Here is the ninth part of the series that is from the list.

TENOCHTITLÁN
26 May–13 August 1521

Forces Engaged
Spanish/Allied: 86 cavalry, 118 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, more than 700 infantry, plus 50,000 Tlaxcalan allies. Commander: Hernán Cortés.
Aztec: Unknown. Commander: Cuauhtemoc.

Importance
Capture of the capital of the Aztec Empire spelled its doom, as Spain became the dominant force in Central America for the next 300 years.
Historical Setting
Much of Central America was dominated by the Toltec peoples until their mysterious disappearance about a.d. 1200. The power vacuum
that followed was coincident with the arrival of nomadic tribes from the north. One of them came to be known as Aztecs, or People from Aztlan, an unknown region to the north. They drifted into the valley of central Mexico and became subject to whatever power was able to achieve temporary hegemony. The Aztecs ultimately settled on the western side of Lake Texcoco, where they began to adapt themselves to the already established practice of building “floating gardens” of built-up silt. Here they established the city of Tenochtitlán in the middle of the fourteenth century. A second city, Tlatelolco, was built by a second Aztec faction. The two cities put themselves under the protection of rival powers: Tenochtitlán under Culhuacan, Tlatelolco under the Tepanecs.
Through the latter part of the fourteenth century, the Tepanecs came to dominate the valley, and they expanded their power across the mountains to the west to encompass an area of perhaps 20,000 square miles. This consolidation was accomplished by the Tepanec king Tezozomoc, but, after his death in 1423, the various city-states he had dominated began to rebel. Three powers joined together into a Triple Alliance to replace the Tepanecs, and one of those three were the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán. Despite the occasional disagreement, the three worked fairly well together and dominated central Mexico for 90 years. From 1431 to 1465, they consolidated their hold over the former Tepanec domain, and then they began a period of expansion. The Aztecs came to be the dominant partner in the triumvirate, but the three tribes collectively spread the empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific and as far southward as the modern-day border between Mexico and Guatemala. Only two tribes remained recalcitrant, and the Aztecs established garrisons along disputed borders and occasionally warred with the Tlaxaltecs and the Tarascans, although the Aztecs never subjugated them.
The Aztecs led the expansion for a number of reasons. Mainly they were expanding their trading routes while incorporating a larger tax base among the conquered peoples. They also fought for religious reasons. The Aztecs worshiped, among others, the god of the sun, Huitzilopochtli. The Aztec religion taught that history had moved in cycles, the end of which came with the destruction of the sun. To keep the god healthy and shining he required sacrifices to eat, and the Aztecs went conquering for sacrificial offerings. The pyramids that dominated the city of Tenochtitlán were large altars that saw the daily execution of prisoners of war. On days of special celebration, several thousand would be sacrificed. This need for offerings drove the Aztecs to conquest but did not create loyal subjects.
Once their empire was consolidated, the city of Tenochtitlán was expanded and beautified. The city reached a population of perhaps 200,000, which may have numbered one-fifth of the Aztec population; the total number of subject peoples might have taken the empire’s population as high as 6 million. When Moctezuma II came to power in 1502, the Aztec empire was well established, and he was responsible for much of the lavish architecture and decoration in the capital city. Their sister-city Tlatelolco, which they took under their control in 1475, became the commercial center that contained the largest market in Central America, hosting perhaps as many as 60,000 people on market days.
The constant need for sacrificial victims created a resentment among all the subject peoples, and, when the Spaniards arrived, they were able to easily gain allies to assist them in their attacks on the Aztec Empire. In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with 550 men and sixteen horses. He had heard reports of a powerful tribe known as the Aztecs who ruled a vast, rich empire located in a land far to the west of Cuba, his Caribbean base. Landing at the site of modern Vera Cruz, Cortés learned that the tribes subject to the Aztecs feared and resented their rulers. Seeing Cortés as a possible savior, they allied with the strange newcomers.
Among the peoples of Central America was a belief in a great white god, Quetzalcoatl, who had visited the region in ages past and promised to return. Cortés was able to play on that belief because his horses, ironCortés began his march into the interior in August 1519, gaining allies by reputation or by force. His major confrontation came with the Tlaxcalans. The Spanish and Tlaxcalans fought a number of battles throughout September, the Spanish firepower and cavalry on open ground allowing Cortés to slaughter large numbers of the natives. Tlaxcala finally surrendered to him in the middle of the month, and the inhabitants quickly saw that the Spaniards could prove vital in overthrowing the Aztecs. The Tlaxcalans warned Cortés that the route by which Moctezuma had asked him to travel, through the religious center of Cholula, was surely an ambush. When Moctezuma learned that Cortés had avoided his ambush, the Aztec emperor was convinced that only a god could have had the foreknowledge of his plan. From that point forward, Moctezuma seemed to have ceded the initiative to the Spanish. Cortés and his men were welcomed into Tenochtitlán on 8 November, where they were amazed at the wealth the city contained.
The Battle
After a few weeks of discussions with Moctezuma, Cortés learned that an Aztec governor near the coast had attacked and killed some Spaniards near Vera Cruz. Cortés used that as an excuse to seize Moctezuma and began to rule through him. Knowing no other ruler, the Aztecs would follow no one of their own people who tried to make himself emperor in the face of Moctezuma’s apparent surrender. Cortés,
armor, and firearms were otherworldly items to the Aztecs and their subjects
however, pushed his luck too far when he began dismantling the Aztec religion to introduce Christianity. That decision provoked extreme disquiet among the population. Then, to make matters worse for him, Cortés learned that a Spanish expedition from Cuba, sent by his main rival, the governor Diego Velazquez, had arrived off Vera Cruz. For a few weeks Cortés carried on a long-distance negotiation with the expedition’s commander, Pánfilo de Narváez. By carefully leaking news of the immense wealth available, Cortés subverted many of Narváez’s men. Sometime in the spring of 1520, Cortés led some 250 of his men to fight Narváez; the short battle went completely Cortés’s way, and he quickly incorporated into his army the men sent to capture him.
When he left Tenochtitlán, Cortés had left in command Pedro de Alvarado, who began fighting the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán and found himself badly outnumbered and besieged in one of the places. Cortés marched back to Tenochtitlán at the head of a force of nearly 1,100 men. No sooner had he reestablished himself than all his work began to fall apart. Moctezuma refused to cooperate in any way and managed to secure the release of his brother, Cuitlahuac, claiming that the people would lay down their arms if Cortés displayed that act of good faith. Instead, Cuitlahuac was quickly elected emperor in Moctezuma’s place by the war chiefs of the city, and, near the end of June, an assault was launched on Cortés’s position. The massive amounts of javelins and arrows wrought havoc in the Spanish lines. Fire from cannon and harquebuses tore huge holes in the Aztec forces, but, employing human wave tactics, they broke through the palace walls and pressed the Spaniards hard. The nature of Tenochtitlán, a city crisscrossed by canals, made maneuver nearly impossible because the Aztecs controlled all the bridges. Cortés led sallies against the attackers, but was always overwhelmed and forced to retreat. “Men who had fought against the Moors declared afterwards that they had never faced such a fierce and determined enemy, and veterans of the Italian wars said that even the French king’s artillery was easier to face than these Indians” (Innes, The Conquistadors, p. 164). Soon every Spaniard not killed had been wounded. Cortés put Moctezuma on a rooftop to speak to his people, to convince them to stop fighting so that the Spanish could evacuate the city. After some discussion, the more warlike Aztecs prevailed, and arrows and stones were soon flying. Moctezuma was struck in several places and died 3 days later.
Cortés had large wooden towers built, hoping to give his crossbowmen sufficient height to control the streets, but the Aztecs were still too numerous. Even aided by a few thousand Tlaxcalans within the palace walls, Cortés was badly outnumbered. He enjoyed a small, hard-fought victory at the pyramid temple near his palace, but his only hope of survival was in escape. He fought his way for 2 days through the streets to the causeway to Tacuba and then had to capture the gaps in the road where eight bridges had been destroyed by the Aztecs. Slowly, the Spaniards captured each Aztec barricade and then tore it down to fill the gap in the causeway where the bridge had been; they then fought their way to the next barricade. Cortés thought he had bought a cease-fire when envoys promised to stop fighting if their high priest was released; in reality, the Aztecs needed him to perform the requisite ceremonies to install Cuitlahuac as emperor. The attacks started again, and the Spaniards were forced back to their palace. Hastily building a portable bridge, Cortés ordered a force of 150 of his soldiers and a few hundred Tlaxcalans to lay the bridge across the first gap in the causeway and then defend it while the bulk of his survivors crossed; they would then lay down fire for the second gap to be bridged. The evacuation took place on the night of 30 June–1 July, what the Spaniards called the Noche Triste, the Night of Sorrows. They managed to break out of the palace with almost all of their cannon, but their greed caused them to carry as much gold as they could, and that certainly slowed their escape. In the end, the Spaniards succeeded to escape, but all their artillery and most of their gold was lost, as were some 600 men and two-thirds of the sixty-eight horses. His Tlaxcalan allies lost perhaps 2,000 men. They made a stand at Tacuba and then escaped the following night northward. They were harassed constantly on their retreat to Tlaxcala.

Had the Aztecs continued to launch hit-and-run attacks on the Spaniards, Cortés’s force would certainly have been wiped out. Instead, Cuitlahuac decided on a battle. Having fought the Spaniards only in the city, he had no idea what their cavalry could do in the open, but he learned the hard way. At the town of Otumba on 7 July, the two forces fought. Cortés had but twenty-two horses, but with armor and lances they were still formidable. By attacking the conspicuously dressed commanders, the Spanish were able to rob the Aztecs of their leadership; still, it was an all-day battle. No accurate count of Aztecs engaged exists, but there must have been many thousands. Spanish discipline defeated them. The day after the battle, the retreating Spaniards reached the Tlaxcalan border, and the Aztecs withdrew.
Cortés sent to Vera Cruz for all the gun-??powder and cannon available. He spent the next several months rebuilding his force and, with Tlaxcalan assistance, pacifying the neighborhood and gaining allies. During this period, Cortés was aided by a benefactor of which he could never have conceived. An African slave who was with the Narváez expedition and afflicted with smallpox died in the town of Zempoala. The disease spread from that one man across all of Mexico, and the epidemic severely weakened Cortés’s enemies. The germs ran rampant through Tenochtitlán, killing Cuitlahuac, who was succeeded on the throne by Cuauhtemoc, one of Moctezuma’s sons-in-law.
Cortés spent his time wisely, sending ships to Jamaica to buy ordnance and horses. He also began the construction of thirteen small ships (brigantines) to operate on the lake upon which Tenochtitlán sat. By Christmas 1520, he was ready to march. By April 1521, his men were capturing one town after another along the shores of Lake Texcoco. After fighting their way completely around the lake, Cortés sent for his allies in order to make his final assault. By this time, he commanded eighty-six cavalry, 118 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, and more than 700 infantry armed with swords and pikes. Another 50,000 Tlaxcalans supplemented his army. Cortés divided his force into three columns, two to march counterclockwise around the lake and occupy Tacuba and Coyoacán, west of Tenochtitlán, and the third to capture Iztapalapa to the southeast. This would put them in control of the mainland end of the causeways entering Tenochtitlán. A fourth contingent was under the command of Cortés himself: the thirteen brigantines he had built to operate on the lake and deal with the canoeborne Aztec warriors.
The attack got off to a bad start when one of the Tlaxcalan chiefs decided to defect. He was quickly executed for desertion, with the approval of the other Tlaxcalans. Then two of Cortés’s commanders quarreled and refused to cooperate with each other; Cortés used all his diplomatic skills to ease the conflict between his subordinates. On 26 May, his first two columns were in position and destroyed the aqueduct that took water to the city. On 31 May, a swarm of Aztec canoes attacked Cortés’s small flotilla. In the early morning hours, they rowed away from the attackers, but, when the dawn brought a friendly breeze, Cortés faced about and attacked. The cannon aboard his small ships did amazing damage; by day’s end he was ruler of Lake Texcoco. The attack on the city was another matter, for the gaps in the causeways were now too large to be bridged. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, one gap was sufficiently wide for the Spanish ships to sail through and set up a crossfire on the defenders, forcing their retreat. A force of crossbowmen was able to enter the city and attack one of the temples, but was quickly forced back by overwhelming numbers of Aztecs.
The battle went on for 10 weeks. Each day the Spaniards saw their fellows, taken prisoner by the Aztecs, sacrificed to the god of war atop the city’s central pyramid. That steeled their resolve, and the lack of freshwater inside the city took its toll as well. The brigantines kept Aztec canoes inoperable while the Spanish worked their way up the damaged causeways. Occasional Aztec ambushes kept the Spanish at bay for weeks. The Aztecs also threw body parts of sacrificed prisoners at the attackers in an attempt to break their spirit. The siege also took place during the rainy season, dampening the Spanish spirits as they made but slow progress. A few Aztecs were able to slip out of the city and carry severed heads of Spaniards and their horses to neighboring towns in an attempt to drum up support, but a punitive expedition by a Tlaxcalan force brought in even more allies to the Spanish cause. Finally, the Spanish were able to fill the gaps in the causeways and move ever closer to the city. In desperation, the Aztecs launched larger and larger attacks, which the Tlaxcalans beat back with enormous losses. Fighting went on street by street as the invaders gained more and more of the city. Finally, on 13 August, Cortés launched a massive attack on the final survivors defending Tenochtitlán. The last 15,000 defenders died in that fight, the handful of survivors fleeing in canoes. The Spanish and their allies occupied the Aztec capital, but it contained only rotting bodies.
Results
Although the Aztecs were in many ways more advanced than the Europeans, they lacked the necessary weaponry and resistance to foreign diseases to defeat their invaders. Although they created outstanding works of art and developed an extensive hieroglyphic writing system, their scientific knowledge was too limited. Even without the arrival of the Spaniards, it is questionable how much longer the tribes of Central America would have accepted the military dominance and religious practices of the Aztecs.
Cortés and the Spaniards who followed him completely dismantled Aztec society. Disease did its work, killing an estimated 90 percent of the population. However, the Spanish were intent on making this country their own rather than adapting themselves to it. One of the first goals of that plan was to ban the exercise of the Aztec religion, for human sacrifice and cannibalism could hardly be acceptable to staunch Catholics. With the new governing power completely in Spanish hands, if any citizens of New Spain had any idea of advancing themselves, learning the Spanish language was vital. Within a generation, the Aztec religion and language virtually ceased to exist. The Aztec culture, as reflected in their artwork, also disappeared. The Aztecs were reputedly expert goldsmiths, and most of their artwork in gold and silver was melted down into bullion for easier distribution as booty for the soldiers as well as ease of transport in the ships that took the wealth of the New World back to Spain.
King Charles in Spain recognized Cortés as the governor and captain-general of the land he had conquered, which came to be called New Spain. The immense wealth looted from Central America, coupled with that obtained in South America, made Spain the richest and most powerful nation on earth. With that financial foundation, the intensely Catholic Spanish king proceeded to spend that money in Europe on military power to enforce the will of the church, embroiled at the time with the new Protestant movement. For a century, Spain dominated Europe, but the defeat of the Spanish Armada at the hands of the English at Calais in 1588 began their decline from international preeminence to that of also-ran by the end of the nineteenth century.
References:
Carrasco, David. Montezuma’s Mexico. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1992; Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521. Translated by A. P. Maudslay. New York: Harper, 1928; Innes, Hammond. The Conquistadors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969; Prescott, William H. Conquest of Mexico. Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1943; White, Jon Manchip. Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971.