Formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance
Three city-states on the lakes of the valley of Mexico allied in 1428 and ruled central Mesoamerica for ninety years. The Mexica had arrived in the valley as the last and least of the migrating peoples, had served as mercenaries for the Tepanec city of Azcapotzalco, and had been given the swampy island of Tenochtitlan because nobody else wanted it. When the Tepanec ruler died in 1426 and his son seized power and demanded heavier tribute, the Mexica under Itzcoatl allied with Texcoco and with the Tepanec town of Tlacopan and destroyed Azcapotzalco. The alliance divided the tribute of conquered territory two fifths to Tenochtitlan, two fifths to Texcoco and one fifth to Tlacopan, and the arrangement held. What it produced was an empire of a specific kind. Conquered provinces kept their rulers, their gods and their customs and paid tribute assessed in kind — cloth, cacao, feathers, jade, maize — recorded in pictorial registers, of which several survive. There were no garrisons in most places and no attempt at administrative integration, which made the whole structure fast to build and quick to come apart. Itzcoatl also had the old books burned and a history written in which the Mexica had always been the chosen people of Huitzilopochtli. Texcoco under Nezahualcoyotl supplied the poetry, the law and the engineering, including the dike that kept the salt water out. Cortés arrived in 1519 and recruited the tributaries. The word Aztec is a nineteenth-century convenience. The people called themselves Mexica, the alliance had no name for itself, and the empire that Cortés destroyed was ninety-one years old — younger than the Spanish reconquest of Granada was when he sailed.
- Year: 1428 CE
- Category: Political
