The Fall of the Aztec Empire — Tenochtitlan starved, besieged, and taken in 1521

Summary

On 13 August 1521, after a siege of some three months, the island city of Tenochtitlan — capital of the Mexica and seat of the Aztec Empire — fell, and its last ruler, the tlatoani Cuauhtémoc, was captured trying to escape across Lake Texcoco by canoe. The empire that had dominated central Mexico for nearly a century was broken. The popular image of that conquest — a few hundred Spaniards under Hernán Cortés overthrowing a civilization of millions — is a myth that flatters the conquerors. The fall of Tenochtitlan was achieved by an army that was overwhelmingly Indigenous, fighting alongside a small Spanish contingent, against a Mexica population already devastated by an epidemic the invaders had brought.

The Aztec Empire that fell was a Mexica-led order, the dominant partner in a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan formed around 1428, which extracted tribute from much of central Mexico through war and the threat of war. Tenochtitlan, built on an island in the lake and laced with canals and causeways, was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population estimated in the hundreds of thousands — larger than most European capitals of the age. Its empire was wealthy, sophisticated, and militarily formidable. It was also resented: the peoples it had subjugated and from whom it demanded tribute and captives were, in many cases, willing to ally with anyone who might break Mexica power.

The mechanism of the conquest rested on three pillars, none of them Spanish superiority alone. First and most important were the tens of thousands of Indigenous allies — above all the Tlaxcalans, an independent people the Mexica had never conquered, who supplied the bulk of the fighting force, the local knowledge, the food, and the manpower without which the small Spanish company could not have taken the city. Second was smallpox, introduced by the Europeans in 1520, which swept Tenochtitlan and killed an enormous share of its people — including the ruler Cuitláhuac — gutting the defense before the final siege began. Third was the siege itself: Spanish-built brigantines cut the lake, the causeways were taken block by block, and the aqueduct supplying fresh water was severed, so that the city fell as much to thirst, hunger, and disease as to assault.

The fall of Tenochtitlan inaugurated three centuries of Spanish colonial rule over the heart of Mesoamerica and a demographic catastrophe — driven above all by epidemic disease — that reduced the Indigenous population of central Mexico by perhaps nine-tenths over the following century. Moctezuma II, the ruler when the Spanish arrived, died in Mexica captivity to the invaders in 1520; Cuauhtémoc, who led the final defense, was kept prisoner, tortured for gold, and hanged in 1525. The empire was not so much defeated in a battle as dismantled by alliance, disease, and siege.

Timeline

The Mexica order at its height

The empire that fell in 1521 was the achievement of the Mexica, a people who had arrived in the Valley of Mexico as latecomers and, by tradition, founded their island city of Tenochtitlan in 1325 on marshy ground in Lake Texcoco. Within a century they had transformed a tributary existence into mastery. After the Triple Alliance of around 1428 broke the power of Azcapotzalco, the Mexica and their partners extended their reach across central Mexico, building a tribute empire that drew goods, labor, and war captives from hundreds of subject communities. By the early sixteenth century the alliance dominated a population of millions, and Tenochtitlan stood at its center as one of the great cities of the world.

Tenochtitlan astonished those who saw it. Built on an island and connected to the mainland by raised causeways, threaded with canals, fed by chinampa gardens and a freshwater aqueduct from Chapultepec, the city held a population estimated between 200,000 and 300,000 — larger than any city in Spain. Its great precinct, dominated by the twin temples of the Templo Mayor, was the ritual heart of a sophisticated civilization with a complex calendar, a writing system, monumental architecture, vast markets, and an elaborate social and religious order. The Mexica were not a primitive people overwhelmed by a superior civilization; they were the rulers of one of the most populous and organized states on earth in 1519.

Their empire's strength was also its weakness. The Aztec order ruled by extraction and intimidation: it demanded tribute, labor, and captives for sacrifice from peoples it had conquered, and it had never absorbed those peoples into a common nation. Many subject communities, and the unconquered Tlaxcalans on its borders, regarded Mexica dominance as oppression. The empire's reach exceeded its loyalty. When outsiders arrived who might serve as a lever against Mexica power, the resentment the empire had accumulated over a century of tribute war became the most dangerous force ranged against it — more dangerous, in the end, than the Spanish themselves.

Alliance, hostage, and the night of defeat

When Cortés's expedition landed in 1519, it numbered only a few hundred Spaniards, and on its own it could never have threatened the Mexica. Its significance lay in what it could catalyze. Moving inland, the Spanish allied first with the coastal Totonacs and then, after hard fighting, with the Tlaxcalans — an independent people who had resisted Mexica conquest for generations and who now saw in the newcomers a means to strike their enemy. The Tlaxcalans would become the indispensable partner of the campaign, supplying the great majority of its soldiers and the local knowledge, supplies, and shelter on which the small Spanish force depended at every stage. Along the way, at Cholula, the allied force massacred thousands of unarmed people, a calculated terror that cleared the road to the capital.

In November 1519 the Mexica ruler Moctezuma II received the Spanish into Tenochtitlan and lodged them in the city — and within days they seized him, holding the tlatoani as a hostage through whom they hoped to govern. The arrangement was unstable and could not last. In 1520, while Cortés was absent confronting a rival Spanish force on the coast, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado ordered a massacre of Mexica nobles and celebrants at a festival in the Templo Mayor, igniting a general uprising. Moctezuma II, by the most common account brought out to calm his people and now seen as a captive collaborator, died in late June 1520; the sources disagree over whether he was killed by stones thrown by his own people or dispatched by the Spanish. Either way, the strategy of ruling through him had collapsed.

Trapped in a hostile city, the Spanish and their Tlaxcalan allies attempted to flee on the night of 30 June 1520 — the Noche Triste, the "night of sorrows." Crossing the causeways in darkness under Mexica attack, they lost a large part of their force, Spanish and Indigenous alike, along with much of the gold they had seized. The Mexica had driven the invaders out and inflicted a heavy defeat. Had the contest been only a military one, the empire might have survived. But two forces the Mexica could not fight were already at work: the accumulated hostility of the subject peoples now flocking to the anti-Mexica coalition, and a disease against which they had no defense.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

On the ruins of Tenochtitlan the Spanish built Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, and imposed three centuries of colonial rule over the peoples of Mesoamerica. The allies who had made the conquest possible, the Tlaxcalans foremost, won privileges and a degree of autonomy under the new order, but the broader Indigenous population was subjected to forced labor, tribute, evangelization, and dispossession. The greatest catastrophe was demographic: successive epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases, compounded by the violence and disruption of conquest, reduced the Indigenous population of central Mexico by an estimated ninety percent over the century following 1519 — a collapse of population among the most severe in recorded history.

The fates of the Mexica rulers framed the conquest's character. Moctezuma II, long caricatured as a fatalistic ruler paralyzed by omens, was in fact a sophisticated and powerful sovereign trapped by the invaders he had received; he died a captive in 1520. Cuauhtémoc, who led the final defense with courage through a hopeless siege, was kept prisoner after the city's fall, tortured by burning to make him reveal hidden gold, and finally hanged in 1525 on a distant expedition. In modern Mexico it is Cuauhtémoc, not Cortés, who is honored — a national symbol of Indigenous resistance — while the conquest is remembered not as a heroic adventure but as a catastrophe and the violent foundation of a colonial order.

The encounter produced the mestizo society of modern Mexico and a long reckoning with its origins. The romantic legend of a tiny band of Spaniards overthrowing a mighty empire by sheer audacity has given way, in serious history, to a sober account centered on the peoples of Mesoamerica: an empire brought down by the rebellion of those it oppressed, by a disease that killed without discrimination, and by a siege that strangled a great city — with the Spanish as one component of a coalition that was overwhelmingly Indigenous.

Lessons

References

• Battle of Tenochtitlan | Summary & Fall of the Aztec Empire ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
• The Fall of Tenochtitlan WORLD HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIA
• Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire WIKIPEDIA
• Fall of Tenochtitlan WIKIPEDIA