Flower wars According to
Diego Durán's History of the Indies of New Spain (and a few other sources that are believed to be based on the
Crónica X), the
flower wars were a ritual among the cities of
Aztec Triple Alliance and
Tlaxcala, Huexotzingo and Cholula. This form of ritual was introduced probably after the mid-1450s following droughts, as famine caused many deaths in the Mexican highlands.
Sacrifice ritual Human sacrifice rituals were performed at the appropriate times each month or festival with the appropriate number of living bodies and other goods. These individuals were previously chosen to be sacrificed, as was the case for people embodying the gods themselves, or members of an enemy party which had been captured and prepared to be sacrificed. in the
National Museum of Anthropology. This altar-like stone vessel was used to hold the hearts of sacrificial victims. See also
chacmool. A great deal of cosmological thought seems to have underlain each of the Aztec sacrificial rites. Most of the sacrificial rituals took more than two people to perform. In the usual procedure of the ritual, the victim would be taken to the top of the temple. The victim would then be laid on a stone slab, a
chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of
flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. The Aztec believed that the heart (
tona) was both the seat of the individual and a fragment of the Sun's heat (
istli). The
chacmool was a very important religious tool used during sacrifices. The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the
diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. The body would land on a terrace at the base of the pyramid called an
apetlatl. Before and during the killing, priests and audience gathered in the plaza below, stabbed, pierced and bled themselves as auto-sacrifice. Hymns, whistles, spectacular costumed dances and percussive music marked different phases of the rite. The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the
tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods. The conquistadors Cortés and
Alvarado found that some of the sacrificial victims they freed "indignantly rejected [the] offer of release and demanded to be sacrificed". The higher estimate would average 15 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple. Additionally, some historians argue that these numbers were inaccurate as most written account of Aztec sacrifices were made by Spanish sources to justify Spain's conquest. Nonetheless, according to
Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
Michael Harner, in his 1977 article
The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, cites an estimate by
Woodrow Borah, according to which about one percent of the population was sacrificed annually in the early 15th century. Borah calculated that about 250,000 persons were sacrificed every year, assuming a total population of the Aztec Empire of roughly 25 million. Others have rejected this estimate as implausibly high, arguing chiefly that the actual population was likely lower, implying that the victim count must have been lower too. Borah's method of calculating the number of sacrificed as a percentage of the population was also criticized as inappropriate.
Victor Davis Hanson argues that a claim by Don Carlos Zumárraga of 20,000 per annum is "more plausible".
Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of
Codex Ixtlilxochitl, states that one in five children of the Mexica tributaries was killed annually, without translating this into an absolute number. He likely referred to sacrifices occurring throughout all of Central Mexico and might have meant that 20% of the children of subject people were sacrificed before growing up. On the basis of the
Florentine Codex,
Caroline Dodds Pennock estimates that about 500 people may have been sacrificed per
tōnalpōhualli cycle in the Aztec capital. She leaves the possibility that such sacrifices were held in each
calpulli district of the capital, resulting in a total number of victims about twenty times as high. For the total empire, she regards 1,000 to 20,000 annual victims as a plausible range. Some scholars believe that, since the Aztecs often tried to intimidate their enemies, they could have inflated the number of victims as a
propaganda tool. Some have argued that Bernal Díaz may have been in a state of shock when estimating the number of skulls at one of the seven
Tenochtitlan tzompantlis, leading to a grossly inflated calculation. According to the
Florentine Codex, fifty years before the conquest the Aztecs burnt the skulls of the former tzompantli. Archeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma has unearthed and studied some tzompantlis. In 2003, archaeologist
Elizabeth Graham noted that the largest number of skulls yet found at a single tzompantli was only about a dozen. As of 2020, 603 skulls have been identified as belonging to another tzompantli, which is thought to be one of the seven towers in Tenochtitlan formed from the skulls of sacrificial victims. Every Aztec warrior would have to provide at least one prisoner for sacrifice. All the male population was trained to be warriors, but only the few who succeeded in providing captives could become full-time members of the warrior elite. Accounts also state that several young warriors could unite to capture a single prisoner, which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging. There is still much debate as to what social groups constituted the usual victims of these sacrifices. It is often assumed that all victims were 'disposable' commoners or foreigners. However, slaves – a major source of victims – were not a permanent class but rather persons from any level of Aztec society who had fallen into debt or committed some crime. Likewise, most of the earliest accounts talk of prisoners of war of diverse social status, and concur that virtually all child sacrifices were locals of noble lineage, offered by their own parents. It is doubtful if many victims came from far afield. In 1454, the Aztec government forbade the slaying of captives from distant lands at the capital's temples. Duran's informants told him that sacrifices were consequently "nearly always ... friends of the [Royal] House", meaning warriors from allied states. ==Sacrifices to specific gods==