Axayacatl

Elected tlatoani in 1469 while probably still in his twenties, Axayacatl owed his throne to an unusually concentrated inheritance: his mother Atotoztli was a daughter of Moctezuma I and his father Tezozomoc was a son of Itzcoatl, making him a grandson of two former rulers and a great-grandson of the dynastic founder Acamapichtli on both sides. The electors passed over his older brothers Tizoc and Ahuitzotl, each of whom would nonetheless rule after him — a sequence of three brothers on the throne that illustrates how succession in Tenochtitlan moved laterally through the royal kin rather than from father to son.

The defining event of the reign came in 1473, when conflict with the neighboring island city of Tlatelolco — Tenochtitlan's twin and commercial rival, ruled by Moquihuix, who was married to Axayacatl's sister — ended in open war. Tenochtitlan's victory extinguished Tlatelolco's separate dynasty; the city was placed under appointed governors and its great market and its merchants were absorbed into the larger Mexica state.

Abroad, Axayacatl campaigned extensively in the Toluca Valley to the west, subduing the Matlatzinca towns, and led expeditions toward the Gulf coast and Tehuantepec regions. His westward push, however, brought the Mexica against the Tarascan (Purepecha) state of Michoacan, and around 1478 a Mexica army suffered a severe defeat — by some accounts the loss of most of the force engaged. The Tarascan frontier remained closed to Mexica expansion thereafter. The chronicles also record that Axayacatl was wounded in the leg in the Toluca campaigns and that major monuments, including by some attributions the famous calendar stone, were carved during his rule, though such assignments are uncertain.

He died in 1481, only about thirty-two years old by the conventional reckoning, and was succeeded by his brother Tizoc and then, in 1486, by his youngest brother Ahuitzotl. His longer-term importance to the dynasty lay in his sons: Moctezuma II, elected in 1502, and Cuitlahuac, the penultimate tlatoani, who led the resistance to the Spaniards in 1520. As with all rulers of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan, the dates of his life, given as about 1449 to 1481, rest on colonial-era annals whose chronologies are approximate.