Flower Wars

The Flower Wars were a distinctive, ritualized form of recurring warfare fought from around 1454 until the Spanish arrival in 1519 between the Aztec Triple Alliance and neighboring city-states of the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley, chiefly Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo and Cholula. Unlike ordinary campaigns of conquest, these engagements were arranged in advance for a set date and place and fought largely at close quarters with weapons such as the obsidian-edged macuahuitl, with the explicit goal of taking live captives rather than killing outright. Historians identify several overlapping purposes behind the practice: supplying captives for the human sacrifices central to Aztec religious ritual, giving warriors a controlled setting in which to train and prove themselves, and, as the scholar Ross Hassig has argued, projecting Aztec military dominance to rival states as a form of propaganda without committing to the greater cost and risk of full annexation. Tlaxcala's survival as an independent, unconquered rival through decades of these contests left it with deep resentment toward the Aztecs, a grievance the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes later exploited by allying with Tlaxcala against Tenochtitlan.