Tenochtitlan

At the center of Tenochtitlan stood the Great Temple, the Templo Mayor, about ninety feet high. It held two temples side by side on one great platform. One was for Tlaloc, god of rain, and the other for Huitzilopochtli, whose birthplace, the hill of Coatepec, it stood for. It was rebuilt and enlarged in seven major phases.

The Mexica (often called Aztecs) founded Tenochtitlan, in a year traditionally dated 1325, on a small island off the western shore of Lake Texcoco. The first island covered about 180 hectares (about 445 acres). The people made more land by building chinampas, raised fields of mud and plants in the shallow lake, where they grew maize, beans and squash. Its twin city, Tlatelolco, grew the same way. Estimates of the island's size by 1519 differ: one puts it at about 750 hectares, four times the first island, while another says it grew to over five square miles. Three causeways linked it to the mainland, and their bridges could be raised to close the city. The city was divided into four parts, made up of neighborhoods called calpulli.

The number of people is debated too. For the city with Tlatelolco in 1519, estimates run from under 100,000 to about 300,000, and the historian Charles Gibson proposed 250,000 to 400,000; all are informed guesses. Hernán Cortés and his Spaniards, with Native allies from Tlaxcala, entered the city peacefully on November 8, 1519. The Mexica drove them out on June 30, 1520. That autumn smallpox struck the city, and the ruler Cuitlahuac died of it in December. The Spaniards and their allies besieged Tenochtitlan from May 1521, and on August 13, 1521, the last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured. The Spaniards built Mexico City on the ruins.

Three library texts show the city in these years. In The Great Market of Tenochtitlan, Cortés lists the goods for sale and the judges who kept order in a letter of 1520 meant to win the emperor's favor. The Smallpox in Mexico, 1520, from Nahua elders who worked with the friar Bernardino de Sahagún, describes the epidemic inside the city between the Spanish flight and the siege. In The Mexica Embassy and the Smallpox in Michoacán, Purépecha envoys come home from Mexico and report that the Mexica asked their ruler for archers to fight the Spaniards; Purépecha elders told the story to a friar about twenty years later.