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The Aztec Empire
The Mexica-led Triple Alliance that dominated central Mexico from an island city
When Spanish soldiers first saw Tenochtitlan in 1519, one of them later wrote that it resembled the enchanted cities of chivalric romance. It was the capital of the Mexica, the people now usually called the Aztecs, who with their allies in Texcoco and Tlacopan dominated central Mexico through a Triple Alliance founded in 1428. Rather than governing directly, the alliance collected tribute in cotton cloth, cacao, feathers and food from hundreds of subject towns. Mexico City stands on Tenochtitlan's ruins, the eagle on a cactus from the Mexica founding legend sits on Mexico's coat of arms, and Nahuatl, the Mexica language, still has about 1.6 million speakers and gave English words such as chocolate, tomato and avocado.
The heart of the empire was the Valley of Mexico, a high basin more than 2,200 meters above sea level, ringed by volcanoes such as Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl and floored by a chain of shallow lakes, which the Mexica farmed with chinampas, raised fields built from lake mud. From this base the alliance's tributary provinces spread east to the Gulf of Mexico coast around Veracruz, west toward the Pacific in Guerrero, and south through the Oaxaca highlands, with a distant province at Xoconochco near today's border with Guatemala. Powerful neighbors, including the Tarascan state in the west and Tlaxcala to the east, stayed independent. At its height around 1520 it covered about 220,000 square kilometers, all of it now within Mexico.
According to their own histories, the Mexica migrated into the Valley of Mexico from the north and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. In 1428 they joined Texcoco and Tlacopan to overthrow the dominant city of Azcapotzalco, and under rulers such as Itzcoatl, Moctezuma I, Ahuitzotl and Moctezuma II the alliance expanded through war and tribute. Religious ritual, including human sacrifice at the Templo Mayor, was central to state life. In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast and gathered tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, especially from Tlaxcala, who opposed Mexica rule. After a siege worsened by a smallpox epidemic, Tenochtitlan fell on August 13, 1521. The city became the capital of New Spain, and Indigenous communities were placed under Spanish tribute and forced-labor systems such as the encomienda.