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Thus, the availability of men and supplies, as well as the absence of rain, meant that major wars were normally fought from late autumn through spring of the following year. The festival of Panquetzaliztli marked the end of the harvest and signaled the usual beginning of the year's wars.
45 But this was a practical restriction, not a ritual one, and there were exceptions. Small armies requiring fewer men and less logistical support could still be dispatched during the agricultural season. The campaigns probably involved elite warriorslargely the nobleswho were not tied so rigorously to the agricultural cycle. But the objectives of such campaigns were necessarily quite limited. |
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And flower wars could still be fought, largely for the same reasons that small armies could be sent: they normally involved fewer warriors, and these were drawn disproportionately from the nobility. |
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Once the decision to fight had been made, troops had to be marshaled, the conduct of the war planned, the city alerted, and supplies prepared and gathered. Someone had to decide how much military action was warranted. And decisions about troops and supplies were pivotal to the success of the venture. |
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Decisions about the appropriate response for a given incident were made by the king and his war council. In the case of an alarm or revolt in Tenochtitlan or the surrounding region, the military orders residing in the royal palace took action. These orders were not a pretorian guard, but by the time of the Spanish conquest the Aztec king was surrounded by a body of soldiers estimated in one account at six hundred nobles, each accompanied by three or four armed men, totaling approximately three thousand men;46 a second account put the figure at ten thousand men.47 |
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War and the marshaling of troops did not involve everyone subject to the Aztec Empire. Rather, responses were geared to the Aztecs' perception of the threat. The first action was taken by these military societies. If the threat was larger than their limited numbers could handle, additional men were marshaled, first from Tenochtitlan, next from Tetzcoco, and then followed by Tlacopan, the third member of the Triple Alliance.48 Troops could also be mobilized from wider areas in accordance with the seriousness of the threat,49 beginning with the cities in the basin of Mexico, and then tributaries from elsewhere in the empire.50 The army's size was manipulated by altering both the depth and the breadth of the call-up of forces. The depth of the call-up determined how intensive it was in a |
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