Nezahualcoyotl

Nezahualcoyotl is the one figure in this material who is remembered for something other than conquest. He saw his father killed by the Tepanecs when he was a boy, spent years in exile, came back with Itzcoatl and took Azcapotzalco apart, and then ran Texcoco for forty years as the alliance's junior partner and its cultural capital — a legal code, botanical gardens, and the great dike across the lake that kept the brackish east water out of the fresh west water and made Tenochtitlan habitable. Poems are transmitted under his name; how many are actually his is disputed, and they are good enough that the question is worth having.

Domains

• sovereignty
• poetry

Relations

• ally: Itzcoatl

Sources

• Reference treatments of Nezahualcoyotl, of Nezahualpilli's reign dates and of the Triple Alliance.