Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/169

Sun from its raise on the east through its setting, in a resplendent and joyful procession, to later reincarnate into a hummingbird and forever live among the flowers." (Jacques Soustelle. 1955)

The mexicas changed the millenary people’s organization of independent communities and began to develop from the Triple Alliance, new lordships groups as a powerful military, political and economic force, as was never seen before in the Anahuac. War became "state reason" and small skirmishes, almost symbolic and little bloody, became major military campaigns that moved thousands of warriors to great distances, in neatly organized, armed and equipped armies, as had not happened before in the Anahuac.

"In aztec religion, we are told, men had no other purpose on earth that to feed to the Sun with his blood, without which the star died exhausted. It is this tragic dilemma which imposed upon leaders’ the sad obligation to choose between the killing and the end of the world." (Laurette Séjourné. 1957)

Lordships were subjected and created heavy tax burdens, because the objective of the war was not only to obtain the "divine liquid" to feed the Fifth Sun, but also obtain goods and raw material in large quantities from the subject peoples, that allowed the formidable growth of Tenochtitlan, that in a few years had monumental works, which perhaps could not had been created in that short period of time, only by the effort and work of the mexicas. A vigorous impulse was given to trade, as never before in the Anahuac. The pochtecas or traders came to occupy a high hierarchy in the Tenochtitlan social scale.

The Pochtecas and the Warriors.

The pochtecas came to have great power, not only economic and political, but even military. To the extent that at a point in time they confronted the Tenochtitlan Tlatócan, but were defeated and