This span of time of over 600 years encompassed three distinct phases. The Early Postclassic, AD 9001200, was the era during which the great cities of Tula and Chichein Itzii dominated the cultural landscape, both apparently strongly influenced by the cult of the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl in Nahuatl, the Aztec language), which spread over Mesoamerica. During the Middle Postclassic, AD 1200-1430, city-stages flourished in many regions, and in some areas, such as Michoaciin and the Central Highlands of Mexico, ambitious rulers began to consolidate these small polities into larger confederations. The Late Postclassic, AD 1430-1521, saw these aggregates grow to empires known, respectively, as the Tarascan empire (ruled from the city of Tzintzuntzan in Mexico’s Michoaciin region), and the Aztec empire (ruled principally from the city of Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City). A large part of the territory of what is now modern Mexico came under the sway of one or the other of these major capitals, and the rest of Mesoamerica interacted with them through trade or war.
The Late Postclassic period is sometimes called the Aztec period because Aztec culture dominates our view of this time. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was conquered in 1521 but remained the most important city in Colonial period New Spain (as Mexico was then called), and remained the capital, its present name (Mexico City) being derived from the name of the dominant Aztec group, the Mexica (pron. may-SHEEkah). Furthermore, Aztec history and customs were amply documented, which is not true of other Late Postclassic cultures. We have eyewitness accounts by the Spanish conquistadores themselves (Hernan Cortes’s letters, Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s accounts), and later accounts by Spanish clergy and laymen interested in Aztec culture (e. g., by Fray Diego Duriin, Fray Bernardino de Sahagiin, Alonso de Zorita). Most books in the native style were destroyed as promoting heresy against the Catholic religion of the Spaniards, but a few were saved as oddities or were copied, providing another important source of information, and are widely available today in facsimile editions (e. g., Codex Borgia, Codex Mendoza, Codex Telleriano-Remensis). Members of Aztec noble families also wrote histories in this Early Colonial period (Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxiochitl’s Obras Histciricas; the Annals of Cuauhtitlan).
Because information about Aztec culture dominates the repertoire of sources, scholars tend to use it often to interpret the customs and history of other cultures in Mesoamerica, those of the Postclassic, and those much earlier. This practice is sometimes necessary because of the difficulty of interpreting the material culture record recovered by archaeology, in cases where no written documentation exists. Thus, for many reasons, the once-mighty Aztecs have cast a long shadow over Mesoamerican culture history. Their empire flourished a mere 90 years, however, which puts into perspective the importance of understanding other cultures of the 600-year-long Postclassic period.
Early Postclassic Period, AD 900-1200
In the Early Postclassic period, Mesoamerica’s Classic period regionalism was overcome by shared cultural trends that spread quickly over vast areas. This process is exemplified by the emergence of two dominant sites: Tula in the Central Highlands of Mexico and Chichen Itzii in the lowland Yucatiin peninsula. The sites are nearly at the same latitude, but 1000 mi apart. They share an architectural style which is characteristic of Tula’s locale, the Central Highlands of Mexico, but it is far from clear that Chichiin Itzii was built under Toltec influence. In fact, some scholars argue that Chichein predates Tula, but because we do not have the same kind of chronometric dates from both sites, the issue cannot, at this time, be resolved.
Tula In Tula’s period of greatness, AD 900-1150, the site covered nearly 16 km2 (c. 6.4 mi2) and had a population estimated at 60 000. The city had been constructed on a new grid that obliterated an earlier and much smaller settlement. Its ceremonial center echoed certain features of Teotihuacan, but the architecture was innovative in its use of massive blocky pyramids, colonnaded buildings, and huge sculptures. Pyramid B is topped by enormous figures, males in battle gear, and also by columns with attributes of important Postclassic deities such as Tezcatlipoca, the all-powerful trickster god, and Quetzalcoatl (‘quetzal-bird serpent’ or ‘feathered serpent’), bringer of life and patron of fine craft work and important aspects of knowledge, such as keeping the books of history and divination. Other deities known from Tula who are important throughout the Postclassic period are Tlaloc (the storm god), Xipe
Totec (flayed skin god who represented agricultural renewal), Tlazolteotl (the wise old woman to whom confessions were made), and Xochiquetzal, a goddess who oversaw human sexuality and textile arts. The importance of ritual human sacrifice is stressed in bas relief sculpture depictions, and by the free-standing ‘chacmool’ form, a reclining figure used as a sacrificial altar.
Tula’s size and grandeur was probably based on a combination of militarism and trade. Trade routes ran to the West Mexico and north as far as the Puebloan cultures of what is now the United States Southwest. Those cultures flourished at the same time as did Tula, and show traits such as the use of the ball court and certain trade goods that indicate contact with Mexican cultures, but do not show that the Toltecs of Tula had an empire that inspired the development of Puebloan cultures.
The Toltecs carried distinctive trade goods by which we can track their contacts, direct or indirect, with areas to the south and east. One item diagnostic of Toltec trading patterns, and also found in later cultures, was the wheeled ceramic figurine, typically depicting a dog or other animal, its feet pierced to accept front and rear axles that bore wheels. These figurines have been called toys, but they almost certainly served a sacred rather than an entertainment function. Mesoamericans revered any object or phenomenon that seemed to possess a lifelike vitality, because they believed that the world around them was animated by spiritual forces, and anything that moved had this energy. The use of the wheel in Mesoamerica was never extended to practical applications, as it was in the Old World. For one thing, there were no domestic animals large enough to pull a conveyance like a cart (all goods were carried in packs by human porters, or, where possible, in canoes), and so there was no springboard for the inventive design of gears and machinery, as happened in the Old World.
Another item diagnostic of Toltec trade was Plum-bate ware, with a distinctive glossy deep gray finish. It was produced along the Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala, but was found at both Tula and Chichsin Itzii, as well as at countless other sites contacted by Tula in the Early Postclassic period.
A further stimulant to trade was the development, in West Mexico, of metalworking. This was apparently a set of techniques first introduced from South America by sea contacts along the Pacific Coast. In the first stage of Mesoamerican metalworking (AD 600/800-1200), copper was smelted and poured into casts. Simple forms were further worked by hammering, and more complicated forms were cast using the lost-wax technique. The most popular items produced by the lost-wax method were bells, small spherical tinkling devices that were worn in groups in the costumes of lords, deity impersonators, and long-distance traders. Metal’s ability to produce sound was one of its most important features in Mesoamer-ican culture. Another was its reflective brilliance, and in the second stage of metalworking (AD 12001521), gold and silver were used to produce a range of decorative devices. Alloys of several metals were developed. Thus, Mesoamerica can be said to have achieved a ‘Bronze Age’ technology, but it was seldom used to produce utilitarian objects, in contrast to the metalworking traditions of the Old World.
Metal objects were widely traded, and while Toltec merchants may have strongly influenced the flow of trade in western and northern Mexico, trade along the lowlands edging the Gulf of Mexico was in the hands of Maya ethnic groups variously known as the Chontal, Putiln, and Itzii. These traders took goods along the coast around the Yucatiin peninsula and also into the interior. In 1502, on his fourth voyage to the New World, off the east coast of Yucatiin, Christopher Columbus saw a canoe at least 15 m (c. 50ft) long, with 25 oarsmen plus the traders and their families, and goods including woven cotton mantles, obsidian blades, copper ax forms (thin sheets of copper used as currency), and cacao beans to be processed into chocolate. Thus the goods included tropical lowland products (cotton, cacao) and those from the highlands far to the west (obsidian, copper), indicating that these traders were handling a wide variety of goods from all over Mesoamerica.
Chichen Itzii This other great center of the Early Postclassic was a Maya site colonized by the ethnic Itzii group in the ninth century AD. Its name means ‘mouth of the well of the Itzii’ and the well probably refers to the great Sacred Cenote (sinkhole), or Well of Sacrifice, 24 m (c. 80 ft) in diameter, with its water level an equal distance below the ground surface. Into this well were thrown all manner of precious materials such as carved jades, copper bells, and carved wooden items, and also human sacrifices, but forensic methods are powerless to determine whether or not the skeletal remains are those of beautiful virgins, as popular legends report.
Chichein Itzii’s architecture reflects two distinct traditions, Maya and Central Mexican, and in some cases a fusion of the two, such as in the Caracol, a circular structure with features permitting tracking of astronomical events. Other buildings are more clearly in the Central Mexican style, and these huge structures dominate the area extending south from the
Sacred Cenote. The Castillo is a 23 m (c. 75 ft) high four-sided stepped pyramid decorated with feathered serpent motifs. The Temple of the Warriors and its associated buildings are of the same style as Tula’s Pyramid B complex, and show the same use of columns on top of the pyramid, and colonnaded halls at its base. Surviving murals at the Temple of the Warriors show battle scenes, and also canoes in use that are of the same type as the one Columbus saw.
The Great Ball Court at Chichein Itzii is Meso-america’s largest, 146 m (c. 479 ft) long and 37m (121 ft) wide, and it is one of 13 at the site. The ball game was played all over Mesoamerica, and the action was somewhat like that of soccer: teams or solo players moved a rubber ball around a court, trying to score goals. Europeans would not know about rubber-ball-centered sporting events until the sixteenth century, when an Aztec team toured Europe, but in Mesoamerica this ancient tradition dates back to at least 1500 BC, the time of the earliest known formal ball court (Paso de la Amada, in Chiapas, Mexico). Countless games were probably played on any cleared field, however. We know from Late Postclassic sources that teams and equipment had become formalized and that gambling on the outcome was common. It should be noted that in Mesoamerica the ritual component of these games was essential, and that the rubber ball was an expression of vitality that was critical to this spiritual aspect. Mesoamericans believed in animatism: objects, landscape features, and natural phenomena that are regarded as passive or inanimate to the Western mind were regarded as having sacred living spirit, and the rubber ball, with its capacity to move would be regarded as sharing in the animatism that enlivened the world, and which must be revered.
Elsewhere in the Early Postclassic Chichsin Itzii is thought to have gone into decline at about the same time as did Tula, in the latter part of the twelfth century AD. The Itzii established a new center at a Yucatiin site called Mayapan, which had a smaller and shabbier copy of the Castillo pyramid. Mayapan’s wall enclosed a closely packed area of mostly residential buildings, covering 4.2 km2 (1.7mi2), with a population that may have numbered 12 000. Members of the Itza group also pushed into the Guatemala Highlands, establishing sites among groups such as the Quiche; Maya. Toltecized groups also pushed into southern Mesoamerica, establishing Nahuatl-speaking enclaves as far south as El Salvador.
Cholula was located in the Puebla Valley in the eastern Central Highlands of Mexico, and had a long history before becoming a major capital in the
Postclassic. Its Postclassic identity was shaped by the arrival of migrants from the north, who defaced its Great Pyramid, though it remained, by volume, the largest structure in the pre-Columbian New World. The major ceremonial focus at Cholula became the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl (demolished after European intrusion), marking the city as the pre-eminent center for worship of the feathered serpent god, and drawing pilgrims to the site.
The migrations that brought adherents of the cult of Quetzalcoatl to Cholula were part of what seem to have been widespread population displacements. Ethnohistorical accounts written down in the native tradition, but after the European intrusion, said that Cholula’s established ethnic groups were displaced by migrants from the northwest. These migration accounts figure in the ethnic histories of many groups in the Postclassic, and some scholars believe that such migrations were exaggerated in order to glorify the courage and hardiness of tribal ancestors. However, overwhelming archaeological evidence indicates that there were many significant shifts in cultural patterns all over Mesoamerica, ranging from ceramic styles and mortuary practices to agricultural techniques and layouts of residences. Furthermore, some languages became widespread over many areas, and these include Nahuatl and its close variants, and also Mayan, which became important along the eastern gulf lowlands which border the Central Highlands of Mexico. These changes are typical effects of migrations. Many migration accounts dealing with the Central Highlands cite a place of origin called Aztliin, whose heart was a cave called Chicomoztoc. In Mesoamerica, caves were regarded as sacred apertures of the living earth, perfectly suitable for the origin point of revered progenitors.
In fact, Cholula, which is geographically placed between Tula and the gulf lowlands, seems to have been influenced from both directions, and also by its proximity to the increasingly important city-states of the Mixteca, whose territory extended from the southwestern Puebla plain down into the Valley of Oaxaca and to the Pacific coast. These Mixtec regions were never strongly unified; their political system was based on the independence of small cities, each ruling its surrounding hinterland, the rulers related to each other through generations of marriage alliance, and all claiming divine descent. The Mixtecs kept track of genealogical matters through their painted books (see, for example, the Codex Borgia), and the masterful cartoon-like style of their illustrated writing system became a kind of symbolic shared script over the Central Highlands in the Postclassic period. The association between Mixtec towns and Cholula was close, and Cholula became an important center of ceramics in this style, which became known as ‘Mixteca-Puebla style’.
Middle Postclassic Period, AD 1200-1430
This stretch of over 200 years marks a transition between the proliferation of small states focused upon modest cities, and the beginning of the Aztec Empire, centered upon the Basin of Mexico in the Central Highlands of Mexico, and Tarascan Empire, based in the Michoactin region of western Mexico. These were to become two huge and complex states that transformed the territories they conquered, and influenced many others beyond their reach. ‘Aztec’ is a modern word, a shorthand term developed by scholars to refer to the Nahuatl-speaking ethnic groups who saw themselves as descended from migrants from Aztltin. Thus, there were ‘Aztecs’ all over the Central Highlands of Mexico by AD 1200, but the Aztec Empire of the Late Postclassic was in great part the work of one of these groups, the Mexica, mentioned above. Specifically, the most powerful segment of the Mexica was the group called the Tenochca, who founded the city of Tenochtitlan in about AD 1325, and since that time their city has grown from a modest temple pyramid surrounded by a few huts to the largest metropolis in the Americas, Mexico City.
But in AD 1200, the Mexica was just one of many ethnic groups that had moved, over many years, from a homeland that had become inhospitable. Their migration accounts describe many stops where they settled and worked for a while, and Tula in its prime was among them. After these stops of several years each, they would move on, finally reaching the Basin of Mexico, where, unfortunately, other groups before them had claimed all the arable land. So they camped on a barren abandoned lava flow and lived off the lizards that flourished there. In time their toughness and their willingness to serve existing city-states as mercenary soldiers impressed their neighbors, and they were given permission to settle in other more comfortable locales, but in each case their aggressiveness frightened their hosts into rescinding hospitality. Finally, they occupied a swampy island in the Basin of Mexico’s central lake and there established Tenochtitlan. By about AD 1376, they had permission to establish their own noble dynasty; their first ruler, Acamapichtli, was descended from a union between a Mexica and a noble from Culhuacan, a basin town that claimed a line of descent from the rulers of Tula.
For about 50 years, the ennobled Mexica flourished on their island, establishing closer ties with other noble lineages in the basin and serving as highly regarded mercenaries for the Tepanecs, the most powerful ethnic group in the basin. The Tepanec confederation was comprised of sets of local city-states, the Mexica among them. But tensions arose between the Tepanecs and the Mexica, and the latter joined forces with other disaffected client states and overthrew Tepanec authority in about AD 1430, taking over the confederation that would become the core of the Aztec Empire.
The Aztecs are among the most familiar of preColumbian cultures; the Tarascans are not. In part, this is because the Aztecs controlled much of the area first encountered by the Spaniards in AD 1519, the gulf lowlands. Their influence was very widespread, and their language, Nahuatl, had become a lingua franca over a large area. However, while the Aztec empire expanded in many directions, in the late fifteenth century it was blocked, one valley west of their heartland, the Basin of Mexico, by the eastern outposts of the Tarascan domain, whose history during the Middle Postclassic bears parallels with that of the Mexica. The Tarascan core area, Michoaciin, was an ethnically mixed region, and the Tarascans established themselves near Lake Piitzcuaro in the Early Postclassic. The founder of the Late Postclassic dynastic line, Tariacuri, unified the core region around Piitzcuaro in the early fourteenth century.
The Tarascan language, Pursipecha, is something of an isolate, resembling no other Mesoamerican language. However, the Tarascans shared in many typically Mesoamerican traits: a solar vague year (365 rather than the modern 365.25 day solar year); a calendar of 18 months of 20 days each, plus 5 extra days at the end; the veneration of caves, mountains, and springs; veneration of serpents and butterflies; the importance of human sacrifice, and autosacrifice (self-infliction of penitential wounds); and the ball game. Another trait that they shared with the Aztecs, to the east, was the practice of forging tribute empires out of city-state confederations.
Late Postclassic Period, AD 1430-1521
In the Early and Middle Postclassic periods, over much of Mesoamerica, the dominant political format was the city-state. In the Nahuatl language the term was altepetl, ‘water-hill’, conveying the geographic ideal of a town’s location, on a hill near water. In a larger sense, the altepetl concept was similar to the Classical Greek polis in that it encompassed an independent political unit consisting of a central community and the hinterland it governed. Each such city-state was basically self-sustaining, though exploitation of local resources would encourage specialization in craft production and trade. In the altepetl, tributes from local farmers sustained the central town’s governing elite, including the hereditary nobles who ran the government and markets, and the priests who ran the temples and schools.
These tributes were the profit from the local political system, and any ambitious ruler could see that if several city-states could be joined into a confederation, part of their tribute profit would be channeled up to the city-state heading the confederation. In the Basin of Mexico, this is what the Tepanecs had done, and the Late Postclassic begins when this confederation was taken over, after the ‘Tepanec War’, by the Mexica of Tenochtitlan and their close allies, the Acol-hua of Texcoco (another city in the Basin of Mexico) and Tepanec separatists, the three ethnic groups forming a ‘Triple Alliance’ that would forge an empire.
Social structure and ownership of resources One
Important transformation of traditional culture occurred among the Mexica at the time of the Tepanec War, and this was the institution of private ownership of farmland by individual nobles. As the Mexica rulers told the story much after the fact, the commoners were reluctant to fight the Tepanec War, so the lords promised that if the effort was unsuccessful, they would henceforth serve the commoners. However, if the war was successful, the commoners would relinquish their rights to conquered lands. This alleged pact highlights an important turning point: the spoils of war, the lands of Tepanec commoners, were not distributed among the Mexica commoners as had been the custom, but seem to have become a kind of private property of individual Aztec lords.
Prior to this, and in common with many ancient civilizations, land and other property were held by corporate groups (such as the Aztec commoners’ cal-pulli land-holding groups), or land would be held by a temple dedicated to a god, or by the government, to be used by rulers and lords to support the costs of office. But in the case of the spoils of the Tepanec War, land became a commodity for an individual’s use and choice of disposition: it could be conveyed as an inheritance, or gambled away on a ball game or board game (patolli). Of course, the lands confiscated after the Tepanec War advantaged the elites, not the commoners, but the arrangement also insured that Tenochtitlan’s character would be firmly urban, because its resident commoners did not have the opportunity to establish farms on the mainland, but stayed in their island city.
The commoners in Aztec society constituted the vast majority of the population, by far the most numerous social class. There was considerable variation in affluence and privilege within this class, with most commoners working at farming and artisanry; they would tend the fields assigned to them in their calpulli rural village, and each household would produce the simple goods required for day-to-day life (wooden and stone tools, textiles). Some households would specialize in the production of items like ceramic vessels or votive figurines, and trade these in local and city markets, where other goods and specialty imported items could be obtained. Some farmers, such as those whose lands were confiscated by victorious nobles in war, became reduced in status to the level of tenant farmers.
A few commoners were as wealthy and powerful as nobles. In fact, some commoners who distinguished themselves in warfare were awarded noble status with its privileges, which included the rents from farms worked by tenant farmers, the right to wear certain insignia and garments, and the right to attend the daily gathering of nobles in the main courtyard of the local palace. Other important commoners were the long-distance traders, the pochteca, who not only moved valuable goods (jaguar skins, jade, precious metals, and fine textiles) over great distances, but also served as spies when the Triple Alliance lords wanted to expand the empire into some unpenetrated part of Mesoamerica. Native histories recount several instances of pochteca merchants being killed in the line of duty, upon which the Aztec empire’s armies would march to the scene and annex the territory, sometimes sending the local population back up to Tenochtitlan to carry the loot and end their lives as human sacrifices.
Aztec society also encompassed slaves, people who were owned by others and were servants, but there was no class of slaves; these were individuals who had been reduced to this status through criminal activity or plain bad luck. If their families could afford it, their freedom could be purchased. If not, they risked being purchased to serve as a human sacrifice (see Social Inequality, Development of).
During the Late Postclassic period’s first 89 years, from 1430 to the arrival of Cortes in 1519, the Mexica and their allies would expand the original confederation of a few city-states into an empire drawing tribute from dozens of regions extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast. They would also expand the political structure of the city-state, first into the simple amalgamation of city-states into confederations, and then, as the organization grew and became more complicated, the Mexica streamlined it so that the political empire of the Aztecs was a vast profit-making enterprise, its provinces ruled by tame local lords or Mexica military governors, overseen by accountants and bureaucrats, and kept intact by fear of Mexica reprisals.
Customs of Aztec warfare, for example, dictated that vanquished warriors be captured alive so that they could be sacrificed to the gods. Human sacrifice was ostensibly a means of repaying the gods for the gift of life to humankind, but it was also an important means of maintaining respect for the power of the Aztec empire to inflict pain. The major venues for human sacrifice in the Late Postclassic period were the temple pyramids in each city. One of the largest was Tenochtitlan’s Great Temple (Templo Mayor). The temple itself has recently been excavated and is now visible in Mexico City, and its seven episodes of building, starting in the early fourteenth century, were occasions for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The major expansion that was dedicated in 1487 probably brought the temple-pyramid’s height close to 100 ft (c. 30 m), with two temples topping the pyramid, dedicated to Tlaloc and to Huitzilo-pochtli, the Mexica patron deity of war. The dedication ceremony is said by one source to have involved over 80 000 victims, though others put the number at 20 000, which is far more likely, given the logistics of guarding, feeding, and sacrificing such a large number of people.
The victims would have been war captives and other unfortunates sent by allies as human tribute, and also civilians from towns that resisted incorporation into the empire. Watching from pavilions in the area surrounding the temple were rulers from city-states both allied and hostile. The latter would have been brought to the city under cover, to avoiding alerting the commoners who fought the wars that there was collusion between rulers. While the ostensible motive for the ceremony was spiritual, to honor the gods, the political message was clear: the fate of those who resisted the Aztec Empire was death, sacrifice to Aztec gods.
The spectacular size of this 1487 ceremony and the pomp associated with it would have made it the largest celebration in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, yet like many displays of political propaganda from all of human history, this one’s glitter and gore hid an uneven conquest record and an uncertain future. The emperor at the time was Ahuitzotl, who vigorously pushed out the boundaries of the Aztec empire. He was also responsible for the last great construction effort to beautify Tenochtitlan. The lake-bound city was subject to periodic flooding, and after extensive damage by one during his reign, Ahuitzotl rebuilt it, taking care to include gardens and plantings among the temple complexes and palaces. By AD 1519, when the Spaniards arrived, the city held about 125 000 people, twice the size of contemporaneous cities in Spain.
The emperor who succeeded Ahuitzotl was Motecu-zoma the Younger (aka ‘Montezuma’), who reigned from 1502 until 1520. In 1519, when Cortsis and his company arrived, they were lodged in the second greatest palace in Tenochtitlan. They had Motecuzoma live with them as a protected hostage, and although many Tenochca and Texcocans wanted to rise up against the Spaniards and kill them, Motecuzoma’s fatalism and compromised position made action difficult. The Spaniards and Motecuzoma and his courtiers lived together for six months and their shared pastimes consisted of feasting, gambling, hunting, and being entertained by courtesans; these were patterns of courtly life that were familiar in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica and Renaissance Europe.
The eyewitness accounts that the Spaniards wrote of life among the Aztecs emphasize the many familiar aspects of this civilization. The Iberian Peninsula had just undergone a long series of battles to drive Moslem populations back to Morocco in northwestern Africa, and the conquistadors often likened the Aztecs to the ‘Moors’, as they called Moroccan Moslems. The palace architecture was similar, as was the practice of polygyny (‘many wives’ for one husband), and the general social order, with its large group of farmer-artisans supporting a much smaller and wealthy group of bureaucrats and scribes, merchants, luxury artisans, and nobles.
But for all these societal parallels, the Spaniards possessed certain advantages in the battle of one great civilization against another. One obvious advantage the Europeans had was metal and simple machinery, including guns. This suite of technologically sophisticated devices and implements was probably of less importance than the diseases they brought to a people with no resistance to them. Smallpox and measles raced ahead of invading armies, destroying and demoralizing the natives. The Spaniards also brought horses, much larger than any Middle American mammal, and fierce war dogs. They also fought battles differently; the Aztecs fought to take captives, not to kill, and grouped whole cadres of soldiers under the direction of standard bearers. The Spaniards killed Aztec standard bearers and as many soldiers as they could, thus removing Aztec officers, who were also nobles.
The conquest of the Aztec empire was finalized with the fall of Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1521, after a siege lasting 3 months which destroyed much of the city. Cortes successfully lobbied to make the Aztec capital the site of the new capital of the Spanish colony, New Spain, and the Spaniards organized their newly conquered vassals into work parties to build the city. The organization of the Aztec empire was, however, left largely in place, a workable means of drawing taxes from a huge conquered population that persisted at least until the end of the sixteenth century.
Elsewhere in Mesoamerica, the Spaniards continued the conquest, with the fall of the Tarascan empire in 1530. Some areas, however, resisted conquest. Deep in Yucat?in, the last remnant of the Itzji remained independent at their capital of Tayasal until 1697. In time, however, all of Mesoamerica became Spanish provinces, and the concerted efforts toward conversion to Christianity, eradication of ancient cultures, and isolation of New Spain from contacts with nations other than Spain worked toward making the ancient cultures there a shadowy presence.
See also: Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Early Cultures of Middle America; Lower Central America; The Olmec and their Contemporaries.
World History
