Tlacaelel

Tlacaelel never took the throne and is the most consequential Mexica of the fifteenth century. He held the office of Cihuacoatl — named, oddly, after a childbirth goddess — for some fifty years under four or five rulers, was offered the kingship more than once and declined it each time, and is credited by the chroniclers with the things that made the empire what it was: Huitzilopochtli raised to the head of the pantheon, the tribute system, the burning of the old books, and the doctrine that war exists to feed the sun. How much of that is really his and how much was assigned to him afterwards by his own descendants, who wrote several of the sources, is a live question.

Parentage

• Huitzilihuitl

Domains

• statecraft

Relations

• half sibling: Moctezuma I
• half sibling: Chimalpopoca

Sources

• Reference treatments of Tlacaelel and of Mexica governance.