Tarascan State

Three things make it worth a long entry. It was never conquered by the Aztecs, and the long frontier war between the two states is the great unsung conflict of late Mesoamerican history. It was the metallurgical centre of the continent north of Panama: the one part of Mesoamerica where copper was smelted from ore, alloyed into bronze and cast in quantity. And it is the one Mesoamerican state that produced an illustrated account of its own history, the Relación de Michoacán, compiled in 1539–1541 from the testimony of Purépecha noblemen — a document as valuable as it is slippery.

The chronology in this entry is conventional rather than recorded. Nobody in Tzintzuntzan dated the foundation of anything. The Relación gives a genealogy and a sequence of wars, not years, and the dates now attached to them — Tariácuri around 1300, his death around 1350 — are back-calculations from five generations of rulers. The map draws the state from 1305 to 1533; both ends are dataset bookkeeping rather than events, and the second runs three years past the execution of the last cazonci, which is where the polity actually ends.

At a glance

Who were the Purépecha, and where did they come from?

The Purépecha language is an isolate. That is not a polite way of saying nobody has looked: Glottolog classifies it as a family with a single member, and the most thorough recent attempt to place it — Kate Bellamy's 2018 Leiden thesis, which compared its lexicon and its morphology against a wide sample — found no signal of relatedness to any other language tested. Proposals have linked it to Chibchan, to Mayan, to Quechua and to Zuni, and none has produced regular sound correspondences or a shared core vocabulary. It is written today in a Spanish-based orthography in which aspiration is marked with an apostrophe, its grammar is agglutinating, and it is spoken today by somewhere between 140,000 and 175,000 people, mostly in the Michoacán highlands, with a large diaspora in the United States.

If the language has no relatives, the people's origin has no linguistic answer, and the debate has been conducted instead over a foundation story. The Relación de Michoacán opens with a migration. A lineage called the uacúsecha, the eagles, comes from the north, out of the Zacapu basin, led by a man named Ticátame who carries the god Curicaueri with him. At Zacapu they quarrel with the local lords over a deer: Ticátame shoots a deer, the lords' people flay it badly and ruin the skin, words are exchanged, and Ticátame — "as who was an eagle Uacúsecha", in the manuscript's phrase — shoots one of his brothers-in-law with an arrow and takes his people away. The migration that follows is presented as a journey of conquest, and the priests recited it at the great festivals as the official history of the state.

The archaeology does not straightforwardly confirm it, and the interesting thing is how the Relación itself complicates it. The priest's opening speech says the land the Uacúsecha conquered was already full of people — "poblada de gente mexicana, naguatatos", in the Spanish of the text, speakers of Nahuatl — with a cacique and gods in every town. That is a story of a small, militarised incomer elite taking over an old and densely settled landscape, not of empty country being filled. Anne Cohen and Christopher Fisher, reviewing the evidence from the Pátzcuaro and Zacapu basins, describe Purépecha development as a long trajectory in which incoming and existing groups negotiated over centuries, with the imperial ideology of the Relación retrofitted onto a much older and messier process.

What was already there before the kingdom?

West Mexico was not a backwater waiting to be organised. The Chupícuaro culture of the late first millennium BC produced some of the most refined painted pottery in Mesoamerica, much of it from island sites in the lakes; its figurine styles and its colour schemes travelled widely. At Zacapu, the lava flow above the later Purépecha heartland carries the ceremonial centre of Loma Alta, occupied from roughly 100 BC to AD 550, with square and circular platforms, sunken plazas and an island cemetery, and with over forty decorative motifs that turn up on Classic-period pottery across Michoacán. Later occupants reused those motifs deliberately, which looks like an appeal to deep local legitimacy.

The Classic period also brought outside influence without outside rule. Teotihuacan's presence in Michoacán shows up in ballcourts and in the grey-green figurines and vessel forms that archaeologists call Teotihuacanoid; the Zacapu region in the Epiclassic carries art influenced by both Teotihuacan and Tula, including warrior imagery and the pyrite mirrors worn at the back of the belt. What Michoacán did not have, so far as anyone can tell, was a single dominant capital. It had a landscape of lake basins, each with its own lords, and a set of very good obsidian and copper sources.

Around AD 900 the older order loosened. The great Classic centres of central Mexico fell, long-distance exchange reorganised, and in the Zacapu basin communities began building towns on the malpaís — the rough, broken lava flows — with raised walkways, platforms and dense housing, eventually forming an urban zone more than four square kilometres in extent. Why anyone would choose broken lava to live on is a fair question; the usual answers are defence and the exhaustion of better land, though the excavators note that there is no evidence of the warfare the defensive argument requires. By the mid-fifteenth century those towns had been abandoned, and the political centre of gravity had moved to the lake.

How did Tariácuri make a kingdom out of the lake?

The Relación's hero is Tariácuri, son of a lord named Pauácume and a woman of the island of Xarácuaro. His story is not a simple founding epic. He is a difficult, mocking man: the text has him taunt his wife's brothers with the claim that their arrows are spindles and their shields women's cloth, and it has him answer a demand from the lords of Curinguaro for his plunder by sending them a bundle of arrows wrapped in cotton, with the message that the green feathers they want are these painted shafts. He takes Pátzcuaro at night, whistling like an eagle on the hill above the town until its occupants abandon it. And he arranges his own succession with considerable theatre. On the hill of Thiuapu he builds three mounds of earth, sets a stone and an arrow on each, and tells his two nephews and his son that the mounds are the three seats of the kingdom: Hirípan at Cuyacán, which is Ihuatzio; Tangáxoan at Michuacán, which is Tzintzuntzan; and Hiquíngare, his son, at Pátzcuaro. "Thus there shall be three lords," he says.

That tripartite arrangement is the constitutional fact behind everything that follows. The three seats were not equal for long. Hirípan became the dominant figure, moved the image of Curicaueri from Pátzcuaro to Ihuatzio, and on his death the balance tipped to Tzintzuntzan; Hiquíngare's line ended when Hirípan had his sons killed. By the early fifteenth century Tzintzuntzan was the capital, and the rulers there — Tangáxoan I, then Tzitzipandáquare, then Zuangua — were the ones who turned a lake hegemony into an empire. The conventional dates for those reigns, 1454, 1479 and 1520, come from modern reconstructions and should be treated as scaffolding.

What made the takeover possible was geography and timing. The Pátzcuaro basin is a compressed world of water, marsh, terraced hillside and pine forest, capable of feeding a large non-farming population if its labour is organised, and it sits astride routes between the obsidian fields of Ucareo and Zinapécuaro to the east, the copper country of the Balsas to the south and the Tierra Caliente to the southwest. When the Zacapu towns emptied in the fifteenth century, the lake had no rival in the highlands. Tariácuri's wars, in other words, were fought in a landscape that was already the richest and best-connected in the region — which is a more convincing explanation of the state's rise than the hero's arrows.

How was the state governed?

The cazonci ruled as the stand-in of a god. "The one who was cazonci stood in the place of Curicaueri," the Relación says, and the identification was literal enough to shape daily life: the ruler fasted and kept vigil, wore his hair bound in the braid that was the insignia of his office, and lived inside a court etiquette that kept him at a distance. He was also the highest court. The same text describes the chief priest, the petámuti, judging offenders in the palace courtyard, and the great annual occasion on which the history of the ancestors was recited aloud to the assembled lords and wrongdoers before sentence was carried out — a fusion of historiography, liturgy and criminal justice that is one of the most arresting passages in colonial Mexican writing.

Beneath the ruler sat a structure that the Relación describes in unusual detail, because it was still functioning when the text was written. The kingdom was divided into four parts, with "four very principal lords on four frontiers of the province", relatives of the cazonci who entered his council. Below them were the caracha-capacha, the caciques of the towns, who came to the capital and attended the ruler; the achaecha, the principals who lived at court and maintained the palace; and the ocámbecha, who counted people, mustered labour for public works and collected tribute. Then came a long list of named mayordomos: one for the cotton blankets, one for the maize, one for the masons and quarrymen, one for the hunters, one for the fishers with nets and another for those with hooks, one for the featherworkers, one for the armourers who made quilted cotton jackets, bows and arrows, one for the spies, one for the messengers who waited in the courtyard, and one who kept the treasury of gold and silver ornaments. Offices were hereditary but confirmed by the cazonci, who appointed a son or brother when the holder died.

The fiscal machinery is the part most often misread. The figure of twenty-five households per collector, repeated in the secondary literature as a pre-Hispanic unit, appears in the Relación in a passage describing what the colonial governor don Pedro had recently done: he "distributed to each of these principals twenty-five houses". It may reflect an older organisation, but the text presents it as a reorganisation, and the honest statement is that we do not know the pre-conquest unit. What is clear is the principle: tribute in kind from the provinces, labour from the core, and storehouses at the capital holding cloth, maize, copper ingots, bells and feathers, redistributed as gifts to lords and foreign visitors.

How centralised this really was is now the liveliest question in the field. The ethnohistory describes a command economy; the archaeology finds craft production dispersed among households and part-time specialists, with potting traditions that continue local forms through the imperial period. Cohen and Fisher's conclusion is that the empire negotiated rather than commanded, and that the spectrum of state-local relations was wider than the Relación, written from the court's point of view, would suggest.

Why does Tzintzuntzan look like that?

Tzintzuntzan — the name means "place of hummingbirds" — occupies terraces on the lower slopes of the Cerro Yaguarato, above the lake, between two other hills that the colonial sources call Colorado and Tariácuri. The surveyed city covers 674 hectares and held, on Helen Pollard's estimate, between 25,000 and 35,000 people at the conquest, which made it much the largest city in the empire. It was laid out in zones: a ceremonial and administrative platform, elite residences around a second platform, craft workshops, and the dense irregular housing of everybody else.

The ceremonial platform is the signature. It is a vast artificial terrace 450 metres by 250 metres, with a rubble core faced in stacked tabular basalt, its front stepped and a ramp running down towards the northwest. Along its eastern edge stand five structures that the Relación calls cues and that everyone now calls yácatas: pyramids of a form found nowhere else in Mesoamerica, a rectangular body extended by a semicircular or circular annex, faced with dressed basalt slabs and often carved with petroglyphs. The yácata was a temple over tombs — in the Purépecha gloss, a temple containing burials, particularly royal ones — and the five at Tzintzuntzan were dedicated to Curicaueri and his four brothers. Excavations in the 1930s and 1940s, by Daniel Rubín de la Borbolla and others, recovered high-status burials inside them, with dental modification and imported grave goods, and at least four and possibly five successive constructions are visible in the masonry of Yácata 5.

What the architecture does is put the ruler's ancestors and the state's gods in one place, on a platform that can be seen from the lake and that looks down on the water rather than up at the sky. There is nothing like the Mexica's twin pyramid, and nothing like the lowland Maya's stucco and corbel vault; the aesthetic is stone-faced mass, repeated geometry, and a deliberate command of the view.

Other seats mattered too. Ihuatzio, on the lake's northeast arm, has its own platform and yácatas and was the capital of Hirípan's line. Pátzcuaro, the eventual colonial see, sits above the lake's southern shore. And in the hills above the basin, LiDAR survey at Angamuco has mapped thousands of building foundations on a lava flow — houses, storerooms, temples, terraces — showing an urban landscape of a kind that surface survey alone had missed, and reminding us that Tzintzuntzan was the political peak of a densely occupied basin rather than an isolated monument.

What made Michoacán the copper capital of Mesoamerica?

Metallurgy reached Mesoamerica late, and it reached it here. The earliest copper working in the region dates to about AD 600–700, in West Mexico, and the best explanation remains Dorothy Hosler's: a transfer from northern South America, where smelting had been practised since around 1500 BC, by maritime contact along the Pacific coast. The technical signatures — the ores, the lost-wax casting, the bell forms, the alloying recipes — are close enough to Ecuadorian practice to make independent invention implausible, and Hosler divided the West Mexican tradition into two phases. In the first, to about AD 1200–1300, copper was worked mostly for sumptuary and ritual objects, with an emphasis on sound: bells, rings, rattles. In the second, ending with the Spanish conquest, smiths began alloying copper with arsenic and with tin, producing bronze, and with it a much wider range of forms, colours, hardness and functions.

The Tarascan state sat on top of this tradition and industrialised it. The copper ore came mainly from the Balsas basin to the south, in the hot country below the highlands; smelting took place somewhere else again, in the Zirahuén basin south of Pátzcuaro and at sites such as Itziparátzico near modern Santa Clara del Cobre, where slag, furnace remains and ingot fragments have been excavated; and the finishing of objects happened in yet other workshops. That sequence — ore, smelting, casting, finishing, each in a different place — implies a supply chain run by part-time specialists who farmed as well as smelted, not a state factory. Blanca Maldonado's work on the smelting sites and Hosler's on the artefacts together describe an industry that was neither free nor fully commandeered: the state took ingots and finished goods as tribute and gifts, and distributed them as marks of favour.

The metal went mostly into prestige and ritual, not into the arsenal. Bells, tweezers, needles, awls, fishhooks, axe-monies, discs, diadems, masks, armlets and cups fill the grave goods and the museum cases; the copper "axe" or hacha served as a currency-like blank and has been found far beyond Michoacán. Hans Roskamp has argued that metal in Michoacán was understood as a sacred substance with its own deity — Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca, the red Tezcatlipoca, lord of the heated colour of copper — and Pollard has argued that by the early sixteenth century metal objects had become expressions of state ideology rather than mere wealth. That combination of technical mastery and sacred meaning is why West Mexican metalwork, much of it from Michoacán, dominates the copper and bronze collections of Mesoamerican museums.

One puzzle is worth flagging. If the technology came from South America, one might expect its vocabulary to come with it. It did not: Bellamy's study of the Purépecha metallurgical lexicon found no loanwords from Andean languages, which she suggests reflects how technology travels — through bodies and gestures rather than words. The furnaces were imported; the names for what happened in them were not.

How did they stop the Aztecs?

Two expansionist states grew up within two generations of each other, and the space between them was the Toluca valley and the hot country of the Balsas. From the 1440s the Mexica of Tenochtitlan and their allies in the Triple Alliance, with Texcoco and Tlacopan behind them, pushed west and south, taking the Matlatzinca towns of the Toluca basin and the garrisons that controlled the roads into Michoacán. The Tarascans pushed east and south at the same time, into the Tierra Caliente, towards the Pacific at Zacatula, and up towards Toluca. The collision was structural, and it lasted seventy years.

The first great test came at Taximaroa, the fortified town on the eastern road, which the Mexica destroyed at some point in the mid-fifteenth century — the Relación dates it to the reign of the father of Moctezuma, and adds that Tzitzipandáquare rebuilt it. Then, in 1478 or 1479 (some accounts say 1476), Axayacatl led the largest Mexica army yet raised into Michoacán and was routed. The defeat entered Mexica memory as a humiliation: Axayacatl, who had conquered Tlatelolco and the Matlatzinca, never recovered his reputation, and the episode is the one clear check on Aztec expansion in the Valley of Mexico's own histories.

After that the war became a frontier war, and the Tarascans fought it with fortresses and clients. Tzitzipandáquare and his successor Zuangua fortified the border towns, settled Otomí and Matlatzinca refugees displaced by the Mexica in the frontier zone on condition that they fought for Michoacán, and maintained garrisons at places such as Cutzamala, facing the Aztec fortress at Oztuma across the same river country. Ahuítzotl, from 1486, intensified the pressure by proxy, sponsoring attacks by Matlatzinca, Chontal and Cuitlatec groups; the Tarascans held, but their own expansion stopped. In the west, between about 1480 and 1510, they occupied parts of Colima and Jalisco — apparently to control saltpetre deposits — and were eventually driven out again, a war remembered in Mexican tradition as the Guerra del Salitre, the Saltpetre War, though the dates and the details rest on late and thin testimony.

Why did the smaller state hold? Distance and terrain helped: the lake basin lies behind mountain passes that a large army could not supply. So did the fortifications and the client buffer. But the decisive factor was probably that the Tarascan state could mobilise its own population quickly and had no coalition to hold together — it fought as one kingdom, while the Mexica campaigned with allies whose enthusiasm varied. In 1519, with the Spaniards on the coast, Moctezuma II sent envoys to Tzintzuntzan proposing an alliance against the invaders. The offer was refused, on grounds that Paredes Martínez summarises as distrust and accumulated hostility towards Mexica power. It was a decision that kept the Tarascan army intact and left Tenochtitlan to fall alone.

What did the empire do to the peoples it ruled?

At its height the state governed, directly or through tributary lords, a territory of about 75,000 square kilometres containing a patchwork of peoples: Purépecha in the core; Nahuas in several towns, including some around the lake itself; Otomí, Matlatzinca and Mazahua along the eastern border; Chichimec groups such as the Guamares and Pames in the Bajío; Cocas around Lake Chapala; Cuitlatecs in the Balsas valley; Chumbios near the Pacific. This was not a nation-state with a single language, and the Relación's account of four quarters with four lords is best read as an administrative ideal projected onto a heterogeneous reality.

Tribute varied with what a province had. Acámbaro, on the northeastern frontier, paid maize, foodstuffs and blankets; the towns of the Pátzcuaro basin paid largely in labour and in the produce of their terraces and fisheries. The state also took craft goods — cloth above all, but also copper, feathers, honey, pulque, salt, dried fish — into storehouses at the capital, from which the cazonci provisioned his household, his armies, his priests and his diplomacy. There is no evidence of a uniform imperial tax rate, and the Relación's officials with portfolios (blankets, maize, fish, birds, arrows) look more like a palace supply administration than a provincial treasury.

Archaeology adds two corrections to the picture. The first is that imperial control of production was partial: obsidian from Ucareo-Zinapécuaro was steered into Purépecha territory during the imperial period, but it was still worked by households and part-time specialists, and pottery continued to be made locally with local materials even at the capital. The second is that the empire exported its ideology as much as its garrisons. Purépecha-style elite ceramics and metalwork turn up in elite burials at Sayula in Jalisco and in the Cuitzeo basin, in contexts where the objects seem to have been used by local lords to construct their own authority — a signature of hegemony rather than occupation.

How did the Spaniards take it without a battle?

When Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, the cazonci Tangáxoan II sent emissaries to the victors, and a handful of Spaniards went back with them to Tzintzuntzan, were presented to the ruler, exchanged gifts and returned with samples of gold. Cortés's interest was immediate. In 1522 he sent Cristóbal de Olid west with a small force, and Olid reached Tzintzuntzan in a matter of days. The Tarascan army was intact — the numbers in the sources are inflated, but it was one of the largest undefeated armies in Mexico — and it did not fight. Tangáxoan submitted, and in return was left in place with a large measure of autonomy.

The arrangement that followed was strange and, in retrospect, unsustainable. The cazonci continued to govern; the Spaniards collected tribute; both behaved as though they ruled Michoacán. Cortés wanted gold and a route to the Pacific. The Purépecha nobility wanted to keep its own hierarchy. For six years the fiction held, and then the machinery of the Spanish Empire caught up with it. The first Audiencia, staffed by men who had come to make money, sent Nuño de Guzmán west in 1529 at the head of a force of several thousand. He demanded supplies, porters, fighting men and treasure, and he demanded them from a ruler whose treasury had already been emptied once.

The Relación gives an eyewitness-shaped account of what happened next, and it is one of the most damning documents of the conquest. Guzmán accused the cazonci of holding back gold and of sending eight thousand warriors to Cuinao; his men questioned him at night in the house of the puppet governor don Pedro, held a brazier to his feet, hanged him by the arms and tormented him; a Franciscan, fray Martín, arrived with a crucifix and stopped it. The charges at the trial included withholding tribute, plotting rebellion, idolatry and keeping the skins of Christians. The sentence was that he be dragged through the streets; the text then has them untie him from the mat while he was still alive, tie him to a stake, ask who else had been party to the plot, get the answer "I know nothing", garrotte him and burn the body. Guzmán had the ashes thrown into the river. Some of the ashes were recovered by servants and buried at Pátzcuaro with a gold disc, his ear ornaments and the nail parings and hair he had kept since childhood.

The date, 14 February 1530, comes from Beaumont's eighteenth-century chronicle rather than from the Relación, which gives the sequence but not the day. What is not in doubt is the nature of the proceeding: a Spanish official, acting as prosecutor and judge, executed the ruler of a state that had submitted voluntarily eight years earlier, on evidence extracted under torture, and did it to clear the way for his own expedition to the north-west. The uprising that some accounts describe did not materialise as a war; what followed was flight, fear and a rapid reordering of the indigenous nobility around a new master.

What happened to Michoacán after 1530?

The cazonci was replaced by a governor. Don Pedro Cuiniarángari, the noble who had allied with Guzmán, took the office, and the Relación was compiled in 1539–41 partly to support the claims of precisely this group of survivors. Tangáxoan's sons, don Francisco and don Antonio, are named in the text; the title and the noble houses persisted, subordinate to Spanish officials, for the rest of the century. Michoacán became a governorship in 1543, its capital at Tzintzuntzan and then, after the arrival of Vasco de Quiroga, at Pátzcuaro.

Quiroga is the dominant figure of the next generation. Bishop of Michoacán from 1536 and resident from 1538, he moved the see from Tzintzuntzan to Pátzcuaro, and set about organising the Purépecha into congregated towns with hospitals, schools of crafts and communal property — the experiment that later tradition remembers as the source of the craft specialisation of Michoacán's villages, where one town works copper, another makes guitars, another carves. The legend has outgrown the evidence, and the craft-village pattern is probably as much a colonial and modern development as a Quirogan plan, but the hospitals and the town plan are real, and Quiroga's reputation among Purépecha communities is genuinely warmer than that of any other Spaniard in the story.

The demographic catastrophe was the deepest change. The population of the basin collapsed over the sixteenth century under epidemic disease, forced labour, tribute and the disruption of the irrigation and terrace systems that had fed the cities; the Relación itself was written by survivors of a generation that had seen the old order disappear. The cazonci's storehouses, the workshops of the metalworkers, the schools of the priests and the annual recitation of the history all went with it. What replaced them was a colonial province of estates, missions and a Purépecha peasantry, with a nobility that kept its titles and lost its power.

How do we know any of this?

Almost everything about the state's internal life comes from one manuscript. The Relación de Michoacán was compiled between 1539 and 1541 at the request of the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, very probably by the Franciscan Jerónimo de Alcalá, working with Purépecha noblemen who supplied the narrative and Purépecha painters who supplied the images. The surviving copy is in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, MS c-IV-5: 153 folios, 140 of them written, 22 by 16.5 centimetres, with 44 colour illustrations on European paper, plus a short calendrical text by Motolinía at the end. It has three parts: the religion and ceremonies of the Purépecha, badly truncated; the government and society of the kingdom; and the history from the migration to the Spanish conquest, ending with the trial and death of Tangáxoan.

Its value and its limits are the same thing. It is a colonial document, made for a viceroy and shaped by the legal needs of a noble faction, and its long speeches are literary constructions rather than transcripts. David Haskell has shown how carefully the priest's oration is built as a statement of Purépecha historicity — a formal, repeated, public account of the past with its own conventions — which means it should be read as a genre, not as a tape recording. The authorship has been argued over for a century; Alcalá may have been the compiler rather than the author, and the Purépecha contributors are unnamed.

The other sources are thinner and later: a handful of pictorial documents such as the Lienzo de Jucutácato, the Relaciones geográficas of the 1570s and 1580s, litigation records, and Beaumont's eighteenth-century Crónica de Michoacán, which preserves material from lost earlier accounts — including the date of the execution. Archaeology has supplied what the texts cannot. Pollard's surface survey of Tzintzuntzan in the 1970s established the city's size and zoning; Shirley Gorenstein's project at Acámbaro opened up the frontier; work at Urichu, Zacapu and Angamuco has pushed the story back centuries before the Relación's migration; and the LiDAR campaigns of the past fifteen years have transformed the picture of how the basin was settled. The trend of all of it is to make the state older, more gradual and less centralised than the Relación says.

What survives?

The language survives, under pressure. Census counts and linguistic surveys put the number of speakers somewhere between 140,000 and 175,000, concentrated in the Meseta and the lake villages, with a large migrant population in California; Glottolog rates the language as "shifting", and the usual pattern of younger speakers shifting to Spanish is well established. Since the 1980s official policy and Purépecha activism have pushed the endonym and the language into schools and public life, and the Academia de la Lengua Purépecha exists to standardise it. The traditional song genre, the pirekua, was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

Copper survives as an industry as well as a memory. Santa Clara del Cobre, the town beside the old smelting sites, still beats copper — though it hammers and raises sheet metal rather than smelting ore, a technique introduced in the colonial period — and the craft supports a large part of the local economy. Tzintzuntzan is an excavated and reconstructed archaeological zone with a site museum, its five yácatas restored and its platform a monument; Ihuatzio and Pátzcuaro hold related remains. The state of Michoacán in the Federal Republic of Mexico carries the old Nahuatl name, and Morelia, its capital, carries the name of a priest who never saw the empire.

The political legacy is more ambiguous. The Tarascan state is remembered in Mexico as the power that never lost to the Aztecs, a point of regional pride that has been put to use in every century since, and as a warning about the difference between military survival and political survival. It held its frontier for seventy years and then lost its independence in a courtroom. Its language, its crafts, its lake and its ruins are what remain of a state that was, for two centuries, the second power in Mesoamerica.

Common myths about the Tarascan State

Timeline of the Tarascan State

What the map shows next

At 1350 on the map the state is a small highland power around one lake, its three seats still sharing authority and its frontier barely beyond the basins of Pátzcuaro and Cuitzeo. That is the moment the Relación describes as the aftermath of Tariácuri: a kingdom won, not yet an empire.

At 1450 on the map the borders have moved a long way east and south, and Tzintzuntzan is the undisputed capital of the second power in Mesoamerica. At 1521 on the map the state is at its greatest extent, with the Aztec frontier held and the Pacific coast reached — and with a Spanish expedition already in the valley of Mexico, deciding what to do about an empire that had just refused to help it.