{"id":500,"date":"2020-10-07T00:05:28","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T00:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calmecacanahuac.com\/blog\/?p=500"},"modified":"2020-10-07T00:09:27","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T00:09:27","slug":"the-most-important-products-in-the-mexica-azteca-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calmecacanahuac.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/the-most-important-products-in-the-mexica-azteca-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Important Products in the Mexica\/Azteca Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Click here to learn about the history of the Matricula de los Tributos
and how it taught us about the Mexica economy, Mexica math,
and Mexica writing!
https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/lesson-4-de-los-42463165?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong>
In this post I will discuss the most important products in Tenochtitlan at the time of the Spanish Conquest. To determine this list I utilized the Codex Mendoza. After the conquest the first thing Hernan Cortez did was asked for a copy of the tribute coming into Tenochtitlan. He was provided with a list copied from Pre-Columbian sources now called the Matricula de los Tributos. Nahua scribes then copied the contents of the Matricula de los Tributos to the Codex Mendoza. The Codex Mendoza contains tribute lists from all of the 37 provinces that were conquered by Tenochtitlan. The frequency of tribute varied between every 80 days to once a year.

The List<\/strong>
This list was difficult to compile because it forced me to define which products were “important,” not an easy task. At first I thought I would go by quantity but that didn’t work because some items such as beans were not necessarily counted by the bean but by the bin whereas other items such as mantas were counted by the manta which inflates the importance of manta. The system I chose then is based on quantity (taking into account different container sizes) plus the number of times the object was requested. Lastly, there were really important products (such as cacao) that the Mexica simply did not have access to because the regions in which these products could be found were not conquered yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n