Cuauhtémoc
Cuauhtémoc took the Mexica throne into a siege and was hanged from a tree in the jungle four years later. He was a nephew of Moctezuma, about twenty-five, and became tlatoani in 1520 after smallpox killed his predecessor Cuitlahuac within eighty days of taking office - the epidemic having arrived with the Spanish and killed perhaps a third of the city before a shot was fired at it. He inherited a capital already surrounded. Cortés had been driven out on the Noche Triste and had come back with tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan allies, thirteen brigantines built inland and carried to the lake in pieces, and control of the causeways and the aqueduct. The siege lasted about ninety-three days. The Mexica fought street by street across a city being demolished behind the attackers so the cavalry could use it, without water and with the dead unburied. He was captured in a canoe on 13 August 1521 trying to reach the mainland, and by the account of Spanish witnesses asked Cortés to kill him with his own dagger. Instead his feet were burned with oil to make him say where the gold was, together with the lord of Tacuba - the episode Mexican tradition remembers, and the reason he is on banknotes and a monument on the Reforma. Cortés kept him alive as a figurehead for four years and then took him on the expedition to Honduras, where he had him hanged in 1525 on an accusation of conspiracy that the chroniclers themselves doubted. Where he is buried has been claimed and disputed since 1949.
- Lived: 1495 CE – 1525 CE
- Nationality: Mexica
- Roles: head_of_state, military
