But even during this Toltec period hunting tribes, both of Nahua and other blood, were pursuing their game in the forests and mountains, especially in the northern region. Despised by their more civilized, corn-eating brethren, they were known as barbarians, dogs, Chichimecs, 'suckers of blood,' from the custom attributed to them of drinking blood and eating raw flesh. Many tribes, indeed, although very far from being savages, were known to the aristocratic Toltecs as Chichimecs, by reason of some real or imaginary inferiority. By the revolutions of the tenth century, some of these Chichimec nations, probably of the Nahua blood and tillers of the soil, although at the same time bold hunters and valiant warriors, gained the ascendancy in Anáhuac. Hence the absurd versions of native traditions which represent the Valley of Mexico as occupied during the Chichimec period by a people who, until taught better by the Acolhuas, lived in caverns and subsisted on wild fruits and raw meat, while at the same time they were ruled by emperors, and possessed a most complicated and advanced system of government and laws. Their barbarism probably consisted for the most part in resisting for a time the enervating influences of Toltec luxury, especially in the pleasures of the table.[344]
CHINAMPAS, OR FLOATING GARDENS.
The Aztecs were traditionally corn-eaters from the first, but while shut up for long years on an island in the lake, they had little opportunity for agricultural pursuits. During this period of their history, the fish, birds, insects, plants, and mud of the lake supplied them with food, until floating gardens were invented and subsequent conquests on the main land afforded them broad fields for tillage. As a rule no details are preserved concerning the pre-Aztec peoples; where such details are known they will be introduced in their proper place as illustrative of later Nahua food-customs.
The chinampas, or floating gardens, cultivated by the Aztecs on the surface of the lakes in Anáhuac, were a most extraordinary source of food. Driven in the days of their national weakness to the lake islands, too small for the tillage which on the main had supported them, these ingenious people devised the chinampa. They observed small portions of the shore, detached by the high water and held together by fibrous roots, floating about on the surface of the water. Acting on the suggestion, they constructed rafts of light wood, covered with smaller sticks, rushes, and reeds, bound together with fibrous aquatic plants, and on this foundation they heaped two or three feet of black mud from the bottom of the lake. Thus the broad surface around their island home was dotted with fertile gardens, self-irrigating and independent of rains, easily moved from place to place according to the fancy of the proprietor. They usually took the form of parallelograms and were often over a hundred feet long. All the agricultural products of the country, particularly maize, chile, and beans were soon produced in abundance on the chinampas, while the larger ones even bore fruit and shade trees of considerable size, and a hut for the convenience of the owner, or gardener. The floating gardens have remained in use down to modern times, but since the waters of the lakes receded so much from their former limits, they have been generally attached to the shore, being separated by narrow canals navigated by the canoes which bear their produce to the markets. In later times, however, only flowers and garden vegetables have been raised in this manner.[345]
On the mainland throughout the Nahua territory few fertile spots were left uncultivated. The land was densely populated, and agriculture was an honorable profession in which all, except the king, the nobility, and soldiers in time of actual war, were more or less engaged.[346]
ABORIGINAL AGRICULTURE.
Agricultural products in the shape of food were not a prominent feature among articles of export and import, excepting, of course, luxuries for the tables of the kings and nobles. Each province, as a rule, raised only sufficient supplies for its own ordinary necessities; consequently, when by reason of drought or other cause, a famine desolated one province, it was with the greatest difficulty that food could be obtained from abroad. The Mexicans were an improvident people, and want was no stranger to them.[347]
The chief products of Nahua tillage were maize, beans, magueyes, cacao, chian, chile, and various native fruits.[348] The maize, or Indian corn, the dried ears of which were called by the Aztecs centli, and the dried kernels separated from the cob, tlaolli,[349] was the standard and universal Nahua food. Indigenous to America, in the development of whose civilization, traditionally at least, it played an important part, it has since been introduced to the world. It is the subject of the New World traditions respecting the introduction of agriculture among men. Tortillas, of maize, accompanied by the inevitable frijoles, or beans, seasoned with chile, or pepper, and washed down with drinks prepared from the maguey and cacao, were then, as now, the all-sustaining diet, and we are told that corn grew so strong and high in the fields that covered the surface of the country in some parts, as to seriously embarrass the conqueror Cortés in his movements against the natives hidden in these natural labyrinths.[350]