Nezahualcoyotl Biography

Nezahualcoyotl (April 28, 1402 – June 4, 1472) was a philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler (tlatoani) of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico. Unlike other high-profile Mexican figures from the century preceding the Spanish Conquest, Nezahualcoyotl was not an Aztec; his people were the Acolhua, another Nahuan people settled in the eastern part of the Valley of Mexico, settling on the eastern side of Lake Texcoco.

He is best remembered for his beautiful poetry, but according to a pictorial History read aloud to Fray Diego Durán, Spanish-born native Nahuatl-speaker, and to more embellished accounts by his descendants and biographers, Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl and Juan Bautista de Pomar, he had an experience of an "Unknown, Unknowable Lord of Everywhere" to whom he built an entirely empty temple in which no blood sacrifices of any kind were allowed—not even animal. However, like the fabled King Solomon, he allowed even human sacrifice to continue in his other temples.

Nezahualcoyotl has been remembered as a poet. This is because a number of poems in the Classical Nahuatl language written in the 16th and 17th centuries have been ascribed to him. In fact this attribution is somewhat doubtful since Nezahualcoyotl died almost 50 years before the conquest and the poems were written down another fifty years after that. One of the writers who put Aztec Poems in writing, Juan Bautista de Pomar was a grandson of Nezahualcoyotl, and he may have attributed the poems to his grandfather.