The Great Market of Tlatelolco
The market at Tlatelolco drew some 20,000 to 60,000 people a day, and the Spaniards who saw it in 1519 said they had seen nothing like it in Europe. Tlatelolco was the twin city of Tenochtitlan on the same island in Lake Texcoco, absorbed by its neighbour in 1473 and left as the commercial centre. Bernal Díaz, writing decades later, describes soldiers who had been in Rome and Constantinople saying that no market of that size and order existed anywhere, and Cortés reported it as twice the size of the square at Salamanca. The organisation is the striking part. Goods were laid out by category in fixed sections — gold and featherwork, cotton and cochineal, cacao, maize and beans, fish, vegetables, timber and lime, medicinal herbs, dogs, rope, tobacco, obsidian blades, slaves in wooden collars — with a court of judges sitting permanently in the plaza to settle disputes and inspectors checking measures. There was no coinage. Cacao beans, cotton cloaks of standard size and quills of gold dust functioned as currency, and counterfeit cacao beans stuffed with earth are recorded as an offence. Supply came in on canoes across the lake and on the backs of porters, since there were no draught animals and no wheeled transport, from as far as Guatemala and the Gulf coast, organised by the pochteca merchant class who also served as intelligence agents. The city was destroyed in 1521, and the square is now a plaza in Mexico City. The same square holds the ruins, a sixteenth-century church and a 1960s housing development, and a plaque calling the fall of the city neither a triumph nor a defeat but the painful birth of a nation. Students were shot there by the army in 1968.
- Year: 1450 CE
- Category: Economic
