by Faun Rice
that represent the submission of distant peoples. Strategically redistributed,
conspicuously consumed, or offered to the gods, the valuables of the aristocratic
economy sustain the greater order of the kingdom—not least by sustaining its
ruling powers-that-be.7
6. Likewise. the merchants usually owned their stocks-in-trade and craftsmen owned
their tools, workshops, and raw materials (Calnek 1974: 194).
7. “Those who create and/or acquire goods and benefits from some dimension of the
cosmological outside are not only providing goods and benefits per se but also are
presenting tangible evidence that they themselves possess or command the unique
qualities and ideals generally expected in persons who have ties with distant places
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
233
I have indulged on this account of stranger-kingship particularly because, as
will be described presently, the Mexica of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
underwent a revolution from above that produced a classic version of it. The
summary of the galactic polity which follows will also be useful in this regard,
since its structures and dynamics were clearly in play in this creation of a Toltec
aristocracy ruling over a Chichimec peasantry.
Stanley Tambiah introduced the galactic polity as a worldly realization of
the cosmological mandala form well known in South and Southeast Asia.8
Here was a scheme of creation spreading “from a refined center outwards and
a refined summit downwards, each outer reality or circle being a progressively
weaker representation of the preceding . . . grosser in constitution and more
imprisoned on sensory pursuits and desires” (1985: 322). By further reference to
famous Buddhist and Hindu texts on universal Cakkavatti and Devaraja kings
of kings, Tambiah transposed the cosmic dynamics to a political register:
We are told that the wheel-rolling emperor solemnly invokes the wheel to roll
outward; the wheel rolls successively to the East, the South, the North, and the
West. As the mighty monarch with his fourfold army appeared in each quarter
following the wheel, the rival kings prostrated themselves in submission. The
cakkavatti allowed them to retain their possessions on the condition of obser-
vance of the five moral principles binding on Buddhist layman. (1976: 45–46)
When Tambiah still further objectifies the model in terms of actual galactic
polities, more needs to be said: for instance, some further notice of the progres-
sive reduction in the imperial center’s hegemonic power as it moves to periph-
eral sectors of the galaxy, where tributary dues may have to be exacted by force.
In this respect, the reach of the center is typically beyond its political grasp:
not only in that the galactic potentate usually claims a greater domain than he
rules; but also in that his grandeur and divine potency are known to the peoples
of supernatural origins and, therefore, are themselves ‘second creators.’ Evidence of
inalienable connections with places of cosmological origins thus conveys a certain
sacrality which readily translates into political-ideological legitimacy and facilitates
successful exercise of power” (Helms 1993: 49–50).
8. The galactic polity as Tambiah described it is essentially the same as the core–
periphery “world systems” of premodern civilizations analyzed by Ekholm, Friedman,
and colleagues, and the “segmentary state” concept developed by Aidan Southall,
among other, similar regional hierarchies otherwise identified (see chapter 6).
234
ON KINGS
beyond, in distant and uncontrolled hinterlands. This imagined imperium of the
galactic outer reaches is an important factor in the attraction and movement of
peripheral peoples toward the “high cultures” of core regions—like the move-
ment of the Chichimecs into the Valley of Mexico, apparently taking advantage
of a weakening Tollan.
Among Tambiah’s historical examples of galactic polities is the fourteenth-
century realm of Sukhothai (Sukhodaya), a kingdom in the Upper Chao Phraya
Valley of Siam that flourished under immigrant Tai rulers who had replaced an
earlier Mon dynasty (Tambiah 1976). Incidentally and coincidently, a number
of Tai peoples had poured into and taken over Southeast Asian valleys from
their original homeland redoubt in the southern borderlands of China, rather
in the same way (and the same direction) the Chichimec groups established
themselves in the Valley. In certain respects, Sukhothai’s own success was also
like the Mexica’s god-driven ascent to power, including a history of competi-
tive relations with other kingdoms within its own galactic system and beyond.
Aided by the importation of Sinhalese Buddhist concepts of universal kingship
and a famous image of the Buddha that became the palladium of their rule, the
Tai sovereigns of Sukhothai transformed their realm from a tertiary outpost of
the Khmer kingdom of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the independent ruler of a
number of other principalities in the region, even as they developed pretensions
of empire in regions beyond.
The Sukhothai capital was a mandala in itself: centered in the royal pal-
ace and principal temples, quartered by roads laid out in the cardinal direc-
tions, and encircled by three concentric ramparts. This was the area of direct
administrative control by the Sukhothai king. Beyond were further concentric
zones marked by diminishing powers of the center and weakening versions of
its royal forms and practices. The sphere immediately outside the capital zone
consisted of four major provinces ( muang), governed by sons of the king from
secondary centers situated in the cardinal directions. Beyond lay an outer ring
of more or less independent kingdoms controlled by their own traditional rul-
ers—whose allegiance to the Sukhothai ruler was often problematic. For all
that the layout of the Sukhothai realm in the cardinal directions signified a
universal extension of the ruler’s authority, the monarch’s hegemonic ambitions
exceeded his real-political powers. For that matter, like all the Southeast Asian
potentates claiming to be the king of kings, the Sukhothai monarch periodi-
cally sent tributes to the Chinese emperor for the purpose of legitimating his
authority relative to rival princes and vassal kings within his own domains as
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
235
well as the rulers of rival galactic regimes—who likewise affected cosmocratic
titles: for example, the erstwhile tributary kingdom of Ayutthaya—reputedly
founded by a Chinese merchant prince—which defeated and absorbed Suk-
hothai in the early fifteenth century. The Ayutthaya rulers created a Siamese
imperium of their own, achieved recognition from the Chinese emperor, and
claimed authority over such distant realms they could not rule as the important
sultanate of Melaka in the Malay Peninsula. A great commercial empire in its
own right, Melaka was ruled by descendants of Alexander the Great in his Ko-
ranic persona of Iskandar D’zul Karnain (C. C. E. Brown 1952). That is another
story, illustrative of many aspects of stranger-kingship, includ
ing the practice
known in Mesoamerica where, rather than strangers becoming native kings,
native kings sometimes become strangers: that is, they take on the identities of
legendary world-historical rulers.
If you will forgive the English pun, galactic systems are marked by a politics
of “upward nobility,” whereby the chiefs of satellite areas assume the politi-
cal statuses, courtly styles, titles, and even genealogies of their superiors in the
regional hierarchy—who for their part imitate the galactic hegemon, while the
latter, in invidious contrast to ambitious vassals and rival emperors, claims to
rule the world. In the event, the structural effect is a certain “galactic mime-
sis,” insofar as peripheral groups assume the polities and cosmologies of their
regional superiors. Recall Edmund Leach’s descriptions in The political systems
of Highland Burma (1954) of hinterland Kachin chiefs who “become Shan,”
acquiring the cultural trappings and political backing of Shan princes—even as
the Shan princes retire to their Burmese or Chinese palaces and the lifestyles of
their own imperial paragons. For all the apparent delusions of grandeur, these
pretensions could be calculated political moves, as when a highland Kachin
chief marries a daughter of a lowland Shan prince, perhaps acquiring a Shan
title as well as making himself a client of his princely father-in-law. As Leach
tells, this did not make him any less a Kachin chief, but potentially too much of
one in the view of his countrymen—who would then be inclined to rebel and
return to an egalitarian state.
These upward moves in the galactic hierarchy are typically motivated by
competition with immediate rivals in a given political field, who are thus
trumped by the chief who goes beyond the shared structures of authority by
adopting a politics of higher order. Gregory Bateson (1935, 1958) called this
“symmetrical schismogenesis,” a type of conflict that works on the principle that
“anything you can do I can do better.” Competition of this kind occurs within
236
ON KINGS
and between groups at all levels of the galactic system, including the attempts
of subordinate groups to displace their superiors. As we shall see momentarily,
it marks the ascent of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan from their contest for supe-
riority with the fraternal town of Tlatelolco to the overthrow of their Tepanec
imperial predecessors, the Mexica rulers taking progressively greater titles at
critical junctures along the way. Such practices of galactic mimesis suggest that
the upward and inward movement of groups such as the Mexica or Banyoro
from the barbarian periphery to the imperial core may well be anticipated in
structural form before it is achieved in historical practice. Indeed, the Mexica of
the long march from Aztlan were an agricultural people, not simply Chichimec
hunters, and they had paramount leaders before the institution of a Toltec king-
ship. Taken together with the imposition of kingly forms and practices from the
center in the course of extending its rule, the dynamics of galactic polities are at
once centrifugal and centripetal, involving displacements of power and culture
in both directions.
In the event, the galactic polity becomes a main forcing ground of stranger-
king formations, both as emanating from the politics of the center and as emu-
lating the center from the peripheries. Regarding the former, the fal out from
fratricidal battles royal among princes contending for the rule of the center
is a major source of the spread of stranger-kingdoms to outlying sectors of
galactic regimes—and beyond that, into the barbarian fringe. At least some
of the princes who fail to win the crown, including some for whom discretion
was always the better part of valor, are then likely to move to peripheral regions
where they can establish kingdoms of their own, whether as dependencies of
their homeland or as autonomous realms. Hence the constitution of society
as previously implied, consisting of a single royal kindred or lineage spread
over a set of diverse native communities. A similar effect is achieved where the
galactic hegemon establishes his sons as rulers of dependent provinces. This
practice is usually confined to areas in and near the capital, however; in the out-
er regions, particularly among peoples of other cultural and ethnic identities,
the local kings are normal y left in charge of their traditional domains. (The
long-reigning ruler of the Tepanec empire, Tezozomoc, seems to have been
an exception, instal ing many of his sons as kings of subordinate cities such as
Tlatelolco, where they gave rise to new dynasties.) Here it is worth remarking
that the greater galactic systems often called “empires” in the historical litera-
ture were primarily regional systems of tribute collection rather than unified,
bureaucratically ruled regimes. Apart from the supervision of tributary dues,
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
237
they were not directly administered by officials from the capital; even in the
aftermath of a conquest, it was often more politic to leave the kings and chiefs
of the outlying sectors in place.9 The only problems came when these chiefs did
not know their place and defiantly took on great ambitions and exalted titles
of their own.
Another mode of stranger-king formation from below is what Fijians call
“to beg a chief ” ( kere turaga), that is, to solicit a ruling chief of their own from
a higher and greater power, most commonly a son of a renowned ruler of the
region. Perhaps the best-known African example concerns the ruling dynasty of
Benin, founded by a Yoruba prince who had been granted by the ruler of fabled
Ile Ife on the request of the Benin elders (Bradbury 1967). Then there were the
elders of Israel, who, when besieged by dissension within and enemies without,
petitioned Samuel to have a king, “that we may be like all other nations; and
that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles” (Samuel
I 8:20). Put out because he was not deemed sufficient to rule his own chosen
people, God instructed Samuel to tell the Israelites if they got a king they’d
be truly sorry; and although Samuel laid it on about the evils of kingly power,
the Israelites insisted, and the omnipotent God had to give in. You will recog-
nize the origins of the Mixteca stranger-king in the person of Acamapichtli,
solicited by the elders from the ruler of Culhuacan in (suspiciously) similar
terms: “We are all alone and forsaken by all nations. We are guided only by our
god. . . . We must have a ruler to guide us, to direct us, to show us how we are
to live, who will free us, who will defend us and protect us from our enemies”
(Duran 1994: 49). Alternatively, a native chief may simply claim membership in
a dominant or legendary foreign dynasty: the way that certain “barbarian” rulers
on the Chinese borderlands took on prestigious Han ancestry (Backus 1981);
or certain Gaulish leaders claimed descent in the Julian or Augustan line of
Roman emperors (Drinkwater 1978). Nor were the Mexica kings the only rul-
ers of Chichi
mec origins to appropriate a Toltec identity, but as that ambitious
move was most fateful for the history of Mexico, I conclude by considering it
in a bit more detail.10
9. This was certainly the case of the Mexica “empire” (cf. Calnek 1982).
10. Cf. Ixtlilxóchitl (1840); Tezozomoc (1853); Sahagún (1953–82, 8 and 10); Soustelle
(1964); Davies (1974, 1977, 1980); Bray (1978); Clendinnen (1991); Nicholson
(2001); E. de J. Douglas (2010).
238
ON KINGS
CHICHIMECA AND TOLTECA
The stranger-kingship developed by the Mexica in the fourteenth century was
not only typical in form; it was motivated, at least in part, by a classic dynamic of
galactic systems: a schismatic rivalry among compatriot adversaries, leading one
faction to put down the other by appropriating a higher political form drawn from
the larger region. I mean Tenochtitlan’s conflict with the fel ow Mexica commu-
nity of Tlatelolco. That Tlateloco originated by splitting off from Tenochtitlan
indicates their relationship had been antagonistic from the beginning (Duran
1994: 47). As recounted in the Codex Ramirez, when the elders of Tenochtitlan
decided they needed a king of their own, and such as they had never had, it
was because of “the seditious activities of their co-citizens at Tlatelolco” (Ranirez
1903: 37). According to Frey Duran, the Tenochca feared that Tlatelolco was out
to dominate them, and by obtaining a king they proposed rather to turn the tables
and rule their Mexica fellows. Although that didn’t happened for some time—the
Tlatelolco people refused to acknowledge Tenochtitlan’s rule, and soon enough
they solicited their own stranger-king in the person of a son of the Tepaneca
ruler Tezozomoc—by a characteristic process of symmetrical schismogenesis, the
Tenochca did get a king like the other nations. And apart from the quarrel with
Tlatelolco, this king could stand the Tenochca in good stead in relation to the
Tepanec rulers of Azcapotzalco on whose land they were squatting.
The problematic relation of the Mexica to their Tepaneca overlords in Azca-
potzalco was the other part of the motivation of the Mexica elders in begging
a ruler from Culhacan. At least the Tepaneca must have thought so, for they
promptly doubled the Tenochtitlan’s tributary obligations, including imposing
