Belinda Blackburn

Nezahualcoyotl

9/28/2011

Nezahualcoyotl , meaning "Coyote in fast" or "Coyote who Fasts" was a philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico. Unlike other high-profile Mexican figures from the century preceding the Spanish Conquest, Nezahualcoyotl was not an Aztec; his people were the Acolhua, another Nahuan people settled in the eastern part of the Valley of Mexico, settling on the eastern side of Lake Texcoco. He is best remembered for his beautiful poetry, but according to a pictorial History read aloud to Fray Diego Durn, Spanish-born native Nahuatl-speaker, and to more embellished accounts by his descendants and biographers, Fernando de Alva Corts Ixtlilxochitl and Juan Bautista de Pomar, he had an experience of an "Unknown, Unknowable Lord of Everywhere" to whom he built an entirely empty temple in which no blood sacrifices of any kind were allowednot even animal. However, he allowed even human sacrifice to continue in his other temples. Acolmiztli Nezahualcoyotl was the son of Ixtlilxochitl and Matlalcihuatzin, the daughter of Huitzilihuitl. Though born heir to a throne, his youth was not marked by princely luxury. His father had set Texcoco against the powerful city of Azcapotzalco, ruled by the Tepanec. In 1418, when the young prince was fifteen, the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco, led by Tezozomoc, conquered Texcoco and Nezahualcoyotl had to flee into exile in Huexotzinco, returning to stay in Tenochtitlan in 1422. After Tezozomoc's son Maxtla became ruler of Azcapotzalco, Nezahualcoyotl returned to Texcoco, but had to go into exile a second time when he learned that Maxtla plotted against his life.