About the same time as Teotihuacán was being founded in
the Valley of Mexico, the cornerstones of another ceremonial center
destined for greatness were being laid some 1000 km (600 mi) to the
east. Sometime during the second century B.C., Olmec-inspired
influences began to spread into the Yucatán region, carried by
a people whom the archaeologists have called the "Pioneers." Surely,
people of Mayan tongue had inhabited the region for many centuries in
the past, but now for the first time the rise of a more advanced
culture could be detected in the development of ceremonial centers
with monumental structures. Although the Yucatán was a
difficult environment in which to nurture an urban settlement, due to
its lack of surface water, its undependable rainfall, and the stony
character of its soils, the first major agglomeration in the region
seems to have arisen in what has to have been the most favorably
endowed area of the entire peninsula. At the risk of invoking the
notion of geographic determinism, it could be said that the Mayas had
located the best place first!
This was Edzná, in the interior of Campeche state about
50 km (30 mi) to the southeast of the present-day port city of
Campeche. It is located on the edge of what is the largest aguada, or
alluvial basin, in all of the Yucatán, and consequently had
one of the most extensive agricultural hinterlands of any settlement
on the peninsula as well as one of the more dependable water
supplies. Founded about 150 B.C., Edzná was the earliest major
Maya urban center and at the peak of its importance probably numbered
some 20,000 inhabitants. It is centered on a five-story pyramid which
the archaeologists have termed simply "Cinco Pisos" (Spanish for
"five stories") and it is laced by a series of great canals that
radiate across the aguada -- an engineering feat fully as impressive
in terms of the man-days required for their construction as the
pyramids of Teotihuacán. And, like the metropolis on the
meseta, the layout of Edzná clearly bears the imprint of its
Olmec-inspired founders, for it is once again precisely oriented to
the sunset position on August 13 -- a date whose significance had
been further enhanced with the creation of the Long Count since it
was believed to mark "the day on which the world
began". From
Edzná the march of civilization continued its advance into the
Maya realm, both northward into the pitted limestone landscape and
scrub-forests of the Yucatán and southward into the tangled
rain forests of Petén and the highlands of Guatemala. This
easterly wave of expansion led to the founding of literally hundreds
of new nodes of settlement amongst the Maya, most of them hardly more
than modest clearings in the forest but also many of which became
imposing ceremonial centers of considerable size and importance
including places like El Mirador, Uaxactún, and Tikal in the
Petén and later Kabah, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá
in the Yucatán. Only in a few of them were solsticial
orientations to prominent mountains possible, for this was not a
region of imposing topography much less of clear sight lines. In all
of them, however, one or more structures can be found which
commemorate the key dates of the Olmec calendar, among which the
sunset position on August 13 is invariably
present.
Although the layout of Edzná mimicked that of
Teotihuacán by being oriented to the August 13 sunset, the
Maya priests were no doubt quick to realize that, sacred as that date
may have been, it had no real meaning to the peasant farmers of the
Yucatán. They were also certainly aware that it was the
zenithal passage of the sun that had defined that date, but at
Edzná their observations revealed that the sun passed overhead
at noon no less than 18 days earlier than the date that the Olmecs
had established as "the beginning of time." Obviously, while the Maya
couldn't change the facts of history, they could amend the calendar
to accord more closely with the realities of their own physical
setting.
Thanks to their knowledge of the Long Count, the priests at
Edzná realized that it would not be too long before the first
day of the secular calendar, 0 Pop, would coincide with the zenithal
passage of the noonday sun over their city, and with the proper
preparation they could "reform" the calendar in such a way as to make
that their "New Year's Day". By examining the structure of the Long
Count ourselves, it becomes a rather simple matter to reconstruct
that event and when we do, we find that such a reform was most likely
carried out in the year 48 A.D. For proof that such a change actually
did take place, we can turn to no less an authority than Bishop Diego
de Landa, one of the earliest Spanish prelates of Yucatán, who
records that he himself witnessed the Maya New Year celebrations on
the equivalent of July 26 in our present Gregorian calendar. And when
we realize that the noonday sun is directly overhead on that day at
latitude 19.5º N. and that Edzná is the only Maya
ceremonial center of importance which is found on that parallel, then
we can appreciate the very special role that this place played in
Maya astronomy and time-reckoning. Indeed, glyphs from the seventh
century A.D. reveal that it was the Maya priests at Edzná who
were the final arbiters when a one-day correction in the calendar
became necessary.
But, aside from its Greenwich-like role in setting time for
the Maya world, we now know that Edzná was the Maya's earliest
center of astronomical studies, for in 1978 the first lunar
observatory in the New World was identified there. To all
Mesoamerican societies, the movements of the moon seemed so erratic
that they thought of it as being "crazy" or "drunken"; yet unless or
until they could accurately chart its "weird" behavior, there was no
way that they would ever know when it was next likely to be "devoured
by darkness". And because eclipses were such fearsome events for the
masses, any priest who learned how to foretell their occurrence would
immediately become living proof that "knowledge is
power."
However, in the flat and featureless landscape of
Yucatán it was quite impossible to find a natural feature that
could serve as a marker for the Mayas' horizon-based observations, so
they were obliged to create such a "marker" for themselves. From
their vantage point atop their five-story pyramid, the priests had an
unencumbered 360º view of the heavens but only as the moon
neared the horizon could its position be defined. What was required
was to find at least one extreme position from which a count could
begin and the idea was to see how long it would take for the moon to
return to that same point again. Little did they know as they
undertook this exercise that it would take them 18.6 years to
calibrate even one such cycle, and, to ensure that their count was
correct, would entail repeating the count at least once
more. Thus, assuming
that their endeavor was attended with a modicum of good luck, they
might have carried it off in a minimum of a little over 37 years, but
that does not seem to have been the case. The very first lunar
inscriptions that we find on Maya stelae go back to A.D. 357, which
strongly suggests that by that time they may have been working on the
problem for nearly 300 years! Still other evidence from the
middle of the 8th century reveals that, while the basic mathematics
of the problem seem to have been finally worked out, complete success
in predicting eclipses continued to elude them even then. In any
case, at Edzná itself the enduring witness to this challenging
enigma is to be found in the ruins of a lofty pyramid known as "La
Vieja" -- "the ancient one" -- constructed just high enough to
intersect the horizon as viewed from Cinco Pisos and sited precisely
at an azimuth of 300º from it, marking the northernmost still
stand of the moon as accurately today as it did when it was built ten
centuries ago.
By the time that Teotihuacán was beginning its meteoric
rise as the major metropolis of the New World and the Maya priests
were busying themselves with trying to make sense out of the
movements of the moon, the Olmec era had already come to an end. The
Olmecs' brilliant burst of creative energy in the arts, astronomy,
and mathematics coupled with their dynamic expansion of city-building
and long-distance trade was not matched by a sufficiently large
population base to result in anything like a consolidated political
entity. As "missionaries" they had been successful in passing on a
rich intellectual heritage to peoples as geographically dispersed as
the Totonacs and the Teotihuacanos, the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, and
the Maya, but it remained for each of the latter to develop their own
identities within the economic, social, and political fabric of
Mexico. And, not
surprisingly, each of their societies came to develop a personality
that strongly reflected its own regional
geography.
Of the new "states" which emerged in the wake of the Olmec
passing, Teotihuacán was the most vigorous and expansive.
Whereas it may have begun purely as a ceremonial center, its obsidian
outcrops soon made it into a hub of craftsmanship and commerce as
well. Its warm-temperate climate, while suited to the seasonal
cultivation of such staples as maize, beans, and peppers, was too
marginally cool to permit the production of either cotton or tropical
fruits, so these had to be imported from the Gulf coastal lowlands
along with such exotic items as the plumes of colorful birds, cacao,
vanilla, and rubber. From yet-more-distant sources came precious
stones such as jade and gold dust. When it is remembered that there
were no beasts of burden in Mesoamerica -- save man himself -- the
extent and volume of trade that went on between the growing
metropolis and its constantly expanding hinterland was indeed most
impressive. Because of its location virtually within sight of the
northern grasslands and desert, Teotihuacán was essentially a
frontier outpost of Mesoamerican civilization; hence it looked
primarily to the east and south for its foodstuffs and raw materials
as well as for markets for its obsidian, ceramics, and various other
handcrafted goods. By the same token, as an urban node, it had no
viable competitor of any size within several hundred kilometers, save
perhaps Cholula, a pilgrimage site in the basin of Puebla to the
east.
To the west of the Valley of Mexico, beyond a pine-forested
ridge some 3000 m (10,000 ft) in height, lay the yet loftier and
cooler basin of Toluca. Here are found the headwaters of the
Río Lerma, a river that descends in "steps" from one highland
basin to the next on its course toward the Pacific. Although the
Lerma itself terminates in Lake Chapala, the Río Grande de
Santiago, Mexico's largest Pacific-flowing river, carries its waters
from the lake to the ocean through a highly dissected region of
steep-walled canyons. Thus, it is perhaps not too surprising that the
Olmecs who first ventured into the Valley of Mexico were not
particularly tempted to probe farther into these less hospitable
regions of the Mexican west. But, despite the fact that western
Mexico lay beyond the influence of the Olmecs and hence outside the
cultural pale of Mesoamerica, its ties with the more advanced
societies of South America continued apace through the entire span of
the Olmec era.
From their mountain top city at Monte Albán, the
Zapotecs dominated the broad Y-shaped valley of the Río Atoyac
and its tributary in the highlands of Oaxaca, and also exerted
control as far as the Pacific coast along the corridor of the
Tehuantepec River. But, surrounded as they were on all sides by
rugged mountains, they found little temptation to extend their
dominions into areas whose isolation had already fragmented the
peoples who inhabited them into a score of different linguistic
groups. Moreover, in the mountains to their north lurked the Mixtecs,
against whom they always were obliged to direct a watchful
eye.
Compared to the expansive feeling that the more open
landscapes of the Mexican highlands tend to produce in the viewer,
the rainforests of the southern Yucatán and the Petén
give one an almost claustrophobic sensation instead. In this tangle
of exuberant verdure -- so familiar to the Zoque and Olmec -- the
Maya struggled to wrest a foothold wherever the trees could be felled
to make way for their corn patches. Because their resultant
settlements had hinterlands that were relatively limited in scope,
most of them remained modest in size and in power. The long-held
notion that the Maya were a peaceful people primarily dedicated to
intellectual pursuits has had to be abandoned, however. More and more evidence has
come to light that, rather than being organized into some kind of
over-arching "empire," they were instead separated by their rain
forest environment into hundreds of small, competing city states, and
that warfare was virtually endemic among them. On occasion, of
course, several of the city-states may have united to form military
alliances, as seems to have occurred in the long series of struggles
between such places as Tikal and Calakmul. In any event, wall
paintings of battling warriors and captives being tortured figure
prominently in Maya art work. Ruins of fortifications, walls, and
moats reveal that the need for defense has been a paramount concern
of the Maya ever since Edzná itself was founded. Clearly, in a
region devoid of other enemies, the feared attackers could only have
been their neighboring Mayas.
But, if the Maya did not succeed in erecting political
entities of more than local or regional importance, this was
certainly not the case with the dynamic metropolis of
Teotihuacán. Already as early as 300 A.D., it had extended its
cultural and commercial influence as far south as the ancient Olmec
site at Kaminaljuyú (where Guatemala City stands today), for
unmistakable evidence of its art, architecture, and ceramics show up
there at that time. By the end of the same century its influence was
also clearly apparent amongst the Maya, and in such centers as
Uaxactún and Tikal they may even have taken over positions in
the ruling elite.
From a geographic perspective, two of the most interesting
manifestations of Teotihuacán's growing cultural and
commercial domination took place in the first half of the 5th century
A.D. In what probably comes the closest of any ventures undertaken in
Mesoamerica in the name of "pure science", the priests of
Teotihuacán launched two expeditions to opposite ends of their
"known world" in order to find answers to questions which must have
intrigued them for some time. One of the expeditions was dispatched
from their own city into the northern desert, its mission being to
find "where the sun stopped" on its annual migration each summer. In
other words, they were curious as to why it went "just so far" each
year and no farther, before it again turned to the south. Rephrasing
their question in the vernacular of Western science, they were
asking, "where does the summer solstice -- the basis of the secular
calendar -- take place", or, more simply, "where is the Tropic of
Cancer”.
The second expedition was to be launched in a southerly
direction and its goal was determine just where it was that the sun
passed vertically overhead on the August 13. If this "place" could be
located, perhaps the birthplace of the sacred almanac could be found
-- and perhaps even the earthly paradise that their myths called
"Tamoanchan", a lush tropical garden of cacao trees and corn plants,
of bountiful fruit and wild game, of beautiful birds and dazzling
dragon-flies. Clearly such an expedition could be more rationally
carried out by the Maya, because it seemed obvious that they must
live geographically much closer to this fabled land than did the
Teotihuacanos. Thus, although couched in religious terms, the
questions that these two expeditions set out to answer were
fundamentally sound scientific queries.
The trek into the northern desert appears to have clung close
to the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental where the likelihood
of finding water was greater than out in the middle of the meseta or
along the arid back-slope of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In any event,
this is where we find the "observatory" built by the Teotihuacanos,
located on an open hillside next to a small stream and looking
eastward toward a group of isolated mountain peaks that break the
distant horizon. Without the benefit of more than their own careful
observations, they chose a site which lies within 2 km (1.25 mi) of
the Tropic of Cancer at a place known to the native Americans as
Chalchihuites, or "the place of the green stones", and in Spanish as
"Alta Vista" -- "the high view" -- near the western border of the
modern state of Zacatecas. The "observatory" which they constructed
consists of two parts, one which embraces a series of trenches cut
through the hillside and plastered over with adobe to preserve them
from the elements and a second which consists of a temple or
courtyard with 28 pillars that increase in diameter toward the middle
of the structure and then decrease toward its outside
corner. It is quite
obvious that the trenches were meant to define key astronomical
alignments, for as one sights along the principal trench, a sharp
peak known as Cerro Picacho is seen to mark the horizon where the sun
rises at the summer solstice. On the other hand, the courtyard with
the pillars of varying diameters appears to have been an attempt by
the Teotihuacanos to chart the changing phases of the
moon.
The expedition that headed south out of Tikal through the rain
forest was faced with environmental and "scientific" problems of
quite another nature. Instead of defining a place where the zenithal
sun stood still, they were looking for a place where it passed
overhead with a cyclic regularity of 260 and 105 days. The route that
was taken most probably lay along the water-divide between the
Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico where Tikal itself had been
sited. Such a route would skirt both the granite ridges of the Maya
Mountains to the east and the vast swamps of the Usumacinta
headwaters that lay to the west. As the limestone crests of the
Cuchumatanes loomed on the southern horizon, the expedition probably
swung east around Lake Izabal before entering the long seismic trench
of the Motagua river. Opening southwestward into the highlands, the
Motagua valley afforded an easy route into the interior but when it
started curving more west than south, it had to be abandoned for one
of its tributaries -- the Río Copán -- instead.
Ironically, by the time they reached this point, the Mayas found
themselves in a strange and hostile environment, a pocket so totally
cut off from the trade winds by the surrounding mountains that it
supported only a semi-desert form of vegetation. Yet, the fact that a clear
stream of fresh water entered it from the south encouraged them to
venture higher up the valley, and as they did so, they saw the drab
desert browns of the scrub-thorn trees gradually give way to the
forest greens of thick stands of pine and oak. At an elevation of
more than 600 m (2000 ft), the valley broadened out as the river
slowed its pace in a series of sweeping meanders and it was here that
the priests jubilantly announced, "This is the place". Here they
could measure an interval of 260 days between the passages of the
zenithal sun, and though it certainly was not the tropical paradise
that their Teotihuacano sponsors had imagined, it did meet the
criteria of the "place where time began". In a sense, for the Maya it
represented a "homecoming" in an otherwise alien land, for they had
discovered a place where the sacred almanac -- the very essence of
their preoccupation with time -- could be calibrated as it had "in
the beginning", but in an environment with which they were quite
unfamiliar. Copán, the ceremonial center that they founded
here, was to become not only the southernmost major center of the
lowland Maya civilization, but ultimately one of its most important
astronomical centers as well. Its earliest Long Count stela dates to
the year A.D. 426.
The centuries following these two remarkable expeditions
surely represented the "Golden Age" of civilization in Mesoamerica,
with Teotihuacán continuing to grow in both wealth and power.
Indeed, at this juncture in history, it ranked as one of the three
largest cities in the world, along with Rome in Europe and Beijing in
China, for its population probably numbered as many as 200,000. While
most of its energies continued to be directed to its extensive
hinterland in the east and south, beginning about A.D. 600 it
suddenly became aware of ominous developments on its exposed northern
frontier. Although the semi-desert expanses of the meseta had never
supported more than marginal numbers of Uto-Aztecan speaking nomadic
hunters and gatherers -- savages known to their civilized neighbors
on the south as "Chichimecs, or "dog people", -- the onset of drought
in these regions now began making their already precarious existence
even more difficult. Whether it had been Teotihuacán's
astronomical expedition to the Tropic of Cancer that had first
alerted the nomads to the existence of the great city in the south or
if the push of other nomads out of the American Southwest was already
driving them southward, the tribes of the meseta increasingly cast
envious eyes toward the moister, greener areas that surrounded the
bustling metropolis in the Valley of
Mexico. The first people
to be impacted by their advance were the Otomís, who occupied
the highland basins just to the north and west of Teotihuacán,
and, when faced with the choice of fighting the barbarous nomads or
of fleeing to the city, they chose the latter. While their own
intentions may not have been hostile, the Teotihuacanos certainly
could not have been expected to welcome a flood of refugees with open
arms, and the resultant struggle caused the city serious economic,
social, and political dislocations. Even so, the Otomís were
only "the tip of the iceberg," for the real collision of cultures
came somewhat later when the Uto-Aztecans themselves -- the
"Chichimecs" -- burst into the Valley of Mexico. With the arrival of
the first wave of them, the Toltecs, the city's fate was sealed, for
the charred timbers of Teotihuacan's palaces reveal that it was put
to the torch about A.D. 750.
It can hardly be imagined what the fall of Teotihuacán
must have meant to the peoples and cultures of Mesoamerica. By way of
a modern analogy, it could perhaps be likened to the repercussions
that the total destruction of a New York or London would have on the
world's economic and cultural life. Yet, because it was the only
metropolis of its size and significance in the New World, its loss
must have been even more keenly felt.
Not only did the fabric of long-distance trade break down, but
also it was as though the very heart and brain of the region had
suddenly stopped. Refugees from the city fled to the south and east
taking with them only what they could carry in their arms and minds.
Some sought sanctuary on a mountaintop near the present-day city of
Cuernavaca where they built a defensively conscious ceremonial center
that we know today as Xochicalco. Others poured across the mountains
into the basin of Puebla, finding only temporary refuge at Cholula,
for the Toltecs soon overran that place as well. Still others
continued down slope into the eastern rain forests where they took up
residence in the ceremonial center of El Tajín, almost hidden
amidst the karstic hills of what is now northern Veracruz state. But
these survivors of the holocaust -- the elite, without question --
could only have been a small number of the original population of
Teotihuacán, the remainder of who now found themselves
struggling to keep alive without the infrastructure and security of
an urban exchange system. For them, the great majority, it was as
though the clock had been turned back to the days of a subsistence
economy, and no doubt within a relatively short time the city must
have been all but abandoned as its survivors shrank back into the
countryside to fend for themselves as best they
could.
Ironically, it was just as Teotihuacán was undergoing
the trauma of its conquest and destruction that the Maya were nearing
the peak of their development. At Tikal, five skyscraper pyramids,
all of them ranging from 50-60 m (160-200 ft) in height, were rising
tier on tier out of the jungles of Petén, crowning the
architectural glory of a city which now numbered perhaps 50,000 to
60,000 inhabitants. Fittingly, each of these lofty temples had been
sited with such accuracy that together they comprised an astronomical
matrix which served to mark several key dates of the Maya year,
including sunrise on the winter solstice, sunrise and sunset at the
equinoxes, and, of course, sunset on August
13.
As the architectural grandeur of Tikal took shape in the
mid-eighth century A.D., so too, did the intellectual achievements of
the Maya culminate about the same time. One of the few Maya books to
escape the bonfires of Bishop Landa is an astronomical manuscript
known as the "Dresden Codex" whose initial dates go back to the year
755. It reveals that by that time the Maya had finally worked out the
mathematics of eclipse prediction, for the Codex begins with a solar
eclipse on November 15, followed by a lunar eclipse on November 30,
and another solar eclipse on December
15. Yet, due to the
bitterest of ironies, correct as their mathematics were, the Maya did
not have the satisfaction of actually seeing any of the events they
had predicted; although the first solar eclipse was a "near-miss" as
viewed from the Yucatán, the lunar eclipse was visible half a
world away over the Indian Subcontinent, and the path of the second
solar eclipse lay between South Africa and Antarctica where probably
not a single human being observed
it! Small wonder, then,
that when the Maya foresaw another lunar eclipse coming about eight
years later, they appear to have convened a "convention" of their
priest-astronomers at Copán to observe it. This time their predictions
were crowned with success because just after sunset on June 28, 763
they watched the disk of the full moon rise in total darkness. They
obviously were so elated that they commemorated this memorable date
no fewer than eight times on six different altars, stelae, and
buildings at Copán!
But, for the Maya the opportunity to enjoy their architectural
and intellectual achievements was destined to be all too brief.
Within less than a half-century one after another of their splendid
ceremonial centers began to be abandoned and swallowed up by the
jungle. Palenque went
first about A.D. 810, followed shortly thereafter by Yaxchilán
and Piedras Negras about 825. By the 840's the material existence of
the remaining Maya cities was deteriorating markedly and by the end
of the century the rain forest had already reclaimed most of the
settlements in the Petén and the southern Yucatán.
Archaeologists have long puzzled over what it was that
triggered this precipitous collapse of Maya civilization, some
attributing it to environmental factors, others to cultural ones.
Climatic change has been one of the primary physical causes advanced,
and "evidence" purporting to support both drought on the one hand and
increased precipitation on the other have been put forth. Another
theory argues that, although the climate probably remained fairly
constant, the real cause of the collapse was soil depletion; after
many generations of farmers repeatedly growing corn on the same plots
of land, the soils simply wore out, especially as the increasing
pressures of population growth precluded their fallowing for any
restorative period. With the breakdown of the food supply system, the
further scenario of administrative and social collapse was
inevitable.
Hypotheses that look to a cultural explanation of the Maya's
downfall tend to stress war, civil unrest, or disease as a causative
factor of societal decay. Certainly, war had been a part of Maya
culture since its earliest beginnings so it cannot be ruled out.
Only, one wonders if and how it could have risen to such a level as
to destroy the entire civilization, and why it would have done so in
a "wave" that seems to have moved from west to east across their
realm -- unless the "culprits" were invaders from the outside. But,
if the latter were the case, why do we not find some evidence of
their "conquerors"?
As regards the civil unrest hypothesis, any number of possible
"triggers" suggest themselves: a farmers' rebellion against repeated
levees of public-works projects by the priestly caste; internal
bickering between heirs-apparent to the power structure could have
fractionalized the public as well. Or, perhaps new and different
interpretations of religious dogma became the divisive "straw that
broke the camel's back." One could, of course, go on suggesting all
manner of such potential causes for dissension, but alas, without the
satisfaction of knowing which, if any, of them is correct. In the
same way, any evidence that there might have been of widespread
mortality caused by disease is totally lacking, for in the humid
climate of the Petén, especially, skeletal remains are quickly
decomposed.
Concerning our earlier discussion of the role of climate in
the demise of the Maya, there is intriguing geomorphic evidence which
lends support to the thesis of an increasingly wet climate in
southeastern Mexico during the Late Classic Period (A.D.
600-900). The
westernmost site ever constructed by the Maya was Comalcalco, which
lies in the heart of the swampy lowland called Chontalpa, some 40 km
(25 mi) to the northwest of the modern city of Villahermosa, the
capital of Tabasco state, and some 16 km (10 mi) from the coast of
the Gulf of Mexico. It is located on the right bank of the Río
Seco ("Dry River") at an elevation scarcely 10 m (33 ft) above sea
level. Situated in the midst of an extensive alluvial lowland,
Comalcalco had no easy access to building stone of any kind, hence,
in this one place and nowhere else the Maya constructed their
buildings of fired brick, giving the site a totally unique character
among Mesoamerican ceremonial centers.
But Comalcalco is unique in another way as well. At the time
of its construction, it apparently served as a seaport -- most
probably for Palenque and the hinterland of the Grijalva valley,
which lay to the southwest. In its heyday, Comalcalco may, in fact,
have lain on or immediately back of the coast, for the continuous
sedimentary deposition of the great rivers in this region has since
pushed the shoreline farther and farther out into the shallow waters
of the adjacent Gulf. At the same time, the block of the earth's
crust beneath the giant, compound delta has been sinking under the
weight of the accumulating sediments, for today the footings of most
of Comalcalco's buildings are standing in water -- not too unlike the
conditions found in Venice.
Sometime, probably in the Late Classic Period as the climate
grew wetter, the Grijalva River overflowed its banks and made a
drastic shift in its channel just upstream of the present-day city of
Cárdenas. Turning sharply eastward, it abandoned its older,
more direct route to the Gulf and spilled into the vast swampy plain
where the immense Río Usumacinta and its myriad tributaries
all come together.
Comalcalco, the former seaport and gateway to the great
Grijalva Valley, was now left "high and dry" along the empty
water-course of the Río Seco -- without a hinterland to serve
and quite cut off from any overland contacts it may have had earlier
with the Maya core area to the east. Certainly, if there had been any
Maya settlements and ceremonial centers in the immensely fertile
river valleys between the Grijalva and the Usumacinta -- and it seems
almost unthinkable that the Maya had not seen fit to utilize this
region -- all traces of them were swept away in the resultant flood.
Although the effects of this cataclysm may have been limited to the
immediate Chontalpa region, it is very possible that they were, in
fact, just the most dramatic manifestation of a changing climate that
was soon to engulf the entire Maya society. In a rain forest
environment, drought would have meant a respite from too much
precipitation, whereas added moisture could only have spelled
disaster because the use of fire in clearing the land would have
become more difficult, the forest would have re-grown more rapidly,
and the soils would have been depleted more
quickly. In any event,
within the next few decades the rampant growth of jungle vegetation
had swallowed up most of the remaining Maya cities and what had once
been a thriving urban population of perhaps 12 million had fallen to
an impoverished rural population of less than 2 million.
While spreading drought was causing the Uto-Aztecans to put
the Otomís and the Teotihuacanos to flight on the Mexican
plateau and the Mayas were slowly succumbing to the advancing
rain-forest in the Petén, an event of quite another type was
taking place in the west of Mexico. Sometime about the eighth or
ninth century A.D., a sea borne people appear to have arrived on the
coast of Michoacán in sufficient numbers to have had a
disruptive effect on the settlement pattern which existed in that
part of the country. Calling themselves the Purépecha, which
in their language meant "the late comers" or "recent arrivals", they
seem to have made their original landfall in the vicinity of the
Balsas river and then spread inland and upstream from there. Apart
from the coastal fringe of the river mouth itself, the country in
which they found themselves was the hottest and driest part of
southern Mexico -- the desert basin of the Balsas Depression -- a
region which may well have been a population void before their
arrival. In any event, the Purépecha quickly realized that the
Balsas had little to offer them other than metallic ores, such as
copper, silver, and gold, and while they had the technology and
skills to smelt and fashion metals, they certainly could not derive
their sustenance from them. Thus, it was almost inevitable that they
would seek the solace of the cooler, damper, forested uplands where
they could cultivate their crops and build their homes. The region
that beckoned them was the volcanic highland of Michoacán, an
upland of productive soils and pine-clad mountains liberally
sprinkled with sparkling lakes teeming with fish and aquatic birds.
That such a land had gone previously unsettled seems hardly likely,
but just which peoples the Purépecha displaced to take
possession of it is somewhat unclear. Surely, the Mixtecs, or "cloud
people" on their southeast were probably jostled by their arrival,
for about this time the Mixtecs began a concerted southward advance
against their longtime neighbors in the valley of Oaxaca, the
Zapotecs. They may also have played a role in dislodging the hapless
Otomís as well. Yet another people who were likely set adrift
by these migrations were the Chiapanecs, whose original homeland is
unknown but who ended up pushing southward into the north-western
corner of Chiapas state -- to which they gave their name -- and there
being ultimately absorbed by the
Zoque. The
Purépecha dominions came to coincide almost perfectly with the
drainage basin of the Balsas, which today coincides nearly exactly
with the state boundaries of Michoacán; both of these natural
and political regions can, in turn, be delimited by the areal extent
of the Purépecha language and its
place-names.
The Purépecha (known later to the Spanish as
"Tarascans") were in almost every way strikingly different from their
neighbors. Not only was their language totally unrelated to any of
the native tongues around them, but their culture was also quite
unlike that of the Mesoamericans. They dressed differently, they cut
their hair differently, they knew the use of metal and their
neighbors did not, and their gods and religion were different.
Obviously, the Mesoamerican calendar with its intertwined pantheon of
gods and rituals was totally unknown to them, and despite their
precocity in fashioning metals, they seem to have been noticeably
lacking in mathematical and astronomical knowledge. Quantification to
the Purépecha was defined as "one, two, and many", whereas
their interest in celestial matters seems to have focused on the
Southern Cross -- suggesting that their native home may well have
been in western South America, from which they brought the knowledge
of metallurgy. In any event, their critical role in influencing the
life of Mexico still lay several centuries in the future.
Thus, by the eighth
century A.D. the greatest city in New World lay abandoned and in
ruins, the Toltec barbarians were struggling to consolidate their
hold over the northern fringes of the Mesoamerican cultural realm,
and an alien people from beyond the sea had established an
impregnable bridgehead in the west. Once the embers of
Teotihuacán had cooled, the Toltecs must have experienced a
certain numbing realization of what they had done. The economic,
social, and political life of the bustling metropolis had been
replaced by a void, and its cultural and intellectual life was all
but dead. One of the casualties of their conquest had been the
calendar, of which it is probably safe to say they had known nothing
as they swooped down on the city. But once they "interviewed" the
survivors, they quickly came to appreciate that this unseen, mystical
force had been the engine that drove the entire civilization. It was
inexplicably bound up with the gods; it ordered the lives of the
people; it gave meaning to the notion of time. Understandably awed by
what they learned, they immediately set about trying to reconstruct
the calendar as best they could, though with the priestly caste long
departed, they had only untutored, secondary sources on which to
rely. Thus, it is all the more remarkable that they came up with as
reasonable a facsimile of the calendar as they did.
To be sure, there were aspects of the calendar which they
either did not understand (for instance, the rationale behind the
August 13 sunset), or whose value they did not appreciate (such as
the importance of zero or the use of a bar symbol to write the number
"5"), or which simply became garbled (as for example, the
substitution of the winter solstice for the summer solstice in
determining the beginning of the new year). Moreover, they had some
innovations of their own which they added to the calendar, such as
the zenithal passage of the Pleiades to define when one 52-year
period came to an end and another began -- an event which they called
the "binding of the years" and whose occasion they commemorated with
a special form of human sacrifice.
From the internal structure of the calendar that the Toltecs
devised it is very likely that it was set in motion in the year A.D.
778, so this reveals how quickly they had felt the necessity of
re-establishing a time-count. Indeed, the Toltecs were so
captivated by the notion that "history repeated itself" every 52
years that they concluded the present world, or "sun", must have been
created just 52 years earlier, i.e., in A.D.
726! Naive as this idea
was, it did reflect a belief common to all peoples of the
Mesoamerican realm, namely that the present world was the Earth's
fifth reincarnation, each of the four previous worlds, or "suns",
having been terminated by such disasters as being devoured by
jaguars, consumed by fire, destroyed by wind, or submerged by floods.
Because the present world, or "fifth sun", had begun on a day named
"4 Earthquake", they were convinced that devastating temblors on
another day with the same name would destroy
it.
The first site chosen by the Toltecs for the city that they
intended to take the place of Teotihuacán was at Ixtapalapa,
on the southeast side of present-day Mexico City and scarcely 12 km
(7mi) from the lava-covered ruins of Cuicuilco. Having no experience
in urban planning, they must have soon discovered that its marshy
site was not the best to build on and its situation offered little
advantage to trade, so a new, more strategically located capital was
founded at Tulancingo some 100 km (60 mi) to the northeast some time
later. Although it had firmer footings and controlled the entrance to
a precipitous pass leading to the coastal lowlands, it too, was soon
abandoned for a third capital located at Tula, 100 km to the west.
This capital was founded by a chieftain whose name was "Ce Acatl
Topiltzin", who later took for himself the title of the ancient
culture hero of Teotihuacán, Quetzalcóatl, or "the
feathered serpent". Despite a long reign of peace and prosperity in
his new capital, a power struggle within the Toltec hierarchy forced
Quetzalcóatl to flee with his retinue to the Gulf coast in the
year "Ce Acatl", or "1 Reed", which would have been the Christian
year 999. Although the deposed king died on reaching the coast,
legend has it that he was subsequently reincarnated as the morning
star, i.e., the planet Venus, having vowed to return one day to
rightfully reclaim his throne. His retinue continued to the east,
arriving on the coast of Yucatán, and then moving inland to
subjugate the by-then almost moribund Maya city-state of
Chichén Itzá.
Although Tula was a rather pale copy of the great metropolis
the Toltecs had destroyed, it gradually grew to support a population
of some 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants and its trading network extended
as far south as the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica (from which it
imported polychrome ceramics), eastward into the Yucatán
Peninsula, and as far northward as the present-day southwestern
United States (where the architectural influences of both Tlaloc, the
rain-god, and Quetzalcóatl may be identified). Interestingly,
although Plumbate pottery from Soconusco shows up in Tula, no metal
has ever been found there, despite the fact that the Toltec period is
known to have coincided with the first appearance of metallurgy in
Mesoamerica. Antagonism with the Purépecha, the first
practitioners of the new craft, may well be the
explanation.
Nonetheless, mining colonies had been established in the
northern desert -- probably as early as Teotihuacáno times --
to supply semiprecious stones to the civilizations of Central Mexico,
but about the year A.D. 600 a southward retreat had begun which had
all but abandoned the Chichimec "outback" to the nomads by 850. A
Toltec re-expansion into this region appears to have taken place
about 900, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua seems to have
been a thriving Toltec trading post by about 1050. Perhaps a
reoccupation of the "observatory" at Chalchihuites occurred about the
same time, for a further trench marking the sunrise on February 12 --
the date the Toltecs selected as their "New Year's day" -- was
apparently added then.
It would seem that the neighbors nearest to the Toltecs who
received the most cultural impact were the Mixtecs. Although they had
originally received the calendar by way of the Zapotecs, together
with the hieroglyphic system of dots and bars to record numerals,
under Toltec influence they abandoned the use of bars. As a result,
we find that all of the beautifully colored Mixtec codices that have
been preserved define calendar dates only with
dots.
As we have already noted, contact with the Maya area of the
Yucatán was not limited to commerce because about the year
1000 Toltec warriors moved in to establish a new militaristic regime
in the old ceremonial center of Chichén Itzá, not only
giving the place a new lease on life but materially altering its
architecture, art, and religion as well. Not the least of these
cultural influences was the introduction of the cult of
Quetzalcóatl, who became known to the Maya by the name of
Kukulcán.
In the west of Mexico certain influences from the central plateau had begun to show up from about A.D. 300 on at such sites as Ixtépete near modern Guadalajara and at Ixtlán del Río in the borderlands of Nayarit, but these contacts were considerably strengthened during Toltec times. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the geographic diffusion of the calendar by the Toltecs is the fact that we have indisputable evidence of its presence in the far reaches of Pacific Mexico by at least the early decades of the twelfth century. As the Codex Botturini makes abundantly clear, when the Aztecs began the migration which took them from their homeland in the marshes of Aztlán to the small rocky islets in Lake Texcoco which ultimately became the spectacular capital city of the vastest indigenous empire Mesoamerica was ever to know, each move along the way was documented both in space and in time. Whereas many of the place-names they used can only be guessed at (e.g., "place of the sand spider", or "place where spear-throwers are made"), the temporal sequence of the events that transpired can be precise pinned down year by year.
The Aztecs record that their departure from their island home
(subsequently identified as Mexcaltitán on the coast of
Nayarit) occurred in the year "1 Flint-Knife". Because they already
knew the significance of the "binding of the years" ceremony, they
celebrated four such events in the years "2 Reed" while en route.
Four years after the last of these celebrations -- in the year "6
Reed" -- the narrative ends abruptly, due to the Codex Botturini
having been damaged. Yet, from the evidence at hand, it is obvious
that their migration took some 187 years to complete. This is because
there are 27 years between "1 Flint-Knife" and the first occurrence
of "2 Reed," and 52 years between each recurrence of a year of that
name, followed by four additional years -- i.e., 27 + 52 x 3 = 27 +
156 = 183 + 4 = 187. Inasmuch as their arrival in the Valley of
Mexico is known to have taken place about the beginning of the
fourteenth century, this would mean that their departure date was
most probably in the year 1116.
Ironically, most of the ancient native accounts herald the
beginning of the Chichimec period with the next time the year "1
Flint-Knife" occurred -- i.e., 52 years later in 1168. This is
because earlier in the decade, Tula, the capital of the Toltecs, had
been overrun by barbarian Chichimecs and put to the torch. In the
Codex Botturini the Aztecs record that they had left the "place of
the reeds," or Tula, in the year 1163, so there is strong
circumstantial evidence that it was the Aztecs themselves who had
been the culprits. Just as the Toltecs had been the undoing of
Teotihuacán, so the Aztecs appear to have been responsible for
bringing down the remnants of the first Nahua civilization on the
plateau of Mexico.
Ultimately, the irony was to become even greater, for once
they became fully aware of what they had done, the Aztecs revived the
memory of the Toltecs as the greatest people who had ever lived. They
were heralded as the first people who had learned to count, the first
to understand the movements of the sun and to measure the passage of
time, and the most consummate artisans who had ever molded clay or
worked in feathers or textiles. Indeed, the highest compliment an
Aztec could pay to anyone was to liken him to a
Toltec!
As might have been expected, the Aztec migration essentially
followed the line of least resistance. This was the corridor afforded
by the Río Santiago, Mexico's second-largest Pacific-flowing
river, and by its major tributary, the Lerma, whose headwaters rise
in the highland basin of Toluca, some 100 km (60 mi) to the west of
the Valley of Mexico. The basin of Toluca, however, was not an
especially attractive goal in its own right, for it was the loftiest
of all the intermountain basins of the Mexican plateau. With an
elevation of 2640 meters (8660 ft), it was both cold and arid
compared to the Valley of Mexico just over the next mountain ridge to
the east. Moreover, in the middle course of the Río Lerma, the
Aztecs most probably ran afoul of the Purépecha, or Tarascans,
and therefore may have been obliged to detour north and eastward
along the valley of the Río Turbio instead, thus ending up in
the open plains to the north of Tula. On the other hand, it is just
as likely that the urban metropolis of the Toltecs had been their
goal from the outset, and that they had moved upstream toward it as
directly as they could. In any event, as the Codex Botturini informs
us, the Aztecs had reached Tula by the year 1145 and did not depart
until 1163.
Whereas the place-name evidence indicates that the first phase
of the Aztec migration had brought them into what is now the state of
Hidalgo, most of the places mentioned in the second phase of their
account have been identified with localities in the present state of
México. At the close of this second phase, they had reached
Chapultepec, on the western outskirts of modern Mexico City, and
celebrated their fourth "binding of the years" ceremony in 1299. Of
the third and final phase of their migration, all of which focused on
the Valley of Mexico, only the fragmentary record of four years
remains, though it is generally agreed that the actual founding of
Tenochtitlán can be assigned to the year
1325.
The Valley of Mexico not only lay some 400 meters (1300 ft)
lower than that of Toluca, and thus enjoyed a somewhat more temperate
climate, but it also embraced the largest body of water on the entire
Mexican plateau -- a feature sometimes known as the Lake of the Moon.
Although it consisted of basically one extensive articulated basin,
it had three major components, partially separated from one another
by higher ridges of land that formed irregular peninsulas. The
southernmost arm of the body of water was known as Lake Chalco,
whereas the largest and most central portion was known as Lake
Texcoco, and the northern arm was called Lake
Xaltocán. The
marshes along the edges of the lake had very early come to be
appreciated for their abundance of waterfowl and for such aquatic
animals as the axolotl, a large salamander that was esteemed for its flesh.
Technically, the Lake of the Moon was what the geomorphologist
calls a playa lake. As such, it was chiefly fed by run-off from the
adjacent mountains, and therefore it was seldom very deep. Depending
upon the amount of summer rainfall received, the lake was often very
irregular in volume and in shape as well. Naturally, the longer the
dry season continued, the more the water evaporated and the more the
lake's shorelines contracted. At the same time, the brackishness of
the water increased as the proportion of dissolved salts in the
remaining water rose toward the saturation point and then began to
crystallize out in the form of saltpans along the edges of the
lake
Had the Lake of the Moon been a classic playa lake, it would,
of course, never have been the magnet for human settlement that it
actually was. This is because, in addition to the summer run-off, its
water supply was augmented by seepages of ground water out of the
volcanic formations on the south and, especially, the southwest sides
of the lake. Because this water had percolated through lava rather
than through limestone it contained little or no dissolved salts and
was therefore fresh rather than brackish. Indeed, having been
filtered through the volcanic formations, it was also cold, clear,
and pure, so a more fortuitous combination of circumstances can
scarcely be imagined -- a plentiful supply of water on the very edge
of a semi desert basin. (The Aztec glyph for Chapultepec very pointedly
depicts the flow of water from beneath the mountain.)
Unlike typical playa lakes in other of the highland basins of
the Mexican plateau, the Lake of the Moon had drawn settlers to its
shores through all of human history. We know, for example, that
prehistoric man was hunting mastodons on the shores of the lake as
early as 11,000 B.C., and the first agricultural villages on its
shores date to about 1500 B.C. The earliest "Olmec"-inspired
settlements at Tlatilco, Tlapacoya, and Cuicuilco were sited near the
western and southern edges of the lake as well, perhaps at least in
part because the freshest waters of the lake were to be found in
these quadrants. Certainly by the time the Aztecs arrived in the
Valley of Mexico in the late thirteenth century, all of the best land
surrounding the lake had long since been occupied. Indeed, at the
time of their arrival, the western, southern, and eastern shores of
the lake had been consolidated into the three distinct kingdoms of
Atzcapotzalco, Culhuacán, and Coatlinchán,
respectively, so it was into this political constellation that these
newly arrived barbarians from the west intruded at the beginnings of
the fourteenth century.
Needless to say, the Aztecs were not particularly welcome in
the already relatively densely settled Valley of Mexico, for it was
all that the local inhabitants could do to feed themselves in this
marginal semiarid upland environment. According to the Aztecs' own
tribal legend, the god of war, Huitzilopochtli, had promised that
their migration would be over when they found an eagle with a
rattlesnake in its beak sitting on a cactus on a small rocky island
-- surely a combination of signs that they would not be likely to
miss. Perhaps it was this augury that led them to look in the middle
of the Lake of the Moon for their "promised land." On the other hand,
another version of their arrival in the basin of Mexico states that
when they asked for land on which to settle, they were offered a
couple of small rocky islets in the middle of the lake roughly
equidistant from each of the existing cities. -- essentially a
"no-man's land" inhabited only by rattlesnakes and scorpions. Indeed,
it has been suggested that this was done in the hope that the latter
would make short work of the Aztecs, but apparently the willingness
of a starving Chichimec to eat almost anything had probably been
overlooked. In any case, to acquire sufficient land on which to
settle, the Aztecs set about driving stakes into the shallow lake
bottom and then scooping up mud and stones to build out the
perimeters of their islands, much as they witnessed had been done in
the heavily cultivated chinampas (sometimes erroneously
referred to as "floating gardens") around Xochimilco at the south end
of the lake. Thus, with an immense input of arduous and disciplined
labor, the Aztecs gradually transformed the little rocky islands of
Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco into the nuclei of two intensely
cultivated garden cities, the former serving as their religious and
political nerve center while the latter increasingly took on the
functions of a busy marketplace.
It should be noted in passing that whatever scenario one
prefers for the founding of the Aztec capital, its siting had nothing
to do with such concerns as solsticial
orientation. There was
no real choice as to where the city should be located, for its
foundations were fixed by the geographic "accident" of the two little
islands in the middle of a lake in which none of the original
inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico had any interest or saw any
value. It was an extremely difficult site on which to build any kind
of a permanent settlement, but once the city had begun to take shape
the advantages of its location gradually became increasingly
apparent. From a commercial standpoint it was easily accessible to
watercraft carrying foodstuffs and other bulky supplies from the
adjacent shores of the lake, and from a military standpoint it was
sufficiently buffered by the surrounding expanses of water to enjoy a
very defensible location. Therefore, although Tenochtitlán
possessed none of the astronomical significance of many earlier
Mesoamerican ceremonial centers, what was initially a very difficult
site was ultimately transformed into a central place with a situation
of paramount importance.
Several decades were to pass, however, before this vigorous,
upstart people were to have so securely established themselves as to
ensure their survival in the hostile physical and cultural
environment in which they had settled. All the while, they remained
the political tributaries of the king of Atzcapotzalco, but by the
1360's they felt that they were ready to found a kingdom in their own
right. However, because they were sorely aware that they lacked the
proper "pedigree" of nobility, they requested that a prince from
Culhuacán become their king. Of course, such a choice linked
them dynastically to a southern rival of Atzcapotzalco and in that
sense it was a brilliant tactical move as well. Thus, in 1364
Acamapichtli ascended the throne in Tenochtitlán, becoming in
the process the first of the monarchs of the
Aztecs.
Acamapichtli's forty year reign was largely a peaceful one,
for it definitely was in the interests of the Aztecs to maintain as
friendly relations as possible with the more powerful city-states
that surrounded them. His successor, Huitzilíhuitl, also made
an advantageous move by marrying one of the daughters of the king of
Atzcapotzalco and then inducing her to implore her father to reduce
the onerous tributes he had been exacting from the Aztecs, which he
agreed to do.
On the death of Huitzilíhuitl in 1417, Chimalpopoca, a
nephew of the king of Atzcapotzalco, became the third regent of the
Aztecs. In the following year, he led his armies in the defeat of
Coatlinchán, seizing the southeastern mainland of the lake for
the growing Aztec city-state. However, within the decade an
environmental crisis brought the Aztecs and their recently acquired
relatives-by-marriage likewise to the point of blows. The expanding
island city-state of Tenochtitlán was rapidly outgrowing its
supply of fresh water, both for domestic consumption and for
irrigating the chinampas on which its food was grown. Whether the
request for help which they addressed to the rulers of Atzcapotzalco
was rudely phrased or not, the latter used this as an excuse to move
against what they now perceived was an alarmingly expanding rival.
Secret emissaries were sent into the Aztec capital, and in 1426 both
the king Chimalpopoca and his son were assassinated. This treacherous
act was followed by an economic blockade of the island towns that
together with the increasingly desperate water supply problem obliged
the Aztecs to react with violence.
What ensued depends on whose account one wishes to believe,
that of the Aztecs or that of their confederates, the nearby
city-states of Tacuba and Texcoco. According to the Aztec version,
they alone resisted the attacks of Atzcapotzalco and finally rose up
to conquer their oppressive neighbor in 1428. Tacuba and Texcoco, on
the other hand, argued that it was their alliance with the Aztecs
that ultimately turned the tables on Atzcapotzalco. In any event,
what is certain is that, following the election of Itzcóatl,
the son of Acamapichtli, as king and the establishment of a supreme
council of advisors, the Aztec state was launched upon an entirely
new course of action from that time forward. Although the council
included the first Montezuma (Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina), a son of
Huitzilíhuitl; Nezahualcóyotl, the poet-king of
Texcoco; and Tlacaélel, another son of Huitzilíhuitl,
it was the latter more than any other single individual who came to
shape the destiny of the Aztec people.
For the better part of the next fifty years, three different
kings occupied the Aztec throne, but throughout this entire time the
real power resided with the royal counselor, Tlacaélel. At his
direction, Itzcóatl began a series of reforms granting titles
to the nobles and redistributing landholdings to enhance their
status. Perhaps Tlacaélel's chief contribution was to forge a
"historic conscience" among the Aztecs by burning the books of
conquered peoples and the old accounts of his own people. He rewrote
history to exalt the origins of the Aztecs and to establish a
genealogical link with the Toltecs. He elevated Coatlicue, the
hideous mother of Huitzilopochtli, the war god, to a special position
of honor in the Aztec pantheon, and gave a new interpretation to the
Aztecs' religious philosophy. The present world of "the fifth sun"
had begun, he argued, with the sacrifice of the gods, especially of
Quetzalcóatl, at Teotihuacán. Thus, if the gods had
sacrificed themselves so the sun would move and man could live, then
man should sacrifice himself so that the sun could live. This, he
maintained, was the only way to postpone the final cataclysm. For
Tlacaélel, war was not alone a tool of conquest, subjugation,
and exploitive tribute acquisition, but also a means of ensuring a
continuous supply of human victims for the sacrificial altars of the
Aztec temples. He not only planned and carried out the first military
campaigns of the Aztecs, securing control over the Valley of Mexico
but he also launched the so-called "flower wars" whose divine mission
it was, in alliance with the war god Huitzilopochtli, to subjugate
all other peoples and nations in order to preserve the world. As the
champions of such a noble cause, he assured the Aztecs that they
would be invincible in battle.
When Itzcóatl died in 1440, Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina
succeeded him on the throne. Although the kingship was first offered
to Motecuhzoma's half-brother Tlacaélel, the latter refused,
no doubt because the reigns of government were already firmly in his
hands. Under his guidance, the "first Montezuma" proceeded to build a
great new temple in honor of their
father. However, the
precariousness of Tenochtitlán's food and water supply
situation manifested itself again in 1454 when a famine struck the
Valley of Mexico and took a heavy toll of life during the following
two years. Perhaps in part to ensure that such privation would not
endanger the growing city-state again, the construction of an
aqueduct from Chapultepec was begun and a military campaign was
launched into the Gulf coastal region that concluded with the
annexation of the area around Veracruz in 1463. This lush tropical
coastland provided the Aztecs with a treasure house of resources,
including corn, beans, fruit, cotton, wood, and medicinal plants as
well as gold dust, jewelry, precious stones, rock crystal, feathers,
live birds, jaguars, seashells, and turtles. After 13 years of labor,
the Chapultepec aqueduct was finally completed in
1466.
It was also during the reign of the "first Montezuma" that the
Aztecs carried out an expedition that probably ranks as the closest
thing to a scientific endeavor that they ever mounted. At
Tlacaélel's urging, a party was sent out to look for
Aztlán, the Aztecs' original homeland, and to learn if
Coatlicue, the mother of the war god, was still living there. Given
such a sponsor and such a questionable goal, it is small wonder that,
when the expedition returned after an appropriate length of time, it
could happily report that Coatlicue was indeed alive and well and
that she sent her greetings!
Motecuhzoma's passing in the year 1468 once more provided
Tlacaélel with an opportunity to reign as king, but again he
declined, and Axayácatl, the grandson of Itzcóatl, next
assumed the mantle of royal leadership. In 1473, the market center of
Tlatelolco was finally and formally annexed by Tenochtitlán,
having remained a separate political entity ever since its founding
at the same time as the Aztec capital. It was in the same year that
the great calendar stone that has since become the virtual hallmark
of the Aztec civilization was also
dedicated.
However, five years farther along, when the Aztec armies
turned their attention westward toward Michoacán, they
suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Purépecha, or
Tarascans. Some reports state that as many as 30,000 Aztec warriors
died in this one battle on the approaches to the Purépecha
capital. Undoubtedly, the Purépechas' mastery of advanced
metallurgy and possession of superior weapons were of decisive
importance in the campaign's outcome, but some scholars have likewise
attributed the Purépecha victory to their superb military
organization. Wherever the truth may lie, we do know that the defeat
was extremely demoralizing to the Aztecs. It was as though the war
god had abandoned them, their sacred mission to save the world had
been aborted, and the myth of Aztec invincibility had been shattered.
It was clear that, as a result of this single bloody disaster, the
violent and short-lived Aztec Empire had already passed its
psychological peak, and within a matter of months Tlacaélel is
reported to have died. Axayácatl himself is said never to have
recovered from this stunning blow, and after a lingering malaise of
three years, he too passed away.
In 1481 Tizoc, the brother of Axayácatl was elected
king but his reign was both brief and depressing. No doubt in a
vainglorious attempt to rekindle Aztec pride and fervor, he began the
construction of the largest temple to the war god ever undertaken,
but he died in 1486 before he saw it completed. At this juncture, a
third brother, Ahuízotl, was elected king, and the following
year the new temple was dedicated in the presence of invited
dignitaries from tributary states both far and near. (Even the king
of the hated Purépechas was reputedly in
attendance.) The Aztecs "pulled out all the stops" to make this
event the most memorable that had ever been witnessed up until that
time, for over the course of the four days that the celebration went
on, it is variously reported that between 20,000 and 80,000 human
victims had their hearts torn out on the sacrificial stone at the
temple's top. The continuing "flower wars" with nearby Tlaxcala
helped to supply many of the victims, but new military campaigns
against the Huastecs to the northeast and the Zapotecs to the south
also made their contributions.
If Tenochtitlán's thirst for blood was in any measure
satisfied by this horrendous ceremony, that satisfaction was only
temporary at best. Just as pressing, if not more so, however, was the
growing city's thirst for water, and in 1499 a new aqueduct was
opened into the city from the southwesterly precinct of
Coyoacán. Although the entire project was carried out against
the advice of some of the earlier residents of the district, the
Aztecs soon found that the volume of water they had directed into the
city was far too great to be satisfactorily contained. As a result,
lake levels were seriously upset and the Aztec capital was flooded,
apparently with a considerable loss of life. Indeed, Ahuízotl
was himself injured during the inundation and after a lingering
illness passed away in 1502.
Against this sobering backdrop, his son, Motecuhzoma
Xocoyotzin (the "second Montezuma") assumed the throne intent on
restoring whatever grandeur he could to the
Aztecs. His first move
was to deify himself, but in order to do this, he had to arrange for
the assassination of most of the court officials who had earlier
served his father, for they obviously knew too much to go along with
his grandiose ambitions. When his supposed ally, Nezahualpilli, the
king of Texcoco (actually a secret enemy), came forward with ominous
predictions as to the imminent demise of the Aztec Empire, Montezuma
was visibly shaken, and the subsequent occurrence of other mysterious
omens only served to heighten his anxiety. Visions of men on horses, a
smoking comet in the sky, and the destruction of the temple of
Huitzilopochtli by fire unnerved him
further. Worst of all
was Nezahualpilli's prophecy that Quetzalcóatl would soon
return to rightfully claim his kingdom, for such a warning the exiled
king of Tula had himself delivered, as all the heirs of the Toltecs
well knew.
When Montezuma led his people in the celebration of the
"binding of the years" in 1507, he may well have doubted whether the
world as he knew it would endure another 52
years. Perhaps already
then the first reports were beginning to reach him of "great white
houses" out upon the sea amidst the islands of the rising
sun. Certainly, within a
few years, these Spanish exploring vessels were being sighted off the
coast of Mexico itself, and with an almost inexorable rhythm, the
approach of impending doom cast its lengthening shadow over the
melancholy emperor and his terror-ridden
state. In what has to be
one of the most remarkable coincidences of all human history,
Hernán Cortés and his small band of conquistadores
landed on the beach at Veracruz in the fateful Aztec year
of "1 Reed" -- a year of the same name as that of
Quetzalcóatl's birth and therefore one in which all
Mesoamericans would have expected him to
return. Paralyzed with a
fear instilled by the prognostications of his own sacred calendar,
the hapless Montezuma was at a loss as to how he should receive the
strange white gods who had arrived on his shores. His indecision not only cost
him his life, but also that of his empire, and that of Mesoamerican
civilization itself.
At the time of the arrival of the Spanish on the Mesoamerican
mainland, the two largest and most powerful political entities in the
region were those of the Aztecs and the Tarascans, both headquartered
in the high basins at the southern edge of the Mexican
plateau. The Aztecs,
heirs of the Nahua, or Uto-Aztecan, nomads who had pushed south out
of the northern deserts in the proceeding six to seven centuries, had
their capital at Tenochtitlán in the valley of Mexico, whereas
the Tarascans were concentrated in the lake basins of
Michoacán to the west. Spread across the Yucatán
peninsula and the mountains of present-day Guatemala were the Mayas,
long since past their peak as a civilization and never organized into
political entities larger than city-states of relative local
importance.
Contrary to general belief, the Aztecs did not constitute a
monolithic empire but represented instead an alliance of three
closely related tribes resident in Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and
Tlacopan. From their base in the valley of Mexico they had sent out
military expeditions into the lowlands, especially toward the east
and south, to acquire commodities that they could neither obtain nor
produce on the plateau.
These included such goods as cotton, tobacco, cacao, vanilla,
jaguar skins, precious stones, incense, and colorful birds' feathers,
as well as sea shells, salt, and additional supplies of basic
foodstuffs, among them corn, beans, and peppers. To ensure the
regular delivery of these commodities to their capital city -- the
less perishable goods on a schedule of twice a year and the more
perishable foodstuffs once every 80 days -- they installed military
garrisons in areas of particular strategic importance. Thus, as long as such
"tribute" was forthcoming, they did not insist on total political
control over the areas concerned, and probably could not have
succeeded in doing so had they tried. As a result, the boundaries of
their "empire" were both nebulous and fluctuating -- totally
dependent on the amount of coercion they could exercise at any one
time. In the eastern lowlands they
had one garrison stationed near the present-day town of Tuxpan to
extract tribute from the Huastecas, a second at Cataxtla to guard the
all-important trail between the coastal area around Veracruz and the
highlands, a third at Tuxtepec to control the southern lowlands and
the gateway to the Maya country, a fourth at present-day Oaxaca to
keep the Zapotecs in check, and a fifth in distant Soconusco, from
which such prized commodities as cacao, quetzal feathers, and rubber
came.
Within the boundaries of the "Aztec empire" lay enclaves of
tribal groups that had resisted domination from Tenochtitlán,
at least with some degree of success. The most important of these
were the Tlaxcalans, who managed to retain their "independence" at
the price of the so-called "Flower
Wars". The latter were
annual tributes of young men and women destined for sacrifice to the
Aztec gods. Indeed, to have attempted to produce and maintain such a
volume of sacrificial victims within the valley of Mexico itself
would have been economically and politically impossible, especially
since the security of the food supply was frequently threatened by
droughts and poor harvests as it
was. On the other hand,
by having such a ready supply of sacrificial youths of good Nahua
stock in close geographic proximity, nurtured for twenty-odd years by
the Tlaxcalans before delivery, was an infinitely more desirable
solution for the Aztecs.
In the west the Tarascans, or Purépecha, had managed to
successfully resist Aztec encroachment due to a combination of strong
border fortresses, metal weapons, and superior military organization.
Similarly, in the rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur the
Mixtecs and Zapotecs had succeeded in holding their fortified
positions against the Aztecs and on occasion had even cut off the
latter's strategic trade route to Soconusco in the far south of
Mexico. Nonetheless, at the time of the conquest, a total of
thirty-eight distinct geographic "provinces" were regularly sending
tribute to the Aztec capital, according to the list itemized in the
Codex Mendoza. Although the military command resided with the nobles
of Tenochtitlán, two-fifths of all booty went to this city,
another two-fifths to Texcoco, and one-fifth to
Tlacopan.
The trade of Tenochtitlán was conducted by a special
caste of merchants known as the pochteca who originally hailed from
the ward, or district, of Pochtlán on the island of
Tlatelolco. The latter, located on the northwest side of
Tenochtitlán, was the primary market place of the Aztec
capital and was described by Cortés as being "twice the size
of the market of Salamanca" back in Spain. Sahagún counted
over 60 kinds of merchants engaged in trade within the market, about
three-quarters of whom dealt in foodstuffs and consumables while the
remainder sold manufactured goods of different types. Cacao beans
served as currency, being counted out in groups of 20 and packages of
8000.
Because Mesoamerica lacked domesticated animals to serve as
beasts of burden, all pre-Columbian commerce moved overland on the
backs of men and along the coasts and on the few navigable
watercourses by canoe. A special low caste of Aztec society, the
so-called tlameme served as bearers for the merchants. They carried
their heavy loads -- sometimes well over 100 pounds -- on their backs
using cacaxtli, or carrying frames, supported by tumplines slung over
their foreheads. Any individual caravan might well have consisted of
several hundred bearers, who, taken together, could probably have
carried as much as a single semi-trailer truck. Nevertheless, in view
of the great distances involved, the poor quality of the trails and
the variation in climates and the ruggedness of terrain through which
they passed, one cannot but be impressed by the volume of goods that
moved between the far-flung reaches of the Mesoamerican realm in
pre-Columbian times.