Daily Life of the Aztecs

by Jacques Soustelle

  Chimalpahin tells how a daughter of Itzcoatl fell in love with a maceualtzintli, a 'little plebeian', of Atotonilco; she married him, and because of this royal marriage he became lord of his village. 76

  This is to say that no impenetrable walls separated the classes, and that the humblest life was not without its hope.

  Beneath the plebeian freemen and above the lowest class of all, the slaves, there was still another category, that of the landless peasants. Their name, tlalmaitl, literally 'hand of the earth' whence 'rural manual labour', is translated 'farm-labourer' or 'day-labourer'. 77 It is hard to see how this class can have come into being, since every member of the tribe had a right to a piece of arable land. Perhaps these landless peasants were what we now call 'displaced persons', victims of the wars and coups d'état which had been so frequent in the cities of central Mexico in the preceding two or three hundred years. Having fled from their tribe they may have offered themselves to some Mexican dignitary who provided them with land: or perhaps they were families who stayed when the farm-land of conquered cities was given to Aztec lords. However that may have been, the tlalmaitl lived on the land that was

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  allowed him with his family, and if the tenure of the estate passed on to inheritors he remained, being bound to the soil. In return for this land that he worked for himself he provided 'water and wood', domestic service, and paid a rent, either by giving up part of his harvest or by working a separate field for the great man whose dependent he was. What we have here, therefore, is share-cropping or tenant farming.

  Unlike the maceualli the tlalmaitl was not a citizen. He did not have the citizen's rights: but he did not have the citizen's expenses, either. He paid no taxes and he could not be called on for labour; that is, he owed nothing to the city and nothing to the calpulli. In short, he looked only to the man who had granted him his land.

  There were two points, however, in which his status resembled that of the plebeian: he was liable for military service (a most important exception); and he was under the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the Aztec ruler. He was not, therefore, entirely given up to the authority of a private person. 78 He was still a free man.

  THE SLAVES

  Below everyone, lower than anybody else, at the bottom of society, we have what for want of a better word must be called the slave, tlacotli -- tlatlacotin in the plural. He was not a citizen; he was not a subject: he belonged like a chattel to his master. In this particular his condition resembled slavery as it was understood in western antiquity or, until not long ago, the modern world; but in many others Mexican servitude was quite unlike the accepted notion of slavery. 'The manner in which slaves are made by these natives of New Spain is very different from the practices of the European nations,' writes Father Motolinía, ' . . . It even seems to me that those who are called slaves (in Mexico) do not fulfil many of the conditions of a slave properly so called.' 79 When the Spaniards introduced the kind of slavery current in Europe into Mexico after the conquest the wretched Indians, who were branded on the face with red-hot irons, put down the mines and used worse than

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  animals, must have envied the lot of the former slaves: they had certainly not gained by the change.

  What were the distinguishing characteristics of the slave status in Mexico at the beginning of the sixteenth century? The first was that the slave worked for another man, as a farm-labourer or as a servant, or perhaps as a porter in the merchants' caravans. The women slaves spun, wove, sewed or mended clothes in their master's house, and they were often among his concubines. The tlacotli had no pay for his work. But he was housed, fed and clothed like an ordinary citizen. 'They treat their slaves almost like their children.' 80 And there are examples quoted of slaves promoted major-domo and given the charge of great estates and command over free men. Better still -- and here we leave the classical idea of slavery altogether -- the tlatlacotin could possess goods, save money, buy land and houses and even slaves for their own service. There was nothing to forbid marriage between slaves and citizens. A slave could marry a free woman; and not infrequently a widow would marry one of her slaves, who would thus become head of the family. All children were born free, including those both of whose parents were slaves. No inherited shame was attached to this state; and the emperor Itzcoatl, one of the greatest in Mexican history, was the son of a slave-woman, by Acamapichtli.

  Furthermore, the state of slavery was not necessarily perpetual. Many were freed at their master's death, by his will; others were emancipated by the emperor or one of his fellow-kings -- Motecuhzoma II and Nezauapilli, for example, decreed very considerable manumissions. 81 Any slave who was about to be sold could try to regain his liberty: if he escaped from the market, nobody except his master and his master's son might stop him without being enslaved himself; and if once he succeeded in getting into the palace the royal presence instantly released him from all bonds, and he was a free man.

  Others again could buy themselves out of slavery, either paying their master back the price he had given for them (which justifies the statement that slaves could become

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  free and prosperous 82 ) or in having themselves replaced by another member of their family -- several brothers could, in turn, undertake the service of the same master. So slavery here had nothing of the hopeless character that it had in other times and other places: it was a state that might be only temporary.

  But how did a man become a slave? In replying to this question one realises that there were many kinds of slave and that the status of the different kinds differed widely. Prisoners of war or at least those who were not sacrificed as soon as the campaign was over, were sold as slaves either at Tlatelolco or at Atzcapotzalco. It is said that the richest traders were those who raided the unsubjected tribes for slaves. Some cities were obliged to supply a given number of slaves as a tax; and they certainly obtained them outside the empire by armed expeditions. Cihuatlán on the Pacific sent Tarascan and Cuitlatec prisoners to Mexico; Zompanco sent Tlappanecs and Teotitlán Mixtecs. All these slaves, foreigners classed as barbarians and prisoners of war primarily intended for death before the altar, might be considered as so many victims under suspended sentence; and most of them ended their lives stoically upon the bloody stone at the top of a pyramid.

  Slavery could also originate as a punishment for certain crimes and felonies. 83 Mexican justice knew nothing of the long sentences of imprisonment so familiar to our courts: but the man who stole from a temple or in the palace, or who burgled a private house, became the slave of the temple, the lord or the private person, unless he ransomed himself by paying back the amount of his theft, if necessary with his family's help. Slavery, too, was the punishment of those who kidnapped children to sell them as slaves; of those who prevented a slave from escaping to the palace to free himself; those who sold goods that did not belong to them; those who plotted against the emperor. And in the more remarkable case of a man who took another's slave as his mistress, if she died in childbed, he was enslaved to replace the woman whose death he had brought about.

  But contemporary documents seem to show that the most

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  numerous class was that of the voluntary slaves. A free man, or a woman, had the disposition of his person, and by a solemn deed he could sell himself to another. Those who decided upon this course were sometimes drunken and idle creatures, tired of working their land, which in any case was taken from them by the calpulli when it had been left uncultivated for three years, or sometimes players of the ball-game or patolli, ruined by their addiction to it, or sometimes women who having played the whore 'for nothing most of the time' 84 ended by selling themselves to be sure of food and a roof, and to be able to dress well.

  The act of giving up one's liberty was accompanied by a ceremony which was at the same time a protection. It took place in the presence of at least four aged and respectable witnesses; and there were always many people there to watch the final settlement. The f
uture slave received his price, which at this period was usually one load of quachtli, that is, twenty pieces of cloth. He remained at liberty so long as he had not spent it all, and this was generally a year or a little over, which is one of the few exact figures that we have for the cost of living in Tenochtitlan. When everything was gone he gave himself up to his master and began his servitude.

  Another form of slavery arose from the indebtedness that one or more families might contract with a private person or a dignitary. A poor family might sell one of its sons as a slave and replace him by another child when he reached a marriageable age. Or again in a time of famine the wretched starving people might engage themselves to perform certain services in perpetuity for a master and his heirs -- sowing, harvesting, sweeping the house, or carrying the wood. Four or five families would join to provide a slave for these duties; he would undertake them for some years and then be replaced by some other member of the same families. The master paid an additional three or four quachtli at each replacement, and gave some maize. This was a very old custom, and it was called ueuetlacolli, 'the old servitude': its disadvantage was that in exchange for a single sum, paid once and for all, and a few small supple-

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  mentary payments, it brought into being a compulsory and permanent liability. For this reason it was done away with in 1505, at the time of the great famine, by Nezaualpilli; and the abolition appears to have become general over the whole of the empire. At the time of the Spanish conquest a family would still provide one of its members as a slave in payment of a debt: if the slave happened to die, the debt was cancelled. These slaves, therefore, were unusually well treated.

  The sale of the slave was also strictly regulated. Generally speaking a master did not sell his slaves: if he became poor, he would send them off to trade on his account between Mexico and some more or less distant village; in order to do this, the slaves moved about quite freely. It was only the idle and vicious slave who could be sold; and even then it was necessary to have admonished solemnly him three times before witnesses in order to record his dishonesty or his refusal to work. If he did not improve his master had the right to put a heavy wooden collar on his neck and lead him to the market to be sold.

  When three successive masters had been obliged to get rid of him the slave faced the most shocking fate possible to his condition: from that moment he could be bought to be sacrificed. The pochteca and the artisans, who could not capture prisoners of war, provided themselves with victims in this way. Sahagún 85 describes these sad processions of slaves plodding dully along the road to their death, ritually bathed, luxuriously dressed and adorned, stupefied by the 'divine' teooctli that they had drunk, to end their lives on the stone in front of the statue of Uitzilopochtli. Yet they did not rebel: this manner of death seemed not only normal and inevitable to the ancient Mexicans, since those who were born under certain signs were foredoomed to such a fate, but even honourable. The slaves, plumed and ornamented, on the point of death, were the physical reflection of the gods: they were gods. Their wretched outcast lives finished in apotheosis.

  But in fact there was little chance of a slave dying thus. The great majority of slaves, it seems, either managed to free themselves, even if it were only at their master's death,

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  or else lived a life that was at least without danger and beyond the reach of misery. They were above all people who had escaped from their responsibilities, who had given up the rights and the duties of freedom.

  No military service, no taxes, no corvées: no duties towards the state or the district. I say it again, they were well treated: furthermore, they were held to be under the protection of Tezcatlipoca -- his 'well-beloved children'. The sign ce miquiztli was sacred to the great god, and on this date the slaves were given presents, and no one presumed to reproach them for fear of being brought to slavery by the wrath of Tezcatlipoca. 'The masters of the slaves gave strict orders to the whole household not to vex a slave in any way. It was said that if anyone reproached a slave on one of those days he would bring poverty on himself, and sickness and misfortune, and deserved to fall into slavery for having misused a well-beloved son of Tezcatlipoca . . . and if it happened that a slave freed himself and grew rich, and that the slave-owner became in his turn a slave, it was said that this was the will of Tezcatlipoca, who had heard the slave's prayer and had had pity on him, and had punished the master for his hardness to his servants.' 86 In this way beliefs, laws and customs all joined to protect the slave, to make his condition easier and to increase his chances of emancipation.

  At the beginning of the sixteenth century the number of tlatlacotin seems to have been increasing, a phenomenon which is explained by the greater tribute, the growth of trade to distant parts and the difference between standards of living. In a complex society whose ancient organisation had almost completely crumbled away, the rise of some to power and wealth had as its counterpart the depression of others -- the very poor and the misfits sank, as it were, to the lowest level, beneath which there was nothing. Yet it is only justice to repeat once more that even this bottommost state was not without its hope.

  WEALTH AND POVERTY: THE STANDARDS OF LIVING

  In the Codex Tellriano-Remensis 87 wealth is symbolised by

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  a wicker-work chest, petlacalli, filled with green stones: and indeed the idea of material possessions tended more and more to take the manageable form of pieces of jade, gold, or cloth: personal estate, as we should say now, was taking the place of real estate. It is none the less true, however, that in the eyes of the ruling class in the sixteenth century land, arable land, still remained the basis of all wealth. As a dignitary rose rank by rank so he acquired rights over a larger and larger area of real estate.

  In theory no one was the owner of a piece of ground. The land belonged collectively either to the calpulli, or to public institutions such as temples, or to the city itself. There was no private ownership of land, but a collective ownership with individual rights of user. 'These lands,' says Zurita, 88 referring to those of each district, 'are not the private possession of each member of the district, but the common possession of the calpulli, and the individual cannot dispose of them; but he enjoys them for his lifetime and he can leave them to his sons and heirs.' It is clear that what we are concerned with is a heritable usufruct.

  The register of the land and its distribution was kept up to date by the chief of the calpulli: he and the elders saw to it that each family was allowed the plot that it needed. If a man did not cultivate his piece for two years running he was severely admonished; if he took no notice of this, the next year he was deprived of his right and the land that had been his returned to the common stock. The same happened when a family left the district or died out. The calpulli's proprietorship covered all the land within its boundaries, even that which was not cultivated: there was no indeterminate ground, nothing without an owner. The chief and his council could let land to men who were not members of the district, but the rent was paid into the communal purse and not to a private person.

  But although the ownership was collective, the usufruct was individual. Every adult married man had the right, and the indefeasible right, to be given a plot and to work it. He was inscribed on the rolls at the moment of his marriage, and if he had not already inherited the right of

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  working his father's land, the calpulli was obliged to provide him with a piece. And at his death he left his children not the piece of land, but the right of farming it.

  Such was the primeval law of the Mexican city, the law of the democratic tribe: every free man was provided with a piece of land and was required to work it. In time, and as the differentiation of social function increased, many exceptions to the ancient rule came into being: the dignitaries, the officials and the priests did not cultivate the fields to which they had a right; the traders and the artisans were excused manual labour. Moreover, arable land was exceedingly rare in Mexico, on the islets o
f the lake, and it was only on the shores that the maceualtin could have their patches allotted to them. Many Mexicans led an entirely urban existence.

  It must be conceded, however, that the cases in which a family had its land taken from it were quite rare. The same maize-field, the same market-garden stayed from generation to generation in the hands of the same family. No doubt the calpulli retained the ownership, but in practice, the citizen who followed his father and his grandfather in the same holding really felt himself at home. At the time immediately before the Spanish invasion it appears that the sale of land was provided for by law. 89 Arising from the traditional collective ownership, private property was in the act of coming into existence.

  This development is all the clearer if one takes the possessions of the other communities and cities, rather than those of the calpulli. The growth of the sovereign's power and the conquests of the Mexica and their allies are the two related bases for the evolution; for they brought into being a wide variety of land-holdings with differing regulations -altepetlalli belonging to a town, tecpantlalli or land set aside for the palace, tlatocamilli or fields 'of the military command', yaoyotlalli, the fields 'of war'.

  In all these cases we are concerned with estates that were cultivated either by slaves or by the plebeians of a subjected city, and whose produce was devoted 'to the needs of the republic'. 90 The Indians of the valley of Toluca, for

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