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Basic Aztec facts: AZTEC MARKETS

2nd Jul 2020

Tlatelolco Marketplace as depicted at Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

Mexico has always been a land of markets. Today there are thriving big and small weekly markets in towns all round the country. The Mexica (Aztec) people relied on markets to move goods between growers and consumers. They had a massive empire, so it’s no surprise that their main market was colossal too... (Written by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

Just about every community, from village to capital city, within the Aztec empire held a weekly market, in an actual marketplace kept for the occasion. In the Aztec calendar system a week lasted five days, so markets took place every 5 days. In the capital, the market was so big and important, it never stopped! Day and night there were at least 20,000 people, and on the major weekly market days this number rose to nearly 60,000!

What’s hard to imagine is the NOISE - Spanish chroniclers wrote that they could hear the sound of the main market at Tlatelolco a league away (that’s around 2-3 miles!) - and the SMELLS: strong-smelling foods being cooked, flowers, the aroma of fruit, leather goods, herbal medicines, live animals for sale, and so on.

We know the main market at Tlatelolco was highly organised - each type of product or service had its own section (so, for instance, all the sandal sellers were to be found in one row, like a street) - and that there were market police on duty all the time. It was a serious offence to steal from or to short-change someone in the market; if caught, you would be hauled before a court to be judged and punished... Usually your family were called and had to pay for your crime.

The fantastic range of goods for sale you can read about by clicking on the links below. Much of it was brought by canoe, along the local waterways (again, learn more below).
In summary: ‘One could wander all day long in this festival of trade, taking one’s meals there and meeting one’s friends and relations; and many did, strolling up and down the alleys lined with tottering mounds of fruit or many-coloured clothes all spread out...’ (Jacques Soustelle).

The 16th century Spanish chronicler Diego Durán reported that the great market was so popular that women told him that after dying they wanted to go to the market first before going to heaven!

If you want a full list of what was available in the main market, click here...!Read here what the Spanish wrote about the great market...‘King canoe....’

Comments (5)

Marc

22nd Jul 2024

Hello. I watched a lecture on YouTube by Dr. Roy Casagranda from the Austin School about the Aztecs. In it he said that in the Tenochtitlan market, weights were standardized and they would have a weight police, whom you could call to check their official standard weights against someone you were trading with, to know if if you were getting swindled. If the accused person was shown to be using the wrong weights, they would be decapitated right then and there, however, if the weights were fine, the one that would lose their head would be the person making the accusation. Either way, once the weight police came, someone was getting killed. So people wouldn’t mess around with calling the police unless they had good reasons and were confident. I would love for this super fun piece of trivia to be true, but unfortunately I’m having trouble confirming its veracity. Any thoughts on the accuracy of this description? Thanks.

Mexicolore

Caution is needed here! There’s no doubt market superintendents operated firmly, and tricking someone in the market was immediately punished, but most scholars (Bray, Soustelle, Smith, Berdan...) say the punishment was a fine (you had to pay back the value of what you’d stolen) - or if caught selling fake goods your whole stock would be confiscated. There WAS a very strict code of conduct for professional merchants - they policed their own (and provided judges for the marketplace court) and the Florentine Codex (Book 9) mentions that ‘A merchant, a vanguard merchant, who did wrong, they did not take to someone else [ie a judges’ court]; the principal merchants... themselves alone pronounced judgement, exacted the punishment, executed the death penalty.’
The Florentine Codex (Book 8) mentions the death penalty in the market, but ONLY for someone who sold stolen goods: ‘If it were made known and he did not declare from whom he had bought that which had been stolen, they went to exact the penalty, and he died. Such was the sentence of the lords and judges, so that [men] would be fearful of that which was stolen and no one would buy it.’
Incidentally, on-the-spot punishments tended to be beating the culprit to death in the market place, not decapitation. Incidentally, too, goods were sold by number and measure (not by weight). Hope this helps a bit...

27th Oct 2023

Hi, was just wondering what kind of things and goods they would sell at the markets. Did they ever list any of what they sold, and what were considered luxuries to buy?

Mexicolore

We’ve tried to give a general answer to this here -
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-us/produce-for-sale-in-the-great-market

Logan

1st Feb 2022

What happens if a thief got away?

Mexicolore

The market police would track him down...!

Zoryan

19th Jul 2020

Thanks for your helpful answer, Ian.
My mom and I were wondering if it might have been as big as the largest market in Mexico City, El Merced.

Mexicolore

We think possibly - all depends again on which comparison Cortés was referring to. La Merced sprawls over 88,000 square metres, in 7 huge buildings, way more than double the plaza of Salamanca. IF, however, the ‘busiest day’ estimate of the Spanish at the time - 60,000 people in the market - is accurate, then very likely. That sort of number would make the Tlatelolco market like a city within a city, and would make Cortés’s reference to the CITY of Salamanca much more credible.

Zoryan

17th Jul 2020

Could you please tell me how large the area of the great market at Tlateloco was?

Mexicolore

Good question! We don’t know exactly, but Cortés wrote that the Tlatelolco market area was ‘twice the size of the city of Salamanca’ in Spain. If he actually meant just the market square of Salamanca, that measures today some 6,500 square metres in area (but beware, the plaza of today has changed since Cortés’s day), so your answer could be some 13,000 square metres - the rough equivalent of two football pitches. IF, however, he really was referring to the city itself, well UNESCO gives the population of Salamanca in the 16th century as 24,000, and the area of the historic city centre as 50 hectares or 125 acres - double that and you’re talking of around 100 football pitches! Panel of Experts member José Luis de Rojas has told us he has been searching for an answer to this for 40 years without success, so if he doesn’t know, no-one does...

Tlatelolco Marketplace as depicted at Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago