Tarascan

A people of pre-Columbian central present-day Mexico whose territory bordered on the extreme north edge of the Aztec empire.

Tarascan origins are unclear, but they probably arrived in central Mexico from the northwest about the same time as the AzTECS. Like their more famous neighbors to the south, the Tarascan had forged an alliance of three cities—Ihuatzio, Patzcuaro, and Tzintzuntzan—that were neighbors on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. They seem to have been more advanced than their Aztec neighbors in the use of metal for practical, rather than merely ornamental, purposes, and this technological advantage has caused some historians to speculate that had Europeans arrived a century later they would have been confronting a Tarascan empire rather than an Aztec.

The Tarascan military superiority was borne out in at least one instance during the reign of the Aztec great speaker Axayacatl, when the Tarascan served the Aztecs one of their only crushing battlefield defeats. On this occasion the Tarascan had nearly 40,000 troops to the Aztecs’ 24,000, and only about 200 of the latter survived. In the end the Aztecs retreated and are not known to have ever attempted another battle with their neighbors to the north.

Further reading: Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest, Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Nigel Davies, Aztecs: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).

—Marie A. Kelleher