Article suitable for older students

How did the bridges in the causeways work?

Detail from Diego Rivera’s mural of the great Aztec market at Tlatelolco

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Thomas Rupp: Can you provide any information on how the bridges between sections of the causeways leading out of the Aztecs’ capital city worked? Were they wooden drawbridge type affairs attached to towers with ropes as shown in many illustrations These seem to portray them as the same width as the causeways. Or were they more narrow platforms moved by lifting to allow a boat to pass? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore).

Many thanks for an interesting question. Frustratingly, as Professor Michael E. Smith wrote in answer to a question from a school about Aztec aqueducts (follow the link below), we don’t know much about how the Aztecs built bridges. One of Cortes’s companion-at-arms, Fray Francisco de Aguilar described the causeways leading to Tenochtitlan in his 1571 Relación breve de la conquista de la Nueva España as being ‘intersected by drawbridges’, however this is the English translation of the Spanish puente levadiza - a more general term for a ‘bridge that rises’. He goes on to write ‘The causeway was built across the lake and had wooden bridges that could be raised or removed’. Further on he outlines the Spaniards’ plan to escape from the city during the Noche Triste by making ‘a portable bridge which had been made of a wide beam, over which we were very silently to cross the canals’. It seems clear from this that the bridges WEREN’T ‘drawbridges’ in the medieval European sense that you describe in your question, but rather plain, flat wooden beams.

This seems to be confirmed by the imagery we have access to today depicting the bridges. Diego Rivera - renowned for the meticulous preparatory research he invested in his paintings of pre-Hispanic Mexico - shows the bridges distinctly in this light in his famous mural of the Great Market at Tlatelolco (see pictures, above). Moreover if we go back to 16th century illustrations, which may well have been one of Rivera’s sources, such as the one we show here - from the travel works collected by the Italian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio - the same idea emerges.
In her notes on de Aguilar’s commentary, incidentally, Patricia de Fuentes adds: ‘These bridges... could be removed for defensive purposes, whereupon the water served as a moat. The breaks in the causeway also permitted the canoes to circulate about the lake’.
Whilst the Spanish chroniclers of the time DID add towers - a few resemble mini churches - along the causeways, we feel it safe to assume that these were Western ‘add-ons’, the result of a biased European imagination.
In summary, we think your second suggestion is the correct one.

Reference:-
• The Conquistadors: First-Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico edited and translated by Patricia de Fuentes, 1963, University of Oklahoma Press.

Picture sources:-
• Main: photo of Diego Rivera’s mural from Wikimedia Commons
• 16th century illustration, from Archivo Salvat, scanned from La Ciudad de México Vol. 1 by Fernando Benítez, SALVAT, Mexico, 1981.

Professor Michael Smith’s answer about Aztec aqueducts and bridges

Comments (1)

Thomas Rupp

27th Feb 2023

Thank you for your response! I wondered if a raft type bridge, floating on the water but tied to stakes, made more sense. But I forgot “puente levadiza” so it seems something like a drawbridge was in fact the actual configuration.

Aztecs

Maya

How did the bridges in the causeways work?

Comments (1)

More Ask Us Entries