Spanish conquest of the Aztecs

The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire took place between 1519 and 1521, when Hernan Cortes and a few hundred Spaniards, joined by tens of thousands of indigenous allies above all the Tlaxcalans, destroyed Tenochtitlan. Cortes left Cuba against orders, landed on the Gulf coast in 1519 and marched on an island city of perhaps 200,000 people in Lake Texcoco. Moctezuma II first received him, but the Spaniards held the emperor hostage and, after a rising in the streets, withdrew with heavy losses in June 1520 on a night remembered as the Noche Triste. Smallpox, carried by an infected member of a relief force, killed a large share of the population, including the new emperor Cuitlahuac. Cortes rebuilt his alliance, cut the causeways and aqueducts that fed the island city, and laid siege through the summer of 1521. Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521 under Cuauhtemoc, its last emperor, who was captured and later executed. The victors levelled much of the city and built Mexico City on the ruins, with the cathedral rising on the sacred precinct. Aztec tribute, gold and forced labour passed into the colonial order, and epidemic disease cut the indigenous population sharply within a century. The memory of it shaped colonial historiography.