The Aztecs

The people we call the Aztecs called themselves the Mexica. According to their own tradition, they had wandered for generations out of a northern homeland they remembered as Aztlan, a poor and unwanted tribe pushed from place to place. Their god Huitzilopochtli, the deity of the sun and of war, had given them a sign to watch for: they were to settle where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus. Around the year 1325, on a marshy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, in the valley that is now Mexico City, they finally saw it. There they began to build, and they called the place Tenochtitlan.

It was a strange spot for a capital — wet, crowded and ringed by stronger neighbours — but the Mexica turned its weaknesses into strengths. They drove long causeways across the water to link the island to the shore, dug canals for canoes to slip between the houses, and floated whole gardens of rich soil, the chinampas, on the lake to grow maize, beans and flowers. Fresh water arrived by an aqueduct from the hills. The city flourished, and over the next two hundred years it grew into one of the largest and best-ordered cities on Earth, home to perhaps two hundred thousand people — far bigger than London or Paris at the time.

At its heart rose the Templo Mayor, a great twin pyramid where the most important rituals were performed. The Mexica believed the sun itself was locked in a constant struggle to rise each day, and that it could only win if it were fed with human blood. It was essential, the priests taught, that the gods be fed, lest the sun fail to rise and the world end in darkness.

For its first century the city was no empire at all, but a junior partner serving more powerful lords. That changed in 1428, when the Mexica and two neighbouring cities formed what historians call the Triple Alliance, threw off their old overlords, and turned outward in conquest. Under a line of ambitious rulers, their armies pushed in every direction, until the alliance controlled much of what is now central Mexico — hundreds of towns and millions of people.

It was not, however, an empire of roads and governors like Rome. The Mexica rarely settled conquered lands or replaced their rulers. Instead they demanded tribute. The emperor insisted that every city pay its share — cotton cloth, cocoa, gold, feathers, jade, maize and more — carried to Tenochtitlan on the backs of porters and recorded by scribes in painted books. A city that refused, or rebelled, could expect the army to return; and defeat in war meant more than tribute, for prisoners were marched back to the capital to be sacrificed.

This was the engine of Mexica power, and also its weakness. The subject peoples paid because they were afraid, not because they were loyal. Many of them hated their masters and the endless demand for victims. The priests required that sacrifices be made on a vast scale to keep the gods fed and the empire favoured — but every captive killed left another grieving, resentful town beyond the lake, waiting for the day the balance might tip.

In 1519, ships unlike any the Mexica had seen appeared off the eastern coast. They carried a few hundred Spanish soldiers under Hernán Cortés, with horses, steel and guns the people of Mexico had never met. The emperor, Moctezuma II, received unsettling reports and, it is said, weighed strange omens that had troubled his priests for years. Whatever he believed, he hesitated — and rather than crush the small band at once, he let them march inland toward his capital.

It was a fatal hesitation. As Cortés advanced, the peoples who hated Mexica rule flocked to him, above all the Tlaxcalans, who had never been conquered. Tens of thousands of native warriors now marched against Tenochtitlan alongside the Spanish. Cortés entered the city as a guest, then seized Moctezuma as a prisoner inside his own palace. When the Mexica finally rose in fury, they drove the Spanish out across the causeways in a single bloody night — but Moctezuma was dead, and the strangers would be back.

Then came an enemy no army could fight. Smallpox, brought across the ocean by the Spanish, swept through a people who had never met it, killing without mercy and emptying whole districts of the city. In 1521 Cortés returned with his native allies and laid siege to Tenochtitlan, cutting its causeways and its water. For some eighty days the starving, plague-struck city held out, until on 13 August 1521 it finally fell. The great capital on the lake was torn down, and on its ruins the Spanish built a new city of their own. The Mexica empire had crumbled — but its language, its foods and its blood run through Mexico to this day, a legacy that conquest never quite annihilated.