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given city; for example, many youths and older men remained behind when only a small army was needed.
51 The job of marshaling the troops presumably fell to some high official, as it had during the Aztec rebellion against the Tepanec Empire, or to the commanding generals,52 but it doubtless followed the existing political hierarchy down through the calpolli level. |
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Armies in Mesoamerica varied in size. "Army" referred to the largest aggregation of warriors marshaled by the polity in a particular instance and was applied to units as small as 7,000 or 8,000 53 and as large as a combined force of the Tetzcocas, Aztecs, and Chichimecs reportedly numbering 700,000 men.54 Whatever the size, it was this unit that the king or, in his absence, the tlacochcalcatl or tlacateccatl led when he went to war. |
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The Aztec army did not always march or fight as a single unit under an overall commander. On numerous occasions the Aztecs divided their armyfor example, into two units for purposes of establishing camp, into three for purposes of multiple simultaneous attacks, and into four for marching.55 However, these segments were complete command units. |
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There were, of course, internal divisions in the Aztec army, but the available descriptions are inadequate to reconstruct them fully. Many generalizations about the sizes of armies and their subunits have been made by modern scholars, sixteenth-century conquistadors, and other writers. Too often figures cited for troops in battle conform closely to round numbers10,000, 100,000, and so onsuggesting that general magnitudes were being indicated rather than precise numbers. And even where the figures do not appear to be round, they are often from the perspective of the Aztec vigesimal (base-20) numerical system (which had place values of 1, 20, 400, 8,000, and so on), resulting in typical troop numbers of 200, 400, 8,000, and so forth. Consequently, the data about the internal structure of the Aztec army are both scant and, quite probably, flawed. Nevertheless, some clarification is possible. |
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The basic Mesoamerican army units (called squadrons in the Spanish chronicles)56 were probably town or calpolli commands.Each town marched under its own banner with its own leaders,57 and if it was large enough to have more than one calpolli, it had one over- |
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