This glossary emphasizes Nahuatl terminology; terms in Spanish are identified. Organized chapter by chapter, terms only appear in the listing for the chapter in which they first appear.

A spiritually enveloping, time-consuming, and value-creating set of activities, Aztecs centered their religion on powerful spiritual beings. Ceremony and time were fundamental parts of everyday life. From the smallest household to the largest city, rituals of offering to the gods took place every day as Aztecs sought water, food, the survival of human life, and balance in what they perceived to be a chaotic spiritual and material world. In their dynamic universe, deities and their human embodiments and priests and priestesses manifested great power. Ceremonies conducted for those beings, the offerings presented to them, and exchanged or distributed provide examples of the power and energy that offerings, including living humans, provided. Time-keeping focused on the notion of progressive ages, the idea of cyclical time, and two calendar systems. Their calendars used two ways of keeping track of days and months for ceremonies, agriculture, and war. Aztecs drew blood for human and plant fertility, purification, and to nourish and repay their debt to the creator deities. Yet the greatest offering human beings could give was to provide human lives, offering hearts and blood, though they did not do so in the numbers often suggested.

The Aztecs represent a complex, class-based civilization, characterized by culturally diverse practices encompassed by the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Basin of Mexico region and its surrounding areas. The subject of much misinformation, the clash between Aztec peoples and Spaniards, provoked by the Spanish invasion, gave rise to an immense number of written sources. Native-authored, hybrid, and Spanish-authored texts all must be carefully considered, but the translation of a still-growing number of texts in the Nahuatl language has provided insights Spanish-language texts cannot. Other kinds of evidence about the Aztecs and how their ideas and identities survived also exist, including material remains and ethnographic evidence. While the word “Aztec” is used in several ways, I use “Mexica” in this book for the peoples of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, either “Excan tlatoloyan” (Tribunal of three) or “Triple Alliance” for the expansive confederation of the late Postclassic period, and “Aztec” for the linguistically and culturally related peoples of the Basin of Mexico region to highlight the variety of ethnicities that constituted Aztec peoples. A brief early history from the time of the migrations into the Basin of Mexico to the founding of Tenochtitlan by the Mexica, guided by their deity Huitzilopochtli, also is covered.

Aztec rulers, Mexica and others, used their authority to develop, expand, and defend the Excan tlatoloyan and other confederations in or near the Basin of Mexico. That region contained about sixty political units, each called an altepetl. The largest, most militarily and economically powerful was Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital city. The most common translations, city-state or kingdom, capture something essential. They had urban cores, and they were each ruled by supreme rulers, the tlatoani. As important as the altepetl was, localities that constituted them, known as tlaxilacalli or calpolli, smaller units that in many ways constituted communities unto themselves, were also important. Violence was a key part of Aztec political culture and state and confederation building in the late Postclassic period. War practices relied upon structure and discipline, weaponry, the pursuit of captives, and the vanquishing of enemies who produced material wealth in the form of everyday and luxury items paid as tribute to the imperial powers. Whether through elite marriages or wars, inter-altepetl relations took place within a context in which the Excan tlatoloyan sought aggressively to enlarge its domain of control by becoming an expansive confederation that can be considered a hegemonic empire.

Aztecs were brilliant scientists, writers, and artists. Medicine is an example of their scientific activities. They developed ideas about the causes of illness, practical and supernatural. Priests and priestesses were involved in curing, but Aztecs had an array of healers. The most commonly used term by Aztecs for a doctor – someone with specific and practical knowledge about healing – was “ticitl,” female and male. That Aztecs wrote is not widely recognized. They used writing to name people, titles, places, and deities. Not merely pictography, their writing is complex and developed from the late prehispanic period into the colonial period. Their books recorded calendars, history, tribute payments, and succession to rulerships. They also created a rich oral literature, often expressed through songs. Many were ancient, others composed in the early colonial period. Those that became written in alphabetized Nahuatl dealt with deities, temples, flowers, lords, war, sexuality, even conquest and Christian worship. Also great artists, they were influenced by the art of earlier peoples and the Mixteca-Puebla style and worked in several media: architecture; monumental and small-scale stone sculptures; books; precious stones and gold work; textiles; dough sculptures; and paper. This art expressed an official ideology as well as resistance to it.

Women and men contributed substance and socialization to bringing children into being and raising them into their eventual Aztec adult roles. Young men experienced a wider range of sexual activity than did young women, but flexibility in gender roles existed. Aztecs raised their children to work hard and create value, obey the rules for proper behavior, and practice moderation in all areas of family and social life. For both children and adults, transgressions in interpersonal relations, work, or spirituality had harsh repercussions. After having been dedicated to either the calmecac or telpochcalli as infants, all boys and many girls would begin their training to contribute to the war-making capacity, political organization, or ritual life of the altepetl. Marriage was an important stage in the life cycle. This new partnership represented the gender complementarity embedded in family life, expressing the gendered aspect of balance found in daily life across the Aztec world. Respected, even revered, Aztecs, nevertheless, also saw the elderly as decrepit and childlike as they approached death. Despite tensions that could exist among family members, the complementary partnership that marriage represented provided a foundation upon which Aztec ways of living survived, however transformed, after the Spanish arrived.

Men’s and women’s work fueled the increasingly sophisticated goods Aztecs produced and the large amounts of trade conducted and tribute paid by Aztecs. While much labor was performed at the household level, workshops grew in number. Craft production became more complex as population increased, political organization became more elaborate, and demand for goods increased. The increasing output of producers and growing number of commercial endeavors by merchants underwrote an increasingly rigid hierarchy. Women’s cooking and weaving fed and clothed ordinary families, Aztec armies, and royal palaces. The special province of women of all social levels, weaving created the most common and among the most valuable of tribute items, woven cloth. Other important forms of production included mining obsidian and making it into tools. Pottery production was crucial for cooking, eating, and carrying and using water among other uses. Both food producers and craftspeople, often one and the same, sold their wares in local markets. Economic descriptions often focus on long-distance trading by the pochteca and oztomeca (long-distance and spying merchants), but trading ranged from producer-sellers, selling goods in local marketplaces to the more illustrious pochteca and oztomeca. Those merchants traveled to distant regions to obtain luxury goods.

The invasion of Mesoamerica – set off by the arrival of Cortés and his followers – was neither peaceful nor simple. These events played out in three phases between February 10, 1519 when the expedition left Cuba and August 13, 1521 when the Mexica tlatoani, Cuauhtemoc, was captured. During the first phase, Moteuczoma and Spaniards sought to learn about each other. Each used diplomacy, Moteuczoma to repel the Spanish, Cortés to gain indigenous allies, to affect events. The second phase of the Spanish-Mexica war began with the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan and their imprisonment of Moteuczoma shortly thereafter. That phase ended with Spaniards forced to retreat after their disastrous assault on the Templo Mayor and slaughter of many Mexica leaders. Re-equipping and solidifying his alliances, Cortés and his fighters succeeded in defeating the Mexica in mid-August, 1521. Many kinds of transformations would follow including extensive depopulation and the introduction of new technologies and religious beliefs. Adjustments by Nahuas followed in social and legal affairs as well as in forms of identity. The idea of “Aztec” has tenaciously survived. It exists in contemporary Nahua communities, as an element of national history and culture in Mexico, and as a transnational idea.