Edge Induced Cohesion

Introduction

In the autumn of 1520, Hernán Cortés sent Charles V a long letter. In it he stopped his account of the march inland to describe a city he judged larger and stronger than Granada, with busier markets and more people than the Moorish capital had at its fall. Its government struck him even more than its size. Tlaxcala had no single king. Its lords governed together, and the nearest European comparison Cortés could find was Venice, Genoa, or Pisa.¹ The comparison was imperfect, but it named something Tlaxcalans would insist on for the next four hundred years: their city governed itself, and its relationship with any greater power rested on agreement rather than conquest.

This essay follows Tlaxcala from its origins as an independent Nahua polity to its place as a state of the Mexican federation. The argument is that Tlaxcala’s history is best read as a series of bargains. First came a polity that survived encirclement by the Triple Alliance. Then came a city that traded military service for royal privilege, and a province that sent its families north on negotiated terms. Last came a Mexican state that had to answer for the bargain its ancestors struck in 1519. Each bargain produced records: petitions, pictorial histories, council minutes, and later murals. Those records protected the city’s standing, and they also shaped the verdict later generations passed on it. Three threads run through the whole story: collective governance, privilege as a status that had to be defended continually, and a long contest over memory.²

I. The Valley Before Tlaxcallan

The Tlaxcala valley sits in the central highlands east of the Basin of Mexico. The Zahuapan River drains it, and the volcano Matlalcueye, now called La Malinche, dominates its southern edge. People lived there long before any Nahua lord ruled. Xochitécatl, a ceremonial center on a hill in the southwest of the valley, dates to the Formative period and was reoccupied in the centuries after Teotihuacan’s collapse.³ Beside it stands Cacaxtla, a fortified hilltop palace complex that flourished roughly between 650 and 950. In 1975 its painted murals were uncovered. They show armed warriors in battle, figures in dress associated with the Maya lowlands, and a vivid mixture of highland and distant visual traditions. Claudia Brittenham reads the murals as the work of a highland court that deliberately drew on foreign imagery to advertise its reach and legitimacy.⁴ Tlaxcalan tradition connected the people of this era with the Olmeca-Xicalanca, a group remembered as the valley’s dominant population before the ancestors of the Tlaxcalans arrived.

Those ancestral traditions survive mainly in the writings of Diego Muñoz Camargo and in the Nahuatl annals of Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza. Both were colonial authors recording what Tlaxcalan nobles remembered.⁵ In their account, the founders were Teochichimeca migrants. They passed through the Basin of Mexico, settled for a time at Poyauhtlan near Texcoco, and were driven out by stronger neighbors. They then moved east, established themselves on the hill of Tepeticpac, and displaced or absorbed the older inhabitants. The chronology cannot be checked in detail, and the story follows the familiar Mesoamerican pattern of a migration from a place of origin to a promised homeland. It still tells us how Tlaxcalans understood themselves: as newcomers who had won their land by struggle and held it against people who wanted it. Ángel García Cook’s archaeological surveys supply the longer settlement sequence the migration story leaves out, and they show a valley where one population repeatedly built on another’s foundations.⁶

II. The Independent Polity, c. 1300s–1519

How pre-contact Tlaxcallan was governed is the most important open question for this period. The traditional answer comes from colonial Tlaxcalan sources and was adopted by Charles Gibson in his foundational study. It describes a confederation of four lordships: Tepeticpac, the oldest, then Ocotelolco, Tizatlán, and Quiahuiztlan. Each had its own ruling lord and its own share of territory, and together they formed a single political community for war and diplomacy.⁷ In this model, Cortés’s “republic” was really an alliance of four small kingdoms.

Since 2010, Lane Fargher, Richard Blanton, Verenice Heredia Espinoza, and their colleagues have challenged that model on archaeological grounds. Their survey of the pre-contact city found terraced residential zones spread across a ridge system, many plazas distributed among neighborhoods, and no palace compound comparable to those of Texcoco or Tenochtitlan. The main civic-ceremonial complex at Tizatlán has painted altars, first excavated in the 1920s, but no structure proclaims the power of a single ruling dynasty. Drawing on colonial descriptions of a council of lords and of the demanding installation ceremony a man had to pass to join it, they argue that Tlaxcallan was one city governed by a large council whose members gained office partly through service and merit rather than birth alone.⁸ Their reading raises the possibility that the neat fourfold division in colonial sources owes something to the way the colonial cabildo later organized its offices. The debate is unsettled. What matters for the longer arc is that both models describe power that was shared and negotiated, and that Tlaxcalans later presented this tradition of shared rule as a credential.

The polity’s survival depended on war. After the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan formed in 1428 and expanded under Moctezuma Ilhuicamina and Ahuitzotl, Tlaxcallan found itself surrounded. Diego Durán, Muñoz Camargo, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo all report that the Mexica cut the Tlaxcalans off from trade, leaving them without salt, cotton, and other lowland goods for generations.⁹ Along its frontiers Tlaxcallan settled Otomí communities, some of them refugees from earlier Mexica conquests, to serve as border guards.¹⁰

The wars between the Triple Alliance and the Tlaxcallan bloc, which at various times included Huexotzinco and Cholula, are known in the sources as xochiyaoyotl, “flower wars.” Durán’s account presents them as prearranged battles meant to supply both sides with captives for sacrifice and to train young warriors.¹¹ Later scholars have not taken that account at face value. Frederic Hicks argued that the label may have served Mexica pride, turning a failure to conquer into a chosen ritual. Barry Isaac’s study of Aztec battlefield conduct likewise questioned whether these wars differed in kind from wars of conquest.¹² Ross Hassig proposed a strategic reading: low-intensity wars wore down an enemy the empire could not yet afford to conquer outright, while surrounding it with tributary provinces.¹³ Whichever interpretation one prefers, the outcome for Tlaxcallan is clear. It was independent, isolated, heavily militarized, and bitterly hostile to Tenochtitlan when a small Spanish force appeared on its eastern border in the late summer of 1519.

III. Alliance and War, 1519–1521

Cortés marched inland from the Gulf Coast in August 1519 with several hundred Spaniards and Totonac allies from Cempoala, who advised him to pass through Tlaxcallan territory. In early September his force met the Otomí of the frontier and then the main Tlaxcalan army under Xicotencatl the Younger, son of the lord of Tizatlán. The fighting lasted about two weeks. The Spaniards survived through a combination of steel weapons, horses, artillery, a defensive position on a hill, and Mesoamerican battlefield conventions that favored taking captives over killing. Díaz’s account of these days is among the most vivid in his history, though his numbers for the Tlaxcalan armies cannot be trusted.¹⁴

The Tlaxcalan decision to make peace was political. Muñoz Camargo presents it as the result of debate within the ruling council. Maxixcatzin of Ocotelolco argued that the strangers could be used against Tenochtitlan, while Xicotencatl the Younger argued for destroying them.¹⁵ Díaz shows Xicotencatl the Younger continuing to oppose the alliance even after the peace was concluded. Cortés entered the city on 23 September 1519, while Mexica ambassadors were present urging him not to trust his new hosts. Camilla Townsend and Matthew Restall have both stressed what the Spanish sources obscure: the Tlaxcalan lords were pursuing their own ends and treated the Spaniards as a weapon in a war they had been fighting for generations.¹⁶ The first use of that weapon came in October 1519 at Cholula, a former member of the Tlaxcallan bloc that had moved into the Mexica orbit. Tlaxcalan warriors accompanied the Spaniards there, and the massacre that followed settled an old score as much as it served Cortés.

The alliance faced its hardest test in July 1520. After the Spaniards fled Tenochtitlan in the disaster remembered as the Noche Triste and fought their way through the battle of Otumba, the survivors reached Tlaxcala wounded and diminished. According to Muñoz Camargo and Díaz, Mexica envoys arrived offering peace in return for the destruction of the Spaniards, and Xicotencatl the Younger again argued for that course. Maxixcatzin’s view prevailed, and Tlaxcala sheltered the Spaniards while they recovered.¹⁷ Later Tlaxcalan petitions claimed that the city had set terms for this support, including freedom from future tribute. Whether or not such promises were made in 1520, the claim became central to the city’s legal position for the rest of the century.

Maxixcatzin did not live to see the outcome. He died of smallpox in late 1520 during the epidemic that swept through central Mexico and struck both allies and enemies of the Spaniards.¹⁸ In the months that followed, the shipwright Martín López built thirteen brigantines in Tlaxcala. Thousands of Tlaxcalan porters carried them in pieces across the mountains to Texcoco, where they were assembled for the assault on the lake city. Before the siege began, Xicotencatl the Younger left the army and returned home. Cortés had him seized and hanged at Texcoco in 1521, apparently with the consent of at least some Tlaxcalan lords.¹⁹ Tenochtitlan fell in August 1521 after a siege in which indigenous soldiers, Tlaxcalans prominent among them, far outnumbered the Spaniards. Hassig’s conclusion that the conquest was mainly a war fought by indigenous forces, with the Spaniards as the catalyst, has become the scholarly consensus.²⁰ In 1521 the Tlaxcalan leadership could reasonably believe it had won its long war. The following decades showed what kind of victory it had been.

IV. Indian Conquistadors and Bargained Privilege, 1520s–1590s

Tlaxcalan military service did not end with Tenochtitlan. Tlaxcalan warriors marched with Pedro de Alvarado into Guatemala in 1524. Some settled permanently near the Spanish capital there, where Laura Matthew has traced their descendants maintaining a distinct identity as “Mexicanos” through the colonial period.²¹ Tlaxcalans also fought with Nuño de Guzmán in western Mexico and with Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in the Mixtón War of 1540–1542. The essays in Matthew and Michel Oudijk’s Indian Conquistadors show that such service was the norm across Mesoamerica. Tlaxcala stands out for how effectively it turned that service into legal status.²²

The instruments of that conversion were embassies and paper. Tlaxcalan nobles traveled to Spain with Cortés in 1528, and later delegations followed in the 1530s, the 1560s, and the 1580s. From the Crown the city obtained formal designation as a city and a coat of arms in 1535, assurances that it would never be granted in encomienda to a Spanish holder, and honorific titles proclaiming its nobility and loyalty in the following decades. Its tribute was fixed at a token payment of 8,000 fanegas of maize a year, far lighter than what comparable indigenous provinces paid.²³

These privileges were written into a working system of local government. From the mid-1540s, Tlaxcala was governed by an indigenous cabildo under the oversight of a Crown-appointed Spanish official. The governorship rotated among the four cabeceras of Tepeticpac, Ocotelolco, Tizatlán, and Quiahuiztlan, and the alcaldes and regidores were drawn from each in turn.²⁴ The council’s minutes, published in English in abridged form by James Lockhart, Frances Berdan, and Arthur J. O. Anderson, are among the best-preserved municipal records produced by any indigenous community in the Americas. They show the council regulating markets, settling land disputes, organizing labor for church construction, lodging Spanish travelers on the road between Veracruz and Mexico City, and managing the cochineal trade. The red dye made from this scale insect brought Tlaxcala considerable wealth in the mid-sixteenth century. The council worried that it also allowed commoners to rise, draw away labor, and neglect maize fields, and it issued ordinances trying to restrain the trade.²⁵

The minutes also record the forces wearing the privileges down. The Spanish city of Puebla was founded in 1531 on lands at the edge of Tlaxcalan territory, and Tlaxcalans were repeatedly required to supply labor for its construction. Spanish settlers acquired land inside the province despite royal orders against it, and the cabildo’s petitions for their removal form a recurring theme in the record. Epidemics in the 1540s and again from 1576 to 1581 killed a large share of the population and left the fixed tribute harder to meet and the cabildo less able to resist encroachment.²⁶ Gibson’s study remains the essential account of this erosion. Andrea Martínez Baracs’s Un gobierno de indios carries the story of the indigenous government forward. The documentary series Tlaxcala: textos de su historia, edited for the sixteenth century by Martínez Baracs and Carlos Sempat Assadourian, makes much of the underlying evidence available.²⁷

Tlaxcala answered this pressure with history. Around the early 1550s the cabildo commissioned the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a large painted cloth that set out the conquest as the Tlaxcalans wished it remembered. It showed their lords greeting Cortés, their warriors fighting beside Spaniards at Cholula and Tenochtitlan, and their armies carrying the campaign to distant provinces. The original copies are lost, and the work is known mainly through later copies such as the one Alfredo Chavero published in 1892.²⁸ In the 1580s Muñoz Camargo compiled his Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala, the city’s reply to the Crown’s questionnaire for the relaciones geográficas, and presented an illustrated version to Philip II in connection with a Tlaxcalan embassy. The manuscript, now at the University of Glasgow, includes scenes that parallel the Lienzo. It also shows Tlaxcalan nobles receiving baptism, Franciscans destroying ritual objects, and the punishment of nobles who returned to the old religion.²⁹ These works are historical sources and legal arguments at once. They minimize the fighting of September 1519, emphasize early loyalty and conversion, and present the city as the Crown’s partner from the start.

Religion was central to that argument. The first Franciscans reached New Spain in 1524, and Tlaxcala became one of their earliest centers. The first diocese in the region was seated at Tlaxcala under Bishop Julián Garcés before it moved to Puebla by the 1540s, and the Franciscan convent in the city was built in the late 1530s.³⁰ The friar Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía, described religious dramas that Tlaxcalans staged in Nahuatl in 1538 and 1539. One, performed for Corpus Christi, depicted a Christian conquest of Jerusalem with Tlaxcalan and other indigenous actors playing the armies. Another, staged by the confraternity of the Incarnation, dramatized the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden. Motolinía reports that the elaborate staging of paradise moved the audience to tears.³¹

A biblicist reading of this material has to hold two observations together. The early Franciscan method put the narrative of Genesis before Nahuatl-speaking audiences with real force: the goodness of creation, the command given and broken, and the exile that followed. Some of the biblical storyline plainly reached Tlaxcalans in these decades. Yet direct access to Scripture narrowed as the century went on. After the Spanish Index of 1559 prohibited vernacular Bibles, Tlaxcalans depended on sermons, catechisms, and dramas prepared by clergy for what they knew of the biblical text. The religious life that grew up in the city over the following two centuries centered on processions, confraternities, and the veneration of images, with little grounding in the text of Scripture itself. That contrast becomes sharper in the eighteenth century.

V. The Northern Diaspora, 1591 and After

By the 1580s the viceroyalty’s most expensive problem lay far to the north. The silver mines of Zacatecas and the roads that served them had drawn Spanish settlement into the lands of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples the Spaniards called Chichimecs, and decades of war had followed. Philip Wayne Powell describes how Viceroy Luis de Velasco the Younger turned from military campaigns toward a policy of “peace by purchase.” Gifts of food and clothing and the establishment of settled agricultural communities would bring the frontier under control.³² Tlaxcalans were chosen as model settlers.

In 1591, about four hundred Tlaxcalan families left the province for the north under formal capitulations negotiated with the viceroy. The terms repeated the city’s older bargain on new ground. The settlers received the status of hidalgos, perpetual exemption from tribute and personal service, the right to ride horses and bear arms, grants of land, and the guarantee that their towns would remain separate from Spanish settlements.³³ In return they would farm, defend the frontier, and demonstrate settled Christian life to the peoples around them. The colonists founded San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala beside the Spanish villa of Saltillo, San Miguel Mexquitic near San Luis Potosí, Colotlán, and other communities. Over the following two centuries, daughter settlements carried Tlaxcalan families into Coahuila, Nuevo León, and eventually Texas.³⁴

David Adams’s study of the Coahuila and Nuevo León colonies established the institutional history of these towns. Travis Jeffres has more recently argued that this Mesoamerican migration shaped the making of the borderlands more deeply than older frontier histories recognized.³⁵ Both show northern Tlaxcalans invoking the 1591 capitulations in lawsuits and petitions well into the eighteenth century, much as the mother city invoked the grants of 1535. The diaspora extended the bargain geographically. It also exposed the bargain’s logic: Tlaxcalan privilege depended on Tlaxcalans remaining useful to the Crown, and on their willingness to take part in the colonization of other indigenous peoples.

VI. The Long Colonial Middle, 1600–1810

The documentary record thins after 1600, and the story of these two centuries is one of slow contraction. The indigenous cabildo continued to meet and the governorship continued to rotate. Martínez Baracs shows, however, that the council’s effective authority narrowed steadily as Spanish and mestizo landholders built haciendas within the province, Crown officials took on more of the cabildo’s functions, and the indigenous nobility’s economic base shrank.³⁶ The privileges remained on paper and were defended in court, but they protected less each generation.

Zapata y Mendoza’s Nahuatl annals give an insider’s view of this world. A noble who held office in the cabildo, he recorded governors and elections, epidemics and harvests, church building and disputes. His record reached into the late seventeenth century and was later handled by the priest Manuel de los Santos y Salazar, who added material of his own. Camilla Townsend places the annals within a wider Nahua historical tradition by which communities kept their memory alive under colonial rule. She shows how such texts preserved a sense of local continuity even as the institutions they described lost ground.³⁷

In the eighteenth century Tlaxcala’s civic identity came to rest increasingly on religious devotion and visual display. The cult of Our Lady of Ocotlán became the city’s most prominent devotion. It rested on a story that the Virgin had appeared in 1541 to an indigenous man named Juan Diego Bernardino and had led him to a miraculous spring and an image hidden in a tree. The narrative was first set in print by the priest Manuel de Loayzaga in the mid-eighteenth century, roughly two centuries after the event it describes. The sanctuary on the hill above the city was rebuilt with an ornate façade and interior during the same period.³⁸ A biblicist reader will note how far this devotion stands from the scriptural standard that testimony be confirmed by more than one witness (Deuteronomy 19:15). It is also far from the second commandment’s prohibition on making and bowing down to images (Exodus 20:4–5). The historian’s point is related but narrower: an apparition first documented two centuries after the fact tells us more about the century that published it than about the one it describes. In eighteenth-century Tlaxcala, the story tied the city’s faith to its own soil and its own people, and that civic function explains much of its power.

Jaime Cuadriello’s The Glories of the Republic of Tlaxcala shows how the city turned painting into political argument during these same decades. Canvases depicting the baptism of the four lords of Tlaxcala, the meeting with Cortés, and the city’s services to the Crown presented the Tlaxcalan nobility as a Christian senate that had freely chosen faith and loyalty. The paintings adapted the language of classical republicanism to indigenous civic pride.³⁹ The baptism scenes are especially revealing. Muñoz Camargo had claimed that the four lords were baptized early in the alliance, and Gibson doubted that claim. By the eighteenth century it had become a founding image, repeated in paint because the city’s legal identity depended on it.

The Bourbon reforms put that identity to a direct test. Under the ordinance of intendants of 1786, Tlaxcala was placed within the intendancy of Puebla, the city that had encroached on its lands since 1531. The Tlaxcalan cabildo protested, invoking its ancient privileges, and in 1793 the Crown restored a separate government for the province.⁴⁰ The episode rehearsed the struggle Tlaxcala would fight again, on different legal ground, after independence.

VII. Independence and the Struggle for Statehood, 1810–1857

José Miguel Guridi y Alcocer, a priest born in Tlaxcala, represented the province at the Cortes of Cádiz. There, in 1811, he proposed ending the slave trade and gradually abolishing slavery in the Spanish monarchy. He later sat in the congress that framed Mexico’s first federal constitution.⁴¹ That constitution, adopted in 1824, did not make Tlaxcala a state. Its population was small, and Puebla again sought to absorb it. Tlaxcala instead became a federal territory under the national government, which preserved its separation from Puebla at the cost of full self-government. Tlaxcalan leaders argued their case with the same appeal to historical distinctiveness that had served them under the Crown. After three decades of territorial status and political upheaval, the Constitution of 1857 recognized Tlaxcala as a state.⁴² Ricardo Rendón Garcini’s Breve historia de Tlaxcala remains the best guide to these decades.

Independence also changed how the old bargain was judged. Mexican nationalism looked to the Mexica past for its heroes, and Cuauhtémoc, the last defender of Tenochtitlan, became a national symbol. In that story the Tlaxcalans who had helped destroy the Mexica capital could be cast as traitors to a nation, even though no such nation existed in 1519. The loyalty narrative that had protected Tlaxcala for three centuries now counted against it.

The first major literary answer came from an unexpected source. In 1826 an anonymous novel titled Jicoténcal was published in Philadelphia. Its authorship has been attributed to several Spanish American exiles, including the Cuban priest Félix Varela. It made Xicotencatl the Younger a republican patriot who saw through Cortés and died resisting tyranny, and it turned the Tlaxcalan council’s debate of 1519 into an allegory of liberty against despotism.⁴³ The novel was aimed at Spanish colonial rule in general rather than at Tlaxcala in particular. It still offered Tlaxcalans a way to reclaim their own history: the city could honor the man who had opposed the alliance. The official name of the state capital, Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl, reflects that choice. The warrior Cortés had hanged became the patron of the city whose lords had consented to his death.

VIII. Porfiriato, Revolution, and Self-Representation, 1880s to the Present

The railway linking Mexico City and Veracruz, completed in 1873, passed through Tlaxcala and turned Apizaco into a transport and industrial town. Textile mills followed in the late nineteenth century. Próspero Cahuantzi, a governor of Nahua descent, ruled the state from 1885 to 1911 under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. Rendón Garcini’s study of his administration describes a careful balancing act among the federal government, hacienda owners, industrial interests, and village communities.⁴⁴ Cahuantzi’s long tenure gave the state stability. It also left rural grievances over land and labor unresolved, and those grievances broke into the open with the Revolution.

Tlaxcala saw some of the earliest revolutionary uprisings. Juan Cuamatzi of Contla led a rising in 1910 and was killed the following year. In the years of civil war that followed, Máximo Rojas rose to prominence on the Constitutionalist side. Domingo Arenas led an agrarian movement that distributed land to villages while shifting between alliances with the Zapatistas and the Carrancistas, until his death in 1917.⁴⁵ Raymond Buve’s research shows Tlaxcalan villages and leaders pursuing local aims through changing alliances with larger national factions. A reader who has followed the city since 1519 will recognize the pattern, though Buve’s analysis rests on the specific politics of the revolutionary decade rather than on any claim of continuity.

In 1957 the painter Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin began the murals of the Palacio de Gobierno in the city of Tlaxcala. He worked on them for roughly half a century, until his death in 2007. The murals retell the whole history this essay has followed: the migration traditions, the valley’s ancient cultures, the four lordships, the war with the Triple Alliance, the alliance with Cortés, the colonial city, and the modern state.⁴⁶ They present the choice of 1519 as the calculation of a free people defending itself against an imperial neighbor, not as betrayal. They are the state’s most public reply to the charge of treason. That charge has not disappeared. It survives in popular jokes about Tlaxcalans as traitors and in the online joke that Tlaxcala does not exist. Still, the murals complete a long reversal: the city that once painted its history to prove its loyalty to a king now paints it to prove its loyalty to its own past.

Conclusion

Seen across seven centuries, Tlaxcala’s history holds together around the three threads identified at the outset. The first is collective governance. It runs from the pre-contact council described by Cortés and reconstructed by Fargher and Blanton, through the rotating cabildo of the sixteenth century, to the eighteenth-century paintings of a Tlaxcalan “republic.” Whether the pre-contact polity was a confederation of four lordships or a single city ruled by a council, Tlaxcalans consistently claimed shared rule as their inheritance. The second thread is privilege as a negotiated status. It was granted in 1535, extended north in 1591, defended against Puebla in 1793 and again after 1824, and steadily worn down by settlers, epidemics, and administrative consolidation. The third is the contest over memory. The Lienzo and Muñoz Camargo argued for loyalty. Nationalist historiography answered with treason. The state answered in turn with Xicotencatl and the murals of Xochitiotzin.

For a biblicist reader, the story recalls the Gibeonites of Joshua 9. Facing a powerful invader, they secured a covenant that guaranteed their lives and a permanent, if subordinate, place in exchange for service. Scripture treats that covenant as binding on Israel long afterward, even though it was unequal and even though the Gibeonites obtained it by deception. When Saul broke it generations later, the violation brought judgment on the land until redress was made (2 Samuel 21:1–9). By Nehemiah’s day, men of Gibeon were working on the walls of Jerusalem beside the people whose invasion their ancestors had survived by treaty (Nehemiah 3:7). The analogy should not be pressed too far. The Tlaxcalans fought before they allied, and the Spanish Crown was not Israel. But the parallel helps show what the Tlaxcalans were doing in their petitions, paintings, and lawsuits. They were holding a stronger power to the promises it had made. They were also insisting, across centuries, that a bargain struck under pressure was still a bargain, and that the people who kept their side of it deserved to have the other side kept as well.

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Notes

¹ Cortés (1986), second letter. Pagden’s introduction discusses the letter as a justification of Cortés’s unauthorized break with Governor Diego Velázquez, which should be kept in mind when weighing his praise of his new allies.

² Following Fargher et al. (2011), this essay uses Tlaxcallan for the pre-contact polity and Tlaxcala for the colonial city and province and the modern state.

³ García Cook (1981) gives the regional sequence from the Formative through the Postclassic.

⁴ Brittenham (2015). On the Olmeca-Xicalanca tradition, see Muñoz Camargo (1998).

⁵ Muñoz Camargo (1984, 1998); Zapata y Mendoza (1995). Both authors wrote in a colonial legal setting in which Tlaxcalan antiquity and nobility carried practical weight.

⁶ García Cook (1981).

⁷ Gibson (1952). The order of foundation and the relative standing of the four cabeceras vary somewhat among the colonial sources.

⁸ Fargher et al. (2010); Fargher et al. (2011). The possibility that colonial institutions shaped the fourfold model is offered here as an implication of their findings, not as a settled conclusion.

⁹ Durán (1994); Muñoz Camargo (1998); Díaz del Castillo (2008). Díaz reports the Tlaxcalans’ own complaints about the lack of salt.

¹⁰ Gibson (1952).

¹¹ Durán (1994). Durán wrote in the later sixteenth century from Mexica informants and a lost Nahuatl chronicle, so his account reflects a Mexica perspective.

¹² Hicks (1979); Isaac (1983).

¹³ Hassig (1988).

¹⁴ Díaz del Castillo (2008); Cortés (1986). The Carrasco edition of Díaz is abridged; readers needing the complete text should consult a full translation or a Spanish edition.

¹⁵ Muñoz Camargo (1998). The council debate is shaped by the author’s later perspective and should be read as a colonial reconstruction.

¹⁶ Townsend (2019); Restall (2003, 2018).

¹⁷ Muñoz Camargo (1998); Díaz del Castillo (2008). Gibson (1952) discusses how the episode was used in later Tlaxcalan claims.

¹⁸ Gibson (1952); Townsend (2019).

¹⁹ Cortés (1986); Díaz del Castillo (2008). The Spanish sources differ on how far the Tlaxcalan lords endorsed the execution.

²⁰ Hassig (2006). For the Mexica memory of the siege, including their view of the Tlaxcalans, see Lockhart (1993).

²¹ Matthew (2012).

²² Matthew and Oudijk (2007).

²³ Gibson (1952). The exact wording and dates of the honorific titles should be checked against the royal cédulas reproduced in Martínez Baracs and Sempat Assadourian (1991).

²⁴ Gibson (1952); Martínez Baracs (2008).

²⁵ Lockhart et al. (1986).

²⁶ Gibson (1952); Lockhart et al. (1986).

²⁷ Martínez Baracs (2008); Martínez Baracs and Sempat Assadourian (1991).

²⁸ Chavero (1892). The dating of the original Lienzo to the early 1550s follows the general consensus; the history of its copies is complex.

²⁹ Muñoz Camargo (1984). Acuña’s edition includes the text associated with the Glasgow manuscript.

³⁰ Gibson (1952).

³¹ Motolinía (1951).

³² Powell (1952).

³³ Adams (1991).

³⁴ Adams (1991); Jeffres (2023).

³⁵ Jeffres (2023).

³⁶ Martínez Baracs (2008).

³⁷ Zapata y Mendoza (1995); Townsend (2016).

³⁸ Cuadriello (2011). The date and circumstances of Loayzaga’s first printed account should be confirmed against the original imprint.

³⁹ Cuadriello (2011).

⁴⁰ Rendón Garcini (1996).

⁴¹ Rendón Garcini (1996).

⁴² Rendón Garcini (1996).

⁴³ Anonymous (1999). The translator’s introduction reviews the authorship debate.

⁴⁴ Rendón Garcini (1993).

⁴⁵ Buve (1994).

⁴⁶ Rendón Garcini (1996) provides context for the state’s twentieth-century cultural policy.

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References

Adams, D. B. (1991). Las colonias tlaxcaltecas de Coahuila y Nuevo León en la Nueva España: Un aspecto de la colonización del norte de México. Archivo Municipal de Saltillo.

Anonymous. (1999). Xicoténcatl: An anonymous historical novel about the events leading up to the conquest of the Aztec empire (G. I. Castillo-Feliú, Trans.). University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1826)

Brittenham, C. (2015). The murals of Cacaxtla: The power of painting in ancient central Mexico. University of Texas Press.

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