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Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco at this time, so the conquests are often more appropriately considered to be those of the Tepanecs. |
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Second, what constituted a conquest under these conditions is not clear. Did it mean total abdication of sovereignty, merely the joining of battle, or something in between? And who had the right to claim such a victoryeveryone engaged in it, so that a multinational force could claim as many victories as it had constituent armies, or only the dominant army? In the Mesoamerican case the former seems to have applied. |
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Third, there are no extant native sources of the period in question that discuss these conquests. While some accounts remain in indigenous codical format, some in Nahuatl, and still more in Spanish, none predates the Spanish conquest. And even if there once were such records, after they came to power, the Aztecs engaged in book burning and the conscious rewriting of history, so little faith can be placed in such accounts. |
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Fourth, the records of the preimperial Aztec kings are so inconsistentsome omitting conquests included by others and others placing them in the reign of a different kingthat total acceptance of their veracity is impossible, even after textual analysis to reconcile conflicting statements. Often the result has been interpretations of conquests and reconquests rather than of a single conquest or perhaps, at best, a series of struggles in a lengthy campaign. While attempts have been made at reconciliation, they have produced a false precision belied by the textual sources. Consequently, while discussing the reconciliations I feel relatively confident about making, I will treat the preimperial reigns of Acamapichtli, Huitzilihhuitl, and Chimalpopoca largely in a single temporal unit within which the general patterns of Aztec conquests and martial participation can be seen, albeit darkly. |
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And fifth, there is a problem of chronology. Many different dates are given for the same events. Some of these events may be ambiguous and thus may not actually be in conflict, such as the "conquest" of a town when the war has been fought intermittently over a prolonged period. Others, however, are unambiguous, such as the death of a ruler, yet there is a lack of consistency among the historical sources in dating these events. One difficulty is in the numerous divergent calendrical traditions that operated simultaneously in the same general area (see Davies 1973:193210). |
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Another difficulty in assessing the conquests of the preimperial kings (and consequently of the Tepanec Empire) is the ambiguity of the town names. While I have followed the majority view in assigning locations to the conquests named, this practice is not universally accepted (see Davies 1980:24243). Nevertheless, given the ambiguities involved in the pre-imperial record, I feel that no reconstruction of the conquests of that period is likely to be definitive, nor is an erroneous one devastating to reconstructions of later conquests. |
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Recorded dates for specific conquests are not reliable, on the whole. While many sources give such dates (in the Julian system, the Mexican system, or both), they frequently conflict with other dates given for the same event in other sourcesin absolute dates, in temporal order, and in time |
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