The Emperors’ Cloak: Aztec Pomp, Toltec Circumstances

Abstract

The official cape of the Aztec emperors characteristically is pictured with a blue, geometric design. A pictorial codex illustrates tribute textiles incorporating a portion of that same pattern. These sixteenth-century Aztec weavings came from geographic areas previously part of the twelfth-century Toltec empire; it is from that revered power that this motif derived. The imperial blue cloak of the Aztec rulers thus served as their “charter,” reflecting the empire's legitimacy based on the emperors’ claim to a Toltec genealogy. The design’s Nahuatl name plus recent dyeing experiments indicate the creation of the emperors’ cloak involved the deliberate inclusion of a labor-intensive tie-dye technique in order to produce a specific motif that carried a powerful symbolism. This design’s occurrence in other contexts confirms its importance and indicates the motif had pre-Toltec origins relating to geopolitical/mythological bases of authority in ancient mesoamerican societies.