War · February 1519 – 13 August 1521
Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire
In 1519 Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba with a few hundred Spaniards, defying the governor who had cancelled his expedition. Landing on the Gulf coast, he won over the Totonacs of Cempoala, who resented Aztec tribute, and after a series of battles made an alliance with Tlaxcala, the Aztecs' unconquered enemy.
In November 1519 Moctezuma II received him in Tenochtitlan, and Cortés soon held the emperor hostage. A massacre of Aztec nobles in May 1520 set off an uprising, and on La Noche Triste (30 June 1520) the Spaniards and their allies fled the city with heavy losses. Sheltered by Tlaxcala, Cortés rebuilt his forces while smallpox ravaged the Valley of Mexico and killed the new emperor, Cuitláhuac. From Texcoco, with thirteen brigantines and tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, he besieged Tenochtitlan from May 1521. The city fell on 13 August 1521, when Cuauhtémoc was captured, and New Spain was built on its ruins.
- Dates
- February 1519 – 13 August 1521
- Casualties
- Estimates vary widely: about 1,800 Spaniards are estimated to have died over the whole campaign and many thousands of their Indigenous allies, while an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 Aztec warriors and civilians were killed, besides the far larger toll of the 1520 smallpox epidemic.
The sides
Spain and its Indigenous allies (Tlaxcala, Totonacs, Texcoco and others)
- Spanish Empire 1519–1521
Aztec Triple Alliance (Mexica)
- Aztec Triple Alliance 1519–1520 · part of Aztec Empire (Triple Alliance)
Timeline of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire
- Cortés's expedition leaves Cuba
Two earlier Spanish voyages had touched the coasts of Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico and heard of a rich empire inland. Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, chose Hernán Cortés to lead a third expedition, then cancelled his commission. Cortés sailed anyway in February 1519 with 11 ships carrying about 630 men, a few horses and some cannon, following the route of the first voyage along the Yucatán coast.
- Potonchán makes peace and gives Cortés the interpreter Malintzin
After defeating the Chontal Maya of Potonchán, on the Tabasco coast, in two battles, Cortés received their submission on 24 March 1519, with gifts that included twenty enslaved women. One of them, a Nahua woman the Spaniards called Doña Marina and the Nahuas Malintzin, spoke both Maya and Nahuatl. Working with Gerónimo de Aguilar, a shipwrecked Spaniard who spoke Maya, she let Cortés talk to the Aztecs, and she became his chief interpreter and adviser.
- Cortés lands on the Gulf coast near San Juan de Ulúa
The fleet anchored off San Juan de Ulúa, and the Spaniards came ashore on Good Friday, 22 April 1519. Envoys of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II soon arrived with lavish gifts, and Cortés tried to impress them with a display of cannon fire and horses. The gifts were meant to persuade the strangers to leave, but they only convinced Cortés that great wealth lay inland.
- Veracruz is founded and the Totonacs of Cempoala ally with Cortés
To escape the authority of Governor Velázquez, Cortés had his men found a town, La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, whose council named him its captain. At Cempoala, capital of the Totonacs, he persuaded the ruler Xicomecoatl to rebel against the Aztecs, and Moctezuma's tax collectors were seized. Cortés then sank his ships so that his men could not return to Cuba.
- Battles with the Tlaxcalans
Marching inland from 16 August with Totonac porters and warriors, the Spaniards entered the lands of Tlaxcala, a confederacy that had resisted the Aztecs for generations. Otomí and Tlaxcalan armies attacked them in a series of battles from 2 to 5 September 1519 and the fighting went on for days. Unable to destroy the Spaniards, and seeing them as enemies of Moctezuma, Tlaxcala's leaders chose to make peace.
- Cortés enters Tlaxcala: the alliance that decided the war
On 23 September 1519 Cortés entered the city of Tlaxcala, welcomed by its rulers Maxixcatzin and Xicotencatl the Elder, who saw the Spaniards as allies against the Aztecs. Tlaxcala had been encircled and blockaded by the empire for decades. Its warriors, porters and supplies, and its refuge after defeats, would make the conquest possible: tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans fought beside the Spaniards to the end.
- The Cholula massacre
Moctezuma's envoys steered Cortés through Cholula, a great sacred city that had broken with Tlaxcala to become an Aztec tributary. Claiming that the Cholulans planned an ambush, and urged on by his Tlaxcalan allies, Cortés had the city's nobles seized and killed in the main temple courtyard, and the city was sacked. Cortés reported about 3,000 dead and other witnesses far more; the massacre frightened other cities into negotiating.
- Moctezuma receives Cortés in Tenochtitlan
Crossing the mountains between the volcanoes, the Spaniards and their allies entered Tenochtitlan along the southern causeway on 8 November 1519. The island capital had an estimated 60,000 to more than 300,000 people, one of the largest cities in the world. Moctezuma met Cortés on the causeway and lodged the Spaniards in the palace of his father Axayacatl, at the heart of the city.
- Cortés takes Moctezuma hostage
After Aztec forces on the coast killed several Spaniards left at Veracruz, Cortés and his captains forced Moctezuma to move into the Spaniards' quarters, where he was held from 14 November 1519. The emperor kept ruling in name, under Cortés's control, and was made to swear allegiance to the Spanish king and hand over his treasure, while resentment grew among the Aztec nobility.
- Massacre at the Great Temple during the Toxcatl festival
Cortés had left Pedro de Alvarado in charge of the small garrison in Tenochtitlan. During the festival of Toxcatl in May 1520, Alvarado, suspecting a plot, had his men close the temple courtyard and attack the unarmed nobles and dancers, killing many. The city rose in arms, and the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies were besieged in their palace. Moctezuma, still a captive, was made to call for calm.
- Cortés defeats Narváez at Cempoala
Governor Velázquez sent Pánfilo de Narváez with some 900 Spaniards and 19 ships to arrest Cortés, and Narváez made Cempoala his base. Leaving Tenochtitlan with a few hundred men, Cortés attacked by night on 27 May 1520 with Chinantec allies, captured Narváez and won over most of his soldiers with promises of riches. Some of the newcomers carried smallpox, which then spread inland.
- La Noche Triste: the Spaniards flee Tenochtitlan
Cortés returned to the besieged palace on 24 June, but the city's nobles had chosen a new ruler, Cuitláhuac, and Moctezuma was killed in late June, by stones from his own people according to the Spaniards, by the Spaniards according to Aztec accounts. On the rainy night of 30 June 1520 Cortés broke out along the Tlacopan causeway. Hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcalans were killed, drowned or captured, and most of the treasure was lost.
- Battle of Otumba
The survivors retreated north around the lakes, harassed all the way. On 7 July 1520, on the plain near Otumba, a large Aztec army blocked their road to Tlaxcala. Cortés and his horsemen charged the Aztec commander, the cihuacoatl Matlatzincatl, and killed him, and the Aztec army broke off. Days later the exhausted, mostly wounded Spaniards reached Tlaxcala, whose rulers refused Aztec offers and kept the alliance.
- The Tepeaca campaign
To rebuild his reputation and secure the roads to the coast, Cortés led Spaniards and Tlaxcalans against Tepeaca, an Aztec tributary whose people had killed Spaniards, from early August 1520. Tepeaca was defeated and became an allied town. Other tributary towns, seeing the Aztecs unable to protect them, began to change sides, while Cortés received reinforcements from ships arriving on the coast.
- Smallpox kills the emperor Cuitláhuac
Smallpox, unknown in the Americas, spread through the Valley of Mexico from the autumn of 1520 for about seventy days. Many thousands died, and others starved because no one was well enough to feed them. The emperor Cuitláhuac died on 4 December 1520, after ruling for eighty days; he was succeeded early in 1521 by Cuauhtémoc. The epidemic also struck Tlaxcala, killing the ruler Maxixcatzin.
- Cortés marches on Texcoco, which becomes his base
On the day after Christmas 1520 Cortés left Tlaxcala with his Spaniards and more than 10,000 Tlaxcalan warriors under Chichimecatecuhtli, and crossed into the Valley of Mexico. At Texcoco, once the Aztecs' partner in the Triple Alliance, he installed a friendly ruler, Ixtlilxochitl II. Texcoco, on the eastern shore of the lake, became the base from which the siege of Tenochtitlan was prepared.
- Cortés circles the lakes and fights at Xochimilco
Having won over Chalco and Tlalmanalco and beaten Aztec forces around Chalco in March 1521, Cortés set out in April with some 20,000 allied warriors on a circuit of the southern and western lakeshore. He fought a hard battle at Xochimilco, Tenochtitlan's ally, then found Coyoacán, Tlacopan and Azcapotzalco deserted, and returned to Texcoco, where thirteen brigantines built from Tlaxcalan timber were nearly ready.
- The siege of Tenochtitlan begins
Three columns, each of about 200 Spaniards and 8,000 Indigenous warriors, took up positions on the lakeshore at Tlacopan under Pedro de Alvarado, Coyoacán under Cristóbal de Olid and Iztapalapa under Gonzalo de Sandoval. Alvarado and Olid cut the aqueduct from Chapultepec that carried the city's fresh water. Cortés launched the thirteen brigantines, which scattered the Aztec canoes and took control of the lake.
- Aztec victory on the causeway: Spanish prisoners sacrificed
Cortés ordered a combined push into the city towards the great market of Tlatelolco but failed to fill in a breach behind his men. The Aztecs counter-attacked, Cortés was wounded and nearly captured, and dozens of Spaniards were taken alive and sacrificed at the Great Temple in sight of their comrades. Many allies briefly left the besiegers, but the blockade held and famine spread in the city.
- The besiegers reach the marketplace of Tlatelolco
Advancing street by street along the causeways, the Spaniards and their allies razed each district they took and used the rubble to fill the canals. By the start of August they had broken into the market square of Tlatelolco, in the north of the island, where Alvarado's men set fire to the temple. The defenders, starving and drinking brackish water, were penned into the last corner of the city.
- Tenochtitlan falls and Cuauhtémoc is captured
On 13 August 1521 Cuauhtémoc tried to escape across the lake by canoe and was captured by one of Sandoval's brigantines, and the last defenders surrendered. Tens of thousands had died in the siege, and allied warriors killed many of the survivors. The Aztec Empire ended; its tributary cities passed under Spanish rule, and Mexico City, capital of New Spain, was built on the ruins.
Related
Other wars of the time
- Wars of the Roses 22 May 1455 – 16 June 1487