The Tlaxcalans

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A people can be known by what it eats, and the Tlaxcalans for three generations ate their food without salt. The white mineral that seasoned every other table in the central highlands came from the lakebeds of the valley and the coasts beyond, along roads that the empire ringing them had closed. They wore maguey fiber where their enemies wore cotton, went without cacao and tropical feathers and the fine goods that moved through the markets of the lake cities, and counted the privation not as poverty but as the cost of a thing they would not surrender. The Tlaxcalteca — the people of the four hills east of the volcanoes — were Nahua in tongue and gods and ancestry, kin to the very Mexica who starved them, and they had made of their encirclement a way of being a nation.

A nation of four hills

The Tlaxcalans speak the same language as the people of Tenochtitlan: Nahuatl, the speech of the broad Nahua world that stretched across the highland basins of central Mexico. They reckoned their descent, as did many highland peoples, from the Chichimeca — the hunting nations who came down out of the arid north in the centuries after the fall of the Toltec order — and from the Otomi and Nahua farmers already settled on the cold tableland when the newcomers arrived. Out of that mixture, on four defensible hills above the basin the Nahuatl sources call Tlaxcallan, “the place of maize bread,” a people took shape that organized itself in a way almost no other Mesoamerican power did.

There was no single king. The Tlaxcalteca lived as a confederacy of four self-governing seats — Tepeticpac on its crag, the senior of the four; wealthy Ocotelulco of the merchant lords; Tizatlan, the seat that came to lead at contact; and Quiahuiztlan — each an altepetl, the Nahuatl word for a sovereign town-and-people, each with its own ruling lord and noble houses. Above them stood not a huei tlatoani, a supreme speaker on his reed mat, but a council in which the lords of the four seats and a body of nobles deliberated together, weighing war and peace by something nearer to consent than command. Beneath the lords stood the pipiltin, the nobility, and beneath them the commoner farmers and artisans; along the dangerous frontiers the confederacy settled Otomi fighters as a warrior buffer, prized allies kept loyal by honor rather than tribute. The Tlaxcalans understood themselves as a Chichimec people, hard, free, and martial by descent, set against the lake-dwelling Mexica who had taken to themselves the mantle of the Toltecs and the prestige of the ruined city of Teotihuacan.

Tlaxcalan warriors with their Spanish allies, a scene from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (mid-16th century). Lithographic reproduction, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The god of the cloud-serpent

The Tlaxcalans worshipped the gods of the wider Nahua world — the same fragile Fifth Sun that had to be fed to keep moving, the same rain-lord, the same calendar of day-signs reckoned by the tonalpohualli. But every Nahua people had its own face turned toward that pantheon, its own patron whose festival fixed the ritual year, and for the four hills the chief god was Camaxtli, the hunting-and-war aspect of Mixcoatl, the Cloud Serpent.

Mixcoatl is the smoking band of the Milky Way drawn across the night, the ancestral god of the Chichimeca who led the hunting nations down into the settled country as the Mexica told that their own patron had led them to the lake. The Franciscan compiler Bernardino de Sahagún, gathering the testimony of Nahua elders in the conquest’s aftermath, recorded that the Chichimeca who peopled Tlaxcala worshipped one god above the rest, and named him Mixcoatl. As Camaxtli he was the deer-hunter with his bundle of arrows and his net, the patron of the chase and of war — the two pursuits the highlanders did not sharply distinguish, since both were the taking of life that the gods required. His was the great festival of the month the Nahua called Quecholli, the season of the hunt, when the people went out after deer in his honor. To be Tlaxcalteca was, among other things, to stand under Camaxtli’s sign: a warrior nation of hunters’ descent, whose chief act of devotion was the offering of captive life.

The wars of the flower

The institution that bound Tlaxcala to its enemy, and that more than anything else marks the Tlaxcalan world, was the xochiyaoyotl — the “flower war.” Across the frontier between the confederacy and the empire of the Triple Alliance, war was not an occasional rupture but a standing condition, fought in arranged engagements whose declared aim was not territory or plunder but the taking of captives and the proving of warriors. The dead and the captured went, in the logic of this world, to the altars — for in the Nahua understanding the Sun and the rain were sustained by the debt of human blood, the nextlahualli that every Nahua people owed and that war was the appointed means of paying. A captive taken in the flower war was a feeding of the world; a warrior who took captives rose in rank and honor. Both sides drank from the same theology, and on its terms the flower war was a kind of sacred field where two enemies harvested the offerings the gods demanded and tempered their young men against a worthy foe.

What the flower war actually was remains a genuine scholarly debate, and the Tlaxcalans sit at its center because they were the empire’s chief opponent in it. The older account, drawn from the imperial chronicles and associated with the Mexica statesman Tlacaelel, presents it as a mutually agreed ritual institution — a sacred tournament that fed both altars and trained both armies without the ruin of total war, and that the empire is said to have deliberately left unwon so that the field of captives would never close. Against this, the historian Ross Hassig has argued that the talk of mutual agreement is largely a Mexica gloss on something harsher: a low-intensity war of attrition by which the empire ground down a foe too costly to finish at a stroke, softening Tlaxcala for a conquest that the Spaniards’ arrival forestalled. The two readings need not exclude each other, and the honest position is that the war may have looked different from each end of the spear — a containing, escalating pressure as the empire applied it; as Tlaxcala lived it, a permanent siege in which every captive lost and every closed road was a wound. The salt blockade was part of that pressure: the Mexica, under Moctezuma I and his successors, did not crush the four hills but throttled them, sealing the trade roads so that the confederacy went without salt and cotton and cacao while it kept its independence. The Tlaxcalans remembered the deprivation as proof that they had never bent the knee.

This is the most charged ground in any telling of the highland nations, and it should be held without relish and without denial. The sacrificial offering of captives was real; the archaeology of the Templo Mayor in the heart of the enemy capital, with its buried offerings and its skull-rack, confirms that the practice was no colonial slander. But the lurid numbers come down to us through the Spaniards and through Tlaxcalan allies who had every reason to magnify the horror of the empire they had helped to destroy, and the conquistador figures are propaganda as much as record. Within the frame of the people who practiced it, this was not cruelty but obligation: a world poised always on the edge of ending, kept alive by the costliest gift a people could make.

The slaughter at Cholula as the Tlaxcalans recorded it in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The strangers from the sea

In the late summer of 1519 a small company of Castilians under Hernán Cortés came up from the coast toward the highlands, through Totonac country and across the eastern marches. The Tlaxcalans, hostile to any armed strangers near their borders, met them first with their Otomi frontier troops and then with the confederacy’s own army under the war-captain Xicotencatl the Younger, son of the blind elder lord of Tizatlan. Across hard days of fighting in early September the Tlaxcalans pressed the small company harder than any force would in the whole campaign, coming near to destroying it outright. They did not break the Castilian line, but they bled it badly, and they learned that these strangers fought well.

Then the four lords in council made the decision that defined everything after. An enemy of the empire that had besieged them for three generations had appeared at their gate, and rather than spend the nation in a war they were not winning against a foe whose true target — the lake city — was their own oldest enemy, they reversed course. The elder Xicotencatl and Maxixcatzin, lord of Ocotelulco, brought the confederacy to alliance; the Castilians entered the Tlaxcalan capital in late September not as captives but as guests, and the bargain that emerged was partnership, not surrender. This was a sovereign people acting on a clear calculation, choosing the stranger over the empire that had starved and hunted it. The younger Xicotencatl, who never trusted the bargain, would later be executed during the campaign; the decision held all the same, because it was the council’s and not one man’s. Some of the lords were baptized the following year, taking Christian names while keeping their seats and their authority — the first turn of a religious history that would run for centuries.

The weight of the alliance

What followed was less a Spanish conquest than a war waged by a coalition of native powers, with Castilian allies inside it, against the Mexica. The few hundred Spaniards could not have taken Tenochtitlan; the Tlaxcalan armies, marching in their thousands and then their tens of thousands across the campaign, were the mass and much of the muscle of it. When the catastrophic Spanish flight from the lake city on the Noche Triste of 1520 nearly ended the whole enterprise, it was Tlaxcala that took in the broken survivors, sheltered and healed them, and let them rebuild. The brigantines that dismantled the lake defenses of the island capital were carpentered with Tlaxcalan labor and carried in pieces across the mountains on Tlaxcalan backs. In the siege of 1521 the warriors of the four hills fought along the causeways, filled the breaches of urban combat the Spaniards could not have sustained alone, and pressed the assault street by street into Tlatelolco, where the empire made its last stand. When the city fell on 13 August 1521, the victory belonged as much to the Tlaxcalteca as to Castile.

Smallpox, arriving with the strangers, did its own work, sweeping the densely peopled lake cities and killing where no army could reach. The four hills bore the contagion too, but they fought from the side that survived the war as victor.

The Tlaxcalans said all this first, and said it loudest, in a document of their own making. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a great painted cloth commissioned by the city council around the middle of the sixteenth century and running to some eighty-seven scenes, set down the alliance and the war as the Tlaxcalan deed — their own banners and lords at the center of every decisive moment, their warriors beside the few Castilians at every battle. It was record and petition at once, a people’s argument that without them the empire would not have fallen and that the crown therefore owed them. The original is lost; the work survives through nineteenth-century lithographic copies and tracings.

A reconstruction of the full Lienzo de Tlaxcala, the Tlaxcalan painted history of the conquest. Mesolore Project facsimile after 1892 lithographs, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Privilege, the road north, and a contested memory

For a time the Tlaxcalteca collected on their bargain. The Spanish crown recognized them as free vassals rather than subjects to be parceled out in encomienda; their lands were largely protected, their tribute largely waived, and the four lords went on governing through a colonial council that preserved the old fourfold structure. Their nobles won the right to bear Spanish arms, ride horses, hold the title of hidalgo, and keep their own names and self-rule. In 1534 the governor Maxixcatzin traveled to meet the emperor Charles V, and the following year Tlaxcala received the rank of ciudad and a coat of arms — among the earliest granted in what would become Mexico. Tlaxcalan delegations crossed the ocean to the Spanish court more than once to defend these liberties when colonial officials encroached on them.

The crown also drew on the Tlaxcalteca as colonists — loyal, agriculturally skilled, militarily reliable, and Christian. In 1591 the viceroy Luis de Velasco resettled families from the four hills northward under negotiated terms that preserved their hidalgo standing, their self-government, and their exemptions, to anchor Spanish settlement on the arid and dangerous Chichimec frontier. The colonists founded daughter-towns across the north; San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, planted beside Saltillo by settlers from Tizatlan, was the most enduring, and Tlaxcalan communities seeded settlements as far as the edges of what is now the United States. They went as soldiers, farmers, and agents of conversion among the northern peoples — a people who had chosen one alliance now extending the reach of the world that alliance had opened.

No question about the Tlaxcalteca has been argued harder, especially since Mexican independence made the conquest a national wound. To a later nationalism that read the fall of Tenochtitlan as the death of the nation, the Tlaxcalans became the archetypal traitors, the people who let the stranger in — and the word malinchista, for one who betrays his own, carries that charge still. From within the Tlaxcalan frame of 1519 the accusation dissolves, for there was no Mexican nation yet to betray, only a field of rival altepetl and an imperial hegemon that had besieged them for three generations. The scholarship has largely moved from the language of treason to the language of agency — the four hills as a sovereign people making the choice any independent power makes when an enemy’s enemy arrives at the gate — without pretending the alliance did not also help open three centuries of colonial rule that fell on every native people, the victors included.

A living people

The Tlaxcalteca did not vanish into the conquest they helped to win. They are a living people. The small state of Tlaxcala, the smallest in the Mexican federation, traces its borders loosely to the confederacy that never bent to Tenochtitlan, and tens of thousands of its people still speak Nahuatl, the tongue of the four hills and of their old enemy alike. The descendants of the northern colonists kept a distinct Tlaxcalan identity for generations in towns across the arid north, and some communities there remember it yet. Camaxtli’s open festivals are long gone, folded into the Catholic year that the lords first entered in 1520; what remains is a people who carry a complicated memory — of a nation that ate its food unsalted rather than submit, that fought the strangers hard and then joined them, and that recorded, in its own painted hand, that it had helped to end a world.

→ Related: The Nahua · Aztec Mexica Empire · Aztec Nahua Religion · Huitzilopochtli · Tenochtitlan · Templo Mayor · Teotihuacan · Toltec · Tonalpohualli Aztec Calendar · Tlatelolco · Great Pyramid Of Cholula · The Purepecha · Quetzalcoatl · Tezcatlipoca · Coatlicue