A confederation of three Nahua cities on Lake Texcoco - Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan - that broke free of their Tepanec overlord in a single war and, within a century, dominated central Mexico through tribute, before a Spanish-led coalition of their own tributaries ended it in another single war.
Conquest1521Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Languages of administration
Nahuatl
Writing system: No cited figure
Core region
The Valley of Mexico and, by tribute, most of central Mexico
How it was governed
4 of 4 coded
Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.
tribal levyContingents raised through kin or tribal structures the ruler did not create
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.
tributeRevenue received from another polity
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.
electionChosen by a body entitled to choose
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.
descentDescent from a house or lineage, publicly invoked
divine sanctionA mandate from above — heaven, or a claim to be mahdi or imam
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.
Turning points
7 hinges
13251521
1325
Tenochtitlan is foundedCapital move
Expelled by their own former overlords at Colhuacan, the Mexica found what their oracle had promised would mark their future home - a nopal cactus growing from a stone, an eagle resting on it - on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco, and raised a shrine there to their own god before building anything else.
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
1428
The war against Azcapotzalco and the Triple AllianceBattle
Itzcoatl, newly elected king of a Tenochtitlan still paying tribute to the Tepanec city of Azcapotzalco, allied with the exiled Texcocan prince Nezahualcoyotl to defeat and kill the Tepanec ruler Maxtla, then formalized a three-way league with Texcoco and the smaller city of Tlacopan that would direct the alliance's wars and divide its tribute for the following century.
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
1486
The Great Temple is dedicatedReform
Ahuitzotl completed the reconstruction of Tenochtitlan's chief temple, begun under his predecessor, and marked its consecration with four days of sacrifice of the war captives held in reserve for the occasion - a festival historians describe as having drawn spectators from every corner of the empire's tribute network.
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
1509
Portents trouble Moctezuma IICatastrophe
A sudden, unexplained fire consumed the turret of the Great Temple in a calm and windless night, followed within two years by a violent disturbance of the lake with no natural cause and reports of armed apparitions fighting in the sky - omens later chroniclers record as having thrown the king into a foreboding he could not shake even as his armies kept campaigning.
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
1519
Cortés and Moctezuma II meetTreaty
A Spanish captain and some four hundred and fifty men, guided and reinforced by Tlaxcalan and other allies hostile to the Triple Alliance, walked the causeway into Tenochtitlan and were received by Moctezuma II himself in a ceremony of exchanged gifts and formal courtesy that neither side, by every account, fully trusted.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
1520
Moctezuma II dies and the Spanish are driven outCatastrophe
Moctezuma, sent out by his own Spanish captors to calm a rebellion against their occupation of his palace, was struck by stones and an arrow while addressing his own people and died of his wounds days later; the occupiers, their position untenable, abandoned the city by night with heavy losses in the retreat later remembered as the Noche Triste.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
1521
Cuauhtemoc is captured and Tenochtitlan fallsSiege
After a siege of some ninety-three days, in which smallpox and the destruction of the city's own causeways and aqueducts did as much damage as the fighting, Spanish brigantines ran down the canoe carrying Cuauhtemoc as he tried to escape across the lake, and his capture on August 13 ended organized Mexica resistance and the independent existence of the Triple Alliance.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Chapters
10 in order · about 15 minutes
An eagle on a cactus
formationDrafted from Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Before they had a city of their own, the Mexica served as vassals and
mercenaries to the Colhua lords of Colhuacan, fighting their wars for
them. Sent against the Xochimilcas without weapons the Colhuas thought
fit to lend a despised subject people, the Mexica improvised knives from
obsidian and took captives anyway - and when their own overlords mocked
them for arriving at the victory feast without prisoners to show for it,
the Mexica emptied baskets full of severed ears before the astonished
Colhua ranks, proof of exactly how many enemies they had killed rather
than bothered to bind.
A sacrifice that frightened their own masters into expelling them
Determined to dedicate an altar to their own god, the Mexica asked the
Colhua lord for something fine to offer on it; he sent them, as an
insult, a filthy dead bird wrapped in a dirty rag. The Mexica said
nothing, but at the dedication itself, before the Colhua king and his
nobles who had come expecting to mock their vassals further, they
produced four Xochimilca prisoners they had secretly kept back from the
earlier campaign and sacrificed them on the spot - the first human
sacrifice, Clavigero notes, known to have been performed in that
country. The horror it caused among the Colhuas was not gratitude for a
show of piety: they expelled the Mexica from their territory outright,
unwilling to keep such a people among them any longer.
A sign at the end of a long search
Driven out, the Mexica wandered the shores of Lake Texcoco until they
reached a place where a nopal cactus grew from a stone, with an eagle's
foot resting on it - the mark their own tradition held had been promised
by their oracle as the site of their future city. Clavigero is careful to
note that the more elaborate versions of this story, in which the eagle
holds a serpent in its claws, belong to later, embellished retellings
rather than the earliest accounts, and he leaves them aside as fable. What
is agreed is the year: 1325. The Mexica built a shrine to their god
Huitzilopochtli on the spot, consecrating it with the blood of a Colhua
warrior killed in a skirmish, and began raising huts of reed and rush
around it - the beginning of a city that would, within two centuries,
become the largest in the new world.
The founding of Tenochtitlan on the opening page of the Codex Mendoza, made in Mexico about 1541; the eagle stands on its cactus with no serpent in its claws.
Bodleian Library, Oxford · Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · Unknown painter · Public domain
A prince hidden among reeds
formationDrafted from Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843)
By the early fifteenth century Tenochtitlan had grown from a refuge into
a functioning city, but it remained a tributary of Azcapotzalco, the
capital of the Tepanec people on the western shore of the lake - a
relationship of subordination, not the equal alliance it would later
enter into. Azcapotzalco's own power reached across much of the Valley
of Mexico, extending to the rival city of Texcoco, whose ruler was
killed when the Tepanecs invaded in 1418. His fifteen-year-old heir,
Nezahualcoyotl, watched his father die from a hiding place in the
branches of a tree overhanging the battlefield.
Years of flight, betrayal and disguise
Nezahualcoyotl's own life over the following decade reads like a string
of narrow escapes. Captured once and imprisoned, he was freed only when
the fortress's governor took his place and paid for the substitution
with his own life. Pardoned for a time and allowed to study under an old
tutor, he was nearly murdered at a banquet, then hunted through his own
capital by soldiers sent to kill him outright - escaping through a
secret passage concealed by a censer's smoke while the assassins waited
in an adjoining room. A price was set on his head, and he spent long
stretches hiding in caves, thickets and, on one occasion, under a pile
of maguey fibre a peasant woman covered him with as pursuers searched
her cottage. Despite the reward offered, no one who sheltered him ever
gave him up.
Nezahualcoyotl hidden from his pursuers in a field of chia, as imagined by Luis Coto in 1865.
Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) · Luis Coto · Public domain
A coalition formed in exile
What kept Nezahualcoyotl alive was less his own concealment than the
loyalty he inspired and the resentment Azcapotzalco's own harsh rule was
generating among its neighbours, Tenochtitlan included. Word reached him
that a coalition was forming against the Tepanec state, and when the day
came he found himself at the head of an army strong enough to face his
enemies directly - the beginning of a war that would end not only his
own exile but Azcapotzalco's dominance over the whole valley.
Three cities, one league
expansionDrafted from Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Tenochtitlan's own king Chimalpopoca died amid the same Tepanec
aggression that had killed Nezahualcoyotl's father, and the Mexica
nobility, finding themselves without a ruler and pressed hard by
Azcapotzalco's new tyrant Maxtla, moved quickly to elect a successor
capable of leading them through the crisis. Their choice fell on
Itzcoatl, a son of the earlier king Acamapichtli by a slave woman - a
birth that might have counted against him elsewhere, but who had spent
more than thirty years as commander of the Mexica armies and was judged
the most prudent, just and courageous man the nation had. He was seated
on the royal mat and acclaimed king by the assembled nobles.
The death of Chimalpopoca and the accession of Itzcoatl in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, a sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript.
Bibliothèque nationale de France · Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · Unknown painter · Public domain
An embassy that became an alliance
Itzcoatl's first act as king was to send word to Nezahualcoyotl of his
own election and his determination to join forces against Maxtla. The
exiled prince accepted gladly, and the combined armies moved against
Azcapotzalco directly, defeating Maxtla's forces, driving him to the
baths of his own capital where he was dragged out and put to death by
the customary rites the Mexica reserved for enemies, and razing the
city itself, whose wasted territory became, from then on, a slave
market for the whole valley.
A league that outlasted a century
With the war won, Itzcoatl formalized what had been a wartime coalition
into a standing arrangement. Nezahualcoyotl was restored, with Mexica
help, to the throne of Texcoco. Totoquihuatzin, a Tepanec noble who had
taken no part in the war against his own people, was made king of
Tlacopan, a lesser city that would receive a fifth of whatever the
alliance's campaigns took in plunder, the remaining share divided
between Texcoco and Tenochtitlan in Tenochtitlan's own favour. Each king
was made an elector with a voice in confirming the others' successions,
and each was bound to send aid to the other two when called upon.
Itzcoatl then travelled to Texcoco to crown Nezahualcoyotl with his own
hands. The three-city league that resulted, later historians would
record, held firm and unbroken for a hundred years, and it was this
alliance, not any one city alone, that made possible the rapid conquests
that followed.
Itzcoatl in the Tovar Codex, painted about 1585.
John Carter Brown Library · Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · Juan de Tovar · Public domain
A coronation paid for in captives
expansionDrafted from Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Itzcoatl died in 1436 after thirteen years as king and more than thirty
as the Mexica's own general, having taken a tributary city and made it,
within a single reign, master of the people who had once ruled it. The
four electors who chose his successors did not deliberate long: with no
surviving brother to inherit, the choice fell to a grandson, Moctezuma
Ilhuicamina, whose own record of service made him the obvious candidate.
Both allied kings of the Triple Alliance confirmed the election and sent
gifts befitting the honour.
A custom that made war a coronation requirement
Before he would allow himself to be formally crowned, Moctezuma
followed what Clavigero records as either established law or his own
strong preference: a new king went to war first, to take prisoners for
sacrifice at his own coronation. Moctezuma chose the Chalca as his
target, in revenge for an old insult - he had once been seized and
imprisoned by them while travelling as an ambassador - and defeated them
in the field, taking captives without yet reducing the whole Chalca
state to tribute, so as not to delay the ceremony any further. On the
day appointed for his coronation, tribute and gifts from every
already-conquered territory arrived in ordered procession: gold, silver,
fine featherwork, and the prisoners whose sacrifice would mark his reign
as beginning the way every reign before his own house's rise had not
been able to.
The Stone of Moctezuma I, carved around its rim with scenes of conquest.
National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City · Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · José Luiz · CC BY-SA 4.0
A name remembered two ways
Some historians, Clavigero notes, identify this same Moctezuma with
another figure much celebrated in Mexica tradition under the name
Tlacaelel - a warrior of such courage in youth that he earned that
title, meaning roughly "man of great heart," alongside Ilhuicamina,
"archer of heaven." Other early chroniclers treat Tlacaelel as a
separate man entirely, a minister serving under Moctezuma rather than
the king himself. Clavigero argues at length against that reading,
pointing out contradictions it creates elsewhere in the record - a
dispute unresolved in his own day and, in the absence of a single
surviving Mexica archive to settle it, unlikely to be resolved by
argument alone.
Four days at the Great Temple
peakDrafted from Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
By the custom Chimalpopoca had begun, no Mexica noble could be crowned
king without having first served as commander of the armies - proof, it
was reasoned, that a man fit to lead a warlike nation in war should also
know how to govern it in peace. Ahuitzotl came to the throne already
tested in that role, and one of his first acts as king was to finish a
project his predecessor had begun: the rebuilding of Tenochtitlan's
chief temple on a grander scale than before.
The excavated remains of the Templo Mayor in the centre of Mexico City. Photograph, 2020.
Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata · CC BY-SA 4.0
Four years of war fought to fill a temple
The work went forward with an enormous body of workmen and was
completed within four years. Through that whole period Ahuitzotl kept
campaigning - against the Mazahuas to the west, the Zapotecs three
hundred miles to the southeast, and several other nations - and every
prisoner taken in those campaigns was deliberately held back rather than
sacrificed at the time of capture, reserved instead for the temple's own
consecration.
A festival historians could not agree how to count
When the building was finished, Ahuitzotl invited both allied kings and
the nobility of all three cities of the league to its dedication, and
the crowds that gathered, Clavigero writes, were the largest ever seen in
Mexico, drawn from the most distant reaches of the alliance's own tribute
network. The festival ran four days, during which every prisoner
collected over the preceding four years was sacrificed at the temple's
upper sanctuary. Historians disagreed even at the time on how many that
was: Torquemada put the total at seventy-two thousand three hundred and
forty-four; other accounts gave sixty-four thousand and sixty. To
manage the killing with the intended spectacle, the victims were formed
into two files, each a mile and a half long, running from the roads of
Tacuba and Iztapalapan to the temple itself, arriving in a continuous
procession as the sacrifices proceeded. The year was 1486.
A princess returns from the dead
contractionDrafted from Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
Moctezuma II inherited an empire at the height of its reach, but
tradition remembers his reign as shadowed from early on by a string of
portents no one at the time could explain away. In 1509 the turrets of
the Great Temple caught fire and burned on a calm, windless night with
no apparent cause; the following year the waters of Lake Texcoco surged
so violently that houses in the city were destroyed, though there was
no wind, no earthquake, nothing that could ordinarily account for it.
Figures of armed men were reported fighting each other in the sky.
The eighth omen of Moctezuma's reign in the Florentine Codex of 1579: two- headed men brought before the king.
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence · Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787) · Bernardino de Sahagún · Public domain
A sister who woke from her own funeral
The most striking of these stories concerns a woman said to be
Moctezuma's own sister, a princess who fell gravely ill and, believed
dead, was laid in a stone sepulchre. She revived there, climbed out, and
made her way to the palace garden, where she was found by her own
household. She told Moctezuma she had been led along a riverbank by a
radiant young man marked with a cross on his forehead, who showed her
human bones and skulls along the way and told her they were the souls
of her ancestors, tormented for their sins. On the river itself, he
showed her ships crowded with bearded, pale-skinned men in armour,
telling her God's will was that she live to witness the revolutions
these men would bring to the kingdom - and that when the fighting was
over and a new faith proclaimed, she should be the first of her own
people to accept it.
A king who stopped visiting his own sister
Moctezuma was struck with such dread on hearing this that he withdrew
without a word to a palace reserved for occasions of grief, and never
again visited the sister whose vision had unsettled him so completely,
preferring not to hear the prophecy repeated. She, for her part, lived
on for years afterward in quiet retirement, and in 1524, three years
after the conquest her vision had foretold, became one of the first of
her people baptized, taking the name Doña Maria Papantzin. Whatever
these stories owed to hindsight once the conquest had actually happened,
Clavigero records that they were set down in detail in both Mexica and
Acolhuan historical accounts, and that the omens, real or reinterpreted,
did nothing to slow Moctezuma's own military campaigns in the years that
followed.
Four hundred and fifty men
contractionDrafted from Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Hernán Cortés and his party reached the causeway approach to
Tenochtitlan in November 1519, guided and reinforced along the way by
Tlaxcala and other peoples who had their own long-standing grievances
against Mexica tribute demands. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who marched
with the expedition and set his own account down decades later, recalled
looking out over the crowded canoes and countless people they passed
on the causeway and reckoning that his own company numbered scarcely
four hundred and fifty men - a mere handful, by his own description,
venturing further into a hostile capital than he believed any men in
history had dared before.
A monarch carried out to meet them
Moctezuma himself came out along the causeway to receive them, borne on
a richly decorated litter under a canopy of green feathers, gold, silver
and precious stones, supported by nobles who walked before him spreading
cotton cloths on the ground so that his feet would never touch bare
earth. No one in his own retinue looked directly at his face except the
four kinsmen who carried him. When word reached Cortés that the monarch
himself was approaching, he dismounted and advanced on foot to meet him.
The meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma as imagined in a chromolithograph published about 1892.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844) · Kurz and Allison · Public domain
An exchange of gifts neither side fully trusted
The two men exchanged courtesies through the interpreter Marina: Cortés
hung a necklace of scented, brightly coloured stones strung on gold wire
around Moctezuma's neck and was prevented by the king's own attendants,
who considered it improper, from embracing him. Moctezuma answered with
appropriate formality of his own, and delegated two of his nephews to
conduct the Spanish party to their quarters before returning to the
city himself. Díaz records the meeting as cordial in every visible
particular - and, in hindsight, as the last moment either side could
plausibly claim the other's intentions were still genuinely unknown.
The portable bridge
contractionDrafted from Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Cortés's occupation of Tenochtitlan collapsed within a year of his first
meeting with Moctezuma. With the city in open revolt against the
Spanish garrison holding Moctezuma in his own palace, Cortés had the
king address the crowd from the walls in a bid to calm them. Moctezuma
went reluctantly, having by then, in Díaz's account, lost faith in
Cortés's promises entirely. His own people recognized him and briefly
held their fire, but before the ceasefire could hold, he was struck by
an arrow and three sling-stones, wounded in the arm, leg and head.
Carried back to his apartment, he refused all treatment and died of the
wounds within days, mourned, Díaz records, even by Spanish soldiers who
had grown fond of him over months of captivity.
A bridge fitted to the width of the causeways
With Moctezuma dead and a new king already raised against them, the
Spanish position in the city was untenable, and Cortés ordered a
night retreat along one of the causeways. Knowing the Mexica had cut the
bridges at several points, his men built a portable wooden bridge sized
to span the gaps and carried it with them. It worked for the first
crossing. At the second, in the confusion of a night march under a
thin rain, two horses slipped on the wet planking and went into the
water, overturning the bridge before it could be recovered.
A canal filled with the drowned
Word of the retreat had already reached the city, and Mexica warriors
poured onto the lake in canoes, cutting off everyone still on the wrong
side of the gap. The canal filled with drowned horses, drowned men and
the baggage they had tried to carry with them, while those still able to
swim were pulled from the water and taken prisoner rather than killed
outright. Hundreds of Spanish soldiers and thousands of their Tlaxcalan
allies died in the retreat later generations would call the Noche
Triste - the sorrowful night - a rout so complete that Cortés's own
survivors reassembled outside the city with barely a fraction of the
force, and the gold, weapons and supplies, they had brought into it.
The Noche Triste in a Mexican painting of the second half of the seventeenth century.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844) · Unknown painter · Public domain
Thirteen ships carried overland
contractionDrafted from Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Cortés spent the months after the retreat from Tenochtitlan rebuilding
his own shattered force and preparing for a second attempt he intended
to win outright. The centrepiece of his plan was a fleet of thirteen
brigantines, small armed vessels built from timber cut and shaped inland
at Tlaxcala, carried in pieces overland to the shore of Lake Texcoco, and
assembled there - a way of putting Spanish firepower onto the same water
that had trapped and drowned so many of his men the year before.
Cortés's brigantines on Lake Texcoco in the Florentine Codex, 1579.
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence · Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844) · Bernardino de Sahagún · Public domain
A city cut off from its own drinking water
Before closing on the capital itself, Cortés's forces marched to
Chapultepec and destroyed the aqueduct that carried fresh water into
Tenochtitlan, fighting off a Mexica force sent to stop them and losing
the city's own water supply for the whole length of the siege that
followed. With the brigantines controlling the lake and the causeways
blockaded by land, the three-way league that had once dominated the
valley through its own tribute network found itself surrounded by
former tributaries only too willing to help finish it.
A city destroyed almost as thoroughly as it was conquered
The siege that followed lasted some ninety-three days, fought house by
house and canal by canal as Spanish and allied troops advanced, filled
in waterways to bring their own artillery forward, and levelled
buildings as they went rather than leave any position the defenders
might use against them. Smallpox, carried unknowingly by the invaders'
own earlier landing, spread through a population with no prior immunity
and killed alongside the fighting itself. By the time the defenders had
been pushed into the last quarter of the city, Tenochtitlan's own
survivors were starving, its causeways broken, and its king,
Cuauhtemoc, was already making plans to escape across the lake rather
than surrender the city that could no longer be defended.
Smallpox victims tended by a healer, in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex.
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence · Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844) · Bernardino de Sahagún · Public domain
Plunge it into my bosom
endDrafted from Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
Cuauhtemoc had kept a fleet of large canoes ready for weeks, intending
to slip across the lake to reeds thick enough to hide in and reach the
mainland once the city's own defence collapsed entirely. When Cortés's
commander Sandoval pushed his brigantines into the quarter where
Cuauhtemoc's own palace stood, the king and his household fled by water
along with the rest of the city's surviving nobility, and the lake
filled with fleeing canoes.
A pursuit that ended in a single fast ship
Sandoval ordered the brigantines to give chase, with strict instructions
that whoever found the king was to take him alive and treat him with
every courtesy. García Holguín, commanding the fleet's fastest vessel,
recognized Cuauhtemoc's own canoe by its fine carved decoration and
ordered it to stop; when it did not, his men levelled their crossbows
and muskets. Cuauhtemoc called out at once: "Forbid your men to shoot at
me. I am the king of Mexico. I only ask that you not touch my wife, my
children or anything else I have with me - take me alone to Malinche."
Holguín brought him aboard with courtesy, spread mats and cloaks for him
to sit on, and had food set before him.
The capture of Cuauhtemoc on the lake, in a Mexican painting of the second half of the seventeenth century.
Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844) · Unknown painter · Public domain
A dagger offered, and refused
A dispute broke out between Holguín and Sandoval over who deserved
credit for the capture, settled only when Cortés himself, watching from
the summit of a temple, ordered both to bring the king before him
together. Cuauhtemoc, in tears, told Cortés he had done everything owed
to the defence of his city and his people, that his resources were
exhausted, and that Cortés should draw his own dagger and kill him where
he stood. Cortés refused, telling him through the interpreters that his
courage in defending his capital did him more honour than shame.
Cuauhtemoc was taken prisoner on the thirteenth of August, 1521, at the
hour of vespers - and Bernal Díaz, recalling the moment decades later,
wrote that in the days after the capture the surviving Spanish soldiers
felt strangely deaf, as though a bell that had rung without pause for
ninety-three days had suddenly gone silent.
A war Tezozomoc's own dying nightmare had tried to head off ended with his son on the losing side of it: Azcapotzalco was defeated and burned, and the dominance Tezozomoc spent a lifetime building passed whole to the league of cities that tore it down.
Aztec Empire
1325–1521
What led away
1521Aztec Empireconquered byNew Spain
Hernán Cortés's forces, overwhelmingly outnumbered by their own Tlaxcalan and other indigenous allies, took Tenochtitlan after a siege of nearly three months, and the Triple Alliance's own former tributaries and rivals found themselves absorbed into the same Spanish colony they had helped conquer the Mexica to build.
The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.
Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.
Extent
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Rating
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Longevity
196 years
46th percentile
Demographic weight
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Influence
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Descendant scripts
No cited figure
Religions carried
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Successor claims
No cited figure
Weighted total
46th percentile
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