#tezozomoc | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

notapaladin · 4 years ago

Text

one day we will be remembered

look i go BATSHIT FERAL over soulmate AUs so the fact that everyone in obsblood comes with a day sign that might be shared by dozens of people? that’s a good setup for one!

Also on AO3

Everyone in the Fifth World has a soulmate. Some people are born with another’s day sign seared into the thin flesh of their inner wrists; others only find it igniting their skin as they linger on Mictlan’s threshold. Children dream about meeting their tonalli’s other half, though most in time settle for people their families know and trust. There are many infants born each day, after all, and you would sooner have your Eight Death be the girl next door instead of the flat-faced, knock-kneed spinster across the canal. (Then your girl runs off with a lover, you marry the spinster anyway because she’s good with your children, and you find she makes you smile as the beautiful one never did. Fate has a way of working these things out.)

Acatl is twelve years old when he wakes with a strangled scream in the middle of the night to discover why it is that soulmarks, which don’t look much like burns, are always described as lighting up your veins. When it’s over, he blinks back tears, swallows the blood in his mouth—he’s bitten the inside of his cheek, and now it will swell and he’ll probably keep biting it for the next three days—and holds up his wrist to the moonlight. There is a number. There is a glyph.

“Ten Rabbit, huh?”

Cuixtli, the boy who always takes the mat next to him. He’d given Acatl a good kick for waking him up, but now he’s watching with fascination. He was one of the lucky ones—his soulmark came a few days after birth, and he’s accordingly been betrothed to the most likely local girl almost since then. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make him any less interested in others’ matches, and he grins as he looks Acatl over. “You’ll have some waiting to do. At least you can still play around ‘till you meet your girl, huh?”

He takes a slow breath. His skin still feels raw all over, too sensitive in the night air. The students of the calmecac are meant to be dignified, which is the only reason he doesn’t punch Cuixtli for that. He has no intention of playing around. He’ll meet her or he won’t, but either way he’ll live a good, temperate life. After all, he might be a priest if he completes his schooling. Priests have no soulmates. “We can’t all be like you.”

(She’ll be much younger than him. If they ever meet, they’ll be strangers. The soulmate bond guarantees a heart he’ll find pleasing, but that’s no substitute for knowing what she’s like. She might be arrogant, or cruel, or too stubborn for him to stand.)

(If the gods made a soulmate for him, he’s starting to think it might not be a girl at all, which is not comforting in the least.)

Cuixtli pats his shoulder, ignoring his flinch. “Cheer up, I’m sure you’ll meet her eventually.”

“Hm.” He looks down at his soulmark again. Fresh, it’s a healthy crimson with each line of the glyph picked out as precisely as any scribe’s pen. Carefully, he runs his thumb over it and is relieved when the touch doesn’t bring more pain, even though it’s still glowing faintly. He knows it will burn again and turn white when he meets her—if he meets her. He thinks she’ll probably be disappointed.

“Can you get me a bandage?”

There are other things to worry about, after all.

And so Acatl grows, and learns, and devotes himself first to the service of the gods and then to his fellow men, and as time passes he finds that he rarely, if ever, looks past the traditional white wristwraps of a priest of the Dead to see if the mark of his soulmate remains. Whoever they are, they’ll just have to be alone. Perhaps they’ll be happy anyway.

(He is not lonely. He is not. Even when his parents, furious at his decision, throw the mark in his face—Your soulmate is alive out there, Acatl, how can you forsake her?—he does not waver.)

(And if he cries, it is only the dust.)

& &

Teomitl is born with his soulmark, but it takes a day or two for anyone to notice. There is the lady Huitzilxochtin’s funeral to plan, after all. She, a great lady of the court with her husband’s day sign on her wrist as proof that they were destined for one another, lived just long enough to kiss her son’s forehead and whisper his name before walking into the Sun’s heaven, and with all that to deal with it is some time before anyone checks the boy for a mark.

It’s his nursemaid who finds it; she immediately tells her superiors, who tell his father Tezozomoc, who rushes into the women’s quarters to exclaim over his son’s good fortune at already having the other half of his heart in the world. Six Reed is an auspicious enough date; true, the number itself is unlucky, but those born on Reed days are great lovers of justice which will hopefully balance it out. The only snag is that she might be much older than him; there is no greater sorrow for an imperial youth then to have a soulmate who cannot bear him children.

They start parading girls in front of him immediately, of course. By the time he is old enough to enter calmecac, he’s met every noble maiden in the Triple Alliance—even the ones who aren’t the right day sign. You never know where your next marriage alliance will come from, after all. They’re...nice enough, he supposes. Most of them are pretty, and some of them have more interests than weaving and music to talk about. But they don’t set the mark on his wrist afire, and so he does not encourage friendship.

(He’s spent a lot of time wondering what she’d be like, this woman with his sign of Ten Rabbit on her wrist. He imagines she’d be much more interesting than any average court lady.)

Calmecac brings its own challenges. His friends there encourage him to branch out, to seek his soulmate or at least a few nights’ pleasure in a market girl or a sacred courtesan, and he finds himself shutting them down with a snarl before he can even think why. When they ask, he doesn’t know what to say.

So he tells them the truth, and they laugh in his face. That’s another few hours of punishment for starting a brawl, but it’s honestly worth it. (His soulmate will be the sun in his sky, a beauty beyond compare. He will never want anyone else.) They don’t laugh at him after that. Soon he begins weapons training in earnest, learning the ways of spear and sword and bow, and they don’t laugh at all.

He goes to war, takes a prisoner, shaves his head. By this time he knows himself well enough—knows the kind of person he is, the way his heart turns—to walk through the lines of captive men too, waiting for heat at his wrist that never comes. It would be a relief, except that it means his soulmate is still out there somewhere waiting.

(He hopes they’re waiting. He hopes they’re healthy, happy, not as lonely as he is—but he hopes that they look at their wrist and wonder.)

He has been freshly made a Leading Youth, the bright dye of his new cloak still a surprise each morning, when Guardian Ceyaxochitl summons him. Her voice is firm, eyes stern, as she tells him, “Mictlantecuhtli’s High Priest needs an extra pair of hands to deal with the matter of Priestess Elueia’s disappearance. You’ll do.”

He’s heard of the new High Priest. Acatl-tzin is supposed to be young for his position, just thirty, and the Guardian was very keen on his appointment even though he’s the son of peasants from the Atempan calpulli. More importantly, he remembers beautiful, terrified Elueia, and his heart aches.

Of course he says yes, and of course he runs up the steps of Lord Death’s temple as quickly as he can. Now is his chance to prove himself, to do more than take a single prisoner for the Sun’s nourishment. He’d be a fool to do otherwise.

Then he sees the man he came for, and the world goes still around him.

He’s not what Teomitl expected for his soulmate—not beautiful or wealthy or tall, not a strong warrior or a noble maiden dressed in gold. He’s only a bit taller than Teomitl himself, slender as a deer, with an expression that says he spends more time frowning than smiling. (Teomitl is almost glad for that. He’s sure that Acatl-tzin would be devastating if he smiled, and he doesn’t know if he can handle that just yet.) His hair is a glory, spilling down his back in waves, and he is not wearing a cloak. Teomitl finds himself grateful for the sizzling ache coursing up his left arm from the soulmark, because it’s a welcome distraction from the way an escaping lock of hair tumbles over bare skin.

He takes a breath. And another. Part of him wants to sob, wants to scream at the gods that it’s not fair—he’s finally found the other half of his soul, and he won’t even get to keep him. There will be no destined marriage such as his parents had; he’ll be lucky to so much as hold his hand. The rest of him remembers his pride and swallows down the pain.

He meets his soulmate’s eyes for the first time. They are darker than his own, narrowed with stress and tiredness and what he’s sure is pain. “You would be...Acatl-tzin?”

Your soulmate’s name on your lips resounds like a bell in their heart; Teomitl is impressed when Acatl doesn’t even flinch. Instead he nods, briefly averts his eyes, and says, “If it’s for a wake—“

A diligent, dutiful man. Teomitl would smile, if hearing his low voice didn’t serve as a reminder that they have a priestess to find. As for being his soulmate...well. He can bring that up later.

He’d had plans for that ‘later.’ They’d involved moonlight, flowers, a spread of delicate dishes from the palace kitchens. Things to tempt and flatter, things that would make Acatl smile and laugh and relax. (Maybe, just maybe, things that would turn Acatl’s heart towards him like a flower to the sun.)

They had not involved this.

Truthfully, he’s not sure he could have made a plan that included this. They’re on one of the Floating Garden’s thousands of islands, there is a dead and stinking beast of shadow practically right next to his ear, his leg is screaming in a way that suggests its claws did some serious muscle damage, and Acatl is bleeding horribly and liberally covered in mud.

Oh, and Acatl’s thrown a knife at him. Aiming for the beast, yes, but still in his direction. In the dark. At a moving target.

He’s angrily binding up Acatl’s wounds, muttering direly to himself about infection, when it slips out.

“...and no, you will not be fine, people die of wounds half as bad as these if they go rotten, Acatl-tzin—Duality, honestly, how did you give me a soulmate who’s so damned reckless—“

Acatl freezes under his hands. “Your—what did you say?”

Oh, gods. He’d said that out loud. He drops his gaze and prays that Acatl does the same with the subject. “I…” The words in his heart are locked behind a dam built of a lifetime’s longing, and he can’t force them out.

“Teomitl.”

If Acatl sounded angry or judgemental, Teomitl would snarl in his face. But he’s patient, and that’s what gets his tongue to work again even though he can’t take his eyes from the strips of cloth he’s winding around Acatl’s injured arm. “...Your day sign. Six Reed, isn’t it?”

Acatl draws in a shaky breath. Slowly, he nods.

He turns his hand over, showing Acatl the underside of his wrist. The lines of his soulmark burn white. Please accept me. Please. I don’t know, yet, if I love you—but I think that I could.

Acatl is silent. Teomitl lifts his head to find that he has his eyes shut, as though the truth is too painful to contemplate—but then he’s undoing the wristwrap on his injured arm in quick, jerky motions, letting it fall into the mud at his side, and Teomitl can’t look away from the glyph of his own day sign bone-white on Acatl’s skin.

“Ten Rabbit, in the year Ten Reed.”

Teomitl swallows past a sudden lump in his throat. “If you expect me to apologize—“

Acatl shakes his head. He still hasn’t met Teomitl’s eyes. “No. I should apologize. I felt it that day on the temple steps, but I…” He pauses, takes a breath, continues. “You are strong and brave, a warrior to make your family and the Empire proud—you ought to marry a woman and have a dozen children. I am...none of those things. Even were I not sworn to the service of Lord Death, I could give you none of the things you deserve.” Another breath, and he blinks once. “I simply cannot see a way forward for us.”

There are many ways forward when you’re the brother of the Revered Speaker, he doesn’t say. Acatl doesn’t need that revelation now, on top of everything else. But he’ll be damned if he lets this moment pass without saying something, and so he covers Acatl’s good hand with his own. (Acatl said us. He can work with that.) “Then we’ll make one, if you want.”

And now Acatl is looking at him in something like awe, and there’s a twitch to his mouth that might be the start of a smile. “Let’s get through this night, first.”

& &

They make it through the night. They make it through one week, another week, a month. Years.

And they make a way forward.

Acatl discovers it is much, much easier when your soulmate is the Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan instead of merely the Master of the House of Darts under (the late, unlamented, unmourned) Tizoc. They still cannot marry, cannot live under the same roof—Teomitl offers, but rooms in the palace would suit Acatl ill and they both know it—but when you bear the Revered Speaker’s soulmark openly there is absolutely no one in the Empire who will bar you from his chambers. Officially Acatl will never have children, only a great many nieces and nephews, but Mihmatini places each of hers in her husband’s arms and tells her brother to give them their names. (Teomitl only once cries a little, out of sheer joy.)

Of course there are arguments and petty disagreements. Of course there are fights, hot and furious and leaving both of them shaken. (Just because they are each other’s souls divided doesn’t mean they are always in harmony, after all.) But they make up in the end, always, and go to their mat warm in each other’s arms. Acatl guards the boundaries, and his beloved guards the Empire. Neither of them are ever lonely again.

Only once, when they are old men, does Teomitl bring up the path they’ve made. “Acatl?”

“Hm?” He’s been trying to make it through a scribe’s report on pale-skinned strangers from the east for an hour, with little success. Teomitl’s offered to read it to him, but he declined—true, his vision is no longer what it once was and the glyphs are distressingly blurred, but he is not blind yet, thank you. He can still make out his soulmate’s face just fine, and can’t help but smile at the sight.

Teomitl tilts his head, frowning, and Acatl hopes he hasn’t forgotten what he was going to say already. Seventeen years ago a great flood swept the city, Chalchiuhtlicue’s rage battering down the walls; Teomitl, trapped under the debris, had been lucky to survive. In Acatl’s estimation, injuries that preclude him being able to fight alongside his army are a small price to pay for such a miracle. When he speaks, though, his voice is quiet and clear. “...Do you think we’ve done enough? For those who will come after us, I mean. I know we can’t be the only soulmates who...well.” He gestures between them, encompassing the decades they’ve spent living as the worst-kept secret in Tenochtitlan.

It’s a question worth thought, and he gives it its due. “I think...I think we can always do more.”

(Even at the very end, when they’re averting the destruction of their world hand in bloodied hand, he smiles and thinks We’ve made a very good start.)

#obsidian and blood #acatl #teomitl #teocatl #paladin writes stuff

1 note · View note

tlatollotl · 6 years ago

Link

@askhistorians

From /u/400-rabbits

This is a whole pack of questions so I'm going to break them up into 4 part, starting with the question of indigenous sources, then moving onto the questions of technology and warfare before looping back around to discuss how the Aztecs portrayed themselves in indigenous sources.

Indigenous Sources

There are a number of pictorial codices which compile various aspects of Aztec culture, with the Borgia group codices thought to represent either a pre- or peri-Hispanic corpus. These pictorial documents are heavy on religious/calendric imagery though, and often bereft of written glosses, which makes them a difficulty entry into Aztec history.

More accessible are alphabetic histories written in the early Colonial period by indigenous and mestizo authors, as well as Spanish friars. The General History of the Things of New Spain, for instance, is a 12 volume encyclopedic collection of topics ranging from the creation of the world to which plant has berries good for treating dandruff. More commonly known as the Florentine Codex, after the most complete copy of the manuscript, the work was compiled in starting the late 1540s by a Spanish friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, utilizing Nahuatl scribes educated at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. The resulting work is composed in Nahuatl with Spanish translations (though sometimes just summaries). The entirety of the work was translated into English in the mid-20th century by Anderson and Dibble.

Diego Durán was Dominican Friar who wrote a history of the indigenous people he lived and preached among. In the 1570s he wrote The Book of Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar, both of which have been translated into English by Heyden and Horcasitas. His magnum opus, however, is his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de Tierra Firme which is significant not only as an early European-style narrative history of the Mexica people, but also as a text based upon a proposed earlier source known as Crónica X (though arguments exist as to whether this was a single source or a diverse corpus of earlier works).

Other Crónica X sources include the work of another friar, this time a Jesuit named Juan de Tovar, who was a contemporary and cousin of Durán. Indeed, he probably even used Durán's work in his own writings, which survive as the Tovar Manuscript and Ramirez Codex (though the latter is a copy not directly attributed to Tovar). As with Sahagún and Durán, Tovar's writings were suppressed and almost lost until rediscovery in the 19th Century, although his fellow Jesuit, José de Acosta, relied heavily on Tovar's work in the chapters covering Mexico in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies.

The other Crónica X work comes from Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, who was a descendant of the ruling dynasty of Tenochtitlan born shortly after the Conquest. Also writing in the latter part of the 16th Century, his significant work is the Spanish language history of the Mexica, the Crónica Mexicana. Certain scholars, notably Galvaro Romero, have gone further and proposed Tezozomoc was the actual author of the Crónica X, though this is a minority view. A later work in Nahuatl, the Cronica Mexicayotl, covers almost the exactly same material, but was physically written by another indigenous author, Don Domingo Chimalpahin. There are various takes on the authorship of the Cronica Mexicayotl, but the synthesis approach it is an adaptation of Tezozmoc's earlier work by Chimalpahin. (See Battock 2018 “La Crónica X: sus interpretaciones y propuestas” for a summary of the historiography of Crónica X). No English translation of the Cronica Mexicana (to my knowledge) exists, but Schroeder and Anderson have published a translation of Chimalpahin's writings in their (1997) Codex Chimalpahin.

Of note, the Monarquia Indiana written by Franciscan friar Juan de Torquemada can also be seen as part of the Crónica X tradition, though this early 17th Century work actually drew upon a number of sources. Torquemada's work would subsequently inform the work of the Jesuit Francisco Clavijero, who wrote his La Historia Antigua de México in the 18th Century. In a pattern you might be starting to notice, there is no full English translation of Torquemada's work (though all 6 volumes are available online via INAH).

Outside of the Crónica X tradition there are various other works, the most important to understanding the Aztecs coming from the Texcoco tradition. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the ruling dynasty of that altepetl, wrote various works in the early 17th Century by drawing upon then extant pictorial works (such as the Mapa Quinatzin). Perhaps his most relevant work to this discussion is his Historia de la Nación Chichimeca. In this text, he not only outlines the various happenings of the most important polity of the eastern Basin of Mexico (and 2nd most important part of the Aztec Triple Alliance), but delves further back in history to describe the social and political rearrangements in the Basin wrought by the arrival of the Chichimecs. Alva Ixtlilxochitl, along with his relative Juan Pomar, form the much of the basis of our understanding Texcoco, though more recently there have been some critical interpretations of their histories (see Lee's The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl).

There are certainly other works produced in the decades after the Conquest which can inform our understanding of indigenous life. There are more historically minded documents written in a combination of Nahua and European styles, such as the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. There are pictorial documents which are more focused on genealogy and territory, like the Codex Quetzalecatzin. There are various "relaciónes," surveys conducted by the Spanish to collect demographic data (but also cultural information) about various regions. There's the compilation of Aztec tribute found in the Codex Mendoza. There are pictorial and alphabetic works about nearby regions, such as the Relación de Michoacan and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. There are, in other words, a plethora of non-Conquistador sources to draw upon, though their accessibility and availability to an Anglophone reader maybe limited.

Technology

This is probably the most uninteresting part of your question to me, in that it falls under a "not even wrong" rubric, so apologies if this section is short and somewhat brusque. There's a whole FAQ section of past answers you can read on this topic. Suffice to say, technology and civilization are not synonymous, and neither follows a straight line of development.

The example of the wheel, for instance, is usually tritely answered by noting that Mesoamericans were aware of wheels, we see them used in toys. The next step is to note the lack of draft animals usable to haul wheeled vehicles. A further step is to note much of Mesoamerica is composed of mountains and valleys, which are less than ideal areas for wheeled carts and other conveyances (being sure to note that Andean groups had draft animals in the form of llamas, but did not utilize them to pull carts despite a well-developed road system). A further note is to look explicitly at the Basin of Mexico, whose central lake system provided more advantageous transport by watercraft than by land, though this did not preclude a system of indigenous porters, the tlamemeh.

Going with an even broader view, we might note the Aztecs were about 2500-3000 years removed from the full development of staple food crop, maize. The equivalent time period in Afro-Eurasia using wheat would put us (following Tanno and Wilcox 2006 of wheat domestication being widespread in Mesopotamia by 8500-7500 years before present) would put us in the 6th-5th Millennia BCE, which generously puts us at the very early period of polity formation in Sumeria... and centuries before we see evidence of wheeled vehicles. Certainly there was no settlement in 5th Millennium Mesopotamia which could rival the megapolis of Tenochtitlan, nor even that of Teotihuacan a thousand years earlier. Perhaps the better question is why it took so long for complex states to form in Western Asia after the adoption of agriculture, relative to Mesoamerica.

Regardless, to put things more into context, here's a relevant quote from Hopkins (1973) An Economic History of Africa:

“Although the wheel is commonly regard as a symbol of economic progress, it is as well to remember that wheeled vehicle did not achieve a decisive advantage over other forms of transport until the industrial revolution, with the development first of the railway and then of the motor car. Before that time, the use of wheeled vehicles in Europe was inhibited by many of the problems experienced in Africa. In eighteenth-century Spain, for example, pack animals, especially donkeys, were by far the most important means of transport, though ox-carts were available and were used to a certain extent. The ox-cart carried three to our times as much as a large pack animal, but since it was costly to purchase and operate, and travelled at half the speed, it could not compete with donkey transport. Wagons did not become numerous in northern Europe until the sixteenth century, and even then they were used mainly for short-haul work. Until the roads were improved, pack animals remained the leading form of long-distance commercial transport on land. 'Long trains of these faithful animals, furnished with a great variety of equipment... wended their way along the narrow roads of the time, and provided the chief means by which the exchange of commodities could be carried on.' This statement could well apply to the Western Sudan in the pre-colonial period, though in fact it refers to England in the early eighteenth century.”

Add to this that mule-trains and porters continued to be major, even primary, methods of conveyance in Mexico well into modern age. The selection of something like "the wheel" to represent "real" civilization doesn't actually reflect the realities of use, and that is just one of any number of seemingly arbitrary indicators often used to show the primitiveness of Mesoamericans. So forgive me if I don't have much patience for this question which implicitly implies that Europeans -- using wheels, metal, crops, domesticated animals, and writing they did not invent, but borrowed from other peoples -- are superior to the peoples of a region which did independently invent many of those things. Why not ask why the Spanish had not invented universal schooling, steam baths, and public waste collection?

Warfare

This is another section I’m going to only briefly touch upon, because it has been covered extensively on this forum, including another FAQ Section.

Suffice to say that the idea of the Aztecs (and Mesoamericans, in general) fighting primarily to capture and not kill is a misconception. This is not to say capturing an opponent was not a valued goal, but we must recognize that the Aztecs did not conquer a large swathe of Mesoamerica by engaging in tactics detrimental to actual winning battles. As Hassig (2016) puts it, “capture was a significant goal, although one that is perhaps overestimated in the literature.”

Isaacs (1983) proposed making a distinction between wars of conquest and Flower Wars (xochiyaoyotl) based on primary source descriptions of the former which consistently show them as having “heavy slaughter of the enemy on the battlefield.” This perspective is consistent with actual descriptions of combat from the Spanish, who routinely describe tactics which preclude taking captives, such as barrages of arrows, slingstones, and atlatl darts. Likewise, the casualty rates of their Native allies (when mentioned) are indicative of deadly nature of warfare.

Often though, wars of conquest and expansion are conflated with Flower Wars, which are often portrayed as wholly ritualistic and based upon obtaining captives for sacrifice. Hicks (1979) examines how this view does have roots in primary sources, such as when Andrés de Tapia states Motecuhzoma told him they did not conquer the Tlaxcalans because “we desire that there should always be people to sacrifice to our gods"” or when Duran has Tlacaelel declare that region to be a “marketplace where “Huitzilopochtli] will buy victims, men for him to eat.”

Even as these sources state an overt aim of obtaining sacrifice, they also acknowledge the usefulness of continuing to maintain military activity outside the normal constraints on timeframe place by the necessity to plant and harvest crops. Per Tapia, the other reason to not conquer the Tlaxcalans was to maintain a “place where our youth could train themselves,” and Duran says one benefit is “the sons of noblemen would be occupied in this way and military activity would not be lost.”

The consensus view of Flower Wars then, is that there were realpolitik aspects to Flower Wars. They allowed a powerful foe to be ground down in what was essentially a long-term siege, while wars of conquest gradually encircled them, isolating them from the rest of Mesoamerica. The Tlaxcalans themselves acknowledged this, complaining to Cortés that their conflict with the Aztecs had left them bereft of sources of cotton and salt. Hassig (1988) further notes that we see gradually intensification of Flower Wars until they shifted over to become wars of conquest, as was already starting to happen in the borderlands between Tlaxcala and the Aztecs.

Views on themselves

The central tension of the Mexica identity was that they saw themselves both as put-upon underdogs and as destined by divine providence for conquest and glory. Sahagún writes that, on their migration into the Basin of Mexico, “nowhere were they welcomed; they were cursed everywhere; they were no longer recognized. Everywhere they were told: ‘who are the uncouth people? Whence do you come?’” (Bk. 10, p.196). Yet, they were also a people who were promised greatness by their patron god, Huitzilopochtli, who said “they [would] spread out, establish ourselves, and conquer the peoples who dwell in the great world” and receive “countless, infinite, unlimited commoners who will pay tribute to you” in the form of “precious green stones, of gold, of quetzal feathers, of emerald green jade, of spondylus shells, of amethysts, of costly clothing” as well as “various kinds of feathers -- cotinga, spoonbill, trogon; all the precious feathers; and multicolored chocolate and multicolored cotton” (Chimalpahin 1997)

They were both a part of the wild Chichimec peoples, but also the inheritors of the great and refined Toltecs. They were a severe and austere people, but, as we see in the quote above, a people which valued rich and refined goods. Gradie (1994) writes about how the union between the Mexica and the Culhua merged those two heritages into a single lineage which was quintessentially dual-natured, both savage and civilized.

The Mexica were also great cultural chauvinists, particularly when it came to their language; Nahuatl pretty much means “clear speech.” As much as they saw themselves as reviled and denigrated by their neighbors, they rarely missed a chance to get their own jabs in. The Otomi, for instance, were “blockheads,” “vain,” and “greedy,” while also being “lazy, shiftless” (Bk. 10, pp. 178-9). The Matlatzinca were “presumptuous, disrespectful” people who drank too much and even though some of them spoke Nahuatl, “the way they pronounced their language made it somewhat unintelligible” (p.182). The Tlahuica, though they spoke Nahuatl and not some “barbarous tongue” were nonetheless “crude,” “pompous,” “untrained,” and “cowardly” (p. 186).

For as much as they looked down their nose at other groups, the Mexica were not hypocrites and held themselves up to the highest standards of morality, behavior, and appearance. Maffie (2013) has written extensively about how Aztec philosophy conceived of a righteous life as balancing on summit or ledge, whose slippery earth constantly threatened to drop the individual into the depths of filth and depravity. As such, the Mexica individual was to constantly being on-guard against their own flaws, constantly monitoring their own behavior, constantly striving towards fulfilling their obligations to themselves, their community, their gods.

So a “good father” is one who “exemplary; he leads a model life” by being diligent, solicitous, compassionate, sympathetic; a careful administrator of his household” (Bk. 10, p. 1). In return a “good son” is one who is “obedient, humble, gracious, grateful, reverent” (p. 2). Sahagún expounds for several chapters about the ideal behaviors of various social roles, which consistently exhort some permutations of being humble, diligent, and gracious.

So when the Aztecs speak about themselves as destined to conquer and rule, this is not simple arrogance (though yes, it is arrogance). Their destiny was not just ordained and all they had to do was wait for it to be delivered, they were expected to strive and struggle, to prove their worthiness. In the Aztec mind, they had proved themselves, and continued to prove themselves, as worthy of greatness.

Battock 2018 “La Crónica X: sus interpretaciones y propuestas” Orbis Tertius 23(27)

Duran 1994 History of the Indies of New Spain trans. Heyden

Chimalpahin 1997 Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahua Altepetl in Central Mexico trans. Schroeder and Anderson

Gradie 1994 “Discovering the Chichimecas” The Americas 51(1)

Hassig 1988 Aztec Warfare

Hassig 2016 “Combat and Capture in the Aztec Empire* British Journal for Military History 3(1)

Hicks 1979 “‘Flowery War’ in Aztec History” American Ethnologist 6(1)

Isaac 1983 “Aztec Warfare: Goals and Battlefield Comportment” Ethnology 22(2)

Lee 2008 The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl

Maffie 2013 Aztec Philosophy

Sahagun 1961 General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 10: The People trans. Anderson and Dibble

Tanno and Wilcox 2006 “How fast was wild wheat domesticated?” Science 311(5769)

#askhistorians #reddit #aztec #mexica #mesoamerica #history

102 notes · View notes