THE AZTEC
LEGAL SYSTEM
Dale Frank Andrade
Spring 2004
Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own
Professor David D Friedman
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Book I. Cultural Evolution and General Structure of the
Aztec Legal System: p1
- Introduction p 3
- History p 3
- Social Structure
- Nobility p 8
- Middle Class p 11
- Commoners p 14
- Evolution and Structure of the Aztec Legal System
- Judicial System p20
- Judges p 23
- Judicial Review p 25
- The In Courtroom Experience p 26
- Other Personnel Involved in the Administration of Justice p 27
- The Pochteca and the Law of the Marketplace p 29
Book
II. A Dan in the Life of an Aztec Citizen: p 32
- Dawn p 32
- Midday p 39
- Family law p 39
- Criminal Law p 44
- Homicide p 44
- Theft p 45
- Adultery p 46
- Misc. Criminal Offenses p 48
- Property Law p 49
- International Law: The Law of War p 51
- Night
Conclusion p
55
Nothing
but flowers and songs of sorrow
Are left in Mexico and
Tlatelolco
Where once we saw warriors and wise men.
We wander
here and there
In our desolate poverty.
We are mortal
men.
We have seen bloodshed and pain
Where once we saw beauty and
valor.
We are crushed to the ground;
We lie in
ruins.
There is nothing but grief and suffering
In Mexico and
Tlatelolco,
Where once we saw beauty and valor.
Have you grown
weary of your servants?
Are you angry with your servants,
O Giver
of Life?
Aztec
Poem
[1]Book I: Cultural
Evolution and General Structure of the Aztec Legal System
I. Introduction
So laments an Aztec poet over the fall of his once mighty empire. An
empire forged in manifest destiny and brought low by the Spanish lust for gold.
The word “Aztec” evokes images of soaring pyramids, bloody human
sacrifice and rampaging conquistadors. The Aztecs were eloquent orators, hard
workers, fierce fighters and excelled in mathematics, agriculture and
engineering. They were a people of motion who sought to better themselves
through constant growth, expansion and change. This sense of change was not
governed by whim, but through a series of complex laws handed down from
generation to generation.
II. History
The word Aztec is a generic term referring to several Nahuatl-speaking
groups that inhabited the Valley of Mexico from
1250-1519.
[2] The people we think of
as Aztecs referred to themselves as the “Mexica” and were fierce
warriors, cunning diplomats, skilled builders and shrewd
merchants.
[3] The Mexica forged an
empire of 15 million people that spanned two oceans and extended from the
northern deserts of Mexico to Oaxaca in the south but for all the might, they
eventually attained, the Mexica were a people of humble origin.
The Mexica
began their journey to greatness in a semi-mythical land they called
“Aztlan” (“Place of
Herons”).
[4] Aztlan’s
exact location is unknown, but could have been as near as 60 miles to the Mexico
Valley or as distant as the American
Southwest.
[5] It took nearly 200
years for the Mexica to migrate from Aztlan to the Valley of Mexico, a journey
that began around A.D. 1111 and ended around
1325.
[6] During this journey, the
Mexica developed the reputation as fierce warriors with bizarre customs and were
considered barbarians by all they encountered.
Over the course of this
journey, the Mexica were lead by three priests and a priestess who were divinely
inspired by the god Huitzilopochtli to seek a new promised land. As time
passed, dissenters began to defy the ruling priests and sought to break away
from the main body of Mexica to settle down at one of the sites along the way.
It is out of this turbulent time that Mexica law begins to take shape. Mexica
priests were said to be divinely inspired to seek the promised land by
Huitzilopochtli and defiance of their edicts was to defy god. This affront
required the immediate sacrifice of the offending party to satisfy
Hutizilopochtli and served to maintain order in the tribe.
The Mexica
eventually arrived in the Valley of Mexico and became ensnared in the
Machiavellian politics of the city-states surrounding lake Texcoco. They first
settled on a hilltop called Chapultepec, but were twice ousted from this
location because their neighbors feared their military prowess and reviled their
bizarre customs.
[7] From Chapultapec,
the Mexica fled into a miserable region festooned with volcanic activity and
overrun with snakes.
[8] Their ability
to thrive in this region so impressed the city-state of Culhua, that it employed
the Mexica as mercenaries who developed an even more fearsome reputation for
martial prowess.
[9] Throughout this
time of wandering and strife, strict discipline and order needed to be
maintained in the tribe, lest they be overwhelmed by the superior numbers of
their neighbors or the brutality of the environments they were forced to endure.
It is my belief that this mentality stayed with them throughout their tenure in
the Mexico Valley, forming the bedrock of the order driven society they later
created.
Unfortunately for the Culhua, the Mexica asked its king to make
his daughter the mistress of the Mexica and bride of their
god.
[10] This was allowed, and the
king traveled to the temple of the Mexica to celebrate the wedding. He fled in
horror upon learning that his daughter had been sacrificed and that a nearby
priest was wearing her skin.
[11] In
his fury, the leader of Culhua forced the Mexica to retreat into the marshes of
lake Texcoco where they saw an eagle seated upon a prickly pear cactus. This
sight was the signal for the Mexica’s long journey to end and the Mexica
settled this island and named it Tenochtitilan (“Place of the Fruit of the
Prickly Pear Cactus”).
[12]
The year was 1325, and little did the surrounding city-states know that
Tenochtitlan was poised to become the heart of the most powerful empire
Mesoamerica had ever seen.
From 1325-1428 the Mexica were a
semi-independent client state of the Tepanic city of Azcaportzalco.
Azcaportzalco was a potent city-state, whose star was on the rise and had no
little success conquering city-state after city-state. The Mexica paid tribute
to Azcaportzalco in resources and military service, a state of affairs continued
for over a century. During this time, the Mexica learned the laws and customs
of the nearby societies and gained the tools they required to become a
legitimate force in the Mexico Valley. They formed a web alliances through
political marriages that gradually strengthened their position in the Mexico
Valley, the most important of which was that of a Mexica noblemen to a princess
from their old rival Culhua.
[13]
Culhua was an ancient power who’s bloodlines reached all the way back to
the Toltecs. This descent was considered vital to a leaders ability to rule and
the marriage allowed Mexica nobility to claim legal and political
legitimacy.
[14] The Mexica
waited patiently and honed their military skills in campaign after campaign
until one day; a succession crisis arose in Azcaportzaco allowing the Mexica to
ally with the city-state of Texcoco, to overthrow their former masters. In
1428, the Mexica, allied with Texcoco and Tlacopan formed the
“triple-alliance, which became the dominate power in Mesoamerica for the
next 90 years.”
[15] The
price of continual expansion was the development of enemies and resentment to
the rule of the triple-alliance. The Aztecs had numerous enemies, the two most
potent of which were the mighty Tarascan Empire to the West and the besieged
Tlaxcala within. Herman Cortez and his conquistadors arrived on scene to find a
potent empire of “heathens” filled with gold for the taking. Upon
arrival in Tenochtitlan, many conquistadors thought they were dreaming as they
observed a bustling city of over 250,000 people, with vast markets pulsing with
commerce on an unimagined scale. This dream quickly came to an end when the
Spanish observed the Aztec practice of mass human sacrifice. In 1519, Cortez,
in alliance with enemies of the Triple Alliance launched an invasion that
completely destroyed Tenochtitlan and with it, Aztec civilization.
During
their period of imperial expansion, the Aztecs developed a complex bureaucratic
state with an immense population and an ever-shifting series of tributary
subjects. This, combined with the complex social structure and moral ideals of
the Aztec people, necessitated the creation of an intricate legal system that
was as efficient as it was harsh to govern its people. This web of law was both
oral and, codified by scribes in pictorial form. The Aztecs maintained
extensive written records including official correspondence between the capital
and outlying regions and had vast archives. Government archives contained legal
codes, records of lawsuits between villages and individuals, tribute maps,
genealogies, histories, philosophical works government reports, extensive
economic documents and anything else that may be of
import.
[16] Unfortunately, most of
this vast storehouse of knowledge was destroyed during the conquest or lost over
time. The best remaining source of original books from the era were recovered
from the Mixtec city of Oaxaca though most surviving texts tend to be post
conquest works that were transcribed from the original or were written by
Europeans with Spanish or Nahauatl margin
notes.
[17] While the gulf of
time, has taken most original copies of their legal code with them, careful
analysis of Aztec culture was performed by a number of Spanish monks and
administrators after the fall. These accounts were taken directly from former
members of the triple-alliance and have been combined with archeological surveys
of Mesoamerica, to produce a reasonably accurate picture of the Aztec legal
system.
III. Social Structure
To understand their legal system, it’s important to understand the
many complex social divisions within Aztec society. Aztec society is
hierarchal, with an Emperor at the top and sacrificial captives at the bottom.
The intermediate strata of society had their own set of responsibilities with
social mobility being largely determined by heredity and prowess on the
battlefield. Nobles and commoners had separate courts with guild courts in the
middle to regulate infractions of commercial law or those by or against guild
members. These caste differentiations were strictly maintained and enforced on
pain of death.
a. Nobility The nobility maintained high-level
positions in the Aztec state whose positions were hereditary but had to be
validated through personal achievement (typically on the
battlefield).
[18] All nobles were
considered to be descendants of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and are therefore
divinely ordained to rule.
[19] The
“
Tlatoque (“rulers”) occupied the highest social rung
in Aztec society. The “
Tlatoque” were divided into
Tlatoani (“speaker” or “he who speaks”),
Tetecutin (“chiefs”) and
Pipiltin (“sons of
nobility”).
[20] Nobles
were highly trained in special
Calmecac noble schools, were required to
participate in war, had a separate court system and were held to extremely high
standards of personal conduct.
[21]
Nobles were expected to set the standard for those below, and failing to do so
was severely punished. A number of laws were enacted to enforce the social
distinctions between noble and commoner. Nobles were the only members of
society allowed to live in two story houses or wear certain types of clothing,
including cotton capes, gold headbands, gold armbands, lip plugs, ear plugs and
nose plugs fashioned of precious gold or
stones.
[22] Sandals were limited to
the emperor of Tenochtitlan, his second in command or certain warriors who were
rewarded with the ability to wear cheaper versions than their noble cousins. No
commoner was allowed to wear a garment that covered his shins unless their shins
bore horrific wounds received in battle. Defiance of any of these edicts was
punishable by summary execution.
Individual “
Tlatoani”
ruled the varied city-states and provinces throughout the empire and were
responsible for “organizing military activities, sponsoring religious
activities and adjudicating legal disputes not resolved in lower level
courts.”
[23] A
Tlatoani “controlled the tribute of commoners in their
jurisdiction, possessed privately owned patrimonial lands, and managed the labor
and tribute of their rural tenants
(
mayeque).”
[24] These
patrimonial lands were the
Tlatoani’s private property and could be
sold at their discretion.
[25] These
lands would pass to their heirs upon death, or baring living heirs, would pass
to the
Tlatoani above them in the social hierarchy as a gift to the
state.
[26] The title of
Tlatoani
was inherited and depending on which city-state the
Tlatoani was
from, would pass from bother to brother or father to
son.
[27]The most powerful of the
Tlatoani was the ruler of Tenochtitlan. In the early days of the empire,
he was basically “first among equals” in the triple-alliance, but by
Cortez arrival, he was the absolute monarch of the Aztec
state.
[28] The position of emperor
was hereditary and like all nobles was directly descended from Quetzalcoatl
giving him supreme authority to create laws, unbound by mortal
limitations.
[29] The emperor was the
final arbiter of unique or politically sensitive cases and only he or his duly
designated representatives could issue death
sentences.
[30] Each emperor had
a council of four advisors that were close members of his
family.
[31] When an emperor died, a
council of nobles, warriors and priests would elevate a member of the council to
the supreme position, and fill the vacant spot on the council with another
member of his family.
[32] In
addition to this internal selection process, the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan
were required to give their
consent.
[33] A similar process was
performed to select the new
Tlatoani of Texcoco or Tlacopan with the
ruler of Tenochtitlan giving his assent to their council’s choice of
ruler.
[34]Once elected, the
emperor’s responsibilities included three cardinal areas, diplomacy,
warfare and justice.
[35] While the
emperor had supreme authority to guide the fate of the empire as he saw fit, he
had a number of important advisory councils to assist him. The most important
advisor was the
Cihuacoatl (“woman-serpent”) whose position
was filled by a close family member that managed the day-to-day affairs of the
empire. The
Cihuacoatl was responsible for “handling official
finances, organizing military campaigns, determining rewards for warriors,
serving as supreme judge and acting as ruler during the emperor’s
absence.”
[36]To resolve
general political matters, the emperor and his council of four were advised by a
10-20-man council composed of distinguished members of the community called the
Tlatocan.[37] The council of
four and the emperors
Cihuacoatl advised the emperor on matters of
diplomacy, while a council of elite warriors advise the emperor on matters of
war.
[38] Membership in the war
council was composed entirely of
Tequiua (warriors who had captured at
least four enemy combatants) to ensure their worthiness for the position.
The next layer of Aztec nobility was composed of the greater body the
Tlatoani the most important of which were the rulers of Texcoco and
Tlacopan. Next in line were the rulers of the individual city-states and
provinces of the empire. Each of these rulers was empowered to act on matters
of diplomacy, war and justice, but owed fealty and paid tribute to the
Tlatoani above them, creating a pyramid of loyalty whose apex was the
emperor.
Next in line are the
Tetecutin (“chiefs”)
who were hereditary members of the noble caste that occupied high ranking
military and political positions. They served as advisors to the
Tlatoani
and controlled agricultural lands in addition to having numerous lesser nobles
and commoners attached to them.
Below the
Tetecutin were the
Pipiltin (“sons of nobility”) who were literally the children
of the
Tlatoani and
Tetecutin. These nobles staffed the vast
state bureaucracy, acted as military officers and served in the priesthood.
Many of the empires important tribute collectors were
Pipiltin and all
could wear the specialized garments of the nobility and attend
Calmecac
noble schools.
b. Middle Class Between the nobility and the
commoners were the powerful
Pochteca merchants and
Toltecca
artisans.
[39] Each of these groups
wielded immense power in Aztec society, but could not truly be classified as
noble or commoner. The cardinal difference between the
Pochteca and
Toltecca was that
Pochteca were completely excluded from the Aztec
legal system and had their own internal system of justice that regulated both
the marketplace and
all criminal activity relating to
Pochteca
members.
The
Pochteca were a semi-independent series of merchant
guilds that held immense power in Aztec society and had the honor of being the
only social class with a legal system separate from that of the Aztec state.
They gained their independent status shortly after the mighty Aztec trade center
of Tlatelocao rose up in revolt against Tenochtitlan. Emperor Axayacatl crushed
the revolt and placed a viceroy on the
throne.
[40] The merchant groups of
Tlatelocao struck a deal with Axayacatl, allowing them to be the official spies
and merchants of the emperor while enjoying his patronage, forever defining the
symbiotic relationship the
Pochteca and emperor would
share.
[41] This alliance greatly
strengthened the empires intelligence gathering capabilities, improved the
economy and allowed the triple-alliance to create pretexts to expand their
empire. This alliance continued throughout the empire, but was particularly
effective under the emperor Ahuitzatl, who’s ultra lavish ceremonies
required a vast influx of slaves and goods that could only be provided by his
Pochteca allies.
[42] The
Pochteca were responsible for all foreign trade in the empire, and
typically dealt in high value, easy to transport items (regional merchants
handled the rest).
[43] There were
12 powerful guilds, each located in a different major
city-state.
[44] Each guild occupied
their own separate districts of town, and possessed their own unique internal
ritual and patron deities.
[45]
Pochteca were skilled merchants, but were also trained as fierce
warriors, as their trade missions often required them to be the vanguard of an
Aztec invasion or travel through hostile foreign
lands.
[46] These guilds were
extremely wealthy, but took great pains to conceal their wealth from the
nobility. They feared destruction due to noble jealousy, so were very careful
to launch and return from trading expeditions late in the evening, and even
then, took care to conceal their goods as well as
possible.
[47] They were also
careful not to wear the trappings of nobility in public, only reveling their
wealth in the confines of their closed
guildhalls.
[48] For all their might
and ability to escape the highly stratified legal/hierarchal system of imperial
Aztec culture, they could not survive without their longtime partners, the
Toltecca.
The
Toltecca were craftsmen who provided luxury
goods to members of the noble class. It was believed that Quetzalcoatl was the
patron god of the Toltecs who were patrons of the arts, hence the name
Toltecca.
[49] Toltecca
were organized into powerful guilds or worked directly for the state whose
ranks included workers of precious metals and feathers, lapidary experts,
stone-masons, painters and sculptors whose skills were in high demand by the
Aztec nobility.
[50] Legally,
the
Toltecca enjoyed semi-independent status due to their privileged
position, but were still governed by the mainstream Aztec legal system, unlike
their
Pochteca cousins. For the most part, membership in the
Toltecca was hereditary and had its own internal system of
education/training apart from mainline Aztec society. It was these guilds that
created the Aztec nobilities most important symbols of office and the power of
their position was not illusory. A close alliance was formed between the
Toltecca and the
Pochteca they would trade raw materials for
finished products.
[51] The
extra-legal power of the craft guilds can be seen in the influence they had on
the Aztec state. The
Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan allowed the feather
workers guild, direct access to the imperial zoo to maintain their valuable
supply of exotic bird feathers.
[52]
Goldsmiths were given access to the imperial treasury to ply their trade and
painters and sculptors were paid wages well above those of
commoners.
[53] The most telling
example of their sway was an incident in which the lapidary
Toltecca
informed the emperor that they required a specialized form of sand that could
only be found outside the current boundaries of the empire. When the
city-states in this area refused the emperors request for sand, he called a
council of war and conquered them
utterly.
[54] c.
Commoners Macehualtin (“free-commoners”) formed the
bulk of Aztec society. They were the rank and file of the Aztec military,
maintained agriculture and worked in non-luxury trades. They paid tribute to
the nobility, could not wear the cotton clothing/capes the nobles wore and were
forbidden to own, let alone wear, ornate jewelry (baring heroic military service
in which it was legal for them to possess/sell it).
The
Macehualtin
were organized in
Calpulli (“group of houses”)
that formed administrative districts that paid tribute to the nobility and
were allowed to maintain
Mayeque’s (tenant
farmers).
[55] Calpulli were
basically corporations that either owned farmland that it divided amongst its
members or specialized in a particular
craft.
[56] The exact composition of
a
Calpulli is still under debate and while a
Calpulli is defiantly
a unit of territory, its size seemed to range from very small to very
large.
[57] One author believes that
each
Macehualtin family was grouped in units of 20 and then organized
into units of around 100 households to form a
Calpulli.
[58] Whatever the size, each
unit of territory was referred to as a
Calpulli and had an informal
pecking order that favored heroic fighters and always maintained its own temple
and school for commoners.
Calpulli districts had a number of legal
responsibilities, the first of which was to elect a
Calpullec to act as
headman of their district. The
Calpullec was elected for life and
was responsible for maintenance of agriculture, taking/updating the census
maps for tribute purposes, providing personnel/resources for public works and
rallying troops for military
service.
[59] He paid no taxes but
was legally required to provide all food and drink for
Calpulli meetings,
which could be very expensive.
[60]
The
Calpullec reported to the local tribute collector (likely a
Pipiltin noble) on a daily basis to update the census or receive orders
from the
Tlatoani of the city-state. The
Calpullec brought suit
and represented his
Calpulli in court on matters that affected the
Calpulli as a whole while individuals could bring suit on their own
behalf in personal
disputes.
[61] Below the
Macehualtin’s were the
Mayeque (rural tenants) who were
“commoners who worked on the private lands of the nobility” and
composed approximately 30% of the imperial
population.
[62] Many
Mayeque’s were people displaced by war and later distributed to
successful nobles and warriors to support their households (including that of
the emperor of Tenochtitlan).
[63]
The
Mayeque were basically the serfs of imperial Aztec culture and paid
tribute to their individual lords with a portion of their harvest or by
providing services (fetch firewood, collect water or domestic
service).
[64] During times of war
Mayeque were required to act as soldiers and their legal issues were
resolved by the Aztec legal system as
usual.
[65] Mayeque were
bound to remain on their lord’s property but there is no recorded
punishment for one who left.
[66]
Beneath the
Mayeque were the
Tlacotin (“slaves”)
who unlike many ancient cultures composed only about 3% of the Aztec
population.
[67] Slaves were
considered commoners and generally because they went bankrupt and had to sell
themselves into slavery to survive, or became slaves in compensation for some
crime they committed.
[68] Aztec
citizens could sell themselves or another member of their family into slavery to
support them. Common activities incurring slavery were “unsuccessful
gambling, theft, failure to pay tribute; or extreme
poverty.”
[69] Aztec
slavery had a number of legal benefits, including exemption from taxation and
military service.
[70] “Many
slaves rose to positions of responsibility acting as overseers and estate
managers, and Aztec law allowed them to acquire land, property, and even slaves
of their own.”
[71] It was not
illegal for slaves to marry and there was no social stigma attached to such
unions (one of Tenochtitlans greatest rulers mother was a slave, and he was
elected emperor over his other brothers who were born of
nobility).
[72] Slavery was not
hereditary with one exception for pacts of ancient servitude that required the
children of this indentured servant to continue on as slaves. Even in these
cases, the slave was not forced to stay with his master and was allowed to have
his own home/family.
[73] Many
slaves were brought in from foreign lands, to be sold in the central slave
markets of the Mexico Valley. The government regulated the slave trade and it
was illegal to sell an obedient slave against their
wishes.
[74] If a slave could
escape their captors and make it to the
Tlatoani’s palace, he would
legally set free.
[75] It was
against the law for anyone other than the slave owner to try to capture the
slave during his flight and such interference warranted immediate enslavement of
the offending party.
[76] If a
slave disobeyed their master, legal action could be brought against the
uncooperative party. The offending slave would be brought before witnesses and
given public warnings not to offend
further.
[77] If they continued to
misbehave after three or four warnings, they would be fitted with a wooden
collar and sold at the slave market. If the slave continued to be troublesome
and had to be sold three times, he would be sold to the government for
sacrifice, creating the ultimate three strikes
rule.
[78] The final social rung
of the Aztec hierarchy was made up of sacrificial victims captured in war. The
empire engaged in a continual process of expansion through conquest and
sacrificial captives served three primary purposes. First, they increased the
prestige of the captor as they attained special status when they captured their
first four captives. Second, the Aztecs firmly believed that their gods
sacrificed themselves bodily to keep the universe intact and believed that
slaves needed to be sacrificed in order to emulate this sacrifice and keep the
universe in order. Finally, the mass sacrifice of sacrificial captives provided
the
Tlatoani of the various city states a visible reminder of the price
of defiance. Sacrificial slaves had no rights, but were generally expected to
die with dignity.
IV Evolution and
Structure of the Aztec Legal System
War fueled the engine of the Aztec state and their legal system is a
reflection this. “The maintenance of social order and social respect for
the judicial, political and educational institutions was the cornerstone of the
Aztec legal system.”
[79]
“The law protected morals, family, manners, and property, and required
total respect for
authority.”
[80] Order and
obedience were prized in the triple-alliance and fearsome punishments were
devised for the disobedient.
Some authors argue that the Aztecs are the only
culture aside from Ch’in China that can be truly said to embrace
legalism.
[81] The legalistic
approach focuses on a mechanical application of rules to legal problems instead
of looking at the totality of circumstances on a case-by-case basis. Evidence
of this can be found in the willingness of the Aztec state to enforce its laws
without regard to the social class of the offender according to pre-set rules.
The famous ruler of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl was the first great legalist of
Aztec society and created an 80-statute code, designed to augment the
pre-existing code of Texcoco and provide a greater sense of
order.
[82] This code was added to
by his son and later, Montezuma himself. However, true legalism can never
exist, because it’s impossible to create a code that accommodates all
circumstances. The Aztecs solved this through application of analogy and the
concept of the “reasonable man”. The legal code of Texcoco has a
special proviso after its rules are finished stating that “all other
delicts and excesses they punished as a good man might see fit, coming around to
what appeared to them most just and most in conformity with
reason.”
[83] This allowed the
system to be predictable in application, yet flexible enough to accommodate new
situations.
The Aztec legal system was largely based on a form of
highly structured customary law that was enforced in the style of legalism with
the overall view being that if a crime was committed, it must be punished
whether or not the action had previously been defined as a
crime.
[84] There was no legislative
body to pass laws, but the emperor had full authority to make decrees with the
force of law.
[85] This is similar
to the imperial Chinese penalty of “defying the will of the emperor”
or “doing what ought not to be done.” “Only major civil and
criminal laws were written down and there were only available to judges
(although judges did meet on a fairly regular basis to determine which laws to
codify in pictographic form).
[86]
The remaining non-written laws were so thoroughly engrained in Aztec customary
law that codification was unnecessary. These laws were simply passed down
orally from generation to generation.
In general, the cardinal city-states
of the triple alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan) had an independent
legal system and didn’t impose their laws or customs on the city-states
they conquered.
[87] However, they
did extract tribute, goods and soldiers from vanquished cities depending on how
receptive they were to Aztec
dominion.
[88] In, theory, it may be
easy to look at such as system and imagine a complete lack of legal uniformity
between the city-states of the imperial Aztec realm but this was not necessarily
the case.
The
Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan created
the rules that governed the triple
alliance.
[89] However, the rulers
of Texcoco were extremely well respected and Texcoco soon became the heart of
Aztec legal scholarship for the duration of the empire. The primary figures
responsible for this state of affairs were Nezahualcoyotl and his son
Nezahualpilli, who, ruled Texcoco for 91
years.
[90] Each was a formidable
ruler and imposed many laws for the maintenance of Texcoco and its other
territorial possessions. The system they created was so well ordered that the
rulers of Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan were said to have imported the Texcocan
legal system wholesale and sent their more complex cases to Texcoco for
adjudication.
[91] Members of the
triple-alliance followed Tenochtitlan’s lead on matters of war and
religion, but consulted Texcoco on matters of
law.
[92] a. Judicial System
The general structure of the Aztec judicial system is similar to the US
system in a number of ways. It included courts of first instance, a number of
appeals courts and even a few courts of special
instance.
[93] The emperor could
hear any case of interest to him or that affected the
empire.
[94] The first court an
Aztec would likely have recourse to go to was the
Barrio
court.
Barrio courts dealt with minor civil and criminal offenses and
were located in small towns and each district of a major
city.
[95] Barrio judges were
elected by the people of their
Barrio and were drawn from the ranks of
veteran soldiers who exhibited “a sound and righteous
upbringing.”
[96] This judge
reported his verdicts to the appropriate trial level judge and had a group of
elected neighborhood watchmen at his disposal who would look for crime and
report back to the judge (they had no enforcement
powers).
[97] The
barrio
judge also had a group of police that served summons and arrested criminals at
his direction.
[98] When an arrest
was made for a serious offense, the
barrio judge would carry out a
preliminary examination, and then transfer the case up to a
Teccali
court.
[99] Teccali
courts met in Tenochtitlan and in each provincial capital of the
empire.
[100] The Teccali courts
were permanently in session and their primary duty was to resolve cases sent to
them by the
barrio
courts.
[101] Their primary
purview was the civil and criminal cases of commoners and they were believed to
be staffed by 3-4
judges.“
[102] The exact
number of judges is still in dispute, but it is believed that each court had no
less than a “president” and 2
judges.
[103] The Teccalli
courts verdict was final in civil cases, but criminal cases could be appealed to
the appellate courts, whose verdict would be sent to the Supreme Justice (the
Cihuacoatl “Woman
Serpent”).
[104] The
appeals court or
Tlacxitlan heard criminal appeals from the
Teccalli courts and was the court of first instance for nobles and
warriors.
[105] 3-4 judges staffed
this court and its cases could be appealed to the Aztec Supreme Court or the
Emperor himself.
[106] The exact
nature of this court and the Aztec Supreme Court is in dispute. Some sources
say that the structure is as presented here, while another omits the
Tlacxitlan court altogether and would transfer cases directly from the
Teccali courts to the Supreme Court. The latter theory would assume the cases
involving nobles would go directly to the Supreme Court, but I believe this
would be highly inefficient due to the sheer number of people who fit into the
noble class. Until we know more, it will be difficult to say either way, but I
will continue under the assumption that the
Tlacxitlan court is still
present.
The Aztec Supreme Court heard criminal appeals from the
Teccali courts and the appeals of nobles from the
Tlacxitlan
courts. It sat in Tenochtitlan and was composed of 12 justices, headed by the
Cihuacoatl.
[107] It was
the
Cihuacoatl who determined the final verdict and their verdict was
final. No appeal could be had to any other
Tlatoani or judge once the
Cihuacoatl made his decision, but if the case was deemed important
enough, the
Cihuacoatl could refer the case upward to the Emperor
himself.
[108] The emperor held
court every 12 days and had the aid of 2-13 advisors in rendering his final
verdict.
[109] The Aztec court
system also contained a number of courts of special jurisdiction including,
commercial courts, domestic affairs courts, fiscal affairs courts,
artisan’s courts, military courts and religious
courts.
[110] The most important
special affairs courts were the commercial, military and religious courts. The
commercial court had three levels and was referred to as the
Pochteca
Tlahtocan.
[111] This court
was run by the
Pochteca guilds and each level was staffed with 12
judges.
[112] These courts could
be found in the marketplace, had jurisdiction over all commercial disputes and
had enforcement powers up to and including summary capital
punishment.
[113] Military
courts were staffed by 4 judges and adjudicated all military disputes. These
courts were mobile and could be conducted immediately after a
battle.
[114] The religious court
only had one judge appointed to the position by the highest-ranking priest of
that particular temple. Religious judges were called
Teohvatzin and
heard all cases involving
priests.
[115] There appears to be
a tribunal housed in the emperor’s palace that adjudicated offenses
committed by dignitaries.
[116] It
had jurisdiction over criminal offenses and serious misdemeanors committed by
foreign dignitaries with adultery being specifically mentioned (adultery was a
capital offense).
[117] b.
Judges Aztec judges were known by the title
“Techuhtlatoque” which means “lords that govern the
public well being and speak
it”.
[118] Judges were
greatly respected members of the community and were seen as the literal
embodiment of the emperor’s
justice.
[119] The emperor
appointed judges, with the exception being barrio judges who were elected by
their
calpuli.
[120] Many
Aztec judges were members of the nobility and had numerous responsibilities
outside their judicial capacity including military service, political duties and
tending to their temple (priests could be
judges).
[121] Priest-judges would
be a particularly fearsome sight as many priests were painted black and had long
hair matted with dried blood from a long night of ritual bloodletting.
A
high level judicial career required extensive training, which included legal
training in a noble
Calmecac school and a period of apprenticeship
whereby apprentices would sit behind a judge to learn the
system.
[122] It was from this
pool of apprentices that new judges were
selected.
[123] Once selected, a
judge would sit for life and could only be removed for judicial
misconduct.
Judges decided their cases from a 7-8 step tall, raised
mezzanine housed in a room attached to or within the palace of the ruler of
their particular region.
[124]
Lower court judges met daily while higher-ranking judges met more infrequently.
A famous quote by the Spanish administrator Alfonse Zorita describes the daily
ritual of Aztec judges and states that they “would seat themselves at
daybreak on their mat dais, and immediately begin to hear pleas. The
judge’s meals were brought to them at an early hour from the royal palace.
After eating, they rested for a while, then returned to hear the remaining
suitors, staying until two hours before
sundown.”
[125] Aztec
judges drew their salary from the proceeds of lands set aside for them by the
state, which was supposed to make the judge less susceptible to bribery and
corruption.
[126] Judges were bound
to render impartial verdicts and sentences without regard to the parties social
status based solely on their wisdom. A judge was not allowed to accept gifts in
any form and was bound by strong rules of ethics. A violation of these ethics
could result in a number of penalties.
For minor offenses like drinking to
excess, accepting bribes or negligence, the judge would be severely reprimanded
by his fellow judges.
[127]
Further cases of misconduct could warrant having the offender’s house
knocked down and his possessions
confiscated.
[128] If the
misconduct continued, upon the third offense, the judge’s hair would be
cropped (a sign of great shame and humiliation in Aztec culture) and he would be
summarily stripped of his
office.
[129] If the offense was a
serious one that earned the notice of the
Tlatoani of his region, the
ruler himself could summarily strip the judge of his
position.
[130] Serious offenses
or major breaches of the standards of professional ethics meant death for the
offender.
[131] One story tells us
of a judge who unfairly favored a noble over a commoner and lied about it to the
ruler of Texcoco.
[132] The ruler
learned of this and had him hanged in addition to reversing the case in favor of
the commoner.
[133] Aside from
direct punishments from a ruler, the Aztec judiciary was
self-policing.
[134] c.
Judicial Review The Aztec word for justice is
“tlamelahuacachinaliztli” which means “straight line to a
point, or to straighten that which is
twisted.”
[135] While bound
by written or customary law Aztec judges used their own common sense, reason and
wisdom to render a judgment that seemed just and appropriate. Aztec judges were
not ignorant of the principle of stare decisis and had created a body of case
law that they could look to in determining future
punishments.
[136] This body of
law was largely handed down through custom although major civil and criminal
cases were recorded by scribes and made available to judges in the form of
case/statute books.
[137] One
author argues that Aztec judicial decisions were designed to defend long
established customs, as these customs “served to distinguish between good
and evil, tradition that caused harm and tradition that enriched and served to
develop society.”
[138] Most
judicial decisions simply upheld customary law or followed the rules lain out by
the rulers of Tenochtitlan or
Texcoco.
[139]d. The In
Courtroom Experience When charges were filed, the accused party was
summoned before the court and given a chance to confront their
accuser.
[140] Parties represented
themselves in court and while no lawyers were present they could bring a friend
or relative to help plead their
case.
[141] Trials were public and
based on an inquisitorial process that allowed the judge to question witnesses,
defendants and plaintiffs.
[142]
Sources are divided as to whether torture was or was not allowed to extract
confessions.
Parties were required to swear strict oaths in the name of
Huitzilopochtili to tell the truth and did so by touching the ground and then
their lips.
[143] In this way,
lying became an affront to the gods and was punished by
death.
[144] Witnesses are said to
have told the truth out of respect for this oath in addition to having a healthy
fear of the judge who was described as “very skillful in getting the facts
and displayed much wisdom in their questioning and
cross-examination.”
[145]
Judges were authorized to apply severe punishments to those who lied in
court.
[146] Those convicted of
perjury were given the same punishment as the person they were trying to
protect.
[147] Documents,
testimony, circumstantial evidence and confessions could be admitted into
evidence.
[148] Scholars
believe the maximum length of an Aztec court proceeding was limited to 80
days.
[149] This limit was
artificial because judges would meet in Tenochtitlan every four months (Aztec
months were 20 days) to decide the most difficult criminal cases and these
judgments were final.
[150] Judges
attended these meetings from each provincial capital that gave accounts of the
court proceedings in their
area.
[151] The most difficult
suits were brought up for discussion and debates were had on issues that
affected the empire as a
whole.
[152] e. Other
Personnel Involved In The Administration of Justice Aztec judges had a
great deal of assistance in effecting their task of administering justice.
Aztec judges had a stable of summoners, messengers and constables inform or
arrest the accused. It is said that these people would “carry out their
errands with the greatest diligence, by night or day, in rain, snow, or hail,
without the slightest
delay.”
[153] As stated
above, the
Barrio judges had a form of neighborhood watch to keep them
informed of what was going on in their neighborhood. Jailers were also present
and prisoners awaiting trial were placed in wooden cages until their trial date.
Aside from these jails no truly long term prison system was
employed.
[154] The two most
important groups available to assist judges were their scribes and their
constables.
Scribes were an ever-present fixture in the Aztec court system
and served the important functions of recording lawsuits between villages,
acting as stenographers in court proceedings and compiling codebooks for their
judges. The Aztec’s use a complex pictorial writing system that required
no small degree of skill to draw or understand, so a scribe that could
accurately keep pace with an Aztec court proceeding was an impressive person
indeed.
[155] Scribes recorded
“who the parties to the suit were, what it concerned, and the various
claims, witnesses and the finding or
sentence.”
[156] The
enforcement arm of Aztec society is a little harder to classify for a variety of
reasons. First, there are many conflicts in the sources as to what exactly
constitutes a “constable” and second, the Aztec writing system made
it very difficult to determine what class a “constable” belonged
to.
[157] It appears that the
appellate courts or the Aztec Supreme Court had a circle of 12 constables at its
disposal to send to send anywhere within the empire to arrest offenders that
needed to appear before
them.
[158] Below the Supreme
Court level there appear to be at least four types of enforcement agents, all of
which are associated with a particular form of execution method. All were part
of the
Achcauhcalli or “constables meeting house” and may
have been recognizable by the unique way they arranged their hair with white
ribbons.
[159] The first constable
class, were the
Quauhnochtli (“Eagle Cactus Fruit”) who
appear to be from the commoner class and are depicted as executing criminals in
the marketplace by strangling or stoning
them.
[160] The second type were
Tlilancalqui (“Keeper of the House of Darkness”) who may have
been part of the high nobility and were involved in execution but we don’t
know how.
[161] The third class
was the
Atenpanecatl (“Keeper on the Edge of the Water”) who
appear to be commoners that also publicly executed criminals in the marketplace
through strangling, stoning and cutting people to pieces in a process similar to
Imperial China.
[162] The final
class was the
Ezhuahuacatl (“Raining Blood”) who smashed
criminal’s heads in
public.
[163] f. The
Pochteca and the Law of the Marketplace The one legally unique
faction within Aztec society was the
Pochteca merchant guilds who were
basically a society within a society. They worshiped their own gods, married
within their class and membership was strictly
hereditary.
[164] In exchange for
taxation, these guilds were granted the power to regulate the marketplace,
represent themselves before the emperor, judge all law suits relating to the
merchant class and issue death sentences to those who violated their
laws.
[165] The Aztecs had a
dynamic economy of no small complexity that was facilitated by an interlinked
series of marketplaces.
[166] The
Aztec economy was not heavily regulated by the central government and seems to
have more or less been run on a local
scale.
[167] Each village of any
size had at least one marketplace, while larger cities had multiple. Cortez was
astonished at the sheer scale of Aztec market in Tlateloloco, observing that it
was twice the size of its equivalent in Salamanca and held over 60,000
people.
[168] Large markets would
meet every 5 days while smaller ones would meet less
frequently.
[169] People would
travel up to 15 miles to reach a market where they could buy, sell, get the
local news and socialize with
friends.
[170] For the most
part, the Aztec economy was based on barter, but a number of items had an agreed
upon value that came to recognized. The primary unit of exchange for expensive
items was a length of cotton cloth called a
quachtli.[171] Quachtli
were basically capes and seem reminiscent of the woolen lengths of cloth used in
Saga period Iceland.
[172] Other
media of exchange for expensive items were copper ax blades and quills filled
with gold dust.
[173] The primary
unit of small-scale exchange was the Cocoa
bean.
[174] Sources indicate an
exchange rate of between 100 and 300 Cocoa beans per cotton mantle depending on
what period the transaction took place and a brisk counterfeiting market seems
to have grown up around them.
[175]
Some markets were highly specialized while others were of a more general nature,
but all were regulated by
Pochteca staffed courts and their omnipresent
market inspectors.
[176] A
number of regulations applied to Aztec markets. First and foremost, no party
could trade on the way to the market for fear of offending the market
gods.
[177] This tradition must
have been fairly potent because it is still firmly in practice in parts of
Mexico today.
[178] Goods could
only be sold in areas designated by the
Pochteca market judge who
required vendors to pay a market tax in
quachtl mantles or cacao beans to
sell their wares.
[179] Impassive
Pochteca market inspector’s similar to the Islamic
Mutasih
would mix with the crowd to make sure items were being sold at proper exchange
rates and to monitor the quality of the products being
sold.
[180] The Aztec’s sold
everything by number and measure instead of by weight, and inspectors would
destroy false measures upon
discovery.
[181] Traders trying to
pass off shoddy merchandise immediately had their entire stock of goods
confiscated.
[182] Inspectors
immediately took thieves and those selling stolen goods to the
Pochteca
run market court (conveniently located at one end of the market) where judgment
and sentencing were rendered on the spot by a panel of 3-12
judges.
[183] This court governed
all disputes between traders, any issue that arose in the marketplace or was
related to a member of the
Pochteca.
[184]
Punishment was immediate, wrongdoers who were fined, sent for their families to
bring
quachtli mantles to pay up, while serious offenders were beaten to
death in the center of the marketplace as an example to others.
Pochteca market courts also regulated all commercial transactions
that took place in the marketplace. The Aztecs had a number of different types
of contracts, including sales contracts, commission sales contracts, lease
contracts, work contracts and loan
contracts.
[185] All contracts were
created orally and became binding when witnessed by four
people.
[186] Loan contracts
required collateral that could be in the form of goods, property, or a promise
to become a slave upon
default.
[187] Usury in the
medieval sense was technically illegal, but these laws appear to have been
lightly enforced if enforced, at
all.
[188] Apparently “First
lenders had first rights, and debts were passed to their
heirs.”
[189] A major
concern for the market inspectors was the presence of counterfeiting and
counterfeiters had a number of ingenious ways to cheat the system. Many would
mix in poor quality chilis or hole filled cotton
quechtli mantles with
newer, high quality ones.
[190]
Cacao beans were particularly susceptible to counterfeiting as vendors would
remove the outer shell and fill it with dirt, heat shriveled beans to make them
look larger, or create entirely false beans out of wax or amaranth
dough.
[191] These beans would
then be mixed with real beans for sale in the marketplace. It is said a body of
law was developed for dealing with counterfeiters, but it has been lost to
antiquity. We might assume that counterfeiting falls under the “selling
of substandard goods” category that requires forfeiture of the
vendor’s property.
[192]
Book II. A Day in the Life of an Aztec Citizen
The Aztecs had a highly complex social structure, where both formal and
informal laws governed the life of the citizen from birth to death. A citizen
of the empire was expected to live an obedient, ordered life in service of the
state. A structured path was devised for them from the day they were born, to
the day they died. This path is a fusion of rigorously ingrained customary law
and brutally enforced statutory law. I will divide this journey into dawn,
midday and twilight, symbolizing the Aztec legal journey through life.
a. Dawn Few formal laws applied to an Aztec before he was born,
but a number of customary prohibitions exist for his protection. Pregnant women
were forbidden to lift heavy objects, take excessive sweat-baths or engage in
excessive sex (they thought the fetus would be glued to the
womb).
[193] They were also
sternly warned not to have an abortion because pregnancy was seen as a sign that
the gods favored the women and to defy them is to incur their
wrath.
[194] A number of other
pre-birth taboos were given to Aztec women. They were advised not to eat
tamales that stuck to the side of a cooking pot for fear that the child would do
the same in her womb.
[195] She
shouldn’t go out at night without spreading ash, a pebble or wormwood on
her chest because the wandering apparitions of women who died in childbirth
would prey on her unborn
child.
[196] Prospective mothers
should not look at a hanged person because the child will be born strangled by
their umbilical cord.
[197] She
should also avert her eyes from an eclipse or the rising moon, because this
action would cause her children to become hair-lipped (although placing an
obsidian knife in her bosom would protect her from the rising moon
part).
[198] In the final months
of pregnancy, the woman was to be provided with anything she requested and she
was not allowed to sleep during the day or look at anything frightening,
offending or red.
[199] All were
thought to result in birth defects, stillbirth or the death of the
mother.
[200] From birth to age
three, the complex web of legal and social rules that will soon govern his life
only lightly affected an Aztec. Complex divinations were performed using the
child’s day sign to determine both his name, and their most auspicious
career path. An Aztec boy was presented with a small shield a bow and four
arrows to symbolize his future as a warrior, while an Aztec girl was presented
with a spindle to represent her future as
homemaker.
[201] After the
appropriate ceremonies were complete, Aztec children were more or less free to
enjoy their childhood until age three.
From age three to four, children
received some degree of instruction as to what it was to be a good or bad child,
but this was not yet the official training they would receive later. A good
child was one who was healthy, strong and happy, while a bad child was sickly,
maimed or violent in
temperament.
[202] It was believed
that a family had to “stretch” their child on a regular basis if
they were to grow properly during the year. This stretching spared neither male
nor female and involved the parents pulling of the child’s hands, fingers,
arms, legs, feet, neck, noses and
ears.
[203] Children also had to
be stretched during earthquakes because it was feared that they would grow no
further if stretching wasn’t performed
quickly.
[204] If one-stepped over
a child, he had to quickly step backward over them or his growth would be
stunted.
[205] Children were also
prevented from drinking before their older siblings for fear that they would
cease to grow (in addition to reinforcing age
distinctions).
[206] Formal
education began around age five or six and it was considered vital that all
children be taught to be obedient, respectful and
honest.
[207] Pages accompanied
young noblemen to ensure that they would bow and issue proper greetings to those
of higher station.
[208] Commoners
were instructed to work diligently and “do what pertains to your office,
labor, sow and plant your trees, and live by the sweat of your brow. Do not
cast off your burden, or grow faint, or be lazy; for if you are negligent and
lazy, you will not be able to support yourself or your wife and
children.”
[209] Children
were now given tasks that included carrying water, collecting firewood, carrying
bundles to the market, fishing and collecting maize grains from the floor of the
marketplace.
[210] Formal
punishments did not seem to apply quite yet, but children of this age received
lengthy speeches from their parents about what it meant to live in the Aztec
world.
[211] Children were taught
that life was a painful and dangerous thing and taught to proceed with
moderation, humility and
diligence.
[212] At age seven,
formal punishments began to creep into the child’s life. Children were
again admonished to be obedient, honest, discreet, respectable, modest and
energetic and modest in all
things.
[213] One nobleman laid
out eight rules for his child which included avoiding excess rest, being prudent
in travel, speaking slowly and deliberately, refraining from staring, not
gossiping, responding immediately to summons, being moderate in dress and
washing hands before eating and refraining from
gluttony.
[214] At this point, it
seems that formal punishments were more of an intense reproach
as opposed to the physical punishments that begin at age 8.
A variety
of punishments were lain out for children of both sexes between the ages of 8
and 12. If scolding didn’t work, a parent could threaten to pierce their
male child’s body with maguey spines at age 8, actually use the spines at
age 9, beat him with a stick at 10, hold him over a fire and force him to inhale
chili smoke at age 11 and bind him hand and foot, forcing him to lay on a wet
mat in the cold at age 12.
[215]
Girls between ages 8 and 12 were expected to be obedient, discreet and
chaste. If scolding didn’t work, girls received punishments similar to
those of their male brethren. At age 8, they were threatened with maguey
spines, at 9, their hands may be pierced, at 10 a girl could be beaten with a
stick for spinning cotton poorly, and from 11 and up, she could be forced to
inhale chili smoke over a
fire.
[216] The state seems to
have had some interest in the rearing of its citizen’s children seeing as
Aztec mothers feared punishments from Aztec judges if their daughters failed to
act properly by age 14.
[217] A
girl’s skill at weaving was considered to be a direct index of her moral
character. Properly woven outfits were a sign of good moral character, while
crooked seams and edges indicated crooked or perverse
character.
[218] Cotton cloaks
were a primary source of tribute and a potent symbol of the nobility, so one
could infer that the powers that be had a vested economic and social interest in
the weaving skills of their subjects.
Between the ages of 12 and 15,
all children were required to attend
cuicacalli (“house of
song”) schools.
[219] These
schools were adjacent to major temples with classes beginning and hour before
sundown and lasting late into the
night.
[220] Aztec children were
taught to sing and dance and continued to do so throughout their stay in the
cuicacalli school. It is believed that these schools served to provide a
religious education.
[221]
Aztec children were legally bound to obey and respect their parents such
that parents could bring their children to court if they proved particularly
deviant.
[222] The range of
punishments a court could issue included beatings, disinheritance (particularly
worrisome for young nobles) and death although death, was reserved for the
children of nobility who were disrespectful, cowardly or
cheap.
[223] Parents who could not
afford additional children could obtain permission from the courts to sell their
children into slavery.
[224]
There were six deadly sins an Aztec youth was taught to avoid at all cost,
including becoming a vagabond, thief, excessive ball player, gambler, gossip or
drunkard.
[225] Aztec society had
little love for drifters or the idle, so being a vagabond was said to have
severe supernatural consequences. Aztec youth were told that being a vagabond
would warrant a visit by a
Cihuapipiltin (deified soul of a woman who
died in child birth) that would place them under a spell that contort
one’s face and limbs and would cause him to foam at the
mouth.
[226] Thieves will be
dealt with in a later section, but suffice it to say that theft was severely
frowned upon by Aztec society and typically warranted execution. Excessive ball
playing and gambling is an interesting topic, because the negative connotation
isn’t the sport itself, but the wagering affiliated with
it.
[227] There seems to be no
small fear of gambling addiction in Aztec society and there are numerous stories
of Aztec citizens having to sell themselves into slavery to get out of debts
incurred by a bad throw of the dice or failure of a popular ball team. This
problem seems to extend all the way to the
Tlatoani themselves who
wagered the fate of their entire kingdoms on the outcome of a singular ball
game.
Gossips were described as “discourteous, evil-spoken, great
talkers, big mouthed, belittling, sower’s of discord and spreaders of
tales.
[228] Gossips were thought
to create social discord and were offensive to the public order. An Aztec child
was counseled to speak clearly and on matters of import, and to perfect speech
in the fashion of an orator, not a gossip.
Drunkenness is the final Aztec
sin and features prominently in many of the Aztec
codices.
[229] There was great
disdain for public drunkenness as it was viewed as robbing the individual of
their faculty of
reason and created great discord that
was an affront to the state as a whole. Drinking was completely forbidden in
Aztec society except on certain occasions. These occasions include childbirth,
certain religious days and for people who were engaged in a particularly
difficult form of labor. The main exception was for people who had children
and grandchildren or were over the age of 70. These individuals could
then who could drink as much as they
pleased.
[230] For a first offense
of public drunkenness, the offending party had their head shaved and their house
destroyed as they were thought unfit to associate with polite
society.
[231] Upon a
commoner’s second offense, or a noble/public official’s first
offense, the offending party was
executed.
[232] Age 15 marks a
significant turning point in the life of an Aztec male as he was admitted to a
school of higher learning to obtain the skills he would need throughout the rest
of his life.
[233] Noble children
attended the
Calmecac schools while commoners attended
telpochcalli.
Calmecac schools provided the empire with its
priests, generals, judges and senior
administrators.
[234] Each school
required its students to work day and night under a curriculum that combined
intense academic activity with grueling physical
labor.
[235] General skills
imparted were, oration, songs, histories, calenderics, interpretation of dreams
and omens, and combat
training.
[236] It is here that
future judges learned their legal skills and priests entered the priesthood.
Punishments for dereliction were severe in
calmecac schools.
Students who drank wine, committed severe infractions of school rules or slept
around were “burned, or strangled, or cast into fire alive or shot with
arrows.”
[237] Lighter
infractions including failure to speak well or greet others properly were
greeted with the drawing of blood from the student’s ears and sides with
maguey spines or pieces of sharpened
bone.
[238] Commoners were
educated in
tepochalli schools that were housed in their
calpulli.
These schools focused on military training as all adult males, noble and
commoner alike, were required to serve in the Aztec
military.
[239] Punishments in
these schools seem to approximate those of their
calmecac counterparts.
After five years of education, nobles and commoners alike were believed to be
sufficiently educated to take their place in Aztec society and moved on to their
next great venture in
life...marriage.
[240]b.
Midday After leaving their youth behind in their respective schools,
members of Aztec society would now be confronted with the full weight of Aztec
customary and statutory law. Everything from marriage to warfare was regulated
by custom or formal legal mechanism. Some primary areas of importance here are
family law, criminal law, property law, fiscal law and international
law.
[241]a. Family
Law Marriage was an important institution and its polygamous nature
brought two primary benefits to Aztec
society.
[242] First, it allowed
multiple noblewomen from other states to marry a single male noble from the
triple alliance, to further cement diplomatic relations across the
realm.
[243] Second, a large
number of widows are generated by a society constantly at war and polygamy
allowed widows to stay in the family by marrying the brothers of their fallen
husbands.
[244] Polygamy was
widespread among nobles but was more limited among commoners which may indicate
that polygamous marriages were used to preserve political instead of social
pairings. Aztec males were expected to
marry by age 22
while females were expected to marry by the time they were
18.
[245] Aztec marriages were
primarily governed by customary law and were formed when a child’s parents
entered into negotiations with another family and hammered out a marriage
agreement.
[246] The whole family
took part in selecting a mate and was often assisted by a professional marriage
broker.
[247] Sources are divided
as to whether a child had any say in who they were
marrying.
[248] Dowries were
present, but sources are vague as to what their exact nature was.
There
were two forms of marriage, conditional and
unconditional.
[249] Conditional
marriages were basically contractual events that lasted until the birth of the
first male child.
[250] Once this
child was born the couple could either stay married as normal or separate
forever. In contrast, unconditional marriages continued forever and could only
end upon divorce or
death.
[251]The husband was the
master of the house, but the wife retained her full rights as a citizen post
marriage.
[252] She could own
property, make contracts, engage in business and file suit in the legal
system.
[253] Men’s lives
were filled with labor, work or war while women maintained the household or
pursued careers as professional matchmakers or priestesses.
While entrance
into marriage had nothing to do with the formal legal system, exit did. A
husband or a wife could petition the court for legal separation, but was
required to attempt to reconcile their differences before a formal separation
was granted.
[254] Lack of
reconciliation was no guarantee to the issuance of a divorce decree because some
courts had a strict no divorce policy. A husband could file for separation on
grounds of incompatibility of character, misconduct on the part of the wife,
insanity of the wife, the laziness of the wife, infertility and financial
default.
[255] A wife could file
for divorce if her husband beat her, deserted her or failed to provide for her
children education.
[256]Once
the couple separated, they would remain so forever and were not allowed to
remarry each other (to do so was a capital
offense).
[257] They were however
allowed to marry other people and were encouraged to do
so.
[258] Children were divided
between their parents with sons remaining with the father and daughters with the
mother.
[259] Each party’s
property was recorded upon entrance into marriage (by who is unknown) and its
division depended upon who was at fault. If one party was guilty of splitting
up the marriage, the offender forfeited half their share to the other
spouse.
[260] In particular, if a
husband was found to have abandoned his wife, she would be granted her freedom,
given half of all the property owned by the couple and granted custody of all
the children.
[261] In a no fault
separation, the property was divided according to who brought the property into
the marriage.
[262] There are
two schools of thought on how the Aztecs handled issues of inheritance. The
first school is highly speculative and may be somewhat suspect in its
conclusions because little evidence has been recovered about how the Aztecs
resolved their inheritance issues before the fall. This school may reflect the
way intestate succession issues were resolved while the second school could be
more illustrative of testate succession. School one speculates that when a party
died, property descended through the male line from firstborn son, down the
chain of male heirs.
[263] Women
had no rights of inheritance but the decedent’s brother was required to
marry the widow and if no male heirs were present, the property would pass to
the nearest male relative. In the absence of any surviving male relative, the
property would escheat to the state (likely the
emperor).
[264] The second
school of thought on Aztec inheritance is derived from post fall observations of
how surviving Aztec communities divided their property. A great number of wills
were written by former triple-alliance members during the Spanish colonial
period that may reflect the way inheritance issues were resolved during the
empire.
[265] Plots of land and
homes could be devised in almost any conceivable way including “male to
male, female to female, female to male or even among
in-laws”.
[266] Land sites
had a tendency of being divided among several relatives instead of a single
individual and it was not uncommon for bequests to be spread across three
generations.
[267] The great range
of ways people were allowed to leave their property to is likely to have been
present before the fall, but it is possible that the massive drop in population
caused by smallpox may have made bequests to distant relatives more
common.
[268]Household items
were passed from mother to daughter while luxury items and important status
symbols were passed from brother to
brother.
[269] The right to
collect tribute payments could be passed to other relatives in the pattern
above, including husband to
wife.
[270] Trustees were
appointed to administer to property of
minors.
[271]b. Criminal Law
The emphasis of criminal law was to instill respect for the social
order, customs and legal institutions of the Aztec
state.
[272] It was believed that
the state would soon disintegrate unless respect for its legal institutions from
the emperor down to the family unit were properly drummed into the
citizenry.
[273] The Aztec state
did not apply its criminal laws equally because nobles were believed to descend
from the gods, represent the emperor and provide an example for the masses and
were subject to more severe punishments than
commoners.
[274] The most severely
punished crimes were homicide, theft, and adultery, all of which typically
warranted
execution.
[275]
i. Homicide
Homicide was always a capital crime whether it was justified or
not.
[276] Killing another was
viewed as usurping the authority of the emperor, who reserved the exclusive
right to grant the authority to take
life.
[277] This crime was
punished with execution, but the victim’s family could intervene by
forgiving the condemned individual who would then be handed over to the family
as their slave.
[278] ii.
TheftTheft was another major offense in Aztec society that often
involved bizarre circumstances. Theft from merchants, temples, of the arms and
insignia of military personnel or theft of items worth more than 20 ears of
maize
was punishable by death by
strangulation.
[279] Theft of
items worth less than 20 ears of maize required restitution or the criminal was
given to the victim as a
slave.
[280] However, enslavement
was only available if the value of the items could be recovered, if not, the
penalty was death (likely by
strangulation).
[281] Theft
didn’t pay on either side, as handling stolen property was punishable by
enslavement.
[282] A safe harbor
existed for children under 10 who were considered minors and not punished, but
it’s unknown as to whether restitution could be demanded of this
minor.
[283] In addition to the
type of the item stolen, the location of the offense was important.
Theft
from a dwelling (burglary) was considered a serious offense and was typically
defined as “theft accomplished by boring/breaking a hole in the victims
dwelling.”
[284] Aztec homes
had no doors (doorways) or windows although their entryways used to be covered
with curtains that had some type of chime or bell attached. These chimes and
the alarm they raised could have been the impetus for Aztec burglars to bore
their way into their victim’s homes. A first offense was punished by
enslavement and the offender was required to serve the family they stole
from.
[285] However, if the thief
stole a “considerable value” from the home (perhaps items worth more
than 20 ears of maize) or was a repeat offender, he was executed by
strangulation or “death by blows to the head with a
club”.
[286] Frequent thefts
from the marketplace or countryside were also punished by death by strangulation
or “death by blows to the head with a
club”.
[287] Even more
serious than theft from a dwelling was theft by sorcery. There are numerous
tales of groups of sorcerers banding together to commit burglary. These groups
were usually 2-20 people in size who typically employed the forearm bone of a
woman who died in childbirth to magically freeze the occupants of a home. It is
said it was “as if the victims were all dead, and yet they heard and saw
everything that
happened.”
[288] The
sorcerers would then sit down at the victim’s table, eat their food, steal
their belongings and do “a great many foul things to the women of the
house.”
[289] Another form
of sorcery (and seemingly more effective) would simply put the victim to sleep
while the sorcerer robbed them. Upon capture the sorcerers were either hanged
or were sacrificed in public by having their hearts torn
out.
[290]Its hard to tell
exactly what was going on during these mystical offenses, but aside from actual
sorcery, one could assume that offenses involving large numbers of
“sorcerers” were equivalent to our own home-invasion style
robberies. Records left by Spanish monks tell us that the Aztecs firmly
believed in the ability of a sorcerer to freeze them in their homes, but the
monks themselves were convinced that it was terror and not sorcery that froze
the victims.
[291] Other offenses
involving one or two people typically involved the perpetrators being caught
with the offending charms/forearm bone while entering or leaving the home,
creating the presumption that sorcery was employed in the crime.
iii.
Adultery Marital relations were extremely important to the Aztecs, as
they maintained the population in addition to cementing important alliances
between the city-states of the triple-alliance. Adultery was an offense against
the state and while its penalties varied from city-state to city-state, they
were always severe.
Adultery was a capital offense and was defined as
sexual relations between a man and a married woman that was not his wife. There
was no penalty for a married man who slept with an unmarried woman (like a
concubine), but a married woman was guilty if she slept with another man,
whether he was married or
not.
[292] The actual act
generally had to have an eyewitness, but city-states following the Texcocan
model allowed proof through indirect evidence. Penalties for adultery extend
not only to the offending parties, but also to anyone who knew of the adultery
and failed to report it to the
authorities.
[293] A number
of brutal penalties were devised to deal with an adulterous couple. One common
punishment was to crush the offending parties head between two stones, although
if the offended party forgave the adulterers, the punishment was not carried
out.
[294] In other areas, a more
stratified system was set up, starting with adulterers who were caught in the
act.
[295] In these cases, both
offending parties were stoned to death in the
marketplace.
[296] If the
adulterers were sentenced on the basis of circumstantial evidence, they were
strangled and dragged to a temple outside the
city.
[297] If the adulterers
killed the husband of the adulteress, the adulterer was burned at the stake
while having water and salt thrown on him, while the adulteress was strangled
before him.
[298] Finally, nobles
who were caught were strangled and had their remains were
cremated.
[299]
Interestingly, a husband who killed the offending parties after catching
them in the act, was himself executed for taking matters into his own hands and
usurping the power over life and death, granted the Aztec
judiciary.
[300] In some areas, a
husband who slept with his wife after she was convicted of adultery (but before
execution) was himself
punished.
[301] For the most part,
Aztec adultery laws were inviolate, with no exceptions being made for rank or
title. The famous legalist and
Tlatoani of Texcoco, Nezahualpilli, had
his own son executed for sleeping with a married
woman.
[302] Another Texcocoan
ruler had four of his sons and their mistresses slain for adultery, even though
the mistresses were daughters of powerful nobles from
Tenochtitlan.
[303] A final,
telling example is when the rulers of Tlaxcala executed one of their greatest
generals and his mistress due to their adulterous
acts.
[304] It has been postulated
that the adultery laws may have been used as a pretext to execute ones
enemies.
[305] While not
impossible, no affirmative evidence appears in the sources to indicate that this
was the case. The only exception to the mandatory execution rule was reserved
for active duty soldiers serving in the military of Texcoco. In these cases, the
soldier’s mistress was executed, and he was permanently banished to a
distant frontier military
post.
[306]
iv Miscellaneous Crimes
Numerous other criminal offenses exist, beyond the main three above, the
most important of which were rape and abortion (which includes anyone assisting
with the abortion). Rape was as repulsive to the Aztecs as it is to most other
cultures and abortion was viewed as usurping the power of the emperor (both were
punishable by death).
[307]
Suicide had criminal penalties attached to it that applied to all social strata.
In one instance, the
Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan killed himself with poison
out of fear that the city may come under
attack.
[308] His family was
summarily stripped of noble status and no member of his family would ever be
allowed to hold noble status
again.
[309] There doesn’t
appear to be a set penalty for inciting another to commit suicide, but that may
be folded into the homicide category. Other serious crimes include defamation
of character, kidnapping, incest, sodomy, destruction of crops, pederasty,
inciting public disturbances, sedition, use of the emperor’s insignia and
many forms of witchcraft, all of which were capital
offenses.
[310] Crimes against
the crown were always capital offenses as were crimes threatening the public
order. Treason was heavily frowned upon and those who plotted against the state
were summarily executed. In one spectacular case, the offending party was
sentenced to execution by being dragged through the streets until he died
(although, by what, we don’t know, because the Aztecs had no horses or
wheeled vehicles).
[311] In
another instance, Tlacateotzin, ruler of Tlatilolco, spread false rumors of an
immanent attack. Upon learning of this act, he was sentenced to execution by
his fellow
Tlatoani.
[312]
Any other threats against the state, or threat of rebellion was typically dealt
with by execution of the offending party, or full-scale invasion of the
offending city-state.
v. Property Law
The emperor alone had the legal power to regulate real property, and all
land in the Aztec domain was owned in his name. The emperor immediately
acquired title to all new lands acquired through conquest and had the power to
divide them as he saw fit between the nobility, warriors, institutions and
Calpulli.
[313] Most of the
land given away by the emperor was parceled out from recently conquered
territories.
[314] An interesting
feature of this system was that the original owners from the conquered lands
still own, live on and pass their title to future generations, but simply share
the profits with their new
“lords”.
[315] Land
boundaries were clearly marked by special measuring sticks called
varas
that were about two yards in
length.
[316] These sticks were
used to create the tax maps contained in each
calpuli and tampering with
these sticks was punishable by
death.
[317] Below the
emperor, nobles were allowed to purchase property from other nobles or have it
granted to them by the emperor himself. Land purchased from other nobles was
free of any obstruction and could be resold at will, but land acquired from the
emperor may come with conditions
attached.
[318] These conditions
include restrictions on resale, or a requirement that it forfeit back to the
state after the nobles death or the death of a certain family member X number of
generations in the future.
[319]
The same rules applied to Aztec warriors with the proviso that they
couldn’t purchase land, and could only acquire it from the emperor for
valorous service in battle.
[320]
Institutions like the army, church and certain bureaucratic organizations
could own lands granted to them by the emperor. These lands belonged to the
institution, not its leadership, and were used to support the institution as a
whole.
[321] The
calpuli were the final major land holding body, and held land either in
the name of an individual family or for the community as a
whole.
[322] Family land was
occupied by a single family unit and was passed down from generation to
generation.
[323] If this land
went to waste for two years a stern warning was issued to the family, if it went
to waste for a third year ownership was transferred back to the
community.
[324] All members of
the calpuli cultivated community lands, and monies derived from these lands were
used to pay the community’s
taxes.
[325] The core cities
of the Aztec state didn’t produce enough food to sustain themselves so a
great deal of food had to be imported. Each year, the empire would suffer at
least one lean period and famines were greatly feared. To remedy this a
sophisticated welfare system was created that allowed the leaders of the triple
alliance to feed the populace in time of need from, huge storehouses constructed
in Tenochtitlan.
[326] Fear of
famine was so great that strict penalties were devised for those who interfered
with the state welfare system. In one account, the ruler of Texcoco,
Nezahualcoyotl required corn, squash and beans to be planted along all roads and
ponds for people in need.
[327]
Anyone who partook of these plantings out of greed instead of hunger was put to
death.
[328]
vi. International Law: The Law of War
The Aztec economy was fueled by the tribute of its conquered territories
and employed obsidian sword diplomacy whenever possible in its dealings with
neighboring city-states. The primary method of Aztec social advancement was for
an Aztec warrior to capture a set number of the enemy to be sacrificed in
Tenochtitlan. The typical number of captives needed to net high status/reward
was 4, although only one was required if the captive was from Tlaxcala.
If
a kingdom didn’t acquiesce diplomatically to the emperor of Tenochtitlan,
he would typically declare open warfare, or use his trusted
pochteca
allies to create a pretext to attack. There are only two instances where the
Aztecs failed to conquer their opponents. The first is in their interaction with
the Tarascan Empire (too powerful to conquer) and the second is against their
longtime rival Tlaxcala who then indulged in numerous “flower wars”
designed to net captives for each side, but not to capture territory. The Aztec
state had a very advanced body of international law relating to the declaration
of war such that surprise attacks were far from the
norm.
[329] All declarations of
war had to come from the emperor in Tenochtitlan and a set ritual was employed
in each instance. First, a delegation from Tenochtitlan was sent to the enemy
state instructing the enemy ruler on the merits of joining the triple-alliance
and the evils that could befall them if they chose not to embrace the protection
of Tenochtitlan.
[330] The enemy
state would be allowed maintain its own government structure, it just had to
build a temple to the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, pay some amount of tribute and
listen to Tenochtitlan in matters of international
affairs.
[331] The envoys then
presented gifts and gave the ruler 20 days to decide whether they would join the
triple-alliance or go it
alone.
[332] If this didn’t
work, another set of envoys, this time from Texcoco would travel to the enemy
ruler with a gift of arms and tell him in no uncertain terms that if he
didn’t join the triple alliance, he would be killed and his warriors
sacrificed to the man.
[333] The
ambassadors would present more gifts of weapons to the ruler, anoint his head
for strength in battle and wait another 20 days for his
response.
[334] If the ruler still
held out, a final delegation, this time from Tlacopan would arrive in the enemy
state and appeal directly to the citizens to force their leader to give up,
because war could only result in ravaging their lands, destroying their armies
and forcing the populace to labor under brutal tribute as a vassal state of
Tenochtitlan.
[335] If this
final ploy failed, war would break out, (typically with the triple-alliance as
the victor). City-states who capitulated paid light tribute, retained their own
government structure and benefited from free trade with the triple-alliance
while, true to their word, those who resisted had their armies sacrificed,
leaders executed, temples burned and labored under heavy
tribute.
[336] No paper on
the Aztecs would be complete without some mention of their infamous practices of
human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that their gods physically sacrificed
themselves to prevent the world from being destroyed and thought the universe
was created and destroyed in cycles. They were so firm in this belief that,
Aztec priests watched the sky every 52 years to make sure the stars continued to
travel across the heavens (next cycle is 2022). The Aztecs believed that human
sacrifices were necessary to emulate the sacrifice of their own gods to keep the
wheel that was the universe, turning.
Captives in war were immediately
carried back to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice with one exception being
“Gladiatorial sacrifices” that occurred approximately once a month.
Famous warriors or rulers of opposing states would be given fake weapons (stick
with feathers tied to it) and forced to fight elite Aztec warriors for their
freedom.
[337] This typically
involved a quick death for the Aztec captive, but one exception stands out above
the rest. The Tlaxcala captain Tlahuicol was captured by the Aztecs in battle
and forced to endure the Aztec gladiatorial sacrifice ritual. Armed with only a
fake sword and his wits, he personally slew 8 elite Aztec jaguar and eagle
warriors.
[338] He was offered a
generalship in the Aztec military, but chose to be sacrificed just to spite
them.
[339]
c. Night
Aztecs in their winter years were more or less bound by the same laws that
applied to them in midlife and were expected to conduct themselves with
dignity.
[340] The elderly were
looked to as respected repositories of knowledge and were an important component
of many rituals in addition to being the primary agents of punishment for the
young.
[341] As previously stated,
the main advantage of elder status was the ability to drink freely after having
grandchildren or reaching age
70.
[342] It should be noted
that the eventual destination upon death was determined by the way a person
died, not by the way they lived, so threats of punishment in the afterlife were
not available in Aztec
culture.
[343] There was however,
a procedure for confession that absolved the wayward Aztec of the wrongs they
had committed during life.
[344]
This confession could only be made once and was typically undertaken near death
to absolve the elderly of the wrongs they had committed in
life.
[345] This confession was
heard by an Aztec priest and typically involved a penance like fasting or
piercing ones tongue with maguey
spines.
[346] Once this confession
was complete, the penitent was absolved off all crimes they had committed and
was prepared to meet
death.
[347]Obviously,
one’s legal issues tend to end after death, but aside from estate issues
there was one major post mortem legal problem in Aztec society...tomb robbing.
When a woman died in childbirth, she was believed to become deified and certain
key parts of her body were given magical
attributes.
[348] It was thought
that a lock of hair and the middle finger of the decedents left hand would make
a warrior invincible in battle and that the forearm bone would magically freeze
the occupants of a home, to allow easy
theft.
[349] Mourners would arm
themselves with swords and shields to fend off roving bands of young men who
sought to mutilate the corpse and the decedents husband and friends would stand
watch over the grave for 4 days, allowing the body to loose potency and rest in
peace.
[350] Penalties during
these melees could involve numerous laws, from theft, to witchcraft to murder.
Conclusion
The Aztec legal system was like the Aztec people, constantly in motion,
yet solidly rooted in tradition. This system is both beautiful and terrible,
providing equality under the law for noble and commoner alike, but embracing
brutal human sacrifice. Today, there are over 1,000,000 Nahuatl speaking people
living in Mexico, many of whom live in conditions similar to their distant
ancestors. The Aztecs engaged in a constant struggle to find Eden by way of
Oceania, and provide a fascinating glimpse into a system totally divorced from
those of Europe and Asia.
Proud of itself
Is the city of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan
Here no one fears to die in war
This is our
glory.
This is Your Command,
Of Giver of Life!
Have this
in mind, oh princes
Lest we forget it.
Who could conquer
Tenochtitlan?
Who could shake the foundation of heaven?
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Aztec Realm, University of Texas Press 1994
Jerome A. Offner, Law
and Politics in Aztec Texcoco, Cambridge University Press
1989
Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of The Aztecs of the Eve of the
Spanish Conquest, Stanford University Press, Stanford California
Alfonso de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico, Rutgers
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History and Mythology
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Bierhorst trans., 1992).
Frances F Berdan, The Aztecs of Central
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Michael E Smith., The Aztecs, Blackwell Publishers
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John Pohl, Adam Hook, Aztec Warrior AD 1325-1521, Osprey
Publishing 2001
Francisco Avalos, An Overview of the Legal System of
the Aztec Empire, Lexis Nexis 1994
Aztec Law and Punishment,
Internet at
http://history.smsu.edu/jchuchiak/HST%20397--Theme%2023-Aztec_law_and_punishment....
[1] Michael E Smith.,
The
Aztecs, p274 (Blackwell Publishers
1996)
[2] Frances F Berdan &
Patricia Rieff Anawalt,
The Essential Codex Mendoza, p. xi (University of
California Press 1997)
[3] id
[4] Frances F Berdan,
The
Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society, p3 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
College Publishers 1982)
[5]
id
[6]
id
[7] id at
p6
[8] id at
p6
[9] id at
p6
[10] id at
p6
[11] id at
p7
[12] id at
p7
[13] id at
p8
[14] id at
p9
[15] id at
p10
[16] Warwick Bray,
Everyday Life of the Aztecs, p91 (Dorset Press
1968)
[17] id at
92
[18] Berdan, supra at p45
[19] id at
p46
[20] id at
51-54
[21] id at
47
[22] id at
47
[23] id at
51
[24] id at
50
[25] id at
50
[26] id at
50
[27] Berdan supra at p
70
[28] Francisco Avalos,
An
Overview of the Legal System of the Aztec Empire, p2 (Lexis Nexis 1994)
[29] Frances F Berdan,
The
Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society, p104 (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich College
Publishers1982)
[30]
id
[31] Berdan supra at p100
[32] id at
100
[33] id at
100
[34] id at
100
[35] id at
102
[36] id at
100-102
[37] id at
102
[38] id at
102
[39] id at
46
[40] Berdan & Anawalt
supra at p19
[41] id at
p19
[42] id at
p22
[43] Warwick Bray,
Everyday Life of the Aztecs, p148 (Dorset Press
1968)
[44] Michael E Smith.,
The Aztecs, p121 (Blackwell Publishers
1996)
[45] Bray, supra at p148
[46] Smith supra at
p122
[47] id at
p121
[48] Berdan supra at
p33
[49] id at
26
[50] id
26
[51] id
28
[52] id
28
[53] id
29
[54] id
29
[55] Bray supra at
p79
[56] id
p79
[57] Berdan supra at
56
[58] id p79,
[59] id
p80
[60] id
p80
[61] id
p80
[62] Berdan supra at p46,
Bray supra at p80
[63] id
p60
[64] id
p60
[65] id p
60
[66] id
p60
[67] id
p61
[68] id
p61
[69] id
p61
[70] Bray supra at
p81
[71] id
p81
[72] id
p81
[73] Berdan supra at
p62
[74] Bray supra at
p82
[75] id at
p81
[76] id
p81-82
[77] Berdan at
p62
[78] id
p62
[79] Francisco Avalos,
An
Overview of the Legal System of the Aztec Empire, p2 (Lexis Nexis
1994)
[80] Id
[81] Jerome A. Offner,
Law
and Politics in Aztec Texcoco, p66 (Cambridge University Press
1989)
[82]
id
[83] id at
p70
[84] Avalos supra at
2
[85]
id
[86]
id
[87]
id
[88]
id
[89] Jacques Soustelle,
Daily Life of The Aztecs of the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, p123
(Stanford University Press, Stanford California)
[90] id at
p124
[91]
id
[92]
id
[93] Avalos supra at
p3
[94]
id
[95] Bray supra at
p83
[96]
id
[97] Avalos supra at
3
[98]
id
[99] Bray supra at
p83
[100]
id
[101]
id
[102] Avalos supra at
p3
[103] Bray supra at
p83
[104] Avalos supra at
p3
[105]
id
[106]
id
[107]
id
[108]
id
[109] Bray supra at p
83-84
[110] Avalos supra at p
3
[111]
id
[112]
id
[113]
id
[114] Bray supra at
p195
[115] Avalaos supra at
p3
[116] Soustelle supra at
p24
[117] id
[118] Avalos supra at
2-3
[119] id at
3
[120]
id
[121] id at
2
[122] id at
4
[123]
id
[124] Zorita supra at
125
[125] Berdan supra at
p78
[126] Bray supra at
p84
[127] Zorita supra at
p128
[128] Bray supra at
p84
[129] Zorita supra at p
128
[130]
id
[131] Avalos supra at
4
[132] Zorita supra at
p128
[133]
id
[134] Avalos supra at
4
[135]
id
[136]
id
[137]
id
[138]
id
[139]
id
[140]
id
[141]
id
[142]
id
[143]
id
[144] Bray supra at
p84
[145] Zorita supra at p
128
[146]
id
[147] Avalos supra at
p6
[148] id at
p4
[149] Zorita supra at
p128
[150] Zorita supra at p
130
[151] Bray supra at
p84
[152]
id
[153] Zorita supra at
p129
[154] Bray supra at
p85
[155]
id
[156] id at
p128
[157] Berdan and Anawalt
supra at p195
[158] Zorita
supra at p129
[159] Berdan and
Anawalt supra at p195
[160]
id
[161]
id
[162]
id
[163] id at
p195-196
[164] Soustelle supra
at p61
[165]
id
[166] Smith supra at
p132
[167]
id
[168] Bray supra at
p111
[169] Smith supra at
p118
[170] Bray supra at
p110
[171] Soustelle supra at
p28
[172] David D Friedman,
website
www.daviddfriedman.com
[173]
Bray supra at p112
[174]
id
[175]
id
[176] Smith supra at
p117
[177] Bray supra at
p110
[178] id at
111
[179] id p111, Avalos supra
at p 7
[180] Bray supra at
p111
[181]
id
[182]
id
[183] id, Soustelle supra at
p28
[184]
id
[185] Avalos supra at
p8
[186]
id
[187]
id
[188]
id
[189]
id
[190] Smith supra at p
132
[191] id at p 125, Bray
supra at p 112
[192] Aztec
Law and Punishment, Internet at
http://history.smsu.edu/jchuchiak/HST%20397--Theme%2023-Aztec_law_and_punishment....
[193]
Berdan supra at p82
[194]
id
[195]
id
[196]
id
[197]
id
[198]
id
[199]
id
[200]
id
[201] Berdan & Anawalt
supra at p148
[202] Berdan
supra at p85
[203] Berdan &
Anawalt supra at p154
[204]
id
[205]
id
[206] id
[207] Berdan supra at
p85
[208]
id
[209]
id
[210]
id
[211] id at p
86
[212]
id
[213] Berdan & Anawalt
supra at p158
[214]
id
[215]
id
[216]
id
[217] id at
p164
[218] id at
166
[219] Berden supra at
p88
[220]
id
[221]
Id
[222] Avalos supra at
6
[223]
id
[224]
id
[225] Berden and Anawalt
supra at p 229-230
[226] id at
p226
[227] id at
p266
[228] id at
p228
[229] id at
p229
[230] id at
p146
[231] internet supra at p
2
[232]
id
[233] Berden supra at
p88
[234] Bray supra at
p63
[235]
id
[236] Berden supra at
p89
[237] id at
p90
[238]
id
[239] id at
p90
[240]
id
[241] Avalos supra at p
5
[242] Bray supra at
p69
[243]
id
[244]
id
[245] Avalos at p
6
[246]
id
[247]
id
[248]
id
[249]
id
[250]
id
[251]
id
[252] Bray supra at
p66
[253]
id
[254] Avalos supra at p
6
[255] id, Bray supra at
p66
[256]
id
[257] Avalos supra at p
6
[258] Bray supra at
p69
[259] Avalos supra at p
6
[260]
id
[261] Bray supra at
p69
[262] Avalsos supra at p
6
[263]
id
[264] id at p
7
[265] Brendan supra at
71
[266]
id
[267]
id
[268] id at
p72
[269] id
[270] id
[271]
id
[272] id at p
6
[273]
id
[274]
id
[275] id at
p5
[276]
id
[277]
id
[278] id at p
6
[279] id at p 5 and Offner
supra at p276
[280] id at p
5-6
[281] Offner supra at
p276
[282] internet supra at p
2
[283] id
[284] id at
p276-277
[285] id at
p277
[286] id at
p276-277
[287] id at
p276
[288] Soustelle supra at
57
[289]
id
[290] id at
57
[291] Bray supra at p
181
[292] Avalos supra at
6
[293]
id
[294] Offner
257
[295] id at p
258
[296]
id
[297]
id
[298]
id
[299]
id
[300] id at
257
[301]
id
[302] Zorita supra at p
130
[303]
id
[304]
id
[305] David D. Friedman
[306] Offner supra at p
261
[307] Avalos supra at p
6
[308] History and
Mythology of the Aztecs The Codex Chimalpopoca, p81-82 (The University of
Arizona Press (John Bierhorst trans.,
1992).
[309]
id
[310] Avalos supra at p
6
[311] Bierhorst supra at
p81-82
[312] id at
p83
[313] Avalos supra at p
7
[314]
id
[315]
id
[316]
id
[317] internet supra at
p2
[318] Avalos supra at p
7
[319]
id
[320]
id
[321]
id
[322]
id
[323]
id
[324] Bray supra at p
117
[325]
id
[326] Brendan supra at p
38
[327] id at
85
[328]
id
[329] id at p
8
[330] Bray supra at
p190
[331]
id
[332]
id
[333] id at
p191
[334]
id
[335]
id
[336] Avalos supra at p
8
[337]
id
[338] John Pohl, Adam Hook,
Aztec Warrior AD 1325-1521, p 61 Osprey Publishing 2001
[339]
id
[340] Berden supra at
p93
[341]
id
[342]
id
[343] id at
p96
[344] id at
p93
[345]
id
[346] id at
p94
[347]
id
[348] Bray supra at
p71
[349]
id
[350] id