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The Past and Present Society The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society Author(s): Inga Clendinnen Source: Past & Present, No

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The Past and Present Society The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society Author(s): Inga Clendinnen Source: Past & Present, No. 107 (May, 1985), pp. 44-89 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650706 Accessed: 05-07-2017 18:31 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650706?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press, The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past & Present This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:31:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE COST OF COURAGE IN AZTEC SOCIETY* Proud of itself is the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Here no one fears to die in war. This is our glory ... Who could conquer Tenochtitlin? Who could shake the foundation of heaven?' Today we are tempted to read this fragment of an Aztec2 song-poem as a familiar piece of bombast: the aggressive military empire which insists on its invincibility, its warriors strangers to fear. In what follows I want to indicate how the business of war was understood in the great city of Tenochtitlin, and then, in more but still inadequate detail, to enquire into how warrior action was sustained and explained, in the hope of drawing closer to an Aztec reading of this small text. I That Tenochtitlin was the creation of war and the courage and stamina of its young fighting men was indisputable. The splendid city which Cortes and his men saw shimmering above its lake waters in the autumn of 1519 had been founded as a miserable collection of mud huts less than two hundred years before. Some time late in the twelfth century the final abandonment of the once-great imperial city * My thanks are due to members of the Shelby Cullom Davis Seminar on War and Society at Princeton University, who responded to an initial draft of this article with lively interest, subtle and acute criticism, and generous encouragement. The Plates are reproduced by permission of the Bibliotheque de l'Assemblke Nationale, Paris, and Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz (Plate 8), the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (Plate 2), the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Plates 1, 3, 4), the British Library, London (Plates 6, 7), the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico (Plate 9), and the Museum fuir Volkerkunde, Basle (Plate 5). 1 "Cantares mexicanos", fos. 19v-20', trans. Miguel Leon-Portilla in his Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico (Norman, Okla., 1969), p. 87. 2 The people who had come to dominate central Mexico at the time of European conquest, ruling their tribute empire from the island city of Tenochtitlin, called themselves the "Mexica" or the "Tenocha", but common usage has established them as the "Aztecs". This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:31:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE COST OF COURAGE IN AZTEC SOCIETY 45 of Tula to the north had begun a restless movement of southwards, to the gentler lands of the valley of Mexico. By of the thirteenth century more than fifty "miniscule politie in the valley, bound together by trade and increasingly, as p and ambition grew, by the determination to exact tribute fr other.3 The Aztecs, latecomers in the migration, lived misera marginally on the narrow tolerance of their longer-settled n until the lord of Azcapotzalco allowed them to settle the lands in the south-west of Lake Texcoco. He had been imp their ingenious exploitation of previously despised lake resou their energetic reclamation of productive land through the d and piling system of chinampa agriculture long practised in th and most of all by the unusual ferocity of their young fight The Aztecs were to live essentially as mercenaries for t difficult years, as their city and neat patchwork of chinamp grew. Their tribal deity Huitzilopochtli, who spoke thro mouths of his four god-bearer priests, had led them through of the migration, and with settlement internal affairs were by the leaders of each calpulli or lineage group, who distribu and labour and gathered the young men for war.4 With t the need for more formal and unified representation for neg with other valley peoples, so the calpulli leaders approached a of Culhuacan who could claim descent from the Toltecs of Tula to become their tlatoani, or "Speaker". The outsider was integrated into the group and created an instant aristocracy by the neat device of marrying twenty Aztec wives, one from each calpulli, or so the story goes.5 That first tlatoani probably had little influence on the administration of Aztec affairs, but in the late 1420s, a hundred years after the establishment of Tenochtitlin, there was a significant shift in the 3Edward A. Calnek, "Patterns of Empire Formation in the Valley of Mexico, Late Postclassic Period, 1200-1521", in George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo and John D. Wirth (eds.), The Inca and Aztecs States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History (New York, 1982), p. 44. Calnek elegantly reviews recent developments in this complex area. 4 Gordon Brotherston, enquiring into Huitzilopochtli's "indelibly suggests that a one-time leader was transformed into the god by t empire, as a vivifying figure of unbounded energy and terror. Go "Huitzilopochtli and What Was Made of Him", in Norman Hamm american Archeology: New Approaches (London, 1974), pp. 155-65 s More correctly, one of the stories: C6dice Ramirez: relacidn del o que habitan esta Nueva Espaiia, seguzn sus historias (Mexico, 1944), sketchy accounts conflict for this early period. This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:31:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 46 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 107 locus of authority. Itzcoatl, son of the with two other client cities, led his w overlord city and won. The spoils of the labour to work it, even the chance o Azcapotzalco from its subject cities - l to distribute that wealth directly to the warriors and especially to his royal kin elaborate system of military offices and rights to tribute and the produce of persuasively argued that with Itzcoat recruitment of calpulli leaders into servi nascent state, and the development of an tion between a privileged hereditary aris moner class.6 The calpulli was not exting local unit for the distribution of calpulli of labour for public works, war and colle century and the Spanish attack. But followed him, both power and authority locally based lineage groups to the pala temple complex adjacent to it. Under Itzcoatl's successor Moctezuma the Elder the armies of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlin, Texcoco and Tlacopan spilled beyond the valley to carve out the broad shape of their magnificent if unstable tribute empire. That expansion was paralleled by the increasing magnificence of Tenochtitlin. In 1519, the last year of its grandeur, it contained perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 people, with many more densely settled around the lake margin. (Seville, the port of departure for most of the conquistadores, numbered in the same year not more than 60,000 persons.)7 The city lived more by trade than tribute, but that trade had been stimulated and focused by war, just as its war-fed splendour attracted the most skilled artisans and most gifted singers to embellish its glory further.8 The one-class society o 6 J. Rounds, "Lineage, Class and Power in the Aztec State", Amer. Ethnologist, vi (1979), pp. 73-86. For a different emphasis, see Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, "Aztec Stat Making: Ecology, Structure and the Origins of the State", Amer. Anthropologist, lxxxv (1983), pp. 261-84. 7 For a review of recent discussion on population figures, see William T. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Parsons and Robert S. Santley, The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization (New York, 1979). For Seville, see J. H. Elliott, Imperia Spain, 1469-1716 (New York, 1964), p. 117. 8 For trade and tribute into Tenochtitlan, and the development of hierarchy, see Calnek, "Patterns of Empire Formation in the Valley of Mexico"; Edward Calnek, "The Internal Structure of Tenochtitlin", in Eric R. Wolf (ed.), The Valley of Mexico (cont. on p. 47) This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:31:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE COST OF COURAGE IN AZTEC SOCIETY 47 the early days of hardship had given way to an elaborately d ated hierarchy. But that hierarchy had been created thr distribution of the spoils of war, and success in combat rem dynamic. Performance on the field of battle was as centr confirmation of an elevated position as for escape from a low and concern regarding that performance gripped young mal social ranks. It also concerned those who directed the city. From the age of ten or eleven all commoner youths save those few dedicated to the priesthood came under the control of the "House of Youth", the warrior house in their own calpulli. These were not exclusively military schools: each lad was expected to master a range of masculine skills, most particularly the trade of his father. The great mass of Aztec warriors were essentially part-time, returning from campaigns to the mundane pursuits of farming, hunting or fishing, pulque brewing and selling, or the dozen other trades the city supported. Few commoners were so successful in battle as to emancipate themselves entirely from such labour. Nonetheless it was war and the prospect of war which fired imagination and ambition.9 At fifteen the lads began intensive training in weapon-handling, gathering every evening in the warrior house with the mature warriors - local heroes - to learn the chants and dances which celebrated warriors past and the eternal excitements of war. Assigned labours became a chance to test strength, as boys wrestled logs from the distant forest to feed the never-dying fires in their local temple or to meet their ward's obliga(n. 8 cont.) (Albuquerque, N.M., 1976), pp. 287-302; Johanna Broda et al., Estratificaci6n social en la Mesoamirica prehispdnica (Mexico, 1976); Pedro Carrasco and Johanna Broda (eds.), Economia politica e ideologia en el Mexico prehispdnico (Mexico, 1978); Frances Berdan, "Trade, Tribute and Market in the Aztec Empire" (Univ. of Texas at Austin Ph.D. thesis, 1975). 9 Bernardino de Sahaguin, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 pts. (Santa Fe, 195082), bk. 8, ch. 20, pp. 71-2. Other information on warrior schools and the conduct of war is to be found in bk. 3, app., chs. 4-6; bk. 6, chs. 3, 21-31; bk. 8, chs. 12, 14, 17-18, 20-21, apps. B, C. See also, for the regalias and the training and disciplinary procedures, Codex Mendoza, ed. James Cooper Clark, 3 vols. (London, 1983); Thelma D. Sullivan, "Arms and Insignia of the Mexica", Estudios de cultura ndhuatl, x (1972), pp. 155-93 (translation of the relevant sections of the C6dice Matritense de la Academia de la Historia); Johanna Broda, "El tributo de trajes de guerreros y la estructuraci6n del sistema tributario", in Carrasco and Broda (eds.), Economia, politica e ideologia en el Mexico prehispdnico, pp. 113-72. For garrisons, see C. Nigel Davies, "The Military Organization of the Aztec State", Atti del XL congreso internazionale delli Americanisti, xl pt. 4 (1972), pp. 213-21. Descriptions of campaigns are most abundant in Diego Durin, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-Espafia y islas de Tierra Firme, ed. Jose F. Ramirez, 2 vols. (Mexico, 1867-80). This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:31:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 107 tions at the central temple precinct. But indeed the sole consequential test. Per measured in a quite straightforward, arit ment through the ranks of the warrio alive on the field of battle a specified nu quality. (See Plate 1.) Each promotion w designated insignia and by a distinctive c hair, although the "warrior lock", at th back of the head, was always kept intact warriors, the "shaven-headed Otomi", with bright cord close to the scalp so tha the shaven pate.) It was possible for the himself over several campaigns to grad the royal administration, or even to enjo at least for his lifetime. Rewards were n in battle brought increasingly gorgeous i tunities for their public and ceremoni access to the goods of the tribute war dispersed to kin and friends: a nice exam The connection between the honours warrior and the general benefits enjoyed him by blood or friendship were well conquest men recalled what happened w arms" was successful: such honour he won that no one anywhere might be adorned [like him]; no one in his [own] house might assume all his finery. For in truth [because] of his dart and his shield there was eating and drinking, and one was arrayed in cape and breechclout. For verily in Mexico were we, and thus persisted the reign of Mexico .. ..o The conditions of warrior training for the sons of the lords are less clear. Some appear to have been associated with local warrior houses, taking their specialized training there, while others, dedicated early to a particular order of warriors, trained within its exclusive house.11 0o Florentine Codex, bk. 8, app. C, p. 89. 11 For the warrior training of the sons of lords, see Florentine Codex, bk. 8, ch. 20. For training within the house of the knightly order, see Duran, Historia, ii, ch. 88. For the complex business of access of commoners to high military office, see Virve Piho, "Tlacatecutli, Tlacochtecutli, Tlacateccatl y Tlacochcdlcatl", Estudios de cultura ndhuatl, x (1972), pp. 315-28. My own suspicion is that a rhetoric of access and an actuality of restriction was tempered by the occasional exception - a not unfamiliar situation - but that the positions of tlacateccatl and tlacochcdlcatl of Tenochtitlin were reserved to members of the ruling dynasty. See J. Rounds's absorbing discussion in his "Dynastic Succession and the Centralization of Power in Tenochtitlin", in Collier, Rosaldo and Wirth (eds.), Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800, pp. 63-89.