Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives

10. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Texcocan Dynasty

219 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322849.c010 10 Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Texcocan Dynasty Nobility, Genealogy, and Historiography Pablo García Loaeza Todo hombre noble generoso o hijodalgo debe saber hacer relación de aquel linaje donde desciende al menos hasta su cuarto abuelo. Y el que esto no sabe es de reprobar y tachar como aquel que no sabe dar razón de quién es.1 Feranto Mexía (1492) It is most difficult and even impossible to ascertain those antiquities; for, it plainly appears, the greatest part of them are inventions of modern authors, who wrong their works by mixing spurious and fabulous stories in them, which makes them look rather like poets than historians. Thomas Richers (1724) Feranto Mexía, a nobleman of arms and letters in fifteenth-century Jaén, wrote his Nobiliario (1492) to demonstrate that the essential ingredient of nobility is old blood, that noble status is determined primarily by a lineage’s antiquity.Two hundred years later Mexía would have found no cause to reprove Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who dedicated significant effort and expense to tracing his ancestry well beyond his fourth grandfather on his maternal grandmother’s side.2 Thus Alva Ixtlilxochitl knew full well how to explain who he was: a legitimate descendant of the prestigious Royal House of Texcoco. By doing so, he also meant to make his family’s entitlement plain to the colonial authorities in New Spain. In the comprehensive introduction to Alva’s Obras históricas, Edmundo O’Gorman identified the Compendio histórico del reino de Texcoco in particular PABLO GARCÍA LOAEZA 220 as a memorial de méritos y servicios, intended to confirm and assert seigniorial rights based on the venerable stature and notable deeds of his ancestors (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1: 211). In fact, all of Alva’s texts, from the Relación sucinta en forma de memorial to the extensive Historia de la nación chichimeca, are extended nobiliarios, family histories intended to call attention to his lineage’s nobility. However fleshed out with narrative anecdote, the skeleton is consistently genealogical, following the dynastic succession of Texcoco’s legitimate rulers from Xolotl, the legendary founder of the southern Chichimec empire, by way of the renowned Nezahualcoyotl to don Fernando Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, a key Spanish ally in the military and spiritual Conquista de México. Nobiliarios typically follow the family’s genealogy as far into the past as possible, stressing any link to kings of old, because, as Mexía pointed out,“one is more noble or less noble contingent on how far and how high the dignity or lordship of one’s lineage is or how near a relative or close to royal blood one is”(Mexía 1492: n.p., L. 2º, C. vii, Concl. iii).3 According to Mexía, numerous classical authorities starting with Aristotle, as well as multiple legal codes, emphasize ancestry as the defining feature of nobility: The Philosopher, in the second [book] of rhetoric, calls nobles those who come or carry nobility from their parents, Boethius according to what is said in the third [book] of Consolation, Livy in all three of his Decades, Tullius in the [book] on Duties and in the Paradoxes, Seneca, Ovid in his Metamorphoses . . . Virgil in his Aeneid (in the seventh book), Lucan, Leomarte, Pompeius Trogus, Vegetius, Leonardo d’Arezzo, Master Raymond, and all the other authors, philosophers, poets, orators, and historiographers ancient and modern, and all the laws, especially the Partidas, affirm it . . . and infinite others, which would make it impossible to finish.4 (ibid.: ii) However, Mexía’s notions about the connection between nobility and genealogy can be more precisely traced to the twelfth century, when throughout Europe the landed aristocracy sought to establish a patrimonial claim to their titles and estates. It was also around that time that genealogy became the organizing principle of European historiography. In his work on the formation of the French nobility in the Middle Ages, Georges Duby (1977) finds that prior to the tenth century there were no lineages or any systematic concern with ancestry. Instead, family relations were dispersed horizontally in the present, and alliances were determined as much by marriage as by blood. Over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the spread of hereditary fiefdoms and the institution of primogeniture promoted the development of vertical structures; patroclinous bloodlines became [3.147.42.168] Project MUSE (2024...