A Fighting Chance, Tethered to a Stone

The gladiatorial sacrifice staged on the temalacatl was structurally unlike the more familiar Aztec heart extraction performed atop a pyramid temple, and Spanish chroniclers who witnessed or recorded accounts of it, including Sahagun's Nahua informants, treated it as a distinct and notable rite in its own right. The captive, always a warrior taken in battle and typically one already recognized for courage, was bound by a rope through one ankle to a ring at the stone's center, long enough to let him move but not to flee its circumference. He fought with a club studded with feathers rather than the obsidian edged macuahuitl used in real combat, against a succession of Aztec warriors who fought him with full weapons, an asymmetry that made the contest a display of the captive's valor under impossible odds rather than a fair fight.

Accounts describe the crowd and priests watching from around the platform, and the fallen captive's body was afterward treated with the same postmortem honors as other high status sacrifices, including subsequent ritual handling of the body reserved for warriors of proven distinction. Some accounts describe a captive who fought exceptionally well being spared outright rather than merely earning a chance at further combat, suggesting the rite could function as a genuine test of valor with a real, if rare, escape from death at its far end.