The Aztec Economy

From about 1300 to the Spanish invasion of 1519–1521, economic life in central Mexico connected household cultivation and manufacture with local markets, long-distance trade and tribute. The Mexica were the Nahua people centered at Tenochtitlan; Nahua communities elsewhere had their own local histories and rulers. The Triple Alliance, formed in 1428 by Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, linked many communities through unequal political obligations. Food and crafted goods moved through these relationships by different routes.

Farming and household production

Maize, beans, squash and other crops came from fields adapted to local water and soils. Around the shallow freshwater lakes south of the Basin of Mexico, farmers built chinampas, raised plots made from lake sediment, branches and decaying vegetation. Channels between the plots supplied water and let canoes travel among fields. Farmers replenished soil by adding organic matter, including aquatic vegetation. Irrigated river valleys, hillside terraces and rain-fed fields supported other communities and crops.

Households grew food and turned some raw materials into goods for use or exchange. Cotton from warmer regions could be spun into thread and woven into cloth. A maize account in Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, compiled around 1577 by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators, follows a farmer through turning soil, sowing maize and beans, weeding, harvesting cobs and storing them in a granary. The sequence shows how fieldwork continued through storage before food reached the household or market.

Markets and long-distance exchange

Local markets allowed households to obtain goods they did not produce themselves. In his second letter to Charles V, dated 30 October 1520, Hernán Cortés describes a daily market at Tlatelolco beside Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City. Sellers were grouped by kinds of merchandise: food, medicines, cotton thread, pottery, building materials and other goods. Porters carried loads, while barbers and food vendors sold services as well as objects. Cortés says goods were sold by number or measure; market magistrates heard disputes, and inspectors checked measures.

People also exchanged goods directly, while some useful products served as payment. Cacao beans were counted for purchases and payments, while lengths of cotton cloth called quachtli offered another exchange medium. These commodity forms of money were not minted metal coins.

Professional merchants also organized exchange over longer distances. Pochteca referred broadly to professional merchants; oztomeca were specialists in distant trade. In Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún and Nahua collaborators describe merchants traveling in organized companies and reaching Tzinacantla, in present-day Chiapas. Some dressed and spoke like local residents, exchanging blades of obsidian, a volcanic glass, needles and dyes for amber and bright feathers. The account says they reported what they learned to merchant leaders and the ruler, so a trading journey could carry both goods and information.

Tribute and provincial supply

Tribute joined a named community with an obligation imposed through political power. In the same letter, Cortés wrote that governors and collectors in the provinces kept pictorial accounts of what each province owed and that communities supplied distinctive local products. Such assessments moved goods through an administrative obligation, rather than through a buyer and seller agreeing on a market price.

The Codex Mendoza, a manuscript made in 1542 by Nahua and Spanish collaborators to record earlier tribute demands, shows how those assessments connected production to political supply. Its folio 52r represents seven towns in Tochpan, near present-day Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, and lists garments, warrior costumes, feather shields, bags of feathers, greenstone and turquoise beads, and dried chiles. A garment required cotton preparation and weaving; featherwork called for specialized makers and access to feathers. Cortés also describes canoe traffic linking the Basin’s lake cities, while the codex depicts goods assessed from distant communities. Markets and tribute could involve similar products, but one transferred them through exchange and the other through a political duty.

For the wider setting, see Aztec History and Society.