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Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe the Medieval Globe LEGAL ENCOUNTERS ON THE MEDIEVAL GLOBE THE MEDIEVAL GLOBE The Medieval Globe provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars of all world areas by focusing on convergence, movement, and interdependence. Con­ need not encompass the globe in any territorial sense. Rather, TMG advan ces a tributions to a global understanding of the medieval period (broadly defined) new theory and praxis of medieval studies by bringing into view phenomena that have been rendered practically or conceptually invisible by anachronistic bound­ aries, categories, and expectations. TMG also broadens discussion of the ways that medieval processes inform the global present and shape visions of the future. Executive Editor Carol Symes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Editorial Board James Barrett, University of Cambridge Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island Felipe Fernández­Armesto, University of Notre Dame Elizabeth Lambourn, De Montfort University Yuen­Gen Liang, Wheaton College Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia Elizabeth Oyler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Christian Raffensperger, Wittenberg University Rein Raud, University of Helsinki & Tallinn University D. Fairchild Ruggles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alicia Walker, Bryn Mawr College Volume 2 LEGAL ENCOUNTERS ON THE MEDIEVAL GLOBE Edited by ELIZABETH LAMBOURN Copyeditor Shannon Cunningham Editorial Assistant Kelli McQueen Page design and typesetting Martine Maguire­Weltecke Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress © 2017, Arc Humanities Press, Kalamazoo and Bradford Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work. granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copy­ right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94­553) does not require the Publisher’s permission. ISBN 9781942401094 eISBNmip-archumanities.org 9781942401117 THE FUTURE OF AZTEC LAW JEROME A. OFFNER 2019 will mark half a millennium from the Spanish intrusion into central Mexico. Throughout this region and beyond, the Spaniards encountered a Thegreat worldyear civilization, enormously complex and ancient, some small portions of which a few members of their society managed to record, motivated by conven­ tional religious, economic, political, and legal concerns, although often as well by fascination with what they encountered.1 As the postcontact society and economy changed, more rapidly in some areas than others, asserting and ascertaining the content of precontact Aztec law became a vital concern of Spanish missionaries,2 colonists, colonial administrators, surviving indigenous elites, and indigenous communities. Although the fate of indigenous law under the new Spanish hegem­ ony is a compelling3 topic in itself, this article is concerned with recovering the substance and nature of a legal tradition4 developed in the Americas in isolation from the rest of the world and now forever lost in time. What we can know of this Nahuatl speakers in Mexico as well as to Mesoamerican researchers and all schol­ unique tradition, nevertheless, remains of interest to millions of contemporary ars interested in comparative legal systems. concentrating on the city and small empire of Texcoco, where documentation on In the 1980s, I published a monograph and a series of articles on Aztec law, precontact law was most plentiful. Although I was careful to communicate the dynamism, factional disputes, and change in the Texcocan system in these works, 1 Townsend, The Aztecs; Coe and Koontz, Mexico; and Smith, The Aztecs, provide broad and detailed descriptions of the civilization encountered, although there is no consensus view on many of its aspects. 2 The term “Aztec” has increasingly been replaced by the name of the hegemonic ethnic group, the Nahua (see below), in spite of the fact that there were many ethnic groups in the region (e.g., Otomi, Totonac, Tepehua, etc.), often successfully living together, although generally (but not always) under Nahua rule. The Nahuas were not themselves a unitary group; subgroups exhibited significant cultural and linguistic differences that often, in will generally be employed to emphasize the political and legal administration of this multi­ conjunction with differing economic interests, led to armed conflict. In this article, “Aztec” ethnic situation. 3 Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, remains the classic study in this respect, along Los pueblos de la Sierra. E.g., Cline, ; Kellogg, ; with4 later workColonial by Garc Culhuacanía Martí�nez, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture Megged, “Between History, Memory, and Law.” 2 JerOMe a. OFFner killing as vigorously pursued by the elite in Aztec societies.5 Although Mesoameri­ I reemphasized these aspects in an article in 1993 on inter­state and intra­familial can studies have continued to develop in the past two decades, no other investiga­ tor primarily interested in precontact Aztec law has emerged, with the exception of Carlos Brokmann Haro.6 In almost all other instances, Aztec law continues to be mentioned only in decontextualized fragments. Meanwhile, some investiga­ the content of Aztec law must have been as determined by their own Marxist and tors (such as Frederic Hicks and Pedro Carrasco) have persisted in declaring what Polanyist ideologies, especially with regard to land tenure and political structure. Other investigators have taken an empirical approach to the available data, reveal­ ing the nuances and complexities found in reality. In one of Hicks’s last articles, for example, we see him working to reconcile the richness7 of detail regarding land with the strictures of his ideology. tenure, as reported in sources from8 Tlaxcala (just outside the Basin of Mexico), Aztec laws,9 whether in pictorial or alphabetic form, for the entirety of the Texcocan Perhaps the major current tendency, however, has been to mistake reports of legal system,10 with little consideration given to the evident but poorly understood empire.11 It is, in fact, in the richness of reports of precontact indigenous behavior intricacies of Aztec jurisprudence and how it varied from town to town across the 5 See comments below on limitations on the power of Aztec rulers. 6 Haro, La estera y la silla. This short monograph is essentially an extended review of published work, rather than the product of original source research. Nevertheless, it follows and presents both legal and anthropological issues well while deftly contextualizing the Aztec legal system with special attention paid to the interests of Mexican readers. Some areas of agreement and a few areas of disagreement with this valuable study are mentioned below. 7 E.g., Harvey and Prem, Explorations in Ethnohistory; and Cline, Colonial Culhuacan. 8 Hicks, “Land and Succession in the Indigenous Noble Houses of Sixteenth­Century Tlaxcala.”9 . See also 10Or, more specifically, what may or may not be legal rules: Allure see below.of Nezahualcoyotl Mohar Betancourt, Códice Mapa Quinatzin. Lee, “Reexamining Nezahualcóyotl’s Texcoco” and 11 Haro understands the importance of appreciating and analyzing the Aztec legal system as more than just a list of legal rules. Nevertheless, he unaccountably believes that (jurisprudenica verdardera La estera y la silla, adherence to legal rules in precontact Mexico was so strong that “true jurisprudence” ) could not develop: 13–14, 94. (The use of lapse into ethnocentricity by a modern Western writer insisting that the cultural concepts “true” when coupled with a modern Western understanding of a concept usually signals a contrary, numerous reports regarding the creation and application of law in rapidly changing of “the Other” should be the same as or very similar to modern Western concepts.) On the 3 The FUTUre OF Aztec law that we can begin to appreciate the interplay between legal rules,12 principles, and everyday conduct among the Aztecs, as well as the actual behav­ jurisprudential ior within and attitude towards the legal system. At the same time, we can gain hints regarding how the various legal systems regarded plaintiffs and defendants and how legal process actually functioned. Such sources also record social discord and dysfunction, as well as cohesion; and the intersection of indigenous concep­ tions of law and morality. Chief among these are the works of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar13 who worked with indigenous informants in the six­ teenth century to produce an encyclopedic account of Aztec culture. This necessarily brief article is written for specialists in Old World14 medieval studies and is intended to: introduce the nature of and the challenges involved in interpreting the surviving materials; highlight some interesting aspects of Aztec law and society; and suggest fresh approaches to Aztec law, given new tools avail­ able for research on Mesoamerica. The relative paucity of information compared to other vanished legal systems, especially in the areas of case law, legal process, ­ and jurisprudence, presents
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