The TLaTOani in TenochTiTlan • 57In a prayer recorded in the Florentine Codex, recited
on the death of a ruler, supplicants address Tezcatlipoca,
the great creator deity. Their words suggest that the ruler
is a kind of vessel for the deity: “Briefly, for a while, N.
[the ruler] hath come to assume thy troubles for thee on
earth . . . and he came to reap reward on thy reed mat,
thy reed seat, there he came to await thy spirit, thy word.”
The prayer also concerns itself with the liminal period
between the death of a ruler and the appointment of the
next. Anxiety during these periods ran high, particularly
about the fate of the altepetl, always subject to attack by
other altepeme and even more so when it lacked a desig-
nated leader. The prayer continues: “And the altepetl, will
it perhaps here in his absence be mocked? Will it divide?
Will it scatter? . . . Will the altepetl lie abandoned, will
it lie darkened?” The prayer goes on to implore the deity
Tezcatlipoca’s aid in selecting a successor, to “concede,
reveal, designate which one will guard for thee, will gov-
ern, will fortify, will gladden the altepetl, which one will
place [contlatlalitiez] the city upon his thigh, will fondle
it [in conahuiltiz], will dandle it?” 15 In this passage, the
joyful (even sexual) nature of the tlatoani’s duties is height-
ened—the word ahuiltia (found in “fondle”) was translated
in the sixteenth century as “to amuse someone with an
enjoyable game”; additionally, ahuiya had connotations of
sexual pleasure, with ahuiyani (literally, “a giver of plea-
sure”) translated into Spanish as the equivalent of “pros-
titute.” However, another current in the idea of tlatoani
would have been audible to speakers of Nahuatl—that of
order. Understood by the use of the root word tlalia (used
in the agglutinative word contlatlalitiez) was “to place”;
thus the Florentine’s translators render it in the question,
“Which one will place the city upon his thigh?” Given that
tlalia also means “to set things in order,” the prayer neatly
exposes that a key element of Mexica kingship was the
ruler’s role as delegate of Tezcatlipoca, and it addition-
ally identifies him as the protector (even sexual partner)
and organizer of the altepetl, the figure who keeps it from
military assault and from disorder. On reading more of
the passage, we find that the ruler is not only a stand-in for
Tezcatlipoca, but also a delegate of the line of male rulers
who came before him, and he will go to rejoin them on
his death. Because rulers were understood to be delegates
of immortal deities, costume was crucial in revealing the
“altered” identity of the ruler, made manifest in his role as
the delegate of a divine authority. Such transient costumes
had a more enduring life when they were reworked into
stone on monumental sculptures.maRking The uRban sPace
The costumes that Mexica rulers wore in public helped
forge a visible bond between them and the otherworldly
deity cults whose worship was shared by all sectors of soci-
ety; by dressing as deities such as Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilo-
pochtli, or Xipe Totec in public and by commissioning
works in stone of himself in which he was wearing their
costumes, a ruler thereby established himself as the con-
duit between the sacred spaces of the otherworld and the
quotidian plane of the known earth, the medium through
which these representations of sacred spaces came down to
earth. And the costumed ruler, as the center of a spectacle,
moved through very particular pathways in the city. Thus,
rulers, as they represented spaces of the empire both near
and far and the layered spaces of the cosmos, were aligned
with specific nodes at the city’s ceremonial centers and axes
both inside and outside of the urban fabric.
What were these nodes and axes? We know something
of the lived space of the city and the valences that some
of these spaces carried through time. On the eve of the
Conquest, Tenochtitlan was a four-part city, so large that
its component parts were themselves altepeme, with rul-
ers and internal bureaucracies, the whole being a “complex
altepetl” (see figure 1.10). 16 These component altepeme,
Moyotlan, Teopan, Atzacoalco, and Cuepopan, seem to
have been separated by the causeways (to the north, west,
and south) and main street (to the east), and thus occu-
pied the intercardinal spaces of the city. Tlatelolco, which
filled the northern part of the island, was also an altepetl,
having been conquered by Tenochtitlan in 1473, but was
never fully integrated into the four-part system. Each of
these altepeme had its own ceremonial center; we know
little about these urban centers, and assume that they were
smaller versions of the temple-and-plaza complex of the
main ceremonial center, at whose heart was the Templo
Mayor, because each contained districts called teocalli or
teocaltecpan—Nahuatl words meaning “temple” from com-
bining teotl, “divinity,” and calli, “house”; and from teotl, calli,
and tecpan, “p a l a c e .” 17 This four-part city was in turn subdi-
vided into smaller neighborhoods called tlaxilacalli (known
elsewhere as calpolli), whose residents traced descent to a
common ancestor. We currently understand the tlaxilacalli