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Macuilxochitzin (born c. 1435), also referred to in some texts as Macuilxochitl, [1] was a poet (cuicanitl [2]) during the peak years of the Aztec civilization. She was the daughter of Tlacaélael, [3] a counselor to the Aztec kings and the niece of the Tlatoani warrior Axayacatl. [1]
The Aztecs [a] (/ ˈ æ z t ɛ k s / AZ-teks) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
As Aztec society was in part centered on warfare, every Aztec male received some sort of basic military training from an early age. Typically by the time the child reached three years of age, the boy would begin to take simple instruction at the hands of his father on the tasks expected of men, no matter what social class they fell into. [5]
The Aztecs were conquered by Spain in 1521 after a long siege of the capital, Tenochtitlan, where much of the population died from hunger and smallpox. Cortés, with 508 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala , and eventually other Aztec tributary states.
The word Aztec in modern usage would not have been used by the people themselves. It has variously been used to refer to the Aztecs or Triple Alliance, the Nahuatl-speaking people of central Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest, or specifically the Mexica ethnicity of the Nahuatl-speaking tribes (from tlaca). [7]
These attributions are testament to the long lifespan of oral tradition, since Nezahualcoyotl died almost 50 years before the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and the poems were written down another fifty years after that. Juan Bautista de Pomar was a grandson of Nezahualcoyotl and likely wrote them from memory of the oral tradition.
Mexica children were forcibly taken to newly established Christian schools where they were indoctrinated into Christian beliefs and Spanish culture, and the surviving Mexica men and women were sent to work in newly-established Spanish estates, known as haciendas, as well as mines and other civil projects, such as digging canals.
There are multiple examples of Aztec poetry written in Nahuatl. [3] Most of these were collected during the early period of the colonization of Mexico by Spanish clergy who involved themselves in an effort to collect firsthand knowledge of all things related to the indigenous civilizations of the newly conquered territory.