Aztec Empire (Mexica Triple Alliance)

Not an empire in the usual sense but a tribute alliance, and the largest state in the Americas when Cortes reached it. The Mexica arrived late in the valley of Mexico as unwelcome newcomers and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco around 1325, a site nobody else wanted. In 1428 they joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in the Triple Alliance and spent the next ninety years extracting tribute from perhaps five to six million people across central Mexico - conquered towns kept their own rulers and gods and sent goods, which made the system efficient and brittle at once. Tenochtitlan itself may have held two hundred thousand people, fed by chinampas, raised garden beds in the lake, and supplied with fresh water by aqueduct; Spanish soldiers who had seen Rome and Constantinople described it as larger. Human sacrifice on a substantial scale was tied to a cosmology in which the sun required blood, and to the flower wars fought partly to obtain captives. Cortes landed in 1519 with a few hundred men and won by recruiting Tlaxcala and other tributaries who had every reason to help. Tenochtitlan fell in August 1521 after a siege, with smallpox killing much of the defence. Mexico City was built on the ruins. Nahuatl still has over a million speakers. Tenochtitlan stood where Mexico City's centre is now, and the Templo Mayor was excavated beneath it from 1978. The Nahuatl language gave English chocolate, tomato, avocado and coyote. The calendar stone weighs over twenty tonnes. Their pictographic codices record tribute lists in detail, and a handful survive.

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