32 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
history of the Mexica written in Nahuatl at the beginning
of the seventeenth century, “Then they overtook Copil at
Tepetzinco. And when he had died then [Huitzilopochtli]
cut off his head and cut open his breast. When he had cut
open his breast he took his heart from him. And he placed
his head on top of Tepetzintli, a place now named Acopilco,
[for] there Copil’s head died.” 17 Despite Copil’s defeat and
dismemberment (another narrative tells us his heart was
cast into the depths of the lake), the Mexica were routed
by his forces, who chased them out of Chapultepec, taking
women as slaves. 18 This happened in the year 2 Reed in
the native calendar, a year that correlates to 1299. 19 Their
ensuing exodus took the Mexica from one inhospitable
place in the valley to another, all the choice grounds being
occupied and carefully guarded by other altepeme.
Eventually they were allowed to settle in Tizaapan by
the ruler of one of the lake cities, Culhuacan, but this too
was a marginal and uninviting place, far from the ideal
altepetl they were seeking. Nonetheless, they survived, and
in 1323, the Mexica leaders asked the ruler of Culhuacan
for the hand of his daughter to marry to their deity. 20 The
unsuspecting monarch sent his daughter to them, only to
arrive at the wedding feast to find that she had been sacri-
ficed. Her flayed skin was draped over a priest in her new
incarnation as “goddess.” This female sacrifice led her hor-
rified father to expel these Mexica from Culhuacan, and so
they began their peregrinations again. But Huitzilopochtli
never abandoned them and kept them going by promising
to send them a sign when he found them a home.
That sign arrived in 1325, the year 2 House, when
Huitzilopochtli sent an eagle, a bird associated with him,
to land on the top of a prickly-pear cactus (a nopal) grow-
ing on a rocky outcropping in the middle of the lake; some
accounts say that the nopal tree had sprouted from Copil’s
sacrificed heart. 21 It was here that the Mexica leaders were
told to settle (see figure 1.3). The topography of this place
is carefully described in a number of sources, both pictorial
and textual, and in the motif of abundant flowing water,
it conforms to the ideal altepetl. For instance, the Codex
Chimalpahin records the Mexica leaders seeing the sign of
Huitzilopochtli’s eagle thus:
Then they saw the white cypresses [ahuehuetl], the white
willows that stood there, and the white reeds, the white
sedges; and the white frogs, the white fish, the white snakes
that lived in the water there. And then they saw the inter-
secting crags and caves. The first crag and cave faced thesunrise, [with a stream] named the Fiery Waters [tleatl],
Where the Waters Burn [atlatlayan]. And the second crag
and cave faced north; the place where they intersected
[were streams] named Blue Waters [matlallatl] and Yellow
Waters [toxpallatl]. And when the ancient ones saw this,
they wept. 22Just as the image of Aztlan seen in the Tira de la Pere-
grinación provided a template of the city surrounded by
water that would be replicated in Tenochtitlan, the verbal
representation of the city evokes a cosmic model. Across
pre-Hispanic central Mexico, people understood that a
great world tree supported the heavens; in the Mexica ver-
sion, it is a pair of trees, an ahuehuetl, the great cypress that
could live a thousand years, and a willow, both of them
water-seeking plants. At the base of the world tree was
a cave, and from this cave, like an earthly womb, human
beings had once emerged. The Tenochtitlan version of this
template includes another significant element: streams of
water emerge from the caves, composed of complementary
elements: fiery water and burning water, blue water and
yellow water. But instead of being violent, as their names
would suggest, the streams are peacefully flowing ones.
These streams were connective axes between the human
world of the earth’s surface and the underworld, whose
entrance was marked by caves. 23
Having arrived at the ideal space of an altepetl, Huitzilo-
pochtli addressed his chosen people, the Mexica, and his
speech in this history underscores their sense of being
embattled and surrounded by enemies: “Thus shall we
find all who lie surrounding us, all whom we shall conquer,
whom we shall capture.” 24 These enemies included the hos-
tile surrounding environment. During their migration, the
Mexica often lived in marginal areas in and around the
salty lake, and had to subsist on a diet of snakes and frogs;
one of their settlements at Tizaapan, adjacent to the lake
near Culhuacan, was “occupied only by vipers and poison-
ous snakes.” 25
Despite its representation as the ideal altepetl, the rocky
outcrop was hardly a ready-made paradise, and it was
only in conquering the surrounding lake that the Mexica
made it so. Archeology has revealed how the city was
once formed of small atolls that rose from the salty Lake
Tetzcoco; lower-lying areas were underwater during the
rainy season. 26 Over generations, residents filled in around
these atolls to reclaim more land from the lakebed, gradu-
ally filling in a larger landmass (albeit one with swampy