INTRODUCTION AND A BRIEF HISTORY

Hernán Cortés and his small band of Spanish soldiers arrived in the Valley of Mexico on November 8, 1519, after a long march from the Gulf of Mexico. What they saw was unreal, expressed by some members of the expedition as like a dream. They and their Mexican allies looked out across Lake Texcoco to an island containing a beautiful city, with tall buildings, stone monuments, wide streets and canals, and long aqueducts, connected to the mainland by causeways (Figure 25.1). The Aztec city of Tenochtitlán had a population of more than 200,000, although some estimates of the number of inhabitants are as high as 400,000, which would have made it the largest city in the Americas. Either estimate made the city larger than any city in the native Spain of the invaders, and, for that matter, larger than any contemporary European city. The Aztec empire was called the Triple Alliance because it was a union of three separate city-states: Tenochtitlán, Tlacopan, and Texcoco. The empire, dominated by the Aztec/Mexica city-state of Tenochtitlán, stretched from the Pacific to the Gulf coast and extended south toward the Yucatán Peninsula, location of the older Mayan and Olmec civilizations.

The Spanish expedition was greeted with great respect by the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma, and his entourage. An Aztec legend held that at about this time, Tenochtitlán was supposed to be visited by Quetzalcóatl, the god of the East. Moctezuma concluded that the Spanish party, with their light skin, long beards, and short hair, having arrived on the east coast on tall sailing ships perceived by the Aztecs as floating towers, fulfilled that prophesy.

However, it soon became apparent that the two cultures were not going to get along. The Spanish were shocked by the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, and the Aztecs were insulted by the insistence of the Spanish that the accepted religion would be Christian, not the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli.

The Spanish were greatly outnumbered, and they would have been overwhelmed quickly except that other Mexican tribes hated being lorded over by the Aztecs. The Aztec, or Mexica, people, originally from northern Mexico, were the most recent dominant group, and the Aztec empire was the largest in North America up to that time.