Tula

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The road north out of the Valley of Mexico climbs into a drier country, away from the lakes and into low limestone hills, and about sixty-five kilometers along it crosses a river and rises onto a long spur of rock. On the crest of that spur stand four stone men. They are more than four and a half meters tall, cut from columns of gray basalt, carved in a rigid frontal stance with a spear-thrower in one hand and a sheaf of darts at the side, a stylized butterfly fixed across the chest and a round solar disk strapped to the back. They once stood inside a roof, holding it up; the roof is gone, and they stand now in the open air, four warriors looking out over the ruins of a city that the people who came after called the place of reeds.

The city is Tula, in the modern Mexican state of Hidalgo, and the people who built it were the Toltecs. For roughly two and a half centuries — the period Mesoamericanists call the Early Postclassic, about 900 to 1150 of the common era — it was the great power of central Mexico, the city that rose after Teotihuacan fell and held the high plateau until the rise of Tenochtitlan and the people known as the Aztecs. Then it burned. But the memory of it did not. When the Aztecs looked back across the centuries to Tula, they did not see a provincial capital of stone. They saw Tollan, the source: the place from which art and craft and right rule had flowed into the world, the home of every fine thing, the city against which all later cities measured themselves and fell short.

The city on the spur

The defensible position came first. The earliest monumental core, which archaeologists call Tula Chico, “Little Tula,” took shape in the centuries after Teotihuacan’s collapse, when the broken Mesoamerican world reorganized itself around new centers and new peoples pressed in from the arid north. By the tenth century the center of gravity had moved to the larger ceremonial precinct called Tula Grande, the monumental zone whose ruins crown the spur today. At its height the city covered something on the order of fourteen square kilometers and held a population that estimates place between thirty and sixty thousand, with more tens of thousands scattered through the farming country around it — a real city, with house-platforms and workshops and drainage, not a ceremonial fiction raised for the gods alone.

Its architecture is austere and martial, and that character is worth holding onto, because it does not match the soft golden city of the later legend. The principal structure, the building archaeologists label Pyramid B, carried on its summit 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, the form in which the god rose ahead of the sun. It was on this pyramid that the four colossal figures stood: columns cut in the shape of armed warriors, who once bore the weight of the sanctuary roof. Mexico’s national institute of anthropology, which manages the site, describes them in just these terms — basalt warrior-columns of the temple of the Morning Star, each carrying the atlatl, the darts, and the insignia of a Toltec fighting man.

The Atlantes of Tula — four basalt warrior-columns more than 4.6 meters tall atop Pyramid B (the temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the Morning Star), Hidalgo, Mexico. Photograph by Karen Rojo Martínez, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

These four are the Atlantes — the name borrowed from the figure in European architecture, the male counterpart of the caryatid, who stands in for a column. Beside them rise square pillars carved with more warriors, and the friezes that ran along the building set prowling jaguars and coyotes against eagles eating hearts and against 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 rest of the Toltec signatures: a low relief screen called the Coatepantli, the “Serpent Wall,” along which carved serpents glide past files of skeletons; colonnaded halls where forests of columns and benches running round three sides mark out meeting places for the ruling order; two ball courts for the ritual game played across Mesoamerica; reclining stone figures of the type called chacmool, holding a vessel on the belly to receive offerings; and racks for the display of skulls, the tzompantli. The iconography is consistent 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 warfare and cosmic maintenance in a single breath — the same logic that would later organize the sacred center of Tenochtitlan, where the great twin temple of Templo Mayor rose to the rain god Tlaloc and the war-and-sun god Huitzilopochtli.

Pyramid B (the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli) at Tula, the stepped base that once carried the roofed sanctuary held up by the warrior-columns. Photograph by Berenike, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sometime around the middle of the twelfth century the ceremonial center burned. The destruction layer is in the ground; the date is argued within a few decades, but the fire is not in doubt. What conjunction of drought, faction, and pressure from the northern frontier brought the city down is debated, but the result is plain: the temples were toppled, the colonnades fired, the warrior-columns thrown from their pyramid, and the population scattered. Tula as a living capital ended there.

Tollan, and the inheritance the Aztecs claimed

The afterlife began at once. The Nahuatl word tolteca came to mean far more than “a person from Tula.” It meant artist, craftsman, sage — one who works with skill and judgment and a kind of inner conversation with the work. 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 crucible and the painted book, everything that separated the settled city from the wandering desert camp. To do a thing in the Toltec manner was to do it as well as a thing could be done. To say a craftsman had a Toltec heart was among the highest compliments his world could pay him. Tollan, in this usage, was not only a place on the map; it was the name of accomplishment itself.

This was praise of a pointed kind, because the Aztecs had reasons of their own to honor it. The Mexica were latecomers. They had entered the Valley of Mexico from the north as one more band of Chichimeca, the unsettled hunters of the desert margin, and rose to dominance only in the fifteenth century — a dynasty too recent to rest its legitimacy on antiquity alone. So they married it into the older line. Through the rulers of Culhuacan, who claimed Toltec descent, the Mexica wrote their own emperors into a succession reaching back through Tollan to the founding of the present age of the world. To wear the Toltec inheritance was to be the rightful heir of civilization, not an upstart from the reed-beds. The empire of the Mexica ruled the present; the memory of Tollan certified its right to do so.

The catalog of Toltec virtue that survives is itself a colonial document, and its provenance must be kept in view. The fullest version is preserved in the great sixteenth-century compilation assembled by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with his Nahua collaborators at the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco — the manuscript known as the Florentine Codex. There the Toltecs are remembered as wise beyond measure: their works all good, all perfect, all marvelous; they invented the count of days and the calendar; cotton grew for them already colored; the ears of maize were as long as a man could carry; nothing they needed was lacking. This is the golden age in full flower. But the compilation that records it was made two centuries after Tula fell, by Nahua informants remembering through the imperial frame the Mexica had built, set down under the supervision of a missionary church that meant the work to serve conversion. The golden city of the text and the martial city in the ground are not two reports of one place that careful work will reconcile. They are two different kinds of object: a settlement that can be excavated, and a memory that did real work in the world.

Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the priest-king

At the center of the remembered Tollan stands one figure, and the whole drama of Toltec sacred kingship turns around him. 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”; and 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 a conquering lord named Mixcoatl, “Cloud Serpent,” who led his people down out of the north, and they place his birth in the tenth century. He is at once the founder-hero of the Toltec order and its priest, the human bearer of a god’s name — the kind of figure in whom a people’s idea of itself and a god’s mythic biography fuse so completely that the seam can no longer be found.

The story the sixteenth-century sources tell of him has the shape of a fall. Topiltzin reigns at Tollan as a king of penance, a celibate ascetic who serves the feathered serpent and — in the most striking versions — refuses human sacrifice, offering instead serpents, birds, and butterflies. Against him works Tezcatlipoca, “Smoking Mirror,” the shape-shifting god of sorcery, fate, and the night, who in the narrative is the patron of the rival faction. By trickery the dark god brings the king low: he is shown his own aged face in a mirror, dressed in finery against his vows, made drunk, drawn into a transgression that shames him before his 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.

Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent whose name the priest-king of Tollan bore, depicted in the sixteenth-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Public domain (faithful reproduction of a pre-1931 manuscript), via Wikimedia Commons.

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 — 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, vowing to return in a year One Reed. That departing vow became, centuries later, the hinge of a famous and treacherous piece of history: the claim that the Mexica emperor Moctezuma took the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519, in a year One Reed, for the foretold homecoming of the god, and surrendered his world in dread. That story is best understood as a post-conquest construction — shaped by Spanish self-justification and by the Nahua annalists’ own effort to fit catastrophe into the cyclical frame of their calendar — rather than a belief the Mexica held before the ships appeared. The correction belongs properly to the entry on Quetzalcoatl; what matters here is that the priest-king of Tollan was the seed from which the later, contested prophecy grew.

How much of Topiltzin is recoverable as history is one of the hard problems of the field. At one pole stands the identification, argued by Wigberto Jiménez Moreno from the 1930s, that the ruins in Hidalgo simply are the legendary Tollan, and that a historical priest-king stands behind the god. At the other stands a deep skepticism: Susan Gillespie argued that Topiltzin is not a recoverable king at all but a figure generated by the Mexica conception of cyclical time, in which the deeds of the reigning lord are read back onto a founding ancestor so that history repeats at the turning of each era. The search for a single man behind the name, on this view, looks for something the sources were never built to hold.

The Chichén Itzá puzzle

The most persistent question Tula has set scholarship lies a thousand kilometers to the southeast, in the lowland Yucatán, at the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá. For the visitor who knows Tula, the resemblance is uncanny. Chichén Itzá has its own colonnaded halls, its own reclining chacmools, its own warrior-pillars and feathered-serpent columns, its own friezes of eagles and jaguars devouring hearts — the whole martial Toltec vocabulary, transplanted into Maya country and rendered in Maya stone. An earlier generation of scholars, following Alfred Tozzer, read this as the trace of an outright Toltec conquest of Yucatán: the Toltecs, or a Toltec-led Itzá dynasty, had carried their architecture and their cult across Mesoamerica and imposed it on the Maya.

That diffusionist reading has been largely set aside, but nothing settled has fully replaced it, and the resemblances themselves are not in dispute — only their direction and their mechanism. Some have argued the influence ran the other way, from a precociously cosmopolitan Chichén Itzá toward Tula; others see two cities drawing on a shared Mesoamerican repertoire of rulership and the feathered-serpent cult, linked by the long-distance trade networks of the Early Postclassic rather than by conquest in either direction. The chronologies of the two cities, once thought to place Tula neatly before Chichén Itzá, have proven harder to align than the old story required. The architectural cousinhood is real; the family tree is not agreed.

Recovery and afterlife

The scientific recovery of Tula began in earnest in the twentieth century. After Jiménez Moreno’s argument tied the ruins to the legendary Tollan, the Mexican archaeologist Jorge Acosta conducted long campaigns of excavation at the site from the 1940s, clearing Pyramid B and raising the fallen warrior-columns upright again. Later work by the universities of Tulane and Columbia, coordinated through the regional office of Mexico’s national institute of anthropology and history, passed in the 1990s to Alba Guadalupe Mastache and Robert Cobean, whose settlement survey and ceramic chronology placed the city’s life on firm empirical ground — the sequence of phases that ends in the burned layer the excavators named, simply, Fire. The site is administered today as one of Mexico’s protected archaeological zones, with a museum named for Acosta, and the Atlantes that he set back on their feet have become the emblem of the place. As Mexico’s heritage institute frames it for the visitor, Tula stands as the great Toltec capital, the bridge between the fall of Teotihuacan and the rise of the Mexica.

The recovery cut both ways. It gave back a real city — datable, mapped, excavated — and in doing so it quietly dismantled the golden Tollan of the chronicles, or rather set it apart as a thing of a different order: a memory, not a ruin. The hard archaeological Tula is a martial Postclassic capital of perhaps forty thousand people that flourished for two and a half centuries and burned. The shining Tollan is the Aztec idea of civilization itself, projected back onto that capital and given a saintly king. Modern scholarship has learned to hold both without collapsing one into the other.

There is a further turn in the word itself. Tollan means “place of reeds,” and by extension a great civilized metropolis — and the sources apply it to more than one city: to Tula in Hidalgo, but also to Cholula, to Teotihuacan, and to others. This is the question of the single Tollan and the many Tollans. Perhaps the place the Mexica revered was less a particular ruin than a category, the idea of the great city as such, of which the spur in Hidalgo was one instance among several. On that reading the old question — was Tula the real Tollan? — is malformed, because Tollan was never only one place.

The warriors stand for this whole condition. The people of Hidalgo cut four columns to hold up a temple roof, and they cut them in the likeness of their own fighting men, armed for the Morning Star. The Aztecs, and the archaeologists, and the travelers who climb the spur today, have made those same four figures stand for something their makers never meant: a golden age, a vanished saint-king, the very type and origin of the civilized arts. The basalt has not changed. What it is asked to carry has. To read Tula well is to see the warriors as the Toltecs cut them and as Tollan remembered them at once — the spear-throwers in their hands, and the weight of an idea on their shoulders that was laid there long after the roof had fallen away.

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