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The word Azteca is derived from Aztlán (variously translated as “White Land,” “Land of White Herons,” or “Place of Herons”), where, according to Aztec tradition, their people originated, somewhere in the northwestern region of Mexico. The Aztecs are also known as Mexica or Tenochca. Tenoch, or Tenochca, was a legendary patriarch who gave his name to Tenochtitlán, the city founded by the Aztecs on an island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico. The name Mexica came to be applied not only to the ancient city of Tenochtitlán but also to the modern Mexican country and its inhabitants (Mexico, Mexicans).
The language of the Aztecs was Nahuatl (Nahua), part of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family that, at the time of the early explorations of America by Europeans, was influencing languages as far north as the Yellowstone River and as far south as Panama. Once the Aztecs achieved political ascendancy, Nahuatl became the lingua franca of an area almost as large as present-day Mexico.
The empire the Aztecs established was equaled in the New World only by that of the Incas of Peru, and the brilliance of their civilization is comparable to that of other great ancient cultures of America and the Old World. From their legendary land of Aztlán, the Aztecs came into contact with the highly developed Toltec civilization of central Mexico and its capital, Tula, a magnificent urban centre with pyramids, temples, public buildings, statuary, private residences, and ball courts. The appearance of the Aztecs is linked, however, not to the splendour of Tula and of the Toltec but to their decline. For reasons not fully known but having to do with internal social, political, and religious conflicts, a tremendous cultural catastrophe occurred at the beginning of the 12th century ce. The city of Tula was attacked and destroyed, as were other important Toltec centres. Tribes of hunters and gatherers took advantage of the situation and added to the chaos, traveling from the arid plateau of northern Mexico toward the fertile, heavily settled central zone. Among them were the Acolhua in the 1100s and, in the 1200s, the Chichimecs, who settled at Tenayuca; the Otomí, who took control of Xaltocan; the Tepanecs, who conquered Atzcapotzalco; and the Aztecs. Except for the Otomí, all were Nahuatl speakers.
According to Aztec legend, from the beginning of the 12th century to the beginning of the 13th, the Aztecs wandered in search of a new place to settle. During that time a group of Chichimec, under the leadership of Xólotl, established a capital in Tenayuca and later in Texcoco. Xólotl’s Chichimec joined forces with the remaining Toltec, who were firmly entrenched in Culhuacán. Apparently, this confederation led to a period of relative peace and cultural progress in the Valley of Mexico. During this time the Aztecs established a precarious home near the ruins of Tula, where they improved their agricultural methods and other technological knowledge. But their stay was temporary. Aztec tradition has it that the god Huitzilopochtli ordered them to leave again in search of a permanent home, which would be indicated by an eagle perched on a nopal cactus with a serpent in its beak.
Their long pilgrimage ended in the year of “two house,” according to their calendar (1325 ce). On a small island in Lake Texcoco, elder members of the tribe spotted the eagle, the cactus, and the serpent. There they built a temple and, around it, the first dwellings of what was to become the powerful city of Tenochtitlán. Five centuries later the capital city’s foundation story would be depicted and memorialized on Mexico’s national flag.
The swamp-surrounded island on which the Aztecs took refuge was so uninviting that none of the powers in the Valley of Mexico had claimed it. Tenochtitlán was thus located at the edge of the lands occupied by the valley’s three powers: the Chichimec of Texcoco, the Toltec of Culhuacán, and the Tepanec of Atzcapotzalco. It was not long before the Aztecs used their strategic position to advantage by aiding the Tepanec in a war of expansion against the Toltec, the Chichimec, and other neighbouring peoples. And by 1428 the Aztecs’ ruler, Itzcoatl (“Obsidian Snake”), and his chief adviser, Tlacaelel, led the Aztecs in conquering their old allies and overlords. Under a succession of ambitious kings in the 15th century, the Aztecs established a dominion that eventually stretched over most of present-day Mexico.
The almost incredible story of a small wandering tribe that was able to build an empire in one century (from the beginning of the 14th century to the beginning of the 15th) can be largely explained by three main factors: Aztec religion, the economy of the Valley of Mexico, and Aztec sociopolitical organization.
Aztec religion centred around the fierce sun god Huitzilopochtli. After battling his way across the sky each day, he returned to the bosom of the earth, his mother (Coatlicue), where he renewed his strength in order to take up the fight against darkness. In order to guarantee human existence, the Aztecs, as “people of the sun,” had to nourish Huitzilopochtli with human blood. For them war was therefore a religious obligation that provided prisoners who could be sacrificed to the sun god. As their power grew, the Aztecs ritually murdered prisoners from all parts of what is now Mexico in Tenochtitlán, often by ripping their still-beating hearts from their chests. (See also pre-Columbian civilizations: Aztec religion.)
The economic basis of the Aztec hegemony was the Valley of Mexico’s agriculture, characterized for several centuries by irrigation systems and chinampas, the misnamed “floating gardens” that were actually a raised-field system of agriculture. Rich soil from the bottom of a lake was piled up to form ridges between rows of ditches or canals. With the mild climate and ample water for irrigation, the chinampas yielded multiple harvests each year. The high productivity of the systems resulted in a heavy density of population in the Valley of Mexico and the development of large urban centres. In the early 16th century the population of the valley may have fluctuated around 2,000,000, with some cities approaching or exceeding 100,000. Because of this enormous concentration of population and economic resources, the Valley of Mexico became the key to power in the central part of the country.
From very early times, another factor contributed to the strategic importance of the Valley of Mexico: a system of lakes (Texcoco, Chalco, Xochimilco, Xaltoca, and Zumpango) that were connected naturally and by means of artificial canals. Extensive water transportation on the lakes compensated for the lack of the wheel and of domesticated pack animals and, in no small measure, furthered the early economic and political unification of the valley.
All these factors served as powerful stimuli to trade. Probably in keeping with an ancient tradition, the merchants (pochteca) of Aztec society were organized in powerful guilds, which even started wars on their own and sent trading expeditions as far as Central America. It was on the basis of the geographic data collected by their merchants, often wandering through hostile territory, that the Aztecs drew up maps not only for economic purposes but for military use as well.
The third essential factor in Aztec imperialism was the empire’s complex sociopolitical organization, the levels and functions of which were poorly understood by Spanish chroniclers (and continue to be debated among anthropologists). For example, the division of the tribe into calpulli (“big houses”), pseudo family units established in Tenochtitlán, has sometimes been interpreted as proof of an egalitarian organization. Yet, evidence of social stratification is indisputable. Aztec society has also been interpreted as “feudal.” This assertion is based on the existence of an Aztec hereditary nobility. Nevertheless, the relation of these noble groups to the Aztec kings, to the rest of society, and to land ownership was distinct from Old World feudalism, partly because the Aztec monarch’s rule was more absolute. During the reign of Montezuma II, the ninth Aztec king (1502–20), Aztec officials produced codices that recorded the organization of the empire into provinces and the payment of tribute according to the production of each region. A gigantic political, military, and religious bureaucracy was built up, with governors, tax collectors, courts of justice, military garrisons, mail and messenger services, and other civil offices. Along with their feverish efforts at political organization, the Aztecs had the strength to subjugate their allies, Texcoco and Tacuba, and to undertake new campaigns as far south as Central America.
Angel Palerm Michael C. Meyer The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaFor fuller treatment of Maya, Aztec, and other Middle American civilizations, see pre-Columbian civilizations.
Conquest of Mexico
Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, laid the foundation for the conquest of Mexico. In 1517 and 1518 Velázquez sent out expeditions headed by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba and Juan de Grijalba that explored the coasts of Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico. Velázquez commissioned Hernán Cortés to outfit an expedition to investigate their tales of great wealth in the area. Spending his own fortune and a goodly portion of Velázquez’s, Cortés left Havana in November 1518, following a break in relations with Velázquez. Cortés landed in Mexico and then freed himself from Velázquez’s overlordship by founding the city of Veracruz and establishing a town council (cabildo) that in turn empowered him to conquer Mexico in the name of Charles I of Spain. Meanwhile, rumours of ships as large as houses reached Tenochtitlán.
Divining that Mexico was a fabulously wealthy realm held together by sheer force and that the Aztec ruler Montezuma held him in superstitious awe, Cortés pushed into central Mexico with only about 500 European soldiers. Although the Aztecs soon learned that the Spaniards were not gods—and that the invaders and their horses could be decapitated in battle—their arrival spelled disaster for them and their god Huitzilopochtli. By August 13, 1521, Cortés had taken the capital city of Tenochtitlán, the climax of a brutal two-year campaign. His success was the result of a combination of factors: Montezuma’s initial suspicion that Cortés was a returning god; Cortés’s abilities as a leader and diplomat; European arms—crossbows, muskets, steel swords, and body armour—and horses and dogs (which were all trained for battle); deadly European diseases against which the indigenous Americans had no immunity; and the aid of Cortés’s interpreter-mistress, Marina (La Malinche). Another, especially important factor in the Spaniards’ success was the hatred of conquered tribes for the Aztec overlords and Cortés’s ability to attract these tribes as allies, meaning that thousands of Indian warriors joined the Spanish invasion. Without them the Spanish conquest would not have succeeded, at least not at that time. Moreover, Cortés’s capture of Montezuma threw the Aztecs into disarray, at least until the king’s violent death. Despite a heroic defense and the efforts of the last two Aztec kings, Cuitláhuac and Cuauhtémoc, Tenochtitlán was besieged and utterly destroyed. Over the island-city’s still-smoldering ruins, the Spaniards began building a new capital with the erection of a Christian cathedral on the stones of Huitzilopochtli’s temple. (See also Aztec; history of Latin America: Early Latin America.)
Marvin David Bernstein Michael C. Meyer The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaExpansion of Spanish rule
After taking possession of the Aztec empire, the Spaniards quickly subjugated most of the other indigenous tribes in southern Mexico, and by 1525 Spanish rule had been extended as far south as Guatemala and Honduras. The only area in southern Mexico of effective indigenous resistance was Yucatán, inhabited by Maya societies. Francisco de Montejo undertook the conquest of this region in 1526, but, because of determined Maya resistance and unforgiving terrain, it was nearly 20 years before the Spaniards won control of the northern end of the peninsula. Some indigenous peoples in the interior remained independent for another century and a half.
The occupation of northern Mexico, which was thinly populated and largely arid, proceeded more slowly than did that of central and southern Mexico. Spanish expansion in this area was motivated chiefly by the hope of discovering precious metals, the need for defense against nomadic indigenous raiders, and the desire to forestall incursions by the British and French.
Between 1530 and 1536 Jalisco and other Pacific coast regions were conquered by Nuño de Guzmán. The Indians of Jalisco rebelled in 1541 but were suppressed after hard fighting in an episode known as the Mixton War. In order to complete the subjugation of the indigenous peoples, the Spaniards began to move into Zacatecas, where in 1546 they found immensely valuable silver mines. After similar discoveries in Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, Spaniards occupied most of the north central region. Meanwhile, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had shipwrecked on the coast of Texas in 1528, spent eight years making his way across northern Mexico before reaching a Spanish settlement on the Pacific coast and had brought back stories of rich indigenous civilizations—El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold—that supposedly existed somewhere in the north. During the years 1540–42 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expedition to search for these mythical kingdoms, exploring as far as Kansas before turning back in disappointment. The effective occupation of northern Mexico occurred later in the century and involved prolonged fighting with nomadic Indians. Throughout much of the north, the first Spanish settlers were Franciscans and Jesuits who established missions. At the same time that exploration and settlement were bringing new areas under effective control, an administrative bureaucracy was being put into place. New Spain was organized as a viceroyalty governed by a viceroy appointed by the king.
Near the end of the 16th century, the northern frontier of New Spain in most areas was close to the present Mexican-U.S. boundary line. Within the area that is now the United States, a settlement had been made in Florida in 1565. In 1598 Juan de Oñate began the conquest of New Mexico, though the Pueblo Indians of the region rebelled in 1680 and were not reconquered until 1694. The Pueblo Rebellion was by no means the only example of resistance. Whenever Spanish excesses were deemed oppressive by indigenous civil or religious leaders, rebellion could follow.
Expansion on the northern frontier of New Spain was also motivated by rival European powers. When France established colonies in Louisiana, the Spanish crown countered with settlements in Texas. Similarly, when motivated by the possibility of a Russian threat on the Pacific coast, the Spaniards began colonies in Louisiana, Texas, and Upper California (the area corresponding to the U.S. state of California). Throughout the 18th century there were incessant boundary disputes between Spain, Britain, France, and subsequently the United States, and some territories changed hands several times. The northern boundary of New Spain remained largely indeterminate until the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, by which the United States acquired Florida but recognized Spanish sovereignty over Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Colonial period, 1701–1821
As colonial life gradually stabilized itself, more Spanish women emigrated to New Spain, accompanying their fathers and brothers, and greatly altered the social composition of colonial society. Spanish women, especially those who could bring a respectable dowry to marriage, were greatly sought. Although Spanish society, like other European societies, was patriarchal in its relegation of women, wives and daughters could inherit property. By the late colonial period several women could be found running businesses in the cities or administering rural property in New Spain.
A fundamental shift in the governance of New Spain occurred as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), when the house of Bourbon replaced the Habsburgs on the Spanish throne. The Bourbon kings were enlightened despots whose major interests lay in increasing economic returns, and they introduced many French practices and ideas into the overseas administration of the Spanish empire.
Among the notable administrative reforms undertaken by Charles III in 1784 was the creation of 18 intendancies within which local governments were also reorganized. Headed by the intendancy of Mexico, each intendancy (intendencia) was presided over by an intendente who was given considerable autonomy in increasing economic production within his sphere, developing useful arts and sciences, and bettering education and social conditions, all of the latter less for altruistic than for economic reasons.
Fed by currents of rationalism from England and Europe, the Enlightenment in Spain and Mexico spurred the spread of new scientific knowledge and, especially, its application to mining and agriculture. Mexico was also influenced by political liberalism when the American and French revolutions called into question the divine right of kings and by growing militarism when the British and Russians encroached on New Spain’s colonial frontiers. Having strung a series of mission-forts across northern Mexico, authorities in Madrid and Mexico augmented the few regular Spanish troops that could be spared from the peninsula by fostering a local militia with special exemptions (fueros) granted to Creole (Mexican-born) officers. Thus, an explosive combination resulted from the almost simultaneous appearances of new ideas, guns, and administrative confusion between the old Habsburg and the new Bourbon bureaucracies.
The turmoil of Napoleonic Europe was the immediate background of the move for Mexican independence. Napoleon I occupied Spain in 1808, imprisoned King Ferdinand VII, and placed his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. Rebelling, the Spanish resurrected their long-defunct Cortes (representative assembly) to govern in the absence of the legitimate king, and, with representation from the overseas realms, the Cortes in 1812 promulgated a liberal constitution in the king’s name. The document provided for a constitutional monarch, popular suffrage, a representative government, and other features taken from the French and U.S. constitutions. But as Spain sent contradictory commands to Mexico, it stimulated rivalries and revolts. The viceregal establishment put down sporadic rebellions by those who professed loyalty to the imprisoned king but who demanded some form of self-government.
The most important local revolt was sparked by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a parish priest in Dolores. On Sept. 16, 1810—the date now celebrated as Mexican Independence Day—Hidalgo issued the “Grito de Dolores” (“Cry of Dolores”), calling for the end of rule by Spanish peninsulars, for equality of races, and for redistribution of land.
Warning that the Spaniards would deliver Mexico to the “godless” French, Hidalgo exhorted his followers to fight and die for the Mexican Virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe. When Hidalgo left his tiny village, he marched with his followers into Guanajuato, a major colonial mining centre peopled by Spaniards and Creoles. There the leading citizens barricaded themselves in a public granary. Hidalgo captured the granary on September 28, but he quickly lost control of his rebel army, which massacred most of the Creole elite and pillaged the town.
Reports of the chaos in Guanajuato fed the support for the viceroy’s efforts to crush the rebellion, lest a full-scale caste war ensue. Royalist forces defeated Hidalgo at the Bridge of Calderón on January 18, 1811, and captured him along with other major insurgent leaders on March 19. On July 31 Hidalgo was executed, ending the first of the political civil wars that were to wrack Mexico for three-fourths of a century.
The Hidalgo cause was taken up by his associate José María Morelos y Pavón, another parish priest. With a small but disciplined rebel army he won control of substantial sections of southern Mexico. The constituent congresses, which Morelos called at Chilpancingo in 1813, issued at Apatzingán in 1814 formal declarations of independence and drafted republican constitutions for the areas under his military control.
At about the same time, Napoleonic troops were withdrawing from Spain, and in 1814 Ferdinand VII returned from involuntary exile. One of his first acts was to nullify Spain’s liberal 1812 constitution. Spanish troops, which were no longer needed to fight the French, were ordered to crush the Morelos revolution. Captured and defrocked, Morelos was shot as a heretic and a revolutionary on December 22, 1815. Scattered but dwindling guerrilla bands kept alive the populist, republican, nationalist tradition of Hidalgo and Morelos.
Mexican independence came about almost by accident when constitutionalists in Spain led a rebellion that, in 1820, forced Ferdinand VII to reinstate the liberal constitution of 1812. Conservatives in Mexico, alarmed that anticlerical liberals would threaten their religious, economic, and social privileges, saw independence from Spain as a method of sparing New Spain from such changes. They found a spokesman and able leader in Agustín de Iturbide, a first-generation Creole. Iturbide, who had served as a loyal royalist officer against Hidalgo and others, had been given command of royal troops with which he was to snuff out remnants of the republican movement, then headed by the future president Vicente Guerrero.
While ostensibly fighting Guerrero, however, Iturbide was in fact negotiating with him to join a new independence movement. In 1821 they issued the so-called Iguala Plan (Plan de Iguala), a conservative document declaring that Mexico was to be independent, that its religion was to be Roman Catholicism, and that its inhabitants were to be united, without distinction between Mexican and European. It stipulated further that Mexico would become a constitutional monarchy under Ferdinand VII, that he or some Spanish prince would occupy the throne in Mexico City, and that an interim junta would draw up regulations for the election of deputies to a congress that would write a constitution for the monarchy.
United as the Army of the Three Guarantees (independence, union, preservation of Roman Catholicism), the combined troops of Iturbide and Guerrero gained control of most of Mexico by the time Juan O’Donojú, appointed Spanish captain general, arrived in the viceregal capital. Without money, provisions, or troops, O’Donojú felt himself compelled to sign the Treaty of Córdoba on August 24, 1821. The treaty officially ended New Spain’s dependence on Old Spain, renamed the nation the Mexican Empire, and declared that the congress was to elect an emperor if no suitable European prince could be found. In one of the ironies of history, a conservative Mexico had gained independence from a temporarily liberal Spain.
