12.6 Xiuhtlaltzin, Last Queen of the Toltec (Mexico)

The history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is hard for historians because the best sources were all destroyed. Those that remain are of dubious historicity, but they do tell of the Queen Xiuhtlaltzin, who reigned somewhere in the 800s or 900s, shortly before the fall of the Toltec empire. Since the records are so sketchy, this episode is not exactly a biography, but it does cover:

• what written records the people of Mesoamerica left
• why the written records didn't survive (they got burned)
• how the people reconstructed their oral histories in the 1600s
• how those reconstructions tell a very little about Xiuhtlaltzin
• what archaeology of Tollan/Tula can tell us
• how Xiuhtlaltzin might have worshipped a frog goddess
• how she might have cheered and/or played and/or sacrificed the losers of the famous Mesoamerican ball game

In the end, the jury's out on whether Xiuhtlaltzin even existed. Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments on the website or on social media.

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Feature image by AlejandroLinaresGarcia - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24460525

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