Barbara_E._Mundy]_The_Death_of_Aztec_Tenochtitlan

The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 89

space, oriented to the south. The upper left is dominated
by the tecpan, the palace of the indigenous government
built in the 1540s and discussed in the next chapter, and it
appears as a façade only, with an arched doorway and four
doughnut-shaped rings across the entablature. Estimating
from the scale of the 1588 map, the street façade of this
building would have been about ninety yards long.
The perimeter of the tianguis is dominated by struc-
tures, likely shops, with doorways, but it corresponds to the
1588 map in showing very few entrances; like the 1588 map,
on the lower right appear the circles to show the bases of
the arches of the Portales de Tejada. While the 1588 map
shows only a circle marked as fuente (fountain), in the oth-
erwise unmarked space of the interior of the market, the
map of figure 4.11 gives us more physical details. Within
the bounded space of the tianguis, there was an open square

around the central octagonal fountain or cistern, and eight

straight streets or passages radiated out from the corners,

dividing the space of the market into eight blocks. The

great corner blocks contain spaces for twenty marketers,

while the inner blocks, oriented to the cardinal directions,

contain ten, a grid that is diagramed in figure 4.12. The

large open square at the southwest corner was left unoccu-

pied by sellers, and was likely designed so that carts could

unload and turn around, the heaviest loads, those of ocotl,

“pitch pine,” quickly dispatched to an adjacent stall.

Many of these rectangular market spaces are identi-

fied by small hieroglyphs or images of the goods sold,

figuRe 4.11. Unknown creator, map of the Tianguis of Mexico,

oriented to the south, ca. 1580s, nineteenth-century copy. Ms. Mexicain

106b, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.