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The Aztecs were conquered by Spain in 1521 after a long siege of the capital, Tenochtitlan, where much of the population died from hunger and smallpox. Cortés, with 508 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala , and eventually other Aztec tributary states.
The Aztecs [a] (/ ˈ æ z t ɛ k s / AZ-teks) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
Mexica children were forcibly taken to newly established Christian schools where they were indoctrinated into Christian beliefs and Spanish culture, and the surviving Mexica men and women were sent to work in newly-established Spanish estates, known as haciendas, as well as mines and other civil projects, such as digging canals.
Guided by their priest, the Aztec tribe fled. On the road, their god Huitzilopochtli forbade them to call themselves Azteca, telling them that they should be known as Mexica. Scholars of the 19th century—in particular Alexander von Humboldt and William H. Prescott—translated the word Azteca, as is shown in the Aubin Codex, to Aztec. [2] [3]
The form of government is often referred to as an empire, yet most areas within the empire were, in fact, organized as city-states (individually known as altepetl in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs). These were small polities ruled by a king or tlatoani (literally "speaker", plurally tlatoque) from an aristocratic dynasty. The Early Aztec ...
La Gran Chichimeca was a term used by the Spanish conquistadores of the 16th century to refer to an area of the northern central Mexican altiplano, a territory which today is encompassed by the modern Mexican states of Jalisco, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Zacatecas.
Using this term for the Nahuas has generally fallen out of favor in scholarship, though it is still used for the Aztec Empire. They have also been called Mēxihcatl [meːˈʃiʔkat͡ɬ] (singular), Mēxihcah [meːˈʃiʔkaʔ] (plural) [15] or in Spanish Mexicano(s) [mexiˈkano(s)] "Mexicans", after the Mexica, the Nahua tribe which founded the ...
Two key works by historian Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (1952) [95] and his monograph The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (1964) [96] were central in reshaping the historiography of the indigenous and their communities from the Spanish conquest to the 1810 Mexican ...