This temple sat at the very heart of the Aztecs’ empire, the axis mundi of their known world (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Soon to be dedicated, in the year AD 1487, this version of the Huey Teocalli, or Great Temple, was the fifth full expansion of a humble construction erected in AD 1325. That first modest temple, built of reeds, wood, and mud, was the effort of a small, bedraggled, and unwelcome group of Mexica who had recently arrived in the Basin of Mexico in search of a new homeland and, in their eyes, their destiny.

The temple would experience one more expansion, in 1502. This was the temple seen and climbed by the Spaniard Hernán Cortés in his epic visit to the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan in November 1519 (Figure 1.3). Less than two years later, in August 1521, the great city fell to the Spanish conquerors, to be recast as Mexico City in the Spanish Empire’s colonial jurisdiction of New Spain.