axes in The ciTy • 189the citizenry’s growing poverty: the exorbitant demands
by members of the Crown government on the peoples of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan. He issued a searing complaint to
Valderrama about the demands for goods and services
that the viceroy and the judges of the audiencia had been
making on his people for the past decade—those loads of
lime and stone for their houses, the cartloads of fodder
for their horses, the fruit for their tables. This complaint
comes down to us in the form of the Codex Osuna, the
pictorial source for much of what we know about the city
from 1555 to 1565. Ironically, the Osuna precisely mirrors
the complaints about him and his cabildo launched by com-
moners in the 1564 lawsuit.
Cipactzin’s complaint would have an effect. Viceroy
Velasco would escape any censure, as he died of a lingering
illness at the end of July 1564, two weeks after the tecpan
riot. But Valderrama eventually would suspend two of the
six judges of the audiencia (Villanueva and Vasco de Puga)
from their offices and push another (Zorita) to resign and
return to Spain at the beginning of 1566. 96 Not long after,
the city’s royal government and the Spanish cabildo were
sucked into another political maelstrom as Martín Cortés,
the conquistador’s son, who returned to New Spain in 1563,
fomented a coup d’état, which was uncovered in the summer
of 1566. These events—with their marquee actors—playing
out on the Plaza Mayor eclipsed the tragedies unfolding in
the tecpan. On May 24, 1565, Cipactzin emerged, alone, on
the same balcony from which he had announced the crush-
ing tributes the previous year. He screamed “as if possessed
by the devil,” and his raving went on through the night. He
would die at the end of the year. 97concLusion
This chapter has shown the multifold ways that spaces
were marked in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, from the movement
of sacred images in processions, to decorous mitotes in the
tecpan, which in turn defined axes, urban hot spots, and
peripheries in relation to the center. We have also seen how
the indigenous rulers in the tecpan connected their person
and their rule to these spaces, often working in tandem
with the Franciscans. In the giveaways of feasts and the
feathered costumes of the mitotes, we have seen how these
very rulers carried the festival culture of the pre-Hispanic
altepetl into the seventeenth century. But one of the most
important roles of pre-Hispanic rulers was the manipu-
lation of water, which was essential for the maintenance
of the altepetl within the singular watery environment of
the Valley of Mexico, and it is to water that we return in
the next chapter.