Defying the authority of Velasquez, Cortes founded the city of Veracruz on the southeastern Mexican coast, where he trained his army into a disciplined fighting force. Cortes and some soldiers then marched into Mexico, aided by a native woman known as Malinche, who served as a translator.
Thanks to instability within the Aztec empire, Cortes was able to form alliances with other native peoples, notably the Tlascalans, who were then at war with Montezuma. Though the Aztecs had superior numbers, their weapons were inferior, and Cortes was able to immediately take Montezuma and his entourage of lords hostage, gaining control of Tenochtitlan.
The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody. European diseases like smallpox, mumps and measles were also powerful weapons against the local population, who lacked immunity to them. After his victory, Cortes razed Tenochtitla and built Mexico City on its ruins; it quickly became the premier European center in the New World. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Maya Empire, centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala, reached the peak of its power and influence around the sixth century A.
The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar-making and mathematics, and left behind an astonishing The Aztec Empire was a shifting and fragile alliance of three principle city-states. The Aztec Triple Alliance exerted tremendous power over a Teotihuacan is an ancient Mesoamerican city located 30 miles 50 km northeast of modern-day Mexico City.
Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their The history of chocolate can be traced to the ancient Mayans, and even earlier to the ancient Olmecs of southern Mexico.
The word chocolate may conjure up images of sweet candy bars and luscious truffles, but the chocolate of today is little like the chocolate of the past. The book won the Cundhill History Prize for history. Edited excerpts:. Rajat Ghai: Did the fall of Tenochtitlan set the template for European-native interactions throughout the Americas and the rest of the planet? Camilla Townsend: I tend to think that the pattern was established when Christopher Columbus landed in Hispaniola in Of course, some specific elements emerged for the first time in the war against Tenochtitlan.
This was because it was a large and complex city with a standing army. But the basic pattern was established in the Caribbean. He has shown that there were people in Europe, among them Columbus, who had begun to realise that their knowledge of the world gleaned from ancient Greek and Roman texts was wrong. There were people far to the south of Europe. The stories brought back by the Portuguese from the coast of Africa proved this. Columbus was sailing to find India and China.
But he was also sailing not just to trade but also to conquer. They did not think they would conquer India or China. But they thought they could at least conquer native people. Conquest was on top of their minds. CT: Tenochtitlan made it easier for Europeans to make such an accusation.
Europeans had long said the people they wanted to conquer were probably cannibals, that they were low, undeveloped and uncivilised. But the Mexica or the Aztecs made this easier because they really did practice human sacrifice. The priests really did touch the blood of victims to their lips. There is a great deal of exaggeration. The Aztecs did not begin by sacrificing many people.
They did what most ancient peoples did around the world. They sacrificed an occasional prisoner of war. This was very normal. Archaeology shows that happening in most places around the world. But as they gained power, they wanted to terrify their neighbours so that they could keep this power. So, they turned this element of their religion into a power play. This was done so that such people would go home and tell others that they should just join the empire and not fight.
Because if they fought, some of their people would be sacrificed. So, we must understand that while it was an element of their culture, it became big only towards the end since they used it politically as a power play. The Europeans did not know all this. That made it easier for them as Europeans to say that elsewhere — even if it was not true — too, native peoples were like this.
This became a very convenient excuse. After a four month siege, during which time Aztec defenders succumbed as much to disease and starvation as to the force of arms, the new Aztec king Cuautemoc surrendered. By , most of central Mexico was integrated under Spanish control in the kingdom of New Spain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , — The strange end of the Aztec nation remains one of the most fascinating events in the annals of human societies. Why did a strong people defending its own territory succumb so quickly to a handful of Spaniards fighting in dangerous and completely unfamiliar circumstances?
The answers to these questions lie in the fact that at the time of the Spanish arrival, the Aztec and Inca Empires faced grave internal difficulties brought on by their religious ideologies; by the Spaniards' boldness, timing, and technology; and by Aztec and Inca psychology and attitudes toward war. The Spaniards arrived in late summer, when the Aztecs were preoccupied with harvesting their crops and not thinking of war.
From the Spaniards' perspective, their timing was ideal. A series of natural phenomena, signs, and portents seemed to augur disaster for the Aztecs. A comet was seen in daytime, a column of fire had appeared every midnight for a year, and two temples were suddenly destroyed, one by lightning unaccompanied by thunder.
These and other apparently inexplicable events seemed to presage the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and had an unnerving effect on the Aztecs.
They looked on the Europeans riding "wild beasts" as extraterrestrial forces coming to establish a new social order. Defeatism swept the nation and paralyzed its will. The Aztec state religion, the sacred cult of Huitzilopochtli, necessitated constant warfare against neighboring peoples to secure captives for religious sacrifice and laborers for agricultural and infrastructure work.
Lacking an effective method of governing subject peoples, the Aztecs controlled thirty-eight provinces in central Mexico through terror. When the Spaniards appeared, the Totonacs greeted them as liberators, and other subject peoples joined them against the Aztecs. Montezuma faced terrible external and internal difficulties. Historians have often condemned the Aztec ruler for vacillation and weakness. But he relied on the advice of his state council, itself divided, and on the dubious loyalty of tributary communities.
The major explanation for the collapse of the Aztec Empire to six hundred Spaniards lies in the Aztecs' notion of warfare and their level of technology. But for the Aztecs, warfare was a ceremonial act in which "divide and conquer" had no place. The Aztecs killed many Spaniards. In retaliation, the Spaniards executed Montezuma.
The Spaniards escaped from the city and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Aztec army at Otumba near Lake Texcoco on July 7,
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