Tezozomoc

Tezozomoc built the empire the Aztecs took, and it fell apart within two years of his death. He ruled Azcapotzalco, the Tepanec city on the western shore of the lake of Mexico, for something close to sixty years, and is one of the longest-reigning rulers recorded anywhere in the pre-Columbian Americas. His method was marriage, tribute and patience rather than annihilation. He installed sons and grandsons as rulers of subject cities, took tribute rather than land, and let defeated dynasties continue under obligation - which is the system the Mexica later inherited whole. Tenochtitlan was one of those subject cities. The Mexica had been allowed to settle on the island and served as his mercenaries for decades, and their own first kings were his relatives by marriage. His great war was against Texcoco, which he took in 1418, having its ruler Ixtlilxochitl hunted down and killed in front of his son Nezahualcoyotl, who watched from a tree and escaped. That boy spent years as a fugitive with a price on his head and came back to destroy the Tepanec state. He died in 1426, extremely old, and the succession went wrong at once: his son Maxtla seized the throne from a brother, murdered the ruler of Tenochtitlan and began squeezing the Mexica. Itzcoatl chose war against the advice of his own nobility, allied with Nezahualcoyotl and with Tlacopan, and Azcapotzalco was destroyed in 1428. The alliance that replaced it ran central Mexico until Cortés, using his methods, and the Mexica then burned the older histories and wrote themselves a past in which they had never been anyone's tributaries.

• Nationality: Tepanec
• Roles: head_of_state