Xicotencatl the Younger

Xicotencatl's first war was fought entirely in the present tense. He met the Spanish column at Tzompantzinco and again at Tehuacingo, and when a pitched clash on open ground failed, he switched to night raids and ambushes along the mountain approaches — a commander adjusting tactics on contact rather than working from a fixed doctrine. Díaz describes Tlaxcalan attacks arriving in overwhelming waves, thousands of warriors in constant motion, coordinated well enough that Spanish arquebuses and cavalry charges — decisive against every other force they had faced in the New World — only barely held the line.

What marks this as Se rather than mere aggression is the sheer physical, moment-to-moment competence of it. Xicotencatl was not managing the war from a palace; he was in the field reading terrain, timing assaults to Spanish fatigue, probing flanks in real time. Cortés himself, no admirer of the enemy who had nearly broken him, wrote to the Spanish crown that Tlaxcala's resistance was the fiercest he encountered on the road to Tenochtitlan. That is Se doing what Se does best — total command of a live, chaotic, physical situation — deployed by a man barely out of his twenties against the best-equipped army the hemisphere had seen.

The same instinct carried him through the two years that followed. He fought on the causeways during the siege of Tenochtitlan with the same visceral engagement he had shown resisting Cortés at the border, which is part of what makes his eventual desertion so legible: a dominant Se type does not abandon a fight out of theory. Something concrete — the treatment of his men, the direction of the campaign, the spoils — finally became intolerable enough to act on.

Xicotencatl's objection to the Spanish alliance was not sentiment or wounded pride at having lost the war he had just fought. It was a cold internal calculation, run independently of what the rest of the council wanted to believe: an alliance built on a shared enemy does not survive the disappearance of that enemy, and a confederacy that helped hand the strangers the whole valley would have no leverage left when the debts came due. Later events — the encomiendas, the demographic collapse, the erosion of Tlaxcalan autonomy under colonial rule — would bear him out almost exactly, though he did not live to see it.

What is distinctly Ti about the stand is that it held under intense social pressure and lost him nothing in conviction. His own father was one of the four lords voting for alliance; the rest of the senate closed ranks behind the decision; and Xicotencatl kept arguing anyway, by every account undiplomatically, because the logic hadn't changed just because he was now outvoted. He did not soften the position to preserve the relationship with his father, and he did not quietly comply once the vote went against him — he fought under the alliance while continuing, by Spanish and Tlaxcalan accounts alike, to be the most visibly resentful man in it.

It is Ti in service of Se rather than Ni: a private, self-referential model of the situation, tested against what he had just seen on the battlefield, not a long-range vision of how the conquest would ultimately reorder the world. He was right about the near future because he trusted his own read over the room's consensus — the defining move of an auxiliary Ti, and the thing that made him impossible to fold back into the coalition once he had decided it was wrong.

Why ESTP Over ISTP

The clean tell is the desertion itself. An ISTP who had lost the argument might have simply stopped caring, drifting to the margins of the campaign. Xicotencatl stayed engaged to the very end, fighting through the causeway battles of the siege, and only broke when something concrete became unbearable — the hallmark of a Se-dominant temperament that needs a live provocation to move, not a slow accumulation of private disillusionment.