Toltec Empire

Seven chiefs and a prophet

formationDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

Long before they had a monarchy, the people later remembered as Toltecs were exiles on the move - driven, tradition holds, from a homeland called Huehue Tlapallan, and led for generations by rebel princes and a council of seven chiefs who answered, in matters of real importance, to an aged prophet named Hueman. They settled for a time at Tulancingo, building a single house large enough to shelter the whole community while they sent out smaller parties to found satellite settlements nearby, as they had done at every previous stop on their long migration.

A capital taken from its own earlier inhabitants

On Hueman's own counsel, the wanderers moved on to a river valley already held by an Otomí settlement, and there founded the city of Tollan. Colonial-era chronicles pass in near silence over how the land actually changed hands - it strains belief that the valley's own previous inhabitants yielded it without a fight, yet no account of such a struggle survives, an omission historians attribute to native annalists simply choosing not to record it. What the sources agree on is what came next: six years spent building the new city and cultivating the surrounding land, under a government that was, in its own structure, a theocratic republic - each of the seven chiefs commanding his own people in war and peace, but all of them yielding, in matters of national importance, to the prophet's own spiritual authority.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · Lgarciar · CC BY-SA 3.0

A republic that voted itself out of existence

In the seventh year of peace and prosperity at Tollan, the chiefs convened an assembly of the heads of every family and the community's leading men. Their proposal was to abolish the collective government they themselves led, fearing that a commonwealth answering to so many independent chieftains would eventually tear itself apart, and to replace it with a single monarch chosen by election - offering, in the same breath, to surrender their own standing as the price of stability. The assembly agreed.

A crown with a time limit

formationDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

Rather than raise one of their own seven chiefs to the new throne, Tollan's assembly sent an embassy laden with gifts to the distant court of Huehue Tlapallan, the homeland the Toltecs themselves had been exiled from generations earlier, asking for a prince of that court's own royal line to come and reign over them. The mission succeeded: a young son of the Tlapallan king, still largely unknown in his own country, was brought back and crowned at Tollan under the name Chalchiuh Tlatonac, "shining precious stone" - his personal charm and intelligence, the chronicles say, winning the new subjects over almost immediately.

A throne no one could hold forever

One of the new king's first acts, together with his own counsellors, was to set a limit on his own office that no later Toltec ruler would be free to ignore: no king was to reign more than fifty-two years - one full turn of the Mesoamerican calendar round - after which he was required to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, continuing afterward only as an adviser rather than a ruler. Should a king die before his own fifty-two years were up, the unexpired term was to be governed by magistrates chosen by the people rather than left to an underage or unready heir.

A capital that outgrew the plan that founded it

Tollan's own transformation from a republic of exiles into a monarchy with a written rule of succession happened, by the chronology Bancroft's own sources suggest, sometime in the first quarter of the eighth century, between roughly 710 and 720. What began as a modest new settlement on contested Otomí land would, within less than two centuries, become the city every later Mesoamerican civilization - the Aztecs prominent among them - looked back on as the source of legitimate kingship itself.

A prince who waited for his throne

peakDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

The generations of kings who followed Chalchiuh Tlatonac left the Toltec chronicles thin on specific events, but by the ninth century the throne had passed, through a line the sources trace only unevenly, to a king whose murder left his own young son unable to claim the crown outright. Rather than press an immediate and probably hopeless claim, the prince withdrew to a city near Tollan to wait, quietly building support among sympathetic nobles across the wider Toltec domain and working out, in the meantime, the religious reforms he intended to pursue once in power.

A throne won by reputation rather than force

The prince's patience paid off. On the death of the king who had succeeded his murdered father - possibly his own brother, the sources are not certain - broad support for his own claim, built as much on religious conviction as on hereditary right, carried him to the throne at Tollan. He took the name Topiltzin Ceacatl Quetzalcoatl, and the chronology later chroniclers assign to his accession, however uncertain in its particulars, is usually placed around 873.

A reign every later tradition would remember as golden

Under Quetzalcoatl, Toltec influence extended, by voluntary allegiance rather than conquest, across an enormous stretch of territory - from Tehuantepec in the south to Zacatecas in the north, few provinces between the two seas failing to acknowledge Tollan's own primacy. The city itself, already the political capital under the older alliance with Culhuacan, now surpassed every rival in the magnificence of its temples and palaces and the skill of its own artists, becoming in practice, if not always in formal precedence, the true metropolis of the whole Toltec world.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · HJPD · CC BY 3.0

A king who would not shed blood

peakDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

Quetzalcoatl's own religious reforms, popular as they were among much of the Toltec population, made him powerful enemies from the very start of his reign. Human sacrifice, practiced since long before Tollan existed and adopted widely across the Toltec world, he prohibited outright within his own capital's temples - a direct affront to the established priesthoods of rival cities, who saw a king who was also their own religion's supreme pontiff turning his combined authority against the rites that had always underpinned it. Toltec nobles, too, grew restive under a degree of priestly restraint their counterparts in other cities did not have to answer to.

An opposition led by his own rival priest

The dissident faction at Tollan coalesced around a figure the chronicles call Huemac, also known by the name Tezcatlipoca - a rival high priest with, the sources suggest, a plausible claim of his own to the throne, and the backing of allied monarchs uneasy at how thoroughly Tollan's own prestige had come to eclipse theirs. Colonial-era accounts remember the struggle between the two men and their factions in the language of sorcerers' tricks and supernatural contests, but the underlying conflict was concrete enough: whether human sacrifice would remain central to Toltec religion, and whether Tollan's own primacy would continue unchallenged.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · Unknown painter · Public domain

A throne surrendered rather than defended by force

After roughly two decades on the throne, and with his own more warlike supporters urging him to fight for his position, Quetzalcoatl chose instead to give it up. Rather than preside over a restoration of the sacrifices he had banned, he left Tollan by his own choice, staying briefly at Quauhtitlan before crossing east to the plateau of Huitzilapan in 895. Huemac succeeded him immediately as ruler of Tollan

• and the faction Quetzalcoatl had spent a reign trying to suppress inherited the city his own reforms had failed to make permanent.

An empire with no fixed border

peakDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

By the close of the tenth century Tollan stood, in art and learning, at the head of the whole Toltec world, though the older political precedence of Culhuacan lingered in formal terms even as its practical weight faded. Sources give no data precise enough to draw a firm boundary around the domain the allied Toltec monarchs actually controlled at this height, but its reach is generally reckoned to have matched, and in some directions exceeded, what the Aztec empire would later hold - stretching into Michoacán and a wide stretch of the north-west that no later Nahua power would fully master either.

A king who inherited a rival's name

The throne passed in 994 to a second king remembered as Huemac - distinguished from the priest-rival of Quetzalcoatl's own generation by the numeral historians attach to him, Huemac II, also called Tecpancaltzin. Unlike his namesake, this Huemac belonged to Quetzalcoatl's own religious faction rather than opposing it, restraining the practice of human sacrifice in Tollan's temples much as his predecessor had, and by some accounts even taking Quetzalcoatl's own name as part of his royal titles - a fact that has left later chroniclers genuinely unable to say, in places, whether a given episode belongs to this reign or to the earlier one.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · Gerd Eichmann · CC BY-SA 4.0

A promising start weighed down by old grievances

Huemac II's first year on the throne won him, by every account, the same kind of popular trust his more famous predecessor had once enjoyed: careful in his religious duties, sparing with his words, prompt and impartial in dispensing justice to subjects of every rank. But the old rivalry between Quetzalcoatl's followers and the partisans of the bloodier Tezcatlipoca cult, reduced to a minority but never extinguished, had not gone away - and its adherents, unable to match Huemac's own popularity directly, set about looking for a way to bring him down by more indirect means.

The king's mistress

contractionDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

A Toltec noble named Papantzin came to Huemac II's own court one day with his daughter Xochitl, bringing the king a new sweet syrup made from maguey sap that Papantzin himself had invented. The king was pleased enough with the gift, and with the young woman who brought it, to ask that she return with more of it - alone, save for a single attendant. Papantzin, proud of the honour shown his family, suspected nothing. Xochitl resisted the king's advances when she came, but was compelled by threats to submit, and was kept afterward, cut off from her own family, in a guarded palace near the capital under the pretext that she was being groomed for a great marriage.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · José María Obregón · Public domain

A secret that produced an heir

The affair lasted three years in secret, during which, in 1002, Xochitl bore Huemac a son, named at birth Meconetzin - "child of the maguey" - and known later as Acxitl. Papantzin eventually learned the truth by disguising himself and visiting the palace directly; his anger was calmed only by Huemac's promise that the boy would be named heir to the throne, since the queen had given the king only daughters. The Tezcatlipoca priesthood, no friend to a king of Quetzalcoatl's own religious line, spread the scandal as widely as it could, and Toltec faith in a monarch reputed for his own piety was badly shaken.

A succession the highest-ranking princes would not accept quietly

After the queen's death, Xochitl and her son were brought openly into the royal palace, and some accounts hold she was made Huemac's own legitimate wife by formal marriage. None of this settled the deeper problem: naming Acxitl heir meant disinheriting princes of higher rank who had expected the succession for themselves, and their resentment, compounded by the scandal's own damage to the king's reputation, left the throne of Tollan resting on foundations considerably less secure than the ones Huemac had inherited.

A demon at Teotihuacan

contractionDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

By the 1040s the strife between Quetzalcoatl's own followers and the Tezcatlipoca faction that had simmered since Acxitl's birth erupted into open violence inside Tollan itself. A rival religious sect was admitted into the capital by partisans of Tezcatlipoca even as the king's own forces were away campaigning elsewhere, and fighting between the rival factions in the city's own streets left its temples and palaces nearly in ruins. War between the allied kingdoms and a fresh outbreak of pestilence and famine followed in the same years, a run of disasters the chronicles date to between 1040 and 1047.

An assembly that begged for mercy and received a demon instead

Convinced the gods themselves had turned against them, the kingdom's priests, nobles and wise men convened a great propitiatory assembly at Teotihuacan, the ancient holy city where prayers had always been heard. What answered them, the tradition records, was no reassurance. A demon of huge size with long bony fingers appeared dancing among the assembled crowd, seizing Toltecs at random and dashing them dead at his feet; those present found themselves unable to flee even as hundreds died around them. The apparition returned a second time in a different shape with the same result, and a third time as a beautiful pale child sitting on a hilltop - until onlookers who approached discovered its head was a mass of corruption whose stench killed on contact. A final apparition told the assembly plainly that the gods would hear no more petitions, and that only flight could save the Toltecs from complete destruction.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875) · Peachseltzer · CC BY-SA 4.0

Invaders arriving as an old truce expired

Whatever the apparitions' own nature, the disasters they seemed to foretell were concrete enough. Toltec nobles had already begun emigrating from the country in growing numbers even before any formal decision to abandon it was made, and a ten-year truce between Acxitl's government and rebel forces to the north was, by 1058, nearing its end. Bands from the surrounding regions - loosely grouped by the chronicles under the name Chichimec, though which specific peoples were involved cannot now be traced with confidence - took advantage of Tollan's own internal dissension to press into Toltec territory from multiple directions at once, preparing a war the weakened kingdom was in no position to win outright.

Flight from a cave at Xico

endDrafted from Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (1875)

Acxitl, ruling as the successor of Quetzalcoatl's own line, marched out to meet the invading forces directly but was defeated in every engagement he fought. While he campaigned, a rival faction inside Tollan opened the city itself to a band of invaders under their own leader, and civil war broke out in the streets between three rival factions until the capital's noble buildings were, once again, badly damaged. Fighting between the allied Toltec kingdoms and pestilence and famine returned to the land at the same time.

A last stand that could not hold

Acxitl ordered a final stand at Tultitlan, where the battle raged for days before the Toltec forces were driven back step by step - first to Tollan itself, then to Xaltocan, Teotihuacan and Xochitlalpan in succession. Huemac and Xochitl were killed in this retreat, along with several of the kingdom's remaining generals. Acxitl himself escaped the rout by hiding in a cave on the island of Xico in Lake Chalco, while what remained of the Toltec army scattered into the mountains and lake marshes.

A kingdom's children entrusted to strangers

From his hiding place, Acxitl made a final secret visit to Culhuacan, gathered what loyal followers remained to him, and announced his own intention to leave the country for the homeland his ancestors had once been exiled from, promising to intercede there on his people's behalf. He entrusted his two infant children to guardians who would raise them without revealing their royal birth, and left in 1062. Other Toltec nobles scattered in different directions rather than follow him - some to the coasts, from which their own descendants would later send parties back to resettle the valley; others remained where they were, absorbed into the cities that had once answered to Tollan. What disappeared with Acxitl's own flight was a ruling dynasty, not a people: most Toltecs stayed in the land their ancestors had held, and simply became subjects, in the end, of whichever chiefs the invasions had left standing.