The Flower Wars Begin
The Aztecs and their neighbours fought arranged wars whose purpose was to take captives rather than territory. The xochiyaoyotl, flower wars, are recorded from the mid-fifteenth century between the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan and the cities of Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo and Cholula on the other side of the mountains. The conventional account, given by Spanish-era sources, is that they began during a famine in the 1450s as a way of supplying sacrifices to end it, and became a standing arrangement: a time and place agreed, a fixed number of warriors, and combat conducted with weapons designed to disable rather than kill — the macuahuitl, a wooden sword edged with obsidian, and a preference for seizing an opponent by the hair. The captives were sacrificed at the temples, and to be taken alive was a warrior's honourable end. Modern historians treat the ceremonial explanation with some caution. Tlaxcala was an independent state that the Alliance surrounded and could plausibly have conquered, and the flower wars kept it under permanent pressure, trained young warriors, and displayed Aztec power without the cost of a full campaign — which is a strategy of attrition dressed as a ritual. Whatever the intention, the consequence was decisive. Tlaxcala had been fighting the Aztecs for two generations when Cortés arrived in 1519, and supplied him with tens of thousands of troops. Most of the army that took Tenochtitlan was Indigenous. The Spanish also had trouble understanding what they were watching. Their accounts describe warriors trying to capture rather than kill them and regard it as a tactical error, which it was against opponents fighting a different kind of war entirely. The last flower war was fought a few years before Cortés landed.
- Year: 1450 CE
- Category: Military
