Mexica, far to the west, were really the peo- ple to seek if they wanted gold and other precious goods, but that they would barter what they had, if only the strangers would return the four boys they had kidnapped near Xicallanco. Some goods were brought out and traded, but the boys were not returned. Later that day the winds were right, and the strangers rapidly put up a sail and departed.9

No one could tell if they were gone for good. The Chontal leaders built a few stockades and arranged for neighboring peoples to fight at their side if it came to that. The people harvested their corn and cacao and wove their cloth. Many undoubtedly forgot about the incident or put it out of their minds. But if the women had ceased to gossip and speculate about the strangers, the sub- ject nevertheless resurfaced dramatically less than a year later. In 1519 a mes- senger arrived, saying that no fewer than ten of the big boats were sailing westward from Cozumel.10

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The ships came straight to Potonchan. In the talks that unfolded between Spaniard and Indian on the very first day—undoubtedly while the women and children were being led out of the city—the Chontal leaders said bluntly that they would kill anyone who entered their land. They offered food and advised the strangers to leave before anything unpleasant happened. The for- eigners’ leader, a man in his early thirties who called himself “Hernando Cortés,” refused to listen. Instead, he made plans to come ashore. He divided his men into two groups. One landed at the mouth of the river on the coast and then moved overland toward the town, and the other sailed upriver, then drew near the settlement in smaller boats and began to wade ashore in a tight formation. Their glinting swords were bared, creating a circle of space around them, and their outer clothing was likewise made of metal, so they could move with relative impunity, as the Indians’ stone arrowheads and spear tips shattered against it. Still, it was tough going for them. One of the strangers later described the scene:

With great bravery the [locals] surrounded us in their canoes, pouring such a shower of arrows on us that they kept us in the water up to our waists. There was so much mud and swamp that we had difficulty get- ting clear of it; and so many Indians attacked us, hurling their lances and shooting arrows, that it took us a long time to struggle ashore. While Cortés was fighting, he lost a sandal in the mud and could not recover it. So he landed with one bare foot.11

As soon as they were ashore, the invaders began to use their crossbows and lances against the indigenous, who were armored only in padded cotton, forc- ing them to retreat. With their metal weapons, the strangers broke through the wooden stockades that had been constructed, and then the other group of outsiders, who had been making their way overland, arrived. The Indians rap- idly withdrew, and the newcomers were left in command of the abandoned center of Potonchan, a square surrounded by empty temples and halls. There they slept, with sentries standing guard. Armed and armored and in a large group, they were relatively invulnerable. But they soon grew hungry. When they sent out foraging parties, the Chontal attacked them guerrilla-style and killed several men.12

Two days later, the strangers, determined to make something happen, moved out in a body onto an open plain. Wave after wave of warriors attacked the group of metal-clad foreigners, perishing before the lethal steel weapons, but wearing them down nevertheless. The battle continued for more than an

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hour. The Chontal lords thought the strangers would surely tire soon, and then their own greater numbers would carry the day. Then, from behind, there suddenly came thundering over the plain more enemies mounted on huge quadrupeds, twenty times as strong as deer. Under cover of night, the Spaniards had unloaded ten horses from the ships that were still in the mouth of the river. It was a time-consuming and difficult task, requiring pulleys and canvas slings, but the men were protected by darkness and their armor, and whichever Chontal were watching could not possibly have known how sig- nificant these actions would turn out to be. The horsemen, who had been struggling through the coastal swamps all morning, came charging over the flat grasslands, cutting down Chontal foot soldiers with wild exhilaration. The warriors had no alternative but to withdraw.

The leaders of Potonchan counted their missing men, whose bodies lay strewn over the field of battle. They had lost over 220 warriors in only a few hours. Nothing comparable had ever occurred in all the histories recorded in stone or legend. They simply could not afford to keep up a fight like that. Even if in the end they could drive these men away, the battle would do them no good, for everyone in their world would learn of it. They would be left weak and defenseless, vulnerable to their enemies, having lost many hundreds of their own.13 Moreover, it seemed likely that more of these strangers would arrive the following year. So it was that the Chontal sued for peace. One of the enemy, strangely enough, spoke some Yucatec Mayan, a language well known to the Chontal. He had been a prisoner on the pen- insula for years. He said that his leader, Cortés, would forgive them if they made amends.

Among many other gifts, the Chontal leaders sent twenty slave girls down to the shore. The young woman from Coatzacoalcos was among them.14 She watched as a man who was evidently a religious figure approached them in a costume different from that of all the others. He made gestures and mur- mured prayers of some kind, finally sprinkling water on each new arrival. Daughter Child’s new name, she learned, was Marina. Her captors did not ask what her former name had been, nor did she tell them.15 Almost immediately, she was presented to a confident, even arrogant man whom the others deferred to. She could not yet pronounce his name, but she heard that it was “Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero.”16 Later she would learn what gave the man his authority among these people: he was first cousin to a nobleman, the Count of Medellín, across the ocean in the place called Spain. Cortés had been so excited to have someone of his stature along that he had given him a sorrel mare as a gift and would now present him with the most beautiful girl in the

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group. Marina’s spiritual baptism, it turned out, had simply been a prelimi- nary to rape.17

Marina learned a great deal in the next few days. This wasn’t only because she was an astute observer who could hold her feelings in check. She found she could speak easily to the foreigner named Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had been relaying messages to the Chontal.18 Over eight years earlier, when he was about twenty years old, he had been aboard a ship that capsized near Cancun. A good swimmer, he made it to shore. But then he was taken prisoner by the Yucatec Maya and had labored as a slave among them ever since, learning enough of their language to function. When Cortés arrived in the area where he was living and learned of his existence, he ransomed him so that he might serve as an interpreter, one who would be more loyal than any the strangers had ever had. Aguilar did not speak Chontal, but Marina and some of the other women spoke enough Yucatec Mayan that they could communicate with him easily. Fortunately, Marina had a razor-sharp mind, and she soon realized that there was a staggering amount of information that she needed to absorb and process rapidly if any of it was going to be of use to her.

It seemed that the sea that surrounded their world was not boundless after all. It was larger than she could imagine, but within about ten weeks’ sailing toward the rising sun, there lay a land full of people who worshipped a power- ful god of their own. They called themselves cristianos, among many other names. In any case, explained Jerónimo de Aguilar, his people were one group among many who worshipped this same god. He himself was, he said, a Spaniard, and it was the Spaniards who had first discovered this part of the earth, this New World, and conquered and settled the great islands that lay a few days to the east in the Caribbean Sea. At first the Spaniards thought that they had reached the islands off the coast of a place called Asia, such as the famed Cipangu ( Japan), or perhaps India. The explorer called Columbus was so convinced of this that he had named the people he met “Indians,” and the name stuck. After more than ten years, the newcomers had acknowledged that what they had found was not Asia, but a landmass hitherto unimagined by anyone. They sent out many exploratory expeditions from the Caribbean and kidnapped a number of interpreters. They thought they had learned that on this mainland there was a rich nation somewhere to the west. It was impor- tant that they find it, Aguilar added, for there were now about five thousand Spaniards living in the Caribbean, and there simply was not enough wealth for all of them. Over four hundred men and another hundred or so servants and retainers had come away with Cortés on his expedition, convinced as they were that better things awaited them over the western horizon. They

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would be grievously disappointed and therefore dangerous, at least to their own leaders, if they did not find what they sought. But Hernando Cortés had no intention of letting them taste such bitterness.19

In the days after peace was made with the Chontal, the two sides did a brisk business together, the Spaniards presenting goods they had brought for the purpose in exchange for food. The priest they had with them said mass. Jerónimo de Aguilar may have tried to explain some of what he was talking about, but it would have been difficult. Later, a linguistically talented mis- sionary would try to translate Hail Mary into an indigenous language. He heard the murmured words in his head: Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Virgin, mother of God, pray for us sinners. Amen. He tried to convey these words in an utterly foreign tongue to people who were com- pletely unfamiliar with any of the ideas. He struggled. “May you be joyful, oh sainted Mary, you who are full of gracia.” He left just that one word in Spanish; it was too difficult to translate. He went on, “God the king is with you. You are the most praiseworthy of all women. And very praiseworthy is your womb of precious fruit, is Jesus. Oh Saint Mary, oh perfect maiden, you are the mother of God. May you speak for us wrong-doers. May it so be done.”20 The much less articulate Jerónimo de Aguilar could not even have gotten this far. As they listened, the Chontal looked non-committal, but politely kept their impatience to themselves. When they were given a chance to speak, they said nothing about God or his mother. Instead, they worked to convince the Spaniards that the type of tribute they sought could best be delivered by the Mexica, to the west.

On the day that the Spaniards called Palm Sunday, they took to their ships with the twenty enslaved women and headed west. About three days later, they passed near the land of Marina’s birth, drawing into the entrance to the Coatzacoalcos River at the foot of the Tuxtla mountains. This place, however, seemed to be of no interest to her new masters. They sailed on, and she watched the coast of her homeland recede once again in the distance. A day later, they anchored at a point that had been charted by the previous year’s expedition, on the site of today’s Veracruz.

Within half an hour, two canoes approached the flagship of the fleet, which bore Cortés and Puertocarrero and their Indian servants. Moctezuma, they would later learn, had ordered that this spot be watched since the strang- ers had visited it the year before.21 Cortés called for Jerónimo de Aguilar and asked him to translate. The man tried. In his desperation, he may even have considered feigning comprehension, but that could only go so far. Aguilar

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spoke Yucatec Mayan well enough, but unbeknownst to him, the expedition had now left Maya territory. He was hearing Nahuatl and could make nothing of it. Cortés grew angry. He had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to ransom the castaway, and the man had assured him he could speak to Indians. Now it seemed he couldn’t, after all.

The young woman now named Marina did have alternatives. She could have remained silent. No one expected a young slave girl to step forward in that moment and become an international conduit. But she chose to explain what the Nahuatl speakers were saying. By the end of that hour, she had made her full value felt. Afterward, Cortés claimed that he took her aside along with Aguilar, and promised her “more than her liberty” if she would help him find and speak to this Moctezuma of whom he now had heard so much. He meant that he would make her rich; it was what he promised everyone who agreed to help him.22 But it is doubtful that Marina acted out of any interest in the riches promised by an interloper whom she had no real reason to trust. Her motivations would have been quite different. As it was, she was the con- cubine of Puertocarrero—a man with so few morals that he had once even abandoned a Spanish girl whom he had persuaded to run away with him. When he tired of his Indian slave girl, or when he was killed, Marina would be passed on and might even become the common property of all the men. Alternatively, she could speak aloud, earning the respect and gratitude of every Spaniard there, especially their leader. If she did that, the group might survive longer, and she along with them, for if she rendered it possible for them to communicate with the local people, she could help stave off battles, gain important information, and aid them in trading more efficiently for food. She does not seem to have hesitated. Within days, the Spaniards were calling her “doña” Marina, a title reserved for highborn ladies in Europe. Over the months to come, she proved herself to be both courageous and charming; she even managed to laugh at times.

Mexicans today generally consider Marina to have been a traitor to Native American people. But at the time, if anyone had asked her if she should per- haps show more loyalty to her fellow Indians, she would have been genuinely confused. In her language, there was no word that was the equivalent of “Indians.” Mesoamerica was the entire known world; the only term for “peo- ple native to the Americas” would have been “human beings.” And in her experience, human beings most definitely were not all on the same side. The Mexica were her people’s enemies. It was they who had seen to it that she was torn from her family, and their merchants who had sold her in Xicallanco. Now this relatively small group of newcomers wanted to make war on the

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Mexica. No one in her world could have imagined that she owed loyalty to the Moctezuma’s people. While she lived, and for many years afterwards, no one expressed surprise at the course she chose. Only modern people who lacked knowledge of her situation would later say that she was some sort of traitor.

Gradually, Marina and others of her generation did begin to understand that the people on the American side of the ocean were profoundly different in some regards from the people on the other side of the sea, and that the former were eventually going to lose to the latter. None of them, however, could see that at first contact. The indigenous people struggled with catego- ries and eventually began to refer to themselves as nican titlaca (NEE-kan tee-TLA-kah, “we people here”), whenever they needed to distinguish them- selves as a whole from the outsiders who were arriving. Moctezuma’s messen- gers, for example, told him that the interpreter the strangers had with them was not one of the ones from across the sea, but rather “one of us people here.” They explained that she was from the eastern lands; they never meant that she was “one of us” in the sense of being one of the Mexicas’ own. It would not have occurred to them to expect any loyalty from her, any more than they would have from anyone else whom they had made war against.23

In the first few days after Cortés discovered that he had such a marvelous translation chain at his disposal, he worked hard to convince Moctezuma’s messengers that he needed to be taken to meet their lord in person. Meanwhile, the emissaries worked hard gathering information and preparing their report. Sometimes they questioned Cortés though Marina and Aguilar; sometimes they spied on the Spanish encampment, watching them race their horses up and down the hard-packed sand of low tide. Soon they decided they had as much information as they could glean easily, and they departed.24

The Spaniards covered themselves with stinking grease to try to ward off the mosquitoes that swarmed them, driving them nearly mad. And then they waited.

***

Many years later, it would become an accepted fact that the indige- nous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortés to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated so many times, in so many reputable sources, that the whole world came to believe it. Moctezuma was not known for his cheerful

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disposition. Even he, however, had he known what people would one day say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.25

What really happened when the messengers returned with their report was that he sent scouts out to every important town between Tenochtitlan and the coast, and then set up a veritable war room. This is exactly what one would expect him to have done, given his history as a ferociously successful tlatoani who believed whole-heartedly in order, discipline, and information. Years later, a man who had been young at the time remembered: “A report of everything that was happening was given and relayed to Moctezuma. Some of the messengers would be arriving as others were leaving. There was no time when they weren’t listening, when reports weren’t being given.”26 The scouts even repeated a summary of the religious instruction that was being regularly offered by the Spanish priest and translated by Aguilar and Marina. When the Spaniards later got to Tenochtitlan and tried to deliver a sermon to Moctezuma, he cut them off, explaining that he was already familiar with their little speech, his messengers having presented it to him in full.27

Only one European recorded the events in writing as they were unfolding— or at least, only one account from that time has survived. Hernando Cortés himself penned a series of letters that he sent back to the king of Spain between 1519 and 1525. These are our only existing direct source, all other commentar- ies having been written years later when their authors were older men and the events deep in the past. And in his letters, written on the spot, Cortés never claimed that he was perceived as a god.

The idea first appeared, albeit in somewhat incoherent form, in some writ- ings by Europeans in the 1540s. Fray Toribio de Benavente wrote of the indig- enous observers’ purported understanding: “Their god was coming, and because of the white sails, they said he was bringing by sea his own temples.” Then, remembering that he had earlier claimed that all the Spaniards were supposed to have been gods, the priest quickly added, “When they disem- barked, they said that it was not their god, but rather many gods.”28 It was a deeply satisfying concept to this European author and his readers. In such a scenario, the white men had nothing to feel remorse about, no matter how much the Indians had suffered since their arrival. The Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been worshipped. Indeed, could there be a European man living who didn’t like the idea, who didn’t feel flattered and pleased by the notion? In years to come, other invaders would try out comparable asser- tions. John Smith, for example, would claim that in Virginia, the local chief ’s daughter had been wildly in love with him and had been willing to sacrifice

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her very life for his. He didn’t mention that when he had known her, she had been only ten years old. And interestingly, he only told the story of her adula- tion when she and her English husband had both been dead for years and couldn’t possibly refute what he said; in the report he sent back to London during the period in question, he said nothing remotely similar. There are, in fact, numerous such tales in the annals of colonialism.29

In retrospect, the story of Cortés being mistaken for a god seems so obvi- ously self-serving and even predictable that one has to wonder why it was believed for so long. In a fascinating turn of events, by the 1560s and ’70s, some of the Indians themselves were beginning to offer up the story as fact. The first ones to do so were the students of the very Franciscan friars who had originally touted the idea. The young indigenous writers were from elite families, the same ones who, forty or fifty years earlier had lost everything with the arrival of the Spaniards. And they were longing for an explanation. How had their once all-powerful fathers and grandfathers sunk so low? They were intimately acquainted with both sets of people—their Mexica families and their European teachers. They knew them both too well to believe that their own people were simply inferior, necessarily weaker or less intelligent than Europeans. Their own personal experience taught them that this was definitely not the case.

Here, however, was an explanation. God had been on the side of the Christians, of course; their own immediate ancestors had been trapped by their own loyalty to a blinding faith, tragically imprisoned in their own religi- osity. The students of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the Florentine Codex, beginning in the 1560s and ’70s, wrote down what no indigenous person had ever said before—namely, that their forefathers had been paralyzed even before 1519 by the appearance of a variety of terrifying omens. Interestingly, the stories they told bore a distinct resemblance to the narrations in certain Greek and Latin texts that were in the Franciscan school library.30 They waxed eloquent in their tales of pillars of fire and a trembling king. A few pages later, the students turned to a new phase of the project and began to write down what certain old men who had actually participated in the events had to say, and then both the substance and the tone of their writ- ings changed dramatically. They became much more specific and the indige- nous people they described much more pragmatic. “At the first shot the wall did not give way, but the second time it began to crumble,” someone remem- bered, for instance. Gone were the pillars of fire.31

The students weren’t done with the subject of influential prophecies, how- ever. They liked an idea that one of their teachers had offered, which was that the great schism that had occurred in ancient Tula, present in so many of their

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early histories, had really been a battle between a brutal leader who believed in human sacrifice and a peaceful one who did not—one who was in effect an early Christian, unbeknownst even to himself. The group that had wandered away to the east had been following the peaceful leader. If they decided the man’s name was not Huemac, as a leading culture hero of numerous ancient stories was called, but rather Quetzalcoatl, as the former teacher fray Toribio was the first one to suggest, the story would work perfectly, as one of the many year signs associated with the god Quetzalcoatl corresponded to 1519. The mortal man could have become a god and been expected to return then. Unfortunately, the students got the matter a bit confused. From their people’s own records, they knew of the arrivals along the coast in the two preceding years, and they said it was the second captain who was thought to be Quetzalcoatl returning from the east.32 That one was actually Juan de Grijalva, sailing in 1518, not Cortés arriving in 1519. But no matter. The gist of the story was there, and it could be taken up in generations to come and embellished as much as future authors saw fit to do.

None of the original Nahua histories written down by the earliest genera- tion of students in the privacy of their own homes had said anything like this. In fact, none of the elements ring true, given what we know about Mexica culture. The Mexica did not believe in people becoming gods, or in gods com- ing to earth only in one particular year, or in anybody having a preordained right to conquer them. They didn’t consider Quetzalcoatl to be their major deity (like the Cholulans did) or originally associate him with an abhorrence of human sacrifice. When we add the fact that we can actually watch the sto- ry’s birth and evolution in European-authored and European-influenced works, the case for its being a later fabrication seems closed.33

However, even if the notion that the Mexica mistook Cortés for the god Quetzalcoatl is discounted, the fact remains that they did refer to the Spaniards for a number of years as teules. Beginning a generation later, Spanish writers delighted in this, as it was a bastardization of the Nahuatl word teotl, meaning “god.” But the word carried other connotations as well. In religious ceremonies, a teotl was a representative of the god, destined for sacrifice. In certain other contexts, the word implied strange and unearthly power, such as some sorcerers or priests might wield. At the time, the Europeans seemed to understand this: in an early letter back to Cortés, the Spanish king instructed him to take special care to convert the Indians’ political leaders (their “señores,” he said) as well as their priests (their “teules,” he called them).34 Later genera- tions, however, forgot what the Spaniards had initially understood about the word’s use, probably because they hadn’t seen the chaos and confusion of the

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earliest interactions. In general, the Nahuas struggled to come up with terms that would apply to the Spaniards. In their world, everybody was named for the place from which they came (the Tenochca from Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalteca from Tlaxcala, the Culhuaque from Culhuacan, etc.). If a person’s geographical origins were unknown, then it wasn’t clear what to call him. The newcomers presented a problem in this regard. The only element that rapidly became clear was that the strangers considered themselves to be representa- tives of their god. That made sense to the Nahuas. Until they were certain what the name of the newcomers’ god was—and the strangers used a confus- ing array of terms—it apparently seemed most logical to refer to them by a word that conveyed they were the representatives of a revered divinity.35

Their choice of labels apparently left even some of their own grandchildren believing that the white men really had been considered gods. The fact remained that those grandchildren desperately needed to come to terms with the conquest. That their ancestors had been benighted savages, as the Spaniards sometimes said, they knew to be false. But their ancestors could perhaps have made a mistake of this nature, and if they had, it might explain a great deal.36

Indigenous youths of the late 1500s had no way of knowing the deep his- tory of either the Old World or the New. They had no way of knowing that in the Old World, people had been full time farmers for ten thousand years. Europeans had by no means been the first farmers, but they were nevertheless the cultural heirs of many millennia of sedentary living. They therefore had the resultant substantially greater population and a panoply of technologies—not just metal arms and armor, but also ships, navigation equipment, flour mills, barrel-making establishments, wheeled carts, printing presses, and many other inventions that rendered them more powerful than those who did not have such things. In the New World, people had been full-time farmers for perhaps three thousand years. It was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians. The Mesopotamians were stunningly impres- sive—but they could not have defeated Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire working in combination with the Pope. Had the young indigenous writers of the late sixteenth century known all of this, it would have been a relief to their minds. But that relief was denied them. And so they partici- pated in constructing a version of events that Moctezuma would have derided—but that he had no power to change from the land of the dead.

***

In the rainy season of 1519, neither the Spaniards nor the Mexica knew what stories would someday be told about them. At the time, both sets

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of people had pressing realities to contend with. Neither could spare time or energy for philosophical musings about the future, historical memory, or the nature of truth.

First of all, the Spaniards were hungry. Marina bargained as effectively as she could. From the people living nearby, she bought cages full of turkeys, and some of the other women plucked and stewed them. She bought tortillas and salt, fruits and vegetables. The people grew used to dealing with her and sought her out. They did not have an “r” in their language, so they heard her name as “Malina.” They added the honorific “-tzin” to the end, and it became “Malintzin,” which sometimes came out as “Malintze.” As the Spanish speak- ers did not have the “tz” sound in their language, they heard the “Malinchi” or sometimes “Malinche.” Thus when they did not call her “doña Marina,” they called her “Malinche,” and so she has remained to historians ever since. What the Spaniards found disorienting was that to the various groups they dealt with, this woman seemed to be the most important member of their party. They did not even seem to see Jerónimo de Aguilar, and they called Hernando Cortés himself “Malinche,” as if her name must be his name, too, though the Spaniards felt it should have been the other way around.37

Cortés knew he was dependent on Malintzin, and he did not like it. In his letters home to the king, he referred to her as little as possible. He might not have referred to her at all, but then his whole story would have been suspect, as there were moments where an interpreter simply had to have been present in order for events to have transpired as they did. What Cortés did not want others to realize was that if Malintzin hadn’t been there, they could not have succeeded. Of course, it was possible that if she had not appeared when she did, someone else might have filled this role later. After all, women who had been ripped from their homes and had no love for the Mexica were now scat- tered all across Mesoamerica. But Cortés had been especially lucky, and on some level he knew this. Not all women who hated the Mexica spoke both Nahuatl and Yucatec Mayan. And of those who did, not all of them were the daughters of noblemen and spoke with such finesse, with the ability to under- stand and use the high register of the nobility, which even had its own gram- mar. Nor did all of them have such a subtle understanding of complex situations. It soon became clear that Malintzin actually had a special gift for languages. She began to learn Spanish from Jerónimo de Aguilar, without a blackboard or a grammar book. Within a few months, she no longer needed her teacher at all.38

In the meantime, she helped Cortés to lay his plans. Messengers came back from Moctezuma twice, each time bearing gifts and promising more in the

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future, but also categorically refusing to escort Cortés and his party to Tenochtitlan. There was a drought, said Moctezuma’s emissaries, and the king could not entertain them in the style to which they were undoubtedly accus- tomed. Cortés, however, was absolutely determined to get there. He had decided that he would either conquer this city, or if that was impossible, then he would trade for marvelous goods and bring back specific intelligence of the place to Spain; in either case, he would be hailed as a great discoverer. Undaunted, he considered what he had learned from some nearby Totonac villagers and from Malintzin herself—namely, that Moctezuma had many enemies who would help him in his travels. He could proceed by making his way first to a rebellious Totonac town, and then go on to Tlaxcala, where the people hated the Mexica. There, his forces would have access to food and water and other support.

There was a serious obstacle, however—namely, that he had left the Caribbean without the governor’s permission, so he was, technically speak- ing, an outlaw.39 The governor had at first assigned him to go on an explora- tory expedition, which was the reason that more than four hundred landless men had flocked to join him. At the last moment, however, the governor began to fear that Cortés planned to exceed his authority and attempt to establish some sort of fiefdom on the mainland, one that would cut the gov- ernor out of all the profits. He sent a messenger to convey that he was revok- ing his permission. What could Cortés do but leave immediately and pretend he had never received the word? (The messenger himself he dealt with by bribing him to come along to find the rumored land of riches.) Yet even if his venture into the heart of the mainland succeeded, he was still liable to be arrested when he returned. Even the permit he pretended to believe was still in effect only gave him the right to explore, nothing more.

Cortés knew Spanish law well—some historians even believe he had attended law school for a while—and he clearly had been trained by a notary. He knew that the Spanish legal apparatus was based on the idea that an organic unity of purpose bound together a leader and his subjects. Any leader, even a king, could be set aside by “all good men of the land” if he was behaving outrageously. In that case, the good men of the land were not traitors when they refused to obey, but were acting instead for the common good. Cortés therefore needed a citizenry to demand that he lead them in settling the land. He arranged for all the Spaniards present to band together and sign a docu- ment insisting that they found a Spanish town (it was to be called the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, or the “Rich City of the True Cross”), and that he lead them where they wanted to go—which was to Tenochtitlan.

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There was more to do, however, before they set out. Cortés asked Puertocarrero, the most influential man on the expedition because of his high social status, to return to Spain and speak directly to the king, in order to ensure that the Caribbean governor not prejudice him against their case too much. This was not just a maneuver on Cortés’s part to get rid of the man who kept him from having Malintzin all to himself. Crucially, Puertocarrero’s high status meant that he could take responsibility for sending more men, supplies, horses, and arms. Five hundred Europeans could not bring down the Mexica, but Renaissance Europe could, so Cortés needed to make sure that more of mainland Europe was on its way to support him. At this point Puertocarrero and his party left. Finally, Cortés ordered that the remaining ships be beached. They weren’t permanently destroyed, but leaving would now be a major undertaking requiring many weeks of repair work. It was a way of preventing discontented men from easily going home.40

With this done, Cortés led the ascent from the hot coastal lands up into the mountains. Two Totonacs guided them toward Tlaxcala. They entered a pine wood, where it was unexpectedly cold at night. Many of the men weren’t dressed for it, and a few of the enslaved Indians the Spaniards had brought from the Caribbean died after a drenching rain with hail. At length the path began to lead downhill, into a valley. There they came upon a nine-foot-high wall built of stone, stretching to the right and left as far as they could see. It was shaped like an extended pyramid: at its base, it was twenty feet across, and at the top it culminated in a flat walkway only a foot and a half wide. This, it seemed, was the Tlaxcalan border. Despite the forbidding boundary, the Totonacs continued to insist that all would be well. The Tlaxcalans, they explained, truly hated the Mexica, for although they had remained in de pend- ent, they had done this by participating in the dreaded Flower Wars against them for years.41

The travelers soon found an opening in the wall, and Cortés along with half a dozen men rode forward to explore. They soon caught sight of about fifteen warriors up ahead and called out to them. Cortés sent one of the riders galloping back in case reinforcements were needed, and then he and the oth- ers approached the Indians. Suddenly, hundreds of warriors seemed to rise out of nowhere and surrounded them completely. Cortés actually claimed it was thousands in his letter home, but he always exaggerated numbers for dra- matic effect whenever anything went wrong; it wouldn’t have been possible for the Tlaxcalans to have placed a guard of thousands at the entrance, given their total population. In any event, two of the horses were killed and their riders gravely injured before more of the Spanish cavalry approached and the

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Tlaxcalans retreated. Cortés had learned a crucial lesson: a handful of armored men was not enough to withstand an onslaught, not even if they were mounted on horseback. His men simply had to move in larger groups in order to remain relatively invulnerable.

Late in the day, some Tlaxcalan messengers arrived. They apologized for the incident and blamed it on foolish and rambunctious Otomí who lived in their territory. They claimed to desire friendship and asked to tour the impres- sive camp. Malintzin had misgivings; she wasn’t sure what to expect.

A huge Tlaxcalan force attacked at daybreak. The Spaniards were ready for them, and with their armor on, they could inflict more casualties than they received, but they were weakened from their travels and distraught at this reception. They had to fight without food or respite all day long, surrounded by a sea of enemies who only withdrew when darkness made it impossible for them to tell friend from foe. That night, Cortés took the thirteen remaining horsemen galloping over the plain to the nearby hills, where lighted fires sig- naled the presence of villages. “I burnt five or six small places of about a hun- dred inhabitants,” he later wrote to the king.42

The next morning, the Tlaxcalan warriors attacked once more, in such numbers that they were able to enter the camp and engage in hand-to-hand combat. It took four hours for Spanish armor and weaponry to drive them back. This time, the Spanish even used their guns, which were really tiny can- nons that couldn’t be aimed well but could scatter grapeshot with deadly effect. “The enemy was so massed and numerous,” commented one of the Spaniards later, “that every shot wrought havoc among them.”43 Many dozens of Tlaxcalan men died that day, each one swept up into the arms of his com- rades and carried from the battlefield. Yet only one Spaniard died.

Before dawn the next day, Cortés once again led the horsemen rapidly out of the camp, this time in the opposite direction. “I burnt more than ten vil- lages,” he reported. For the next two days, the Tlaxcalan chiefs sporadically sent emissaries suing for peace, but they somehow sounded unconvincing, perhaps because no gifts were forthcoming. Cortés tortured one of them, demanding the truth through the interpreter, Malintzin—who was quickly ascertaining that the Christian god was not truly one of peace. The emissaries learned nothing, and Cortés cut the fingers from the hands of a number of them, so that “they would see who we were,” as he said, and then sent them home.44

The Indians attacked again, and again were driven back. After a few days of silence, Cortés took his now-rested horsemen out again during the hours of darkness. “As I took them by surprise, the people rushed out unarmed, and the women and children ran naked through the streets, and I began to do

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them some harm.”45 He had Malintzin on horseback with him and had her shout aloud that the strangers offered peace and friendship, if they chose to accept it. Something she said convinced them, for the war ended that night. Peace talks began in earnest in the morning.

Tlaxcala was in effect four countries in one. The altepetl consisted of four well-populated sub-altepetls. Each had its own king, but they were so tightly bound by intermarriage and tradition that they remained an unbreakable unit in their relations with outsiders. So it was that they alone had been able to resist Mexica aggression. For many years, they had been allies with nearby Cholula and Huexotzinco, but recently these two, facing the possibility of destruction by Moctezuma, had gone over to his side and fought against the Tlaxcalans. The Tlaxcalans remembered proudly that they had gotten word of the defection while they were playing a ball game and then had roundly defeated the Huexotzincan traitors. “We pursued them right to their own homes,” they bragged in their annals.46 Their courage notwithstanding, they were still surrounded by enemies, their trade routes cut off. The Mexica could not bring them down without losing more men than they could spare, but they did not really need to, because they could use the traditional enmity to fuel the ritual Flower Wars that often ended in death.

Over the years, the Tlaxcalans’ survival had depended on their ability to prove that their warriors were the match of anybody’s. Although they would have been aware of the approach of an expedition of over four hundred strang- ers, they would not have had a ring of spies and messengers bringing them detailed reports or anyone to explain to them ahead of time the newcomers’ hope that they would help bring down the Mexica. It fell to Malintzin to convey the situation to them. Fortunately, until the recent wars had cut them off, Malintzin’s people in Coatzacoalcos had been among Tlaxcala’s trade partners. She apparently presented herself as a gracious and authoritative noblewoman, for they decided that they could trust her.

The Tlaxcalans brought the Spaniards to the imposing palace of the tla- toani Xicotencatl (Shee-ko-TEN-kat) of Tizatlan, one of the two largest sub- altepetls. There, they offered the newcomers women, ranging from princesses whom it was intended the lords should marry, to slave girls meant as a form of tribute. Cortés gave the most important princess—a daughter of Xicotencatl himself—to Pedro de Alvarado, a charismatic man with a bright blond beard who was one of his lieutenants. One of the minor lords’ daughters was given to Jerónimo de Aguilar, and the rest were distributed to other men in the company who were proving their worth in the eyes of Cortés. Not many years later, Tlaxcalan artists painted a record of the politically important event on

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Tizatlan’s palace walls and made another copy on bark paper. They wished the early alliance to be recalled in perpetuity. Strings of young women being given to the Spaniards, together with the names of the most important ones, looked out from the painting; they personified the treaty of alliance that the Tlaxcalans believed had been made.47

Meanwhile, Cortés was bargaining for more through the women. He wanted several thousand warriors to go with him to Tenochtitlan. The Tlaxcalans agreed. It was the kind of alliance they had had in mind when they offered Xicotencatl’s daughter as a bride to one of the strangers’ leaders. When the company set out, it was at least three times larger than it had been before. It gave the appearance of an army of victory.48

***

At this point, Moctezuma decided he could not delay any longer what he had so dreaded having to do. He sent messengers offering annual tribute— including gold, silver, slaves, and textiles—to be delivered as the strangers desired. The only provision was that they not enter his lands, as he could not host so large a company. Moctezuma and his council assumed that this arrangement was what the foreigners’ sought. It was certainly what the tla- toani himself would have sought in like circumstances. He had hesitated to make the offer before because it would constitute such a drain on his resources, and he had hoped there might be another way of turning the newcomers aside. What he absolutely could not afford, politically speaking, was a con- frontation with such a force anywhere close to home. He knew from his sources that the strangers won their battles. Even if he collected a mighty army and did manage to bring them and their allies down, his kingdom would still be lost, for the casualties would be immense, beyond anything calculable from past experience. And if he could not deliver an easy victory at the heart of his kingdom, his allies would not continue to stand with him. Under no circumstances could the Mexica be made to appear weak in the central basin; it would be political death to them. Moctezuma could not afford a battle; he did not even want the strangers to come close enough for comparisons to be drawn. In later years, scholars would delight in arguing that Moctezuma did nothing at this point because he was paralyzed by some aspect of his culture which the scholars could perceive and specify (he was relying on man–god communication rather than man–man, or perhaps unable to fathom warfare to the death) but there is no genuine evidence that overwhelming fatalism had anything to do with it. Moctezuma had, as he had always had throughout his adult life, a pragmatic agenda.49

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However, his plan failed. The strangers and their newfound friends, the Tlaxcalans, turned down his offer of tribute and continued to approach. They stopped in Cholula, now a subject town of Moctezuma’s. He gave orders to the Cholulans that they not feed the strangers well. It seems that he also com- manded them to attack the party as they left the city, when they would be forced to pass through certain narrow ravines as they entered the ring of mountains surrounding the central valley. At least, Cortés claimed that Malintzin gathered this news from an old woman who lived in the city. It is eminently logical that Moctezuma would have done this: Cholula was the last stop outside of the central valley, and the town was a new ally. He had little regard for the lives of the people who lived there, and if their attack failed, he could easily dissociate himself from it, both in his own people’s eyes and those of the Spaniards. But perhaps he was too cautious to order a confrontation even this close to home; we cannot be sure. Whether he wanted a battle or not, the Tlaxcalans were spoiling for a fight. They had not forgiven the recent turncoats in Cholula. If they could bring down the present chiefly line and install one more sympathetic to Tlaxcala, the result would be of lasting ben- efit to them. It may, indeed, have been the Tlaxcalans who planted the story of the planned attack, and the Spaniards were merely their dupes. However it came about, the Spaniards and the Tlaxcalans combined forces in a terrible rampage. The temple to Quetzalcoatl was burned—Quetzalcoatl was the pri- mary protector god of the Cholulans—as were most of the houses. “The destruction took two days,” commented one Spaniard laconically.50

That business done, the combined Spanish and indigenous force moved on. They safely traversed the mountain pass between the volcano Popocatepetl (Smoking Mountain) and the snow-capped Iztaccihuatl (White Woman) and entered the valley. As they approached the lakeside towns at the center, the Spaniards—as well as many of the accompanying Indians—began to feel a sensation of awe. A Spaniard named Bernal Díaz wrote of his impressions many years later: “These great towns and cues [pyramids] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadís.” (Amadís was a legendary knight, and a book about him had recently become a best seller in Spain.) “Indeed,” the Spaniard remembered, “Some of our soldiers asked if it were not all a dream.” When the men stopped to rest at the town of Iztapalapan, they were literally stunned. The lord’s pal- ace there rivaled buildings in Spain. Behind it a flower garden cascaded down to a lovely pond: “Large canoes could come into the garden [pond] from the lake, through a channel they had cut. . . . Everything was shining with lime and decorated with different kinds of stonework and paintings which were a

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marvel to gaze on. . . . I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world.”51

Bernal Díaz was writing these words as an old man. He had reason to feel a bit maudlin as he thought of his lost youth, and then also recalled all that had happened since. At the end of the paragraph, he almost visibly flinched with shame. “Today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”

***

On the morning of November 8, 1519, the Spaniards and the Tlaxcalans crossed the wide, clean-swept causeway that led straight to the city. Cortés rode on horseback towards the front of the cavalcade; Malintzin, her small shoulders squared, walked at his side. Moctezuma had wisely decided to han- dle the situation by putting on a grand show of two brother monarchs meet- ing. At the gate at the edge of the island, hundreds of dignitaries had gathered, including multiple representatives of each of the central altepetls. Each per- son in turn stepped forward and made the gesture of touching the ground and then kissing the earth upon it. The joint performance was a classic Nahua method of expressing the strength of a united body politic. The chiefs were nothing if not patient as they carried it through. But Cortés was different. “I stood there waiting for nearly an hour until everyone had performed his ceremony,” he said huffily.52

Then Cortés and his company were led across a bridge and found them- selves looking at a broad, straight avenue leading to the heart of the metropo- lis. It put the tiny, mazelike streets of European cities to shame, and the small downtown area of Tlaxcala also paled in comparison. For the newcomers, there was a moment of doubt as they tried to make sense of the scene, and then the various elements resolved themselves before their eyes. Not far down that wide sun-lit road, there stood a royal company, which now moved toward them. Every man there was dressed in bejeweled cloaks, and at the center came Moctezuma, the tlatoani, speaker for his people. Anyone could see that he was the high king. Over him his retainers held a magnificent canopy, a great arc pointing toward the sky, its bits of gold and precious stones glinting in the light.53 It was as if he carried with him a reflection of the sun itself.

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The smell of the burning bodies was rank in the air. But worse was the smell of the miccatzintli, the poor dead woman who had not been moved for days. She lay where she was, because there was no one left in the palace strong enough to cope with the problem. The sickness, like nothing ever seen before, had struck not long after the unwelcome strangers had been forced to leave Tenochtitlan. Now Moctezuma’s young daughter looked at her sisters lying with her on the soiled sleeping mats. They were still alive. When they looked back at her, their dark eyes reflected her own terror. Their faces, their arms, all their parts were covered with the vile sores. But they were beginning to heal; they did not seem to be at the point of death. Not like before, in the fevered haze, when she thought she knew they were all perishing, all disappearing—it was the same word.1

***

None of the royal children had ever known a day’s hunger until now. Even through this scourge, they had had good care as long as there were any servants left to tend to them: their good fortune had helped them survive. It helped that they were grown girls, too. Later, Moctezuma’s daughter would find that her younger siblings—children recently born to the newest wives— had died.2 Nor were they the only ones gone. Others had been “erased”—as she would have described it—weeks before the pox struck. Two of her broth- ers had been accidentally killed when she herself was rescued from the

Temples burn in war. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 6r.

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strangers,3 the night the Spaniards were ejected. People said that her father, the Lord Moctezuma himself, had been found strangled by the Spaniards like a common criminal.4 It was probably true. However it had happened, he was gone, as were the others. Like the heroes in the songs, they would never come back. Time on earth was fleeting, the singers always said. “Are we born twice on this earth?” the singers called out when people died. And the chorus knew the tragic, angry, tear-laden response, “No!” The child understood what they meant now.

Tecuichpotzin (Tek-weech-PO-tzin, Lordly Daughter) was about eleven years old.5 She had experienced so much horror in the past year that her mind had almost certainly chosen to forget some of it, as she needed to use the wits she had left to make it from day to day. It had been a joyous moment when the Spaniards left, when they were pushed out of the seething, resentful city and forced to flee for their lives. If she had known then that the ordeal was far from over, that the worst was yet to come, she might not have found the for- titude to forge ahead and join her people in putting their world back together. But she was eleven, with a child’s zest for living, and she had her beloved sis- ters at her side. And of course she had not known that the sickness stalked them. So when the Spaniards left, she—like all the other women—reached for a broom and began the holy act of sweeping.6 She swept the cobwebs, both literal and figurative, out the door.

***

Had anyone asked Tecuichpotzin, she undoubtedly would have said that the problems had started even before the strangers and their Tlaxcalan allies had crossed the causeway into her world. Her father’s temper had been frayed for months before that moment, as he had struggled to determine the best course of action. He could not afford the casualties of a battle with the newcomers so close to home, in front of all their allies. His offers of tribute, no matter how great or dedicated to what god, had proven ineffective in turn- ing the marching army from its course. Eventually he determined that there was nothing to be done but to welcome them, even act as though he expected them—and gather as much information as he could. There had been tensions from the earliest moments of their arrival when Hernando Cortés dismounted from his horse, took a few steps forward, and made as if to embrace Moctezuma. The tlatoani’s shocked retainers had stepped forward quickly to prevent such marked disrespect. They waited nervously as gifts were exchanged. Cortés presented a necklace of pearls and cut glass. Moctezuma signaled that a servant bring forth a necklace of red snail shells, hung with

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beautifully crafted shrimp made of gold. Then he gave orders that the new- comers follow him, as he would speak with the leaders indoors.7

To this day we do not know exactly what the great men said to each other. Tecuichpotzin did not hear what passed between them; few did. A year later, Cortés made the remarkable claim that Moctezuma had immediately and contentedly surrendered his kingdom to the newcomers, on the grounds that an ancestor of his had gone away generations before, and that he and his peo- ple had long expected that his descendants would return and claim the king- dom. Cortés added that a few days later (because he doubted that he really had full control) he had placed Moctezuma under house arrest and never let him walk free again. Cortés’s statements would be utterly mystifying—except that they were absolutely necessary for him to make at the time. When he wrote of these events a year later, the Mexica people had ousted him and all his forces from the city. At that point, he was desperately trying to orchestrate a conquest from near the coast, in conjunction with indigenous allies and newly arrived Spaniards. He did not want to look like a loser, but instead like a loyal servant to the Spanish monarch who had already accomplished great things and would soon do more. According to Spanish law, he was only in the right in launching this war in the name of the king . . . if in fact he was attempt- ing to retake a part of the kingdom that was in rebellion. He had no authority to stir up trouble by making war against a foreign state that had just ejected him. Thus it was essential that the Mexica people were understood to have accepted Spanish rule in the first place, so that their present choices could be interpreted as acts of rebellion.8

When Cortés’s men wrote about these events in later years, they often for- got what they were supposed to say. Cortés, for example, claimed that his control had been complete from the beginning, and he asserted that he had ended human sacrifice. “While I stayed . . . I did not see a living creature killed or sacrificed.” But Bernal Díaz admitted, “The great Moctezuma continued to show his accustomed good will towards us, but never ceased his daily sacri- fices of human beings. Cortés tried to dissuade him but met with no success.”9 Another man seemed to remember mid-paragraph that Moctezuma was sup- posed to have been their prisoner. “[His people] brought him river and sea fish of all kinds, besides all kinds of fruit from the sea coast as well as the highlands. The kinds of bread they brought were greatly varied. . . . He was not served on gold or silver because he was in captivity, but it is likely that he had a great table service of gold and silver.”10

It is more than likely that Cortés had heard about the Mexica history of schisms and migrations through Malintzin or perhaps others. Moctezuma

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knew well that his own ancestors were invaders and that there had been other waves of invaders, some of whom had moved on or turned back. It would make sense for him to believe—or at least seem to believe, in front of his people—that the strangers were other descendants of his own fearsome ances- tors, in short, that these visitors were long-lost relatives, whose existence did not surprise him at all. Such a scenario makes perfect sense. But we can’t know with any certainty what really passed in that first conference between the Mexica tlatoani and the men from Europe. All that the children of the indig- enous elites ever mentioned was that Moctezuma recounted his own ancestral lineage in great detail, before calling himself the newcomers’ “poor vassal.” If he really said that, then he was only underscoring his great power in the speech of reversal that constituted the epitome of politeness in the Nahua world. It certainly would not have been an indication that he actually intended to relinquish his throne without further ado.11

What is clear is that Moctezuma continued to govern in the weeks and months that followed, and that he treated the strangers, even the Tlaxcalan lead- ers, like honored guests, despite the drain on his resources that feeding so large a company entailed. He persistently questioned them through Malintzin. The Spaniards toured the city, rudely demanding gifts everywhere they went. Their hosts remembered them chortling and slapping each other on the back when they saw Moctezuma’s personal storehouse and were told they could take what they liked. The Spaniards took beautiful gold jewelry and melted it down to make bricks; the Tlaxcalan warlords preferred polished jade. Moctezuma showed the strangers maps and tribute lists in an effort to get them to name their price and go away. He clearly hoped to convince them to leave and to have established the most favorable possible relationship with them by the time they did.12

Tellingly, Moctezuma sent for Tecuichpotzin and two of her sisters to be turned over to the newcomers as potential brides. It was a test. If the strangers treated them only as concubines and not as brides, it would be bad news, but he would at least know where he stood. The royal sisters, presented in all their finery, kept their eyes down and maintained a respectful silence as their elders made the requisite rhetorical speeches and Malintzin listened.13 The transla- tor learned that Moctezuma had a number of older daughters who were already married into the royal houses of Chalco, Culhuacan, Tlacopan, and other important altepetls. These three daughters were the girls presently of marriageable age. The mother of two of them was the daughter of the Cihuacoatl, the leading military commander.14 The mother of Tecuichpotzin, or Lordly Daughter, was a daughter of the former king Ahuitzotl, so this child’s marriage was of great political significance, as her heritage brought

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together both the rival branches of the royal family, the one descended from Huitzilihuitl and the one descended from Itzcoatl.15 Moctezuma kept the existence of a younger sister of hers a secret from the Spaniards, so that they did not even know of her until years later. Perhaps he thought she might be useful as a political pawn some day in the future, or her Tepanec mother had insisted on hiding the girl, or both. Another young boy, the child of a woman from Teotihuacan, was also purposely hidden from the Spaniards.16

Malintzin managed to convey to the strangers—utterly ignorant of the complex politics of marriage in this part of the world—that Tecuichpotzin was the daughter of a high-ranking mother and thus a princess of significance. This they understood. When they baptized her, they named her Isabel, in honor of Queen Isabella, who had launched the first ships to the New World. They called the other girls “María” and “Mariana.”17 Then they were taken away to live with the Spaniards in their quarters in Axayacatl’s former palace. What happened to them there is undocumented, but some of the Spaniards later said that Cortés violated multiple princesses during those early years; and other, less public figures than Cortés would never have been brought to account for anything they might have done.18

The weeks of tension dragged on. Then in April of 1520, the situation changed dramatically. Moctezuma received news from his network of mes- sengers that at least eight hundred more Spaniards in thirteen ships had arrived on the coast.19 The Spaniards did not yet know. The tlatoani eventu- ally decided to tell them, in order to gauge their reaction. He gave the news to Malintzin, who turned to tell Jerónimo de Aguilar, who said the words aloud in Spanish. Cortés could not hide the panic he experienced in that moment.

***

When Alonso de Puertocarrero had sailed from Veracruz, the plan had been to make straight for Spain. But one of the Spaniards on board had lands and loved ones on the north coast of Cuba. Stopping briefly at his plantation had proven irresistible. They left within just a few days, but word soon spread. The angry governor, Diego de Velázquez, made a futile effort to overtake the scofflaws on the high seas, and he brought in for questioning all those who had learned anything during the ship’s brief stopover. Velázquez, who had once led the brutal conquest of the island of Cuba, now decided that he was extremely concerned about the violence Cortés had inflicted on the Indians along the Maya coast. He wrote of his concerns to the king, and assured him he would immediately send Captain Pánfilo de Narváez in pur- suit of the renegade. Narváez had been his second-in-command in the taking

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of Cuba and now held a legal permit to explore the mainland. Unlike Cortés, he said, he would establish a suitable relationship with the people there.

Puertocarrero docked in Spain on November 5th, and the letter from the enraged Cuban governor arrived shortly after. Puertocarrero and other speak- ers on behalf of Cortés’s expedition—such as his father, Martín Cortés—did their best to defend the operation in the king’s eyes. They delivered all the gold and other exotic treasures the expedition had been able to collect along the coast. Some of the material was sent on tour for exhibition throughout the realms of the Holy Roman Emperor. In July, in the town hall in Brussels, the artist Albrecht Dürer saw some of the tiny, lifelike animals the indigenous people had made out of gold. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I have marveled at the subtle intellects of men in foreign parts.” The stories, of course, traveled even faster than the exhibit—many of them full of wild exaggeration. Unbeknown to him, Cortés became a famous man in Europe. His father immediately began to outfit a shipload of supplies. Ships and printing presses ensured that the news passed from port to port in weeks rather than years, a speed that was to make a huge difference. Within months, there were people in every part of western Europe considering the possibility of investing in the newly discovered lands or even going there themselves.20

***

In the meantime, across the sea, both Cortés and Moctezuma were busy assessing future possibilities. Cortés knew that his messengers had not been gone long enough to have sent the many well-outfitted ships so rapidly. The recently arrived fleet had to have come from his would-be nemesis, governor Velázquez. Somehow, either through Malintzin or some other Nahua who was learning Spanish—perhaps even Tecuichpotzin—Moctezuma learned of Cortés’s tension and the reason for it. He detected an opportunity to divide the Spaniards and, hopefully, defeat them. For the first time, he ordered his people to begin preparations for war—though he could not have been entirely certain which group of the outsiders he would initially side with.21

In desperation, Cortés risked all by doing what he only claimed he had done before: he took Moctezuma hostage—literally put him irons, where he would remain for about eighty days.22 Only with a knife at Moctezuma’s throat could Cortés assure the newly arriving Spaniards that he was in control of the kingdom and thus hopefully win their allegiance. And only in doing that could he stave off a violent rejection on the part of the Indians: this was

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a tried-and-true practice of medieval Spanish warfare.23 The Spaniards took Moctezuma by surprise, dragged him back to their quarters, and guarded him around the clock, threatening to kill him if he ordered his people to resist. Then Cortés took Malintzin and a substantial portion of his men and trav- eled with haste down to the coast.24

Once there, they sent messages and bribes to key men in Narváez’s camp, assuring them that they were welcome to join them in dividing up the riches of Mexico if they chose. At the end of May, they attacked the camp suddenly in the middle of the night. The fighting was brief—only about ten men died—for once the obstreperous Narváez was captured, few others seemed to have the heart to go on with the battle. They reached an accord almost imme- diately. Cortés now had approximately eight hundred more men armed with steel, eighty additional horses, and several ships full of supplies at his disposal. Now he could truly bring down Moctezuma, he thought. They even had wine from home with which to celebrate.

On the twelfth day, however, as Cortés was in the midst of making plans and arrangements, some Tlaxcalans brought Malintzin a devastating piece of news. The people of Tenochtitlan were in open rebellion. The Spanish forces had turned Axayacatl’s palace into a fortress, but they could not hold out much longer. They had every reason to believe it was the beginning of the end. The next day, two more Tlaxcalans arrived, this time carrying a smuggled-out letter from the Spaniards. Cortés remembered reading it. “I must,” they begged, “for the love of God come to their aid as swiftly as possible.”25

They set out at once. The trek up into the mountains was more than a little disconcerting. “Not once in my journey did any of Moctezuma’s people come to welcome me as they had before,” Cortés wrote. “All the land was in revolt and almost uninhabited, which aroused in me a terrible suspicion that the Spaniards in the city were dead and that all the natives had gathered waiting to surprise me in some pass or other place where they might have the advan- tage of me.”26 Later he would learn that a much smaller group that had trav- eled separately, whom he had dispatched before receiving the bad news, had in fact been attacked in a mountain pass, imprisoned, and eventually killed down to the last person—and animal. This group had included Spanish women and children, enslaved Africans, and other servants carrying burdens and leading livestock. Despite what Cortés had learned about the need for numbers and cavalry, they had been sent ahead because they would travel more slowly and would need more time to cover the same ground. As it turned out, they paid for their commander’s arrogant decision with their lives.27 Cortés’s own force was large enough to be relatively invulnerable while

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on the move. No one tried to stop them, not even when they reached the city. They passed easily through the silent streets to Axayacatl’s palace, where they were greeted by their compatriots with great joy. It was to be the last laughter the Spaniards shared for quite some time, for the next morning, the Mexica attacked.

The signs of trouble had begun three weeks earlier. The resentment of the city’s people had become evident when they stopped delivering food to the strangers. A young woman who had been paid to do their laundry was found dead near their quarters, a clear sign to others not to do business with them. The Spaniards sent clusters of armed men to the market to obtain food, and they stored what they brought back. Meanwhile, the city people were prepar- ing for an important holy day, the celebration of Toxcatl, at which the alte- petl’s warriors danced before a huge figure of the god Huitzilopochtli. Pedro de Alvarado, who had been left in charge, said that he began to fear they planned to use the dance to launch a war. This seems highly unlikely; there were far more efficient ways for the Mexica to overcome the Spaniards, as events would later prove. But Alvarado was not known for his acumen. Perhaps he simply believed that a struggle was coming and that whoever attacked first would secure victory. In that case, he sought only an excuse, and the days of warlike dancing provided one.28

What followed was etched in the altepetl’s memory for many years to come. Thirty years later, a survivor told a young listener what had happened:

The festivity was being observed and there was dancing and singing, with voices raised in song. The singing was like the noise of waves breaking against the rocks. When . . . the moment had come for the Spaniards to do their killing, they came out equipped for battle. They came and closed off each of the places where people went in and out [of the courtyard]. . . . And when they had closed these exits, they stationed themselves in each, and no one could come out anymore.

When this had been done, they went into the temple courtyard to kill the people. Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just went on foot, each with his metal sword and leather shield. . . . Then they surrounded those who were dancing, going among the cylindrical drums. They struck a drummer’s arms; both of his hands were severed. Then they struck his neck; his head landed far away. Then they stabbed everyone with iron lances and struck them with iron swords. They struck some in the belly, and then their entrails

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came spilling out. . . . Those who tried to escape could go nowhere. When anyone tried to go out, at the entryways they struck and stabbed him.29

Yet a few did escape, for it was they who told posterity what had happened. They hid where they could. “Some climbed up the wall and were able to escape. Some went into the various [surrounding] calpolli temples and took refuge there. Some took refuge among those who had really died, feigning death. . . . The blood of the warriors ran like water.”

That evening, Mexica warriors raised their cry promising vengeance. The Spaniards and those Tlaxcalans who were still in the city walled themselves into their “fortress” and waited. The Mexica attacked en masse, but they couldn’t penetrate the wall of crossbows and steel lances. Then suddenly, they ceased their attack. For more than twenty days, they left the Spanish alone in silence and uncertainty. Thirty years later, an old man recalled what they had been doing. “The canals were excavated, widened, deepened, the sides made steeper. Everywhere the canals were made more difficult to pass. And on the roads, walls were built, and the passageways between houses made more diffi- cult.”30 They were preparing, in short, for a cataclysmic urban battle. During that period, Cortés and his army reentered the city and made their way back to their quarters.

When the warriors were ready and felt the strangers had grown hungry enough, they attacked. For seven days, Tecuichpotzin and her sisters listened to the sounds of battle—to the rising murmurs and then shouts of their own warriors, and then the noise of the harquebuses (a heavy matchlock weapon) firing grapeshot among them, and the hissing crossbows slinging forth iron bolts or whatever came to hand. The fighting began anew every day at dawn as soon as it was light enough to see. The Spaniards could not escape, but the Mexica could not penetrate their defenses, either. At length Moctezuma tried to speak to the people from a rooftop, conveying his words through the booming voice of a younger man who served as his mouthpiece. His message went something like this:

Let the Mexica hear! We are not their match. May the people be dis- suaded [from further fighting]. May the arrows and shields of war be laid down. The poor old men and women, the common people, the infants who toddle and crawl, who lie in the cradle or on the cradle board and know nothing yet, all are suffering. This is why your ruler says, “We are not their match. Let everyone be dissuaded.”31

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