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Codex Chapman

Cocoa Beverage

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Commodities and (Being) Good: Nahua Traders and Merchants. The primary function of this page is to describe how certain vocations worked in relation to Nahua trade and how they practiced trading and merchandizing. This will also briefly touch on how each good works and what their function was. The Floretine Codex offers an incredible amount of information and each passage within Book 10 usually pertains, for the most part, of how a specific form of trade worked within the society. There were many different sources of trade for Nahuatl pochteca, as they were primarily responsible for dispensing various different commodities and goods. Living in the pochteca social class meant a variety of things, but for this page, the primary products that will be focused on within this page are going to be meat products, agricultural products, and how they functioned with society – including the Nahuatl ideas on what makes a good vocation practitioner and what doesn’t. This also includes the specific traders’ specializations and vocations, and how they made a living within Nahuatl society.

General Merchant Definition
For the Nahuatl peoples, they had an entire class of merchants named pochteca, and they sold a variety of goods. What makes it more interesting is that the Florentine Codex not only describes the trade, but the moral means of trade as well. To be specific, in Book 10: The People, the Spanish translation goes as follows:

“The merchant is often a haggler, and he knows how to earn a profit and how to loan with interest, how to make deals with buyers, and how to multiply his wealth.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

What is also interesting, in interest of studying not only Nahuatl forms of trade, but also their culture. To be specific, in the documents that describe merchants, vocations, and trade, there is also a good iteration and a bad variant. Following the description of a merchant, the Spanish to English translation describes the two variants:

“A good merchant takes his wares abroad, away from his land, and sells them for a moderate price, each item according to its value, just as it is, not cheating anyone with them but always fearing god. A god merchant is stingy and tight, a cheater, a talker, and arrogant; one who overprices things, a big speculator; a thief, a liar, and one whose bad conscience lurks behind everything he has and spends. And all his earnings are ill-gotten; and he is a smooth talker when making a sell. And he praises what he is selling so much that he easily swindles the buyers.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

This implies that within Nahuatl society, there was an emphasis on practicing what would be contemporarily called ethical capitalism. No matter what merchandise was being sold, there was a right way to do so, and what was considered honorable. This not only presents a new perspective onto how Nahuatl society functioned, and how some of the practices they implemented in their day could possibly synergize with modern conflicts and issues.

But before fixating on historical themes, the primary purpose of this paper is to document the various trade vocations worked in Nahuatl society and how this produce was traded around the empire.

Cacao Traders
Agriculture traders typically specialized in a singular product and were usually responsible for that good’s export and trade. For example, in the Florentine Codex, there is an instance in which the Cacao pod, an integral part of Nahuatl economy, traders are described and how they function (both morally and immorally). One of the most important products for the Nahuatl empire (especially once the Spanish arrived) was Cacao seeds:

“The one who trades cacao often has a great quantity of it, and he also has fields of cacao; and he takes it abroad to sell it, or he buys it wholesale to sell in single lots. A good trader of this merchandise sells seeds that are fat, firm, and selected. He separates each one when he sells them; he keeps the ones that are fat and solid in one place (…)” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

There were also different types of cacao seeds as well, and, from the Spanish-to-English translation of Book 10, “each kind [was] sold separately; the ones from Tochtepec, the one from Anahuac, the ones from Cuauhtemala, the one from Coatulco, the ones from Xoloteco – whether they are whitish or ashen or red.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

This commodity also has a bad trader variant as well: “A bad trader sells fake [seeds], because he boils them and even toasts them so that they look good, and sometimes he soaks them in water so that they swell. And he makes them look ashen colored or tawny to deceive [people], because these are the best seeds. And he also has this way of counterfeiting them: to make the new seeds look fat, he will often toast them in hot ashes and then cover them with clay or with wet soil, so that the seeds that looked tiny will look fat and new. He has another kind of trick: he puts inside the seed husks a black dough or black wax that looks similar to their kernels. And sometimes, they shatter avocado pits, make them round and when they are thus rounded, they put them inside the empty seed husks.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

It seems that with every instance in which there is a good being described, it is shortly followed with a brief description on what makes an immoral version of that merchant. It is interesting because it displays a degree of cultural responsibility/honor, and how that may have affected the Nahuatl society as a whole.

Continuing on the subject of Cacao, the product was also used to make a frothy drink that was made from grinded pods. Specifically, in Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, the drink is described as such:

"The woman who sells cacao for drinking first grinds it in this way: first, she breaks or crushes the beans; second, they are crushed a little bit more; third and finally, they are finely crushed and then mixed with cooked and washed maize kernels. And once [the beans] have been crushed and mixed in this way, they pour water on them in a cup. If they add a little water to them, they make a beautiful cacao, and if [they add] a lot [to them], they do not produce foam. And the following things are carefully done and observed in order to prepare it well: that is, it is strained, and once it is strained, it is lifted up in order to pour it; and this is how the foam rises, and then it is put aside. And sometimes it becomes too thick. It is mixed with water after it is ground. And one who knows how to prepare it well sells a beautiful cacao, such that only the lords can drink it: soft, foamy, vermillion, red and pure, and not too thick. Sometimes they add aromatic spices to it and even bee honey, or else some water mixed with flowers. And cacao that is not good is too thick and has too much water, and so it does not produce foam but only some froth."  (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

While the Spanish-to-English does not distinguish who enjoys Xocolatl, the Nahuatl-to-English does. For the Nahuatl translation, it goes as such:

"She sells good, superior, potable [chocolate]: the privelage, the drink of nobles, of rulers - finely ground, soft, foamy, reddish, bitter; [with] chili water, with flowers, with uei nacaztli with teonacaztli, with vanilla, with mecaxochitl, with wild bee honey, with powdered aromatic flowers. Inferior choclate has maize flour and water; lime water; [it is] pale; the [froth] bubbles burst. [It is chocolate] with water added - Chontal water fit for water flies" (Garcia Garagarza 2023). . Comparing the two translations offers different points of information that reveals more about Nahuatl culture and trade; for example, the Spanish translation offers details yet no context, but the Nahuatl translation does.

Chile Trader
On the subject of Xocolatl, another ingredient that had a whole vocation/trade with it is chile. In the Spanish-to-English translation, a trader of chile is described as such: "The seller of chile, which is the pepper of this land, sells all the types of chile that are named here, such as the ones that are long or broad and ones that are not, big and tiny, green and dry, the summer season ones, and all the ones that grow from various stems. And they sell each kind separately, as well as those that are harvested after being affected by frost. A bad dealer in this trade sells the stinking, spoiled ones."  (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

It is interesting comparing the Nahuatl translation against the Spanish because not only does it contextualize Nahuatl culture, but it also provides more evocative language that aptly describes the important of vocational trade and how to practice it ethically.

Bean Seller
There is also the bean trader who, in the Spanish Translation, does as such: "The bean seller, if he is a good trader, sells each kind separately and prices them according to their fair value, without deceit. And the beans that he sells are those that are new, clean, fat, and not spoiled but whose condition is such that they can be stored like something precious in the chest or in the grain bin, such as yellow beans, red beans, white beans, the tiny ones, the ones that look as if speckled, the ones that have different colors, and the ones that are very fat and look like fava beans."

Again, comparing this against the Nahuatl translation tells much more, but instead of repeating the type of beans that make a good bean seller, what will be focused on is the Nahuatl version of a bad bean trader: "The bad bean seller never tells the truth; he always lies. He is a great liar, a congenital liar, a teller of falsehoods. He mixes the good, the precious with the spoiled, the infested beans." (Garcia Garagarza 2023).

The Nahuatl were very trade-oriented and most of the traders followed the same doctrine of practicing their trades ethically and honestly; almost as if it could be interpreted as a form of modern ethical capitalism.