It is often said that money makes the world go around. This also was true for the precolumbian world and merchants were the individuals who applied the grease to make it spin. The native economies of the Aztec realm were a complex web of production and distribution relationships fueled by both political and commercial agendas. Professional and semi-professional merchants moved goods over the landscape both for individual gain and as agents of the Aztec state. These individuals stocked the marketplaces with food and luxury goods and supplied urban centers with the resources needed for daily life. It was through merchants that gold smiths, copper smiths, lapidaries, and feather workers obtained the raw materials to make the luxury goods consumed by the state and its social elite. These individuals moved goods over space, a formidable task in a tumpline economy. Long-distance trade was especially risky and the merchants who undertook it often lost their lives and merchandise to attacks by hostile groups along the routes they traveled.

Despite their importance, merchants throughout history have rarely received the treatment necessary to understand their role in the societies where they operated. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the success of merchants throughout the ancient world was based on the possession of “trade secrets.” These secrets encompassed knowledge of the routes to travel, where to get goods at low prices, and how to establish the social contacts to obtain merchandise. Whether merchants operated in groups or as individuals, knowing where goods could be profitably bought and sold was the key to commercial prosperity. The formula for success involved keeping this information to yourself or only sharing it with family members or close associates. The result is that a great deal more information exists about what goods moved over space than is known about the organization of trade and how merchants operated on a daily basis. Even in the Old World where there are written records of economic transactions, important information is lacking on prices, the structure of inter-ethnic commercial relations, logistic arrangements, and the cross-cultural economic institutions established to facilitate trade.