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THE CODEX MENDOZA

NEW INSIGHTS

Jorge Gómez Tejada, editor

USFQ PRESS Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ, Quito 170901, Ecuador. https://usfqpress.com

We are the publishing house of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ. We further the mission of the university by disseminating knowledge to train, educate, research and serve the community within the philosophy of the Liberal Arts.

The Codex Mendoza: new insights Authors: Jorge Gómez Tejada1, Davide Domenici2, Chiara Grazia3, David Buti4, Laura Cartechini5, Francesca Rosi5, Francesca Gabrieli5, Virginia María Lladó-Buisán6, Aldo Romani3, Antonio Sgamellotti7, Constanza Miliani8, B. C. Barker-Benfield6, Diana Magaloni9, Mary Ellen Miller10, Claudia Brittenham11, Frances F. Berdan12, Barbara E. Mundy13, Daniela Bleichmar14, Todd P. Olson15, Carmen Fernández-Salvador1, Joanne Harwood16, Lucien Sun11

1Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ, Quito, Ecuador; 2Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà, Università di Bologna, Italy; 3Centro di Eccellenza SMAArt (Scientific Methodologies applied to Archaeology and Art), Dipartimento di Chimica, Biologia e Biotecnologie, Università di Perugia, Italy; 4CNR-ISPC (Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale), Florence, Italy; 5CNR–SCITEC (Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Chimiche "Giulio Natta"), Perugia, Italy; 6Head of Conservation & Collection Care, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, United States of America; 7Accademia dei Lincei, Roma, Italia; 8CNR-ISPC (Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale), Naples, Italy; 9Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; 10Getty Research Institute, United States of America; 11University of Chicago, Illinois, United States of America; 12University of California, San Bernardino, United States of America; 13Tulane University, New Orleans, United States of America; 14University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States of America; 15University of California, Berkeley, United States of America; 16Independent researcher

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© Jorge Gómez Tejada, Davide Domenici, Chiara Grazia, David Buti, Laura Cartechini, Francesca Rosi, Francesca Gabrieli, Virginia María Lladó-Buisán, Aldo Romani, Antonio Sgamellotti, Constanza Miliani, B. C. Barker-Benfield, Diana Magaloni, Mary Ellen Miller, Claudia Brittenham, Frances F. Berdan, Barbara E. Mundy, Daniela Bleichmar, Todd P. Olson, Carmen Fernández-Salvador, Joanne Harwood, Lucien Sun, 2022 © Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ, 2022 © Richard Ovenden, del Prefacio, 2022

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Claudia Brittenham Department of Art History, The University of Chicago

The Representation of Taxation in the Codex Mendoza

C H A P T E R 7

The very utility of the second section of the Codex Mendoza as a document about the Aztec economy has made it difficult for us to see what it does not represent. Yet, the

omissions in these pages are as significant as the very valuable information they provide. In what follows, I will suggest that the focus on imperial taxation from the conquered provinces, as opposed to other forms of state finance, is a deliberate choice with import- ant rhetorical consequences, as is the way that these goods are represented, luxuriously painted but separated from the bodies and performative acts which accompanied their original production and presentation. Comparison with other Mesoamerican repre- sentations of tribute and taxation will make some of these omissions and their strategic potential more visible. I will conclude with a tentative proposal about the pre-Hispanic prototype for this section. First, I present a brief review of what the second section of the Codex Mendoza does picture. Each page (or multi-page spread) represents the taxes owed by a particular con- quered province.1 At the left, a column of glyphs names the conquered towns, beginning with the head town of the province in the upper corner; the place-names may continue onto the bottom edge of the page. The goods to be paid by the entire province are arrayed in a grid-like arrangement on the remainder of the page, and occasionally on the follow- ing pages as well, with the quantities of each item indicated by conventional symbols: a white banner for twenty, a triangular feather for 400, and a tasseled bag for 8,000 units. Thus, folio 37r (illustrated in figure 1) shows the goods to be paid by the province of Tepequacuilco, which corresponds to a region in the modern state of Guerrero. The glyph for the head town, which gives its name to the province, is written in the upper left, followed by the names of thirteen other subject towns, ending with Cueçalan at the lower right. Spanish glosses transcribe each of the toponyms and provide commentary on the goods represented on the rest of the page. Some goods were singular: only one of each “warrior costume of rich feathers” of the styles represented at left and center of the page were owed, but the flag attached to the red costume at right— “of ordinary feathers,” according to the gloss—indicates that twenty such costumes were to be paid, along with twenty matching shields. In the upper right, 100 copper axes are indicated by a single copper axe with five banners signifying the number twenty connected to it, while at low- er right, 200 “little jars of bee’s honey” are indicated by ten jars, each with a single flag. Clearly the artist had the choice to compress or expand the notation.2 The fine cotton mantles at the top of the page are to be paid in loads of 400,3 as are the gourd bowls at the far right, while 8,000 balls of copal (to be refined into incense) are specified in the low- er left. Significantly, though, the Nahua pictorial text on this page offers no information

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about the periodicity of tribute payments.4 The Spanish-language textual glosses alone specify that textiles are paid every six months; the copper axes, gourd bowls, honey, and copal incense are paid every eighty days; and the warrior costumes, greenstone beads, and wooden bins of maize, beans, chia, and amaranth are paid annually.5 That is, the pictorial content by itself is not sufficient to reconstruct taxation payments, a point to which I will return to later.

Aztec taxation systems

In showing the taxes paid by conquered provinces, the second section of the Codex Men- doza represents only a small part of the Aztec economy, which also included vibrant mar- kets and substantial long-distance trade. But even taxation was a complex matter: Michael Smith (2014; 2015) outlines as many as thirteen different sources of revenue for the Aztec empire. At the imperial level, these sources included taxes from the conquered provinces (this, or at least Tenochtitlan’s share of it, is what is represented in the Codex Mendoza) (Berdan 1992, 63–64), tribute or “gifts” from client states,6 and taxes from the conquest states maintained by each of the three partners in the Triple Alliance (Smith 2015, 76–82). To this I might add periodic tribute or “gifts” solicited from allies and conquered provinces

Figure 1 Codex Mendoza, f. 37r. Tribute from the province of Tepequacuilco

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on occasions such as coronations or temple dedications (e.g., Durán 1994, 302–4, 306–8, 319, 323). Perhaps more important financially were taxes at the city-state level, including land taxes, rent on royal estates, rotational service, public works corvée, market taxes, compulsory military service, and military supply taxes (Smith 2015, 82–93).7

In contrast to the sumptuary goods emphasized in the Codex Mendoza pages, the majority of Aztec taxes were paid not in goods, but in labor. Farmers worked a dizzying variety of different types of land for fixed numbers of days in order to fulfill labor obligations, including calpulli lands, altepetl lands, temple lands, palace lands, lands which furnished military supplies, lands which supplied produce for taxes, and various different kinds of lands belonging to lords (figure 2; Gibson 1964, 257–70; K. G. Hirth 2016, 35–41; Lock- hart 1992, 155–63; Zorita 1963, 117–18, 187).8 Service to lords was also an important cat- egory of obligation, with households required to provide both men and women for du- ties such as spinning, weaving, sweeping, preparing food, carrying water or other items, and cutting firewood at the palace; even lesser lords had duties of personal attendance at court (figure 3; Hicks 1984; Smith 2015, 88–89). Like agricultural labor, these duties were again assigned on a set rotation: “Personal service (provision of water, fuel, and domestic service) was assigned or apportioned for each day among the ruler’s towns and barrios” (Zorita 1963, 125). That is, tax obligations were often measured in time and labor, not in quantities of goods. Diego Durán (1994, 435) gives a picture of this complex ecology in his Historia de las Indias… in which he enumerates the privileges Motecuhzoma Xoyo- cotzin granted to valiant warriors after the victory at Teuctepec, among which was the reward of being “exempt from paying tribute, taxes, or any other tithe or imposition or personal service”.9

Figure 2. Beinecke Map (Codex Reese), detail of the right side. This map shows the distribution of recently claimed land in Mexico City. Like many working documents, it was changed in several campaigns. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, WA MSS S-2533 .

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Other taxes, such as market taxes, might have been paid in money or in kind. The Aztec economy used several kinds of currency, including plain white mantles and cacao beans, but also quills or gourds full of gold dust and copper axes. Many of these kinds of goods are also pictured in the pages of the Codex Mendoza—note the plain white mantles and copper axes in figure 1; the eighty loads of cacao on folio 38r; or the twenty gourds full of gold dust in figure 5—but not in nearly the kinds of quantities required to sustain Tenochtitlan and the rest of the empire. The items of currency are not pictured differently than the sumptuary goods, but other sources indicate that they might be exchanged for items in the marketplace, where prices for certain goods were set in cacao, gold, or man- tles (León-Portilla 1962, 47–49; Hirth 2016, 72. 249-253; Rojas 1995, 244–45). Together, these labor- and money-based taxation systems many have contributed more in absolute terms to the Aztec economy than provincial taxes in goods, which are the subject of the Codex Mendoza pages.10 Many of the sumptuous goods represented in the Codex Mendoza pages also represent the end points of other modes of taxation. Both plain and elaborately decorated textiles, for example, concretize women’s labor, while the bins of produce represent the output of ag- ricultural labor, and feather costumes represent the result of the featherworker’s art (Rojas and Batalla Rosado 2008; Gómez Tejada 2012, 291–95). But as Gerardo Gutiérrez has shown in his study of tax records from Tlapa, the process was not always direct: taxes in this province were collected in gold and (occasionally) cloth (Gutiérrez 2013; Gutiérrez, König, and Brito 2009).11 Figure 4 shows the taxes collected in Tlapa and figure 5 shows the taxes recorded for the province of Tlapa in the Codex Mendoza. Gold features prom- inently in both tallies, but the warrior costumes and decorated cotton textiles recorded in the Codex Mendoza seem not to have been part of the taxes collected in the province. Gutiérrez suggests that these items were not produced in Tlapa, but rather purchased in a metropolitan market, using currency collected in taxes.12

The inefficient conversion of currency back into goods to be paid in taxes signals the ideological power of these charismatic goods. Some of the goods are rare and specific to

Figure 3. Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaoz- toc (Códice Kingsborough), showing labor obligations in colonial times. British Museum Am2006, Drg. 13964, AN564240001, © Trustees of the British Museum

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particular regions, such as the Spondylus shells from Çihuatlan on folio 38r, the amber from Xoconochco on folio 47r, or indeed the gold from Tlapa in figure 5. But other taxes were, at the same time, more commonplace and more complex: many provinces were charged with providing goods not to be found within their borders, requiring market purchases or exchange (Gutiérrez 2013, 157–58; Hirth 2016, 50–52; Litvak King 1971, 95–97, 105–7).

Some of the goods represented in the pages of the Codex Mendoza have particular rhet- oric built into them, such as the obligation of 32 of the 38 provinces to provide warrior costumes for the armies that had subdued them (Berdan 1992, 73).13 It also cannot have been much fun to be responsible for the annual delivery of a live eagle, as was required from the provinces of Xilotepec (folio 31r) and Tochpan (folio 53r). Durán (1967, II:367) recounts an even more carefully calibrated insult, not pictured in the Codex Mendoza: “Motecuhzoma the Second … even had lice and fleas brought as tribute. In this the kings showed their tyrannical nature”; elsewhere, Durán also mentions snakes, scorpions, and centipedes as items of tribute (II:206).

The goods paid by the conquered provinces had power, not just as useful, precious, rare, and/or ideologically-charged things, but also as representations of empire. Textual ac- counts consistently stressed the representative quality of the taxation system: “Each town or province paid in tribute the things that were grown there” (Zorita 1963, 117); “From each city and each province, every eighty days, a million Indians arrived with a third of the yearly tribute, laden with everything the land produced, even tiny creatures” (Durán 1994, 358–59).14 Both commonplace produce and exotic feathers mattered because they demonstrated the vast range of Aztec control: “The purpose of this tribute was to show the magnificence and authority of the Aztec nation and so the Aztecs would be held to be

Figure 4. Tribute Record of Tlapa (Codex Azoyú 1), f. 1. The scene at the bottom shows the negotiation of taxation obligations for the newly-conquered province of Tlapa. Subsequent rows show the quarterly payments collected in the months of Tlacaxipehualiztli, Etzalcualiztli, Ochpaniztli, and Panquetzaliztli in the year 8 Grass (1487). Gold tables and gourds full of gold dust are the only goods collected at this early stage; white mantles were added later. Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City

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Lords of All Created Things, upon the waters as well as upon the earth” (205). The goods requested provide a conceptual map of empire, both territorial and ideological.15 In this, they enacted some of the same rhetoric as the offerings deposited in the Templo Mayor, so insightfully analyzed by Johanna Broda (1987).16 The way the pages of the second sec- tion of the Codex Mendoza are organized, in a loose, counterclockwise spiral out from the imperial center, also has cosmic resonance (Gómez Tejada 2012, 289–90; Hamann 2017, 116–17; Mundy 2010, 116–17).

Furthermore, the imperial tax system was inextricably linked to military conquest. Pay- ments of tax or tribute were metonymic for submission to the Aztec state, so much so that responding to an Aztec request for exotic goods from one’s territory could come to mean incorporation into the Aztec empire (Durán 1994, 105, 175, 223–24). Taxation and its attendant bureaucracy was an immediate consequence of conquest: “And when the city which they had destroyed was attained, at once was set the tribute, the impost. [To the rul- er who had conquered them] they gave that which was there made. Likewise, forthwith a steward [calpixqui] was placed in office, who would watch over and levy the tribute” (Sahagún 1950, 8:53-54). Paying taxes was how provinces experienced incorporation into the Aztec empire, while failing to pay taxes constituted revolt (e.g., Durán 1967, 197).

Figure 5. Codex Mendoza, f. 39r. Tribute from the province of Tlapa. Note the decorated textiles and warrior costumes, which were not part of the tribute collected in Tlapa

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If the goods in the second section of the Codex Mendoza are the products of conquest, their representation highlighted the Aztec self-conception as a nation of fierce war- riors. By focusing on imperial taxation, the second section emphasizes bellicose “Chi- chimec-like” conquests over more sedentary “Toltec-like” pursuits such as agriculture, craft making, and long-distance trade (for a description of these activities as Toltec at- tributes, see Sahagún 1975, 3:195-96).17 But it also emphasized the continuing gestures of submission required by the periodic delivery of taxes. As such, the second section of the Codex Mendoza is a much closer correlate to the first section than has sometimes been recognized: it translates the conquests of the first section into a register of ongoing acts of material submission. The gridded format of the pages in both sections highlights this connection (Jorge Gómez Tejada, personal communication, 2017).

The performance of taxation

The splendid goods arrayed on the pages of the Codex Mendoza correspond to a larger Mesoamerican tradition concerning the presentation and display of goods. We see some of the clearest representations of such dazzling displays in images of the Maya courts, cen- turies before the Aztecs came to power. Goods are often associated with thrones, either being presented by kneeling intermediaries or simply stashed beneath the throne while courtly life carries on around them (figure 6). In many cases, there is an emphasis on stacks of plain white textiles—women’s labor concretized and commodified into a standardized form that, by the time of the conquest, was beginning to serve as a form of currency—but there are other intriguing bundles as well, sometimes labeled with their contents, much as we see in the Codex Mendoza (Stuart 1998, 409–17; 2006, 127–28). In these images, it is not always possible to tell if regular taxation, one-time gifting, or the spoils of war are being represented—and, indeed, different images may represent all three, using a set of conventions which could also be deployed for mercantile or supernatural scenes.18

For example, figure 7 shows bundles under the throne as captives are being presented, suggesting booty or perhaps tribute obligations brought into being by warfare.19 The mu- rals of Bonampak, by contrast, seem to show gifts presented on the special occasion rep- resented in the murals of Room 1, perhaps the presentation of an heir (or heiress), which occasioned dances, musical performances, and embassies from other courts. Stashed un- derneath the throne in the upper vault of Room 1 lie bags of full of luxurious goods, one even labeled ho’ pik kakaw, or 40,000 cacao beans (figure 8; Miller and Brittenham 2013, 125; Miller and Houston 1998, 248–49; Stuart 2006, 137–41; Houston cited in Miller

Figure 6. Rollout of a Maya cylinder vase, showing cloth and bundles of goods being presented to a Maya ruler. Princeton University Museum of Art. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund 2001-181. Rollout photograph © Justin Kerr, K8089

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1997, 40). Significantly, what these Maya images emphasize is the performative aspect of tribute presentation. The goods themselves are never represented alone, as they are in the Codex Mendoza. Tribute does not just appear—it is piled up in front of the throne by kneeling subjects, under the gaze of the royal recipient.

In contrast to the Maya examples, where representations frequently focused on personal interactions between king and subject, the Aztec performance of tax or tribute delivery was a demonstration of imperial might. Personalized dynamics might have persisted at the provincial level—well into the colonial period, Zorita (cited in Gibson 1964, 196)” noted that taxes were received “from the hand of the señor”, and tribute continued to be paid in kind until at least 1549 (see discussion in Gómez Tejada 2012, 292). But the presentation of tribute at the Aztec capital was a stunning display of bureaucracy, the responsibility of imperial officials, including the calpixque (tribute collector or provincial administrator) and petlacalcatl (keeper of the imperial storehouses).20 Here is Durán’s (1994, 335–36) description of an extraordinary levy of tribute and gifts for the emperor Ahuitzotl’s dedi- cation of the Templo Mayor in 1487,

Ahuitzotl then requested that the royal officials have the majordomos, adminis- trators, and treasurers of all the provinces bring the royal tribute to him. One by one these authorities brought the tribute they had collected. … All these men brought tribute in gold, jewels, ornaments, fine feathers, precious stones, all of great value and in quantity. There were countless articles of clothing and many adornments both for men and for women, of great richness, and an amazing quantity of cacao, chiles, pumpkin seeds, all kinds of fruit, fowl, and game. All this was received in an orderly manner and to show Aztec grandeur and power to the enemies and guests and foreign people and fill them with bewilderment and fear. They saw that the Aztecs were masters of the world, their empire so wide and abundant that they had conquered all the nations and that all were their vassals. The guests, seeing such wealth and opulence and such authority and power, were filled with terror.

While this extended passage describes tribute collected for a temple dedication rather than a regular tax, Durán (1994, 323) suggests that the performance of tax payments was similarly staged: “everything that was paid in tribute by the different cities and provinces during the entire year was given to the lords and chieftains in only one day. It was for this purpose that those riches were acquired, were collected, throughout the year, in order to make a grand and magnificent display”.

Figure 7. Rollout of a Maya vase, showing the presentation of captives, while goods are stashed underneath the throne. Rollout photograph © Justin Kerr, K5459

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It is a disembodied echo of this “grand and magnificent display” that is represented in the pages of the Codex Mendoza. We should take seriously the possibility that this repre- sentation aims to evoke the same kinds of sentiments that the very splendor and organi- zation of the goods within the palace might have done. The grid-like form of the tribute payments arrayed on the page makes claims about the orderly nature of the Aztec state (Gómez Tejada 2012, 273–74). While this may have been a feature of the Codex Mendo- za’s pre-Hispanic prototype, for a colonial audience, as Jorge Gómez Tejada (2018) has argued, demonstrating the just and rational nature of Aztec government continued to have important stakes.

Comparing the images of the Codex Mendoza with Durán’s descriptions of tribute pre- sentation ceremonies or with Maya images of the same subject, highlights a conspicuous absence within the pages of the Codex Mendoza: the lack of people. With the exception of the disembodied heads of the rulers of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco on folio 19r and the heads representing captives from Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Huexotzingo to be delivered as slaves by the province of Tepeacac (folio 42r), there are no bodies in this section of the manuscript.21 We see neither the bodies which performed the labor required to produce the goods ordered across the pages (Litvak King 1971, 99–112; Rojas and Batalla Rosado 2008), nor the bodies of the administrators and attendants who would have presented these goods at court. The performative element is conspicuously absent, just as the blood and gore of conquest is missing from Part I of the book.

But there is yet another kind of body missing from the second part of the Codex Mendoza—not just the body of the tribute-payer, but also the body of the emperor, the ultimate recipient of all taxes, tribute, booty, and other goods that flow through the Aztec imperial system (see Barbara Mundy’s essay in this volume for an argument that the altepetl or city-state of Tenochtitlan is the true subject of the Codex Mendoza; in this case, what matters is the tlahtoani’s status as representative or embodiment of the altepetl). It is for his delectation that the goods are piled up before being redistributed to temples and storehouses and as royal gifts to subjects, allies, and enemies. After describing the amassing of tribute for the Templo Mayor dedication (quoted above), Durán (1994, 335–36) continues,

All the tribute was delivered to the royal treasurer or to the chief majordomo so that it could be divided according to law. Especially everything the priests required for the cult to the gods and for the present ceremonies was provided. Then the artisans, silversmiths and lapidaries, and featherworkers were giv- en all they needed for making the jewelry, feather ornaments, diadems, and precious objects that the kings and great lords were to be given. In this way, not only was the grandeur and sumptuousness of Tenochtitlan made evident, but also these things were available for the great feast and dedication of the Great Temple.

In this light, it is significant to consider again the kinds of goods which are being deliv- ered from the provinces. We realize how these dazzling goods must have made satisfying piles in front of the throne, more so than either monotonously compact piles of gold or a vast bulk of agricultural produce. What is also notable is how few items could actually be put directly to royal use. Although the goods would be piled up before the emperor, he personally had little use for the modest warrior costumes or even the vast majority of

Figure 8. Bonampak Room 1, detail of east, south, and west walls. The bundles in front of the throne on the west wall —including one labeled as containing cacao— may have been presented by the visiting emissaries represented on the east and south walls. Reconstruc- tion painting by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, courtesy of the Bonampak Documentation Project

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the elegantly-decorated textiles (and much less for the women’s clothing).22 Many of the goods would of course go immediately into the petlacalli or imperial storehouses, while other raw materials would be distributed to court artisans to begin making goods which might be fit for a king; however, an equal number of objects might have been immediately redistributed as gifts. Indeed, rare is the account of tax or tribute delivery in Durán (e.g. 1994, 201, 341) which does not conclude with the distribution of gifts . I quote one of these lengthy passages, from Ahuitzotl’s reign,

The following day the treasurers and factors from the different cities and prov- inces brought to the king the tribute that had been collected during the year. … He divided up among all those men much of the tribute just received, that is, the fine mantles and breechcloths, jewels and precious stones, weapons, and shields handsomely decorated with feathers of many colors. After making these gifts to the noblemen, Ahuitzotl called the sons of the lords and dignitaries of the court, all the captains and leaders of the army, the seasoned warriors and the other soldiers who had participated courageously in the conquest of those four provinces. They were all awarded part of these riches, each one according to his rank and feats in battle, as the king had promised them in Tecuantepec

Figure 9. Mátricula de Tributos, page 24. Taxes owed by the province of Xoconochco. Note the glyphs for the months of Ochpaniztli and Tlacaxipehualiztli in the upper left and right corners of the page. This is the cognate of f.47r in the Codex Mendoza. Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City

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when he prohibited the looting and destruction that was going on there. All these men were contented and considered themselves well paid. They thanked their lord and king for this favor. They were most willing to continue serving him, seeing that he was so generous, so magnanimous, in compensating them for their work. (Durán 1994, 358–60)

The presentation of tribute or taxation was ultimately a demonstration of Aztec imperial power, embodied in the person of the tlahtoani or emperor. Taxes—of goods, services, and labor—were first received by him and then redistributed as gifts, positioning imperial subjects as dependents and recipients of royal largesse.23 Taxation may have been only part of the Aztec economic system, but the rhetoric of its performance and representation mattered greatly.

The prototype of the Codex Mendoza taxation pages

In closing, I would like to raise the possibility that the pre-Hispanic prototype of the Codex Mendoza may have been part of an elaborate performance of the presentation of taxation and that this may account for some of the most striking absences within its pages. There are two cognate texts, the pictorial Matrícula de Tributos (figure 9) and the textual Infor- mación de 1554 (Rojas 1997), and, although the three do not agree in all particulars, their coincidence does suggest a pre-Hispanic genre.24

But just what was that pre-Hispanic genre? As Frances Berdan (1992, 64) puts it in her magisterial study, “There is some question whether the Codex Mendoza tribute list is a record of assessment (i.e., what was asked or demanded) or a record of collection (i.e., what was sent by the provinces)”. There were undoubtedly books that served both pur- poses: both Cortés (1960, 54) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1984, A325) make note of such documents.25 Yet, I question whether the prototype of the Codex Mendoza and the Matrícula de Tributos was such a pedestrian accounting document. The very visual elaboration of these pages as well as the loving care lavished on the representations of mantles, feathers, and greenstone beads signal a rhetoric far in excess of the demands of simple record keeping.26

Furthermore, the Nahua graphic text alone does not represent a complete tally of objects paid in a given year because it includes no information about the periodicity of payment (except for the divergent notations on folio 19r and 47r, see note 4 above). While some payment schedules seem to have been conventionally agreed upon (textiles were paid every six months, warrior costumes were paid annually), others, like the delivery of green- stone beads, could vary significantly from province to province (Berdan 1992, 62). It is impossible to calculate an entire year’s tax burden from the pictorial content of each page.

What if the prototype of the Codex Mendoza and Matrícula de Tributos were not a record of taxes owed or paid in an entire year, but rather an elaborate presentation copy of the taxes that were being given at a particular moment—an exquisitely calligraphic bill of lad- ing, as it were? Such an elegant document might have been made to be presented to the emperor during one of the formal tax presentation ceremonies described above. Assum- ing that that yearly, semiannual, and quarterly payments all coincided during the yearly payment ceremony, this would account for the partial representation of the total annual goods owed as well as the absence of notations of periodicity in the Nahua pictorial text. Furthermore, neither the recipient nor the date would need to be specified, since both would be obvious from the context of presentation.

If so, the status of the original document as a self-reflexive gift resonates with its subse- quent incorporation into the compilation we know as the Codex Mendoza. This manu- script was itself a royal gift, much as its prototype may have been, albeit under radically changed political circumstances (Gómez Tejada 2012, 309–20). The Codex Mendoza fits into a long European tradition of books as gifts. Many European books self-reflexively register their own presentation with a dedicatory text or an illustrated frontispiece which anticipates the presentation of the work to its patron. This practice also made its way to

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colonial New Spain; the frontispiece of the Relación de Michoacán, for example, shows the presentation of the manuscript to Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who had commis- sioned the document (figure 10). Yet, as Cynthia Stone (2004, 54–62) has demonstrated, this illustration was a site of contention between indigenous scribes and the Spanish friar who oversaw the work, with late changes transforming the image from a subtle critique of colonial authority into a more conventional gift-giving scene. The presentation of books, it seems, was a protocol which indigenous nobles easily embraced, fully appreciating the political nuances possible within the gesture.

But, if an Aztec royal tax presentation register were the prototype of the second section of the Codex Mendoza, this is radically different from the purposes to which the same images were put in within that document, where they are used to illustrate not a singu- lar presentation, but an entire system of taxation. It has often been remarked that the Codex Mendoza represents as stable and unchanging a taxation system which was, in fact, in considerable flux (Berdan 1992, 65; Hamann 2017). Indeed, it is the expansion of the Aztec territories through conquest (and their contraction via revolt) which allows Frances Berdan to suggest a date between 1516 and 1518 for the creation of the prototype of the Codex Mendoza. Additionally, Gerardo Gutiérrez’s work on the Tlapa tax documents has confirmed that the Aztec tax demands escalated frequently, with a dramatic spike in the years just before the Spanish invasion. Even the composition of the provinces was

Figure 10. Relación de Michoacán, frontispiece, showing the presentation of the book to Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. Later changes in the image, such as the position of the friar and the gesture of the indigenous nobleman behind him, suggest the charged rhetoric that accompanied the presentation of a manuscript during colonial times. Royal Library of the Monastery of El Escorial

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not static: part of the rise in tax demands for Tlapa in 1511 and 1515, for example, came from the incorporation of new territories into the province (Gutiérrez 2013, 161–63). A system of annual, semi-annual, or quarterly presentation documents could account for such fluctuations without unsightly emendations and cross-outs (although these may very well have been present on the working inventories and tax treaties). Such a system might also help explain some of the discrepancies between the Codex Mendoza, Matrícula de Tributos, and Información de 1554, in that each may be a copy of a record of a different episode of tax presentation (although other discrepancies are surely errors of interpretation or glossing).

What is key is that the pictorial Nahua document never claims to be a complete represen- tation of a static taxation system. It is the Spanish language glosses that do this work, spec- ifying the periodicity of payments, without which it is impossible to calculate yearly tax payments, and suppressing any mention of the yearly fluctuations in tax assessments. Here we have another example of the “tyranny of the gloss” (the phrase is Marc Zender’s, per- sonal communication with Jorge Gómez Tejada, 2017), where the Spanish-language texts have preconditioned our understanding of the Nahua pictorial document and converted a record of a particular moment into a general system, losing historical nuance along the way.27 The images themselves resist this normalization: glosses underneath the images simply translate quantities, and it is only the purely textual commentaries on the facing pages which specify the periods of payment (with the exceptions of folio 19r, perhaps an early attempt to unify the two systems, and folio 47r, which may represent an unusual periodicity of payment).28 It is the use of the imperfect past tense in the Spanish language text which makes the claim that these payments were repeated in just the same way again and again, in a timeless and unchanging past: “ellos pagaban,” “tributavan dos veces al año,” and “daban en tributo.” These terms themselves are relentlessly repeated, only reinforcing the impression that the system continued unchanging and uninterrupted, from a remote past until its protracted colonial end. It is the Spanish text which transforms the meaning of the images from a copy of a record of a particular instance into the evidence of a fixed and orderly system. As in so many other colonial documents, in the second section of the Codex Mendoza, alphabetical writing reshapes the meaning of the Nahua pictorial text.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jorge Gómez Tejada for the invitation to participate in this volume as well as for his thoughtful feedback on this essay. Barbara Mundy and Kris Driggers also read the essay and offered many helpful comments. Brian Muhs, Richard Payne, Niall Atkin- son, and Chelsea Foxwell provided helpful comparative perspectives on taxation, as did Dain Borges and Clark Evans. Kenneth Hirth graciously shared his work on Aztec eco- nomic systems, and our energetic conversation about Aztec economies greatly enriched the work. Thanks also to Davide Domenici for thought-provoking questions.

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Endnotes

1 Distinguishing between tax and tribute is a complicated matter, with many competing definitions. Here, I follow Michael Smith (2014, 19; 2015, 74–75; 2015, 79–80) in making a distinction between taxes, which are paid regularly in pre-negotiated quantities, and tribute, which is an irregular levy extracted at unpredictable intervals. The matter is confused by the fact that early Spanish sources render both kinds of payments as “tributo” (Smith 2014, 19; 2015, 75). Glosses which stipulate the periodicity of payments in the Codex Mendoza suggest that its images were interpreted by the glosser as taxes, to be paid annually, semi-annually, or every eighty days, and not as more irregular tribute. But, it is likely that tax-paying provinces could also be subject to unexpected levies of tribute, on occasions such as the coronation of a ruler or the dedication of a new temple, often in the form of requests for “gifts” (e.g., Durán 1967, 323).

Note that there are other competing definitions of tax and tribute: Hirth (2016, 35) prefers to retain the term “tax” for levies on finished products, as opposed to labor, in order to highlight the prevalence of labor-based extractive systems in the Aztec world, while Berdan (1992, 55) defines tribute as “revenue collect- ed by a militarily dominant state from its conquered regions”. Richard Payne (forthcoming), by contrast, in an ancient Iranian context, highlights differing terms for tax payments from imperial subjects (whether regular or special levies) and tribute as gifts from outside the empire, either from allies or client states. While acknowledging this diversity of terminology, I concur with Smith in using the word “tax” to facilitate comparison with other ancient economies. Frances Berdan (1992, 63–64) suggests further that it is taxes paid to Tenochtitlan alone, and not to the whole of the Triple Alliance, which are represented in the Codex Mendoza.

2 This is especially notable on folio 47v, showing the taxes of Xoconochco, where the jaguar pelts, loads of cacao, gourd bowls for drinking cacao, and pieces of amber are duplicated, as if to emphasize the preciousness of the goods owed (see figure 9 for the cognate page in the Matrícula de Tributos). Berdan (1992, 56) suggests that this division corresponds to the two annual payments made during the months of Ochpaniztli and Tlacaxipehualiztli (unusually, the glyphs representing both months are painted at the top of the page). Doublings or expansive representations on other pages may have a more purely rhetorical motivation (note for example the doublings on folio 19r).

3 There is some uncertainty whether the textiles represent individual cloths, or bundles of 400 cloths. The scribe who added the glosses to the Codex Mendoza himself seemed unsure, inserting the word “cargas” or “bundles” with a carat into existing notations. For recent summaries and positions on the controversy, see Berdan (1992, 156), Gutiérrez (2013, 151, 156, 165n9), Hirth (2016, 300n35), and Rojas y Batalla Rosado (2008, 201–5).

4 The two exceptions are glyphs for the months on Ochpaniztli and Tlacaxipehualiztli on folio 47r (figure 9 illustrates the cognate page in the Matrícula de Tributos) and the four circular glyphs on Tlaltelolco page (folio 19r). As the gloss explains indicate “estas quatro como flores, significan, ochenta días, cada una flor vente días, en los quales portasacion, de los señores de Mexico, tributaban los di Tlatilulco, de las cosas en esta plana figuradas e yntituladas” (Ruwet 1992, 43; these four, like flowers, indicate eighty days, each flower twenty days, in which the people of Tlatelolco gave in tribute to the lords of Mexico those things drawn and named on this page). The use of two different ways of showing periodicity and the rarity of temporal glyphs suggest that this was not a familiar or necessary part of the prototype text. For more on the periodicity of tribute, see Barlow (1949), Berdan (1992, 62–63), Smith (2015, 93–94); for more on representations of the Aztec months, see Brown (1977).

5 Note also how bins of foodstuffs are systematically underrepresented on the pages of the Codex Mendoza: the text on folio 36v specifies “four large wooden bins … full of maize, beans, chia, and amaranth,” but only two bins are represented, their contents mixed together, while the glosses on folio 37r pull the contents apart again: “two bins, the one of maize and the other of chia” and “two bins, the one of beans and the other of amaranth.” This pattern is found wherever bins of staple foods are pictured (folios 20v, 22r, 23v, 25r, 26r, 27r, 28r, 29r, 30r, 31r, 32r, 33r, 34r, 35r, 36r, 37r, 41r, 42r, 44r).

6 Smith’s (see discussion in 2015, 80–81) preferred term for the “strategic provinces,” again to facilitate cross-cultural comparison.

7 I have omitted Smith’s (2015, 92–93) category of “labor by youths in the telpochcalli” in the list above, which Smith also suggests might be grouped with public works corvée.

8 Calpullalli, altepetlalli, teopantlalli, tecpantlalli, milchimalli, tequitlalli, and piltalli, teuctlalli, and tlatocatlalli, to name just a few. See Hirth (2016, 37) for a more complete listing as well as Lockhart (1992, 1155–63).

9 The text in Spanish reads: “y declarándoles las preeminencias de que desde aquel día gozaban. Que era: vestir algodón, ponerse sandalias en los pies, entrar en palacio, comer de las comidas reales, beber cacao, usar de xúchiles y humazos, tener las mujeres que pudiesen sustentar, y ser reservados de tributos

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y alcabalas y pechos y cualesquier pensiones e imposiciones y de servicios personales, salir a todos los bailes reales y comer carne humana, poder beber vino y dar voto en las cosas de guerra, edificar casas con sobrados, y juntarse con los caballeros del sol, que llamaban comendadores del Aguila” (Durán 1967, 443; emphasis is mine).

10 For a thorough review of Mesoamerican marketplaces, which includes an argument for a minimal impact of market taxes, see Hirth (2016, 72–87).

11 Although Gutiérrez does not speculate about how the gold was obtained, I wonder if some of it might have been generated by selling products of taxed labor as well as by mining. The provinces of Çihuatlan and Tepequacuilco, studied by Jaime Litvak King (1971, 95–97, 105–7), in fact collected a greater range of goods in taxes than those recorded in the Codex Mendoza, suggesting another kind of market exchange (cited in Hirth 2016, 54).

12 Gutiérrez also notes that annual taxes represented in the Tribute Roll of Tlapa amount to about 12% more in monetary equivalent than the good represented in the Codex Mendoza and cognate documents, as if the local calpixqui (Aztec tribute collector and administrator) took a hefty cut along the way.

13 Weapons and armor would also seem to be exquisitely calibrated items to demand in tribute, if questionable ones, due to the risk of sabotage. Although Durán (1967, 209) lists them among the items of tribute received by Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina, in the Codex Mendoza, only the province of Tepeacac on folio 42r is shown to provide arrows and atlatl projectiles.

14 Zorita (1963, 117) continues on to say that no province paid goods from beyond its borders “so the people did not have to leave their natural surround- ings to seek tribute.” Close examination of taxation documents demonstrates that this idealized understanding is incorrect (see note 12 above). In quoting so extensively from sixteenth century Spanish accounts like those of Zorita and Durán, I do not wish to suggest that they represent correct or definitive under- standings of how the Aztec taxation system worked; instead, I use them to capture a sense of the rhetoric surrounding Aztec taxation.

15 Barbara Mundy (2015, 23–55) makes a similar point about the rhetoric of royal feathered costumes.

16 There is surprisingly little overlap between the goods represented in the Codex Mendoza and the items deposited as offerings in the Templo Mayor (no corals, for example, in the pages of the Codex Mendoza). In this context, it is helpful to recall Melgar Tísoc and Solís Ciriaco’s (2015) argument that many of the “foreign” offerings at the Templo Mayor were made in Tenochtitlan workshops. However, corals, shells, and other products of the sea must have arrived via a different mechanism, perhaps requested as exceptional gifts in honor of a temple dedication or bought in the market.

17 I am grateful to Davide Domenici for highlighting the tensions between Toltec and Chichimec in Aztec self-conception (personal communication, 2017); see also Umberger (1996, 86). Richard Payne (forthcoming) notes a similar pattern among putatively nomadic late Iranian empires in Central Asia, where again, goods received via imperial tribute may have been monetarily far less important than the revenues from labor and land and market taxes, but received far greater rhetorical emphasis because of their splendor, and also because of the ritualized gestures of submission involved in their delivery.

18 The same kinds of conventions are used to represent a mercantile scene on K1728, while gods with bundles assemble before the creation of the present era on K2796 (Kerr 2019; the K numbers refer to Justin Kerr’s catalog of rollout photos of Maya vases).

19 War is likely also the context of the very Codex Mendoza-like representations of goods in the fragmentary murals of the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza (Morris 1931, 409, pl.154).

20 Though the Codex Mendoza (folio 44v) suggests that the petlacalcatl was the provincial governor and a calpixqui placed in each conquered town. See Smith (2015, 95–101) for further discussion.

21 In this light, it is also worth noting the problematic transitional status of folios 17v-18r, which name the governors of various provinces. These pages are structured very much like the tribute pages of Section 2, with an L-shaped fame of place-names on folio 17v, but at the end of folio 18r comes the notation “fin de la partida primera de esta ystoria.”

22 Crucially, in Durán’s (1967, 205–14) account, the catalog of Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina’s tribute comes just before his establishment of laws, the first ten of which have to do with sumptuary privileges. I am grateful to Davide Domenici (personal communication, 2017) for highlighting this conjunction. In another passage, Durán (1967, 367) notes, “entre estos tributos traían ropas que sólo servían a señores y otros para gente de todos estados”.

23 I am grateful to Brian Muhs for suggesting this line of analysis (personal communication, 2017). See also Mundy (2010, 120) and Umberger (1996, 103).

24 For a review of the question, see Berdan (1992, 56–63). I follow Jorge Gómez Tejada (2012, 200–209, 281) in thinking that at least the first few pages of Mátricula de Tributos must be post-conquest, and perhaps even later than the Codex Mendoza, based on the style of the heads, with characteristically mid-six- teenth century pointed chins, and also some of the unusual renderings of glyphs. For a strong statement of the contrasting view, see Batalla Rosado (2007). If both the Codex Mendoza and the Mátricula de Tributos are post-conquest, it is likely that they are derived from a shared pre-Hispanic prototype (Borah’s and Cook’s [1963] “prototype A”) or perhaps even two very similar pre-Hispanic documents. There is, however, no reason to think that these pre-Hispanic documents would have looked exactly like the Codex Mendoza or the Matrícula de Tributos, especially in the ways that both documents are accommodated to the very peculiar proportions of the European page; amate strips are visibly glued together in the Mátricula de Tributos to attain pages of this unfamiliar configuration (see Gómez Tejada 2012, 207–8). Other elements of the compositions, such as the grid-like layout and the L-shaped border of place glyphs, may have more pre-Hispanic precedent.

25 Here are the relevant passages. Cortés (1960, 54): “En todos los señoríos de estos señores tenía fuerzas hechas, y en ellas gente suya, y sus gobernadores y cogedores del servicio y renta que de cada provincia le daban, y había cuenta y razón de lo que cada uno era obligado a dar, porque tienen caracteres y fig- uras escritas en el papel que hacen por donde se entienden. Cada una de estas provincias servían con su género de servicio, según la calidad de la tierra, por manera que a su poder venía toda suerte de cosas que en las dichas provincias había”. Díaz del Castillo (1984, A:325): “Acuérdome que era en aquel tiempo su mayordomo mayor un gran cacique que le pusimos por nombre Tapia, y tenía cuenta de todas las rentas que le traían al Montezuma, con sus libros hechos de su papel, que se dice amatl, y tenía destos libros una gran casa dellos”.

26 Many of the other taxation records from the same period are far more workmanlike in nature, frequently rendered solely in black ink, and certainly with none of the elaborate shading and elegant presentation of the two imperial tax registers. In fact, some of the closest parallels are to other documents intended as petitions or legal documents—that is, for presentation—such as Codex Kingsborough, the Codex Osuna, or certain pages of the Codex Huehotzingo, where the care lavished may also signal part of a colonial rhetorical strategy.

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27 I am grateful to Kristopher Driggers (personal communication, 2017) for this observation.

28 For further discussion, see note 4 above. Folio 18v also includes the only note about the beginning of tribute payments: “tuvo principio el dicho tribute desde en tiempo de Uauhtlatoa y Moquihuiz, señores que fueron de Tlatilulco. Los señores de Mexico que dieron principio a los Tatilulco para que les tribu- tasen, reconociendo vasallaje, fueron Ycoaçin y Axayacaçin.” Apart from this passage, the system is treated as if it had been there since time immemorial.