The Toltec

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About sixty kilometers north of the Valley of Mexico, on a limestone spur above the Tula River in the present-day Mexican state of Hidalgo, stand the remains of a city that the people who built it called Tollan and that archaeologists call Tula. On the summit of its principal pyramid four basalt warriors rise to a height of about four and a half meters, carved in a rigid frontal stance, each shouldering an atlatl and a sheaf of darts, a stylized butterfly across the chest and a round solar disk fixed to the back. These are the Atlantes — once the roof-supports of a sanctuary, now standing exposed against the sky after the roof that hid them rotted away. They are the most famous image of the Toltec, and they are also a fair emblem of the problem the Toltec present: a hard, specific, datable thing, lifted out of its original setting and made to carry a meaning far larger than itself.

For the city of Tula and the people who lived in it flourished for only about two and a half centuries — roughly 900 to 1150 of the common era, in the period Mesoamericanists call the Early Postclassic — and then burned and emptied. But the idea of Tollan outlived the city by four hundred years and acquired a weight the archaeological record alone cannot bear. When the Mexica who built the empire of Tenochtitlan — the people commonly called the Aztecs — looked back across those centuries, they did not see a modest provincial capital. They saw a golden age: a city of artist-sages where cotton grew in colors, where ears of maize were as long as a man, where the air itself was fragrant, ruled by a priest-king of unearthly virtue. To be civilized, in their language, was to be Toltec. To disentangle the small hard city from the shining one the Aztecs remembered is the central labor of Toltec studies, and it is a labor that may have no clean end.

The archaeological Tula

The site occupies two principal ceremonial zones. The earlier, Tula Chico (“Little Tula”), grew up in the centuries after the fall of nearby Teotihuacan, around a population that produced the red-on-buff pottery archaeologists call Coyotlatelco ware. By the tenth century the center of gravity had shifted to Tula Grande, the monumental core whose ruins dominate the spur today. The ceramic sequence worked out by Robert Cobean and refined by Alba Guadalupe Mastache and Dan Healan runs through phases named Prado, Corral, Terminal Corral, Tollan, and Fuego — the last word, “Fire,” naming the destruction layer in which the apogee ends. A later synthesis anchored the sequence to sixty-eight radiocarbon and seven archaeomagnetic determinations, placing the city’s height in the Tollan phase, roughly the tenth through the mid-twelfth centuries.

At that height Tula was a real city, not a ceremonial fiction. Estimates for its population run from about forty to sixty thousand, with the urban zone spreading over some thirteen square kilometers of house-platforms, workshops, and drainage. Its monumental architecture is austere and martial. The principal structure, Pyramid B, carried a temple dedicated to Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the Lord of the House of Dawn — that is, to the planet Venus as the morning star, and so to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl in his astral guise. It is on this pyramid that the four colossal Atlantes stood, columns in the shape of warriors who once held up the sanctuary roof; beside them are square pillars carved with more warriors, and the friezes that ran along the building alternate prowling jaguars and coyotes with eagles eating hearts and with a recurring image of a human face emerging from the open jaws of a feathered serpent — Quetzalcoatl as the dawn.

Around the pyramid lie the other signatures of Toltec building: a low relief wall called the Coatepantli, the “Serpent Wall,” along which serpents glide past files of skeletons; a colonnaded hall west of the pyramid, the so-called Burnt Palace, where a forest of columns and a bench running round three sides mark out not a royal residence but a meeting place for the ruling order; two ball courts for the ritual game played across Mesoamerica; reclining stone figures of the type called chacmool, with a vessel held on the belly to receive offerings; and the racks of carved skulls, tzompantli, that announce the public, devouring face of the cult. The iconography is unmistakable and it is everywhere the same: predation, war, the heart given up, the serpent and the star. Whatever else the Toltec capital was, it was a place whose state cult thought about sacrifice and cosmic maintenance in the same breath, in the manner that would later organize the sacred geography of Tenochtitlan.

Toltecayotl: the inheritance the Mexica claimed

The Nahuatl word tolteca came to mean far more than “person from Tula.” It meant artist, craftsman, sage — one who works with skill and judgment. From it the Mexica formed the abstract noun toltecayotl, “Toltec-ness”: the whole quality of refined civilization, the mastery of the feather-mosaic and the goldsmith’s furnace and the painted book, the cultivation that separated the settled city from the wandering desert. The Florentine Codex compiled in the sixteenth century by Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua co-authors at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco preserves the great catalog of this praise: the Toltecs, it says, were wise, their works all good, all perfect, all marvelous; they invented the calendar and the count of days; they were rich, and nothing they needed was lacking. To be said to have a Toltec heart — to do all things worthily and to excel — was among the highest compliments a craftsman or a ruler could be paid, and the codex’s portrait of the true artist, who works from the heart and converses with it, is in effect a definition of toltecayotl itself.

This is praise of a particular kind. The Mexica were comparative latecomers, a people who entered the Valley of Mexico from the north as one more band of Chichimeca — “people of the dog lineage,” the term for the unsettled northern hunters — and who rose to dominance only in the fifteenth century. A dynasty that recent could not rest its legitimacy on antiquity alone. So the Mexica married it into the older Toltec line through the rulers of Culhuacan, who claimed Toltec descent, and they wrote their own emperors into a succession that reached back through Tollan to the dawn of the present age of the world. Tollan became, in this telling, the source: the place from which civilization itself had flowed, and to which every later art and institution traced its warrant. The move is an old one in the history of cultures — much as the heirs of Mesopotamia and of ancient Egypt would invoke those lands as the deep wellsprings of writing, kingship, and wisdom — but in the Toltec case the gap between the remembered fount and its modest archaeological residue is especially wide, and especially instructive. Honoring the Toltec was, among other things, a way of honoring oneself. The impulse was not the Mexica’s alone: across Postclassic Mesoamerica, peoples as distinct as the screenfold-painting Mixtec of the Oaxaca highlands traced their dynasties and their authority to claimed Toltec roots, so that “Toltec” came to function less as the name of one vanished nation than as a shared charter of legitimate rule.

Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: the priest-king

At the center of the remembered Tollan stands a single figure, and around him the whole drama of Toltec sacred kingship turns. He is Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: Ce Acatl, “One Reed,” the day-sign of his birth and the year-sign that would govern his fate; Topiltzin, “Our Dear Prince”; Quetzalcoatl, the name of the feathered serpent god, borne by the priest as the title of his sacred office. The chronicles make him the son of Mixcoatl, “Cloud Serpent,” a conquering lord who led his people down out of the north, and they set his birth in the tenth century, on a day One Reed. He is at once the founder-hero of the Toltec order and its priest, the human bearer of a god’s name.

The story the sixteenth-century sources tell of him has the shape of a fall. Topiltzin reigns at Tollan as a king of penance and abstinence, a celibate ascetic who serves Quetzalcoatl and — in the most striking versions — refuses human sacrifice, offering instead serpents, birds, and butterflies. Against him works Tezcatlipoca, “Smoking Mirror,” the dark and shape-shifting god of sorcery and the night, who in the narrative functions as the patron of the rival faction. By trickery Tezcatlipoca brings the king low: he is shown his own aged face in a mirror, dressed in finery against his vows, made drunk, drawn into transgression that shames him before his own people. Broken, Topiltzin abandons Tollan and journeys east, through the holy city of Cholula and on toward the gulf coast, to a place named Tlillan Tlapallan, “the land of the black and the red” — the colors of writing, and so of wisdom, and so also of the edge of the world.

There the accounts divide. In one, the king lays himself on a pyre and burns, and his heart rises into the sky to become the morning star — an apotheosis by fire, the man transformed into the planet Venus whose temple crowned his city. In another, he sets out across the eastern sea on a raft of serpents, declaring that he will come again in a year One Reed. That departing vow is the hinge on which a famous and treacherous piece of history would later turn.

Fact, legend, and the historiographic knot

The difficulty is plain once stated. Almost everything narrated above comes from documents written down a full four to six centuries after Tula’s fall, by Nahua and Spanish hands working within the Mexica imperial frame or the colonial mission that succeeded it. The archaeology gives a city, a chronology, a martial cult of the serpent and the star, a destruction by fire. The texts give a golden age and a saintly king. Whether and how the two describe the same thing is the open problem of the field, and scholars have ranged across the whole distance between credulity and refusal.

At one pole stands the identification, argued by Wigberto Jiménez Moreno from the 1930s in his study Tula y los toltecas, that the ruins in Hidalgo simply are the legendary Tollan — that the place-names scattered through the chronicles map onto the real landscape around Tula, and that the city of the texts can therefore be set down on the modern map. For a generation this was the working consensus, and it underwrote the great campaigns of excavation by Jorge Acosta and, later, the synthesis of Richard Diehl. At the other pole stands a deep skepticism. Susan Gillespie, in The Aztec Kings, argued that Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl is not a recoverable king at all but a figure generated by the Mexica cyclical conception of time, in which the deeds of the present ruler are read back onto a founding ancestor so that history repeats at the turning of each era; the search for a single historical Topiltzin behind the god, on this view, is the search for something the sources were never built to hold. Michel Graulich reached a kindred conclusion by another route.

Between these poles runs a further and subtler debate over the word Tollan itself. Tollan means “place of reeds,” and by extension a great civilized metropolis — and it was applied, in the sources, to more than one city: to Tula in Hidalgo, but also to Cholula, to Teotihuacan, and to others. This is the “single Tollan, many Tollans” question that Shannon Dugan Iverson has framed in a study of Tula’s long afterlife: perhaps the Tollan the Mexica revered was less a particular ruin than a category, the idea of the great civilized city as such, of which the place in Hidalgo was one instance among several. On this reading the question “was Tula the real Tollan?” is malformed, because Tollan was never only one place to begin with.

A parallel argument once tied Tula to the distant Maya city of Chichén Itzá, whose colonnades, chacmools, and feathered-serpent columns echo the Toltec capital so closely that an earlier generation of scholars, following Alfred Tozzer, proposed an outright Toltec conquest of Yucatán. That diffusionist reading has been largely set aside; the resemblances are not in dispute, but their direction and mechanism are, and no settled account of who borrowed what from whom has replaced the old certainty.

The most consequential strand of the legend ran forward into the conquest. By the later sixteenth century it was widely written that the emperor Moctezuma II took the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519 for the foretold return of Quetzalcoatl in his year One Reed, and surrendered his world in religious dread. But the earliest version of that claim appears in the 1552 chronicle of Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’s own chaplain, who had never crossed the ocean; Cortés’s firsthand letters say nothing of being mistaken for a god. As Camilla Townsend argued in her essay “Burying the White Gods,” the returning-god story is best understood as a post-conquest construction — partly Spanish self-justification, partly the Nahua annalists’ own effort to make sense of catastrophe within the cyclical frame — rather than a belief the Mexica held before the ships appeared. The most famous “Toltec prophecy” is thus, on the present evidence, an artifact of the very encounter it claims to explain.

Scholarship and sources

The textual Toltec is reconstructed almost entirely from sources external to Tula and later than it. The richest is Book III of the Florentine Codex (c. 1577), the bilingual Nahuatl-and-Spanish encyclopedia assembled by Sahagún with his Nahua collaborators, which preserves the fullest narrative of Topiltzin’s fall, while the same encyclopedia’s Book X holds the catalog of Toltec arts and the praise of the toltecayotl; the Library of Congress hosts a full open scan of the manuscript at loc.gov. The cosmogonic Leyenda de los Soles and Anales de Cuauhtitlán, bound together as the Codex Chimalpopoca, carry parallel and sometimes divergent accounts of the priest-king and his exile. The pictorial Codex Telleriano-Remensis and its sister manuscripts depict Quetzalcoatl in his feathered-serpent form. None of these is a Toltec document; all are Mexica or colonial reflections, and reading the Toltec out of them means reading through the frame that produced them.

The modern archaeological foundation is Richard A. Diehl, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico (1983), and the comprehensive Mastache, Cobean, and Healan, Ancient Tollan: Tula and the Toltec Heartland (2002), which together set the chronology and the settlement history on firm ground. The fullest treatment of the priest-king as a problem in source criticism is H. B. Nicholson, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs (2001). The skeptical historiography is anchored by Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings (1989). For the long life of Tula as a remembered place — and the “single Tollan, many Tollans” debate — see Shannon Dugan Iverson, “The Enduring Toltecs: History and Truth During the Aztec-to-Colonial Transition at Tula, Hidalgo,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 24 (2017): 90–116, online at Springer. The demolition of the returning-god story belongs to Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108 (2003).

The city and the idea

What burned in the Fuego phase, sometime around the middle of the twelfth century, was the real Tula: a martial city of forty thousand on a limestone spur, its temples toppled, its colonnades fired, its people scattered by some conjunction of drought, faction, and pressure from the same northern frontier that had once sent the Toltec themselves south. The ash is in the ground; the date is debated within a few decades but not the fact.

The Atlantes lay where they fell until the twentieth century lifted them upright again, and that second raising is itself the Toltec condition in miniature. The people of Hidalgo built warriors to hold up a roof; the Mexica, and the archaeologists, and everyone since, have made those warriors stand for something the builders never intended — a golden age, a saintly king, the very type of civilization. The hard city and the shining one are not two reports of one place that careful work will someday reconcile into a single picture. They are two different kinds of object: a settlement that can be excavated, and a memory that did real work in the world, organizing how a later empire understood its own right to rule. To take the measure of the Toltec is to hold both at once and to mistake neither for the other — to read the serpent on the wall and the serpent in the song as what each of them is.

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