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span. Furthermore, the timing of the campaigns introduces some dating difficulties. The usual campaign season followed the harvest in late fall and continued until planting and the rainy season of late spring and early summer, so that a single campaign could easily encompass part of two dated years. |
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Consequently, while I have used relative sequences of the various sources and attempted to reconcile them where possible, I have used significant events with generally agreed upon dates to place conquests in better sequence. Among these are the Tepanec war, the famine of 1454, the conquest of Tlatelolco, and the Spanish conquest, as well as the succession and death of kings. I have not placed significant reliance on absolute dating as a means of placing isolated conquests into general campaigns. Rather, I have placed primary reliance on the geopolitical logic of the military thrusts themselves. |
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I have attempted to evaluate the various claims by examining overall strategy and looking at the probable geographical constraints and thrusts of Aztec expansion. Furthermore, while the problem of several sources having borrowed their information from a single parent source may contaminate the quantitative test of authority, I have examined the conquests by kingly reign as reported in the historical sources and have attempted to establish a clustering of attributed conquests and to see whether those that deviated did so systematically. Such would be the case if all conquests were systematically displaced by a king or two, as would happen if a conquest were attributed to the wrong king initially but the same temporal sequencing was retained between all subsequent conquests; thus the sequences of conquests may play a more significant role than the attribution of conquests to specific kings, especially when examined in the context of all the sources. Consequently, a few towns mentioned in some of the early accounts are discounted when they contradict the majority of the sources, when their sequential ordering would place them more satisfactorily elsewhere even when their stated conqueror is ignored, or when there is no compelling reason to accept the validity of the claims and they contradict logical principles. |
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Unfortunately, the reverse is not always true. There may be towns for which false conquest claims were made, but where these fit into the logic of the conquest pattern, there is no way to weed them out, barring contradictory evidence. Consequently, the delineated conquests are conservative in that they include only those for which a reasonable argument of conquest can be made, but this reconstruction approach accepts at face value recorded conquests that do not otherwise contradict logical principles. |
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The issue of chronology is complex and unresolvable here. Therefore, in the interests of presenting as coherent and logical a sequence of conquests as possible, I will follow the standard chronology of central Mexico as given by Davies (1973, 1974, 1980). |
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6. Chimalpahin 1965:82 [1376, 1 Tecpatl]. The struggle reportedly began at Techichco, near Colhuacan (Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1975:32, 1 Tecpatl), and lasted either nine or twelve years. The primary chronicler, Chimalpahin (1965), does not reflect Aztec orthodoxy but records the events of the Chalco |
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