Ichcahuipilli

Origins

Cotton grew in the warm lowlands of Mesoamerica and was one of the most valuable goods in the region. Quilted cotton armor was worn in central Mexico long before the Aztecs, and similar padded armor was used by the Maya and other peoples. The Nahuatl name ichcahuipilli combines ichcatl, cotton, and huipilli, the word for a tunic or blouse. Under the Aztec Empire of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries it was the basic body armor of trained warriors. The Codex Mendoza, made for the Spanish administration around 1541, records that some conquered provinces sent war costumes and cotton goods to Tenochtitlan as tribute, which shows how important such equipment was to the imperial army.

Design & Construction

An ichcahuipilli was made from layers of raw cotton packed between sheets of cloth and quilted together with close stitching, which held the padding in place and made it dense and firm. Spanish writers described it as about two fingers thick, though thickness probably varied. Most were sleeveless jackets that covered the torso and sometimes reached the upper thigh, and they were tied at the front or back. Some later writers claim the cotton was soaked in salt water to stiffen it, but there is little firm evidence for this. The armor was light and allowed free movement, which mattered in a style of fighting that relied on agility. Experienced warriors of high rank often wore a tlahuiztli, a close-fitting feathered suit in bright colors, over the cotton armor, so that the ichcahuipilli is often hidden in pictures of Aztec warriors.

Combat Use

Mesoamerican weapons were designed to cut and wound rather than to pierce metal. Obsidian-edged arrows, darts thrown with the Atlatl, sling stones and the edges of the Aztec Macuahuitl could all be slowed or stopped by thick quilted cotton, and the armor gave good protection for its weight. It was carried on campaign by ordinary soldiers as well as elite warriors, usually with a round Chimalli shield. When Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in 1519, they soon found that native armor worked well against native weapons and was far more bearable in the heat than a steel breastplate or mail. Many of the Conquistadors wore escaupiles, as they called them, in place of or beneath their own armor, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo mentions them several times in his account. Cotton was also easy to obtain in Mexico, whereas iron and steel armor had to be brought from Spain or the Caribbean and could not easily be replaced. Both sides wore cotton armor during the Fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spaniards and their thousands of Tlaxcalan allies as well as the Mexica defenders.

Legacy

After the conquest of Mexico, Spanish expeditions in the Americas went on using quilted cotton armor for much of the sixteenth century. It was light, cheap and could be made locally, and it gave useful protection against the arrows of peoples in North, Central and South America. Some Spanish accounts even describe horses protected with cotton padding. In Spain itself the escaupil was little used, but it became part of the equipment of the frontier soldier in New Spain. Surviving examples are very rare, since cotton decays quickly, and most of what is known comes from Aztec manuscripts, Spanish chronicles and later pictures. The ichcahuipilli remains one of the clearest examples of an indigenous military technology adopted by European invaders.