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ity was not of primary importance in the integration of a hegemonic empire, but logistical constraints did foster the creation of efficient spatial arrangements, and areas otherwise of little interest to the Aztecs were conquered when they formed vital links in the supply chain. |
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Cities were often attacked sequentially, with the resources, intelligence, and, sometimes, the soldiers of the latest conquest aided in the next one. The army attacked targets until it exhausted its resources, attained its objectives, reached some boundary (physical or cultural), or was defeated. The Aztecs' unprecedented expansion took them to regions where they had no traditional enemies but where they were sometimes able to exploit local antagonisms by siding opportunistically with one adversary against another. They also waged campaigns of intimidation against cities they did not attack directly. Emissaries were sent to such cities to ask that they become subjects of the Aztec kingusually on reasonably favorable terms. Both the proximity of a large, trained, and obviously successful army and the object lessons burning around them led many cities to capitulate peacefully. |
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Because the Aztecs integrated their empire through indirect control enforced through their opponents' perception of their power, victory and defeat were conceived of differently than in a more territorial system. Victory did not involve the destruction of the target polity's army but their acquiescence in becoming tributaries of the Aztecs. Thus unconquered city-states or empires were not necessarily those that remained unbeaten on the battlefield but those that refused to acknowledge their tributary status after the withdrawal of Aztec forces. And one reason that potential tributaries sometimes resisted the Aztecs so fiercely was that they feared an alteration in their own internal hierarchy of power after conquest. This threat came not from the Aztecs, who usually retained existing arrangements, but from subordinate groups within a polity, which sometimes shifted their allegiance directly to the Aztecs, bypassing and undermining the power of the local tlahtoani. |
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Governance of these conquered areas was tailored to the hegemonic imperial system: the Aztecs were unconcerned about many local activities. They allowed local laws, customs, and beliefs that did not obstruct imperial aims to be retained, even when they differed from those of the Aztecs. Thus incorporation into the Aztec Empire did not necessarily mean that tributaries altered their behav- |
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