In April 1519, Hernán Cortés landed near modern Veracruz with about 530 men, sixteen horses, ten cannon, and a small number of large dogs. He was 34 years old, a minor Spanish noble of unimpressive birth, a failed law student, and a regional administrator on Cuba whose patron, the Cuban governor Diego Velázquez, had given him command of an exploratory expedition and then changed his mind and tried to recall him. Cortés sailed anyway, in defiance of orders, and he understood that his political position depended entirely on succeeding spectacularly enough to retroactively justify his insubordination. The 500 men with him were not picked troops; they were a mix of soldiers, sailors, and adventurers, equipped with steel armor and edged weapons, but few of them had any combat experience above small skirmishes. Against the 200,000-soldier Aztec military, on paper they should have lasted weeks at best.

They lasted long enough to win because Cortés understood something Motecuzoma II did not. The Aztec Empire was not a unified state. It was a tributary system extracting goods and warriors from hundreds of subject peoples, many of whom hated it, several of whom were willing to fight on the side of anyone who would help them break free. Cortés's first political move was to land near the Totonac city of Cempoala (sem-poh-AH-lah). The Totonacs were a non-Nahua people of the central Gulf Coast, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Mexica, who had been conquered by Motecuzoma I some seventy years earlier (Chapter 3) and had owed Aztec tribute since. Cempoala itself was a recent and uneasy tributary, close enough to the coast to receive the brunt of Aztec tax pressure. The Totonacs hated Aztec tribute collectors. They saw an opportunity. Cortés had Aztec collectors who happened to be in Cempoala arrested in front of the Totonacs (then secretly released them to maintain the option of negotiating with Tenochtitlan), and then declared the Totonacs free of Aztec tribute under his protection. The political message was clear: the Spaniard was offering to break the Aztec system. Within weeks, the Totonacs had pledged thousands of warriors. Cortés had his first allies.

He then scuttled his own ships in the harbor at Veracruz, eliminating the option of retreat for his 500 Spaniards, founded the Spanish settlement of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (the legal jurisdiction that gave him independent authority from Cuba), and marched inland.

The march from the coast to Tenochtitlan covers about 200 miles (320 km) over difficult terrain, including the high passes between the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Cortés took six months. The reasons were diplomatic and political, not logistical. He needed to convert the 500 Spaniards plus a few thousand Totonac auxiliaries into a force that could realistically take Tenochtitlan, and the only way to do that was to find more allies along the route.

The crucial alliance was with Tlaxcala.

The Tlaxcalans, eighty years deep into the Flower War with Tenochtitlan (Chapter 3), had cut a particular kind of grim deal with the Aztec Empire. They had remained nominally independent but at the cost of being raided continuously for sacrificial victims, tens of thousands of their men taken to the Templo Mayor over generations. They were surrounded on three sides by Aztec tributaries, salt and cotton and other essentials had been embargoed by the Aztecs for decades, and their accumulated grievances were as deep as any in Mesoamerica. When Cortés appeared on their borders in September 1519, however, they treated him as another invader. The Tlaxcalans first attacked Cortés's column with 30,000 to 50,000 warriors, in some of the most brutal fighting of the entire campaign; the Spaniards held formation by murderous use of their cannon and crossbows, but several Spanish soldiers were killed and more captured for sacrifice. After two weeks of inconclusive battle, Tlaxcalan leaders met to debate. The hawks wanted to destroy the strangers. The doves, led by the elderly senator Xicotencatl the Elder, argued that the Spanish were a tool that could be used against Tenochtitlan, and that the Tlaxcalans should ally with them.

The doves won. Tlaxcala became Cortés's most important ally in the conquest, eventually contributing tens of thousands of warriors to the final Siege of Tenochtitlan. The Tlaxcalan-Spanish alliance was the single political fact that made the conquest possible. Without Tlaxcala, Cortés's 500 Spaniards would have been cut off and destroyed. With Tlaxcala, the conquest became a civil war within Mesoamerica, with the Spanish providing technological and tactical edge but the bulk of the fighting force being Mesoamerican.

Two other figures from the early phase of the conquest deserve to be named.

Malintzin (mah-LEEN-tseen), known to the Spanish as Doña Marina and to later Mexican history as La Malinche, was a Nahua woman who had been sold into slavery as a child by her own mother (a noblewoman of Coatzacoalcos who, after remarrying, wanted to clear the way for her new husband's children to inherit). She ended up among the Maya of Tabasco, where she learned Yucatec Maya in addition to her native Nahuatl. The Maya gave her, along with nineteen other women, to Cortés as a peace offering after a battle. Cortés, who already had a Spanish-Maya interpreter (a Spanish friar named Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán years earlier and had learned Maya in captivity), realized within days what Malintzin's bilingualism meant: he could communicate with any Nahuatl-speaking polity through a two-step translation chain (Spanish to Maya through Aguilar, Maya to Nahuatl through Malintzin). Within months, Malintzin had learned enough Spanish to translate directly. She became Cortés's translator, advisor, lover, and eventually the mother of his son. Her role in the conquest is enormous: she negotiated alliances, decoded political situations, and probably saved Cortés's life multiple times by detecting plots before they unfolded. Modern Mexican opinion of Malintzin has shifted multiple times: from villain (the woman who betrayed her people) to victim (a slave forced into impossible choices) to political agent (a survivor who navigated unprecedented circumstances and shaped them as best she could). All three readings have a basis in the evidence. The Mexican word malinchismo, meaning "preference for foreigners over one's own people," derives from her name and is still in use as a political insult.

Cuitláhuac (kweet-LAH-wahk, "Excrement Owner," a respectful name in Nahuatl, where bodily references carried no shame), Motecuzoma's brother and the king of Iztapalapa (one of the lake-shore cities), was the principal Aztec hawk in the high command who consistently advised aggressive resistance to the Spanish, was overruled by Motecuzoma II repeatedly, and eventually replaced his brother as tlatoani after Motecuzoma's death (see below). His brief reign would last 80 days.

Cortés reached Cholula (cho-LOO-lah, the great pilgrimage city to the southeast of Tenochtitlan, with a pyramid larger by volume than the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Teotihuacan Ch 2) in October 1519. Cholula was nominally independent but strongly aligned with Tenochtitlan. Cortés camped in the city and spent several days there. Then, on October 18, 1519, he ordered his troops to massacre several thousand Cholulan nobles and warriors in the temple plaza. The pretext was that Malintzin had warned him of a Cholulan plot to ambush the Spanish at Motecuzoma's order; the existence of the plot is debated by modern historians (some sources strongly suggest it was real, others suggest Cortés invented it as cover for a calculated act of terror). What is clear is that the Cholula massacre sent a brutal political signal across central Mexico: the Spanish would respond to even suspected resistance with extreme violence. Tributary cities along Cortés's route that had been hesitating now hurried to declare for him.

On November 8, 1519, Cortés met Motecuzoma II on the southern causeway leading into Tenochtitlan. The meeting is one of the most photographed-in-the-imagination encounters in world history. Motecuzoma rode in a litter borne by nobles, dressed in the regalia of a tlatoani (cotton mantles trimmed with gold, gold sandals, a turquoise diadem on his forehead, and rich plumes of quetzal feathers). Cortés was on horseback in steel armor. They exchanged formal greetings through Malintzin. Motecuzoma escorted the Spanish into the city and installed them in the palace of Axayacatl, an old royal compound near the Templo Mayor. The decision to admit Cortés to the city, rather than fight him on the causeways, has been called the most consequential single mistake in Mexican history. Motecuzoma's reasoning is unrecoverable; the explanations range from Quetzalcoatl-return paralysis to a calculated decision to neutralize the Spanish threat by bringing it inside the walls where his army was strongest. Whatever his thinking, the decision was catastrophic.

Within two weeks, Cortés had taken Motecuzoma II hostage in his own palace. The mechanism was simple intimidation: Cortés visited Motecuzoma with armed soldiers, accused him of complicity in an attack on Spanish coastal positions, and demanded that the tlatoani come live as a guest in the Spanish quarters as proof of good faith. Motecuzoma went. The senior Aztec nobility was divided on what to do; the tlatoani's instructions, transmitted through Cortés's hands, were to maintain calm. For seven months, Cortés effectively ruled the Aztec Empire through Motecuzoma, with tribute being collected normally and the city government continuing under Spanish supervision.

Then everything fell apart.

In May 1520, Cortés had to leave the city. A second Spanish expedition, sent from Cuba by Velázquez specifically to arrest Cortés for his earlier insubordination, had landed at Veracruz under the command of Pánfilo de Narváez. Cortés took half his force and marched east, defeated Narváez's larger but disorganized army at Cempoala (and absorbed most of Narváez's men into his own command), and headed back to Tenochtitlan.

In his absence, his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado (the red-haired Spaniard the Aztecs nicknamed "Tonatiuh," the Sun) managed the Spanish position in the city. On May 22, 1520, during the festival of Toxcatl (the great festival of Tezcatlipoca, Chapter 5, when 600 to 1,000 of the empire's senior nobles and warriors gathered unarmed in the Sacred Precinct for the choreographed dances), Alvarado ordered his troops to seal the gates of the precinct and slaughter every Aztec inside. The Massacre at the Templo Mayor killed several hundred to several thousand Aztec nobles in a single afternoon, depending on which source you trust. Alvarado's stated justification was that the Aztecs had been planning an attack on the Spanish; modern historians are skeptical, and the more likely explanation is that Alvarado, with too few men and too many enemies, attempted a preemptive decapitation of the Aztec leadership.

Whatever his reasoning, the result was that the Aztec population finally turned on the Spanish openly. When Cortés returned with his reinforced army, he marched into a city in open revolt. The Aztec command structure had been damaged by the massacre but not destroyed; the surviving nobles selected Motecuzoma's brother Cuitláhuac as their war leader, and the entire population of the city had risen to fight. Cortés tried to use Motecuzoma to calm the crowds; according to Spanish sources, the captured tlatoani went to a balcony of the Spanish quarters and tried to address his people, who responded by hurling stones and arrows at him. Motecuzoma was struck and died of his wounds three days later, on June 29, 1520. (Aztec sources give a different account: that Motecuzoma was murdered by the Spanish when his usefulness ended. The truth is contested; the Spanish version is uncorroborated, but the projectile-strike account is the more economical reconstruction of events. Either way, the empire's tlatoani was dead at Spanish hands, in custody, in the middle of his own city.)

With Motecuzoma's death, Cortés's leverage over the city evaporated. The Spanish position became militarily impossible. They were 500-plus men in a city of 200,000 that had finally and decisively turned hostile.

On the night of June 30 – July 1, 1520, Cortés ordered a desperate retreat from Tenochtitlan, west along the Tlacopan causeway. The Aztecs had pulled out the wooden bridges; the Spanish had built portable wooden bridges of their own to span the gaps. The Spanish withdrew through driving rain in the dark, weighed down by the gold and treasures they had stolen during their seven-month occupation (Cortés had ordered that any soldier could carry as much gold as he could manage; many soldiers stuffed their armor and clothing with gold ingots, an act of greed that would prove fatal when they had to swim or fight). The Aztecs attacked from canoes on both sides of the causeway. Spanish soldiers, weighed down by gold, fell into the water and drowned. Spanish prisoners taken alive were sacrificed at the Templo Mayor over the following days.

The night is remembered in Spanish history as La Noche Triste ("The Sorrowful Night," from a tradition that Cortés sat under a tree on the western shore at dawn and wept for his dead). The Spanish lost about 600 of the roughly 1,300 Spanish soldiers (now reinforced by Narváez's men), thousands of their indigenous allies, and almost all of their cannon, gunpowder, and gold. Several days later, the Aztecs hauled drums up to the Templo Mayor and beat them while priests sacrificed the captured Spanish soldiers, in full view of the surviving Spanish on the lake shore. Bernal Díaz, who was there, never forgot the sound of the drums; he wrote about them decades later as the most terrible noise he had ever heard.

It was, in conventional military terms, a Spanish disaster. Half the European force had been destroyed in a single night. The Aztecs had retaken their city. The empire still held its tributary network. The Tlaxcalan alliance was untested by serious defeat. Any reasonable observer in July 1520 would have concluded that Cortés's gamble had failed, that the Spanish should withdraw to Veracruz and accept the loss, and that the Aztec Empire would survive. Bernardino de Sahagún would write later that this was the moment when the empire could have been saved.

It wasn't.

The Spanish retreat to Tlaxcala took two weeks of hard fighting. They were down to about 400 Europeans and a few thousand Tlaxcalan auxiliaries. Aztec forces under Cuitláhuac followed them, attacking as they could. At the Battle of Otumba in July 1520, Cortés's depleted force met an Aztec army roughly 40,000 strong on an open plain. Cortés's cavalry, the few remaining horses he had managed to bring out of Tenochtitlan, broke the Aztec center by killing the Aztec commander and capturing his battle standard (the loss of the standard, in Mesoamerican military convention, signaled defeat regardless of the actual military situation). The Aztec army withdrew. The Spanish reached Tlaxcala alive.

And then the empire's other enemy arrived.

Smallpox, a disease the Americas had never seen before, was reportedly introduced to the Mexican mainland in April 1520 by an African slave who came over with the Narváez expedition; the chronicles name him Francisco de Eguía, though the patient-zero attribution to a single individual is contested by modern historians and was probably a tidied-up account constructed after the fact. What is not in doubt is that Smallpox arrived with the Narváez landing. The virus, against which indigenous populations had no immunity, spread westward through central Mexico through summer and autumn 1520, reaching Tenochtitlan during the post-Noche-Triste recovery period. The Aztec sources describe it as huey zahuatl ("great rash"), a disease that had no name in Nahuatl because nothing like it had ever existed in the Americas. The mortality was catastrophic. Estimates of population loss in central Mexico from this single 1520 epidemic range from 25 percent to 50 percent. The disease did not discriminate by class or military function: peasants died, nobles died, priests died, generals died, the tlatoani himself died. Cuitláhuac, who had ruled for only 80 days, died of smallpox in late November 1520, ending one of the most brilliantly led military campaigns in indigenous American history before he could finish the job he had started.

The empire's command structure was wrecked. The military leadership, the administrative class, the priesthood, the experienced officers, all of them had been disproportionately exposed during the epidemic and disproportionately killed. The Aztec sources describe villages where there were not enough living people to bury the dead, and corpses were pulled from houses and dumped into mass graves or left where they lay. Tenochtitlan, a city of 200,000 that depended on a complex labor and food-distribution apparatus, faced food shortages because too many of the people who ran the system were dying.

Cuitláhuac was succeeded as tlatoani by his cousin Cuauhtémoc (kwah-oo-TEH-mok, "Descending Eagle"), the last tlatoani, a young man (probably about 25) who had survived the epidemic and who was determined to fight for the city. By his accession, the world was already largely lost.

In Tlaxcala, Cortés rebuilt his army. He drew on Tlaxcalan auxiliaries (perhaps 50,000 to 100,000), additional reinforcements from Cuba, fresh gunpowder and cannon, and (most consequentially) thirteen brigantines (small sailing-and-oared warships) that he had ordered built in Tlaxcala from the timbers of his scuttled coastal ships, transported overland in pieces, and reassembled on the lakeshore. The brigantines were the first European warships ever launched on a New World inland lake, and they would be decisive. They allowed the Spanish to control Lake Texcoco, cut off canoe traffic in and out of the city, and bombard the causeways from positions the Aztecs could not reach.

The Siege of Tenochtitlan began on May 26, 1521, with about 700 Spanish soldiers and somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 indigenous allies (Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, Totonacs, and a growing number of formerly subject Aztec tributaries who saw which way the war was going). The Spanish cut the Chapultepec aqueduct, eliminating Tenochtitlan's main freshwater supply. They blockaded the causeways. They began grinding through the city quarter by quarter, fighting through canals and over rooftops, demolishing buildings as they advanced (so that the Aztec roof-jumping defensive tactics would have no platforms). The Aztecs fought brilliantly, as they always had. They sacrificed captured Spanish soldiers atop the Templo Mayor in full view of the besieging army, hauling captives up the steps and removing their hearts in plain sight, then rolling the bodies down the steps onto the Coyolxauhqui Stone. Spanish soldiers in the besieging army watched their comrades die this way and described it as the most terrible thing they had ever seen.

But the city was starving. Smallpox was killing more defenders than Spanish weapons were. The supply of fresh water was gone. The chinampas were cut off from access. After 75 days of siege, on August 13, 1521, Cuauhtémoc attempted to escape the city by canoe with a small group of nobles and family. He was intercepted by a Spanish brigantine and captured. The same day, the city formally surrendered.

The Aztec sources describe what was left as "a city of corpses." The most famous Aztec lament for the fall of the city, recorded in the Cantares Mexicanos (the early colonial-era anthology of Nahuatl poetry), reads in part: "Broken spears lie in the roads / We have torn our hair in our grief / The houses are roofless now, and their walls / are red with blood."

Cuauhtémoc was tortured by Cortés (the Spanish poured boiling oil on his feet) to make him reveal the location of Tenochtitlan's gold treasury. According to the Aztec tradition, Cuauhtémoc bore the torture without breaking; according to the Spanish tradition, he revealed nothing because there was less treasure than the Spanish had hoped for. He was kept alive as a puppet for several years and finally executed in 1525 during Cortés's expedition to Honduras, on charges of plotting rebellion. Modern Mexico considers him a national hero, and his statue stands at the head of one of Mexico City's main avenues.

The empire was over. Tenochtitlan was a ruin. The Spanish founded Mexico City on top of it, deliberately demolishing the temples and using the stones to build the cathedral and the colonial palaces. The Templo Mayor was buried beneath the colonial central plaza (the Zócalo), where it lay for 450 years until the 1978 rediscovery of the Coyolxauhqui Stone (Chapter 3). The chinampas were drained over the next century, the lake itself progressively reduced and finally eliminated by 19th-century drainage projects, and the basin floor that had once held one of the largest cities in the world became one of the largest cities in the world again, in an entirely different form.

What survived?

The Nahuatl language survived. Over a million people in modern Mexico still speak it as a first language; it is one of Mexico's official indigenous languages. Many Spanish words come from Nahuatl, and from Nahuatl into English: avocado (ahuacatl), chocolate (xocolatl), tomato (tomatl), chili (chilli), coyote (coyotl), peyote (peyotl), tequila (from a place name), Mexico itself (Mexihco). The Mexican flag still carries the eagle on the cactus devouring the snake, the Mexica's founding sign.

The chinampas survived in fragmentary form at Xochimilco, where farmers still maintain a network of canals and floating gardens that look essentially as they did in 1500, and which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The codex tradition partially survived. Most pre-conquest pictorial books were destroyed in the conquest or in early colonial book-burnings (the Spanish friars considered them devil's works), but a handful (the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Borgia, the Codex Mendoza, the Codex Florentine, perhaps two dozen others) survived in libraries in Europe and Mexico. Combined with the post-conquest manuscripts compiled by Sahagún, by Aztec elders working in the colonial period, and by Spanish chroniclers, they preserve a fraction of pre-conquest Aztec knowledge — far less than what was lost, but more than survives for any other indigenous American civilization except the Maya.

The medical tradition survived in fragments. The Badianus Manuscript, written in 1552 by an Aztec physician trained at the colonial Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and translated into Latin by another graduate, preserves illustrated descriptions of pre-conquest Aztec herbal medicine. It is the oldest medical text from the Americas. Aztec medicine was, in many areas, more advanced than European medicine of the same period — botanical pharmacology in particular, where the Aztec ticitl healers maintained working knowledge of over a thousand medicinal plants.

The poetry survived. The Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España preserve Nahuatl poetry from before and immediately after the conquest, including Nezahualcoyotl's poems and the great laments for the fall of Tenochtitlan.

The genetic legacy survived: most modern Mexicans descend from the Mexica and their neighbors, and the Spanish-Indigenous mestizo population that emerged in the colonial period now numbers over 100 million people across Mexico and the United States.

What did not survive was the political fact of an indigenous Mesoamerican imperial state, the religious cycle of public sacrifice, the calendrical apparatus that organized cosmic time, and the trade networks that had connected central Mexico to the Pacific cacao coast and the American Southwest. These were destroyed deliberately by the Spanish authorities in the decades after the conquest, and, less directly, by the demographic catastrophe that followed European contact: the population of central Mexico fell from perhaps 12 million in 1519 to roughly 1 million by 1605, a loss greater than the Black Death in any European country. The empire was destroyed by smallpox, by Tlaxcala, by Cortés, and by Motecuzoma's hesitations, but the civilization beneath the empire was destroyed by the diseases that came with Cortés's ships.

A final cross-civ check. The fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 sits in the same century as the Protestant Reformation (Luther's 95 Theses, 1517), the rise of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent (succeeded 1520), the Mughal conquest of India (Babur's victory at Panipat, 1526), the consolidation of the Ming Dynasty's mid-period in China, the late Inca expansion (Andean Kingdoms Ch 8 — the Inca Empire was at its peak when Pizarro arrived in 1532, eleven years after Tenochtitlan's fall, and would be destroyed by the same combination of factors), and the European Renaissance entering its mature phase. A related but distinct version played out in the eastern woodlands of North America, where Hernando de Soto's entrada of 1539–43 carried epidemic disease into the still-functioning Mississippian chiefdoms (Mississippian Culture Ch 9). The early 16th century was a global hinge: the closing of the Old World's isolated regional histories, the beginning of an integrated global system. The Aztec Empire, which had risen from a vassal city-state to one of the largest and most sophisticated states in the world in less than two centuries, was caught at the moment of its greatest extent by the first wave of European-American contact, and it did not survive the encounter. Neither did most of the populations that the empire had ruled. The conquest was not the Spaniards' achievement alone; it was a catastrophic intersection of microbial biology, internal Mesoamerican politics, technological mismatch, and individual human decisions, and any of those factors changed in another direction would have changed the outcome. But once the encounter had begun, no realistic alternative outcome would have left the empire intact in its 1519 form. The Fifth Sun set in 1521, and the world that came after was a different world.

The Mexica had told themselves, generation after generation, that the cosmos required regular blood to keep functioning. They were not, by the standard of all the previous cosmic ages they remembered, wrong. The cosmos had ended four times before. It would, they knew, end again. They had hoped, and labored, and sacrificed, to push that ending as far away as they could.

It came in the year One Reed. They had had advance warning of that for centuries. They were prepared for it as well as they could be. It still ended them.

Aztec Empire

Aztlan and the Eagle on the Cactus

From Vassal to Hegemon

Tlacaelel and the Engine of Conquest

The Floating City

The Sun That Demanded Blood

Ladders and Cages

Ahuitzotl and the High Tide

The End of the Fifth Sun