By the 1200s, the Mexica had reached the central valley of Mexico. There they continued their practice of allying with others – often, in fact, working as mercenaries for other city states. Amid tough competition, they frequently came to grief and found themselves fleeing, or fighting for some territory they could call home. The people of the central valley – whom the Nahuas called the Toltecs, meaning ‘skilled craftsmen’ – had been practising agriculture for centuries and so the population was dense and land was at a premium. Eventually, the Mexica found an island at the centre of a huge lake. It was a reedy, swampy site that no one else seemed to want. When an eagle landed on a cactus, they decided that their God meant that they should stay. They built a little temple in the town they called Tenochtitlan, and desperately tried to manage the powerful groups who lived around them.
By the early 1400s, the situation had grown intolerable. In a bold move, a warrior named Itzcoatl, Obsidian Snake, a prior chief’s son by a commoner woman, someone who normally would never have become king, allied with other disempowered chiefs’ sons from two other nearby ethnic groups: together, in a moment of chaos caused by the death of a leading chief in the region, they took power – with each other’s help – in their three hometowns. Obsidian Snake soon came to dominate the Triple Alliance and he used the tight (forged-in-fire) connection with his allies to convince others to join them, and then to take territory from those who were recalcitrant; he had launched what has come to be called ‘the Aztec Empire’.
Obsidian Snake faced a difficulty common to many rulers: how to talk about history in such a way as to leave everybody (or at least most people) content with the status quo. He burned many of the pictographic histories, and commanded history-tellers to paint new ones. Propaganda, however, is of limited value in a face-to-face society in which almost everybody was there during a crisis and remembers what happened. The history-tellers needed to craft a careful story that fostered unity not division. They found a way to do this in keeping with the customs they had developed wandering south from the lands near Chaco Canyon. When the wandering travellers left the Nonoualca behind, many Nonoualca wives went with them. A story of the war that simply vilified the Nonoualca wasn’t going to work. So they told the story twice, once from the Nonoualca’s point of view, and then from the vantage point of those who had to depart.